Re: <nettime> The War to come ...

[Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

Felix gets it, imo.

Not sure about elsewhere, but the 'special relationship left' — the US certainly and the UK as well, I think — has been stuck in a rut. OT1H hard-ish doctrinaire 'anti-imperialist' formations robotically denounce NATO in the monolithic, one-sided terms Felix points out; OT0H milquetoast centrists revert to form and support all kinds of aggressive action, if not outfight belligerence (yet), with little or no introspection about how that relates to their other earlier stances. Both are backward-glancing in a way that Corey Robin put well a week ago on Facebook:

> God, I hate left debates about international politics. More than any other kind of debate, they never have anything to do with the matter at hand but, instead, always seem to involve some attempt, on all sides, to remediate and redress some perceived failure or flaw of politics past.

I don't think the left will make much progress until it gets over its post-'70s anxiety over the use of force — always coercive, sometimes violent — to achieve its political ends. Until then, it'll necessarily marginalize itself with anti-statist denialism masquerading as warm-fuzzy idealism. The way out? Ditch the genealogical-moral hand-wringing and accept the fact that human institutions, all of them, are deeply flawed, but each in their own unique way. A bit like what Tolstoy said of families: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The question is how can we work with the institutions we have toward *better* (NOT 'the best') political ends — in this case, fostering conditions that help Russian populations (very plural) to try once again to remake their society in more sustainable, fairer ways. If we had more than one major multilateral alliance and were asking which would be better suited to realizing that end, fine, let's debate whether NATO is the better choice; but we don't, really, so scholastic debates about whether NATO is Good or Evil lead nowhere.

Are McDonald's and Coke "Good"? No. Is their withdrawal from Russia the right thing in moral and practical terms? Yes. That wasn't so hard, now, was it? Why would we discuss NATO in any different way? Because, being a multilateral entity that's ultimately grounded in democratic national governments it "represents" us more than McDonald's and Coke? Good luck arguing that.

Cheers,
Ted

On 10 Mar 2022, at 7:21, Felix Stalder wrote:

> On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote:
>>
>> Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all those Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of those states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They lived for decades under significant degrees of political repression. Did they have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at the brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly obvious to me that they did -- and by the same token, I have suddenly become less certain of what I always used to say, that Nato is an imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is also an imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a lot). But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not yet?
>
> I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US doesn't really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America or Asia.
>
> NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either because the US read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans believed in trade leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for Macron, not worth investing for the Germans.
>
> For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep historical reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also after the end of the cold war, hence NATO was always seen crucially important and they entered NATO voluntarily.
>
> History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course not, because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as unipolar is certainly a big factor in this.
>
> But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO would have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on some kind of large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not sure such a project would have been popular in Poland, though.
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