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

On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 8:43 AM Prem Chandavarkar <prem.cnt@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Brian,
Good to hear from you and to be in an exchange of thoughts with you once again.

My thoughts:

Let me start with your question on NATO’s eastward expansion. Yes - on principle, one cannot deny the freedom of the Eastern European states to choose their alliances. But the consequences must be dispassionately assessed. Security could be on offer from an alliance toward the West, but security concerns from Russia, as the military power to the East, must be factored in the equation, particularly from the possibility of their destabilising security. This was foreseen in the cable sent by William Burns in 2008 which I cited in my previous email, where he predicted that NATO expansion into Ukraine could provoke a military invasion by Russia, even though such an invasion may not be Russia’s first choice. So what is the net balance of security that is on offer in such a situation? One must factor that NATO is an institution that is primary to allowing the US to keep Europe within its sphere of influence, the eastward expansion appears to spring from a blind belief that Pax Americana is the inherent history of the world to come, and it is necessary to account for the reaction that may be provoked from a military power that has historically been viewed with hostility by the Pax Americana project. What would have happened if there had been follow through on the proposal James Baker made to Gorbachev in 1990: a limitation placed on Pax Americana through a pact between the US, Europe and Russia where the Eastern European states are accepted by all as a buffer zone of non-interference. Of course, such goals are far easier to state in an international treaty than to implement, but that is the case with all international treaties. Could such a treaty have led to greater security for Eastern Europe? Given the hindsight of current events, I suspect that is a likely possibility.

I do not think people in the west understand that in parts of the world outside North America and Western Europe, there is little seen in the difference of foreign policy and hegemonic interference when comparing the US, Europe, China or Russia. In India, there may be a greater sensitivity to China because of the proximity, the current tensions on the border, and the memory of a traumatic war in 1962, but Russia, Europe and the US are viewed with equal suspicion in matters of foreign policy. I am always amazed at the conversations I have with people in the US or Western Europe, and how they automatically assume their countries are on the side of the angels. I remember when I was living in the US in the early 1980’s (during the Reagan era and the height of the Cold War), people would react with a mixture of amazement and horror when I would say that I saw no moral difference between the foreign policies of the US and the USSR. They would indignantly ask, “What about Afghanistan?”, and have no satisfactory response to offer when I would ask how that was different from Vietnam. I suspect the reaction would be the same now if I equated Russia and USA, they would indignantly ask, “What about Ukraine?” and would be hard pressed to respond when quizzed about how that is different from the invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War.

India is not in a direct conflict with the US, and Iraq and Ukraine are contexts viewed in India from a distance. But even without conflict, and a supposedly good relationship with the US, Pax Americana invades and disrupts our everyday life in ways that are not tied to military campaigns. You have asked for the specificities of a narrative discerned in the view from a place like India. I give a few examples below.

The first is the state of agriculture in India. The US has used its dominance in WTO to push for rules that favour it. So direct income support to farmers is seen as a subsidy that is not market distorting, and therefore permitted under WTO, whereas purchases of agricultural produce by the state under a guarantee of minimum prices is seen as a subsidy producing a market distortion and is forbidden. How one is seen as distortionary whereas the other is not evades logic. The US gets away with one of the highest levels of agricultural subsidies, currently estimated in excess of $ 25 billion, with a substantive portion going to large agribusinesses. India is forbidden to give any subsidies unless it is under the same category of direct income subsidies. No weight is given to the consideration that if the Indian state wants to implement redistribution by subsidising food for the poor and hungry, a direct program of public purchase is far more effective than an indirect program of income subsidies. And in a fragmented and complex society with a rigid digital divide, implementing a direct income subsidy program is very hard to do. The result is not only to increase hunger, but a collapse of equitable access by farmers to remunerative markets. Given that the majority of farmers in India are marginal farmers with land holdings below five acres, this has created a severe crisis. Since 1995, there have been over 300,000 farmer suicides in India precipitated by economic distress, and this is the official record, the actual count is believed to be significantly higher. This cannot be blamed primarily on US policy, the Indian state holds far greater culpability, but the brand of global neoliberalism pushed by the US is a significant part of the equation.

Second, and this is an extension of the first point, is the way the US has leveraged its economic dominance to push its neoliberal agenda down the throat of the world. The way this is distorted to suit Western interests is not perceived by the Western public. Both capital and labour are considered major constituents of an economy, any Economics 101 textbook will tell you that. Yet neoliberalism pushes the myth globally integrated economy that is actually severely segmented, with an unrestricted flow of capital while maintaining strong controls on the movement of labour. This becomes an advantage to those countries that are capital rich and labour poor, and a disadvantage to countries like India which are labour rich and capital poor. So in India we see economic confrontations where the global confronts the local in an immediacy berefit of the intermediaries of the past that offered a buffer. This confrontation embodies a power imbalance that renders the local as powerless. The West is often disliked for this reason.

Finally, a more everyday example of how the story of the insular arrogance of ’The Ugly American’ endures: the process of applying for a visa. If I apply for a US visa, the interview can only be in English, I have no choice. If I do not speak English, translators are available, but one feels vulnerable as one cannot have a clear reading of the thoughts of the person who has the power to pass unilateral judgment on you in this situation. In contrast, if I apply for a Russian visa from a linguistically diverse country like India, I see a conscious and proactive effort toward linguistic adjustment. My interview will not need translators to engage with the visa officer, and can be in Hindi in Delhi, in Bengali in Kolkata, in Marathi in Mumbai and in Tamil in Chennai. The kind of Americans I encounter on Nettime are the more informed ones who can perceive a non-American perspective, but they are the exception not the rule, and I am amazed by the extent to which so many Americans just naively assume that the rest of the world, by modernising, is turning American. This penetrates diplomatic circles too. I remember seeing an interview on television of a teacher of foreign languages in a US university who remarked on how in the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, of the 52 hostages, barely half a dozen had a working command of Farsi. He said that the US position in the world will always have a degree of instability as long as behaviour continues to feed the story of the ‘ugly American'. Just because McDonalds has spread across the world does not mean that the world is turning American (remember Thomas Friedman’s assertion that no two countries that have McDonalds will go to war against each other). In fact, visit a McDonalds in India and you will be surprised at how it has been forced to turn away from American custom and localise - there is no beef on offer and you can have a chicken tikka burger.

This kind of history of hegemony has been prevalent and visible in such ways since a long time. My personal experience of it comes from memories after achieving adulthood in the 1970’s, and I have been reading examples of it or hearing tales told of it from a time before I was born or I am too young to personally remember. This is not to state that there is pure hegemony, there has been benevolence and goodwill in the relationship as well. And that has been the case with Russia/Soviet Union too. And one hears more cases of Russians being aware of the problems their country causes overseas, and if they do not speak about it, it is because of fear of domestic political repression. Whereas Americans, and Western Europeans to a certain extent, do not speak out because they do not know, remaining blithely unaware of the hegemony their countries have imposed overseas: Western Europe dominating until World War II, and America after that. Cracks in the edifice of this blinkered gaze are needed for change, which will only happen with a more balanced view of the history of hegemony of the last century.

US hegemony has been balanced so far by US soft power: a reputation as a land of widespread political freedom and economic opportunity. This is beginning to change with: (a) an inward insular shift with growing anti-immigration rhetoric with a racist bias; (b) rigid polarisation of the polity, where politics is reduced to sloganeering with little accommodation to differing views; and (c) more evidence emerging of how inequality and exploitation are on a steep rise and hope of economic opportunity recedes on seeing how survival of the bottom 80% is become more precarious by the day. This is changing perceptions, and when people are looking for opportunities in the West they are beginning to turn to options where a welfare state is more prevalent. I read a recent study on students from India who go to study in colleges overseas, and in 2021, for the first time in history, students going to Canada outnumbered those going to the US. Till now, US numbers were ahead of all others by a wide margin. Too soon to tell how this will play out in the long term.

Regarding leashing the imperial war machines - they will not change on their own, are fuelled by internal forces such as capitalist oligarchy or the military-industrial complex, and will reform only when forced to do so. This can come only from global trends out of their control that destabilise them or from popular movements.

Let’s look at global trends first. I am seeing some writing on a potential miscalculation made by the US (probably due to Pax Americana blinkers) which could threaten the status of the dollar as the de facto reserve currency of the world. Unilateral actions taken, starting with sanctions against Iran which overrode a signed treaty, then the seizure of Afghanistan’s cash assets after the Taliban took over, and now the seizure of the reserves of the Russian Central Bank, are breeding a global insecurity on holding dollar denominated assets that are vulnerable to unilateral US action (and one must remember here that international perception has long regarded the US as hegemonic rather than principled). A change in the dollar’s status as the dominant reserve currency will affect the room the US has in managing its debt, and could lead to severe constraints in domestic spending. This will have internal political repercussions that could put constraints on foreign policy. We are very far from any tipping point, and change will be very slow as no country wants to risk the exchange rate volatility that would ensue from rapid change. But it could be a slow and long-term trend that the US will have to start taking into account.

Moving on to popular resistance. There is an old adage in foreign policy that states do not have principles and only have interests. This is the way the imperial war machine works. However, a state cannot obtain political support from its own population on the basis of interests, it must construct some argument based on principles. The balance between these principles (or at least the superficial appearance of them) and interests of the hegemonic global state becomes important in sustaining the imperial war machine, and one must ask whether the old means of achieving a balance will endure in the future. In unstable times, democratic states must either change the focus of public debate or turn more autocratic, and so far the signs are toward the latter. And autocratic states, like China and Russia, are able to stabilise only when offering a rate of economic growth whose benefits percolate to enough of a population that is willing to trade political freedom for these benefits. High growth rates are difficult to sustain over long periods of time, especially in an era that must confront a frugality demanded by the crises of climate change. China has sustained it by an export-led model arbitraged by labour that is competitively priced by global standards, and Russia by the world’s reliance on a fossil fuel based economy. Both trends will be hard to sustain in the years to come.

One must realise that the global/local confrontation that eviscerates the local is not confined to a confrontation between the global north and south; it also operates within the north and within the south. One is seeing a geography of marginalisation within cities of the global north that begins to resemble, more and more, that found in cities of the south. To offer a personal and anecdotal example: I lived in Philadelphia in the 1980’s and travelled often to Manhattan. I was struck by how the island had so many large buildings, but the spatial division of commerce at the street level was contrastingly fine-grained, with small stores dominating. This bred a complex relationship between street and building, leading to a dynamic street life. Small stores tend to be anchored by personalities, often eccentric, and local residents often developed their own relationship with those personalities. Jane Jacobs writes about how a local hardware store became a place where she could leave her key so that a visitor who arrived in New York when she was away at work could collect the key and enter the home. This has changed. Now many small storefronts have been consolidated and taken over by global brands. Where there were four small store fronts, there is one large store, a global brand with one entrance and three large displays. Entering, one interfaces with the brand rather than a personality one recognises. The vibrancy of street life is reduced. The dynamic shaping the street has changed beyond the changed relationship between inside and outside. Looking at the people one sees on the street, one senses that middle class residents are displaced, the middle and working classes are there only as a floating population that offers its labour during working hours, and residences are increasingly reserved for the affluent. Where lower income neighbourhoods survive, they are increasingly ghettoised. Real estate values are driving this shift of gentrification of the inner city, especially given that these values are driven by global speculation rather than local investment, and markets are shaped by a speculative logic based on repackaging debt that grows more and more distant from the real world micro-economy of people and neighbourhoods. This distance reaches a point where its logic becomes self-referential: I heard a lecture by Saskia Sassen of Columbia University where she showed that to earn profit from a real estate asset, it is no longer necessary that the asset be used. How all this will play out in the long run, I do not know, but I sense the history of hegemony cannot continue to be what it has been.

A revival of grassroots mobilisation is needed, but the hope of social media fuelling this mobilisation has been dispelled by the short life of movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Social media is distorted by the business logic of its creators, is dependent on short attention spans interspersed with impulsive and nuance-free action, and is vulnerable to what the Rand Corporation has termed as ’the firehose of falsehood’. And this complicates a longer history of media in which the relationship between media and truth has always been problematic (see Walter Lippmann, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Neil Postman, and many others). The post-truth era is not something that has suddenly burst on the world in recent times.

I suspect that we need a new theory of mobilisation. I have some thoughts on this, but I have rambled on long enough, so will save that for another day.

Cheers,
Prem

On 10-Mar-2022, at 10:32 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Prem, it is good to hear from you. It's obvious you have a lot to say about all this. I would like to hear more on some points.

First I totally get it that the Pax Americana is a cover for US hegemony and how it has become a glaring fact. You say that to overcome it "we would need a frank and realistic accounting for the history of hegemony since World War II." I'm totally curious about that and wonder if you perceive a particularly strong narrative like that in India, or beyond, in Asia or in other transnational circuits? As I imagine you know there are mountains of books about that here in USA (I'm an aficionado of such literature) and the antiwar left has a readymade read of that history; but I know from traveling and speaking other languages that people on the receiving end of empire often understand it better than those who willingly or unwillingly do the giving.

Could US/Western hegemony become the theme of a social movement? Well, so far in the US there is a big move to understand how colonialism and slavery shaped social relations and even the landscape. That movement is led by Black, Indigenous and Latinx intellectuals, and no one knows how far it is going to go. Having the big newspapers report which of the "founding fathers" of the "land of the free" owned slaves is no small thing, a war in itself. But what could be on the table, and isn't yet, is the understanding of US foreign policy and economic power over the last century, what they do, how they shape the world. I think the misuse of power by the US, since WWII and more specifically since the Nineties, is a direct reflection and integral part of unjust and poisonous class/race relations in the domestic sphere. So there is a potential to go very far with that critique. However no viewpoint of that sort makes it out into the broad public sphere, which is structured to exclude any outside reference. So I understand your lack of optimism.

Going further into your argument, Prem, I have a for and an against. I am for the recognition that Nato and "the West" cannot rule anymore by edict, there is no legitimacy for that, no one will bear it. Reading between the lines, I sense you may be saying that great Asian or Eurasian societies such as China, India and Russia have to be recognized as such, on a par with Europe and separately with America, I mean as civilizations that chart a unique course and can't be compelled by force, but instead need to engage with each other through some kind of diplomacy. I am for that too, it's the idea that there is no one superpower -- or rather, to some extent there still is, and it's unjust and dangerous. In the present instance, one would have to account for things such as the very real financial devastation unleashed by the so-called "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98, which people in Russia experienced as the one-two punch of the capitalist system, coming right after the "reforms" of the early Nineties. As I recall, that crisis wiped out all sorts of fixed-capital formation in South Korea, Russia and Brazil especially, but it had basically no impact on the US itself, nor particularly in Europe. There is a kind of violence, emanating from the US but also the EU, that is real and people in the old imperial centers need to know it, so that they can change their politics.

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?

Well, at this point I have no idea and would all the more like to hear your insights, Prem.

The big question for me is how to get a rules-based international order out of a glut of imperial war machines. It's a serious one, and since the glorious leaders of our glorious empires aren't talking about it, we should.

warmly, Brian

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 12:40 AM Prem Chandavarkar <prem.cnt@gmail.com> wrote:
The fearful scenarios you lay out are all highly plausible, and will dominate till Putin is given greater options by considering a wider history of hegemony in which the US is highly complicit:

In 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate, US Secretary of State James Baker had a conversation with Gorbachev in which he suggested the Soviet Union should support German unification in return for a guarantee that NATO would not expand an inch eastward. On Baker’s return to the US, this option was rejected by George H.W. Bush.

NATO’s eastward expansion is bound to be a sensitive matter for Russia’s security. The Cold War established the history of Russia having a hostile frontier to the east, a vulnerability that increased once the buffer of the Warsaw Pact counties disintegrated in the early 90’s. Russia, on its eastern front, is one large plain with no natural defence features such as a mountain range or ocean, so the buffer between its heartland and this hostile frontier is a major concern.

Since the 1990’s, NATO has been on a major expansion spree eastwards, adding Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

This was bound to evoke a reaction from Russia, with Ukraine likely to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. This was foreseen 12 years ago by William Burns (then US Ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director) who wrote in a confidential cable (released by WikiLeaks), "Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

As Siddharth Varadarajan pointed out in The Wire (a digital media publication in India), “If Ukraine is to Russia today what Cuba was to the US during the missile crisis of 1962 (when it allowed the stationing of Russian nuclear weapons on its soil), then its resort to force – reprehensible though it undoubtedly is – should not surprise us. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ is as much the handiwork of a deranged leader as Kennedy’s illegal ‘quarantine’ of Cuban ports was."

NATO’s eastward expansion is driven by the Pax Americana project: a global peace underpinned by global economic, political, and military dominance of the US. This project is validated by Western governments by the argument that “we are the good guys”, the ones supporting the quest for a rule-based international order that has been the aspiration after World War II. This validation is supported by Western mainstream media, and largely accepted by the Western public.

This “we are the good guys” perception is not one that is shared by most other parts of the world, which sees the US as one of the major violators of the rule-based International order. Some examples are the invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, support to Israel’s ruthless annexation of Palestinian territory, interventions affecting regime change in many parts of Latin America, long-standing economic sanctions against Cuba; and there are many more.

The Pax Americana project is perceived by most of the world as nothing more than a US quest for global hegemony. This would be felt with greater acuity by Russia.

We have now returned to the value-free and rules-free international environment that existed before World War II, with the addition of a game changing element of nuclear armed nations.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under International law, a violation of the assurances that Russia gave Ukraine as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and must be condemned and resisted. But a way out of the conflict depends on a stronger assurance of a rule-based International order,

A precondition for a implementing this is the acceptance that no single superpower should possess global hegemony. To achieve this, we would need a frank and realistic accounting for the history of hegemony since World War II.

Due to domestic political concerns, it is unlikely that any Western government will foreground, or even articulate, such a reading of history. Change is only possible with a people’s movement within the West. Sadly, one sees little ground for optimism on this count.

On 08-Mar-2022, at 5:50 PM, patrice riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:

... has already arrived .

Aloha,

Even though the last two posts on the list are mine, I have no intention to become (again) nettime's #1 poster! So this will be my last one for now.

This said I still wanted to share my thoughts - was it only to be relieved of them - about 'the situation' with fellow nettimers.

ExecSum: I think that war in Western Europe is now inevitable, and it will descend on us sooner than we all would wish for.

In my mind, there are three options about when NATO will actually go to, or be dragged into a war against Putin's Russia.

Option Zero: There will be no war. Putin will enslave Ukraine after having laid it to waste, annex part of it, and transform the rest in a vassal state, or whatever 'solution' he has in mind after achieving 'victory'. And 'we' in the West, will accommodate with the new situation and try to make the best of it, even if it won't be fun at all on many front. And yet I would feel insanely optimistic if I gave it half a chance of happening - or even less than that.

Having put his war machinery in movement, there is no turning back for Vladimir Putin, save a number of scenarios for his demise that have been discussed here and there and which are all entirely speculative. So by keeping it strictly to the current state of the situation, I see only three possible outcomes, all based on the assumption that the political and military deciders in the Western alliance (but also outside of it) have by now concluded that a war can no longer be averted, the only question being when it will start 'for real'.

So there are in my mind three 'moments' when NATO will become involved in an armed conflict with Putin's Russia:

Moment 1: The situation in Ukraine becomes so dire, the 'Grosnyfication' of Ukrainian cities so blatant, the masses of refugees into Ukraine's neighbours, fleeing the violence under the bombs so colossal, that 'in the West', populations, politicians, media, and even the military brass get so agitated as to decide that enough is enough - and that 'we will be next' any way. So there will be more and more support pouring into Ukraine that will less and less distinguishable from direct military intervention, a stage that in the eyes of Putin has been passed long ago in any case.

Moment 2 happens if Putin indeed achieve his goals in Ukraine, at whatever cost to the Russian and to the Ukrainian people without NATO actually intervening, it having be paralysed by the fear of consequences Putin has repeatedly, and unequivocally threatened with. In which case there is no reason whatsoever to assume he will stop at that and now will go to menace, and, if unsuccessful, attack both ex-Soviet, but not NATO members Moldova and Georgia. Russia annexing Moldova will make Romania very angry and very anxious, doing the same with Georgia will rattle Turkey to an even larger extent, and greater consequences. And both Romania and Turkey are NATO members. At which stage the same 'we'll anyway be next' conclusion might prevail after all ...

... or not. Moldova and far-from-Europe (if not from Turkey) Georgia will be left to their fate of post-Soviet & pre-Imperial vassal states, whether they have resisted invasion (& be destroyed in the process) or not. Moment 2 in any case represents a 'between-in' scenario that could be triggered by the outcome of Moment 1, ... or not, or might just as well merge with ...

Moment 3 which will happen when Putin's Russia will directly threaten NATO countries, arguing yet again that NATO, not Russia, is the 'structural' aggressor. Unfortunately, the trigger to make it is there, in plain sight, on the map: it is called the 'Suvalky gap' and it consist in the 90km long borderline between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian (semi-)exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast from Russia's vassal Belarus - by now, and surely by then, a nation in name only. No doubt Putin will demand a 'corridor' to put an end to this insufferable situation, itself the result from the evenmore insufferable existence of the formerly Soviet Baltic states as independent countries. And all NATO members, just as Poland.

There will be no Czechoslovakia 1939. Having gone that far, the analogy with the precedent of Nazi Germany will have become too stark. NATO will go at war. What happens next is for any one and everyone to imagine.

I am aware that there are a lot of holes that can (and will) be shot in my presentation. The most obvious one being whether Putin can hold Russia together as it is dragging it into a fratricidal annihilation war with Ukraine - with the economic disaster that it entails. And whether he can hold his power (and even his life) in the face of possible (probable?) mounting discontent, both of the Russian people and of his own clique. Beware of the Ides of March (in 6 days time!) and the 'Tu quoque' bit they say ... but this wishful thinking is surely part of my sentiment, but not of my reasoning.

Conclusion: We - and this time without speech marks - are toast. Sorry.

Cheers all the same,

p+7D!

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