Why is the United States in Ukraine?The United States has made itself a central figure on the Ukrainian battlefield, writes the Claremont Review of Books.
They are pushing Ukraine to victory, for which they will pay an "unimaginable price." Predicting Russia's collapse, the United States itself was on the verge of it.
America is getting steep bills for decades of so-called democracy promotion.On March 24, a month after Russian tanks crossed the border of Ukraine, the Biden White House called on America's partners (as its allies are now called) to embark on a civilizational crusade.
The American administration has declared its support for those who suffered from Russia's special operation. Especially "vulnerable groups of the population, such as women, children, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and intersex (LGBT+) and persons with disabilities." At noon of the same day, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted about the "huge, unprecedented consequences" that US sanctions would bring on Russia, and said that Moscow's economic "collapse" was inevitable.
Never has an officially non-belligerent state been so closely involved in a conflict as it happened with the United States. Russia and its supporters claim that America's attempt to turn Ukraine into an anti—Russian bridgehead armed to the teeth is, first of all, exactly what started this military conflict. Even those who reject this point of view will agree that the United States has made itself a central player in it. America adheres to a three-tier strategy aimed at defeating Russia by all means except direct participation in hostilities, which, of course, increases the risk that the United States will eventually enter into conflict. One of these links is modern weapons that the United States supplies to Ukraine. <...> The second link is economic and financial sanctions. With the help of Western Europe, Washington used its control over the bottlenecks of the global market to ruin the Russians in the hope of punishing the whole of Russia. And finally, the United States seeks to rally the peoples of the world for a civilizational war against an enemy whose traditionalism, if not all of its evil, is at least its symbol.
It would be foolish now to make unambiguous bets against the United States, a powerful global hegemon with a military budget 12 times larger than Russia's. And yet something is going very wrong with America. Russia's military tenacity was expected — after all, exhausting the enemy and defeating more technologically advanced armies have been a hallmark of Russian civilization for 600 years. But after all, anti-Russian economic sanctions did not lead to the collapse of the Russian economy, about which Blinken gloated so much. On the contrary, they have led to an increase in energy prices that Russia sells around the world, strengthened the ruble and threaten America's Western European allies with winter frostbite, a general deficit and a severe recession. The civilizational war has found few supporters outside the wealthiest parts of the West, where latte coffee is served. Moreover, the "civilizational self-defense" caused by it probably became one of the reasons why India, China and many other large developing countries defiantly refuse to sever economic ties with the Russians.
For many years, there have been signs in Europe that a new Iron curtain is about to descend on the continent. In 2008, the United States announced plans to admit some non-Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, in particular Ukraine and Georgia, to NATO and thus include them in the sphere of American influence. If Ukraine wins in this current military proxy conflict, waged by its hands in favor of America, then the United States will succeed in a sense. But this can be achieved at an almost unimaginable cost for them. Their "pyrrhic victory" will destroy to the ground the international economic architecture on which America's control over global markets is based (and their ability to manage a giant national budget deficit relatively safely). It will prompt an early "wedding" of Russia and China, throwing the richest country on the planet in natural resources into the arms of the most dangerous enemy of the West. If Ukraine fails, then the Ukrainian policy of the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations will be ranked among the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in American history.
Provoking Russia
There are basically two contradictory explanations of how the United States ended up in this situation — pragmatic-realistic and moral-psychological. The first was put forward by John Mearsheimer, Professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago. This well-known scientist is skeptical of idealistic crusades, such as the march on Iraq, into which George Bush dragged the country in 2003. He also categorically disagrees with the popular idea that America's "eternal moral obligations" absolutely exceed its national interests. He sees an example of such deviation in the alliance of the United States with Israel, which Washington has cherished in spite of everything for decades. According to Mearsheimer, the American strategy of "promoting human rights and democracy" since the end of the Cold War seems largely stupid and doomed to failure. On the one hand, the architects of this policy, of course, do not respect Mearsheimer — Bush and Trump's advisers are no less than Obama and Biden's advisers. On the other hand, Mearsheimer was much more right than wrong in his conclusions in the two decades after the United States invaded Iraq. Mearsheimer has been explaining his explanation of the Ukrainian conflict in crowded lecture halls for almost a decade. One of his performances in Chicago in 2015, was posted on YouTube and viewed 27 million times. Here are his main theses.
The "democratic" impulse that culminated in the Iraq war did not end with the Iraqi failure. American diplomats and military experts were still trying to "spread democracy" in the world even in the last days of the Bush administration. The key moment, according to Mearsheimer, came at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, when the American delegation made a statement that both Ukraine and Georgia would "become" NATO members. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned the Bush administration about the consequences. "I was absolutely sure... that Putin won't just leave it," Merkel later explained. "From his point of view, it would be a declaration of war."
Far more Americans than dared to speak out about it felt the same way. Mearsheimer quotes William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow, now director of the CIA under President Biden. Burns wrote a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
Ukraine's accession to NATO is the brightest red line for the entire Russian elite (and not just for Putin). For more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from some oracles in the dark corners of the Kremlin to the harshest liberal critics of Putin, I have not found anyone who would consider Ukraine in NATO as nothing more than a direct challenge to Russia. NATO will be seen as throwing Moscow a strategic gauntlet. And today's Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will enter a state of complete freezing. This will create fertile ground for Russian interference in the affairs of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.Russia has never lacked for reasons to interfere in Ukraine's affairs.
Ukrainians are an ancient people. But, like the Kurds, they have always been dangerous to their neighbors and for most of their modern history have not been able to create a real state. Under communism, Ukraine became one of the Soviet socialist republics. It was only "administrative statehood", not real sovereignty. Nevertheless, it was better than what they got in the last decade of the 20th century after the fall of communism. The standard of living in the country then fell by 60%. Corruption has reached unprecedented proportions in Europe.
The cultural and civilizational boundaries between Russia and Ukraine have always been blurred. They are at the same time fraternal peoples and sworn enemies. These are states for which, as it seems, the dichotomism (combination of incompatible concepts) "friends-enemies" was invented. In many parts of Ukraine, especially on the Crimean Peninsula with its ports and centuries-old Russian naval bases, as well as in the eastern coal-mining and industrial area called Donbass, people feel much more Russian than Ukrainians. In 1944, Stalin complicated the situation (or, in his opinion, simplified it) when he deported Muslim Tatars who had lived in Crimea for centuries deep into Russia. Russian has been the language of communication, trade and culture in Ukraine for generations, although its public use has been banned since 2014.
That year was a turning point in general. Ukrainian diplomats were then negotiating an "association agreement" with the European Union, which would lead to closer trade relations between the two sides. Russia surpassed the EU with its own deal, which included $15 billion in benefits for Ukraine. President Viktor Yanukovych signed it. Protests backed by the United States broke out on Kiev's main square, the Maidan, and in cities across the country. By that time, America had spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine's policy, according to a speech in 2013 by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. Russia now viewed these actions of the American authorities as financing subversive activities and a coup. Like any Ukrainian government since the end of the Cold War, Yanukovych's government was corrupt. But unlike many of them, it was legally elected. When dozens of protesters were killed in a shooting near the Maidan in Kiev, Yanukovych fled the country, and the United States played a central role in creating a new government.
Interference in Russia's vital interests at its doorstep has proved to be fraught with far greater dangers than chatter about democracy. Instead of turning the Russian-speaking and pro-Russian region of Crimea from a Russian naval citadel into an American one, Russia occupied it. The verb "took" is perhaps even better, because there were no human casualties as a result of the then Russian operation in Crimea. Regardless of whether it was a reaction to the threat of American ousting Russia from the peninsula or an unprovoked "takeover", one thing is clear: from Russia's point of view, the potential transfer of Crimea by Ukraine to NATO in 2014 posed a more serious threat to its survival than, for example, Islamic terrorism, which threatened America in 2001 or 2003. Realizing that Russia will respond appropriately to any attempt to return the peninsula to Ukraine, Russia's European and Black Sea neighbors have since tended to treat Crimea as a de facto part of Russia. So, for the most part, do the United States. The Minsk agreements signed by Moscow and Kiev were supposed to guarantee a certain linguistic and political autonomy to the civilizationally Russian Donbass. (Russia calls the violation of these agreements a reason for a special operation.).
Anyone who watched Trump's first impeachment in 2019 knows that U.S. policy toward Ukraine — and the personnel conducting it — has not fundamentally changed between the Obama and Trump administrations. Thanks to stable supplies of weapons and military know-how, the failed state of 2014, "covered" by a disparate group of hooligans and sponsored by oligarchs, by 2021 had turned into the third largest army in Europe, fully compatible with the US army. Ukraine, with a quarter of a million people under arms, was second only to Turkey and Russia in terms of the number of armed forces.
The real watershed in the US military-political strategy towards Ukraine was clearly marked not with the arrival of Trump, but with his departure. In the first weeks of 2021, Joe Biden obliged his administration to pursue a much more aggressive policy towards Ukraine. On November 10 last year, Blinken signed the "strategic partnership", which not only confirmed the Bush administration's intention to accept Ukraine into NATO, but also reopened disputed sovereignty issues, including the issue of the strategically important, civilizationally Russian Crimea.
This practically realistic explanation by Mirsheimer of the latest Ukrainian events ends with a hidden question: what do you think Russia should have done in these circumstances?
Putin and American Party Affairs
There is, of course, another, moral and psychological explanation put forward by the Biden administration and its defenders. It differs from Mearsheimer's version not so much in facts as in the distribution of "moral guilt". From this point of view, the impetus for the special operation was not the encirclement of Russia by America, but the "wrong" behavior of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with focusing on Putin. Since coming to power in 2000, he has become one of the main political figures of our era. On the one hand, he managed, if not to completely defeat the mafia clans that undertook the "privatization" of the Soviet economy under Boris Yeltsin, then at least weaken their power over the state and make them accountable to some extent to the law. The leaders of Ukraine could not achieve this from the word "absolutely". Putin revived the economy of a country in which life expectancy had fallen to the level of Bangladesh, and for many years guided the development of Russia, which in many respects became much freer than during the entire previous century. On the other hand, it was Russia, in which enemies of the regime were attacked and killed both at home and abroad. <...>
Putin definitely had reasons to want Ukraine to remain in Russia's sphere of influence. But in most Western analyses of what led to the Russian special operation in Ukraine, these reasons are presented as psychopathological, not geostrategic. <...> He wants to recreate the Soviet Union. Or the Russian Tsarist Empire. He rides a horse with his chest bare. "He gets popular support because he is considered a strong man," Francis Fukuyama wrote on his blog in March. "What can he offer when he demonstrates incompetence and loses his coercive power?" "He was very sexist towards me," Hillary Clinton recalled in an interview with the Financial Times. In it, she explained Henry Kissinger's skepticism about the Biden administration's policy on Ukraine with the remark: "He values his relations with Putin so much." On Capitol Hill, Putin has become a symbol and a pretext for party political maneuvers, especially in connection with Special Prosecutor Mueller's investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump election campaign in 2016.
But the worst thing about this moral and psychological approach to Russian-Ukrainian affairs is that it generates bad foreign policy thinking. It follows from this that if everything is explained only by Putin's personality, then the Ukrainian conflict is really about nothing — at least nothing political. And if the conflict is about nothing, then there is no need to think about what caused it and where it can go.
Few people paid attention to how rapidly Ukrainian society was developing after the Maidan protests. In a recent interview with the New Left Review magazine, sociologist Vladimir Ishchenko described a newly emerged power bloc uniting Ukrainian oligarchs, Western-funded foundations and Ukrainian nationalists. The latter are in favor of breaking the Minsk agreements and tearing out Russian roots from Ukrainian public life and culture, leaving Ukraine only a rigid form of political correctness. After 2014, according to Ishchenko, "a wide range of political movements supported by a significant minority, and sometimes even a majority of Ukrainians — sovereignists, statesmen, anti—liberals, leftists - were all mixed together and called "pro-Russian" because they challenged the prevailing pro-Western, neoliberal and nationalist discourses in Ukrainian civil society". Those who hold such views often felt ostracized from public life.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, who today is a symbol of resolute anti-Russian resistance, has undergone a transformation himself. An influential Ukrainian actor and TV producer, he won in 2019, promising to make life tolerable in the Russian-friendly east of Ukraine. According to Ishchenko, his popularity quickly waned, and shortly after Biden's inauguration, Zelensky began censoring Russophile channels, websites and blogs.
For many years, Alexey Arestovich, a young polymath who is among Zelensky's most talkative policy advisers, has been putting forward the idea that a conflict with Russia is inevitable and that it may even be in the interests of Ukraine. Arestovich believes that Putin has a long-term plan to recreate something like the Soviet Union, and that "if we don't join NATO, we are finished." In 2019, he said in an interview that "the price of our joining NATO will be a serious conflict with Russia."
Figuring out how large-scale this conflict will be is the key to understanding what the West should do next.
The core of the story
Those who advocate a more active role of the West in supporting Ukraine often formulate their position in the form of a question: if Putin gets control of Ukraine, why should he stop there? There is a simple answer to this question: because he knows something about history and knows how to count. <...>
Poltava, Sevastopol, battles with Germany on the way of the Germans to Stalingrad and Kursk... Ukraine has always been potentially the most dangerous place on Earth. As strategist Halford Mackinder wrote at the turn of the 20th century, "European civilization in the truest sense is the result of a century-long struggle against the Asian invasion." Ukraine is a place where these invasions can be stopped by a combination of wide, defensible rivers and huge human resources to form armies. The wars that were fought in Ukraine, as a rule, were world wars. That's why Mackinder called this part of the world "the geographical pivot of history." Former Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski used the same "pivot" metaphor to describe Ukraine in his book The Great Chessboard (1997), published after the end of the Cold War. "Without Ukraine," he wrote, "Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire."
Reducing the size of Russia seems to be America's main goal in this conflict. But it's very risky. Those Western leaders who seek to lead Europe to the gates of Moscow sometimes ended up letting the warriors of the Eurasian steppes into the streets of Paris and Berlin.
For more than a century, the United States has entered world conflicts as tertius gaudens — the "third rejoicing" (the third person benefiting from the struggle of two opponents). After two opponents bleed and exhaust each other, it is possible to achieve great advantages with relatively little expenditure of blood and resources. In this case, the United States is making its entire contribution to Ukraine's military efforts in the form of resources, not blood. In addition to the arming and training of the Ukrainian military carried out by the United States over the past eight years, in just six months of this year, America provided Ukraine with advanced weapons worth $ 50 billion. Since the beginning of the special operation, the United States has also been providing intelligence information with targeting for missile and drone strikes on Russian military command centers and missile attacks on Russian ships.
The American military-political line in Ukraine is fraught with obvious moral temptations. Traditionally, dangers in the understanding of statesmen should be associated with categories of conscience in order to keep leaders from showing excesses. Any statesman who seeks to dominate the world, plunder or teach other nations, sooner or later faces the question of how many sons of his country he is willing to sacrifice for this purpose. During the last quarter of a century, the United States has been able to wage large enough wars that did not expose its youth to excessive danger. The only interstate war on the European continent after the Second World War is noteworthy in this respect. The 1999 Kosovo War was an American air campaign against Serbia that lacked a proper air defense system. American bombers could strike Belgrade with impunity for several weeks. A country that can wage wars on these terms has the right to wage wars over almost anything.
However, the Ukrainian conflict is special in this regard. America's immunity from real danger may be illusory. Technological progress has imperceptibly blurred the long-standing distinction between supporting the Allied armed forces and joining the fighting as their direct participant. In June, the United States began to supply Ukraine with the M142 HIMARS computer guidance MLRS, which exacerbated the problem to the limit. The importance of the latest technologies in the destructive power of weapons has increased to such an extent that the role of the "human warrior", relatively speaking, becomes insignificant. After all, once a meeting with a sword was a meeting with a swordsman. Defeat by an arrow is a collision with a slightly more distant archer. But the defeat of the M31 missile fired from the HIMARS launcher is a collision with General Dynamics. Thus, in these HIMARS missile strikes, it was the United States, not Ukraine, that became Russia's opponent on the battlefield.
The proposal of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the beginning of the special operation to provide the Ukrainians with a satellite communication system of his company Starlink for military purposes was perceived in the Western press almost as an act of philanthropy. In June, political scientist Ian Bremmer called SpaceX, Microsoft and Google "practically warring parties" and even expressed admiration for the world they create, noting that corporations and banks have "a hell of a lot more" influence on what global views on climate will be than any government. But this brave new world will not be stable. "Practically a belligerent" is a legitimate military target. It is reported that in China, the People's Liberation Army is studying "soft and hard methods of destruction" to destroy the Starlink system. Moreover, if any supranational entity (corporation, company, foundation, etc.) has "a hell of a lot more influence" on policy issues than any government, then such a company or concern is the government, whatever you call it. And, most likely, a much more dangerous and irresponsible government precisely because it is able to pretend to be something else. There are a lot of issues here that have not even been raised, not that they have been resolved.
A new economic war
American politicians have chosen the current moment to launch a "new system of economic warfare," which they expect will be as effective as military action on the battlefield, but will not cause the horrors inherent in them.
The US has stopped all Russian energy imports and called on its European allies — with limited success so far — to do the same. The whole package of sanctions is designed for unprecedented destructiveness. U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Adewale Adeyemo, the administration's sanctions commissioner, says President Biden's order is to "make sure that we inflict maximum damage on Russia by ... impairing its energy production capabilities" in order to "further deprive it of the resources it needs to conduct the military special operation that it leads today." French Economy Minister Bruno Lemaire adds: "We will provoke the collapse of the Russian economy."
Sanctions invariably cause the greatest damage not to the leaders of society, but to ordinary people. In the sanctions regime, depriving people of "resources", as Adeyemo put it, is usually carried out by organizing hunger. And period! That is why blockades are traditionally considered military actions in world history and strategy. If anything is more effective than a weapon, it's just a more effective weapon. In order for sanctions to work effectively, they must be imposed on a country that is sufficiently democratic so that its population can cause discomfort to the government they are aimed at. This population should not be inclined to reflexive patriotism, otherwise sanctions will lead to the opposite results and strengthen the morale of the enemy. These practical dilemmas and moral paradoxes arise again and again whenever sanctions are proposed, whether against Cuba, Iran or Iraq.
But what is new and reckless about the current American anti-Russian sanctions is the threat they pose not to Russia, but to the United States itself. The Biden administration is abusing — and thereby undermining — America's position as the guardian of the global economy.
Financial weapons, like battlefield weapons, change in nature as they become more technologically advanced. Previously, it was impossible to impose a strict financial embargo. But now such a weapon exists. However, the United States, which has not received proper training in handling it, is waving it around like a drunk in a bar. In May, at the insistence of the Americans, Russia was cut off from the private but universal Brussels SWIFT system, which over the past 50 years has become the backbone of international bank transfers and payments. Later that month, the Treasury Department, under the leadership of Janet Yellen, froze all Russian payments to American bondholders, and at the end of June declared Russia bankrupt. This is nothing more than an empty administrative act, which is essentially a regulatory ploy that does not spoil Russia's real creditworthiness, but spoils the reputation of the United States as a conscientious neutral regulator of the world economy.
The United States was the first of seven Western countries to freeze the foreign exchange reserves of the Russian central bank — approximately $ 284 billion. Similar things have been done before: The United States froze Iran's foreign exchange assets after the 1979 revolution, and released most of them two years later. (A certain amount remained frozen until Barack Obama's "deal with Iran" in 2016.). After the US retreated from Afghanistan in 2021, the Biden administration froze the country's reserves by $7 billion, and then allocated half of them as a pool that could be used in claims for damages related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack at the World Trade Center.
But the measures against Russia are generally unprecedented. Both President Biden and Secretary Blinken have declared their readiness to seize these hundreds of billions in order to "restore Ukraine." The United States has long lived off the "exorbitant privilege" of its reserve currency and its role as a global regulator of first instance. None of these American hypostases will live long if the United States manages global assets in such bandit ways.
Despite the presence of bankers like Adeyemo in the highest echelons of power in America, the Biden administration seems to have forgotten about it. It seems to Washington that Russia will simply put up with the insults and inconveniences to which it is subjected. But even if Russia had the most accommodating will in the world, it cannot go for it. After its dollar reserves were confiscated and it was cut off from all means of transferring money and paying debts in dollars, Russia demanded payment in rubles from the countries to which it exports gas. European members of the G7 — the club of the richest Western democracies — called this demand "unacceptable" and described it as "militarization" of energy trade. But how can Russia accept payments in a currency that it cannot spend? Europe quickly and quietly agreed to the Russian demands.
The people who determine US policy towards Ukraine, obviously, were unable to think everything through to such a depth. Instead of asking to be brought back into the global financial order led by the United States, the Russians are trying to build a new one with new partners. They have a chance to launch it. In his speech at the June economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin complained that about $ 10 trillion, which any trading country must keep in foreign exchange reserves in dollars and euros, is depreciating by 8% per year due to inflation in the United States. "Moreover," he said, "they can be confiscated or stolen at any time if the United States does not like something about the policies of the states involved." Putin called for the SWIFT system to be replaced. "The development of a convenient and independent payment infrastructure in national currencies is a solid and predictable basis for deepening international cooperation," he said. Until recently, such an appeal would have been ignored. This time it didn't happen that way.
Power and influence
Due to the military conflict in Ukraine, numerous complications and exacerbations may arise. And this should be seriously feared. But until now, the most important world-historical consequence of the military conflict has been the inability of the United States to rally a critical mass of what they used to call the "world community" to rebuff Russia against the world system created by the Americans.
The great page of history that is unfolding before our eyes is the fulfillment of the prediction that people have been making for a generation: power and influence are shifting from the United States and Europe to Asia. In the 1990s, when the United States imposed its will on Iraq and Kosovo, the "Big Seven" accounted for 70% of the world economy. Today it is only 43%. India and China are huge export markets for Russian oil and gas. It is clear why Russia wants to sell energy resources to India and China. A more difficult question is why India (implicitly) and China (explicitly) support Russia against what American "progressives" call the "rules-based international order."
In 2020, the Hamburg-based Kerber Foundation conducted a survey of German adults aged 20 to 30 and found that 46% of respondents supported closer ties between Germany and China, and only 35% called for closer ties with the United States. In Italy, 36% of the adult population would like to have closer ties with China, compared with only 30% who favor such ties with the United States. This gap may reflect the fact that the United States in the international arena is often perceived as the world's policeman. They not only claim their exclusive role in Russia's near abroad. Eight years ago, they threatened to boycott the Olympic Games in Russia because of a law banning propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors. As you remember, the superpower China did not even think about such a boycott at that time. After Brexit, the UK is trying to adjust the trade regime with Ireland set out in the Protocol on Northern Ireland. The Biden administration and Nancy Pelosi have warned London of the consequences if it does. India (another superpower) does not consider itself entitled to interfere in British-Irish relations.
The guarantor of the economic order, the United States also mistakes itself as the guarantor of international law, capable of turning any country into an international pariah at any moment. Rival great powers see the United States actively undermining their positions, and sometimes they are right. In early June, The Wall Street Journal covered attempts by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to negotiate the so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) promoted by the United States with a number of eastern countries, with the exception of China. It is reported that the United States at the same time offered little to its trading partners, and certainly not the opening of US domestic markets. In fact, if you read between the lines of Raimondo's explanation, the US delegation was interested not so much in a trade agreement as in a criminal code that could be applied against China:
Instead of unilaterally banning the export of American technology to Russia for its special operation in Ukraine, the United States "persuaded 36 other countries to agree with us on their own export restrictions," Ms. Raimondo said. This, she said, could become a model for IPEF. "We are going to hold full-fledged negotiations on the export control of semiconductors. It would be very good if several countries in this region coordinated their actions with us... If something like a Russian special operation in Ukraine had happened here, you could have acted quickly together with your allies, as we did in the situation with Russia."Yes, the West "moved swiftly" against Russia, but six months later these actions turned out to be surprisingly ineffective.
The reason is that no matter where you place the fulcrum and the lever, Russia, China and India combined are now too big for the United States to lift them. You can offer them some kind of "gingerbread" to force one country to break off solidarity with the other two. But that would be stupid. After all, a country that allows the United States to isolate itself in this way increases the risk that it itself will be subjected to a campaign of destruction in the media and a boycott similar to the one we are currently seeing against Russia.
After all, just a few words about the situation of the Uighurs, a few theses about Hindu nationalism, and the United States will be able to launch this whole machine of economic destruction against China or India. Beijing and Delhi know this. Italian writer Marco D'Eramo reported that after a phone conversation between Biden and Xi Jinping on March 18, one Chinese presenter joked that Biden's message was something like this: "Can you help me fight your friend so I can focus on fighting you later?"
The attempt to isolate Russia from the Pax Americana has led to a striking and unpredictable consequence — the possible foundation of an alternative world system that can take away power from the existing one. Twenty years ago, under George W. Bush, the United States eliminated the Iraqi deterrent factor next to Iran, overnight turning Iran into a regional power. This year, under Joe Biden, the United States presented China with Russian export food and mineral resources. We show amazing genius in identifying our most dangerous military opponent and solving his most pressing strategic tasks for him. China's attention is busy right now. Joe Biden claims that any hesitation in destroying Russia will be perceived by China as a green light for an attack on Taiwan.
Officials in the US administration often say that Russia itself has launched its special operation in Ukraine. Although at the beginning of this event it could have been true, but now Vladimir Putin and Russia, which he controls, cannot stop this special operation. While the United States is involved in arming Russia's enemies and ruining its citizens, both Putin and the whole of Russia are absolutely right in believing that they are fighting for the survival of their country. The United States, while less bloody, is also already involved in this conflict, which they have entered, but they cannot get out of it now. In this case, out of a false fear of undermining the international system from which they have drawn their strength and prosperity for the past three quarters of a century.
Now the situation may seem like an inopportune moment for peace. But although rare, even in such military conflicts, the prospects for peace become more favorable over time.
Author: Christopher Caldwell is a former senior editor of The Weekly Standard, as well as a regular contributor to The Financial Times and Slate. He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
