Could Putin Have Avoided War?

 

I think I'll first mention Michael Husdson's essay, which I read earlier this morning, before moving onto David Swanson's essay about how both Russia and the Ukraine could have avoided this terrible conflict.

Hudson writes: "America has just destroyed a Great Empire" and in it he mentions the story from ancient history about ... aw fuck it.  I can't summarize it more efficiently that Hudson already did:

Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Hudson's point is that Biden and Blinken (two very stupid men, advised by delusional psychopathic idiot neo-cons) thought that they were leading Putin's Russia to its doom, but instead it is the US Empire that has been exposed and weakened.

A nationalist reaction against U.S. dominance is rising throughout European politics, and instead of America locking in its control over European policy, the United States may end up losing – not only in Europe but most crucially throughout the Global South. Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s balance of trade has soared and its gold supply has increased. So have the gold holdings of other countries whose governments are now aiming to de-dollarize their economies.

It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within. The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”

...

The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor, and the idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards.

The irony is that America’s historical role has been that although it itself was not able to lead the world forward along these lines, its attempts to lock the world into an antithetical imperial system by conquering Russia on the plains of Ukraine and trying to isolate China’s technology from breaking the U.S. attempt at IT monopoly have been the great catalysts pushing the global majority along these lines.

It is shocking to me how few people in North America have even the faintest glimmering clue about this reality.  It is an indictment of North American and other NATO countries' "journalism" that they present such a warped picture of reality.  The state of journalism in these countries is truly abysmal.

Then again, when I ask my deluded fellow progressives just why they think that Biden actually cares about the sufferings of Ukrainians when he actively insists on the continued genocide of Yemenis, they either ignore me, or utter the [supposedly] magic word "Whataboutism!" and continue on reading garbage and thinking garbage and writing garbage.

Anyhow; Food for thought hunh?

Now to Swanson's editorial. First of all, nothing in what Swanson says cancels out the reality that this terrible conflict is 95% the fault of the scumbag Biden administration.  If Russia or China was able to, and began taking steps to incorporate Canada or Mexico into an anti-USA military alliance, the USA (no matter what sort of administration was in power) would attack Canada/Mexico, overthrow said governments and install a pro-USA puppet government.  That's a given.  And that being the case, it is the height of hypocrisy for the USA to provoke Putin/Russia this way (no other conceivable Russian government would have responded differently) and then shriek about "the rules-based international order" and weep crocodie tears for suffering Ukrainians (while simultaneously celebrating the slaughter of Palestinians, Yemenis, Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Somalis, etc., etc., ).

It is obvious to everyone who isn't a complete shit-head that Putin tried to avoid this war.  He tried to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine (its borders were as much an artificial construct, ignoring demographics and regional history as did many European colonies in Africa) several times even before Minsk's I & II.  He tried one last time in a letter to the USA and its NATO satraps in December 2021 only to be arrogantly dismissed out of hand.  (Which .... according to many shit-heads .... is exactly what you do when a "madman" with nuclear weapons is threatening war if his security concerns aren't addressed.)

But was war Putin's only realistic option?  David Swanson says no.  Here are some things that Putin could have tried as an alternative:

Never mind that what Russia has done has strengthened NATO beyond anything NATO could ever have done on its own. Never mind that Ukraine is dumping gasoline on the fire of its own destruction. Supposedly there was and is no choice but the counterproductive choice of violence. Nothing else is even thinkable. However . . .

Russia could have:

1. Continued mocking the daily predictions of an invasion and created worldwide hilarity, rather than invading and making the predictions simply off by a matter of days.
2. Continued evacuating people from Eastern Ukraine who felt threatened by the Ukrainian government, military, and Nazi thugs.
3. Offered evacuees more than $29 to survive on; offered them in fact houses, jobs, and guaranteed income. (Remember, we’re talking about alternatives to militarism, so money is no object and no extravagant expense will ever be more than a drop in the bucket of war spending.)
4. Made a motion for a vote in the UN Security Council to democratize the body and abolish the veto.
5. Asked the UN to oversee a new vote in Crimea on whether to rejoin Russia.
6. Joined the International Criminal Court.
7. Asked the ICC to investigate crimes in Donbas.
8. Sent into Donbas many thousands of unarmed civilian protectors.
9. Sent into Donbas the world’s best trainers in nonviolent civil resistance.
10. Funded educational programs across the world on the value of cultural diversity in friendships and communities, and the abysmal failures of racism, nationalism, and Nazism.
11. Removed the most fascist members from the Russian military.
12. Offered as gifts to Ukraine the world’s leading solar, wind, and water energy production facilities.
13. Shut down the gas pipeline through Ukraine and committed to never building one north of there.
14. Announced a commitment to leaving Russian fossil fuels in the ground for the sake of the Earth.
15. Offered as a gift to Ukraine electric infrastructure.
16. Offered as a gift of friendship to Ukraine railway infrastructure.
17. Declared support for the public diplomacy that Woodrow Wilson pretended to support.
18. Announced again the eight demands it began making in December, and requested public responses to each from the U.S. government.
19. Asked Russian-Americans to celebrate Russian-American friendship at the teardrop monument given to the United States by Russia off New York Harbor.
20. Joined the major human rights treaties it has yet to ratify, and asked that others do the same.
21. Announced its commitment to unilaterally uphold disarmament treaties shredded by the United States, and encouraged reciprocation.
22. Announced a no-first-use nuclear policy, and encouraged the same.
23. Announced a policy of disarming nuclear missiles and keeping them off alert status to allow more than mere minutes before launching an apocalypse, and encouraged the same.
24. Proposed a ban on international weapons sales.
25. Proposed negotiations by all nuclear-armed governments, including those with U.S. nuclear weapons in their countries, to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons.
26. Committed to not maintaining weapons or troops within 100, 200, 300, 400 km of any borders, and requested the same of its neighbors.
27. Organized a nonviolent unarmed army to walk to and protest any weapons or troops near borders.
28. Put out a call to the world for volunteers to join the walk and protest.
29. Celebrated the diversity of the global community of activists and organized cultural events as part of the protest.
30. Asked the Baltic states that have planned nonviolent responses to Russian invasion to help train Russians and other Europeans in the same.

You can read Swanson's thoughts about what the nazi-dominated Ukrainian government could have done to avoid war at the link if you want.  

I need to go to the gym.  I'm also going to head out to the beach today.  I'll look at those proposals in depth later.  But I do think they're worth considering.  I've stated several times in the past that I do not like Putin.  He's a far-right reactionary.  But I have also said that over the past few decades, so far as foreign diplomacy goes, he has been  a restrained, responsible actor in the face of multiple, outrageous US provocations.

To be continued ...

CONTINUATION

So, not invading while the US government and media continued to claim Russia would invade?  That would have had some comedic effect I suppose.  What would the USA/Ukraine response eventually be though?  To continue to arm Ukraine and build fortifications?

Evacuate Donbas residents vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery fire?  Because the cost to do so would be less than the financial and, obviously, human costs of war?  That is something that I think could have been explored.  It would be nice to see some estimates for the financial expenses of re-locating thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands?) of people out of range of the shelling.  How would that play domestically?  Putin has politicians on his right who criticize his restraint.  Would every Donbas resident in the area agree to be re-located?  Would Washington somehow be able to twist things to make this seem like a crime against humanity?

It has potential though.  I was going to leave it at that but then I thought about the businesses that would also need to be re-located.  And Russia's resources are limited.  Swanson seems to be saying that the rest of Russian society would be fine subsidizing the population of the Donbas border-lands as if Russia's ability to provide a decent lifestyle for everyone is quite attainable.  There is a lot of poverty in Russia.  (Obviously corruption has a major role in that.)

Democratize the UN Security Council and eliminate the veto?  That's interesting but I'm not sure how it's relevant.  It could be relevant but I'm not seeing it.  How would doing this prevent Washington's provocations and empower Russia on this diplomatic crisis?

Have the UN conduct another poll referendum for Crimea joining Russia?  This might only provide an opening for USA shenanigans or the USA might just hypocritically insist that it is none of the UN's business and that any outcome that benefits Russia was the product of Putin's meddling and the UN's corruption.

Join the ICC?  Since the ICC has already shown itself a shameless tool for the USA, I can't see this as having any use at all.

Flood the Donbas border region with awesome non-violence experts/human shields?  Swanson says they'd be "trainers" which presumably means they'd be training the population that he said should be evacuated.  With regards to the human shield idea; well, the Ukrainians were already shelling civilians to begin with, so how they'd respect the international brigades of Putin-puppets is anybody's guess. [NOTE: Anti-NATO writers are always saying that 14,000 people had been killed by shelling since 2014.  But that number actually includes Ukrainian military and Donbas militia members.  Civilian deaths were in the thousands but I believe numbered no more than a third of those killed.]

Proposal 10 about international education seems entirely useless.

Removing fascists from the Russian military is always and everywhere a good thing.  Remove them from every military on the face of the earth and then eliminate militaries everywhere while we're at it.  Except, in this specific instance we need to ask how Putin will define "fascism" and how they will be removed and where they will go with their training and bitterness and how this purge would play-out within the Russian military itself and in Russian public opinion.  How would it strengthen Putin's hand vis-a-vis NATO and Ukraine? 

Offering gifts to Ukraine is sort of bizarre.  Would they accept them or reject them?  Would they accept them and continue to demand the Donbas back to that they could continue their Banderite demographic policies?  

Closing-off the oil pipeline to Ukraine is the most realistic thing Swanson has proposed.  But this would obviously heighten tensions rather than reduce them.  Ukraine's US-puppets and nut-bar fascists have demonstrated how much of their national self-interest they were/are prepared to sacrifice for their delusions/corruption.

Slit the economy's throat by leaving Russian fossil fuels in the ground?  As with getting fascists out of armies and getting rid of armies this is inarguably a good thing.   Again though; in this context it would weaken Russia and have zero influence on the US and Ukraine's behaviour.

Wilsonian public diplomacy?  Remember the "New Super-Power" of public opinion before dubya bush's invasion of Iraq and how inconsequential it was?

A demonstration of Russian-American friendship by Russian-Americans at the Teardrop monument in NYC?

It would be dismissed as crude Putin propaganda.  Especially by Democratic Party cultists who believe that Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump against their deranged Queen Hillary.

Re-stated Russia's 8 demands from December 2021 and insist on a US response to each of them?  I could see that being 24-48 hours of irrelevance.

Again I find myself wanting to get to the gym and then getting on with the rest of my day.  I re-skimmed the rest of Swanson's proposals and didn't see anything that wouldn't have been useless in this crisis.

FWIW, Swanson has some proposals for Ukrainians.  But I have even less influence in the world than Swanson does and my opinions of his ideas aren't as important as today's work-out.