June 9th, 2022
Three months after the launching of what amounts to a sui generis world war against Russia (*), two important interventions, asking for de-escalation and some kind of peace with Moscow, came from Henry Kissinger, speaking to the Davos meeting of and from the New York Times. It seems, like Henderlin noticed, that where evil grows, also grows the medicine that can cure it.
It is truly astonishing and deeply ironic to see today one of the most criminal figures of American imperialism in the past and of international policy during the whole twentieth century, Henry Kissinger himself, intervene in the gathering of western capitalist elites to tell them to make peace with Russia before it is too late, and even to do so by accepting to modify the currently internationally recognized Ukrainian borders (**). In other words, to accept that it is just impossible to reverse Russia’s gains on the ground.
If anyone else had said much less than what Kissinger said, with the climate of neo-McCarthyism prevailing now in the West, the mainstream media would have portrayed him as a paid agent of the KGB! But this is a little bit difficult to do with the former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser of the United States, who is considered the guru of American diplomacy and Western strategy, invited to Davos by the president of the Forum, Klaus Schwab himself.
What is the explanation of the irony? Kissinger remains of course an imperialist himself. But he has grown up in an era much more rationale than our times. The fact he is now becoming a sort of “dissident” reflects the fact the international system – and in particular the western, capitalist – imperialist system – has moved far away from rationalism and any point of equilibrium. That is representing in itself a huge danger for the whole world. (Strategically speaking we must always remember we are living, after 1945, in a world where it is impossible for anybody to win a world war, because of the productive forces and technologies we developed. But nobody seems to accept it, to grasp the real significance of this new situation, observed for the first time in human history and act accordingly).
If the war does not stop in two or three months, there will be such turmoil that it will hardly possible to fix things anymore, Kissinger warned.
New York Times against New York Times: The cost of illusions
Kissinger’s intervention cannot be considered accidental. And it was not the only one. The New York Times, an independent major center of power in the US and a newspaper that starred for three months in the anti-Russian pro-war hysteria of the West, abruptly changed its stance a few days ago. It published an editorial under the headline “the war in Ukraine is complicated and America is not ready.” The article is expressing concern about the “enormous costs and grave dangers of the war” and emphasizes that there are many questions that President Biden has not yet answered to the American people about the continued involvement of the United States.
It is not in America’s interest to go to a full-blown war with Russia, “even if a negotiated peace may require some tough decisions from Ukraine”, i.e. to make the painful territorial decisions that any compromise solution will require.
“Mr. Biden must also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will go in the confrontation with Russia, and a limit to the weapons, money and political support they can provide. It is imperative that the Ukrainian government’s decisions be based on a realistic assessment of its means and how much more destruction Ukraine can endure.”
To the above two interventions, which are very important because they come out of the very center of the world establishment, we can add also various other voices like President Macron, speaking of the need not to try to humiliate Russia, the Greek ex-PM Karamanlis, who called Europe to take an initiative for peace, the ex-President of the German SPD and of the German Linke Party Oscar Lafontaine, who accused the US of not being interested to end the war or the near certain future and President of Brazil Lula who also had the courage to indicate, speaking to the Time, that Biden himself shares a part of responsibility for the war.
To the camp of the “doves”, if we must call them like that, one must also include the US armed forces, with General Milley insisting that “a negotiated outcome is a logical choice, but both sides have to come to that conclusion on their own.” Generals know what is war and they also understand the dangers associated with means of mass destruction. On the contrary, the crushing majority of present day western political personnel is very uneducated and very inexperienced, it has grown up in the particular atmosphere of “end of History” and eternal victory of Western capitalism and was propelled to the positions they hold by special “leaders creation laboratories” of the US and the EU or the international Financial Capital. They are extremely dangerous ignorants who could get mankind to a world war and annihilation because they don’t understand what they are doing and they are intellectually and morally disconnected from the real world (this is very evident from the top to the bottom of many international bureaucracies like those of NATO, EU, OECD, partly the UN etc.). The emergence of this personnel reflects also the enormous increase of entropy, the measure od disorder and of irrationalism in the world and in particular the western capitalist – imperialist system.
But the position of the US Armed Forces does not coincide with the powerful lobby of the US defense and fossil fuel industries, which make already fantastic profits out of the war and they plan to make much more, while cancelling any serious measures to stop the use of fossil fuels in order to reverse climate change (which is threatening life on Earth). It is not also the position of the various extremist forces operating in the center of the system and pushing towards all forms of war of all against all and of chaos.
Why the doves now?
The reasons why a “pro-compromise” camp has arisen in the very center of the West are multiple:
1. In the beginning of the war, western analysts were believing that a military victory and even a regime change in Russia was possible. All this was stupid nonsense, as many centuries of wars between the West and Russia prove. Still, it was a powerful illusion.
After the fall of Mariupol, it became clear that Russia cannot be defeated militarily in the war, nor it is possible to reverse its territorial gains that will expand as time goes on.
2. Washington and Europe cannot manage the enormous social and economic consequences of sanctions worldwide, including in the Western states themselves.
3. Instead of consolidating western domination on the planet, the extremist anti-Russian policy of the West imposed by Washington and other western extremists threatens to undermine the pursuit of US and Western global dominance. It is doing that by stabilizing the Moscow – Beijing axis and western unity itself. It is clear that both Kissinger and Mersheimer, two of the basic opponents of the present – day US policy (and also the Trumpian sui generis far right) would prefer a kind of an alliance of capitalist powers (including Russia) against China and its regime of planned economy than a war against a Russian – Chinese anti-western, anti-imperialist front. The other risk of such a reckless strategy as the one pursued by the West is to provoke a nuclear war or another form of global disaster.
Western unity is undermined because the European allies (or rather satellites) of Washington are bearing the burden of the extremist anti-Russian policy, while the US have all the profits from it (they are increasing their control of Europe, they become its energy providers and they sell much more weapons to the European states).
4. Prolonging the conflict may further undermine the strength of the post-communist capitalist economic oligarchy of Russia and the other former Soviet states. This oligarchy is the main, organic ally of the West throughout all the former Soviet Union.
The secret deep, very deep rogue state
But there is probably a fifth issue, equally or even more dangerous. The “Western War Party”, whose “visible” representatives and tools are Britain, Poland and other Eastern European states and, probably, the Ukrainian power itself, wants the escalation. There is even a kernel inside it decided to go to generalized wars and chaos in the planet. It is the deep, very deep (not strictly US but international) rogue state. (***)
It is not excluded that it will attempt some provocation (such as the one personally organized by Boris Johnson during the summer of 2021 when he send a British destroyer to the territorial waters of Crimea).
US and Britain are sending already longer-range weapons to Ukraine, able to attend Russian territory. Ukrainian officials have already spoken of an American plan to sink the Russian Black Sea Fleet, while the US and Britain (whose prime minister publicly advised Zelensky not to back down) have begun delivering anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. By bringing Denmark (and Greenland) into NATO war planning through European Defense schemes and Finland and Sweden into NATO, the West is transforming the whole Arctic into a nuclear battlefield. It seems that 30 years after the historic agreements between Gorbachev and Reagan (later Bush), mankind has become simply mad.
All this is happening while President Biden seems now to be completely unstable. After having come under the full control of the “party of War”, he is now again indicating that some “territorial concessions” from Kiev will be necessary. The same instability of Biden is clear regarding his policy on China. One day he says that the US will defend Taiwan in case China attacks it, then he says that the policy of “strategic ambiguity” (not taking a firm position on what the US will do) remains in its place.
George Soros expressed the view of the Western “War Party” in Davos. Realizing that his life’s work, namely the overthrow of Soviet “communism” and the global prevalence of “(neo) liberal capitalism” faces a risk of bankruptcy and collapse, the Hungarian-Jewish speculator insists on the overthrow of Putin and Xi as the means to save civilization and avoid nuclear war! But insisting to such purposes is a way to do, not to avoid nuclear war.
Impasse
There is no doubt that the peoples of the Middle East, which resisted Western neo-colonialism and imperialism after 1991, Russia with its military and China with its economic surge have all together created decisive barriers to the realization of the dream of an unhindered domination of the Capitalist West on the whole planet, a project which by its very scope and extent would be the incarnation of the perfect Totalitarianism.
The West – and the Ukrainian example proves it – has not the means to dominate the world. But it does not want to resign from the dream of dominating it. There is not inside western societies a serious socialist movement that could propose a change of economic and civilizational paradigm without which peace is unattainable in the world.
The problem comes from the fact Western capitalist system needs expansion, war and imperialism to survive itself. This is why currents like the Trumpian far right do not represent a solution. They are the fraud of the system directed both to the western popular and middle strata and to Russia. Their historic function is to make possible not only sui generis world wars but direct world wars and they will lead to the end of humanity.
On the other hand, the forces resisting US and Western domination, like the peoples of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America have rather partial, defensive programs. As for Russia or China, they are also more or less conservative powers which want to deny America the global domination it wants, but they do not possess a counter project, a counter vision to offer, something which can be at the same time attractive to people in the East and in the West, in the South or in the North – a vision able to address simultaneously all the aspects of the human problems (the social, the ecological and the international).
The survival of humanity depends on its capacity to produce such a vision and to realize it in a rather short period. Time is running out very quickly (for ecological reasons).
(*) For the concept of sui generis world war and its various sonsequences look to our article https://www.defenddemocracy.press/it-is-high-time-for-the-non-aligned-to-intervene-in-the-ukrainian-crisis/ or, for a more analytic version, https://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-war-between-east-and-west-the-non-aligned-and-the-struggle-for-the-salvation-of-humanity/ and https://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-war-between-east-and-west-the-non-aligned-and-the-struggle-for-the-salvation-of-humanity-2/.
(**) Such a change is not so arbitrary, as it may seem to people not familiar with the history of the Ukrainian conflict and the way the USSR was dissolved. The borders of the post-Soviet states do not take into account the national, ethnological composition of the former Soviet republics, history and the right of nations to self-determination.
(***) We don’t know the origin of COVID. It can be the result of the change of our relationship with nature or the product of a lab, leaked accidentally or in purpose. If the third of those scenarios is true, then it is this “deep deep international state” which is responsible. Read: https://www.unz.com/runz/a-million-american-deaths-and-400000-rumble-views/ and: http://www.defenddemocracy.press/what-americas-17-intelligence-agencies-wont-say-about-the-origins-of-covid/