Russia Madness on the Eve of Destruction: Hegemony Trumps Survival
By Paul Street
Truthdig
There are good reasons to wonder if human civilization will exist a century
from today. (Pixabay)
Noam Chomsky’s 2016 book “Who Rules the World?” contains a passage in
which the great left thinker asks readers to “imagine you’re a historian a
hundred years from now-assuming there are any historians a hundred years
from now, which is not obvious-and you’re looking back on what’s happening
today.” This reflection appears in a chapter titled “The Eve of
Destruction.”
It’s a bracing thought. Given the current state and rate of environmental
destruction, the continuing advance in the destructive power of nuclear
weapons systems, and the likelihood of pandemics in a warmer and more
globalized world, there are good reasons to wonder if a human civilization
with historians will exist a century from today. We may well be standing
near the “end of history,” and not the glorious bourgeois-democratic one
that Francis Fukuyama imagined with the end of the Cold War.
Speaking of cold wars, United States neoconservatives and liberals have in
the last three decades teamed up to create a “new” one with still heavily
nuclear-weaponized Russia. The risk of a nuclear war catastrophe is greater
today than it was during the Cold War, when humanity came close to disaster
on numerous occasions. This reflects the ongoing development of nuclear
weapons technologies and a series of U.S. and U.S.-allied Western actions
that have provoked Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern
European empire:
● President Bill Clinton’s decision to annul a 1990 agreement with Moscow
not to push the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) further east after
the reunification of Germany and not to recruit Eastern European states that
had been part of the Soviet-ruled Warsaw Pact.
● NATO’s decision to renege on its 1997 pledge not to install
“permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Soviet bloc
nations.
● NATO’s decision two years ago to place four battalions on and near the
Russian border.
● The 1999 U.S.-NATO military intervention in the Yugoslav civil war,
leading to the dismemberment of Serbia and the building of a giant U.S.
military base in the newly NATO-U.S.-created state of Kosovo. This
remarkable development has hardly stopped Washington from shaming Russia for
deploying its military to “forcibly redraw borders in Europe” by annexing
Crimea.
● President George W. Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty.
● President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy anti-missile systems
(supposedly aimed at Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons and actually meant
to intercept Russian missiles) in Romania and Poland.
● Obama’s decision to invest more than $1 trillion in an upgrade of the U.
S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which was already stocked to blow up the world
50 times over. The upgrade involves “strategic” bombs with smaller yields,
something that dangerously blurs the lines between conventional and nuclear
weapons. It has certainly helped spark a new nuclear arms race with Russia
and, perhaps, China.
● U.S. provocation and endorsement of a 2014 right-wing coup against the
pro-Russian government in Ukraine-on Russia’s western border-a development
that predictably created war in eastern Ukraine and a crisis that has led to
dozens of dangerous incidents between NATO and Russian forces.
● Washington’s self-righteous denunciation and slandering of Russia’s
“very reasonable” annexation of Crimea (in the words of political writer
Diana Johnstone), which was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans as a
natural response to the United States’ installation of a right-wing,
pro-NATO government in Kiev.
Perilous as the nuclear situation may be, the environmental danger is
arguably greater. This is thanks to the shrinking time window for averting a
climate catastrophe that is unfolding before our very eyes. Nuclear weapons
don’t kill off the human species just by existing. If we continue to
miraculously escape launch (and even a first strike could start nuclear
winter on its own) for a century, we can thank our lucky stars and proceed
to dismantle nuclear weapons in 2118. There’ll be no such luck available to
us if we avoid action to stop the carbon-gassing of life on earth. We have
20 to 30 years (to be generous) to get off fossil fuels and curb mass
consumption or it’s curtains. We are currently on pace for 500 atmospheric
carbon parts per million-a level of warming likely to melt much of the
world’s life-supporting Antarctic ice sheet-within 50 years, if not sooner.
Every new year of increased carbon emissions in an ever-warmer and more
climatologically volatile world speeds us toward fatal feedback loops
(perhaps already underway), bringing the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’
Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The clock is currently at two minutes to
doom, thanks to what leading scientists call “the failure of world leaders
to … reduce the existential threat of nuclear war and unchecked climate
change.”
As Andrew Glikson, the Australian earth and paleoclimate scientist,
explained eight years ago: “Humans cannot argue with the physics and
chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including:
deep cuts in carbon emissions; parallel fast-track transformation to
non-polluting energy utilities-solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal,
hot rocks; global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including
application of biochar. The alternative does not bear contemplation.”
“The alternative” is underway. There’s no mystery about the exterminist
consequences of an open-ended increase in atmospheric carbon. The lethal
results are richly evident in the planet’s geological record.
Can we survive and even maintain a decent or better existence into another
and future centuries? Perhaps. But surviving will require massive, and
combined, dialectically inseparable transformations in our relationships
with each other and with nature, of which we are of course part. It will
require a radical restructuring and revolutionary makeover. The British
Marxist economist Michael Roberts is likely right to argue that we cannot
undertake the collective planning and coordinated action required to save
the commons under the bourgeois system of socioeconomic management and
politics, with capital and profit at the chaotic and amoral commanding
heights:
“
The potentially disastrous effects from higher temperature, rising sea
levels, and extreme weather formations will be hugely damaging especially to
the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet. But industrialization
and human activity need not produce these effects if human beings organized
their activities in a planned way with due regard for the protection of
natural resources and the wider impact on the environment and public health.
That seems impossible under capitalism. … What is really needed …
require[s] public control and ownership of the energy and transport
industries and public investment in the environment for the public good. …
It is important to note that the climate crisis hits disadvantaged
populations first-and the rich and powerful last. One problem we face is
that class rule (and capitalism is, among other things, a system of class
rule) tends to delay a civilization’s capacity to perceive threats to its
continued existence until the full consequences of the civilization’s
deadly practices are felt by those who have been protected by class
privilege from environmental harm. By the time the ruling class gets it,
things have gone too far. This in one of the timeworn paths to societal ruin
discussed in a paper published four years ago by mathematician Safa
Motesharrei, atmospheric scientist Eugenia Kalnay and political scientist
Jorge Rivas in the journal Ecological Economics. Reviewing past societal
collapses, they reflected on a potential current global scenario in which:
“
[T]he Elites-due to their wealth-do not suffer the detrimental effects of
the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners. This buffer
of wealth allows Elites to continue ‘business as usual’ despite the
impending catastrophe. It … explain[s] how historical collapses were
allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic
trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). This buffer
effect is further reinforced by the long, apparently sustainable trajectory
prior to the beginning of the collapse. While some members of society might
raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and
therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it,
Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point
to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.
Is this not the current state of humanity today, with many millions of
disproportionately poor and powerless people already suffering from climate
disruption while the wealthy few continue to enjoy lives of unimaginable,
environmentally shielded opulence atop a recklessly fossil-fueled planet so
vastly unequal that the world’s eight richest people possess as much wealth
between them as the bottom half of the species?
It’s not an easy topic. The profits system seems fatally preemptive for the
radical alterations in energy and resource that are required to avert
catastrophe. But environmental beggars can’t be choosers, and there is a
reason to feel reluctant to make (eco-) socialist transformation a
prerequisite for saving chances for a decent future. Our time window for
green transformation may be shorter than the period required for conceiving
and birthing a socialist transformation.
This dilemma aside, one would think that an issue as significant as Homo
sapiens sitting at the precipice of self-inflicted extinction would be
front-page news. Think again. The climate crisis holds little interest for
the U.S. commercial corporate media. The fact that the world stands at the
eve of ecological self-destruction, with the climate-denying,
fossil-fuel-loving Donald Trump White House in the lead, elicits barely a
whisper in the reigning U.S. news media.
As far as “mainstream” U.S. media is concerned, the greatest danger posed
by Trump has nothing to do with his insane commitment to the accelerated
greenhouse gassing to death of life on earth. It’s all about the
preposterous notion that he owes his presence in the White House to Russia’
s supposed subversion of our unmentionably nonexistent “democracy.” It’s
all about Russia, Russia, Russia and Trump, Trump, Trump or what I sometimes
call “TWITR,” an acronym for “This Week in Trump and Russia.” It’s been
an explicit programming decision-something I’ve written about at some
length on at least three prior occasions (see this, this and this). It’s a
remarkable choice-to put the biggest issue of our or any time on the back
burner of the news.
Which brings me, curiously enough, to a second passage that jumped out at me
in Chomsky’s “Who Rules the World?” On page 113 of that volume, near the
end of an essay in which he reflects on how close John F. Kennedy helped
bring the world to annihilation by engaging in a reckless game of
thermonuclear chicken with the Soviet Union in October 1962, Chomsky
reflects on a “basic principle” long shared by U.S. foreign policy makers
and the reigning “elite” U.S. “intellectual and moral culture.” This
principle, Chomsky writes, reflexively assumes “without question … that
the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is by definition a force
for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, one in which it is
plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all
over the world while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart)
to make even the slightest gesture in that direction or even to think of
deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.”
Consistent with Chomsky’s observation, a Pentagon study released last
summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer
controls events. Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a
Post-Primacy World,” the study warns that competing powers “seek a new
distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as
legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world.
China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to
“engage,” the Pentagon study reports, “in a deliberate program to
demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence and
impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the
endangered, U.S.-managed world order was “favorable” to the interests of
U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it
favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to
U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from
U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly
its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to
the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order
to underwrite their security and prosperity.”
The report recommends a significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.
S. must maintain “military advantage” over all other states and actors to
“preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow U.S.
decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over
outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of
unacceptable consequences” for those who defy U.S. wishes.
“America First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that
Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of
anyone who doesn’t agree with that. To quote President George H.W. Bush
after the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”
What is Russia’s great sin in the age of Vladimir Putin? America’s New
Cold War complaints have ranged far and wide, running from claims that it is
concerned about Russia’s oligarchic and repressive internal power
structure, its rigged elections, its weak environmental protections, its
violence against ethnic and religious minorities, its murderous military
actions in Chechnya and the Middle East, its cyberwarfare against other
states, to its supposed key role in undermining “American democracy” by
supposedly tilting the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Trump over the
leading anti-Russian, New Cold War hawk Hillary Clinton.
This is all quite dubious, to say the least. The openly plutocratic and
itself corporate-oligarchic and environmentally ruinous United States
possesses no great “democracy” to subvert in the first place. As Thomas
Ferguson and his colleagues have recently shown in an important study at the
Institute for New Economic Thinking, Russian interference was of tiny
significance compared to the impact of big American money in helping Trump
defeat Hillary Clinton (and in helping Clinton defeat herself).
At the same time, the U.S. and many of its close allies commit the same
crimes attributed to Russia by American New Cold Warriors. The world’s and
history’s only global superpower, the United States, regularly interferes
in other nation’s politics and kills people en masse abroad. It does both
these things on a much bigger scale and much farther beyond its own borders
than does Russia. Russia’s great sin for the American power and foreign
policy elite is that it has dared to resist Washington’s supposedly God-
and/or history-ordained right to run the world as its own possession even on
Russia’s borders.
One of the many dirty little secrets of the Cold War was that anti-communism
functioned as a pretext and cover for Washington’s Wall Street-fueled
ambition to force open and run the entire world system in accord with its
multinational corporate elite’s globalist-“Open-Door”-political-economic
needs. From this imperial perspective, the real U.S. Cold War enemy was not
so much “communism” as other peoples’ struggles for national, local and
regional autonomy and independence. The enemy to the “open door” in Moscow
remains after the statues of Marx, Lenin and Stalin have come down. It
doesn’t matter that Russia is no longer socialist. Nationalist and regional
pushback against Uncle “We Own the World” Sam has been more than
sufficient to get Vladimir Putin designated as the next official Hitler and
Russia targeted as a malevolent opponent by the U.S. elite political class
and media.
The present moment is dire. We are witnessing the remarkable and dangerous
continuation of a bizarre right-wing, prefascist U.S. presidency, subject to
the weird whims and tweets of a malignant narcissist who doesn’t read
memorandums or intelligence briefings. Unimpeded by a feckless
“resistance” staged by a Russia-mad, inauthentic opposition party of
elitist, anti-working-class “progressive” neoliberals (the dismal dollar
Democrats), Trump poses grave environmental and nuclear risks to human
survival. A consistent Trump belief is that climate change is not a problem
and that it’s perfectly fine-“great” and “amazing,” in fact-for the
White House to do everything it can to escalate the greenhouse gassing to
death of life on earth.
The nuclear threat is rising now that Trump has appointed John Bolton-a
frothing right-wing uber-warmonger and longtime advocate of bombing Iran and
North Korea, who led the charge for the archcriminal U.S. invasion of
Iraq-as his top “national security” adviser. As a candidate, Trump
wondered aloud why the U.S. couldn’t use nuclear weapons and if the U.S.
should equip Saudi Arabia-the most reactionary government on earth and the
homeland for extreme Islamist Wahhabism-with nuclear weapons. Trump and
Bolton hate Obama’s relatively sane nuclear agreement with Iran. Their
determination to rip up that accord-another reflection of Trump’s wacky,
white-supremacist obsession with destroying any and all accomplishments
claimed by a first black president-threatens to generate a disastrous
nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the crazy orange-tinted Donald-who does (make no mistake) have a
strange and potentially compromising history of Russian business dealings
and who has behaved in suspect ways regarding Putin’s regime-has been
convinced to expel dozens of Russian diplomats, leading to predictable
Russian counter-expulsions.
The Clinton-Obama neoliberal Democrats and their many allies in the
corporate media that helped create the Trumpenstein have spent more than a
year running with the allegation that Russia magically subverted our
nonexistent “democracy” to put Trump in the White House. The climate
crisis holds little interest for the Trump and Russia-obsessed corporate
media. The fact that the world stands at the eve of ecological
self-destruction, with the Trump White House in the lead, elicits barely a
whisper in the commercial news media. Unlike Stormy Daniels, for example,
that little story-the biggest issue of our or any time-is not good for
television ratings and newspaper sales.
