“The empire doesn’t rest. The stakes are too high.”
Noam Chomsky has two important new pieces about US empire:
“Noam Chomsky: The ‘Historic’ NATO Summit in Madrid Shored Up US Militarism” (6 July 2022)
“Noam Chomsky: Humanity Faces Two Existential Threats. One Is Nearly Ignored.” (13 July 2022)
This short piece will just provide some notes on the two Chomsky pieces—I took the following notes on the 6 July 2022 piece:
NATO held a summit and produced a “new Strategic Concept for NATO”
regarding the “fate of the arms control regime”, the US has “torn it to shreds under W. Bush and particularly Trump”, so we can dismiss the “lament” about what happened to arms control as “rank hypocrisy”
the “bitter irony” is that NATO powers met “just after the conclusion” of the unnoticed “first meeting of the states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)”
the “NATO summit was expanded for the first time to include the Asian ‘sentinel states’ that the U.S. has established and provided with advanced high-precision weapons to ‘encircle’ China”, so “the North Atlantic was officially expanded to include the newly created Indo-Pacific region, a vast area where security concerns for the Atlanticist powers of NATO are held to arise”—this official expansion’s “imperial implications should be clear enough”
“U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia was strongly affirmed in the Strategic Concept: no negotiations, only war to ‘weaken Russia.’”
Washington’s opposition to negotiations “has been steady policy since George W. Bush’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO”—France and Germany vetoed this invitation, but the “offer remained on the agenda in deference to U.S. power”
Washington “began openly to move to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command” after “the Maidan uprising in 2014”—the Biden administration extended those policies and officially acknowledged post-invasion that Washington hadn’t “taken into consideration” Russia’s concerns about NATO
“The plans have not been concealed.”
“The goals are to ensure full compatibility of the Ukrainian military with NATO forces in order to ‘integrate Ukraine into NATO de facto.’”
“Zelensky’s efforts to implement a diplomatic settlement were ignored” even in March 2022—at that point there were “indications of Russian support” and at that point the “official Russian stance” was favorable
negotiations might have narrowed the “considerable gap between the Ukrainian and Russian positions on a diplomatic settlement” and even post-invasion there “may have remained some space for a way to end the horrors”
NATO’s Strategic Concept completely drops France’s and Germany’s “overtures toward diplomatic settlement”, and “simply ‘reaffirms’ all plans to move toward incorporating Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO”, and formally dismisses Russia’s concerns
the “shifts in the European stance reflect Europe’s increasing subordination to the U.S.”—Putin accelerated this shift
regarding the invasion, Putin refused to “consider European initiatives that might have averted the crime and possibly even opened a path toward Europe-Russia accommodation that would be highly beneficial to all”—Putin instead chose aggression
the world “may not survive great power confrontation”—the “great powers will either find a way to cooperate, to work together in confronting imminent global threats, or the future will be too grim to contemplate”
this reality “should be kept firmly in mind while discussing particular issues”
Washington’s “program of de facto incorporation of Ukraine within NATO” unambiguously reaffirms “the refusal to contemplate a diplomatic settlement”
the Strategic Concept unambiguously reaffirms the “Ramstein declarations a few weeks ago that the war in Ukraine must be fought to weaken Russia, in fact to weaken it more severely than the Versailles treaty weakened Germany, if we assume that U.S. officials mean what they say”—regarding US officials’ declarations, we “can expect that adversaries take them at their words”
“The message to Russia is: You have no escape. Either surrender, or continue your slow and brutal advance, or, in the event that defeat threatens, go for broke and destroy Ukraine, as of course you can.”
“we must pursue this course to punish Russia severely enough so that it cannot undertake further aggression”—“we must ensure that the war continues in order to weaken Russia”, even though prolonging the war means further devastation for Ukraine and even though prolonging the war means that we will “drive millions to starvation while we march on triumphantly toward an unlivable earth and face increasing risk of terminal nuclear war”
there are “fevered constructions” about Putin’s imperial ambitions, but the “only Russian threats that have been cited” are that “Russia will strengthen its defenses in response” if “NATO advances to its borders”—Chomsky is “unaware of a word in the record about plans to invade anyone outside the long-familiar red lines” of Ukraine and Georgia
the “core issue for 30 years has been Ukraine’s entry into NATO”
regarding Ukraine, Putin was until recently “calling publicly for implementation of the Minsk II agreement”—this particular agreement would mean “neutralization of Ukraine and a federal arrangement with a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region”
“It is always reasonable to suspect dark motives in great power posturing, but it is the official positions that offer a basis for diplomacy if there is any interest in that course.”
John Quigley is the US State Department’s representative in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—Quigley’s review of the background shows that what happened with Crimea was “not a simple matter of unprovoked Russian aggression, as in the received U.S. version”
“Like many others familiar with the region, Quigley now calls for a diplomatic settlement and wonders whether the current U.S. goal ‘is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.’”
“Is there still an option for diplomacy? No one can know unless the possibility is explored.”
what we’ve seen contradicts the idea that the “new Peter the Great is on the march”
“tenacious Ukrainian resistance revealed that Russia could not conquer cities a few miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army”
we saw the “Russian debacle in its attack on Kyiv”
“Russian devils of incomparable might aiming to conquer the world and destroy civilization have been a staple of official rhetoric, and obedient commentary, for 75 years.”
“Today’s formula is no innovation.”
the US is a global power that engages in global planning, so a “particular manifestation” of US planning in “one part of the world” is “often replicated elsewhere”—we “often miss the global tapestry” when we focus on “one strand”
the US “took over global hegemony from Britain after World War II” and “kept the same guiding geopolitical concepts”—the concepts were “greatly expanded” because the US is “far more powerful”
a “primary goal of British imperial rule was to prevent a unified hostile Europe”—the US has “far grander imperial objectives” than Britain did and seeks to control “from all directions” the entire “Eurasian land mass”
regarding Eurasia’s northern flank, there’s a “new arena of conflict” where global heating is opening up new territory to “exploitation and commerce”
regarding Eurasia’s western flank, the “NATO-based Atlanticist system” is—“thanks to Putin”—now “more firmly in Washington’s hands”
regarding Eurasia’s eastern flank, NATO is extending its “reach to the Indo-Pacific region” and “deepening its relations with its island partners off the coast of China” and enlisting these island partners “in the ‘encirclement’ of China”
the US Navy is directing “the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) programs”; there are “regular U.S. naval missions in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)”; there are military exercises “in the Pacific Northeast region”; and there are military exercises “in part” in “the Baltic region” with “participation of new NATO members Finland and Sweden”
“The empire doesn’t rest. The stakes are too high.”
the UN Charter serves as “the foundation of modern international law” and “has two primary flaws”
the first flaw is that it “bans ‘the threat or use of force’ in international affairs, apart from designated circumstances that almost never arise”—it therefore “bans U.S. foreign policy, obviously an unacceptable outcome”
the second flaw is that “the UN Security Council and other international institutions, like the World Court, set the rules”—the US prefers a different situation “in which the U.S. sets the rules and others obey”
“Under the U.S. Constitution (Article VI), the UN Charter is also ‘the supreme law of the land.’ But it is unacceptable to U.S. elite opinion and is violated freely, with no notice, by U.S. presidents.”
“one of the major international crimes” is “annexation of conquered territory in violation of international law”
“There are two examples: Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in violation of the ruling of the International Court of Justice, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria and Greater Jerusalem in violation of unanimous Security Council orders. All have been supported by the U.S. for many years, and were formally authorized by the Trump administration, now by Biden. One will have to search hard for expressions of concern, even notice.”
“the UN-based order is dismissed except when it can be invoked to punish enemies”
Turkey “delayed the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO”—it seems like the reason is “Turkey’s commitment to intensify its murderous repression of its Kurdish population”
“Sweden had been granting asylum to Kurds fleeing Turkish state violence”—there are “legitimate concerns that an ugly underground bargain may have been struck when Turkey dropped its opposition to full Swedish entry into NATO”
Turkey’s brutal repression of the Kurds “reached a crescendo in the 1990s” with a “state terror campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurds, destroyed thousands of towns and villages, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, many to hideous slums in barely survivable corners of Istanbul”—Washington “strongly supported” these “terrible crimes”
Washington “poured arms into Turkey to expedite the atrocities”—the flow of arms “increased under Clinton as the crimes escalated”
“Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), replacing Colombia, the leading violator of human rights in the Western hemisphere.”
“As usual, the media cooperated by ignoring the Turkish horrors and crucial U.S. support for them.”
“Turkey is also extending its aggression in Syria, aimed at the Kurdish population who, in the midst of the horrendous chaos of the Syrian conflicts, had managed to carve out an island of flourishing democracy and rights (Rojava).”
“The Kurds had also provided the ground troops for Washington’s war against ISIS in Syria, suffering over 10,000 casualties. In thanks for their service in this successful war, President Trump withdrew the small U.S. force that served as a deterrent to the Turkish onslaught, leaving them at its mercy.”
“There is an old Kurdish proverb that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”
there’s justified concern that “Turkish-Swedish NATO maneuverings might confirm” the proverb
Washington is “quite openly seeking to restrict China’s role in global affairs and to impede its development”
China’s development “provides the basis for the expansion of China’s arena of influence through such projects as the Belt-and-Road (BRI) initiative, a massive multidimensional project that integrates much of Eurasia within a Chinese-based economic and technological system, reaching to the Middle East and Africa, and even to U.S. Latin American domains”
the US complains that China’s development involves breaking the rules, but China “is following the practices that the U.S. did, as did England before it and all other developed societies since”
it’s been a “staple of modern economic history” for countries to “climb the ladder of development by any means available”—including “robbery of higher technology and ample violence and deceit”—and then bar “others from doing the same”
regarding the “‘security challenge’” that China poses, no “infringement on U.S. domination of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region can be tolerated, even a threat that China might set up its second overseas military base in the Pacific Solomon Islands (the first is in Djibouti)”
“the U.S. has 800 bases worldwide”—these US bases play a “very prominent role” in “imperial domination” and “enable hundreds of ‘low-profile proxy wars’ in Africa, the greater Middle East, and Asia”
it’s correct to deplore “severe human rights violations in China”, but Washington “easily accommodates and commonly vigorously supports such violations”
“Everyone is in favor of ‘peace,’ even Hitler: on their own terms.”
“Most of the world is the proverbial grass on which the elephants trample.”
“The human species is advancing toward a precipice. Soon irreversible tipping points will be reached, and we will be falling over the precipice to a ‘hothouse earth’ in which life will be intolerable for those remnants that survive.”
military expenses (1) contribute enormously to “destroying the conditions for tolerable existence” and (2) divert “huge resources” away from saving ourselves from global heating
“Putin’s aggression in Ukraine made the same double contribution” of (1) “destruction” and (2) “robbery of the resources that must be used to avert environmental destruction”
“The window for constructive action is closing while humanity persists on this mad course.”
“All else pales into insignificance.”
“We will find ways to cooperate to avert disaster and create a better world, as we still can. Or we will bring the human experiment to an inglorious end.”
“It’s as simple as that.”
So there’s a window—however brief—during which humanity can act in order to “avert disaster and create a better world”.
And I took the following notes on the 13 July 2022 piece:
“The great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or the wreckage of human society will be so extreme that no one will care. All else fades alongside of recognition of that fundamental fact about the contemporary world, very possibly the last stage in human history.”
Washington’s “long-term strategy” is to “keep the war going in order to weaken Russia” to “a degree considerably harsher than the treatment of Germany at Versailles a century ago”—the Versailles treaty “did not succeed in the proclaimed goal”
“The tacit assumption is that while the U.S. and its allies are proceeding to weaken Russia sufficiently, Russian leaders will stand by quietly, refraining from resorting to the advanced weapons we all know Russia has.”
“Perhaps so, but quite a gamble, not only with the fate of Ukrainians but far beyond.”
this “colossal foolishness” is “prevailing common sense”
“It is commonly just taken for granted that we can disregard the shocking record of the past 75 years, which demonstrates with brilliant clarity that it is a near miracle that we have escaped nuclear war—terminal war if major powers are involved.”
“Republicans may well take Congress in a few months. Their leadership is not concealing their intent to find ways to hold on to virtually permanent political power, independent of the popular will, and might succeed with the help of the ultra-reactionary Supreme Court.”
“The party—to dignify it with that word—has been 100 percent denialist on global warming since it succumbed to the Koch conglomerate onslaught in 2009, and the leadership has carried along the voting base.”
regarding nuclear weapons and global heating: “The two most important issues in human history, issues of literal survival, may soon be off the agenda in the most powerful state in human history, carrying forward the grim experience of the four Trump years.”
“There are voices of sanity, some with considerable prestige and experience. A decade ago, four of them—William Perry, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Sam Nunn—wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for ‘reversing the world’s reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.’”
“Last month (June 21-23), the first meeting was convened of states-parties to the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Citing ‘increasingly strident nuclear rhetoric,’ the TPNW states-parties issued the Vienna Declaration, which condemns all threats to use nuclear weapons as violations of international law, including the UN Charter. The declaration demands ‘that all nuclear-armed states never use or threaten to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances.’”
“The nuclear states have refused to join the treaty, but that can change under popular pressure, as we have often seen before.”
“In August, the 10th review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) will convene. That could offer an opportunity for an organized public to demand adherence to its provisions, which call for ‘good faith’ efforts to remove the scourge of nuclear weapons from the Earth, and while pursuing these efforts, to sharply reduce the enormous threats they pose.”
“That will not happen if the two most important issues in human history are removed from attention, one almost completely while the other barely reaches a fraction of the concern it requires if there is to be a livable world.”
“We need not be passive observers, content to be mere instruments in the hands of the powerful. That is a choice, not a necessity.”
“Let’s recall the overriding concern: The great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or the wreckage of human society will be so extreme that no one will care.”
there’s a question about “just who is being isolated in the new world order that is taking shape”—there are “some serious reflections about it close to the centers of power”, including “an analysis of the evolving world order by Graham Fuller”
Fuller is the “former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA with responsibility for global intelligence estimates”—he “has no illusions about the nature and roots of the war” and sees it as a proxy war in which Ukraine is collateral damage
Fuller says that Europe “has little realistic choice” but to resume economic ties with Russia and that it’s even less realistic for Europe to confront China
Fuller says that Washington has induced cooperation and integration and partnership between Russia and China
according to Fuller: “‘That the US can split US-induced Russian and Chinese cooperation is a fantasy.’”
“Fuller is far from alone. ‘The idea of Eurasia is once again the subject of geopolitics,’ reads a headline in the London Economist. The report reviews the renewed attention to the principle of the founder of modern geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, that control of the central Asian heartland is key to world control. These conceptions are taking new form as the Ukraine war reshapes the global strategic landscape in ways that may turn out to be profound.”
“The tendencies that are shaping world order are not immutable. Human agency has not ended. That crucially encompasses the agency of an organized public that demands an end to cynical posturing and a serious commitment to grasp the opportunities that exist for dialogue and accommodation. The alternatives are too grim to contemplate.”
“There are realistic ways to reduce the likelihood of terminal war—once again, the appropriate term for nuclear war involving great powers.”
“The most immediate is a serious arms control regime.”
Trump and George W. Bush dismantled important arms-control treaties
“At the end of the Trump years, very little was left beyond the New START treaty, which Biden was able to rescue from demolition literally by a few days.”
Trump also destroyed “the joint agreement (JCPOA) on Iranian nuclear programs in violation of the UN Security Council, which had endorsed it”
“One of the great tragedies of the Ukraine war is that these means for reducing the threat of terminal war are being cast out the window.”
“The tragedy is enhanced by the impending return to full power of the party of the wreckers.”
“the same kinds of mass mobilization that helped bring about earlier steps toward sanity can be effective again”—that “means first resurrecting the tattered arms control regime, and then moving well beyond”
“Other steps could be taken right now if sufficient popular pressures were mounted. In the coming weeks in fact, at the August NPT conference.”
a “Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East” could be “a significant step towards international security”—popular “pressures could help bring it to realization”
regarding the Middle East NWFZ, there’s “almost unanimous global support” and Washington always blocks it—Obama blocked it “at the 2015 conference”
the Middle East NWFZ has support from “the Arab states, Iran, and the Global South, G-77, now expanded to 134 countries, the large majority of the world”
it would be “an important step toward reducing the nuclear weapons threat” if we could establish NWFZs—the US insists on blocking NWFZs because the US wants to maintain “nuclear weapons facilities within” the areas where the NWFZs are being proposed
“All of this could be on the agenda, right now, as ways of addressing the terminal threat.”
“Beyond that, there is the overriding concern: To repeat again, the great powers will find a way to cooperate in addressing today’s critical problems, or nothing else will matter.”
So there’s still time to act before it’s too late—we can overcome omnicidal hawkishness before it ends us.