Incompatible

Washington has an official Ukraine-war goal. But is this goal compatible with diplomacy? And is this goal compatible with ethics?

I’ll use this piece to talk about Washington’s Ukraine-war approach. And I hope that everyone will—before reading this piece—take the time to check out my 28 May 2023 piece “Cartoonization”, since that piece provides some crucial context.

Washington Makes a Big Decision

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Washington expected a quick Russian victory, planned for a Ukrainian government-in-exile, and then shifted—after Russia’s remarkable military failures—to an anti-diplomacy approach that has continued right to the present. The Biden administration was anti-diplomacy—regarding Russia—before the Ukraine war started. But it was a major decision when the Biden administration moved from (A) generally opposing diplomacy to (B) actually extending a horrifying war.

Chas Freeman comments in a 24 March 2022 interview: “I was stunned when Putin actually invaded Ukraine”; “I don’t think his troops were prepared for it”; there’s “no evidence that they had the logistics in place or that the troops were briefed about where they were going and why”; “it looks like an impetuous decision”; “the United States is not part of any effort to negotiate an end to the fighting”; to “the extent that there is mediation going on, it seems to be by Turkey, possibly Israel, maybe China”; “the United States is not in the room”; and everything “we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and” accelerating “some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but that will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians”. Freeman observes—in the 24 March 2022 interview—that everything “we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and” accelerating “some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting”.

I think that it’s interesting how blunt Washington was in April. Look at this video where Lloyd Austin—the US defense secretary—talks about the Biden administration’s Ukraine-war approach:

Austin made these remarks on 25 April 2022 when briefing the press in Poland. Antony Blinken is the US secretary of state and was—during the remarks—standing next to Austin. 

A 26 April 2022 CNN piece says: as “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed into a grinding war of attrition with no meaningful peace deal in sight, the US and its allies have begun to convey a new, longer-term goal for the war”; this new goal is “to defeat Russia so decisively on the battlefield that it will be deterred from launching such an attack ever again”; that “message was delivered most clearly on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters after a trip to Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv that ‘we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; “US officials traveling with Austin said that the message is one that he planned to reiterate, according to a senior administration official”; “Russia coming out of the conflict weaker than before is an idea that other Biden administration officials have referenced”; “US officials, however, had previously been reluctant to state as plainly that the” US’s goal is to (1) “see Russia fail” and (2) see Russia “be militarily neutered in the long term”; US officials had previously remained “cautiously optimistic that some kind of negotiated settlement could be reached”, hence the reluctance; Biden-administration “officials and congressional sources said they believe that the continued military support to Ukraine could result in significant blows to Russia that will impair their long-term military capabilities, strategically benefiting the US”; the “US has begun to send heavier and more sophisticated equipment to Ukraine that it had refrained from providing in the past, including 72 howitzers and Phoenix Ghost tactical drones”; and the “‘way we are looking at this is that it’s making an investment to neuter the Russian army and navy for next decade,’ said a congressional source familiar with the ongoing military assistance to Ukraine”.

A 25 April 2022 Guardian piece says: Austin declared “that Washington wanted to see Russia weakened militarily and unable to recover quickly”; this declaration “marks a shift in Washington’s declared aims underlying its military support for Ukraine”; Austin “was asked if he would now define US goals differently from those set out soon after the Russian invasion”; he “started out with the established administration line about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty and defend its territory”; he then “added a second goal”, namely that the US wants “‘to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; regarding this second goal, Austin said that Russia shouldn’t “‘have the capability to very quickly reproduce’” the equipment and forces lost in this war; the “US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled with Austin to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, agreed with” Austin’s “formulation of US objectives”; Blinken said that Austin “‘said it very well’”; the “remarks suggested that even if Russian forces withdrew or were expelled from the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since 24 February, the US and its allies would seek to maintain sanctions with the aim of stopping Russia reconstituting its forces”; the remarks “indicated Washington is taking a position in an internal debate within Nato on whether to use the opportunity of Vladimir Putin’s strategic blunder in Ukraine to try to hobble his ability to threaten other countries in the future”; there’s a question of whether—if “the remarks do indeed represent the Biden administration’s aims”—“it was sensible to declare them so bluntly”; and the declaration arguably (1) “weakens Russia’s incentive to withdraw” and (2) “reinforces Moscow’s narrative that Nato is waging a proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia and even regime change, deepening Putin’s paranoia”.

And Lieven writes in his 27 April 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece: the Biden administration is—to “judge by its latest statements”—“increasingly committed to using the conflict in Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia”; “during his visit to Kiev this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. wants to see ‘Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; a “U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia” is “completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement”; this proxy-war strategy “would require Washington to oppose any such settlement and to keep the war going”; “indeed, when in late March the Ukrainian government put forward a very reasonable set of peace proposals, the lack of public U.S. support for them was extremely striking”; and this proxy-war strategy “involves maintaining Ukraine as a de facto U.S. ally” even though “a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality (as proposed by President Zelensky) is an absolutely inescapable part of any settlement”.

I want to spotlight Lieven’s crucial observation that a “U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia” is “completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement”—Lieven says that the strategy and the search are “completely incompatible”.

Bleeding the Enemy vs. Actually Helping Ukraine

Noam Chomsky says in a 16 November 2022 Truthout interview: prior “to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime”; there’s “unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements”; at “least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion”; the “U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration”; these “moves were accelerated under Biden”; there “was only one way to find out” whether diplomacy could “have succeeded in averting the tragedy”—namely, to try—but Washington ignored this option; “Putin rejected French president Macron’s efforts, to almost the last minute, to offer a viable alternative to aggression”; Putin rejected “them at the end with contempt”; he shot “himself and Russia in the foot by driving Europe deep into Washington’s pocket”; his “crime of aggression was compounded with the crime of foolishness”; Washington “initially expected Russia to conquer Ukraine in a few days and was preparing a government-in-exile”; there were—for military analysts—three surprises, namely (A) “Russian military incompetence”, (B) “remarkable Ukrainian resistance”, and (C) “the fact that Russia didn’t follow the expected U.S.-U.K. model” of war where you “go at once for the jugular” and use “conventional weapons to destroy communications, transportation, energy, whatever keeps the society functioning”; Washington “then made a fateful decision” and decided to continue “the war to severely weaken Russia”; this decision (1) meant “avoiding negotiations” and (2) constituted “a ghastly gamble” where the bet was that a defeated Putin would “pack up his bags and slink away in defeat to oblivion if not worse” instead of destroying Ukraine with conventional weapons; as “the conflict has escalated, the options for diplomacy have declined”; at “the very least, the U.S. could withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia”; this insistence bars “the way to diplomacy”; and there are establishment commentators who call “for diplomatic options to be explored”, which is a “stronger position” than just calling for the US to stop preventing diplomacy.

Linda McQuaig writes in a 29 June 2022 piece: “Germany, France and Italy have correctly pushed for negotiations towards a diplomatic solution in Ukraine”; “the U.S. is digging in, moving beyond the original goal of helping defend Ukraine to adopting the more ambitious and perilous goal of weakening Russia”; and there’s a “dangerous downplaying of the incomprehensible horrors of nuclear weapons”. A 10 May 2022 Guardian piece says: “Vladimir Putin could view the prospect of defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime, potentially triggering his resort to using a nuclear weapon, the top US intelligence official has warned”; the “warning on Tuesday came in an assessment from intelligence chiefs briefing the Senate on worldwide threats”; and the “prediction for Ukraine was a long, gruelling war of attrition, which could lead to increasingly volatile acts of escalation from Putin, including full mobilisation, the imposition of martial law, and—if the Russian leader felt the war was going against him, endangering his position in Moscow—even the use of a nuclear warhead”. And a 11 May 2022 CNN piece says: “President John Kennedy once warned that nuclear powers ‘must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war’”; “Kennedy’s superpower logic is resounding poignantly as Putin gets backed into a corner by the strategic disaster of his war, Ukraine’s heroic resistance and an extraordinary multibillion-dollar allied conveyor of arms and ammunition”; the “aggressive Western approach, the slow progress of Putin’s war of attrition and the lack of any diplomatic effort to end the war mean that it is almost certain the Russian leader will get further backed into a dangerous corner”; at “a fundraiser in Potomac, Maryland, on Monday night, Biden confided that he was concerned Putin had yet to devise an exit from the war”; “Putin’s only exit option right now appears to be a capitulation, and a tacit admission that the Western effort, combined with fierce Ukrainian courage, got the better of him—a position that would be politically impossible to adopt”; “it’s hardly alarmist to consider the possibility” that Putin might use nuclear weapons; there’s “no real consensus on what Putin might do if he’s desperate”; and “the US can be criticized for failing to give Putin the kind of way out that Biden was speculating about”.

Benjamin Abelow writes in his 2022 book How the West Brought War to Ukraine: in “the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed”; what “had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim”, namely “to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future”; in “fact, this strategic objective may have been in place from the start”; Freeman made an observation “more than a month before the new U.S. policy was announced”; he observed that everything “‘we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and’” accelerating “‘some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but…will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians’”; the “observation points to an uncomfortable truth”, namely that “America’s two war aims are not really compatible with each other”; “a humanitarian effort would seek to limit the destruction and end the war quickly”; in contrast, “the strategic goal of weakening Russia requires a prolonged war with maximum destruction, one that bleeds Russia dry of men and machine on battlefield Ukraine”; Washington’s “new military objective places the United States into a posture of direct confrontation with Russia”; now “the goal is to cripple a part of the Russian state, its military”; “one must consider what would happen if Russia started to lose, and its overall military capacity was degraded to the point where Moscow perceived itself as vulnerable to invasion”; in “that situation, Russian planners would surely contemplate using low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons to destroy enemy forces”; “the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, stated that” (1) “Mr. Putin might use nuclear weapons if there was ‘an existential threat to his regime and to Russia, from his perspective’” and (2) Putin might perceive such a threat “if ‘he perceives he is losing the war’”; if “Russia did use nuclear weapons, the pressure for a Western nuclear response, followed by further escalation, might be irresistible”; and regarding nuclear weapons, “the new U.S. policy is seeking to achieve” the exact scenario—namely, “Russian loss and depletion”—that the Director of National Intelligence warned about.

I find it interesting how open, clear, and obvious Washington’s criminal recklessness is—there’s no effort to conceal it. The media informs us that (1) the goal is to weaken Russia and (2) a weakened Russia might go berserk. The logical tension between (1) and (2) is absolutely remarkable, since the goal is—apparently—to make Russia go berserk. Regarding (1), a 26 April 2022 Stars and Stripes piece says: “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that allies must ‘move at the speed of war’ to get more weaponry into the hands of Ukrainian forces, following meetings with dozens of foreign military leaders at Ramstein Air Base on Tuesday”; the “gathering at Ramstein was the first monthly meeting of the ‘Contact Group,’ which includes NATO and partner countries”; the “aim of the Ramstein talks was to come to a common understanding on Ukraine’s changing military requirements as its war with Russia enters a new phase, said Austin, who led discussions with officials from more than 40 countries”; and “Austin told the assembled defense leaders” that “‘Ukraine clearly believes it can win and so does everyone here’”. And regarding (2), a 16 December 2022 NYT piece says: the “more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go”; he “has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain—obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter”; each “time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies”; and “Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory”. 

Looking Inward vs. Looking Outward

I want to emphasize that we control our own actions—we should look in the mirror and make sure that our own Ukraine-war approach is ethical. We shouldn’t be silent about the unethical things that we’re currently engaged in. Unethical things that are—unlike Putin’s actions—under our control.

The 30 September 2022 annexation was an enormous blow to diplomacy. And it’s not like this fact somehow means that we should continue our unethical approach to this war—other people’s wrongdoings can’t somehow justify your own. Look at this image, which shows the four provinces that Putin annexed:

You can see that Russia annexed Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk.

Anatol Lieven writes in his 30 September 2022 Common Dreams piece: the “Russian government’s move today to annex the territories it has occupied in Ukraine is absolutely illegal, as well as a very serious escalation of the conflict”; the “Russian action greatly complicates the search for an eventual peace settlement, as Ukraine and Western nations won’t formally accept nor recognize the annexation”; at “the same time, once these territories have been officially accepted into Russia under the Russian constitution, it will be much more difficult for a future Russian government to give them up”; “U.S. officials should understand that while on the one hand Russia’s annexation of these territories marks a very serious escalation, on the other it also masks a colossal scaling down of Russian ambitions compared to the first months of the war”; the “Kremlin’s original plan was to capture Kyiv, subjugate or replace the Ukrainian government, and reduce Ukraine to the status of a Russian client state”; when “that failed, Moscow hoped to conquer all or most of the Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine”; both “of these plans were foiled by Ukrainian resistance backed by Western weaponry and intelligence”; and now “Putin’s goal seems to be permanent Russian control of a portion of eastern Ukraine (excluding the main cities of Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk), so as to allow him to ward off attacks by Russian hardliners and claim to the Russian people that his criminal and disastrous war has led to some sort of success for Russia”.

I don’t know to what extent the 30 September 2022 annexation can be undone—I think that we’ll find out what the diplomatic opportunities are when we start to pursue diplomacy. I hope that we’ll abandon the unethical—and risky—anti-diplomacy approach and instead figure out what’s diplomatically possible.

Anti-Diplomacy Hurdles

Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe write in a 28 October 2022 Foreign Affairs piece: “U.S. President Joe Biden has said that the United States is committed to a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine”; “his administration has taken few, if any, steps to create a diplomatic process that could produce such an outcome”; and the “mantra in Washington is to support Kyiv ‘for as long it takes’ and to rule out, at least for now, practical steps toward diplomacy”. Charap and Priebe write—in a January 2023 study—that “President Biden has said that this war will end at the negotiating table”. The study says that the Biden “administration has not yet made any moves to push the parties toward talks”. And Charap writes in a 5 June 2023 Foreign Affairs piece: many “commentators will continue to insist that this war must be decided only on the battlefield”; “that view discounts how the war’s structural realities are unlikely to change even if the frontline shifts, an outcome that itself is far from guaranteed”; the “United States and its allies should be capable of helping Ukraine simultaneously on the battlefield and at the negotiating table”; and now “is the time to start”. 

Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne write in their piece “Why Are We In Ukraine?”, which appears in the June 2023 issue of Harper’s: regarding the degree to which Washington would “be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine”, there’s “a good deal of evidence” suggesting “that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government”; the “draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy”; by “repeatedly labeling Putin a ‘war criminal’ and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome”; “Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the ‘entire territory’ occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war”; “the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war” would be “repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower”; that settlement “would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War”; that settlement “would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a ‘common European home’ and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’”; and that settlement “would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it)”, namely “an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic”. Schwarz and Layne refer to: (1) circumscribing “Washington’s diplomatic options” and “rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome”, (2) “major impediments to ending the war”, and (3) “a comprehensive European settlement” that would be “repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower”. 

A 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs piece says: according “to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement”; the deal was that “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership”; and the deal was that Ukraine would—instead of joining NATO—“receive security guarantees from a number of countries”. A 2 September 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece says: “Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April, according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs”; the “news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations”; the “decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons”, namely (A) “Putin cannot be negotiated with” and (B) “the West isn’t ready for the war to end”. And a 26 February 2023 NYT piece says: “Moscow and Kyiv did conduct direct talks early in the war, first in Belarus and then in Turkey”; by “April, the two sides were discussing an agreement under which Russia would return its troops to preinvasion battle lines in return for a pledge that Ukraine would never seek membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization”; “the talks collapsed”; “U.S. officials say that it was unclear whether a lasting deal could have been reached anyway”; and “Russia insists that Ukraine abandoned talks under pressure from the West”. And Chomsky says in a 9 October 2022 interview where he talks about the 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs article: in “the light of the well-documented record, it seems to me to require quite a leap of faith to take current US government pronouncements on diplomacy seriously”; the “record seems to me to show convincingly that the US has been impeding meaningful negotiations throughout, by now unequivocally by adopting the official war aims of continuing the war in order to severely weaken Russia”; these “efforts to undermine diplomacy apparently continue”; the 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs article says that “‘Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement’” in April 2022; the article blames “the failure of these efforts on the Russians” but doesn’t “mention that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at once flew to Kyiv with the message that Ukraine’s” Western “backers would not support the diplomatic initiative, followed by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who reiterated the official US position that Washington’s goal in the war is to ‘weaken Russia’”; and it’s “a fair surmise that” Johnson’s and Austin’s “visits repeated the official policy”, namely the policy of (1) continuing “the war to severely weaken Russia” and (2) gambling “that Putin won’t use his conventional weapons to devastate Ukraine”.

Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, and Marcy Winograd write in a 9 June 2023 piece titled “The Surprising Pervasiveness of Pro-war Propaganda”: “the U.S. has used its power to derail peace talks and push Zelenskyy not to make compromises that he was, early on in the war, ready to make”; during “talks in Turkey in March 2022, the Ukrainian government accepted territorial compromises as part of its draft 15-point peace and neutrality agreement with Russia”; Zelensky “ruled out trying to recapture all Russian-held territory by force, saying it would lead to World War III”; “Russia agreed to withdraw all its occupation forces”; “the UK and the U.S. intervened and derailed the talks”; the “Turkish Foreign Minister said after a failed NATO conference, ‘Some NATO countries wanted the war in Ukraine to continue in order to weaken Russia’”; “the fact that British and American politicians intervened to block negotiations has been confirmed by Zelenskyy’s aides, Turkish diplomats, and Israel’s then prime minister Naftali Bennett”; during “those talks, what Ukraine asked of the U.S. and other NATO countries was for them to provide collective security guarantees to ensure it would not be invaded again”; and “instead of supporting Ukraine in its negotiations, the U.S. and UK used Ukraine’s dependence on Western support as leverage to undermine the peace talks and turn what might have been a two-month war into a much longer one, with corresponding increases in fatalities, casualties, and physical and economic devastation for the people of Ukraine”. 

Gilbert Achcar writes in a 17 March 2023 Nation piece: one “would have expected that Russia’s escalation of its military gestures against Ukraine in 2021, followed the year after by Russia’s invasion of its neighbor’s territory, would have induced the Biden administration to lay off Beijing (if not to actively mend fences with China) and try to cajole it into exerting pressure on Moscow for a cessation of the war and a UN-sponsored political settlement”; “Beijing threw Washington a line to that effect at the beginning of the war”; in “March 2022, its present foreign minister, then–Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang, published an article in The Washington Post”; the article says that China’s Ukraine-war position is that (1) the “‘purposes and principles of the UN Charter must be fully observed’”, (2) “‘the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected’”, (3) “‘the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously’”, and (4) “‘all efforts that are conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be supported’”; it “was certainly possible to build upon this statement to work together with Beijing toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict, knowing that Russia’s reckless military adventure has considerably increased its dependence on China”; what “happened is the exact opposite”; “Washington escalated the tension with Beijing through a series of statements and moves, such as upscaling its anti-China Quad alliance with Australia, India, and Japan, founding an odd AUKUS anti-China alliance with Australia and the UK, dangerously extending its North-Atlantic alliance into East Asia and the Pacific at NATO’s May 2022 summit in Madrid, and allowing for gratuitously provocative acts about Taiwan such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island”; “when Beijing tried again to throw a line, on the occasion of the beginning of the second year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by publishing a 12-point plan for a ‘political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,’ it was immediately dismissed by the Biden administration, which even engaged in potentially self-fulfilling prophecies by accusing Beijing of planning to provide Russia with weapons”; the “new Chinese plan reiterates from the onset the principle emphasized by Qin Gang a year ago”; the new plan says that the “‘sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld’”; “the plan includes the basic principle upon which it should have been possible for Washington to work with Beijing toward a UN-based peaceful settlement of the ongoing war”; “China’s plan does not call for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, which would risk perpetuating Russia’s present occupation of a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory”; instead “of such a demand that could play into Russia’s hands, Beijing’s plan calls all parties to ‘support Russia and Ukraine in…resuming direct dialogue as quickly as possible, so as to gradually deescalate the situation and ultimately reach a comprehensive ceasefire’”; fortunately, “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not follow in Washington’s footsteps”; he “requested to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to discuss with him China’s 12-point document”; on “Thursday, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, spoke over the phone with Qin Gang”; according “to China’s official statement, Kuleba ‘congratulated China on its recent success in mediating the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and noted that Ukraine takes a long-term view of its relations with China, will continue to strictly abide by the one-China principle and respect China’s territorial integrity, and looks forward to enhancing mutual trust and deepening cooperation with China in various fields’”; this “sheds a particular light on the visit that China’s president Xi Jinping will make to Moscow on Monday”; some have interpreted the visit as “a gesture of endorsement of Russia’s aggression”; and the visit “is more likely to be, after Beijing’s success in restoring diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran, a further and much more important step in projecting China’s role on the world scene as a peacemaker in contrast to that of the United States”. 

Achcar writes in a 2 May 2023 Truthout piece: the “way President Joe Biden’s administration reacted to China’s offer to facilitate a political settlement of the Ukraine conflict clearly reveals Washington’s undeclared objective regarding that war”; the “contrast between the administration’s attitude toward China’s position and the attitudes of some of the United States’s allies is striking”; when “Beijing published its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’ on February 24, marking the beginning of the second year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Washington immediately dismissed the initiative as a mere decoy”; “the very first of the Chinese declaration’s 12 points reaffirmed a principle that went against Russia’s interest in the ongoing war and in favor of Ukraine’s”, namely “the principle of ‘sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries’”; China mentioned “Ukraine specifically more than once when talking about territorial integrity”; there’s “good reason to believe that, far from trying its best to prevent the war, Washington wanted it to occur for the simple reason that the Russian invasion would be, and has been, a godsend for the U.S.’s hegemonic designs”; one “is entitled to believe likewise that Washington did very little to deter Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait in 1990 (some even maintain that then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, let Hussein believe that Washington would not even mind) because that invasion was equally a godsend for its hegemonic designs”; in “both cases, Washington’s global hegemony and allegiance of its Cold War allies were greatly enhanced, after years of decline”; there’s a “very important gap between Washington’s stance and European attempts to build on China’s offer of mediation”; the “key to this contrast lies in the fact that Western Europe is eager to see the war in Ukraine come to an end for the obvious reason summarized by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major bipartisan strategic think tank”; Cordesman says that the US’s “‘European partners and allies are suffering far more from the economic consequences of their support for Ukraine and rise in global energy costs than Americans’”; Cordesman also says that “the U.S. stands to derive ‘grand strategic benefits’ from inciting Ukraine to pursue the war—‘an investment whose benefits greatly exceed its cost’”; Zelensky “very lucidly confessed”—“to the London Economist on March 25, 2022”—that there “‘are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives’”; according to Zelensky, for “‘other countries, it would be better if the war ended quickly, because Russia’s market is a big one [and] their economies are suffering as a result of the war’”; and “as much as it is right to help Ukraine defend its territory and population against Russian aggression and wrong to seek to force it into capitulation, it is also in the best interest of the Ukrainian people to do everything possible to bring the war to an end on the basis of an acceptable compromise instead of thwarting every possibility to negotiate such a compromise—as Washington has been consistently doing” since before Russia invaded.

Chomsky says in a 23 February 2023 Truthout interview: there is—given “Washington’s lack of interest”—“little media inquiry” into whether there’s “hope for diplomatic efforts to escape the steady drift to disaster”; “enough has leaked out from Ukrainian, U.S., and other sources to make it reasonably clear that there have been possibilities, even as recently as last March”; “two Finnish analysts suggest” that “‘Peace talks are possible if there is a political will to engage in them’”; the Finnish analysts “proceed to outline steps that can be taken to ease the way toward further accommodation”; persisting “on its present course, the war will come to vindicate the view of much of the world outside the West that this is a U.S.-Russian war with Ukrainian bodies”; this is the “view, to quote Ambassador Chas Freeman, that the U.S. seems to be fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian”; this view reiterates “the conclusion of Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison that in the 1980s the U.S. was fighting Russia to the last Afghan”; there “have been real successes for the official policy of severely weakening Russia”; as “many commentators have discussed, for a fraction of its colossal military budget, the U.S., via Ukraine, is significantly degrading the military capacity of its sole adversary in this arena, not a small achievement”; it’s “a bonanza for major sectors of the U.S. economy, including fossil fuel and military industries”; and in “the geopolitical domain, it resolves—at least temporarily—what has been a major concern throughout the post-WWII era”, namely “ensuring that Europe remains under U.S. control within the NATO system instead of adopting an independent course”.

The Horrors of the Proxy-War Approach

I think that Anthony Cordesman lays out very helpfully—in a commentary that was published on 21 November 2022—some reasons why Washington wants the proxy war to continue. He says in the commentary: “Ukraine may need major amounts of U.S. humanitarian, civil, and military aid for years to come”; regarding “rising U.S. opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine”, much of the opposition comes from “ignoring the strategic benefits” the aid “provides to the U.S.”; “the U.S. has already obtained major strategic benefits from aiding” Ukraine; “such aid helps to rebuild and strengthen the role America plays as the de facto leader of the West and other democratic states”; Washington “must allocate its limited aid funds and efforts according to their strategic value to the U.S. and how effectively the money will be used”; Washington must consider “the grand strategic benefits of continuing to provide such aid”; providing “aid to Ukraine effectively has forced Russia to fight a proxy war in which both the U.S. and Europe” have been able to exploit “a massive strategic advantage in both defense spending and total economic resources”; this aid is “one of the best investments the U.S. can make in competing with Putin’s Russia and in advancing its own security”; and Washington’s Ukraine aid “is probably the most cost-effective investment the U.S. and its strategic partners have recently made in national security”.

I don’t know how it’s possible—when people are dying and starving, but also when potential escalation looms—to talk about “major strategic benefits”, “strategic value”, “grand strategic benefits”, America being “the de facto leader of the West and other democratic states”, and Ukraine aid being “the most cost-effective investment the U.S. and its strategic partners have recently made”.

Charles A. Kupchan writes in a 24 February 2023 Responsible Statecraft piece: “the West needs to keep a watchful eye on the negative effects the war is having at the global level”; the “conflict is polarizing the international system”; “many developing economies are suffering from the war’s supply-chain disruptions, which are causing food shortages, high inflation, and in some regions, political unrest”; and disorder “is radiating outward from the war in Ukraine—yet another reason it needs to come to an end sooner rather than later”. And Marlene Laruelle writes in her 25 February 2023 Responsible Statecraft piece: the “humanitarian cost of the war for Ukraine is high (8 million externally displaced, 6 internally displaced, several million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and at least 100,000 to 150,000 killed, including both military and civilians)”; the “reconstruction of the country will be of an incommensurable scale, estimated at around USD 600 billion so far, and while it could be a unique opportunity for a new Ukraine to emerge, it could also become a quagmire both logistically and financially”; the “Global South has refused to be lectured by the West and to succumb to Western pressures about applying sanctions against Russia”; it “continues to see the war as a conflict specific to the North, between two imperialisms and normative orders that drags the rest of the planet far away from the real collective challenges—redistribution of wealth, climate change, sustainability, food security, better representation of the South in international organizations, and the like”; everywhere “in the world, military–industrial complexes are booming”; and “as military expenditures reach unprecedented levels, the global disarmament project” is getting “put on the back burner”.

I find Washington’s proxy war hideous—the war is killing Ukrainians, destroying Ukraine, and starving people worldwide. I find the disorder horrifying, the distraction horrifying, and the starvation horrifying—the risk of escalation introduces a whole additional dimension of immorality. The planet can’t accommodate Washington’s destructive proxy war—there’s no room for such conflict in our perilous time.