Ukraine war cements decline of the West
“All that remains of the West is the ever more artificial, even insane attempt to arrest the wheel of history… In this senile Europe, the nations, states, and ruling classes… keep their faith in empty formulae of freedom and progress.”
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
In June of this year, the German daily Handelsblatt revealed that German leader Olaf Scholtz, while serving as finance minister in 2020, tried to make a secret deal with the Trump administration to avoid US sanctions on the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline.
Two years later, in early February 2022, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Scholtz, as German Chancellor, visited the White House for talks with US President Joe Biden on the growing crisis.
During a live press conference following their talks, Biden was asked about his view of Nord Stream, the pipeline system that delivers Russian gas to Europe. The US president responded by saying, “If Russia invades Ukraine, there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Scholtz, standing next to the US president, was asked for a response. The German leader affirmed that the US and Germany were on the same page regarding Ukraine. Without mentioning Nord Stream, he implicitly endorsed its destruction.
But as he spoke, the German chancellor seemed uncomfortable. Did he consider how history would judge him for effectively greenlighting the extrajudicial destruction of a crucial part of Germany’s civilian infrastructure? And how it would set a new precedent for international norms of behavior?
Encircling Russia
On the face of it, the West seems to have a schizophrenic view of Russia. Following the collapse of the USSR, Europe and Russia developed growing economic ties that culminated in the first Nord Stream agreement between then-German chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005.
The US government opposed Nord Stream, ostensibly because it would make Germany too dependent on Russian energy. Merkel obviously did not share America’s concerns.
US president Donald Trump nonetheless imposed sanctions against companies involved with Nord Stream. For unclear reasons, Nord Stream had become a part of Trump’s “Make America Great” agenda.
The then-president signed a very deep-state piece of legislation, known as the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which enabled the US to sanction any company that was working with German and Russian companies on Nord Stream to “protect the energy security of US allies.”
With friends like this, who needs enemies or, as Henry Kissinger reportedly said in a rare moment of candor: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
The Ukraine war resulted from the Western failure to remold Russia in its own neoliberal image. After the collapse of the USSR, the US had an ally in Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev’s successor.
Yeltsin took the advice of American economists to turn Russia cold turkey into a neoliberal economy. Only shock therapy could get Russia on track to become a democratic market economy, they advised.
The subsequent “market reforms” resulted in the plundering of Russian resources by well-connected entrepreneurs who formed a class of oligarchs that made billions.
They immediately moved their wealth abroad and bought soccer clubs in England and trophy real estate on the French Riviera while Russian pensioners were sitting in the streets of Moscow selling their medicine to buy food.
When the nationalist Putin replaced the globalist Yeltsin, the West doubled down on NATO expansion.
Failed strategic bet
Whether under Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Putin, the US never stopped its Cold War policy of undermining Russia. President Jimmy Carter provided support to the Afghan Mujahedeen, the precursor to the Taliban, and every successive US president, Democrat and Republican, continued covert and overt interference in countries on Russia’s southern border.
The ideological architect of the strategy to contain Russia was Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to Carter. Ukraine plays a pivotal role in the so-called Brzezinski Doctrine, which identifies it as the key to preventing Russian-European economic integration. Still today, the US foreign establishment is rife with Brzezinski proteges.
With Ukraine, the West made a major strategic bet that failed. The crippling sanctions against Russia should have cratered the Russian economy, resulting in a popular uprising and leading to the replacement of Putin with a pro-Western leader. It should have been the mother of all regime changes.
Another globalist in the Kremlin would have been a boon for Wall Street as Russia is the richest country in the world in terms of natural wealth. With the growing importance of natural resources, Russia represents a rich investment opportunity for the next 100 years.
End game
After the destruction of Nord Stream in 2022, Western governments floated various “leads” for identifying the perpetrators. They offered no proof, but the tips helped to muddy the waters and provided an alternative narrative to Biden’s bold statement on Nord Stream.
Germany, Denmark and Sweden conducted pseudo-investigations into the Nord Stream sabotage and refused to share their findings while the West vetoed a Russian request for an independent UN investigation.
In early August, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on new Nord Stream leads, suggesting that Ukrainian operatives executed the attack with the knowledge of Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky,
An optimistic reading of the WSJ narrative is that the West is preparing public opinion for throwing Zelensky under the bus, opening the way for his replacement to negotiate peace with Russia. Zelensky has admitted that earlier Minsk negotiations with Russia were meant to buy time to build up Ukraine’s army, disqualifying himself as a good-faith negotiating partner.
Apart from Ukraine itself, the West is the war’s big loser. Ruled by a generation of neoliberals and Atlanticists for whom ideology trumps economic, military and historical common sense, they have encouraged and facilitated Ukraine to fight a war against a nuclear and industrial-military superpower it had no chance of defeating.
For Atlanticists, ideology even trumps ethics and morality.
Originally published at https://asiatimes.com on August 21, 2024.
