{"id":208008,"date":"2022-03-28T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=208008"},"modified":"2022-03-28T04:37:35","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T03:37:35","slug":"bidens-reckless-words-underscore-the-dangers-of-u-s-use-of-ukraine-as-a-proxy-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/bidens-reckless-words-underscore-the-dangers-of-u-s-use-of-ukraine-as-a-proxy-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden’s Reckless Words Underscore the Dangers of U.S. Use of Ukraine as a Proxy War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As grave of a threat as deliberate war is, unintended escalation from miscommunication and misperception can be as bad. Biden is the perfect vessel for such risks.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Three long-range cruise missiles are launched from a Russian submarine in the Black Sea on Saturday, striking targets near the Ukrainian border with Poland, following President Biden’s apparent declaration of regime change on Saturday.
(Credit: 7NEWS Melbourne, Twitter)<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Mar 2022 – <\/em>The central question for Americans from the start of the war in Ukraine was what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in that war? A necessarily related question: if the U.S. is going to involve itself in this war, what objectives should drive that involvement?<\/p>\n

Prior to the U.S.’s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war \u2014 horrors which, contrary to the West’s media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own \u2014 left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed<\/a> as adolescent, that Putin is a \u201cbad guy.\u201d Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.<\/p>\n

That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse<\/a> to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism<\/a> and loyalty impugned<\/a> (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become <\/a>more involved<\/a><\/em> in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war “dissent\u201d that is always permissible in American discourse).<\/p>\n

With these discourse rules firmly implanted, those who attempted to invoke former President Obama’s own arguments<\/a> about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine \u2014 namely, that \u201cUkraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one\u201d and therefore the U.S. should not risk confrontation with Moscow over it \u2014 were widely maligned as Kremlin assets if not agents<\/a>. Others who urged the U.S. to try to avert war<\/a> through diplomacy \u2014 by, for instance, formally vowing that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine and that Kyiv would remain neutral in the new Cold War pursued by the West with Moscow \u2014 faced the same set of accusations about their loyalty and patriotism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most taboo of all was any discussion of the heavy involvement<\/a><\/em> of the U.S. in Ukraine<\/a> beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics<\/a>, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering <\/a>last November<\/a><\/em>) \u2014 all of which amounted to a form of de facto<\/em> NATO expansion without the formal membership. And that leaves to the side the still-unanswered yet supremely repressed question of what Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland referred to as<\/a> the Ukrainians\u2019 “biological research facilities\u201d so dangerous and beyond current Russian bio-research capabilities that she gravely feared they would “fall into Russian hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result of the media’s embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition. U.S. officials are boastfully leading the effort to collapse the Russian economy. Along with its NATO allies, the U.S. has flooded Ukraine with billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry, with at least some of those arms ending up in the hands of actual neo-Nazi battalions integrated into<\/a> the Ukrainian government and military<\/a>. It is providing surveillance technology<\/a> in the form of drones and its own intelligence<\/a> to enable Ukrainian targeting of Russian forces. President Biden threatened Russia<\/a> with a response \u201cin kind\u201d if Russia were to use chemical weapons. Meanwhile, reports<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cC.I.A. officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units.”<\/p>\n

The U.S. is, by definition, waging a proxy war against Russia, using Ukrainians as their instrument, with the goal of not ending the war but prolonging it. So obvious is this fact about U.S. objectives that even The New York Times<\/em> last Sunday explicitly reported<\/a> that the the Biden administration \u201cseeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire\u201d (albeit with care not to escalate into a nuclear exchange). Indeed, even \u201csome American officials assert that as a matter of international law, the provision of weaponry and intelligence to the Ukrainian Army has made the United States a cobelligerent,\u201d though this is \u201can argument that some legal experts dispute.\u201d Surveying all this evidence as well as discussions with his own U.S. and British sources, Niall Ferguson, writing in Bloomberg<\/em>, proclaimed<\/a>: \u201cI conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going.\u201d UK officials similarly told him that \u201cthe U.K.\u2019s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n

In sum, the Biden administration is doing exactly that which former President Obama warned in 2016 should never be done: risking war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers over Ukraine. Yet if any pathology defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites \u2014 no matter how true \u2014 is dismissed as “Russian disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we witnessed most vividly in the run-up to the 2020 election \u2014 when that label was unquestioningly yet falsely applied by the union of the CIA, corporate media and Big Tech<\/a> to the laptop archive revealing Joe Biden’s political and financial activities in Ukraine and China \u2014 any facts which establishment power centers want to demonize or suppress are reflexively labelled \u201cRussian disinformation.\u201d Hence, the DNC propaganda arm Media Matters now lists<\/a> as \u201cpro-Russian propaganda\u201d the indisputable fact that the U.S. is not defending<\/em> Ukraine but rather exploiting and sacrificing it<\/em> to fight a proxy war with Moscow. The more true a claim is, the more likely it is to receive this designation in U.S. establishment discourse.<\/p>\n

That there are few if any risks<\/strong> graver<\/strong> or more reckless than a direct U.S.\/Russia military confrontation should be too obvious to require explanation. Yet that seems to have been completely forgotten in the zeal, arousal, purpose and excitement which war always triggers. It takes little to no effort to recognize the current emergence of the dynamic about which Adam Smith so fervently warned 244 years ago in <\/a>Wealth of Nations<\/a><\/em>:<\/div>\n

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies.\u00a0To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.\u00a0They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a\u00a0thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a\u00a0longer continuance of the war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The grave dangers of the world’s two largest nuclear-armed powers acting on opposite sides of a hot war extend far beyond any intention by the U.S. to deliberately engage Russia directly. Such a war, even with the U.S. waging it \u201conly\u201d through its proxies, severely escalates tensions, distrust, hostilities, and a climate of paranoia. That is particularly true given that \u2014 ever since Democrats decided to blame Putin for Hillary’s 2016 loss \u2014 at least half of Americans have been feeding on a non-stop, toxic diet of anti-Russian hatred under the guise of \u201cRussiagate.\u201d As recently as 2018, 2\/3 of Democrats believed<\/a> that Russia hacked into voting machines and altered the 2016 vote count <\/em>to help Trump win. This cultivation of extreme anti-Russian animus in Washington has been made even more dangerous by the virtual prohibition on dialogue with Russian officials, which during Russiagate was deemed inherently suspect<\/a> if not criminal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And all of those preexisting dangers are, in turn, severely exacerbated by an American president who so often is too age-addled to speak clearly or predictably. That condition is inherently dangerous, made all the more so by the fact that it leaves him vulnerable to manipulation by the Democratic Party’s national security advisers who will never forget 2016 and seem more intent than ever on finally attaining vengeance against Putin, no matter the risks. Speaking to U.S. troops in Poland on Friday, a visibly exhausted and rambling President Biden \u2014 after extensive travel, time-zone hopping, protracted meetings and speeches \u2014 appeared to tell U.S. troops that they were on their way to see first-hand the resistance of Ukrainians, meaning they were headed into Ukraine:<\/p>\n