Of the catchier conflict names, my own favorite — though the Pig War of 1859 between the U.S. and Great Britain in Canada runs a close second — is the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748). It was named for Captain Robert Jenkins of the East India Company who, in 1738, told the British House of Commons that his ear, which he displayed for the onlooking parliamentarians, had been severed several years earlier by a Spanish coast guard sloop’s commander. He had boarded the ship off the Cuban coast and committed the outrage using Jenkins’s own cutlass. If ever there was cause for war, that was it! An ear for an ear, so to speak.

If I could give Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine a name for posterity, I think I’d call it the War of Surprises, because from the get-go it so thoroughly confounded the military mavens and experts on Russia and Ukraine. For now, though, let me confine myself to exploring just two surprising aspects of that ongoing conflict, both of which can be posed as questions: Why did it occur when it did? Why has it evolved in such unexpected ways?

It’s NATO’s Fault

Though a slim majority of experts opined that Putin might use force against Ukraine many months after his military buildup on Ukraine’s border began in early 2021, few foresaw an all-out invasion. When he started massing troops, the reigning assumption was that he was muscle-flexing, probably to extract a promise that NATO would cease expanding toward Russia.

Some context helps here. NATO had just 16 members at its Cold War peak. More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has 30 — 32 when Finland and Sweden, which sought membership after Putin’s invasion, are allowed to join. Long before Putin became president in 2000, Russian officials were already condemning the eastward march of the American-led former Cold War alliance. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin made his opposition clear to President Bill Clinton.

In October 1993, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher prepared to travel to Russia, James Collins, chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow, sent him a cable warning that “NATO expansion is neuralgic to Russians.” If continued “without holding the door open to Russia,” he added, it would be “universally interpreted in Moscow as directed against Russia and Russia alone — or ‘Neo-Containment,’ as Foreign Minister [Andrei] Kozyrev recently suggested.”

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In February 2008, eight years into Putin’s presidency and about a month before a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, William Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow and now the director of the CIA, sent a cable to Washington focusing on Ukraine. “NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine,” he warned, “remains an ‘emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia.” That same month, in a memo to President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Burns wrote that Ukraine’s entry into NATO would cross “the brightest of all red lines” for Russia’s leaders. “I have,” he continued, “yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Such diplomatic missives had little effect as NATO expansion became the centerpiece of Washington’s new security order in Europe. In April 2008, at Bush’s urging, NATO finally took a fateful step at that Bucharest summit, declaring that Ukraine and Georgia would, one day, join its ranks.

Now, it was one thing to include former Soviet allies from Central Europe in NATO, but Ukraine was another matter entirely. In the eyes of Russian nationalists, the two countries shared a centuries-long set of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious ties with Ukrainians, not to mention a 1,426-mile-long border, a point Putin made in a 7,000-word essay he wrote in July 2021, tellingly titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

Putin, who never regarded Ukraine as an authentic state, saw the Ukrainians’ overwhelming December 1991 vote in favor of independence as a deep injustice. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that he told George W. Bush at a NATO-Russia Council meeting held during that 2008 Bucharest summit, “Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is Eastern Europe, another part [Ukraine east of the Dnipro River], and a significant one, is a donation from us.” He later added ominously that, if Ukraine entered NATO, it would lose Crimea, its sole Russian-majority province, and the Donbas, its Russophone east. In his 2016 book, All the Kremlin’s Men, Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar confirmed that Putin had indeed threatened to destroy Ukraine, were it to join NATO.

Those who blame NATO for the present war point to just such evidence. And it can’t be denied that NATO expansion created tension between Russia and the West, as well as Russia and Ukraine. But the alliance’s Bucharest promise that Ukraine would become a member someday didn’t make Putin’s war any less surprising.

Here’s why: between then and the invasion moment, NATO never followed through on its pledge to take the next step and provide Kyiv with  a “membership action plan.” By February 2022, it had, in fact, kept Ukraine waiting for 14 years without the slightest sign that its candidacy might be advancing (though Ukraine’s security ties and military training with some NATO states — the U.S., Britain, and Canada, in particular — had increased).

So, the NATO-was-responsible theory, suggesting that Putin invaded in 2022 in the face of an “existential threat,” isn’t convincing (even if one believes, as I do, that NATO’s enlargement was a bad idea and Russian apprehensions reasonable).

It’s Democracy, Stupid

A rival explanation for Putin’s war is that it stemmed from his fear of liberal democracy. Under his rule, Russia had become steadily more authoritarian until the state was embodied in a single person: him. Putin’s greatest fear, so this explanation goes, was the specter of Russians thronging the streets demanding more freedom — and so, his departure. For that reason, he curbed the media, exiled opposition figures, allegedly had others like Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov killed, and jailed Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident and the person most likely to lead a grassroots rebellion against him.

According to this account, Putin can’t imagine Russians turning against him spontaneously, since he played such a crucial role in putting the 1990s — a decade of economic collapse, fire sales of state property to sleazy “oligarchs,” rising poverty, and potential civil war — behind them. Instead, he built a strong state, imposed order, crushed the Chechens’ attempted secession, paid off Russia’s massive debt early, rebuilt the army, revved up the economy, and left the country standing tall as a great power once again.

So, if Russians do protest en masse (as they did from 2011 to 2013 against rigged elections), it must be thanks to instigation from abroad, as was supposedly true in adjoining countries like Georgia during its 2003 Rose Revolution, Kyrgyzstan during its 2005 Tulip Revolution, and Ukraine during its Orange Revolution that same year. Putin, this narrative continues, hated the “color revolutions” because they created turmoil in regions he deemed Russia’s sphere of influence or in which, as former president Dmitry Medvedev put it, the country has “privileged interests.”

But his real beef against citizen rebellions in Russia’s neighborhood, according to this explanation of what sparked the invasion, is that they might inspire insurrection in Russia. And when it came to that, he especially feared such events in Ukraine. In 2014, after all, its “revolution of dignity” culminated in the ouster of a Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. For Putin, in other words, that revolt hit too close to home. He reacted by annexing Crimea (after a referendum that violated Ukraine’s constitution), while working to foster two separatist “republics” across the border in Ukraine’s Donbas region. A little more than a month before his invasion at a meeting of the Russia-led Collective Treaty Organization, he warned that “we will not allow the realization of so-called color-revolution scenarios” and promptly dispatched 2,500 troops to Kazakhstan following a revolt there.

As for Ukraine, while it may be an imperfect democracy, it was certainly making progress. Its elections were cleaner than Russia’s and its media far freer, as political parties competed, governments were voted in and out of power, and civic groups multiplied. All of this, so goes the argument, Putin found intolerable, fearing that such democratic ideas and aspirations would eventually make their way to Russia.

As it happens, though, none of this explains the timing of his invasion.  

After all, Ukraine had been moving toward political plurality for years, however slowly and unevenly, and however far it still had to go. So, what was happening in 2021 that could have taken his fear to new heights? The answer: nothing, really. Those who claim that NATO was irrelevant to the invasion often insist that the deed sprang from Putin’s ingrained authoritarianism, dating back to his days in Russia’s secret police, the KGB, his love of unchecked power, and his dread of uppity citizens inclined to rebellion.

The problem: none of this explains why the war broke out when it did. Russia wasn’t then being roiled by protests; Putin’s position was rock-solid; and his party, United Russia, had no true rivals. Indeed, the only others with significant followings, relatively speaking, the Communist Party and the Liberal Democracy Party (neither liberal nor democratic), were aligned with the state.

According to yet another explanation, he attacked Ukraine simply because he’s an imperialist through and through, yearns to go down in history as Putin the Great (like Russian tzars Peter the Great and Catherine the Great), and has been transfixed by far-right thinkers, above all the exile Ivan Ilyin, whose remains he arranged to have returned to Russia for reburial.

But why then did a Russian ruler seized by imperial dreams and a neo-fascist ideology wait more than two decades to attack Ukraine? And remember, though now commonly portrayed as a wild-eyed expansionist, Putin, though hardly a peacemaker, had never previously committed Russian forces to anything like that invasion. His 1999-2009 war in Chechnya, though brutal, was waged within Russia and there was no prospect of outside intervention to help the Chechens. His brief military foray into Georgia in 2008, his landgrab in Ukraine in 2014, his intervention in Syria in 2015 — none were comparable in their size or audacity.

Do I have a better explanation? No, but that’s my point. To this day, perhaps the most important question of all about this war, the biggest surprise — why did it happen when it did? — remains deeply mysterious, as do Putin’s motives (or perhaps impulses).

God Doesn’t Favor the Bigger Battalions

Once Russian troops did cross Ukraine’s border, just about everyone expected Kyiv to fall within days. After that, it was assumed, Putin would appoint a quisling government and annex big chunks of the country. The CIA’s assessment was that Ukrainian forces would be trounced in no time at all, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley reportedly told members of Congress that resistance would fizzle within a mere three days. Those predictions briefly seemed on the mark. After all, the Russian army made its way to the northern suburbs of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv — think of a military bent on capturing Washington, D.C., reaching Bethesda, Maryland — before being stopped in its tracks. Had it taken that city, we would be in a different world today.

But — perhaps the biggest surprise of all — the far weaker Ukrainian army not only prevented what was then considered the world’s second-greatest military superpower from taking Kyiv, but in September 2022 ejected Russian forces from the northeastern province of Kharkiv. That October, it also pushed them out of the portion of the southern province of Kherson they had captured on the right bank of the Dnipro River. In all, Ukrainian forces have now retaken about half the territory Russia occupied after the invasion.

As winter approached that year, the crescent-shaped frontlines extending from northern Luhansk Province (one of two that make up the Donbas region) all the way south became the scene of World War I-style trench warfare, with both sides throwing their troops into a virtual meat grinder. Still, since then, despite having overwhelming superiority in soldiers and firepower — the estimated artillery exchange ratio between the two forces has been put as high as 7:1 — Russia’s advance has been, at best, glacial, at worst, nonexistent.

The Russian army’s abysmal performance has perplexed experts. According to American, British, and Norwegian estimates, it has suffered something on the order of 180,000-200,00 casualties. Some observers do believe those numbers are significantly too high, but even if they were off by 50%, the Russian army’s casualties in one year of fighting would exceed by perhaps twofold the losses of the Soviet Union’s Red Army during its 10-year war in Afghanistan.

Russia has also lost thousands of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters, while vast amounts of equipment, abandoned intact, have fallen into Ukrainian hands. All of this, mind you, after Putin initiated a mega-bucks military modernization drive in 2008, leading the Economist to declare in 2020 that “the Russian military dazzles after a decade of reform” and NATO had better watch out.

For the surprising evolution of the war, unlike so much else, I do have an explanation. Military experts typically dwell on what can be counted: the level of military spending, the number of soldiers, tanks, warplanes, and artillery pieces a military has, and so on. They assume, reasonably enough, that the side with more countable stuff is likely to be the winner — and quickly if it has a lot more as Russia indeed did.

There is, however, no way to assign numerical values to morale or leadership. As a result, they tend to be discounted, if not simply omitted from comparisons of military power. In Ukraine, however, as in the American wars in Vietnam in the last century and Afghanistan in this one, the squishy stuff has, at least so far, proven decisive. French emperor Napoleon’s dictum that, in war, “the moral is to the physical as three to one” may seem hyperbolic and he certainly ignored it when he led his Grande Armée disastrously into Russia and allowed the brutal Russian winter to shred its spirit, but in Ukraine — surprise of surprises — his maxim has held all too true, at least so far.

When it comes to surprises, count on one thing: the longer this war continues, the greater the likelihood of yet more of them. One in particular should worry us all: the possibility, if a Russian defeat looms, of a sudden escalation to nuclear war. There’s no way to judge or measure the probability of such a dreaded dénouement now. All we know is that the consequences could be horrific.

Though neither Russia nor the United States seeks a nuclear war, it’s at least possible that they could slide into one. After all, never, not even in the Cold War era, has their relationship been quite so poisonous, only increasing the risk of both misperception and overreaction born of worst-case thinking. Let us hope, in this war of surprises, that it remains nothing more than another of the scenarios strategists like to imagine. Then again, if as 2021 began, I had suggested that Russia might soon invade Ukraine and begin a war in Europe, you would undoubtedly have thought me mad.

Copyright 2023 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.

The Myth of Universality

After Russia invaded, the United States and its allies rushed to punish it with a barrage of economic sanctions. They also sought to mobilize a global outcry by charging Putin with trashing what President Biden’s top foreign policy officials like to call the rules-based international order. Their effort has, at best, had minimal success.

Yes, there was that lopsided vote against Russia in the United Nations General Assembly, the March 2nd resolution on the invasion sponsored by 90 countries. One hundred and forty-one nations voted for it and only five against, while 35 abstained. Beyond that, in the “global south” at least, the response to Moscow’s assault has been tepid at best. None of the key countries there — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to mention four — even issued official statements castigating Russia. Some, including India and South Africa, along with 16 other African countries (and don’t forget China though it may not count as part of the global south), simply abstained from that U.N. resolution. And while Brazil, like Indonesia, voted yes, it also condemned “indiscriminate sanctions” against Russia.

None of those countries joined the United States and most of the rest of NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia, not even Turkey, a member of that alliance. In fact, Turkey, which last year imported 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, has only further increased energy cooperation with Moscow, including raising its purchases of Russian oil to 200,000 barrels per day — more than twice what it bought in 2021. India, too, ramped up oil purchases from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices from a Moscow squeezed by U.S. and NATO sanctions. Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.

Despite the risk of facing potential U.S. sanctions thanks to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), India also stuck by its earlier decision to buy Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S-400. The Biden administration eventually threaded that needle by arranging a waiver for India, in part because it’s seen as a major future partner against China with which Washington has become increasingly preoccupied (as witnessed by the new National Security Strategy). The prime concern of the Indian leadership, however, has been to preserve its close ties with Russia, war or no war, given its fear of a growing alignment between that country and China, which India sees as its main adversary.

What’s more, since the invasion, China’s average monthly trade with Russia has surged by nearly two-thirds, Turkey’s has nearly doubled, and India’s has risen more than threefold, while Russian exports to Brazil have nearly doubled as well. This failure of much of the world to heed Washington’s clarion call to stand up for universal norms stems partly from pique at what’s seen as the West’s presumptuousness. On March 1st, when 20 countries, a number from the European Union, wrote Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan (who visited Putin soon after the war began), imploring him to support an upcoming General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, he all too typically replied: “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… [Do you take for granted] that whatever you say we will do?” Had such a letter, he asked, been sent to India?

Similarly, Celso Amorim, who served as Brazil’s foreign minister for seven years during the presidency of Luis Inacio “Lula” de Silva (who will soon reclaim his former job), declared that condemning Russia would amount to obeying Washington’s diktat. For his part, Lula claimed Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were partly to blame for the war. They hadn’t worked hard enough to avert it, he opined, by negotiating with Putin. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.

Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro typically suggested that he wasn’t about to join the sanctions regime because his country’s agriculture depended on imported Russian fertilizer.

Leaders in the global south were also struck by the contrast between the West’s urgency over Ukraine and its lack of similar fervor when it came to problems in their part of the world. There was, for instance, much commentary about the generosity and speed with which countries like Poland and Hungary (as well as the United States) embraced Ukrainian refugees, having largely shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In June, while not mentioning that particular example, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”

The West’s less-than-urgent response to two other problems aggravated by the Ukraine crisis that hit the world’s poor countries especially hard bore out Jaishankar’s point of view. The first was soaring food prices sure to worsen malnutrition, if not famine, in the global south. Already in May, the World Food Program warned that 47 million additional people (more than Ukraine’s total population) were going to face “acute food insecurity” thanks to a potential reduction in food exports from both Russia and Ukraine — and that was on top of the 193 million people in 53 countries who had already been in that predicament (or worse) in 2021.

A July deal brokered between Ukraine and Russia by the U.N. and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, in fact, ensure the resumption of food exports from both countries (though Russia briefly withdrew from it as October ended). Still, only a fifth of the added supply went to low-income and poor countries. While global food prices have fallen for six months straight now, another crisis cannot be ruled out as long as the war in Ukraine drags on.

The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.

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A more fundamental reason much of the global south wasn’t in a hurry to pillory Russia is that the West has repeatedly defenestrated the very values it declares to be universal. In 1999, for instance, NATO intervened in Kosovo, following Serbia’s repression of the Kosovars, even though it was not authorized to do so, as required, by a U.N. Security Council resolution (which China and Russia would have vetoed). The Security Council did approve the U.S. and European intervention in Libya in 2011 to protect civilians from the security forces of that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gadhafi. That campaign, however, quickly turned into one aimed at toppling his government by assisting the armed opposition and so would be widely criticized in the global south for creating ongoing chaos in that country. After 9/11, the United States offered classically contorted legal explanations for the way the Central Intelligence Agency violated the Convention Against Torture and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions in the name of wiping out terrorism.

Universal human rights, of course, occupy a prominent place in Washington’s narratives about that rules-based world order it so regularly promotes but in practice frequently ignores, notably in this century in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at regime change against a country that posed no direct threat to Russia and therefore was indeed a violation of the U.N. Charter; but so, too, was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, something few in the global south have forgotten.

The War and Climate Change

Worse yet, the divisions Vladimir Putin’s invasion has highlighted have only made it more difficult to take the necessary bold steps to combat the greatest danger all of us face on this planet: climate change. Even before the war, there was no consensus on who bore the most responsibility for the problem, who should make the biggest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, or who should provide funds to countries that simply can’t afford the costs involved in shifting to green energy. Perhaps the only thing on which everyone agrees in this moment of global stress is that not enough has been done to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord target of ideally limiting the increase in global warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade. That’s a valid conclusion. According to a U.N. report published this month, the planet’s warming will reach 2.4 degrees Centigrade by 2100. This is where things stood as the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

As a start, the $100 billion per year that richer countries pledged to poor ones in 2009 to help move them away from hydrocarbon-based energy hasn’t been met in any year so far and recent disbursements, minimal as they have been, were largely in the form of loans, not grants. The resources the West will now have to spend just to cover Ukraine’s non-military needs for 2023 — $55 billion in budgetary assistance and infrastructure repairs alone, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky — plus soaring inflation and slower growth in Western economies thanks to the war make it doubtful that green commitments to poor countries will be fulfilled in the years to come. (Never mind the pledge, in advance of the November 2021 COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the $100 billion goal would be met in 2023.)

In the end, the surge in energy costs created by the war, in part because Russia’s natural gas supplies to Europe have been slashed, could prove the shot in the arm needed for some of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and methane to move more quickly toward wind and solar power. That seems especially possible because the price of clean energy technologies has declined so sharply in recent years. The cost of photovoltaic cells for solar power has, for instance, fallen by nearly 90% in the past decade; the cost for lithium-ion batteries, needed for rechargeable electric vehicles, by the same amount during the last 20 years. Optimism about a quicker greening of the planet, now a common refrain, could prove valid in the long run. However, when it comes to progress on climate change, the immediate implications of the war aren’t encouraging.

According to the International Energy Agency, if the Paris Agreement’s target for limiting global warming and its goal of “net zero” in global emissions by 2050 are to prove feasible, the building of additional fossil-fuel infrastructure must cease immediately. And that’s hardly what’s been happening since the war in Ukraine began. Instead, there has been what one expert calls “a gold rush to new fossil fuel infrastructure.” Following the drastic cuts in Russian gas exports to Europe, new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — more than 20 of them, worth billions of dollars — have either been planned or put on a fast track in Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Group of Seven may even reverse its decision last May to stop public investment in overseas fossil-fuel projects by the end of this year, while its plan to “decarbonize” the energy sectors of member countries by 2035 may also fall by the wayside.

In June, Germany, desperate to replace that Russian natural gas, announced that mothballed coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of greenhouse-gas producers, would be brought back online. The Federation of German Industry, which opposed shutting them down well before the war started, has indicated that it’s already switching to coal so that natural gas storage tanks can be filled before the winter cold sets in. India, too, has responded to higher energy prices with plans to boost coal production by almost 56 gigawatts through 2032, a 25% increase. Britain has scrapped its decision to prohibit, on environmental grounds, the development of the Jackdaw natural gas field in the North Sea and has already signed new contracts with Shell and other fossil-fuel companies. European countries have concluded several deals for LNG purchases, including with Azerbaijan, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and Qatar (which has demanded 20-year contracts). Then there’s Russia’s response to high energy prices, including a huge Arctic drilling project aimed at adding 100 million tons of oil a year to the global supply by 2035.

U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres characterized this dash toward yet more hydrocarbon energy use as “madness.” Using a phrase long reserved for nuclear war, he suggested that such an unceasing addiction to fossil fuels could end in “mutually assured destruction.” He has a point: the U.N. Environment Program’s 2022 “Emissions Gap Report” released last month concluded that, in light of the emissions targets of so many states, Earth’s warming in the post-Industrial Revolution era could be in the range of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s nowhere near the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious benchmark of 1.5 degrees on a planet where the average temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees.

As the Germany-based Perspectives on Climate Group details in a recent study, the Ukraine war has also had direct effects on climate change that will continue even after the fighting ends. As a start, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require countries to report emissions produced by their armed forces, but the war in Ukraine, likely to be a long-drawn-out affair, has already contributed to military carbon emissions in a big way, thanks to fossil-fuel-powered tanks, aircraft, and so much else. Even the rubble created by the bombardment of cities has released more carbon dioxide. So will Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, which its prime minister estimated last month will cost close to $750 billion. And that may be an underestimate considering that the Russian army has taken its wrecking ball (or perhaps wrecking drones, missiles, and artillery) to everything from power plants and waterworks to schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.

What International Community?

Leaders regularly implore “the international community” to act in various ways. If such appeals are to be more than verbiage, however, compelling evidence is needed that 195 countries share basic principles of some sort on climate change — that the world is more than the sum of its parts. Evidence is also needed that the most powerful countries on this planet can set aside their short-term interests long enough to act in a concerted fashion and decisively when faced with planet-threatening problems like climate change. The war in Ukraine offers no such evidence. For all the talk of a new dawn that followed the end of the Cold War, we seem stuck in our old ways — just when they need to change more than ever.

Copyright 2022 Rajan Menon

Via Todmispatch.com

Don’t think I’m writing this as a lament, however. I’m lucky. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. For Ukrainians, the war is anything but a topic of study. It’s a daily, deadly presence. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered. As all of us know too well, many of that country’s cities have been badly damaged or lie in ruins, including people’s homes and apartment buildings, the hospitals they once relied on when ill, the schools they sent their children to, and the stores where they bought food and other basic necessities. Even churches have been hit. In addition, nearly 13 million Ukrainians (including nearly two-thirds of all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.

No one knows how many noncombatants have been slaughtered by bullets, bombs, missiles, or artillery. And all this has been made so much worse by the war crimes the Russians have committed. How does a traumatized society like Ukraine ever become whole again? And in such a disastrous situation, what could the future possibly hold? Who knows?

To break my daily routine of following that ongoing nightmare from such a distance, I decided to look beyond the moment and try to imagine how it might indeed end.

Current Battlelines

It’s easy to forget just how daring (or rash) Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was. After all, Russia aside, Ukraine is Europe’s biggest country in land area and its sixth-largest in population. True, Putin had acted aggressively before, but on a far more modest and careful scale, annexing Crimea and fostering the rise of two breakaway enclaves in parts of Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk, which are industrial and resource-rich areas adjoining Russia. Neither was his 2015 intervention in Syria to save the government of Bashar al-Assad a wild-eyed gamble. He deployed no ground troops there, relying solely on airstrikes and missile attacks to avoid an Afghanistan-style quagmire.

Ukraine, though, was a genuinely rash act. Russia began the war with what seemed to be a massive advantage by any imaginable measure — from gross domestic product (GDP) to numbers of warplanes, tanks, artillery, warships, and missiles. Little wonder, perhaps, that Putin assumed his troops would take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, within weeks, at most. And he wasn’t alone. Western military experts were convinced that his army would make quick work of its Ukrainian counterpart, even if the latter’s military had, since 2015, been trained and armed by the United States, Britain, and Canada.

Yet the campaign to conquer key cities — Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv — failed disastrously. The morale of the Ukrainians remained high and their military tactics adept. By the end of March, Russia had lost tanks and aircraft worth an estimated $5 billion, not to speak of up to a quarter of the troops it had sent into battle. Its military supply system proved shockingly inept, whether for repairing equipment or delivering food, water, and medical supplies to the front.

Subsequently, however, Russian forces have made significant gains in the south and southeast, occupying part of the Black Sea coast, Kherson province (which lies north of Crimea), most of Donbas in the east, and Zaporozhizhia province in the southeast. They have also created a patchy land corridor connecting Crimea to Russia for the first time since that area was taken in 2014.

Still, the botched northern campaign and the serial failures of a military that had been infused with vast sums of money and supposedly subjected to widespread modernization and reform was stunning. In the United States, the intrepid Ukrainian resistance and its battlefield successes soon produced a distinctly upbeat narrative of that country as the righteous David defending the rules and norms of the international order against Putin’s Russian Goliath.

In May, however, things began to change. The Russians were by then focused on taking the Donbas region. And bit by bit, Russia’s advantages — shorter supply lines, terrain better suited to armored warfare, and an overwhelming advantage in armaments, especially artillery — started paying off. Most ominously, its troops began encircling a large portion of Ukraine’s battle-tested, best-trained forces in Donbas where besieged towns like Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, Lyman, and Popasna suddenly hit the headlines.

Now, at the edge of… well, who knows what, here are three possible scenarios for the ending of this ever more devastating war.

1. De Facto Partition

If — and, of course, I have to stress the conditional here, given repeatedly unforeseen developments in this war — Putin’s army takes the entire Donbas region plus the whole Black Sea coast, rendering Ukraine smaller and landlocked, he might declare his “special military operation” a success, proclaim a ceasefire, order his commanders to fortify and defend the new areas they occupy, and saddle the Ukrainians with the challenge of expelling the Russian troops or settling for a de facto partition of the country.

Putin could respond to any Ukrainian efforts to claw back lost lands with air and missile strikes. These would only exacerbate the colossal economic hit Ukraine has already taken, including not just damaged or destroyed infrastructure and industries, a monthly budget shortfall of $5 billion, and an anticipated 45% decline in GDP this year, but billions of dollars in revenue lost because it can’t ship its main exports via the Russian-dominated Black Sea. An April estimate of the cost of rebuilding Ukraine ranged from $500 billion to $1 trillion, far beyond Kyiv’s means.

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Assuming, on the other hand, that Ukraine accepted a partition, it would forfeit substantial territory and President Volodymyr Zelensky could face a staggering backlash at home. Still, he may have little choice as his country could find the economic and military strain of endless fighting unbearable.

Ukraine’s Western backers may become war weary, too. They’ve just begun to feel the economic blowback from the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia, pain that will only increase. While those sanctions have indeed hurt Russia, they’ve also contributed to skyrocketing energy and food prices in the West (even as Putin profits by selling his oil, gas, and coal at higher prices). The U.S. inflation rate, at 8.6% last month, is the highest in 40 years, while the Congressional Budget Office has revised estimates of economic growth — 3.1% this year — down to 2.2% for 2023 and 1.5% for 2024. All this as mid-term elections loom and President Biden’s approval ratings, now at 39.7%, continue to sink.

Europe is also in economic trouble. Inflation in the Eurozone was 8.1% in May, the highest since 1997, and energy prices exploded. Within days of the Russian invasion, European natural gas prices had jumped nearly 70%, while oil hit $105 a barrel, an eight-year high. And the crunch only continues. Inflation in Britain, at 8.2%, is the worst since 1982. On June 8th, gasoline prices there reached a 17-year high. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development anticipates that the French, German, and Italian economies (the three largest in Europe) will contract for the rest of this year, with only France’s registering an anemic 0.2% growth in the fourth quarter. No one can know for sure whether Europe and the U.S. are headed for a recession, but many economists and business leaders consider it likely.

Such economic headwinds, along with the diminution of the early euphoria created by Ukraine’s impressive battlefield successes, could produce “Ukraine fatigue” in the West. The war has already lost prominence in news headlines. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s biggest supporters, including the Biden administration, could soon find themselves preoccupied with economic and political challenges at home and ever less eager to keep billions of dollars in economic aid and weaponry flowing.

The combination of Ukraine fatigue and Russian military successes, however painfully and brutally gained, may be precisely what Vladimir Putin is betting on. The Western coalition of more than three dozen states is certainly formidable, but he’s savvy enough to know that Russia’s battlefield advantages could make it ever harder for the U.S. and its allies to maintain their unity. The possibility of negotiations with Putin has been raised in France, Italy, and Germany. Ukraine won’t be cut off economically or militarily by the West, but it could find Western support ever harder to count on as time passes, despite verbal assurances of solidarity.

All of this could, in turn, set the stage for a de facto partition scenario.

2. Neutrality with Sweeteners

Before the war, Putin pushed for a neutral Ukraine that would foreswear all military alliances. No dice, said both Ukraine and NATO. That alliance’s decision, at its 2008 Bucharest summit, to open the door to that country (and Georgia) was irrevocable. A month after the Russian invasion began, Zelensky put neutrality on the table, but it was too late. Putin had already opted to achieve his aims on the battlefield and was confident he could.

Still, Russia and Ukraine have now been fighting for more than three months. Both have suffered heavy losses and each knows that the war could drag on for years at a staggering cost without either achieving its aims. The Russian president does control additional chunks of Ukrainian territory, but he may hope to find some way of easing Western sanctions and also avoiding being wholly dependent on China.

These circumstances might revive the neutrality option. Russia would retain its land corridor to Crimea, even if with some concessions to Ukraine. It would receive a guarantee that the water canals flowing southward to that peninsula from the city of Kherson, which would revert to Ukrainian control, would never again be blocked. Russia would not annex the “republics” it created in the Donbas in 2014 and would withdraw from some of the additional land it’s seized there. Ukraine would be free to receive arms and military training from any country, but foreign troops and bases would be banned from its territory.

Such a settlement would require significant Ukrainian sacrifices, which is why candidate membership in the European Union (EU) and, more importantly, a fast track to full membership — one of that country’s key aspirations — as well as substantial long-term Western aid for economic reconstruction would be a necessary part of any deal. Expediting its membership would be a heavy lift for the EU and such an aid package would be costly to the Europeans and Americans, so they’d have to decide how much they were willing to offer to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

3. A New Russia

Ever since the war began, commentators and Western leaders, including President Biden, have intimated that it should produce, if not “regime change” in Russia, then Putin’s departure. And there have been no shortage of predictions that the invasion will indeed prove Putin’s death knell. There’s no evidence, however, that the war has turned his country’s political and military elite against him or any sign of mass disaffection that could threaten the state.

Still, assume for a moment that Putin does depart, voluntarily or otherwise. One possibility is that he would be replaced by someone from his inner circle who then would make big concessions to end the war, perhaps even a return to the pre-invasion status quo with tweaks. But why would he (and it will certainly be a male) do that if Russia controls large swathes of Ukrainian land? A new Russian leader might eventually cut a deal, providing sanctions are lifted, but assuming that Putin’s exit would be a magic bullet is unrealistic.

Another possibility: Russia unexpectedly becomes a democracy following prolonged public demonstrations. We’d better hope that happens without turmoil and bloodshed because it has nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads, shares land borders with 14 states, and maritime borders with three more. It is also the world’s largest country, with more than 17 million square kilometers (44% larger than runner-up Canada).

So, if you’re betting on a democratic Russia anytime soon, you’d better hope that the transformation happens peacefully. Upheaval in a vast nuclear-armed country would be a disaster. Even if the passage to democracy isn’t chaotic and violent, such a government’s first order of business wouldn’t be to evacuate all occupied territories. Yet it would be so much more likely than the present one to renounce its post-invasion territorial gains, though perhaps not Russian-majority Crimea, which, in the era of the Soviet Union, was part of the Russian republic until, in 1954, it was transferred to the Ukrainian republic by fiat.

This Needs to End

The suffering and destruction in Ukraine and the economic turmoil the war has produced in the West should be compelling enough reasons to end it. Ditto the devastation it continues to create in some of the world’s poorest countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen. Along with devastating droughts and local conflicts, it has led to staggering increases in the price of basic foods (with both Ukrainian and Russian grains, to one degree or another, blocked from the market). More than 27 million people are already facing acute food shortages or outright starvation in those four nations alone, thanks at least in part to the conflict in Ukraine.

Yes, that war is Europe’s biggest in a generation, but it’s not Europe’s alone. The pain it’s producing extends to people in faraway lands already barely surviving and with no way to end it. And sadly enough, no one who matters seems to be thinking about them. The simple fact is that, in 2022, with so much headed in the wrong direction, a major war is the last thing this planet needs.

Copyright 2022 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

Not surprisingly, following Russia’s February 24th invasion, coverage has focused mainly on the day-to-day fighting; the destruction of Ukrainian economic assets, ranging from buildings and bridges to factories and whole cities; the plight of both Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people, or IDPs; and the mounting evidence of atrocities. The war’s potential long-term economic effects in and beyond Ukraine haven’t attracted nearly as much attention, for understandable reasons. They’re less visceral and, by definition, less immediate. Yet the war will take a huge economic toll, not just on Ukraine but on desperately poor people living thousands of miles away. Wealthier countries will experience the ill effects of the war, too, but be better able to cope with them.

Shattered Ukraine

Some expect this war to last years, even decades, though that estimate seems far too bleak. What we do know, however, is that, even two months in, Ukraine’s economic losses and the outside assistance that country will need ever to achieve anything resembling what once passed for normal are staggering.

Let’s start with Ukraine’s refugees and IDPs. Together, the two groups already make up 29% of the country’s total population. To put that in perspective, try to imagine 97 million Americans finding themselves in such a predicament in the next two months.

As of late April, 5.4 million Ukrainians had fled the country for Poland and other neighboring lands. Even though many — estimates vary between several hundred thousand and a million — have started returning, it’s unclear whether they will be able to stay (which is why the U.N.’s figures exclude them from its estimate of the total number of refugees). If the war worsens and does indeed last years, a continuing exodus of refugees could result in a total unimaginable today.

That will put even more strain on the countries hosting them, especially Poland, which has already admitted nearly three million fleeing Ukrainians. One estimate of what it costs to provide them with basic needs is $30 billion. And that’s for a single year. Moreover, when that projection was made there were a million fewer refugees than there are now. Add to that the 7.7 million Ukrainians who have left their homes but not the country itself. The cost of making all these lives whole again will be staggering.

Once the war ends and those 12.8 million uprooted Ukrainians begin to try to rebuild their lives, many will find that their apartment buildings and homes are no longer standing or not habitable. The hospitals and clinics they depended on, the places they worked, their children’s schools, the shops and malls in Kyiv and elsewhere where they bought basic necessities may have been razed or badly damaged, too. The Ukrainian economy is expected to contract by 45% this year alone, hardly surprising considering that half of its businesses aren’t operating and, according to the World Bank, its seaborne exports from its now embattled southern coast have effectively ceased. To return even to pre-war levels of production will take at least several years.

About one-third of Ukraine’s infrastructure (bridges, roads, rail lines, waterworks, and the like) has already been damaged or demolished. Repairing or rebuilding it will require between $60 billion and $119 billion. Ukraine’s Finance Minister reckons that if lost production, exports, and revenue are added in, the total damage done by the war already exceeds $500 billion. That’s nearly four times the value of Ukraine’s gross domestic product in 2020.

And mind you, such figures are approximations at best. The true costs will undoubtedly be higher and vast sums in assistance from international financial organizations and Western countries needed for years to come. At a meeting convened by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, Ukraine’s Prime Minister estimated that the rebuilding of his country would require $600 billion and that he needs $5 billion a month for the next five months just to bolster its budget. Both organizations have already swung into action. In early March, the IMF approved a $1.4 billion emergency loan for Ukraine and the World Bank an additional $723 million. And that’s sure to be just the beginning of a long-term flow of funds into Ukraine from those two lenders, while individual Western governments and the European Union will doubtless provide their own loans and grants.

The West: Higher Inflation, Lower Growth

The economic shock waves created by the war are already hurting Western economies and the pain will only increase. Economic growth in the wealthiest European countries was 5.9% in 2021. The IMF anticipates that it will fall to 3.2% in 2022 and to 2.2% in 2023. Meanwhile, between just February and March of this year, inflation in Europe surged from 5.9% to 7.9%. And that looks modest compared to the leap in European energy prices. By March they had already risen a whopping 45% compared to a year ago.

The good news, reports the Financial Times, is that unemployment has fallen to a record low of 6.8%. The bad news: inflation outran wages, so workers were actually earning 3% less.

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As for the United States, economic growth, projected at 3.7% for 2022, is likely to be better than in leading European economies. However, the Conference Board, a think tank for its 2,000 member businesses, expects growth to dip to 2.2% in 2023. Meanwhile, the U.S. inflation rate reached 8.54% in late March. That’s twice what it was 12 months ago and the highest it’s been since 1981. Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has warned that the war will create additional inflation. New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman believes that it will drop, but if so, the question is: When and how rapidly? Besides, Krugman expects price increases to get worse before they begin to ease. The Fed can curb inflation by jacking up interest rates, but that could end up further reducing economic growth. Indeed, Deutsche Bank made news on April 26th with its prediction that the Fed’s battle against inflation will create a “major recession” in the U.S. late next year.

Along with Europe and the U.S., the Asia-Pacific, the world’s third economic powerhouse, won’t escape unscathed either. Citing the effects of the war, the IMF cut its growth forecast for that region by another 0.5% to 4.9% this year compared to 6.5% last year. Inflation in the Asia-Pacific has been low but is expected to rise in a number of countries.

Such unwelcome trends can’t all be attributed to the war alone. The Covid-19 pandemic had created problems on many fronts and U.S. inflation was already creeping up before the invasion, but it will certainly make matters worse. Consider energy prices since February 24th, the day the war started. The price of oil was then at $89 a barrel. After zigs and zags and a March 9th peak of $119, it stabilized (at least for now) at $104.7 on April 28rd — a 17.6% jump in two months. Appeals by the U.S. and British governments to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to increase oil production went nowhere, so no one should expect quick relief.

Rates for container shipping and air cargo, already hiked by the pandemic, rose further following the invasion of Ukraine and supply-chain disruptions worsened as well. Food prices also rose, not only due to higher energy costs but also because Russia accounts for nearly 18% of global exports of wheat (and Ukraine 8%), while Ukraine’s share of global corn exports is 16% and the two countries together account for more than a quarter of global exports of wheat, a crucial crop for so many countries.

Russia and Ukraine also produce 80% of the world’s sunflower oil, widely used for cooking. Rising prices and shortages of this commodity are already apparent, not only in the European Union, but also in poorer parts of the world like the Middle East and India, which gets nearly all of its supply from Russia and Ukraine. In addition, 70% of Ukraine’s exports are carried by ships and both the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are now war zones.

The Plight of “Low-Income” Countries

The slower growth, price hikes, and higher interest rates resulting from the efforts of central banks to tame inflation, as well as increased unemployment, will hurt people living in the West, particularly the poorest among them who spend a far larger proportion of their earnings on basic necessities like food and gas. But “low-income countries” (according to the World Bank’s definition, those with an average per-capita annual income below $1,045 in 2020), particularly their poorest denizens, will be hit so much harder. Given Ukraine’s enormous financial needs and the West’s determination to meet them, the low-income countries are likely to find it far more difficult to get the financing for the debt payments they’ll owe because of increased borrowing to cover the rising costs of imports, especially essentials like energy and food. Add to that reduced export earnings owing to slower global economic growth.

The Covid-19 pandemic had already forced low-income countries to weather the economic storm by borrowing more, but low interest rates made their debt, already at a record $860 billion, somewhat easier to manage. Now, with global growth ebbing and the costs of energy and food rising, they’ll be forced to borrow at far higher interest rates, which will only increase their repayment burden.

During the pandemic, 60% of low-income countries required relief from their debt-repayment obligations (compared to 30% in 2015). Higher interest rates, along with higher food and energy prices, will now worsen their predicament. This month, for instance, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. Prominent economists warn that that might prove to be a bellwether, since other countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Tunisia face similar debt problems that the war is aggravating. Together, 74 low-income countries owed $35 billion in debt repayments this year, a 45% increase from 2020.

And those, mind you, are not even considered low-income countries. For them, the IMF has traditionally served as the lender of last resort, but will they be able to count on its help when Ukraine also urgently needs huge loans? The IMF and the World Bank can seek additional contributions from their wealthy member states, but will they get them, when those countries are also coping with growing economic problems and worrying about their own angry voters?

Of course, the greater the debt burden of low-income countries, the less they’ll be able to help their poorest citizens handle higher prices for essentials, especially food. The Food and Agricultural Organization’s food price index rose 12.6% just from February to March and was already 33.6% higher than a year ago.

Soaring wheat prices — at one point, the price per bushel nearly doubled before settling at a level 38% higher than last year — have already created shortages of flour and bread in Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, which not long ago looked to Ukraine for between 25% and 80% of their wheat imports. Other countries, like Pakistan and Bangladesh — the former buys nearly 40% of its wheat from Ukraine, the latter 50% from Russia and Ukraine — could face the same problem.

The place suffering the most from skyrocketing food prices may be Yemen, a country that has been mired in civil war for years and faced chronic food shortages and famine well before Russia invaded Ukraine. Thirty percent of Yemen’s imported wheat comes from Ukraine and, thanks to the reduction in supply created by the war, the price per kilogram has already risen nearly five-fold in its south. The World Food Program (WFP) has been spending an extra $10 million a month for its operations there, since nearly 200,000 people could face “famine-like conditions” and 7.1 million in total will experience “emergency levels of hunger.” The problem isn’t confined to countries like Yemen, though. According to the WFP, 276 million people worldwide faced “acute hunger” even before the war began and if it drags on into the summer another 27 million to 33 million may find themselves in just that precarious position.

The Urgency of Peace — And Not Just for Ukrainians

The magnitude of the funds needed to rebuild Ukraine, the importance the U.S., Britain, the European Union, and Japan attach to that goal, and the increasing cost for critical imports are going to put the world’s poorest countries in an even tougher economic spot. To be sure, poor people in wealthy countries are also vulnerable, but those in the poorest ones will suffer so much more.

Many are already barely surviving and lack the array of social services available to the poor in wealthy nations. The American social-safety net is threadbare compared to its European analogues, but at least there is such a thing. Not so in the poorest countries. There, the least fortunate scrape by with little, if any, help from their governments. Only 20% of them are covered in any way by such programs.

The world’s poorest bear no responsibility for the war in Ukraine and have no capacity to bring it to an end. Other than the Ukrainians themselves, however, they will be hurt worst by its prolongation. The most impoverished among them are not being shelled by the Russians or occupied and subjected to war crimes like the inhabitants of the Ukrainian town of Bucha. Still, for them, too, ending the war is a matter of life or death. That much they share with the people of Ukraine.

Copyright 2022 Rajan Menon

During that decade, Russia was on its knees. Its economy had shrunk by nearly 40%, while unemployment was surging and inflation skyrocketing. (It reached a monumental 86% in 1999.) The Russian military was a mess. Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country’s borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.

The Russians were perplexed — as well they should have been.

At the time, Clinton and company were hailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a democrat. (Never mind that he had lobbed tank shells at his own recalcitrant parliament in 1993 and, in 1996, prevailed in a crooked election, abetted weirdly enough by Washington.) They praised him for launching a “transition” to a market economy, which, as Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich so poignantly laid out in her book Second Hand Time, would plunge millions of Russians into penury by “decontrolling” prices and slashing state-provided social services.

Why, Russians wondered, would Washington obsessively push a Cold War NATO alliance ever closer to their borders, knowing that a reeling Russia was in no position to endanger any European country?

An Alliance Saved from Oblivion

Unfortunately, those who ran or influenced American foreign policy found no time to ponder such an obvious question. After all, there was a world out there for the planet’s sole superpower to lead and, if the U.S. wasted time on introspection, “the jungle,” as the influential neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan put it, would grow back and the world would be “imperiled.” So, the Clintonites and their successors in the White House found new causes to promote using American power, a fixation that would lead to serial campaigns of intervention and social engineering.

The expansion of NATO was an early manifestation of this millenarian mindset, something theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had warned about in his classic book, The Irony of American History. But who in Washington was paying attention, when the world’s fate and the future were being designed by us, and only us, in what Washington Post neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer celebrated in 1990 as the ultimate “unipolar moment” — one in which, for the first time ever, the United States would possess peerless power?

Still, why use that opportunity to expand NATO, which had been created in 1949 to deter the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact from rolling into Western Europe, given that both the Soviet Union and its alliance were now gone? Wasn’t it akin to breathing life into a mummy?

To that question, the architects of NATO expansion had stock answers, which their latter-day disciples still recite. The newly born post-Soviet democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, as well as other parts of the continent, could be “consolidated” by the stability that only NATO would provide once it inducted them into its ranks. Precisely how a military alliance was supposed to promote democracy was, of course, never explained, especially given a record of American global alliances that had included the likes of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Greece under the colonels, and military-ruled Turkey.

And, of course, if the denizens of the former Soviet Union now wanted to join the club, how could they rightly be denied? It hardly mattered that Clinton and his foreign policy team hadn’t devised the idea in response to a raging demand for it in that part of the world. Quite the opposite, consider it the strategic analog to Say’s Law in economics: they designed a product and the demand followed.

Domestic politics also influenced the decision to push NATO eastward. President Clinton had a chip on his shoulder about his lack of combat credentials. Like many American presidents (31 to be precise), he hadn’t served in the military, while his opponent in the 1996 elections, Senator Bob Dole, had been badly injured fighting in World War II. Worse yet, his evasion of the Vietnam-era draft had been seized upon by his critics, so he felt compelled to show Washington’s power brokers that he had the stomach and temperament to safeguard American global leadership and military preponderance.

In reality, because most voters weren’t interested in foreign policy, neither was Clinton and that actually gave an edge to those in his administration deeply committed to NATO expansion. From 1993, when discussions about it began in earnest, there was no one of significance to oppose them. Worse yet, the president, a savvy politician, sensed that the project might even help him attract voters in the 1996 presidential election, especially in the Midwest, home to millions of Americans with eastern and central European roots.

Furthermore, given the support NATO had acquired over the course of a generation in Washington’s national security and defense industry ecosystem, the idea of mothballing it was unthinkable, since it was seen as essential for continued American global leadership. Serving as a protector par excellence provided the United States with enormous influence in the world’s premier centers of economic power of that moment. And officials, think-tankers, academics, and journalists — all of whom exercised far more influence over foreign policy and cared much more about it than the rest of the population — found it flattering to be received in such places as a representative of the world’s leading power.

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Under the circumstances, Yeltsin’s objections to NATO pushing east (despite verbal promises made to the last head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to do so) could easily be ignored. After all, Russia was too weak to matter. And in those final Cold War moments, no one even imagined such NATO expansion. So, betrayal? Perish the thought! No matter that Gorbachev steadfastly denounced such moves and did so again this past December.

You Reap What You Sow

Russian President Vladimir Putin is now pushing back, hard. Having transformed the Russian army into a formidable force, he has the muscle Yeltsin lacked. But the consensus inside the Washington Beltway remains that his complaints about NATO’s expansion are nothing but a ruse meant to hide his real concern: a democratic Ukraine. It’s an interpretation that conveniently absolves the U.S. of any responsibility for ongoing events.

Today, in Washington, it doesn’t matter that Moscow’s objections long preceded Putin’s election as president in 2000 or that, once upon a time, it wasn’t just Russian leaders who didn’t like the idea. In the 1990s, several prominent Americans opposed it and they were anything but leftists. Among them were members of the establishment with impeccable Cold War credentials: George Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine; Paul Nitze, a hawk who served in the Reagan administration; the Harvard historian of Russia Richard Pipes, another hardliner; Senator Sam Nunn, one of the most influential voices on national security in Congress; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a one-time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense. Their warnings were all remarkably similar: NATO’s expansion would poison relations with Russia, while helping to foster within it authoritarian and nationalist forces.

The Clinton administration was fully aware of Russia’s opposition. In October 1993, for example, James Collins, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Russia, sent a cable to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, just as he was about to travel to Moscow to meet Yeltsin, warning him that NATO’s enlargement was “neuralgic to Russians” because, in their eyes, it would divide Europe and shut them out. He warned that the alliance’s extension into Central and Eastern Europe would be “universally interpreted in Moscow as directed at Russia and Russia alone” and so regarded as “neo-containment.”

That same year, Yeltsin would send a letter to Clinton (and the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) fiercely opposing NATO expansion if it meant admitting former Soviet states while excluding Russia. That would, he predicted, actually “undermine Europe’s security.” The following year, he clashed publicly with Clinton, warning that such expansion would “sow the seeds of mistrust” and “plunge post-Cold War Europe into a cold peace.” The American president dismissed his objections: the decision to offer former parts of the Soviet Union membership in the alliance’s first wave of expansion in 1999 had already been taken.

The alliance’s defenders now claim that Russia accepted it by signing the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. But Moscow really had no choice, being dependent then on billions of dollars in International Monetary Fund loans (possible only with the approval of the United States, that organization’s most influential member). So, it made a virtue of necessity. That document, it’s true, does highlight democracy and respect for the territorial integrity of European countries, principles Putin has done anything but uphold. Still, it also refers to “inclusive” security across “the Euro-Atlantic area” and “joint decision-making,” words that hardly describe NATO’s decision to expand from 16 countries at the height of the Cold War to 30 today.

By the time NATO held a summit in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, in 2008, the Baltic states had become members and the revamped alliance had indeed reached Russia’s border. Yet the post-summit statement praised Ukraine’s and Georgia’s “aspirations for membership,” adding “we agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” President George W. Bush’s administration couldn’t possibly have believed Moscow would take Ukraine’s entry into the alliance lying down. The American ambassador to Russia, William Burns — now the head of the CIA — had warned in a cable two months earlier that Russia’s leaders regarded that possibility as a grave threat to their security. That cable, now publicly available, all but foresaw a train wreck like the one we’re now witnessing.

But it was the Russia-Georgia war — with rare exceptions mistakenly presented as an unprovoked, Moscow-initiated attack — that provided the first signal Vladimir Putin was past the point of issuing protests. His annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, following an illegal referendum, and the creation of two “republics” in the Donbas, itself part of Ukraine, were far more dramatic moves that effectively initiated a second Cold War.

Averting Disaster

And now, here we are. A divided Europe, increasing instability amid military threats by nuclear-armed powers, and the looming possibility of war, as Putin’s Russia, its troops and armaments massed around Ukraine, demand that NATO expansion cease, Ukraine be barred from the alliance, and the United States and its allies finally take Russia’s objections to the post-Cold War security order seriously.

Of the many obstacles to averting war, one is particularly worth noting: the widespread claim that Putin’s concerns about NATO are a smokescreen obscuring his true fear: democracy, particularly in Ukraine. Russia, however, repeatedly objected to NATO’s eastward march even when it was still being hailed as a democracy in the West and long before Putin became president in 2000. Besides, Ukraine has been a democracy (however tumultuous) since it became independent in 1991.

So why the Russian buildup now?

Vladimir Putin is anything but a democrat. Still, this crisis is unimaginable without the continual talk about someday ushering Ukraine into NATO and Kyiv’s intensifying military cooperation with the West, especially the United States. Moscow views both as signs that Ukraine will eventually join the alliance, which — not democracy — is Putin’s greatest fear.

Now for the encouraging news: the looming disaster has finally energized diplomacy. We know that the hawks in Washington will deplore any political settlement that involves compromise with Russia as appeasement. They’ll liken President Biden to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who, in 1938, gave way to Hitler in Munich. Some of them advocate a “massive weapons airlift” to Ukraine, à la Berlin as the Cold War began. Others go further, urging Biden to muster an “international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.”

Sanity, however, can still prevail through a compromise. Russia could settle for a moratorium on Ukrainian membership in NATO for, say, two decades, something the alliance should be able to accept because it has no plans to fast-track Kyiv’s membership anyway. To gain Ukraine’s assent, it would be guaranteed the freedom to secure arms for self-defense and, to satisfy Moscow, Kyiv would agree never to allow NATO bases or aircraft and missiles capable of striking Russia on its territory.

The deal would have to extend beyond Ukraine if it is to ward off crises and war in Europe. The United States and Russia would need to summon the will to discuss arms control there, including perhaps an improved version of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that President Trump ditched in 2019. They would also need to explore confidence-building measures like excluding troops and armaments from designated areas along the NATO-Russian borderlands and steps to prevent the (now-frequent) close encounters between American and Russian warplanes and warships that could careen out of control.

Over to the diplomats. Here’s wishing them well.

Copyright 2022 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

When it comes to basic water supplies, that’s hardly an outlandish thought. After all, back in 2015, our government, along with other members of the United Nations, embraced the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, the sixth of which is universal access to safe drinking water. Despite modest progress globally — 71% of the world’s population lacked that simple necessity then, “only” 61% today — nearly 900 million people still don’t have it. Of course, the overwhelming majority of them live in the poorest countries on this planet.

The United States, however, has the world’s largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C- grade in their 2021 “report card”? How to explain why Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation?

Worse yet, two million Americans still have no running water and indoor plumbing. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack this rudimentary amenity than Whites; Latinos and African Americans, twice as likely. On average, Americans use 82 gallons of water daily; Navajos, seven — or the equivalent of about five flushes of a toilet. Moreover, many Native Americans must drive miles to fetch fresh water, making regular handwashing, a basic precaution during the Covid-19 pandemic, just one more hardship.

“Safe” Water

Washington and Philadelphia are just two of the many American cities whose water-distribution systems, some of them wooden, contain pipes that predate the Civil War. Naturally, time has taken its toll. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that water mains, especially such old ones, rupture 240,000 times annually, while “trillions of gallons” of potable water worth $2.6 billion seep from leaky pipes, and “billions of gallons of raw sewage” pollute the surface water that provides 61% of our supply. Fixing busted pipes, which break at the rate of one every two minutes nationally, has cost nearly $70 billion since 2000.

The U.S. has 2.2 million miles of waterpipes, which are, on average, 45 years old. The EPA’s 2015 estimate for overhauling such an aging system of piping was $473 billion, or $23.7 billion annually over 20 years — in other words, anything but chump change. Still, compared to the way Congress allots money to the U.S. military for its endless losing wars and eternal build-ups of weaponry, it couldn’t be more modest. After all, the Pentagon’s latest budget request was for $715 billion, to which the House Armed Services Committee added $25.5 billion, unsolicited, as did its Senate counterpart. Self-styled congressional budget hawks never complain about our military spending, even though it exceeds that of the next 11 countries combined. So, $23.7 billion annually to renovate an antediluvian water system? That shouldn’t be a problem, right?

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It turns out, though, that it is. The federal government’s share of total investment in updating water infrastructure plunged from nearly-two-thirds in 1977 to less than a tenth of that by 2019. With state and local governments under increasing financial pressure, the funding shortfall for modernizing the water infrastructure could reach a staggering $434 billion by 2029.

Considering where the American water system already falls utterly short, a contrarian could counter that it’s not a big deal for a mere two million people in a country of 333 million not to have water directly piped into their homes. But in the wealthiest country on earth? Really? And a lack of easy access to water is hardly the only problem. A substantial number of Americans are drinking (and cooking with) contaminated supplies of it. A 2017 investigation found that 63 million of them had done so at least once during the previous 10 years, or nearly a fifth of the population.

This finding wasn’t an outlier. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) discovered that, “in 2015 alone, there were more than 80,000 reported violations of the Safe Water Drinking Act by community water systems” that served nearly 77 million people. And of the total number of violations, 12,000, traced to water providers serving 27 million people, were health-related (rather than monitoring and reporting infractions). There’s more. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 21 million consumers received water that didn’t meet federal standards; and Time reported that 30 million did in 2019.

The Flint Saga and Beyond

Occasionally, stories about unsafe drinking water do make the headlines, as happened with Flint, Michigan. Once a prosperous city, Flint was slammed by a post-1970s wave of de-industrialization in the Midwest and now has a poverty rate of nearly 39% (and 54% of its population is Black). By 2013, facing its massive budget deficit, a commission appointed by the governor devised a cost-saving measure. The city’s water supply would be switched to the Flint River, pending construction of new supply lines from Lake Huron. That river, however, had long been contaminated by waste from factories, paper mills, and meatpacking plants along its shore, as well as untreated sewage.

Residents began complaining that their water smelled and tasted bad, but were regularly reassured that it was safe. Testing, however, revealed lead levels that far exceeded the EPA-stipulated maximum because the water hadn’t been treated with anti-corrosion additives to counter contamination. (There is, in fact, no “safe” level for lead, a toxic metal, but the EPA requires remedial action if 10% of water samples show concentrations exceeding 15 ppb, or parts per billion.) Flint’s water also contained trihalomethane, a carcinogen, as well as dangerous E. coli and legionella bacteria. A scandal ensued.

Flint, as it turned out, wasn’t alone. The NRDC reported this year that “dozens of cities have been found to have dangerous levels of elevated lead” in their water. Another of its studies concluded that the drinking water of 186 million people (56% of Americans) had more than one part per billion of lead, the maximum recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that 61 million Americans used bottled water from sources that exceeded the Food and Drug Administration’s five ppb maximum, while lead levels in the water of seven million others exceeded the 15-ppb EPA threshold for mandatory corrective measures.

In 1986, Congress banned the future use of pipes that weren’t “lead free,” but didn’t require the replacement of existing ones. Even today, as many as 12 million lead pipes still serve households in this country and scientists generally regard the EPA’s lead limit as far too lax and its testing requirements and reporting standards as too permissive. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that local governments and utility companies have regularly opposed tougher regulations for lead-pipe replacement.

Eliminating lead water pipes entirely in this country would cost up to $50 billion. Though that’s a lot of money, it’s hardly unaffordable. In fact, the American Jobs Plan proposed $45 billion for that task, though the separate bipartisan infrastructure bill cut it to $15 billion — again illustrating that penny pinching applies to threats to Americans’ day-to-day well-being, but not to our militarized conception of national security.

Other Contaminants

Lead isn’t the sole contaminant in our drinking water.

• In farming communities in California’s Central Valley and in the San Joaquin Valley, increasing amounts of uranium — associated with kidney damage and a greater risk of cancer — have turned up in the local drinking water, including private wells, which aren’t regulated by the EPA, but are used by migrant workers. A 2015 Associated Press investigation found that a quarter of San Joaquin Valley households were then using drinking water from private wells containing “dangerous amounts of uranium.” Moreover, one in 10 of the Valley’s community water systems contained uranium levels that exceeded federal and state limits — and there’s no reason to believe that has changed in the last six years.

• The rise in fertilizer use — fivefold since the 1950s — to boost crop yields and its runoff has increased the nitrate levels in drinking water. High levels of nitrates, which have been linked to various forms of cancer, birth defects, and thyroid disease, have been found in 4,000 public water systems in 10 states supplying 45 million people, especially in the West and Midwest. In more than half of these places, the contamination seems only to be increasing. The EPA’s maximum concentration level for nitrates is 10 milligrams per liter, but studies reveal that the risk of birth defects and cancer increase even when people consume water containing half that amount.

• Arsenic, a known carcinogen, is another hazard. A 2020 Columbia University study found that, though the average concentration of arsenic in the water supply, nationwide, fell by 10% between 2006 and 2011, concentrations exceeding the EPA’s maximum of 0.01 milligrams per liter were far more likely in smaller communities that use groundwater and are disproportionately Hispanic. A U.S. Geological Survey report, which focused on wells providing drinking water, noted that there were “dangerously high levels of arsenic, potentially exposing 2.1 million people” to health risks in more than half of all states.

• Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in numerous products, including non-stick cookware, pizza boxes, firefighting foam, and waterproof apparel. However, they remain unregulated by the EPA despite being associated with a range of health risks. Worse yet, these “forever chemicals” take thousands of years to break down. Scientists estimate that the tap water of 200 million Americans contains PFAS concentrations that put them at risk.

The Bad News for 2021

Since the early nineteenth century, enormous progress has been made toward providing Americans with abundant, clean water. And water-borne diseases like cholera, which still kills close to 100,000 people worldwide every year, and typhoid, which claims as many as 161,000, have essentially been eliminated in this country (though there are still 16 million annual cases of acute gastroenteritis traceable to contaminated water). So, yes, water in the U.S. is generally fit to drink, but given this country’s economic and technological resources, it’s scandalous that the problems that remain haven’t at least been substantially mitigated.

To understand such a failure, just consider our politics, which, in the wake of recent elections, only seem to be growing worse by the day.

Since the 1980s, the public sphere has been dominated by a narrative that portrays just about anything the government does, other than profligate spending on the U.S. military, as financially reckless, intrusive, and counterproductive. Instead of creating a compelling message to persuade Americans that many valued public benefits, ranging from land grant colleges, the Internet, Social Security, and Medicare to the national highway system and medical research breakthroughs, owe much to government policies, too many Democrats continue to run scared, fearful of being labeled “big-government-tax-and-spend liberals.”

Add to this the outsized political influence that big money exercises through copious campaign contributions — all but limitless thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions — and pricey lobbyists. (Yes, unions and public interest groups lobby, too, but for each dollar they spend, corporations spend $34.)

Companies that, for instance, produce perchlorate, a chemical found in U.S. water supplies that’s used in rocket fuel and munitions and is harmful to iodine-deficient pregnant women and fetuses, have paid lobbyists to fight stricter regulations for years. Not coincidentally, the EPA, which has been monitoring perchlorate since 2001, has yet to set mandatory limits on it for drinking water, though it continues to consider a “roadmap” for doing so. Similarly, the seven largest producers of PFAS spent $61 million in 2019 and 2020 on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. In 2018, there were only two firms lobbying against tougher PFAS regulations; a year later that number had increased to 14.

The EPA sets maximum drinking water levels for 90 substances, but hasn’t (except in a few instances where Congress mandated that it do so) added more since 1996 even though its “Drinking Water Contaminant Candidate List” now contains nearly 100 additional substances. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Companies that oppose tougher regulations have political access and clout. Political appointees to important EPA posts often hail from those very industries or the lobbying groups they bankroll. Scientists paid by industries have weighed in, lending an aura of legitimacy to special-interest pleading.

Water policy is rife with scientific complexity, but the legislation and regulations that shape it are hashed out in the political arena. There, the deck is increasingly stacked — and not in favor of the average consumer. If the Republicans take back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, my small suggestion: have a nice cool glass of ice water and relax. What could possibly go wrong?

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Via Tomdispatch.com

Not surprisingly, the entire spectacle has been tiresome and unproductive. Better to devote time and energy to distilling the Afghan war’s larger lessons.

Here are four worth considering.

Lesson One: When You Make Policy, Give Serious Thought to Possible Unintended Consequences

The architects of American policy toward Afghanistan since the late 1970s bear responsibility for the disasters that occurred there because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look beyond their noses. As a result, their policies backfired with drastic consequences. Some historical scene-setting is required to understand just why and how.

Let’s start in another country and another time. Consider the December 1979 decision of the leadership of the Soviet Union to send in the Red Army to save the ruling Marxist and pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Having seized control of that country the previous year, the PDPA was soon pleading for help. By centralizing its power in the Afghan capital, Kabul (never a good way to govern that land), and seeking to modernize society at breakneck speed — through, among other things, promoting the education and advancement of women — it had provoked an Islamic insurgency that spread rapidly. Once Soviet troops joined the fray, the United States, assisted by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and even China, would start funding, arming, and training the mujahedeen, a collection of Islamist groups committed to waging jihad there.

The decision to arm them set the stage for much of what happened in Afghanistan ever since, especially because Washington gave Pakistan carte blanche to decide which of the jihadist groups would be armed, leaving that country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to call the shots. The ISI favored the most radical mujahedeen groups, calculating that an Islamist-ruled Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” by ending India’s influence there.

India did indeed have close ties with the PDPA, as well as the previous government of Mohammed Daoud, who had overthrown King Zahir Shah, his cousin, in 1973. Pakistan’s Islamist parties, especially the Jama’at-i-Islami, which had been proselytizing among the millions of Afghan refugees then in Pakistan, along with the most fundamentalist of the exiled Afghan Islamist groups, also helped recruit fighters for the war against the Soviet troops.

From 1980 until 1989, when the defeated Red Army finally departed from Afghanistan, Washington’s foreign policy crew focused in a single-minded fashion on expelling them by arming those anti-Soviet insurgents. One rationale for this was a ludicrous theory that the Soviet move into Afghanistan was an initial step toward Moscow’s ultimate goal: conquering the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The spinners of this apocalyptic fantasy, notably President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, seemed not to have even bothered to peruse a map of the terrain between Afghanistan and the Gulf. It would have shown that among the obstacles awaiting Russian forces headed there was the 900-mile-long, 14,000-foot-high Zagros mountain range.

Enmeshed in a Cold War-driven frenzy and eager to stick it to the Soviets, Brzezinski and others of like mind gave no thought to a critical question: What would happen if the Soviets were finally expelled and the mujahedeen gained control of Afghanistan? That lapse in judgment and lack of foresight was just the beginning of what proved to be a chain of mistakes.

Though the PDPA government outlasted the Red Army’s retreat, the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 proved a death sentence for its Afghan allies. Instead of forming a unity government, however, the mujahedeen promptly turned on one another. There ensued a vicious civil war, pitting Pashtun mujahedeen groups against their Tajik and Uzbek counterparts, with Kabul as the prize. The fighting destroyed large parts of that city’s western and southern neighborhoods, killing as many as 25,000 civilians, and forcing 500,000 of them, nearly a third of the population, to flee. So wearied were Afghans by the chaos and bloodletting that many were relieved when the Taliban, themselves former participants in the anti-Soviet jihad, emerged in 1994, established themselves in Kabul in 1996, and pledged to reestablish order.

Some of the Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders who would later make the United States’ most-wanted list had, in fact, been bankrolled by the CIA to fight the Red Army, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the now-infamous Haqqani Network, and the notoriously cruel Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami, arguably the most extreme of the mujahedeen groups, who is now negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps angling for a spot in its new government.

Osama Bin Laden’s links with Afghanistan can also be traced to the anti-Soviet war. He achieved his fame thanks to his role in that American-backed jihad and, along with other Arabs involved in it, founded al-Qaeda in 1988. Later, he decamped to Sudan, but after American officials demanded his expulsion, moved, in 1996, back to Afghanistan, a natural haven given his renown there.

Though the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, never had a transnational Islamist agenda, they couldn’t deny him succor — and not just because of his cachet. A main tenet of Pashtunwali, the Pashtun social code they lived by, was the duty to provide refuge (nanawati) to those seeking it. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, became increasingly perturbed by Bin Laden’s incendiary messages proclaiming it “an individual duty for every Muslim” to kill Americans, including civilians, and personally implored him to stop, but to no avail. The Taliban were stuck with him.

Now, fast forward a couple of decades. American leaders certainly didn’t create the Islamic State-Khorasan Province — aka IS-K, an affiliate of the main Islamic State — whose suicide bombers killed 170 people at Kabul airport on August 26th, 13 of them American troops. Yet IS-K and its parent body emerged partly from the ideological evolution of various extremists, including many Taliban commanders, who had fought the Soviets. Later, inspired, especially after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, to continue the jihad, they yearned for something bolder and more ambitious than the Taliban’s version, which was confined to Afghanistan.

It should hardly have required clairvoyance in the 1980s to grasp that funding an anti-Soviet Islamist insurgency might have dangerous long-term consequences. After all, the mujahedeen were hardly secretive about the sort of political system and society they envisaged for their country.

Lesson Two: Beware the Overwhelming Pride Produced by the Possession of Unrivaled Global Power

The idea that the U.S. could topple the Taliban and create a new state and society in Afghanistan was outlandish considering that country’s history. But after the Soviet Union started to wobble and eventually collapsed and the Cold War was won, Washington was giddy with optimism. Recall the paeans in those years to “the unipolar moment” and “the end of history.” We were Number One, which meant that the possibilities, including remaking entire countries, were limitless.

The response to the 9/11 attacks then wasn’t simply a matter of shock and fear. Only one person in Washington urged reflection and humility in that moment. On September 14, 2001, as Congress prepared to authorize a war against al-Qaeda and its allies (the Taliban), Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) gave a prescient speech. “I know,” she said, “this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However… let’s step back for a moment… and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.”

In the heat of that moment, in a country that had become a military power beyond compare, no one cared to consider alternative responses to the al-Qaeda attacks. Lee’s would be the lone no vote against that Authorization to Use Military Force. Afterward, she would receive hate mail, even death threats.

So confident was Washington that it rejected the Taliban’s offer to discuss surrendering Bin Laden to a third country if the U.S. stopped the bombing and provided proof of his responsibility for 9/11. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld also refused to consider the Taliban’s leadership attempts to negotiate a surrender and amnesty. The Bush administration treated the Taliban and al-Qaeda as identical and excluded the former from the December 2001 Bonn talks it had convened to form a new Afghan government. As it happened, the Taliban, never having received the memo from various eminences who pronounced it dead, soon regrouped and revved up its insurgency.

The United States then faced two choices, neither of them good. Its top officials could have decided that the government they had created in Kabul wouldn’t survive and simply withdrawn their forces. Or they could have stuck with nation-building and periodically “surged” troops into the country in hopes that a viable government and army would eventually emerge. They chose the latter. No president or senior military commander wanted to be blamed for “losing” Afghanistan or the “war on terror,” so the baton was passed from one commander to the next and one administration to another, each claiming to have made significant progress. The result: a 20-year, $2.3-trillion fiasco that ended chaotically at Kabul airport.

Lesson Three: Don’t Assume That Opponents Whose Values Don’t Fit Yours Won’t Be Supported Locally

Reporting on the Taliban’s retrograde beliefs and pitiless practices helped foster the belief that such a group, itself supposedly a Pakistani creation, could be routed because Afghans reviled it. Moreover, the bulk of the dealings American officials and senior military leaders had were with educated, urbane Afghan men and women, and that strengthened their view that the Taliban lacked legitimacy while the U.S.-backed government had growing public confidence.

Had the Taliban truly been a foreign transplant, however, they could never have kept fighting, dying, and recruiting new members for nearly two decades in opposition to a government and army backed by the world’s sole superpower. The Taliban certainly inspired fear and committed numerous acts of brutality and horror, but poor rural Pashtuns, their social base, didn’t view them as outsiders with strange beliefs and customs, but as part of the local social fabric.

Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s first supreme leader, was born in Kandahar Province and raised in Uruzgun Province. His father, Moulavi Ghulam Nabi, had been respected locally for his learning. Omar became the leader of the Hotaki tribe, part of one of the two main Pashtun tribal confederacies, the Ghilzai, which was a Taliban mainstay. He joined the war against the Soviet occupation in 1979, returning to Kandahar once it ended, where he ran a madrassa, or religious school. After the Taliban took power in 1996, though its leader, he remained in Kandahar, seldom visiting the capital.

The Kabul government and its American patrons may have inadvertently helped the Taliban’s cause. The more that ordinary Afghans experienced the raging corruption of the American-created system and the viciousness of the paramilitary forces, militias, and warlords the U.S. military relied on, the more successful the insurgents were at portraying themselves as the country’s true nationalists resisting foreign occupiers and their collaborators. Not for nothing did the Taliban liken Afghanistan’s U.S.-supported presidents to Shah Shuja, an exiled Afghan monarch the invading British placed on the throne, triggering an armed uprising that lasted from 1839 to 1842 and ended with British troops suffering a catastrophic defeat.

But who needed history? Certainly not the greatest power ever.

Lesson Four: Beware the Generals, Contractors, Consultants, and Advisers Who Eternally Issue Cheery Reports From War Zones

The managers of wars and economic projects acquire a vested interest in touting their “successes” (even when they know quite well that they’re actually failures). Generals worry about their professional reputations, nation-builders about losing lucrative government contracts.

Senior American commanders repeatedly assured the president and Congress that the Afghan army was becoming a thoroughly professional fighting force, even when they knew better. (If you doubt this, just read the scathing analysis of retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan.)

Reporter Craig Whitlock’s Afghanistan Papers — based on a trove of once-private documents as well as extensive interviews with numerous American officials — contains endless example of such happy talk. After serving 19 months leading U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen declared that the Afghan army could hold its own, adding that “this is what winning looks like.” General John Campbell, who held the same position during the last quarter of 2015, praised those troops as a “capable” and “modern, professional force.” American generals constantly talked about corners being turned.

Torrents of data were cited to tout the social and economic progress produced by American aid. It mattered not at all that reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction questioned the readiness and capabilities of the Afghan army, while uncovering information about schools and hospitals funded but never built, or built but never used, or “unsafe,” “literally crumbling,” or saddled with unsustainable operating costs. Staggering sums of American aid were also lost to systemic corruption. U.S.-funded fuel supplies were typically stolen on a “massive scale” and sold on the black market.

Afghan commanders padded payrolls with thousands of “ghost soldiers,” pocketing the cash as they often did the salaries of unpaid actual soldiers. The economic aid that American commander General David Petraeus wanted ramped up because he considered it essential to victory fueled bribe-taking by officials managing basic services. That, in turn, only added to the mistrust of the U.S.-backed government by ordinary citizens.

Have policymakers learned any lessons from the Afghan War? President Biden did declare an end to this country’s “forever wars” and its nation-building (though not to its anti-terror strategy driven by drone attacks and commando raids). Real change, however, won’t happen until the vast national security establishment and military-industrial complex nourished by the post-9/11 commitment to the war on terror, regime change, and nation building reaches a similar conclusion. And only a wild optimist could believe that likely.

Here, then, is the simplest lesson of all: no matter how powerful your country may be, your wishes are not necessarily the world’s desires and you probably understand a lot less than you think.

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNBC: “The Fall Of Afghanistan: How America’s $2 trillion, Two-Decade War Ended In Chaos”

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the date Joe Biden has chosen for the same — as, in essence, the very moment when its teenage years will be over.

In all that time, Washington has been fighting what, in reality, should have been considered a fantasy war, a mission impossible in that country, however grim and bloody, based on fantasy expectations and fantasy calculations, few of which seem to have been stanched in Washington even so many years later. Not surprisingly, Biden’s decision evoked the predictable reactions in that city. The military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

The latter began the day before the president even went public when, in a major opinion piece, the Washington Post’s editorial board distilled the predictable platitudes to come: such a full-scale military exit, they claimed, would deprive Washington of all diplomatic influence and convince the Taliban that it could jettison its talks with President Ashraf Ghani’s demoralized U.S.-backed government and fight its way to power. A Taliban triumph would, in turn, eviscerate democracy and civil society, leaving rights gained by women and minorities in these years in the dust, and so destroy everything the U.S. had fought for since October 2001.

By this September, of course, 775,000-plus Americans soldiers will have served in Afghanistan (a few of them the children of those who had served early in the war). More than a fifth of them would endure at least three tours of duty there! Suffice it to say that most of the armchair generals who tend to adorn establishment think tanks haven’t faced such hardships.

In 2010 and 2011, the Obama surge would deploy as many as 100,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon states that, as of this month, 2,312 American soldiers have died there (80% killed in action) and 20,666 have been injured. Then there’s the toll taken on vets of that never-ending war thanks to PTSD, suicide, and substance abuse. Military families apart, however, much of the American public has been remarkably untouched by the war, since there’s no longer a draft and Uncle Sam borrowed money, rather than raising taxes, to foot the $2.26 trillion bill. As a result, the forever war dragged on, consuming blood and treasure without any Vietnam War-style protests.

Not surprisingly, most Americans know even less about the numbers of Afghan civilians killed and wounded in these years. Since 2002, at least 47,000 non-combatants have been killed and another 43,000 injured, whether by airstrikes, artillery fire, shootings, improvised explosive devices, or suicide and car bombings. A 2020 U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan notes that 2019 was the sixth straight year in which 10,000 civilians were killed or wounded. And this carnage has occurred in one of the world’s poorest countries, which ranks 187th in per-capita income, where the death or incapacitation of an adult male (normally the primary breadwinner in a rural Afghan home) can tip already-poor families into destitution.

So how, then, can the calls to persevere make sense? Seek and you won’t find a persuasive answer. Consider the most notable recent attempt to provide one, the Afghanistan Study Group report, written by an ensemble of ex-officials, retired generals, and think-tank luminaries, not a few of them tied to big weapons-producing companies. Released with significant fanfare in February, it offered no substantive proposals for attaining goals that have been sought for 19 years, including a stable democracy with fair elections, a free press, an unfettered civil society, and equal rights for all Afghans — all premised on a political settlement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

Still Standing After All These Years

Now, consider Afghanistan’s bedrock reality: the Taliban, which has battled the world’s most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas. The U.S., its NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces have indeed killed some 50,000 Taliban fighters over the years, including, in 2016, its foremost leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor. In 2019-2020 alone, several senior commanders, also members of the Taliban’s shadow government, were killed, including the “governors” of Badakshan, Farah, Logar, Samangan, and Wardak provinces. Yet the Taliban, whose roots lie among the Pashtun, the country’s historically dominant ethnic group, have managed to replenish their ranks, procure new weapons and ammunition, and raise money, above all through taxes on opium poppy farming.

It helps that the Taliban continues to get covert support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence service, which played a pivotal role in creating the movement in the early 1990s after it was clear that the leaders of the Pakistan-backed Pashtun mujahedeen (literally, those who wage jihad) proved unable to shoot their way into power because minority nationalities (mainly Uzbeks and Tajiks) resisted ferociously. Yet the Taliban has indigenous roots, too, and its success can’t be attributed solely to intimidation and violence. Its political agenda and puritanical version of Islam appeal to many Afghans. Absent that, it would have perished long ago.

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Instead, according to the Long War Journal, the Taliban now controls 75 of Afghanistan’s 400 districts; the government rules 133 others, with the remaining 187 up for grabs. Although the insurgency isn’t on the homestretch to victory, it’s never been in a stronger military position since the 2001 American invasion. Nor has the morale of its fighters dissipated, though many are doubtless weary of war. According to a May U.N. report, “the Taliban remain confident they can take power by force,” even though their fighters have long been vastly outmatched in numbers, mobility, supplies, transportation, and the caliber of their armaments. Nor do they have the jets, helicopters, and bombers their adversaries, especially the United States do, and use with devastating effect. In 2019, 7,423 bombs and other kinds of ordnance were dropped on Afghanistan, eight times as many as in 2015.

Tallying Costs

As 2019 ended, a group of former senior U.S. officials claimed that the Afghan campaign’s costs have been overblown. American troops killed there the previous year, they pointed out, amounted to only a fifth of those who died during “non-combat training exercises” and that “U.S. direct military expenditures in Afghanistan are approximately three percent of annual U.S. military spending” and were decreasing. It evidently escaped them that even a few fatalities that occur because a country’s leaders pursue outlandish objectives like reshaping an entire society in a distant land should matter.

As for the monetary costs, it depends on what you count. Those “direct military expenditures” aren’t the only ones incurred year after year from the Afghan War. Brown University’s Costs of War Project, for instance, also includes expenses from the Pentagon’s “base budget” (the workaday costs of maintaining the armed forces); funds allotted for “Overseas Contingency Operations,” the post-9/11 counter-terrorism wars; interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war; the long-term pensions and benefits of its veterans; and economic aid provided to Afghanistan by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Do the math that way and the price tag turns out to be so much larger.

But even if you were to accept that 3% figure, that would still total $22 billion from the $738 billion fiscal year 2020 Pentagon budget, hardly chump change — especially given the resources needed to address festering problems on the home front, including a pandemic, child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and an opioid epidemic.

Nation-Building: Form vs. Substance

Now, consider some examples of the “progress” highlighted by the proponents of pressing on. These would include democratic elections and institutions, less corruption, and inroads against the narcotics trade.

First, the election system, an effective one being, of course, a prerequisite for democracy. Of course, given the way Donald Trump and crew dealt with election 2020 here in the U.S., Americans should think twice before blithely casting stones at the Afghan electoral system. In addition, organizing elections in a war-ravaged country is a dangerous task when an insurgency is working overtime to violently disrupt them.

Still, each of Afghanistan’s four presidential elections (2004, 2009, 2014, 2019) produced widespread, systematic fraud verified by investigative reporters and noted in U.S. government reports. After the 2014 presidential poll, for instance, candidate Abdullah Abdullah wouldn’t concede and threatened to form a parallel government, insisting that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, had won fraudulently. To avert bloodshed, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a power-sharing deal that made Abdullah the “chief executive” — a position unmentioned in the Afghan constitution. (Incidentally, elections to the national legislature have also been plagued by irregularities.) Although USAID has worked feverishly to improve election procedures and turnout, spending $200 million on the 2014 presidential election alone, voting fraud remained pervasive in 2019.

As for key political institutions, which also bear American fingerprints, the respected Afghanistan Analyst Network only recently examined the state of the supreme court, the senate, provincial and district assemblies, and the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC). It concluded that they “lacked even the minimum independence needed to exercise their constitutional mandate to provide accountability” and aggravated the “stagnation of the overall political system.”

The senate lacked the third of its membership elected by district assemblies — the remaining senators are appointed by the president or elected by provincial assemblies — for a simple reason. Though constitutionally mandated, district assembly elections have never been held. As for the ICOIC, it had only four out of its seven legally required commissioners, insufficient for a quorum.

When it comes to the narcotics trade, Afghanistan now accounts for 90% of the world’s illicit opium, essential for the making of heroin. The hectares of land devoted to opium-poppy planting have increased dramatically from 8,000 in 2001 to 263,000 by 2018. (A slump in world demand led to a rare drop in 2019.) Little wonder, since poppies provide destitute Afghan farmers with income to cover their basic needs. A U.N. study estimates that poppy sales, at $2 billion in 2019, exceeded the country’s legal exports, while the opium economy accounted for 7% to 11% of the gross domestic product.

Although the U.S. has spent at least $9 billion attempting to stamp out Afghanistan’s narcotics trade, a 2021 report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded that the investment had next to no effect and that Afghan dominance of the global opium business remained unrivalled. The report didn’t, however, mention the emergence of a new, more insidious problem. In recent years, that country has become a major producer of illegal synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, both cheaper and more profitable than opium cultivation. It now houses, according to a European Union study, an estimated 500 meth labs that manufacture 65.5 tons of the stuff daily.

As for the campaign against corruption, a supposed pillar of U.S. nation-building, forget it. From shakedowns by officials and warlords to palatial homes built with ill-gotten gains by the well-connected, corruption permeates the American-installed system in Afghanistan.

Though U.S. officials have regularly fumed about the corruption of senior Afghan officials, including the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, the CIA funneled “tens of millions” of dollars to him for years (as he himself confirmed). Investigative reporting by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock revealed that many notorious warlords and senior officials were also blessed by the Agency’s beneficence. They included Uzbek strongman and one-time First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of murder, abduction, and rape, and Mohammed Zia Salehi, the head of administration at the National Security Council under President Karzai.

In 2015, a U.S. government investigation revealed that $300 million earmarked to pay the Afghan police never actually reached them and was instead “paid” to “ghost” (non-existent) officers or simply stolen by police officials. A 2012 study traced 3,000 Pentagon contracts totaling $106 billion and concluded that 40% of that sum had ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, government officials, and even insurgents.

According to SIGAR’s first 2021 quarterly report to Congress, one U.S. contractor pled guilty to stealing $775,000 in State Department funds. Two others, subcontractors to weapons giant Lockheed Martin, submitted nearly $1.8 million in fraudulent invoices, while hiring local employees who lacked contractually required qualifications. (They were asked to procure counterfeit college diplomas from an Internet degree mill.)

And lest you think that this deeply embedded culture of corruption in Afghanistan is a “Third World” phenomenon, consider an American official’s recollection that “the biggest source of corruption” in that country “was the United States.”

Hubris and Nemesis Strike — Yet Again

While writing this piece, a memory came back to me. In 1988, I was part of a group that visited Afghanistan just as Soviet troops were starting to withdraw from that country. After a disastrous 10-year war, those demoralized young soldiers were headed for a homeland that itself would soon implode. The Red Army had been sent to Afghanistan in December 1979 by a geriatric Politburo leadership confident that it would save an embattled Afghan socialist regime, which had seized power in April 1978 and soon sparked a countrywide Islamist insurgency backed by the CIA and Saudi dollars that spawned a small group that called itself al-Qaeda, headed by a rich young Saudi.

Once the guerillas were crushed, so Soviet leaders then imagined, the building of a modern socialist society would proceed amid stability and a shiny new Soviet-allied Afghanistan would emerge. As for those ragtag bands of primitive Islamic warriors, what chance did they stand against well-trained Russian soldiers bearing the latest in modern firepower?

Moscow may even have believed that the Kabul government would hold its own after the Soviet military left what its new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” The Afghan president of that moment certainly did. When our group met him, Mohammed Najibullah Ahmadzai, a burly, fearsome fellow who had previously headed the KHAD, the country’s brutal intelligence agency, confidently assured us that his government had strong support and plenty of staying power. Barely four years later, he would be castrated, dragged behind a vehicle, and strung up in public.

The Politburo’s experiment in social re-engineering in a foreign country — no one said “nation-building” back then — led to more than 13,000 dead Soviet soldiers and perhaps as many as one million dead Afghans. No two wars are alike, of course, but the same vainglory that possessed those Soviet leaders marked the American campaign in Afghanistan in its early years. The white-hot anger that followed the 9/11 attacks and the public’s desire for vengeance led the George W. Bush administration to topple the Taliban government. He and his successors in the White House, seized by the overweening pride theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had long ago warned his fellow Americans about, also believed that they would build a democratic and modern Afghanistan.

As it happened, they simply started another, even longer cycle of war in that unfortunate country, one guaranteed to rage on and consume yet more lives after American soldiers depart this September — assuming Biden’s decision isn’t thwarted.

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

Between February and May 2020, the number of unemployed workers soared more than threefold — from 6.2 million to 20.5 million. The jobless rate spiked in a similar fashion from 3.8% to 13.0%. In late March, weekly unemployment claims reached 6.9 million, obliterating the previous record of 695,000, set in October 1982. Within three months, the pandemic-produced slump proved far worse than the three-year Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Things have since improved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in December that unemployment had fallen to 6.7%. Yet, that same month, weekly unemployment filings still reached a staggering 853,000 and though they fell to just under 800,000 last month, even that far surpassed the 1982 number.

And keep in mind that grim statistics like these can actually obscure, rather than illuminate, the depths of our current misery. After all, they exclude the 6.2 million Americans whose work hours had been slashed in December or the 7.3 million who had simply stopped looking for jobs because they were demoralized, feared being infected by the virus, had schoolchildren at home, or some of the above and more. The BLS’s rationale for not counting them is that they are no longer part of what it terms the “active labor force.” If they had been included, that jobless rate would have spiraled to nearly 24% in April and 11.6% in December.

Degrees of Pain

To see just how unevenly the economic pain has been distributed in America, however, you have to dig far deeper. A recent analysis by the St. Louis Federal Reserve did just that by dividing workers into five separate quintiles based on their range of incomes and the occupations typically associated with each.

The first and lowest-paid group, including janitors, cooks, and housecleaners, made less than $35,000 annually; the second (construction workers, security guards, and clerks, among others) earned $35,000-$48,000; the third (including primary- and middle-school teachers, as well as retail and postal workers), $48,000-$60,000; the fourth (including nurses, paralegals, and computer technicians), $60,000-$83,000; while employees in the highest-paid quintile like doctors, lawyers, and financial managers earned a minimum of $84,000.

More than 33% of those in the lowest paid group lost their jobs during the pandemic, and a similar proportion were forced to work fewer hours. By contrast, in the top quintile 5.6% were out of work and 5.4% had their hours cut. For the next highest quintile, the corresponding figures were 11.4% and 11.7%.

Buy the Book

Workers in the bottom 20% of national income distribution have been especially vulnerable for another reason. Their median liquid savings (readily available cash) averages less than $600 compared to $31,300 for those in the top 20%.

Twelve percent of working Americans can’t even handle a $400 emergency; 27% say they could, but only if they borrowed, used credit cards, or sold their personal possessions.

Under the circumstances, it should scarcely be surprising that the number of hungry people increased from 35 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2020, overwhelming food banks nationwide. Meanwhile, rent and mortgage arrears continued to pile up. By last December, 12 million people already owed nearly $6,000 each on average in past-due rent and utility bills and will be on the hook to their landlords for those sums once federal and state moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures eventually end.

Meanwhile, low-income workers struggled to arrange child-care as schools closed to curtail coronavirus infections. Women have borne the brunt of the resulting burden. By last summer, 13% of workers, unable to afford childcare, had already quit their jobs or reduced their hours, and most held low-wage jobs to begin with. Forty-six percent of women have jobs with a median hourly wage of $10.93 an hour, or less than $23,000 a year, far below the national average, now just shy of $36,000. In some low-wage professions, like servers in restaurants and bars, women are (or at least were) 70% of the workforce. A disproportionate number of them were also Black or Hispanic.

Before the pandemic, 57% of women in low-wage occupations worked full-time and 15% of them were single parents. Close to one-fifth had children under four years old and contend with full-time care that, on average, costs $9,598 yearly. If that weren’t enough, at least 25% of such low-wage jobs involved shifting or unpredictable schedules.

Much has been made recently of the wonders of “telecommuting” to work. But here again there’s a social divide. People with at least a college degree, who are more likely to possess the skills needed for higher-paying jobs, have been “six times more likely” to telecommute than other workers. Even before the pandemic, 47% of those with college degrees occasionally worked from home, versus 9% of those who had completed high school and a mere 3% of those who hadn’t.

Now, add to the economic inequities highlighted by the pandemic slump those rooted in race. Black and Hispanic low-income workers have been doubly disadvantaged. In 2016, the median household wealth of whites was already 10 times that of Blacks and more than eight times that of Hispanics, a gap that has generally been on the increase since the 1960s. And because those two groups have been overrepresented among low-wage occupations most affected by unemployment in the last year, their jobless rate during the pandemic has been much higher.

Unsurprisingly, an August Pew Research Center survey revealed that significantly more of them than whites were struggling to cover utility bills and rent or mortgage payments. After Covid-19 hammered the economy, a much higher proportion of them were also hungry and had to turn to food pantries, many for the first time.

In these months Americans who are less educated, hold low-income jobs, and are minorities — Asians excepted, since they, like whites, are underrepresented in low-wage professions — have been in an economic Covid-19 hell on Earth. But isn’t the American social safety net supposed to help the vulnerable in times of economic distress? As it happens, at least compared to those of other wealthy countries, it’s been remarkably ineffective.

Sizing Up the Social Safety Net

In a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015, Bernie Sanders observed that Scandinavian governments protect workers better thanks to their stronger social safety nets. Hillary Clinton promptly shot back, “We are not Denmark. We are the United States of America.” Indeed we are.

This country certainly does have a panoply of social welfare programs that the federal government spends vast sums on — around 56% of the 2019 budget, or nearly $2.5 trillion. So, you might think that we were ready and able to assist workers hurt most by the Covid-19 recession. Think again.

Social Security consumes about 23% of the federal budget. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program together claim another 25% (with Medicare taking the lion’s share).

Social Security and Medicare, however, generally only serve those 65 or older, not the jobless. With them excluded, two critical areas for most workers in such an economic crisis are healthcare and unemployment insurance.

About half of American workers rely on employer-provided health insurance. So, by last June, as Covid-19 caused joblessness to skyrocket, nearly eight million working adults and nearly seven million of their dependents lost their coverage once they became unemployed.

Medicaid, administered by states and funded in partnership with the federal government, does provide healthcare to certain low-income people and the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) also required states to use federal funds to cover all adults whose incomes are no more than 30% above the official poverty line. In 2012, though, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t be compelled to comply and, as of now, 12 states, eight of them southern, don’t. (Two more, Missouri and Oklahoma, have opted to expand Medicaid coverage per the ACA, but haven’t yet implemented the change.) People residing in non-ACA locales face draconian income requirements to qualify for Medicaid and, in almost all of them, childless individuals aren’t eligible, no matter how meager their earnings.

While Medicaid enrollment does increase with rising unemployment, not all jobless workers qualify, even in states that have expanded coverage. So unemployed workers may find that they earn too much to qualify for subsidies but not enough to purchase private insurance, which averages $456 a month for an individual and $1,152 for a family. Then there are steeply rising out-of-pocket expenses — deductibles, copayments, and extra charges for services provided by out-of-network doctors. Deductibles alone have, on average, gone up by 111% since 2010, far outpacing average wages, which increased by only 27%.

The American health care system remains a far cry from the variants of universal health care that exist in Australia, Canada, most European countries, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. The barrier to providing such care in the U.S. isn’t affordability, but the formidable political power of a juggernaut healthcare industry (including insurance and drug companies) that opposes it fiercely.

As for unemployment insurance, the American version — funded by state and federal payroll taxes and supplemented by federal money — remains, at best, a bare-bones arrangement. Coverage used to last a uniform 26 weeks, but since 2011, 13 states have reduced it, some more than once, while also paring down benefits (especially as claims soared during the Great Recession).

So if you lose your job, where you live matters a lot. Many states provide benefits for more than half a year, Massachusetts for up to 30 weeks. Michigan, South Carolina, and Missouri, however, set the limit at 20 weeks, Arkansas at 16, Alabama at 14. The weekly payout also varies. Although the pre-pandemic national average was about $387, the maximum can run from $213 to $823, with most states providing an average of between $300 and $500.

Except in unusual times like these, when the federal government provides emergency supplements, unemployment benefits replace only about a third to a half of lost wages. As for the millions of people who work in the gig economy or are self-employed, they are seldom entitled to any help at all.

The proportion of jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits has also been declining since the 1980s. It’s now hit 27% nationally and, in 17 states, 20% or less. There are multiple reasons for this, but arguably the biggest one is that the system has been woefully underfunded. Taxes on wages provide the revenue needed to cover unemployment benefits, but in 16 states, the maximum taxable annual amount is less than $10,000 a year. The federal equivalent has remained $7,000 — not adjusted for inflation — since 1983. That comes to $42 per worker.

The $2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the subsequent $900-billion Pandemic Relief Bill did provide federal funds to extend unemployment benefits well beyond the number of weeks set by individual states. They also covered gig workers and the self-employed. However, such exceptional and temporary rescue measures — including the one President Joe Biden has proposed, which includes a weekly supplement of $400 to unemployment benefits and seems likely to materialize soon — only highlight the inadequacies of the regular unemployment insurance system.

Other parts of the social safety net include housing subsidies, the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and childcare subsidies. After surveying them, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded that they amounted to an ill-funded labyrinthine system rife with arcane eligibility criteria that — the elderly or the disabled aside — actually aids fewer than half of low-income families and only a quarter of those without children.

This isn’t an unfair assessment. The Government Accountability Office reports that, of the 8.5 million children eligible for child-care subsidies, only 1.5 million (just under 18%) actually receive any. Even 40% of the kids from households below the poverty line were left out.

Similarly, fewer than a quarter of qualified low-income renters, those most vulnerable to eviction, receive any Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidies. Because median rent increased 13% between 2001 and 2017 while the median income of renters (adjusted for inflation) didn’t budge, 47% of them were already “rent burdened” in the pre-pandemic moment. In other words, rent ate up 30% or more of their annual income. Twenty-four percent were “severely burdened” (that is, half or more of their income). Little wonder that a typical family whose earnings are in the bottom 20% had only $500 left over after paying the monthly rent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even before Covid-19 hit.

SNAP does better on food, covering 84% of those eligible, but the average benefit in 2019, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, was $217, “about $4.17 a day, $1.39 per meal.” Mind you, in about one-third of recipient households, at least two people were working; in 75%, at least one. Not for nothing has the term “working poor” become part of our political vocabulary.

Is Change in the Air?

During crises like the present one, our moth-eaten safety net has to be patched up with stopgap legislation that invariably produces protracted partisan jousting. The latest episode is, of course, the battle over President Joe Biden’s plan to provide an additional $1.9 trillion in relief to a desperate country.

Can’t we do better? In principle, yes. After all, many countries have far stronger safety nets that were created without fostering indolence or stifling innovation and, in most instances, with a public debt substantially smaller relative to gross domestic product than ours. (So much for the perennial claims from the American political right that attempting anything similar here would have terrible consequences.)

We certainly ought to do better. The United States places second in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s overall poverty index, which includes all 27 European Union countries plus the United Kingdom and Canada, as well as in its child-poverty-rate ranking.

But doing better won’t be easy — or perhaps even possible. American views on the government’s appropriate economic role differ substantially from those of Canadians and Europeans. Moreover, corporate money and that of the truly wealthy already massively influence our politics, a phenomenon intensified by recent Supreme Court decisions. Proposals to fortify the safety net will, therefore, provoke formidable resistance from armies of special interests, lobbyists, and plutocrats with the means to influence politicians. So if you’re impatient for a better safety net, don’t hold your breath.

And yet many landmark changes that created greater equity in the United States (including the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women voting rights, the New Deal, the creation of Medicaid, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s) once seemed inconceivable. Perhaps this pandemic’s devastation will promote a debate on the failures of our ragged social safety net.

Here’s hoping.

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

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