To end civilian suffering in Ukraine and Gaza, the UK must quit its double standards and apply international humanitarian law equally

In March 2003, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found, and President Bush lied to the world and the US. This war cost the lives of 4,485 Americans and the lives of 500,000 Iraqis. Moreover, this act of aggression cost the US upwards of two trillion dollars and, to boot, we are still paying the price today. How so? This war left a vacuum in Iraq so that Saddam’s generals formed Daesh or I.S.I.S. a terrorist group that is still active today..

To make matters worse, President Bush had the audacity to say that “Russia’s attack on Ukraine constitutes the gravest security crisis on the European continent since WW II.” Juan Cole notes that George W. Bush laid the foundation in Ukraine by destroying US credibility on enemy intentions and capabilities.

Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, there existed ongoing talks among diplomats from NATO, including the US, and Russia. Putin regarded the dissolution of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” At a speech in 2021 Putin remarked that he was “extremely concerned about the deployment of elements of the US global defense system close to Russia.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Is the risk of direct conflict between Russia & NATO increasing? | Inside Story”

Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, did not have the wisdom to discuss with Putin the removal of anti-ballistic Tomahawk missiles from Romania, Poland and other NATO countries. Instead, Blinken, taking orders from Biden, discussed “confidence building measures” (CBMs) between Russia and NATO. This angered Putin beyond words.

Presently, we have the NATO allies in D.C., led by President Biden, who are like babes in the woods. There’s no way the Ukraine can overtake Russia. Consider this. First, for Russia’s core agenda NATO’s expansion is more important for Putin than the territorial conquest of Ukraine. Second, when Putin addressed the meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board in Moscow, Dec. 21, 2022, he said that “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity, and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved.”

Russia has developed the K-329 Belgorod nuclear-powered submarine able to carry six-Poseidon nuclear torpedoes. Its innovative design made it the largest submarine in the Russian Navy, circa 584 feet long and about 49 feet across.    The Belgorod submarine tested the mass-dimensional model of the Poseidon torpedo in January, 2023. The Poseidon is an intercontinental, nuclear-powered, nuclear armed autonomous torpedo 24 meters in length and a diameter of 1.6 meters. The Poseidon can travel at a speed of 185 kilometers that makes it unstoppable. It’s a strategic nuclear torpedo weapon that can target naval bases and coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. 

On July 10^th, 2024, the US and Germany announced they would begin “episodic deployments” of the long-range Multi Domain Task Force in Germany starting in 2026. Also, conventional long-range fire units will include SM-6 Tomahawk and developmental hypersonic weapons according to a joint statement of Germany and the US. The US also stated that F-16 fighter jets are headed to Ukraine while at the same time a dozen Ukrainian pilots are learning how to fly these planes in Arizona. NATO and the US are playing with fire and they are asking for a nuclear war with Russia. In my view, the only way NATO can avoid a nuclear war with Russia is to roll back NATO expansion entirely.

National impunity is not inevitable, at least if people and governments of the world are willing to take the necessary actions.

(The Conversation) – As wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, another location ravaged by conflict is taking steps to implement a historic peace agreement. From the mid-1960s through 2016, Colombia was torn by conflict between the government, leftist guerrilla movements and right-wing paramilitary groups. Now the government and rebels are working to carry out a sweeping accord that addresses many critical sectors, including environmental damages and restoration.

University of Notre Dame researchers Richard Marcantonio and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez study peace and conflict issues, including their effects on the environment. They currently are advising negotiations between the Colombian government and several rebel factions over wartime damage to soil, water and other natural resources. They explain that while Colombia’s transition from war to peace has been difficult, the accord offers a model for addressing the ravages of war in places such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Is it common for peace settlements to address environmental harm?

Few agreements include environmental provisions, and even fewer see them carried out, even though research shows that many drivers of conflict can be directly or indirectly related to the environment.

We work with a research program at the University of Notre Dame called the Peace Accords Matrix, which monitors the implementation of comprehensive peace accords in 34 countries worldwide. Only 10 of the accords have natural resource management provisions agreements, and these typically have not triggered major steps to protect the environment.

How is the Colombia accord different?

Colombia’s is seen as the most comprehensive peace accord that has been signed to date. It considers issues ranging from security to social justice and political participation, in great detail.

The accord acknowledges that a peaceful postwar society requires not only respect for human rights but also “protection of the environment, respect for nature and its renewable and nonrenewable resources and biodiversity.” More than 20% of the commitments in the agreement have an environmental connection.

They fall into four main categories:

– Adapting and responding to climate change

– Preserving natural resources and habitats

– Protecting environmental health through measures such as access to clean water

– Process issues, such as ensuring that communities can participate in decisions about rural programs and resource management

There also are gaps. For example, many protected areas have been deforested for ranching and coca production in the postaccord period. And there are no provisions addressing toxic pollution, an issue other agreements also neglect.

Often there are power vacuums during transitions between war and peace, when government agencies are working to reestablish their operations. Natural resources and environmental health need protection during these phases.

In Sierra Leone, for example, resource extraction by foreign companies drastically ramped up immediately after the Lome Peace Agreement eventually ended that nation’s civil war in 2002. Companies exploited a lack of governance and support in the rural areas and often mined metals illegally or hazardously without any regulatory oversight. Today these areas still struggle with mining impacts, including contaminated drinking water and fish, the primary protein source in the area.

European Commission: “Ukraine green recovery Conference”

What is the environmental toll of war in Ukraine?

The damage is vast: There’s air, water and soil contamination, deforestation and enormous quantities of waste, including ruined buildings, burned-out cars and thousands of tons of destroyed military equipment. Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded villages, destroyed crops and wrecked irrigation systems.

The cost estimates are staggering. A joint commission of the World Bank, the government of Ukraine and other institutions currently estimate direct damages at roughly US$152 billion.

In addition, cleaning up sites, rebuilding infrastructure and other repairs could cost more than $486 billion over the next decade, as of late 2023. That figure rises every day that the war continues.

There’s broad interest in a green and sustainable reconstruction that would include steps like using sustainable building materials and powering the electricity grid with renewable energy. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been adamant that Russia must pay for the damage it has caused. It’s still unclear how this would work, although some U.S. and European lawmakers support seizing frozen Russian assets held in Western banks to help cover the cost.

There is a legal basis for holding Russia accountable. In 2022, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a set of principles for protecting the environment during armed conflicts. Among other existing statutes, they draw on a protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that prohibits using “methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.”

There has been only modest discussion so far of how to integrate these principles into a formal peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. But a working group that included Ukrainian and European Union officials and former leaders from Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Brazil has recommended a framework for addressing environmental damage and holding perpetrators accountable.

What environmental impacts are known or asserted in Gaza?

Environmental damage in Gaza also is devastating. The U.N. estimated in early 2024 that over 100,000 cubic meters (26 million gallons) of untreated sewage and wastewater were flowing daily onto land or into the Mediterranean Sea.

Gaza’s drinking water system was insufficient before the war and has been further weakened by military strikes. On average, Gazans now have access to about 3 liters of water per person per day – less than 1 gallon.

Thousands of buildings have been destroyed, spreading hazardous materials such as asbestos. Every bomb that’s dropped disperses toxic materials that will persist in the soil unless it’s remediated. Simultaneous environmental and infrastructure impacts, such as water and power shortages, are contributing to larger crises, such as the collapse of Gaza’s health care system, that will have long-lasting human costs.

How can future peace accords address these impacts?

Integrating the environment into peace accords isn’t easy. Resources such as energy, clean soil and water are vital for life, which is precisely why military forces may seek to control or destroy them. This is happening in both Ukraine and Gaza.

Peace negotiators tend to focus on social, political and economic issues, rather than environmental reparations. But leaving environmental damage unresolved until after a peace accord is signed keeps people who have been displaced and marginalized by conflict in precarious positions.

It may even cause fighting to resume. According to the U.N. Environment Program, at least 40% of all wars within states in the past 60 years have had a link to natural resources. In those cases, fighting was twice as likely to resume within five years after conflict ended.

We see some lessons for future negotiations.

First, it’s important for accords to recognize environmental harm as one of war’s main consequences and to acknowledge that a healthy environment is essential for sustainable livelihoods and peace.

Second, connecting environmental provisions with other issues, such as rural reform and political participation, can create better, more sustainable and equal conditions for reestablishing democracy. The Colombia accords are an example.

Third, it is important to clearly define goals, such as what infrastructure and institutions need to be rebuilt, who is in charge of getting those tasks done, and the timetable for doing it. This can help ensure that environmental restoration doesn’t become a secondary goal.

Fourth, the international community has an important role to play in monitoring and verifying environmental restoration and providing financial and technical support. Foreign donors have already pledged $66 billion for rebuilding Ukraine and have said that they will require grantees to follow strict environmental standards in order to receive financing.

Reconstructing nations and simultaneously regenerating communities and ecosystems after wars is a daunting mission, but it’s also an opportunity to build something better. We see Ukraine and Gaza as potential test cases for addressing war’s toll on the environment and creating a more sustainable future.

Richard Marcantonio, Assistant Professor of Environment, Peace, and Global Affairs at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez, Professor of the Practice in International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The latest aid package both opposes and facilitates genocide. How crazy is that?

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The process of crafting congressional legislation is often likened to sausage-making. Best not to look behind the scenes at the mechanics of the process, which is a bloody mess.

But the analogy is not apt. Sure, sausage-making can be ugly. The end product, however, is presentable and usually quite tasty.

The legislation that emerges from the U.S. Congress, on the other hand, is often as ugly and unappetizing as the process that created it.

Consider the recent bill that bundled military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan along with a fourth provision covering more sanctions on Iran, the use of frozen Russian assets, and a potential ban on TikTok in the United States. The bill passed Congress by considerable margins. The vote was 79 to 18 in the Senate and—for the most controversial piece on Ukraine—311 to 112 in the House. The president then swiftly signed it into law.

But the margin of approval belies the months of political infighting that preceded the vote. First came the conflict over immigration provisions that the Dems originally included in the legislation to sweeten the pot for the Republicans only to discover that the Republicans were insisting on harsher measures. President Biden and the Democrats moved further to the right, yet it still wasn’t enough. In the end, the final legislation didn’t address immigration at all.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) delayed a vote in the House for months because of opposition from members further to his right who objected to providing additional funding to Ukraine. This determined minority threatened to remove Johnson over the issue, which ordinarily should not have discomfited the speaker, except that this same minority had ousted his predecessor. Moreover, Donald Trump had made his opposition to Ukrainian aid very clear, and Republicans, in this election year, have been tripping over themselves to show fealty to the Man. Even the one Ukrainian-born legislator, Victoria Spartz (R-IN), voted against the Ukraine bill in the House, largely because she is trying to get Trump’s endorsement in her primary race. Earlier, she’d called the Russian invasion a “genocide.”

Johnson managed to satisfy at least some of his critics by splitting the legislation into four distinct bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, kitchen sink). In this way, House members could, for instance, register their support for Israel and their opposition to more arms for Ukraine. Senators had no such luxury since they had to vote on a single bill, which prompted three progressives to oppose the legislation because it didn’t attach any conditions to the aid to Israel (while 15 Republican extremists joined their House compatriots in opposing the Ukrainian provisions).

Progressives were indeed in a quandary over the bill. Imagine a quite different measure that condemned aggressor countries for breaking international law (Russia, Israel) while aiding those forces pushing back against colonial interventions (Ukrainians, Palestinians). It would never have been brought to a floor vote. But who ever said that U.S. foreign policy was principled or coherent? U.S. politics is all about holding one’s nose, averting one’s eyes from the sausage-making, and voting for the lesser evil.

That said, what impact will the bill have? Will it save Ukraine from being overrun? And is there any chance that all the pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire protests taking place around the country will force greater coherence upon U.S. foreign policy?

Ukraine

The war has not really been going Ukraine’s way for some time. Even when Ukrainian forces were successfully holding the line against Russian occupiers last year, they were suffering a lot of casualties. As Ukraine’s military supplies began to wane, Russia began to push further westward, potentially threatening large population centers like Kharkiv in the northeast. Russia’s larger pool of recruits, combined with a five-to-one artillery advantage (more in certain spots along the line of fire), was creating great anxiety that a Russian counteroffensive in the late spring or early summer could overwhelm Ukrainian defenses altogether.

“Contradictions,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

Meanwhile, Ukraine couldn’t completely defend its population centers and critical infrastructure further to the west. When Russia fired a barrage of 82 missiles and drones at the Trypilska power plant near Kyiv on April 11, Ukraine could only intercept 18 missiles and 39 drones. It had run out of interceptors. The remaining Russian weapons destroyed the plant.

The U.S. military package provides $61 billion in assistance, but the vast majority of the funding (80 percent) does not go to Ukraine. Rather, it allows the U.S. military-industrial complex to replenish the pipeline of supplies heading to Kyiv and fund ongoing Pentagon operations like training Ukrainian soldiers. It will take some weeks before those weapons begin to reach their destination, though the Pentagon, waiting for this moment, is shipping some existing supplies from bases in Germany and Poland. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to press its advantage.

Critics of this assistance to Ukraine—a bizarre alliance of the far left and the far right—argue that such shipments only prolong the war, causing needless suffering to Ukrainians. Others see an imperial motive, that the United States is just using Ukrainian bodies like meat puppets to draw the Russians into a quagmire and hamstring an adversary. The more isolationist critics maintain that this war has nothing to do with the United States, which should just stay out of it.

While I am no fan of the Pentagon, the U.S. military-industrial complex, or the obscene amount of money spent globally on what is euphemistically termed “defense”—$2.4 trillion in 2023, a new record—I view these arguments about Ukraine as dangerously naïve.

First, it is Russia that is prolonging this war, by continuing to occupy Ukraine illegally, pushing for more territory, and committing war crimes from torturing prisoners of war to bombing civilian sites. The Kremlin continues to claim that Ukraine is not a legitimate country, that it has always been part of the “Russian world,” that the government in Kyiv is “Nazi.” It is inaccurate to say that Ukraine is simply fighting for this or that scrap of land. Rather, Ukrainians are fighting to prevent the elimination of their country and their collective identity—in other words, against genocide. They know what happens to those who assert their Ukrainian identity in areas occupied by Russian forces (death, deportation, imprisonment). The vast majority of Ukrainians oppose giving up their land for a peace deal with Russia—around 80 percent—and a majority are against peace negotiations with Russia more generally.

Many hawkish voices in the United State would indeed like to see a weaker Russia. But the Biden administration has been clear that it would prefer some kind of settlement to this conflict so that it can focus on other foreign policy priorities. Ukraine is no proxy. It continues to fight not because it is being controlled like a marionette, but because it is exercising its own agency. It fights despite an American ambivalence that is expressed in so many ways—a reluctance to share the most advanced weaponry, a failure to deliver aid in a timely manner, and a large share of the Republican Party unwilling to provide any assistance at all.

Finally, there’s the question of U.S. interests. I generally prefer to avoid discussions of narrow U.S. national interests, which often boil down to maintaining military dominance, upholding dollar supremacy, and securing access to raw materials. I prefer to look at where U.S. interests can or should overlap with global concerns such as strengthening international law, addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, and reducing global economic inequality.

Viewed from this latter perspective, defending Ukraine is squarely in U.S. national interest. Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory (2014), the invasion of the country (2022), the maintenance of a military occupation (ongoing): these violations of international law are of such great enormity that a failure to punish the aggressor—preferably in court but on the ground if need be—threatens to overturn the very notion of an international community. Russia is paying for this war by pumping out as much oil and gas as the market can bear: in this way, the war is paid for by pollution. And the invasion has put an enormous burden on the world’s poor by reducing the capacity of Ukraine to produce grain. On the basis of these three criteria, the war in Ukraine is very much in the U.S. interest.

Will the recently passed aid package turn the tide of the war? That’s impossible to say. But a better armed Ukraine will have a fighting chance. And future generations will not blame the United States for standing idly by as Russia attempts to commit an act of ethnic cleansing of epic proportions.

Israel

And yet, in the same bill, the Biden administration is not only ignoring another act of ethnic cleansing but is abetting it. The military assistance bill that the president signed includes $26 billion designed to “help ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against the very real threats it faces from Iran, as well as Iran’s proxy groups.”

This is an extraordinary misrepresentation of the military aid going to Israel. First of all, Iran was previously  urging restraint on its “proxy groups” after an exchange of incidents with the United States earlier in the year. And then Israel assassinated top Iranian military leaders in Syria in early April, which has set in motion another cycle of escalations.

Second, it’s not all about defense. Sure, there’s $5.2 billion for missile defense (Iron Dome, Iron Beam). But there’s also $4.4 billion for Israel to restock its military coffers and $3.5 billion for advanced weaponry—so that the Israeli government can continue to wage war in Gaza.

The Biden administration still believes that its military aid provides leverage over the Israeli government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to demonstrate the opposite. As soon as the aid package passed, he launched more air strikes on Palestinians in Gaza (again killing mostly women and children) and announced that plans were still on track to invade the southern city of Rafah (over U.S. objections).

Washington is now pushing Hamas to accept a 40-day ceasefire. The Palestinian organization has insisted on a permanent ceasefire, though it might be mollified by an Israeli promise of the “restoration of sustainable calm.” Also on the table, reportedly, is “a willingness for full return of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the IDF from the corridor that divides the enclave and prevents freedom of movement,” according to Axios.

The Biden administration, pushing this ceasefire proposal, is trying to prove that it’s listening to domestic critics—congressional opposition, voters in swing states, student protestors on campus—as well as the more numerous critics of U.S. policy throughout the world, especially in the Global South. The administration must also take into account the most recent report that the International Criminal Court is on the verge of issuing arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, for actions taken in Gaza.

But the aid package to Israel suggests a continuation of business as usual. None of that military aid was conditioned on the behavior of the Israeli military.

Unless and until a U.S. administration applies some real sticks in its relations with Israel, the gulf between evolving U.S. public opinion and stagnant U.S. policymaking will remain huge.

The Rest of the Sausage

The third element of the aid package provides $8 billion to U.S. allies in Asia to counter China, which includes some key military upgrades for countries like Taiwan.

Although China has indeed been more assertive in recent years, the Biden administration is doing little to repair relations with Beijing. As long as Washington and Beijing get along, Taiwan can prosper in the shadows of international non-recognition. So, this money might have been better spent on collaborative projects with China, which are a more sustainable hedge against war.

Finally, in the bill’s fourth basket, the Republicans assembled a hodgepodge of initiatives against China (to ban TikTok), Russia (to use frozen assets), and Iran (more sanctions). How long will it take the United States to figure out that punitive measures like these tend to push adversaries together? By all means, let’s isolate the one country that has invaded a neighboring democracy. But the United States should be much more strategic about how it can woo Iran and China to make Russia’s isolation more complete.

But that would require much smarter sausage-making. And so far, U.S. policymakers don’t seem up to the task.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The three major wars or conflicts that are ongoing today demonstrate the volatility of the intersection between the local and the global.

In the Hamas-Israeli conflict, we see how the maintenance of the Israeli settler-colonial state is intertwined with the preservation of the global hegemony of the United States.

In the war in Ukraine, a bloody war of attrition between two countries was provoked by Washington’s push to expand NATO to a country of the former Soviet Union.

In the South China Sea, we are witnessing how disputes over territory and natural resources have been elevated to a global conflict by the U.S. effort to maintain its global hegemony against China, to which it is losing the geoeconomic competition but over which it continues to enjoy absolute military superiority.

In short, the main cause of global instability today lies in the fusion of the local and the global, geopolitics and geoeconomics, empire and capitalism.

Balance of Power, Balance of Terror

What makes current conflicts especially volatile is that they are occurring amidst the absence of any effective multilateral coercive authority to impose a peaceful settlement. In Ukraine, it is the balance of military might that will determine the outcome of the war, and here Russia seems to be prevailing over the Ukraine-NATO-U.S. axis.

In the Middle East, there is no effective coercive power to oppose the Israeli-U.S. military behemoth—which makes it all the more remarkable that despite a genocidal campaign that has been going on for nearly four months now, Israel has not achieved its principal war aim of destroying Hamas.

In the South China Sea, what determines the course of events is the balance of power between China and the United States. There are no “rules of the game,” so that there is always a possibility  that American and Chinese ships playing “chicken”–or heading for each other, then swerving at the last minute–can accidentally collide, and this collision can escalate to a higher form of conflict such as a conventional war.

Without effective coercive constraints imposed by a multilateral organization on the hegemon and its allies, the latter can easily descend into genocide and mass murder. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Genocide, have been shown to be mere pieces of paper.

The Right of Self Defense

Given the absence of a multilateral referee that can impose its will, it is only the development of political, diplomatic, and military counterpower that can restrain the hegemon. This is the lesson that national liberation wars in Algeria and Vietnam taught the world. This is the lesson that the Palestinian resistance today teaches us.

This is why even as we condemn wars of empire waged by the hegemon, we must defend the right of people to resort to armed self-defense.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Overnight attacks hit central Gaza”

This does not mean that efforts at peacemaking by global civil society have no role to play. They do. I still remember how shortly before the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times came out with an article on February 17, 2003, in response to massive mobilizations against the planned invasion of Iraq, that said that there were only two superpowers left in the world, and they were the United States and global public opinion, and that then President George W. Bush ignored this outpouring of global resistance at his peril.

Global civil society did contribute to the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by eroding the legitimacy of those wars among the U.S. public, making them so unpopular that even Donald Trump denounced them–in retrospect that is–as did many personalities that had voted for war in the U.S. Congress.

The recent decision of the International Court of Justice that has ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza is likely to have a similar impact as global civil society’s resistance to Bush, Jr’s, invasion of Iraq. The ICJ decision may not have an immediate impact on the ongoing war, but it will erode the legitimacy of the project of settler colonialism and apartheid in the long run, deepening the isolation of Israel in the long run.

A Just Peace

We often see peace as an ideal state. But the peace of the graveyard is not peace. A peace bought at the price of fascist repression not only is not desirable but it will not last.

Oppressed peoples like the Palestinians will refuse peace at any price, peace that is obtained at the price of humiliation. As they have shown in the 76 years since the Nakba, their massive expulsion from their lands and homes, the Palestinians will not settle for anything less than peace with justice, one that enables them to recover their lands seized by Israelis, establish a sovereign state “from the river to the sea,” and allow them to hold their heads up in pride.

The rest of the world owes them its wholehearted support to realize such a just peace through all possible means, even as we work to oppose wars of empire waged by hegemons in other parts of the world.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Buy the Book

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

“On 24 February 2022, while travelling to Lebanon to visit his great-aunt Maria in Lebanon, Ibrahim al-Marashi’s thoughts were with his friend Maria in Ukraine on the first day of the Russian invasion.”

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi | –

( The New Arab ) – As my plane descends into Istanbul airport, from the window I scan the horizon towards the direction of Ukraine, now a warzone. It is 24 February 2022.

While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive.

I make a nidhr, a promise to Sayyida Khawla, the deceased daughter of our revered Imam Hussein that I will visit her shrine in the neighbouring Lebanese town of Baalbek, if Ukrainian Maria survives.

The Maria I am visiting is my grandmother’s older sister, whose family were refugees after World War I, leaving Mardin, in today’s Turkey, to Lebanon. While I was on the plane moving east, I knew Maria in Kyiv was a refugee in the making, and that she would eventually flee to the west.

This tale of two Marias is one of the greater Mediterranean, the sea in the “Middle of the Earth,” flowing into the Black and Red Seas and the terrain surrounding them.

“While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive”

These lands and waters which have witnessed waves of refugees, due to conflicts which compel and coerce. A history of displacement over distance, from antiquity’s Sea Peoples to Syrian refugees.

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, both Maria Marchenko and I are preparing for trips to or away from an airport.

At 5am Maria Marchenko is jolted from her sleep. A barrage of ballistic missiles bombarded Kyiv airport, close to where she lives. Airports around the capital city were targeted that day to prevent Ukrainian planes from taking off, while Moscow sought to secure them as staging grounds for the assault on the capital.

At the same time, it is 6am in Madrid. I am packing for my trip to Lebanon in a few hours to visit Maria Shakir, delivering her the pain reliever Panadol and US dollars, both in short supply there due to an economic crisis.

Istanbul, where I am making my transit, is relatively close to the war zone and I wonder if flights might be cancelled. That would devastate Lebanese Maria. She is 98 and hasn’t seen me in 13 years.

While I’m packing my bag the morning of my flight because I am a procrastinator, Maria hadn’t packed because she did not believe that war would erupt. She thought if she did pack her bag in advance for such a scenario, war would then inevitably occur.

I had prepared my Madrid apartment for Maria, her mother and father in case they needed to flee here. I had arranged fresh linens for them, turning my apartment into a haven to accommodate three potential refugees.

During the morning of the 24th both Maria and I pack warm clothing. There is a winter storm in Zahle, in the high mountains of Lebanon. Maria will be going to a bomb shelter, well below the ground in a freezing metro station.

We collect our documents, laptops, and chargers. Maria packs something I have no need to: photos of family and friends, to preserve their memories unsure if she would see them again.

I shut the teal window blinds on my balcony. On top of the entrance to the convent in front of my house, a dove representing the Holy Spirit flies above the representation of Mary. For her namesake in Ukraine, it is not a dove that flies above her head, but rather enemy aircraft.

 

 

Driving to the airport, I dial Maria in vain. The first leg of my journey is to Istanbul, a four-hour journey where I won’t be able to make calls. At this point, I am not sure if the telecommunication lines have been hit, or even if Maria is still alive.

As I am about to board the plane and turn off my phone, she picks up. When I ask about her, she holds back her tears. Her parents live in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region, 30 miles from the border and now the front lines. Nonetheless, she declares her wish for peace, with no malice or cynicism in her voice. I remind her that they have a home in Madrid.

I place my KN-94 mask snuggly on. And a surgical mask on top of that. I am so grateful the seat next to me is empty. I have yet to catch Covid and feared how I would fare with this virus in Lebanon, having heard stories about the abysmal conditions of health care as a result of the economic crisis. My grandfather survived a pandemic by moving to Lebanon in the late 1940s. I do not want to repeat history.

For the next four hours I will be dodging viruses. I fret that this plane will also have to dodge missiles as we approach Istanbul airport, close to the Black Sea, where warships are bombarding Ukraine with cruise missiles, according to the news.

Istanbul airport is unusually empty. I look at the screen for the gate to my connecting flight to Lebanon, noticing a list of cancelled flights that were destined for Ukraine and Russia.

I turn on my phone. No messages from Ukrainian Maria, but Lebanese Maria sends me pictures of the dishes she has prepared for my arrival via Whatsapp – hummus with olive oil and sesame seeds and falafel.

She is 98-years old yet knows how to send gifs and emojis. When I confirm I am boarding the plane, she sends a gif of a woman from the Sixties with a bra that fires sparks, like bullets. When I leave her a voice message that the flight to Lebanon is scheduled to leave on time, she sends me an animated image of Jesus Christ.

Five hours later, drenched and exhausted, I arrived at a first-floor apartment in Zahle. Maria is elated. I collapse on her sofa. She hugs me, and screams “tu’burni” or “you will bury me,” which is a term of endearment, but I dread the thought of her passing. She is so short that even sitting on the sofa our eyeline is equal.

While she prepares the food, I recline on the sofa, made out of a wooden frame, yet the cushions are made with thick grey blankets, stamped with the logo of “UNHCR,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while a stuffed teddy bear and cheetah rest behind me.

 

I am too embarrassed to ask whether her or a resourceful furniture maker had reappropriated them from the nearby camps housing Syrian refugees.

She brings out her folded table and I eat right there.

“My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis”

While I am in the most comfortable setting, my second home, Ukrainian Maria’s second home is underneath the earth, a cold, underground bomb shelter. While I have a sumptuous Lebanese feast, Maria in Kyiv occasionally comes up for air, to find soup during the ephemeral lull of security, until the sirens call her back.

I asked Maria in Zahle to turn on the TV so I can find news about Maria in Kyiv. My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis.

On top of the TV set, on the wooden bookshelf, there are three separate depictions of the Virgin Mary and a drawn image of Jesus holding his hand to his heart, while what seems like laser rays of red and blue are coming out of his chest.

During the late 1940s, my grandfather contracted tuberculosis, the Covid-19 of its time. He had to leave his home, Najaf, in the dusty Iraqi desert to recover in the clean mountain air of Zahle. He probably bemoaned his fate, but there he met my grandmother, a Christian refugee from Mardin.

If it were not for refugees and pandemics my mother would not be born, and I would not exist.

I often question why God let my grandmother die at such a young age, when my mom was barely five years old. For most of my life I did not know Maria Shakir even existed. It was only as an adult I travelled to Zahle trying to find my grandmother’s family, eventually finding Maria.

Maria and my entire grandmother’s family are Syriac Orthodox Christian. The country of Lebanon tore itself apart because its Muslims and Christians could not see what unites them, and instead focused on the narcissism of small differences, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1991.

Yet this Shi’a Muslim flew across the Mediterranean to help his Christian great-aunt, bringing her money, medicine, and his love.

 

But in Ukraine that same day, the invaders that day could only focus on hate, in their minds, dark, vacuous caverns where only enmity and evil exist, and another set of small differences. Maria in Ukraine became another victim in this cycle.

On the other wall by the TV was an image of Mar Elias Shakir III etched in silver. The Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox church. Maria’s uncle. My great-uncle. I make another nidhr to him: “If you help Maria, she is Orthodox like you, get out of Ukraine safely, I will visit your shrine in Kerala, India.”

During dinner, when I tell my great-aunt Maria about my visit to the shrine of Sayyida Khawla, she informs me that Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, is only ten minutes away from Baalbek.

She tells me this, not to pay a visit as a pilgrim. In fact, rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy.

She tells me that a woman in Bechouat has a café next to the Marian shrine and where I could eat saj, a Lebanese flat bread cooked on an open circular grill, complemented with thyme or cheese. Of course, her saj is not as good as Maria’s, she reminds me, but I should try it still since I will need to eat lunch.

On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, I arrive at the Sayyida Khawla shrine. I approach the shrine, with a gilded minaret and dome, interspersed with turquoise ceramic tiles and white Arabic calligraphy. I pass a pointed arch and enter the main hall, and look up at the dome, a pattern of the top in the shape of a star, a representation of heaven in perfect geometrical symmetry.

Not a single space is unadorned, illuminated with beams of light, with walls and ceilings made up of alternating panels of gold and silver, shimmering, shining, sparkling, with crystals glittering, glimmering, mesmerising.

“Rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy”

I approach the above ground tomb. Khawla was another person displaced by conflict, a refugee of sorts, more akin to a prisoner of war. Khawla was the daughter of Imam Hussein and great granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, the prophet’s son-in-law, and most of his family were massacred in Karbala, in today’s Iraq, in 681 by a political rival, Yazid, based in Damascus.

During a long and arduous journey, the few members of Hussein’s surviving family were taken as prisoners of war across the desert from what is Iraq to Damascus. Khawla died in Baalbek. Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s only surviving son, and Khawla’s brother, planted a small branch to mark her grave. Over the years, that branch turned into a massive cypress tree, which is in the middle of the shrine, making it 1,400-years-old.

I sit on a carpet of alternating floral designs of red, black, and white, in front of her tomb. Technically Khawla is like my Khala Maria, my great-aunt, albeit older by more than a millennium and a half.

 

I pray. For the health of my family, that my sister gives birth to a healthy baby, and that I get some message from Maria in Ukraine that she is safe.

Afterwards, I am on my way to Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, because maybe there Ukrainian Maria’s text will also appear.

The church has a bell tower, an exact resemblance to the minaret of the Shi’a shrine, but the entire complex is constructed of monochromatic, soft beige stones, in comparison with the explosion of colour in Sayyida Khawla. While the Shi’a shrine has a single tree, this complex is covered in sprawling olive trees.

It was here that in 1741, a wooden Byzantine icon of the Virgin was discovered in a cave and a church was built above it. Bechouat then became a pilgrimage site after a miracle occurred there for a paralyzed Christian man. The Marian apparition, however, occurred later, in front of the eyes of a Muslim child. Since then, I learned it has become a site of pilgrimage for both Christians and Muslims.

It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims. In the structure housing the statue, there is a painting of the Virgin Mary, standing on top of a crescent moon.

The crescent moon, along with a star, is a symbol associated with Islam. However, it was originally a Christian symbol representing the Virgin. The crescent moon had long been a symbol of fertility in the Middle East from pagan times, and the star stood in for Mary. It was only in 1453, when the Ottoman Muslims conquered Constantinople, that they appropriated the flag.

“It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims”

Within the span of a few hours in this narrow sliver of land known as the Bekaa Valley, settled by Phoenicians and Romans, known for its hashish, I visited two sites dedicated not just to Christianity and Islam, but the divine feminine: Our Lady of Baalbek, Khawla, and Our Lady of Bechouat, Mary.

The Lebanese often boast about how they can ski in the mountains and be able to go to the beach and dip into the water within the span of an hour. I was more impressed that within the span of an hour I could visit these two shrines, one Shi’a and the other Catholic.

In the span of an hour I could pray for protection, asking one holy Maria to protect both my Syriac Orthodox great-aunt Maria and my Ukrainian Orthodox Maria.

A few days later Ukrainian Maria eventually arrived in Parma, Italy, to stay with her aunt. Her parents remained in Okhtyrka, defending their home.

 

Maria was safe. And now I had to fulfil a promise before the year ended that I would travel to India, to visit the shrine of my great-uncle, and thank him for the favour.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.

Follow him on Twitter: @ialmarashi

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author’s employer, or Informed Comment.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The war in Ukraine is being fought at two different levels. The first one is the military confrontation, where developments are measured in numbers of casualties, kill ratios, and square kilometers changing hands from one belligerent to the other. The second level of the conflict is economic, and here the key aspects are GDP growth, the value of foreign assets seized or companies under sanctions, and the prices of gas and oil. Needless to say, both levels are deeply interconnected. However, for the purpose of this review, it might be useful to look at them separately at first.

The military situation in Ukraine can be best described as one of stalemate when looking at the conflict maps. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted as much on November 2023, when he said that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” During 2023, the frontline barely moved and, on the few occasions it did, the changes came at the cost of enormous human losses. The battle of Bakhmut, which continues around the city after Bakhmut itself was taken by Russian troops following almost seven months of fighting, is paradigmatic of these dynamics.

If the war is slightly tilting in any direction, the current situation would suggest it is in Russia’s favor. Some analysts point out that, while the conflict maps show stability, Ukraine might be slowly exhausting its limited supplies of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition. The recent struggles in both Washington and Brussels to approve supplies for the Ukrainian armed forces lend further credibility to this thesis.

On the economic front of the war, which has pitted Russia against Ukraine and its Western supporters, it is similarly difficult to reach any definitive conclusion on who is coming out on top. What is clear is that neither the West nor Russia achieved their maximalist goals in the economic struggle. Russia did not financially collapse in the face of incremental Western sanctions and Europe had less trouble than expected to surmount last winter’s energy crisis despite Moscow’s resort to cutting gas supplies.

This economic dimension of the war, which in recently published books has received less attention than the military and political dynamics of the conflict, sits at the core of “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West”, authored by political risk analyst and consultant Maximilian Hess. Hess does not look for winners or losers in the current economic war but provides a broad context to understand what is at stake on the economic front. Hess devotes half of his book to the prelude of the current military and economic war, covering the period that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the establishment of two Russia-supported separatist republics in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. London: Hurst, 2023. Click Here.

After the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the context of the Euromaidan protests in 2014, his successor Petro Poroshenko took a more pro-European course. Changes in geopolitical orientation notwithstanding, corruption continued to be rife. As Hess notes, “the revolution and subsequent conflict recast the networks of Ukraine’s politicians and oligarchs” but “failed to break the system that enabled them to rotate in and out of business and politics.”[1] Meanwhile, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its expansionist behavior but Western European countries limited their extent. In 2017, the Trump administration would also tone down US sanctions.

Germany, with its heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for industries and households, was the main European proponent of retaining economic ties with Russia after the annexation of Crimea. Hess is very critical of Germany’s political leaders during that period. He argues that Berlin pursued economic interdependence but failed to realize “Putin did not oversee a democracy or have to answer to economic pressures from his own business community” after Putin disciplined unruly oligarchs.[2] With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Europe’s energy dependency on Russia was an enormous mistake.

Even so, countries like Germany were probably not betting so much on the liberal ideal of trade driving cooperation in the political realm but rather on the high loss of revenue Russia would suffer if it stopped selling gas to Europe. After all, the Soviet Union had been a reliable provider of gas to West Germany during the Cold War. Back in 2019, German economist Michael Wohlgemuth argued that Moscow was more dependent on its gas exports to Germany than Germany was on Russian deliveries. This certainly did not stop Putin from attacking Ukraine, but the numbers supported Wohlgemuth’s analysis. In 2021, Russia exported 203 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas via pipeline. Among these exports, almost 146 billion cubic meters (bcm) were going to EU customers and around half of this volume, to Germany.

Hess explains that, although the sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the annexation of Crimea had very limited effects, the Kremlin’s reaction to them “asserted firmer control over Russia’s economy and increasingly sought to undermine the West’s influence both at home and abroad.”[3] As part of these efforts to increase its global geoeconomic power, Russia looked to Latin America (especially Venezuela), Africa and Asia.

But the most important partnership was arguably the one established with Saudi Arabia, the only oil exporter bigger than Russia. Riyadh and Moscow had engaged in an oil price war during the oil glut at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, by 2022 Putin had secured an alliance with the Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman to reduce oil production and ensure higher and more stable oil prices. Thus, Putin felt that Russia’s energy flank “was secure ahead of the all-out economic war that would ensue when its forces attacked”, explains Hess.[4] Russia’s total gas exports fell around 50 percent in 2022, and a further 25 percent in 2023. Although gas prices in 2022 reached historical heights and helped Russia offset the effects of the loss in export volume, in 2023 the prices returned to levels similar to those in 2019 or 2020. It has been oil, not gas, that has sustained Russia throughout the war.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has often been selling its oil at a discount price. The reasons behind this are the limited number of countries willing to buy Russian oil and the oil price cap imposed by the G-7 and the European Union. The oil price cap prohibits G-7 or EU-based finance companies from providing services to Russian oil companies selling their oil above $60 a barrel. Still, China and India, the latter moving in 2022 from barely buying Russian oil to being the second largest importer after Beijing, have kept Russia’s oil exports afloat.   

Hess identifies some key weaknesses in Russia’s position in the economic war against the West. Moscow underestimated the willingness of the EU to stop buying Russian oil and introduce major reductions in its gas imports. Also important, Russia has suffered greatly from the power of the dollar, which allows US sanctions to have a much greater impact than the US share of the global economy would allow. Too often missing in Hess’ “Economic War”, however, is the fact that the West’s economic war against Russia is not supposed to be an end in itself but a means to achieve political results, which so far have been lacking.

A political success would arguably mean either a significant weakening of Russia’s war effort or forcing Moscow to negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms for Ukraine. In one example among many, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced in December 2022, when the oil price cap on Russia was introduced, that “the decision will hit Russia’s revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine.”

Hess fails to engage with literature that adopts a critical approach towards the effectiveness of sanctions. To understand why sanctions on Russia have had only modest effects on the country’s war capabilities, it useful to search elsewhere. Nicholas Mulder, the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War”, explained in an op-ed that “both the deterrent and the compellent effect of US sanctions have fallen dramatically amid rampant overuse.” Writing about the current sanctions against Russia, Mulder has noted that “the lure of cheap raw materials from Russia is spurring sanctions avoidance on a previously unseen scale.”

The use of economic sanctions in modern times, from post-revolutionary Cuba to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has consistently impoverished civilian populations but has a poor record in forcing policy changes. Sanctions, as seen in the case of Iran, have also incentivized circumvention tools that are certainly suboptimal but keep sanctioned regimes going, especially when the state has a reliable coercive apparatus to deal with protests over decreasing living standards. Sanctioned states also tend to cooperate with each other. Iran, with a long experience in dealing with sanctions, has provided drones and drone components to Russia for its use against Ukraine.

Hess concludes his book by noting that “Russia cannot win the economic war with the tools at its disposal. The West, however, could still lose it.”[5] The important question, nonetheless, is whether Russia needs to win the economic war to achieve military successes in Ukraine, or, at least, to prevent Ukraine from recovering territory. Everything seems to indicate that not losing the economic war is more than enough for Russia to fulfill limited military objectives and could even be sufficient to make major advances if external material support for Ukraine decreases. Soon before the EU passed the 12^th package of sanctions against Russia in December 2023, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published a report on the effects of the oil price cap on Russia. The report noted that “the impact of the price cap has been limited due to inadequate monitoring and enforcement.” It added that “the sanctions have not reduced the Kremlin’s resolve for war.”

Hess’ “Economic War” offers the lay reader an accessible but detailed account of the economic war between Russia and the West. The book is particularly valuable for its long-time approach, which allows Hess to carefully explore connections between the post-2014 and post-2022 contexts. “Economic War”, however, would have benefited from a stronger focus on the close relation between the economic war and the political/military war and a more skeptical approach to the power of sanctions to alter state behavior.

[1] Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] Ibid., p. 127.

[5] Ibid., p. 201.