why not cutting stuff short:
the war is going brilliantly. 3 goals have alread been achieved
1) keep the Russians out
2) the Americans in
3) the Germans down.
(Lord Ismay)
Now, please: harshest sanctions ever, in order to also reach the last goal:
4) Fuck the EU! (Nuland)
Mission almost accomplished!
s
Am 10.03.2022 um 17:52 schrieb Ted Byfield:
Felix gets it, imo.
Not sure about elsewhere, but the 'special relationship left' — the US
certainly and the UK as well, I think — has been stuck in a rut. OT1H hard-ish
doctrinaire 'anti-imperialist' formations robotically denounce NATO in the
monolithic, one-sided terms Felix points out; OT0H milquetoast centrists revert
to form and support all kinds of aggressive action, if not outfight
belligerence (yet), with little or no introspection about how that relates to
their other earlier stances. Both are backward-glancing in a way that Corey
Robin put well a week ago on Facebook:
God, I hate left debates about international politics. More than any other kind
of debate, they never have anything to do with the matter at hand but, instead,
always seem to involve some attempt, on all sides, to remediate and redress
some perceived failure or flaw of politics past.
I don't think the left will make much progress until it gets over its post-'70s
anxiety over the use of force — always coercive, sometimes violent — to achieve
its political ends. Until then, it'll necessarily marginalize itself with
anti-statist denialism masquerading as warm-fuzzy idealism. The way out? Ditch
the genealogical-moral hand-wringing and accept the fact that human
institutions, all of them, are deeply flawed, but each in their own unique way.
A bit like what Tolstoy said of families: All happy families are alike; each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The question is how can we work with the institutions we have toward *better*
(NOT 'the best') political ends — in this case, fostering conditions that help
Russian populations (very plural) to try once again to remake their society in
more sustainable, fairer ways. If we had more than one major multilateral
alliance and were asking which would be better suited to realizing that end,
fine, let's debate whether NATO is the better choice; but we don't, really, so
scholastic debates about whether NATO is Good or Evil lead nowhere.
Are McDonald's and Coke "Good"? No. Is their withdrawal from Russia the right thing in
moral and practical terms? Yes. That wasn't so hard, now, was it? Why would we discuss NATO in any
different way? Because, being a multilateral entity that's ultimately grounded in democratic
national governments it "represents" us more than McDonald's and Coke? Good luck arguing
that.
Cheers,
Ted
On 10 Mar 2022, at 7:21, Felix Stalder wrote:
On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote:
Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all those
Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of those states,
they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They lived for
decades under significant degrees of political repression. Did they have a
valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at the brutality of the
current war, it seems suddenly obvious to me that they did -- and by the same
token, I have suddenly become less certain of what I always used to say, that
Nato is an imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is also an
imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a lot). But maybe
China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not yet?
I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US doesn't
really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America or Asia.
NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at confronting
the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this confrontation was not seen as
vital after 1990 (either because the US read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans
believed in trade leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for
Macron, not worth investing for the Germans.
For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep historical reasons,
"confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also after the end of the cold
war, hence NATO was always seen crucially important and they entered NATO voluntarily.
History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course not,
because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as unipolar is
certainly a big factor in this.
But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO would
have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on some kind of
large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not sure such a project
would have been popular in Poland, though.
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