Month: March 2022

As the Ukraine conflict expands into an economic war between the U.S. and Russia, it has become clear that U.S. foreign policy no longer serves the interests of the U.S. plutocracy. The following developments, engineered by Washington’s Neocons, will inflict increasing harm on the business interests of the United States:

• Freezing of the assets of the Russian central bank. More than $100 billion of Russian central bank assets held in U.S. financial institutions have been seized, resulting in permanent damage to trust in the safety of U.S. dollar deposits.
• Blocking Russian petroleum imports. Although the U.S. is less dependent on imports of Russian oil, there will be inflation of petroleum and commodity prices in the U.S., leading to reduced economic growth.
• Removing Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT electronic payments network. Russia, China, and India will resort to alternative electronic trading networks that will bypass SWIFT and reduce the role of the dollar in world trade.
• Encouraging dozens of U.S. corporations to abandon their Russian business operations. This action has nullified decades of U.S. investment in Russia and will likely lead to the permanent displacement of those businesses by competitors from other nations.

In 1953, a General Motors executive famously said that what was good for GM was good for America, indicating that there was no conflict between the goals of the U.S. government and U.S. business. Today, America’s Neocon ideologues are pursuing policies clearly detrimental to American business and damaging to the U.S. economy. How did this strange situation arise?

The Neocon project, originating with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was to forcibly spread liberal democracy worldwide, with the corresponding expansion of markets for U.S. global corporations. Launched as a response to the 9/11 attacks, the Neocon Global War on Terror was a military campaign aimed at imposing democracy and economic exploitation on the Mideast. After some initial success, this scheme turned into a costly series of stalemated and abandoned wars that spread ruin and chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Having been frustrated in military power projection, the Neocons have increasingly turned to economic warfare, imposing sanctions on unfriendly nations that cannot be cowed by threats of invasion. Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Yemen have been subjected to crippling economic sanctions causing vast human suffering but yielding no geopolitical triumphs. Thus, it came as no surprise that Russia’s attack on Ukraine would trigger massive economic sanctions from the U.S. and its NATO/EU allies.

Unfortunately for the Western business community, impairing the Russian economy through financial and trade sanctions also harms the U.S. and European economies. The Europeans will suffer disproportionally because of their dependence on Russian energy imports, but the U.S. will also suffer because of commodity price inflation; damage to the role of the U.S. dollar; and distrust sown among trading partners. If the economic war expands to China, there will be much more economic damage.

America’s plutocrats are slowly awakening to the fact that in enabling the Neocons, they have created a monster that is now damaging their vital interests, but it is too late for them to tame this monster. Neocon ideology has fully permeated the U.S. political establishment and the media, and opposition to the Neocon economic warfare agenda is now branded as unpatriotic if not treasonous. It is now generally accepted in Washington that America has a right and a duty to bend all other nations to our will by any means necessary, whatever the cost.

The Neocons will not go gently into the night of their failed ideology. Their organizations, reputations, and livelihoods are at stake. They will cling to even the smallest possibility of a final triumph, doubling down at every opportunity rather than accepting defeat. Unlike the plutocrats, they have no financial capital at risk; only their careers are at stake. To this day, the advocates of the disastrous War on Terror regime change invasions are fully in control of U.S. foreign policy and are ratcheting up conflict with Russia and China.

History shows that once a nation becomes dominated by a pernicious ideology, its business community is powerless to change the course of foreign policy. This was the case in WWII Germany and Japan, as business leaders, who earlier supported expansionist militarism, watched helplessly as their assets were destroyed in losing wars. It remains to be seen whether the damage inflicted on the U.S. by the Neocons will be limited to years of economic decline or will extend to the catastrophe of a nuclear war. The American plutocracy sowed the wind by backing the Neocons, and it will now reap the whirlwind of Neocon foreign policy folly.

Haig Hovaness

Co-Chair, U.S. Green Party Peace Action Committee

The Green Party Peace Action Committee (GPAX) views the conflict in Ukraine as the tragic, yet inevitable, result of relentless effort by the U.S., NATO, and the European Union for global economic, political, and military dominance. Within this context, the current conflict stems from the 2014 US-backed coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected government – and in the determination of the U.S./EU/NATO to convert Ukraine, whose government recently stated its intention to acquire nuclear weapons, into a heavily militarized NATO member nation located on the border of the Russian Federation.

NATO’s expansion has been a pressing security concern for Russia since 1998, when the U.S. govt. inaugurated the formal process of growing NATO’s membership to include former nations of the Warsaw Pact – Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe has been carried out, not only in violation of a pledge – made by Secretary of State James A. Baker to then-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 – that NATO would not expand one inch eastward with the end of the Cold War, but also in violation of subsequent treaties in which the U.S. and its allies committed to respect the security concerns of other countries, including the Russian Federation.

Today, as the conflict escalates, NATO’s aggressive expansion has become an existential threat to all oppressed and colonized people around the world. A similar effort to expand is occurring in Latin America with the use of Colombia and Brazil as U.S. proxies against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Also, in the African continent, regime change is enacted through AFRICOM funding and training. For peace to arrive in these regions and in the world, NATO and AFRICOM must be dismantled.

For GPAX, peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Peace means a world liberated from militarism, nuclear proliferation, imperialism and unjust war, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The resurgence and celebration of Nazism in Ukraine, as well as in the West, demonstrates that the global consolidation of xenophobia and racism, especially white supremacy, is an integral part of imperialism.

For GPAX, peace also means: dismantling the military-industrial complex and all intelligence agencies that engage in covert warfare & that subject U.S. citizens to unconstitutional surveillance for “anti-government” views; nationalizing the oil & gas industries that realize windfall profits from contrived world shortages (i.e. oil/gas from Iran, Venezuela and Russia are restricted); abolishing illegal unilateral economic sanctions that kill and cause untold suffering to the people of targeted countries; and nationalizing the Federal Reserve system – that funnels stolen & frozen foreign assets to select member banks which misuse these illicit funds in the repurchasing market to realize extraordinary profit. Witness what’s happening with Afghanistan’s assets, more than 20 years after the U.S. first invaded.

The only way to end war is to end corporate profiteering!

Bloated “defense” budgets must be reinvested into education, health and childcare, housing, and a people centered Green New Deal. While we grieve for the current loss of life in Ukraine, we also mourn over 14,000 deaths in Eastern Ukraine caused over the last 8 years by the Ukrainian military armed heavily by the U.S. We also mourn hundreds of thousands of deaths in Somalia, Yemen, and in every nation suffering because of NATO provoked wars and armed conflicts. We offer our unwavering solidarity with all victims of imperialism.

To secure the interests of the Russian and Ukrainian people, there must be good faith negotiations between the Russian Federation, representatives of the peoples of Donbas, and the Ukraine. The EU and the U.S. must end their continuous shipments of arms and other “lethal aid” to Ukraine. The 2015 Minsk agreements, signed by both Ukraine and Russia and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and approved by the UN Security Council in 2015, offer one formula for a diplomatic solution to the conflict that would satisfy the aspirations of the peoples of the Donbass for autonomy from the current Ukrainian government.

It was only after the Ukrainian government’s shelling of Eastern Ukraine, in violation of the Minsk agreement – which was confirmed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – that Russia, in mid-February, withdrew its support. The conflict in Ukraine has exposed the destructive effects of imperialism: war, racism, and militarism, which continually result in the unjust and anti-democratic redistribution & concentration of capital. Our demand for peace requires an end to U.S. imperialism and its implementation by NATO and other U.S. military alliances.

 

 

The most important and troubling fact of the current war in Ukraine is that the U.S. is on the brink of nuclear war with Russia. Our foreign policy establishment has maneuvered the U.S. into a position of direct confrontation with Russia, the most heavily armed nuclear power. The United States has the second largest nuclear armament. To support the Ukrainian government, the U.S. has effectively declared economic war on Russia, and we are supplying lethal military aid to Ukraine to be used on the battlefield against Russia. We are urging other countries, like Germany, to do the same. How did we get to this precarious situation?

Over the last two decades, U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by militaristic thinking. The use of military power through aggressive war and the threat of military action has been a means of asserting U.S. influence in international affairs. This approach has been unsuccessful, to say the least. Now the same policy makers who created the disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are urging similar militaristic adventures directed against Russia and China. But Russia and China are not militarily weak and vulnerable states like the past victims of U.S. aggression. They are nuclear armed, and there is no defense against nuclear weapons. Once a nuclear war begins, the whole world will be impacted!

The American people are now asked to trust the judgment of a Washington power elite with a record of repeated disastrous miscalculation as it urges increasing hostility toward Russia and China. Errors of judgment in Iraq and Afghanistan led to death and destruction in distant lands, but similar errors in dealing with Russia and China could lead to the nuclear destruction of cities in the United States and around the world..

The Peace Action Committee of the Green Party of the U.S. calls for ending America’s militaristic foreign policy, beginning with advocacy of a negotiated settlement of the war in Ukraine. The U.S., which has enormous influence over the Zelensky government, and has interfered greatly in Ukraine’s affairs at least since the coup of 2014, is currently acting to prolong the armed struggle. Sacrificing the lives of thousands of Ukrainians in a futile struggle against an overwhelming invasion force is an irresponsible action. A neutral Ukraine can coexist peacefully with Russia, just as Finland and Austria have since the end of WWII.

Keeping the U.S. on the brink of nuclear war with Russia and China by sustaining and aggravating regional disputes risks world-wide catastrophe. We must prevent the U.S. policy of unending war fever from becoming a fatal affliction for all humankind.  All countries in the world deserve to live in peace and security.