by Sean Reynolds, CAPA activist
This past Saturday I was pleased to appear, flatteringly labeled as a “Political Analyst” (are any of us not political analysts?), in a segment on Iran’s PressTV, interviewed by journalist Ramin Mazaheri whose three brilliant, vexing books I should admit I’d benefited greatly from reading years earlier. On CAPA’s Viewpoints page, we try not to link to state-sponsored or otherwise high-end broadcast media (and nearly all mainstream media, we’ve learned of late, does seem to be state-sponsored) but the piece is easily googleable searching Ramin’s name plus its title: “Trump Kicks Zelensky out of White House After Historic Press Conference.” It had been quite the day.
Alongside CAPA, I’d long waited, and vigorously called, for the moment that U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s Kyiv government would cease – on highway overpasses countless mornings in Chicago I’ve helped raise the banner pictured below – so that Ukraine could escape being sacrificed to the U.S.’ economic rivalry with Russia and Russia’s ally China, but also that the world might escape the unforgivable nuclear risks created by a de facto, and now blessedly ending, NATO-Russia hot war: in my final minutes of life, walking downtown to calmly meet the birth of a tiny new short-lived star, I won’t want the blood of the entire species on my hands – I trust that you won’t either – nor has their ever-more-parchmenty complexion improved at all in recent years from their incessant, inescapable dousing in Ukrainian and Russian blood.
You’ve heard it all before and I would also hope you’ve read it in books like Scott Horton’s “Provoked” or the late Stephen F. Cohen’s magisterial “War with Russia?” (maybe go find them now: also indispensable foreign policy analysis channels such as “The Grayzone,” “The Duran,” “Dialogue Works” and the goofily-titled “Judging Freedom“) … but let me risk the bizarrely – and from a democracy perspective, terrifyingly – common objection that foreign propaganda is the type to which Americans are most susceptible (if not uniquely so), by going through it all briefly, one more time:
- In 2014 we helped orchestrate a well-funded coup ousting Ukraine’s elected president using neo-Nazi militias who, thereafter, had a strong role in preventing any peace organizing or consequential elections in the country. The country’s ethnically Russian East found itself caught in a U.S.-instigated race war and spent eight years fighting to secede and rejoin the Russian state from which Lenin and Khrushchev had parceled it off in the Soviet era. Russia obeyed the overwhelming preference of Crimeans and more crucially its own realpolitik interests, by immediately reabsorbing the Crimean peninsula and a crucial naval port: but it spent eight years negotiating for the Donbass region to remain, with structural protections, in Ukraine, preferring to avoid a war.
- in 2022, after two rounds of “Minsk accords” by which Ukraine, France and Germany all admitted they’d never intended to abide, Russia made a final plea for NATO to swear off expansion into Ukraine and met with blank refusal: then it recognized the breakaway Donbass provinces as sovereign states in whose aid it would move troops to repel Ukrainian occupiers. A final opportunity for negotiation was lost after Ukrainian negotiators, under pressure of a Russian feint towards Kyiv, had penciled the “Istanbul Agreement” leaving Donbass in Ukraine but giving Russia guarantees against NATO encroachment. Our leaders scuppered the deal demanding that our client in Kyiv fight this war to the last Ukrainian.
And here we are!
Ukraine never had a chance of winning the war against its far better armed and more populous neighbor, but it was never meant to: NATO officials have routinely boasted of the “bargain” the West is getting, weakening their Russian, hence also their Chinese, rival with only scores of thousands of dead or wounded Ukrainians (and Russians, of course), along with Ukraine’s radically diminished future prospects, as the cost.
So when I gave that interview, I was overjoyed at the break of relations between the new administration and Mr. Zelensky: I still am. I’m more inclined to think, a few days after the interview, that the two American leaders might sincerely have been trying to pull Zelensky towards good-faith negotiations with Russia, with no ambush prepared beforehand as a nonetheless invaluable teaching moment for the most peace-minded U.S. citizens: but given what seems Zelensky’s fundamental opposition to any such negotiations, a brawl, planned or unplanned, is probably the best outcome that could have resulted from the meeting. U.S. support for a perpetual Ukraine war, waged to Ukraine’s and to the world’s incalculable cost, seems finally, blessedly, miraculously, to be at an end. If only our support for (and our imperial exploitation of) Israel’s violence would follow suit!
Fascism and democracy are words that actually matter: forcing working majorities to live by, and never even criticize, the edicts of their ruling bureaucracies has become, for the more unapologetically pro-war in my own country, the very definition of democracy, whereas for many of us, including much of the nation’s more conservative half, it still sounds like the other thing. Although, as an antiwar socialist who’s spent two daylong stints in jail protesting Israel’s Gaza genocide, I would have liked, being in a “safe state,” to vote for a third party this past November, the 2024 stakes felt, to me, too high not to make a lesser evil vote (and – I confess – even a lesser evil donation) on antiwar grounds.
I was very grateful this Saturday that the candidate I’d helped elect a few months prior had (for motives I might not even like if it were possible to know them) begun this process of seeking survival for the species, peace for Ukraine, and a distinct lessening of war-fevered ignominy for the United States.
