{"id":9059,"date":"2023-01-27T02:34:47","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T07:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=9059"},"modified":"2023-02-08T00:02:51","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T05:02:51","slug":"making-sense-of-the-ukraine-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/01\/making-sense-of-the-ukraine-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Making sense of the Ukraine war"},"content":{"rendered":"

S<\/span>everal years ago, I was sitting in a Lower Manhattan caf\u00e9 with a friend, the journalist Arun Gupta, lamenting the state of the Left and how so many ostensible leftists had become little more than cheerleaders for reactionary politics. While downing mediocre coffee and an overpriced salad bar lunch, I listened as Arun made an incisive observation: \u201cIn the U.S., the Left has never been close to power. But even powerless, the Left has had influence through correct political analysis. The Left has shaped politics by being right.\u201d And as I thought about it, Arun had a great point. Whether it was the labor movement, civil rights movement, the anti\u2013Vietnam-War movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, or the anti-nukes movement, all were propelled into the mainstream of U.S. political life by the Left.<\/p>\n

And so there is a tradition that we on the Left in the United States\u2014the diseased heart of the imperial \u201cWest\u201d\u2014have an obligation to uphold. Our job is not to cosplay as Little Kissingers studying the global chessboard and basing our political views on the positioning of non-Western pieces. Instead, our responsibility is to discern what is real and to defend and propagate that truth in the service of internationalism and liberation from capitalist and imperialist oppression.<\/p>\n

Our job is to help others understand violence: who is perpetrating aggression, who is victimized, and how we can stop it. Our job is to make sense of the senseless.<\/p>\n

With that principle in mind, the new book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a><\/em> by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies (of the antiwar group CODEPINK<\/a>) fails on every level. It offers a myopic view of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine that sees the entirety of the conflict through the lens of U.S.-NATO aggression without making even a perfunctory attempt to engage with the many other critical aspects of the war: oligarch rivalries, capital accumulation, imperial revanchism, anti-communism, resource extraction, and more.<\/p>\n

The book makes no effort to understand Ukrainian perspectives beyond casting the entire society as nameless and faceless pawns of U.S. imperialism. Similarly, the authors don\u2019t bother to engage with any Russian perspectives\u2014except those of Vladimir Putin\u2014let alone provide a materialist analysis of Russian society, economy, or political institutions. It makes little mention of the events leading up to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, save for those that involve NATO, omitting Russia\u2019s military intervention in Kazakhstan <\/a>in January 2022 to crush a worker uprising. The authors studiously avoid even a superficial analysis of the nature of the so-called People\u2019s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, how the situation came to be, or the players involved.<\/p>\n

In fact, Benjamin and Davies ignore all the critical elements of this ghastly and criminal war apart from the wrongs of the United States and NATO. And even with respect to NATO, the authors fail to capture the complexity of its role since the end of the Soviet Union, carefully sidestepping the inconvenient examples of NATO-Russia collaboration.<\/p>\n

It is distressing to see leaders of one of the most prominent antiwar organizations in the United States, in effect, upholding Putin\u2019s left flank, offering up hollow condemnations of the Kremlin while using its propaganda to badly misinform the public about the nature of a war that has already shaken the global capitalist system and has the potential to end human civilization.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, I offer this review for those interested in a serious analysis of the war and its attendant complexities, one that jettisons the fundamentally flawed framework of Benjamin and Davies and instead maintains an internationalist, anti-colonial, and authentic anti-imperialist perspective.<\/p>\n

A Critical Look at U.S.\/NATO-Russia Relations<\/h4>\n

Benjamin and Davies are at their strongest when highlighting the vicious U.S.-NATO war machine, which sends arms and soldiers across the planet for military exercises, military interventions, and, of course, profits. The book provides an adequate, though uneven, introduction to the insidious role of NATO throughout the post-Soviet period, including most importantly highlighting how the U.S.-led military alliance expanded to include much of the former Soviet bloc. However, as with everything in this book, the analysis is partial and ignores many of the critical elements of the NATO-Russia relationship.<\/p>\n

Reading Benjamin and Davies one could easily reach the conclusion that Russia and NATO have been locked in a conflict since at least 2007, if not 1991, as NATO crept its way to Russia\u2019s border, thus presenting Russia with an \u201cexistential threat.\u201d That aligns them with Putin, who has made the same point countless times, including in his oft-quoted 2007 speech in Munich<\/a>. Conveniently, however, both Benjamin and Davies, like Putin, ignore the fact that Russia was a critical NATO partner for much of the last 20 years.<\/p>\n