"That dream of hegemony hasn't worked out."

Russia may invade Ukraine.

This isn't just their fight. It is also our fight.

We aren't just interested bystanders. We were involved from the beginning and are still involved. We will impose sanctions on trade and finances and the flow of natural gas.  Americans are imagining the pain we will mete out. We aren't yet imagining what Russia will do to us in return. Of course they will do something. They must. I don't expect missiles, but we have vulnerabilities. Our power grid. The internet. Our currency. Our government. Something. Do we imagine ourselves to be invulnerable?

We are experiencing one of the consequences of the end of the Cold War. We felt triumphant. We were the colossus astride the world. We thought we would be wise to run up the score on Russia. 

Herb Rothschild offers a perspective on the events and American mindset that brought us to this moment. He has been resisting U.S. militarism for decades. A graduate of both Yale and Harvard, Rothschild joined the English Department at LSU in his home state of Louisiana. He promoted civil rights and civil liberties in that state from 1966 through1976. He recently published a book about this decade of struggle for justice,The Bad Old Days. He worked in the Peace Movement in Louisiana, New Jersey, and Texas. He continues that work in retirement in Southern Oregon.

Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild, Jr.

The purpose of demonizing others is to discount their humanity. They can’t feel what we feel, desire what we desire, or fear what we fear. So, there’s no point in even listening to them, much less giving any credence to what they might say. That makes life easy . . . until it doesn’t.

Whatever else one might say about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, he didn’t demonize the leaders of other nations. He seemed to save that for his rivals at home. Nothing came of his meetings with the leader of North Korea, primarily because, once he couldn’t get Kim Jung-Un to unilaterally dismantle his nuclear weapons program, Trump’s dream of the Nobel Peace Prize faded and he had no interest in, or understanding of, long-term diplomacy. For a time there, however, a long-overdue new possibility had opened. Regarding Russia, there was always the suspicion that Putin somehow had Trump by the short and curlies, but during Trump’s term the new Cold War that Hilary Clinton and the U.S. foreign policy establishment had been pleased to initiate was put on pause.

Now, we have returned to the policies, psychology and propaganda that characterized the first Cold War. It’s so comfortable to get back to a time when the U.S. drive for global dominance always had an excuse at hand. Putin is a power-hungry tyrant who won’t play by the rules of the much-vaunted “rules-based order” the U.S. has presided over since the end of WWII, the first (but never acknowledged) rule of which is that only the U.S. gets to invade other nations to attempt “regime change.”

But suppose we were really interested in saving the Ukrainian people from the devastating pain that so many people in other nations suffered when the U.S. and the Soviet Union conducted the hostilities of the first Cold War on their soil. We might, then, try to see the world from the point of view of someone living in Russia who isn’t a demon but a human being.

Hawkish media

We might then see a Western military alliance that didn’t disband when the Eastern military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, disbanded following U.S. assurances to Gorbachev that the West would respect Russia’s security concerns. We might then see NATO take in new members that brought soldiers and weapons ever closer to Russia’s borders, including the 2004 admission of the Baltic Republics, which share Russia’s northwest border. We might note Russia’s repeated protests, and the especially vigorous protests in 2008 when NATO announced an intention to eventually admit Georgia and the Ukraine. And we might note that Russia keeps asking the U.S. and NATO to pledge not to admit Ukraine as a way to resolve the present crisis, and that such a request is repeatedly characterized as a “non-starter” by our negotiators.  

Some people in the U.S. have tried to inject into the current conversation this rather simple principle of diplomacy—trying to see the other side’s point of view and giving them a chance to prove that they aren’t just blowing smoke—but they aren’t getting much of a hearing. Shades of our build-up to the invasion of Iraq. When an administration wants hostilities, the drums of war beat louder and louder.

At the start of the 1990s, we could have built an international order in which every nation’s legitimate interests were acknowledged. But no. The U.S. had become the sole superpower, and we were going to keep it that way. That dream of hegemony hasn’t worked out. We’ve squandered our wealth on fruitless wars, Russia finally has had enough, and China’s growth into a superpower cannot be stopped no matter how many naval task-forces we put into the Pacific. But on the bright side, the military contractors have flourished.