By John Moore

Alongside its surprise diplomatic success in bringing together Saudi Arabia and Iran, China’s peace plan for Ukraine has caused consternation in the West. Its 12-point plan calls for a ceasefire, peace talks, the protection of POWs and civilians, and a ban on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. It also calls for an end to military blocs and sanctions and respect for territorial integrity.

Ukraine has not rejected the plan. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has spoken to Kuleba, his Ukrainian counterpart (Morning Star, 17/3/23), and a phone call between Xi and Zelensky has been proposed. Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister says such a call “would be an important move”.

American economist and UN special adviser Jeffrey D. Sachs, by no means a leftwinger – Sachs helped supervise the rapid privatisation of industries in the former Socialist countries – says that the basis for any peace is clear: “Ukraine would be a neutral non-NATO country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet [as it has been since 1783]. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line… Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022” (Common Dreams, 18/2/23).

US REJECTS PEACE

The US has rejected China’s plan out of hand. It has, however, been at great pains to manage the reception of the proposal. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the proposal was “effectively the ratification of Russian conquest” and would “recognize Russia’s gains” (Daily Mail, 17/3/23). A ceasefire would be unacceptable, he said – despite the fact that the US has made great play of claiming that Ukraine decides its fate autonomously (Washington Post, 5/4/22). US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press briefing (20/3/23) that a ceasefire would not only be unacceptable, but illegal: “The world should not be fooled by any tactical move by Russia supported by China, or any other country, to freeze the war on its own terms. Such a move would violate the UN charter.”

For the US, a ceasefire brokered by China would deal a major blow to its global supremacy. Not only would it further undermine US divide and rule after the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, which represents a strategic setback for the US in the Middle East, but if implemented it would actually halt the Ukraine war, an outcome the current US administration wants to avoid. In building up Ukraine’s forces for a long-announced, but as yet to begin, Spring offensive, the West aims to prolong the war and force regime change and dismemberment on an enfeebled Russia. Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center, said: “Now is not the right time for diplomacy” (Bloomberg News, 19/3/23).

Senior US Republican senator Lyndsey Graham who advocated Putin’s assassination last year, is demanding the shooting down of Russian planes (Daily Mail, 15/3/23) after a US spy drone, with its tracking device switched off, flew close to Russian territory and was intercepted by Russian warplanes – the same drone that Russia tracked last year flying close to the Kerch bridge the day it was bombed. Meanwhile, in Poland the most hawkish and pro-American government in the EU has declared that it would intervene directly in the war if Ukraine were in danger of losing (Top War, 19/3/23), and President Duda has announced plans to create the largest land army in Europe (Simplicius The Thinker, 25/3/23). Poland, which has announced the establishment of the first permanent US command base on its territory (TVN24, 21/3/23), is itching to get its hands on the former Polish territory of western Ukraine, known pre-World War 2 as “Eastern Lesser Poland” (Warsaw Institute 1/3/18). As Duda put it last year: “The Polish-Ukrainian border should unite not divide” (Newsweek, 31/5/22). 

ESCALATION

Attacks on Russian territory including Crimea, and the supply of MiG 29 fighter planes from Slovakia and depleted uranium tank-busting shells from Britain – shells condemned by the UN because of the cancers and birth deformities they cause (Reuters, 21/3/23) – all point to continuing western escalation.

While such escalation is proof of undiminished commitment to war, it is not a sign of success. The Asia Times (20/3/23) reports: “The entire [Ukrainian] army that NATO trained between 2014 and 2022 in preparation for a Russian attack is dead, and recruits are being thrown into battle lines with three weeks of training.” The article continues: “A gloomy assessment of Ukraine’s prospects for victory against Russia emerged from a recent private gathering of former top US soldiers, intelligence officials and scholars... The several dozen attendees, many of whom had held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions, met under Chatham House rules, which forbid identification of individual participants but allow the content itself to be presented.” Crucially the article concludes that: “Overwhelmingly, the sentiment of participants leaned towards escalation in the form of providing additional weapons to Ukraine. The great majority of participants favored risking everything for absolute victory over Russia.”

This chimes with Serbian president Alexsandar Vucic’s warning last year that, “We are going to enter a large-scale global conflict the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War 2” (Euronews, 21/11/22).

JINGOISM AND RETREAT

Peace campaigning in Britain has so far failed to address the gravity of the threat posed to world peace by this war. Labour MPs who oppose the Tories on domestic issues have been silenced on the role played by NATO in creating such a dangerous situation. The TUC voted through a disastrous motion backing higher defence spending, albeit narrowly, overturning its previous objection to raising defence budgets. Labour has reiterated its support for NATO, the Green Party has reversed its anti-NATO policy, and some union leaders and left-wing MPs have called for more arms to be sent to Ukraine. The mainstream media have deprived the British public of any dissenting or alternative views.

The collapse by the Second International ‘socialists’ into jingoism that took place in 1914 (for instance, Hyndman in Britain, Plekhanov in Russia) is being repeated, and for many of the same reasons, including the subordination of class to bourgeois national interests – leading to complacency and misidentification as to who the main enemy is – rooted in imperial privilege.

The result has been a disabling underestimation of the destructive role of NATO, above all of US and UK intentions, and amounts to unqualified support for the same liberal interventionist position that brought about the catastrophe in Iraq 20 years ago.

GLOBAL MAJORITY REJECTS US LINE

The liberal interventionist viewpoint is, predictably, not reflected globally. Bolivia’s former democratically elected president Evo Morales, deposed in a US-backed coup in 2019, said recently: “The sending of tanks and new items of weaponry from the US, NATO and some European countries to Ukraine is an irrational provocation towards world war three." (Twitter 2/2/23). Brazilian president Lula is refusing to send Brazilian arms and spare parts for Leopard tanks to Ukraine because “our war is to improve the lives of our people.” Lula also questions the western narrative of the causes of the war. “I think the reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine also needs to be clearer. Is it because of NATO?” (Reuters, 5/5/22).

South Africa likewise – along with the vast majority of the world’s nations, including India, most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia – has refused to impose sanctions on Russia (Daily Maverick, 19/11/2).

The only countries to employ sanctions against Russia have been the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland and South Korea. As Newsweek put it: ‘Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine’ (15/11/22).

In the face of this overwhelming rejection, the US continues to impose unilateral sanctions on 40 countries. Nations with direct experience of imperialist aggression see such economic aggression for what it is: the violation of international law protecting all countries’ rights to development and self-determination (Rahmat Mohamad, Economic Sanctions under International Law, SpringerLink (1/1/15). Such countries well understand the dire future Ukraine faces. As journalist Chris Hedges says: “There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness… The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony” (Consortium News, 14/3/23. Hedges adds: “U.S. love of freedom only extends to people who serve its ‘national interest’”.

For the global majority, which has been on the receiving end of the 251 US military interventions since 1991, NATO is neither defensive nor a guarantor of peace. Since World War 2, the US has killed 12 million people directly through its wars, so the US declaration that it will never allow another power to share its pre-eminent global position rings alarm bells across the world. President Biden said last year: “We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off.”

No wonder there is disbelief when Ned Price, spokesperson for the US State Department, maintains that: “No country on Earth has done more to build a more stable, more integrated Middle East” (Mint Press, 14/3/23). Instead people see a viable Chinese peace plan for Ukraine in line with international law versus the lawless one-sided gangsterism of the USA.

THREAT TO CHINA

US/NATO war plans extend far beyond Ukraine. The military pressure against China is building with the recent agreement between Britain and Japan on the military use of space, regular western and Japanese naval exercises in the South China Sea and the building of four new US bases in the northern Philippines and on Japanese islands close to Taiwan, completing the US’s “arc around China” (BBC, 2/2/23). Taiwan is being armed to the teeth, despite the fact that official US and UK policy is that Taiwan is part of China. The AUKUS pact between the US, UK and Australia will give Australia nuclear submarines to block China’s trade routes and in exchange effectively hands Australia’s sovereignty over to the USA.

4-star general Mike Minihan predicts war with China “within two years”, a prediction endorsed by the Chairman of the Republican Congress Foreign Affairs Committee (NBC News, 27/1/23). The drive to all-out war – one in which the US would not play to lose, leading to almost certain nuclear engagement – is accelerating.

CAPITALISM HEADING FOR WORLD WAR

The US reliance on military violence as a solution to its unproductive and crisis-prone economy means that world war is increasingly likely. Weapons makers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have a vested interest in promoting conflict – as do UK arms-makers such as BAE, Babcock, Rolls Royce and Qinetiq whose shares surged over 24% by £5 billion in the first month of the Ukraine conflict (This is Money, 24/3/22). The massive arms race of the western powers takes the NATO countries’ combined defence budgets over the $2 trillion a year mark. Biden is proposing a budget of $1 trillion next year with US defence spending exceeding the rest of the world put together – over 14 times more than Russia and over 3 times more than China. Such an arms race historically precedes major war.

The laws of capitalist competition inevitably lead to war, unless people mobilise to prevent it. British peace campaigning could learn from the increasingly visible anti-NATO protests that have been emerging across Europe – in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Greece – and notably in Germany where a peace petition has now attracted over 750,000 signatures, and where polls show that 59% of the German population opposes the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine.

As African-American peace campaigner Ajamu Baraka puts it, the US is “an existential threat to collective humanity on our planet” (Black Agenda Report, 17/3/23), by far the greatest danger to world peace of all the world’s powers. Former president Jimmy Carter, has echoed this view, calling the US “the most warlike country in the history of the world” (Common Dreams, 18/4/19). In such a context, Chinese proposals for peace in Ukraine represent a sea-change in global politics. For the first time, China is using its significant weight to try to restrain US violence. Socialists need to see that violence for what it is.

 

 

 

 

More war - President Biden with President Zelensky Kiev 2023 photo by The White House