The speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Brussels
Wednesday was a call to arms for a US-NATO confrontation against Russia.
With a series of lies and evasions, Obama presented a world turned
upside down in which the US and European imperialists, who backed the
coup in Ukraine spearheaded by fascistic forces, are the defenders of
democracy and peace.
There was little in the speech that could convince working people,
either in Europe or the United States, that a policy of open-ended
conflict with Russia was in their interests. That was not the purpose of
the speech, which consisted of one propaganda lie after another,
uttered with the assurance that there would be no serious criticism, let
alone opposition, within the ruling elites of the US and Europe or from
their media mouthpieces.
Obama sought to elaborate the basis for a major turn in US foreign
policy—what one of his foreign policy advisers called a “strategic
pivot” towards confronting Russia, deliberately employing the same term
that the White House has used to describe its systematic anti-China
policy in the Far East.
One aim of this strategy of confrontation is to provide a new
political axis for the US-dominated NATO military structure, which has
visibly frayed in the absence of the old Cold War framework.
Much of the speech was devoted to rehashing long-discredited claims
that American imperialism and its European allies represent democracy,
freedom and the popular will. Obama invoked the conflict between
democratic ideals and the authoritarian view that “order and progress
can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful
sovereign.”
But the words rang rather hollow coming from a president who has
claimed absolute and unreviewable power to order the drone-missile
assassination of anyone he chooses, anywhere in the world, and whose
government asserts the right to collect and store the e-mails, text
messages and telephone calls of the entire human race.
The focus of the speech was an indictment of Russian actions in
Crimea, which was annexed last week after a popular referendum in the
region. “Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks
ago seemed self-evident,” Obama declared, “that in the 21st century,
the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international
law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about
their future.”
Of course, these are precisely the principles that successive US
governments have trampled on: the 1999 US-NATO bombing of Serbia that
resulted in the redrawing of its borders by force and the secession of
Kosovo; the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in flagrant violation of
international law; and countless instances in which the US tramples on
the rights of “people and nations” to “make their own decisions” when
those decisions come into conflict with the interests of American
imperialism.
The Russian government of President Vladimir Putin has pointed to the
hypocrisy of the US-European outcry over Crimea, citing many of these
examples, and Obama sought to rebut Putin’s arguments by employing the
technique of the big lie.
He rejected any comparison between Crimea and Kosovo, denying that
Kosovo was an example “of the West interfering in the affairs of a
smaller country.” Obama asserted, “NATO only intervened after the people
of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years,”
ignoring the responsibility of the United States and the European
powers, particularly Germany, for fomenting the breakup of Yugoslavia
along ethnic lines. In Kosovo, the US sponsored the gangsters of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, who carried out tit-for-tat atrocities against
the Serb population, and now, in power, persecute the Roma and other
minorities.
“Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an
example of Western hypocrisy,” Obama continued. “Now, it is true that
the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world
but in the United States, as well.”
There was no significant debate or democratic discussion in the
lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. The war was the outcome of a
political conspiracy. The Bush administration went to war on the basis
of brazen lies about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass
destruction and its nonexistent alliance with Al Qaeda. The mass
demonstrations that showed the opposition of millions of Americans, and a
majority of the world’s population, were simply ignored.
After claiming he had opposed the Iraq war, Obama sought to justify
its conduct and outcome, claiming, “even in Iraq, America sought to work
within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s
territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we
ended our war and left Iraq to its people in a fully sovereign Iraqi
state that can make decisions about its own future.”
The truth is that the war in Iraq was the greatest crime—up to
now—committed in the 21st century. More than a million Iraqis lost their
lives as a result of the US invasion and occupation, and Iraq was
destroyed as a functioning society. The Bush administration openly
declared that the Geneva Conventions and international law did not apply
either to the war in Iraq or the previous conquest and occupation of
Afghanistan, a position that the Obama administration continues to
uphold.
Obama seeks to rally the world against the supposed crimes of Russia
in Crimea, in which, as of this writing, two people have been killed
(one Ukrainian soldier and one Russian), while opposing any prosecution
of the American war criminals responsible for the immense bloodbath
visited upon the people of Iraq.
Instead, the US president excused the monumental crimes of his own
government with the statement, “Of course, neither the United States nor
Europe are perfect in adherence to our ideals. Nor do we claim to be
the sole arbiter of what is right or wrong in the world.”
Actually, the US government does claim that role. Administration
after administration has declared the United States to be “the
indispensable nation,” the sole superpower, the country whose
military-intelligence apparatus must be the world’s policeman, and whose
leaders are immune from any accountability for their actions.
Obama’s arguments were no less fraudulent when he addressed the
specifics of the situation in Ukraine. “Yes, we believe in democracy,
with elections that are free and fair, and independent judiciaries and
opposition parties, civil society and uncensored information so that
individuals can make their own choices,” he claimed.
But in Ukraine, the United States and the European Union rode
roughshod over national sovereignty, intervening to foment a coup that
overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, an elected president, and installing in
power not the “choice” of the Ukrainian people, but the choice of
Washington.
This was exposed by the notorious phone calls between State
Department official Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, in
which they discussed the pluses and minuses of various Ukrainian
politicians and made their selection of “Yats”—the newly appointed
stooge prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk—as the best option.
Obama dismissed the charge that the US is backing fascists in Kiev
with a banal reference to his grandfather serving in Patton’s army
fighting the Nazis in World War II, as though this had any significance.
The US government has backed countless fascists and authoritarian
killers since 1945, from Franco in Spain, to the Shah in Iran, to
Pinochet in Chile, to the Egyptian military butchers of today—to name
only a few.
Obama made no mention of Egypt in his speech, maintaining a guilty
silence over the US support for the junta that has just sentenced 529
Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death after a two-day show trial. This
was a deliberate and cynical omission, as Obama referred to democratic
strivings in “Tunis and Tripoli,” but not in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Russian charges of US collaboration with fascists in Kiev are true.
US officials have repeatedly met with leaders such as Oleh Tyahnybok,
head of the ultra-right Svoboda party, which is a key component of the
Ukrainian cabinet, as well as officials of the neo-Nazi Right Sector,
which played the role of storm troopers in the fighting to overthrow the
elected government of Ukraine. In all, the US State Department and
other agencies have expended $5 billion to subvert pro-Russian
governments in Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Obama’s speech in Brussels was an attempt to justify a policy towards
Russia that is aggressive, provocative and incalculably dangerous. The
real goal of US actions in this crisis was suggested in the US
president’s sneering reference on Tuesday to Russia as merely a
“regional power.”
This was not, of course, Obama’s language when seeking to enlist
Russian assistance in overthrowing the Assad government in Syria,
browbeating Iran or isolating North Korea. But it has been the goal of
American imperialism ever since the collapse of the USSR to expand its
influence throughout the former Soviet bloc—first in the countries of
Eastern Europe, then in former Soviet republics in the Baltics, the
Caucasus and Central Asia, and now Ukraine.
Russia is to be reduced not merely to the status of “regional power,”
but to a semi-colonial status, dismembered and carved up by the major
imperialist powers. In this context, it is clear that when Obama speaks
of diplomacy, he means the capitulation of the Russian regime to US and
EU demands.
Obama insisted in his speech that Russia’s failure to accept the new
arrangements in Eastern Europe established by American and European
imperialism be met with ever harsher economic sanctions and political
isolation.
In the pursuit of this policy, Washington is turning the regions that
border Russia on the west into an armed camp, creating the conditions
for any spark or provocation to ignite a military conflagration between
nuclear powers. Obama made a point in his speech of invoking Article
Five of the NATO charter, which obliges all NATO member states to come
to the defense of any single member state that comes under
attack—including former East Bloc countries or Soviet republics such as
Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. This was an
implied threat of military force.
The struggle against imperialist militarism and the threat of US-NATO
intervention in the Ukraine crisis requires the independent political
mobilization of the working class on an international basis, uniting
workers of North America, Europe and the former Soviet Union in a common
struggle.
well as regions of conflict and the elusive nature of peace around the world.
