By examining the past of Russia and that of the United States, and more broadly of NATO, one can see and foresee the war of the present, as well as the claims of the North American empire as well as those of the current Russian empire. We note that the conflict does not only oppose Russia and Ukraine, as we see in the international media: the conflict is played out between Russia on one side, and the United States (through NATO) the other.
Ukraine and its people, in this context, are the victims of a war that is tearing apart brothers who are enemies of culture and history; war for which the whole world must pay. It is in fact for Russia to keep NATO away from its borders, because it jeopardizes its future as a military power as well as a sovereign state.
However, a cry of alarm seems to want to spread in the West. It is said that Vladimir Putin wants to reconnect with the past to restore the Soviet Union. Since he was a KGB agent, that makes him a communist. They ignore, of course, that Putin made Russia a capitalist country, which can now be considered an imperialist state. The fact that Putin has made himself one of the strongest critics of the Leninist division is also glossed over. His enemies “McCarthyize” Putin, while being aware that he is the leader and ideologue of the United Russia political party, which is however not a communist, or Marxist or socialist party, but indeed an ultranationalist capitalist party.
War is only the extension of politics by other means, observed the Prussian general officer and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Nevertheless, he forgot to add that politics is also the synthesis of economics, and therefore war is only economics by other means. This is the very essence of the war in Ukraine, as it is the essence of all wars in history, even if they are disguised as defense of the fatherland or the nation, of the sword or of the cross, democracy or freedom. Every war has an ethnic, racist and classist content, and that is why Michel Foucault (1926-1984), rightly placed war in what he called biopolitics.
A big business
Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine displays a marked imperialist character, and we are not talking here about the connotation given in 1916 to this concept by Lenin as the Supreme Face of capitalism. The reconquest of territories, the struggle for the control of natural resources and the geopolitical recomposition of the military picture almost everywhere in the world seems framed not in the new imperialism, of which the British geographer and economist David Harvey spoke in 2003, on the contrary, it reminds us of the historical tendency towards the expansion of empires; from the early, anachronistic, and recurrent way of these to the primitive accumulation of capital.
The recourse to war is, from this other perspective, the recognition of the farce of the free market and, at the same time, of the failure of neoliberal globalization as a strategy of economic and political hegemony in the world.
Ending Europe’s dependence on Russian gas has become a definitive US strategy. War itself has become, like all wars, a great business. The United States forced Russia into war by pushing kyiv not to respect the Minsk peace agreements of September 2014. The aim was to gradually reduce the armed conflict by giving, among other things, autonomy to the population. Donbas Russian. The United States would have allowed the sale of Russian gas only if Russia paid Ukraine the US$2 trillion toll for the transit of Russian gas destined for Europe through the Nord Stream I gas pipeline. Operation of Nord Stream II across the Baltic Sea will not be permitted by the United States. The sabotage with explosives of the two Russian gas pipelines only showed the economic essence of the conflict and its corollary, the gravity of the situation.
There is no doubt: in the United States, the only free market, the only possible globalization or world order, remains the one that develops under their rule. They sold Ukraine millions of dollars worth of weapons and they sell liquid gas to Europe at four times the price of that sold by the Russians. The price of the dollar, as a result, moved several world currencies, which triggered inflation and soaring food prices globally. The economic sanctions imposed by Washington on Moscow seem like a sword in the water.
By denouncing what he calls the “neo-Nazi character of the kyiv government” and by standing up for the defense of the Russian population of Ukraine, Putin ordered the invasion of the Slavic country. He is done with the theoretical and historical speculations around this war. In his September 30 speech on the annexation of the republics or territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Jersón and Zaporiyia — a speech reminiscent of the Soviet socialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1980s — the head of the Kremlin unhesitatingly affirmed that for him it is a question of re-establishing historic Russia.
Back to dialog
Obviously, the past never passes, as the Nobel Literature winner José Saramago summed up so well before the University of Granada in 2005. […] Faced with war, the peoples of the world know it, repeat it, demand it: we must return to politics, even if it is discredited; we must return to dialogue, even if it is sometimes deaf. But to go from the economy by other means, those of the politics of a unipolar world to the neoliberal utopia of the self-regulating market, is, in other words, to go to the “factory of the devil”, of which Karl speaks. Polanyi.
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) believed that peace in Europe lay in its friendship with Russia. Unfortunately, this message does not seem to have reached the ears of NATO countries or the circles of power in the United States.
It is clear that, in their desire to maintain their national security, to have their history and their sovereignty respected, neither the Kremlin nor the White House will back down, and this, to the detriment of the paths of peaceful or nuclear exit.
Perhaps most enlightening here is to return to a phrase that says a lot about Russian temperament and character. This is the title of a famous movie from the 1980s: Moscow does not believe in tears. The problem is that the United States and NATO, with its record of invasions, wars and deaths, neither.