America, don’t encourage the war in Ukraine
Living through apartheid South Africa as one of apartheid’s beneficiaries has left me humbled by just how wrong a dominant narrative can turn out to be. And also aware of how the people inside such narratives rarely question them.
This is true of the dominant western narrative about Ukraine and Russia — the narrative pushed by the Biden administration, the Democratic party, most of the Republican party, and the American media. The mainstream western narrative claims that this war is being driven by a demented Vladimir Putin, the evil big-man who needs to be removed — and his country permanently weakened — for there to be peace.
From my perch at the bottom of the Global South, this sounds all too much like the familiar American narrative that reduces any country America wishes to attack to its evil and mad leader. Saddam Hussein was mad and evil, and so Iraq had to be invaded. Assad was mad and evil and so had to be regime changed. Moammar Gaddafi was mad and evil, and so Libya had to be destroyed by NATO. And now it is Putin’s turn to be the justification for obscene levels of expenditure on the American perpetual war machine.
But there’s another narrative. Most of the governments in the Global South reject the west’s sanctions against Russia, and its supply of increasingly lethal weaponry to Ukraine. As Uganda’s foreign minister Abubaker Jeje Odongo said, “We were colonized, and we forgive those who colonized us. Now the colonizers are asking us to be enemies with Russia, who never colonized us. Is that fair?”
Europe, India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar has said, “has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” This is equally true of the United States.
Some Americans have challenged the narrative as well. They’ve noted that the American push to extend NATO into Ukraine has long been a bright red line for Russia and that this war did not start with the Russian invasion but with the American-sponsored coup of 2014, and the attacks by Ukrainian forces, including the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, against the Russian elements of what was Ukraine. But they are minor voices.
In 2022 the Ukrainians demanded and got M777 howitzers and javelin anti-tank and stinger anti-aircraft missiles from the west, to supplement their 2600 tanks and newly donated ones from Eastern Europe. They lost territory in the East and South and lost thousands of soldiers in battle.
Now in 2023, they have demanded and may get 800 western tanks and some fighter jets. Their losses continue to mount as they lose more and more territory. Where does this “for as long as it takes” strategy lead us?
Just consider how much “mission creep” the citizens of the west have been fed so far. As the British historian Geoffrey Roberts has observed, Putin has not responded to the west’s massive support for Ukraine, but he may be pushed into it. He may, for example, take out Nato’s surveillance systems that help Ukraine hit Russian targets.
“Such actions by Putin would be shocking to those western decisionmakers who have become accustomed to the idea that only they can act with impunity when it comes to escalating the Ukraine war,” Roberts said. “As Putin creeps closer to some kind of military victory in Ukraine, the voice of those urging western restraint will be needed more than ever. The more territory Ukraine loses, the more casualties it incurs, the greater will be the West’s temptation to take yet another escalatory step towards allout war with Russia.”
Mindful that Russia sees the arming of Ukraine by NATO as an existential threat, and that if Russia believes its existence is threatened, it may resort to nuclear war, it is time to consider again the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s concept of pluralism — and the accomodations it requires.
“Different cultures have different ideals,” he said. “These ideals are ultimate values for these cultures. They are not the same. But if I have enough cultural empathy, … (for) what the centre of gravity of a culture is, then I understand why people in those circumstances pursue the goals they do.” People who insist on their absolute political ideals are “idolatrous barbarians.”
It is time also to allow that other nations have legitimate security concerns. America felt threatened by the Soviet missiles placed in Cuba in 1962, risking nuclear war to have them removed. Your country would do that again today. Russia feels similarly threatened by the extension of NATO to Ukraine, and launched a (so far) conventional war to remove that influence.
It is my prayer that rather than continue to encourage Ukraine to keep fighting, and continuing to arm its military, the American administration will convince Ukraine to negotiate a peace with Russia that recognizes its legitimate security concerns. This will not be possible with the current mindset that the war must continue for “as long as it takes” for Russia to be defeated, and the west’s continuous funding of Ukraine’s demands for more weapons and more aid.
Given the immense destruction already, and the real prospect of nuclear war, I pray that the Americans are seized more by the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, and less by that of John Bolton, and that a peace deal can be signed, and the killing stopped.