War or Peace in the Trump Era: We need to build on the call for a new détente with Russia, even as we oppose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarianism and domestic policies

[Sukla Sen]

http://fpif.org/war-peace-trump-era/

War or Peace in the Trump Era
We need to build on the call for a new détente with Russia, even as we
oppose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarianism and domestic policies.

By Joseph Gerson, January 23, 2017

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has long been warning that
nuclear war is more likely now than during the Cold War. Now we face
the added uncertainty of Donald Trump taking our already militarized
government to new heights with increased military spending and by
stocking his regime with an unprecedented number of generals. We also
find ourselves in a hall of mirrors with a president who lies out of
all sides of his mouth and contradicts himself from moment to moment,
and who apparently is not on the same page with his secretaries of
state and defense.

Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are committed to ending the
post-war liberal democratic order, with Trump praising his new best
friend in Moscow while criticizing Angela Merkel as German elections
approach. Adding to the surrealism, Putin has joined Trump in the lie
that the Donald “won a convincing” election victory, and gold coins
emblazoned with Trump’s image are being minted in Moscow.

But, it is difficult to see into the future when Trump’s picks for
secretaries of war and state speak about the importance of NATO and
the need to be tough with Russia, while their boss challenges these
commitments. Yet, nominee for secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s
Exxon-Mobil has long sought an end to the sanctions against Russia in
order to open vast new oil fields. And then we have the right-wing
Republicans from John McCain to Max Boot and many Democrats committed
to investigating the Russian sabotage of the election, a break-in that
was more successful and damaging than Watergate.

We don’t know if we had a Manchurian candidate and now a Manchurian
president. Nor do we really know who will be leading U.S. foreign and
military policy formulation. Just last weekend we watched the rise and
fall of Trump’s ignorant and improvisational bid to trade ending
sanctions against Russia for a mutual reduction of superpower nuclear
arsenals. Trump supports spending for the trillion-dollar nuclear
triad, but he has been silent about the quadrupling U.S. military
spending in Europe, the deployment of U.S. troops to Poland, and the
presence of first-strike-related U.S. missile defenses in Romania and
soon in Poland.

Putin’s Ambitions

Putin is no innocent in an era when U.S., Russia and Chinese relations
resemble the rules of the games among Mafia Dons. To counter NATO
expansion and its provocative military exercises, Russia has launched
its own massive military exercises, deployed nuclear-capable missiles
to Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania, is about to deploy new
Topol ICBMs, and apparently has already begun meddling in the German
and French elections to unseat Chancellor Merkel and to promote the
neo-fascist Marine LePen,

This is a dangerous era with similarities to the period before the
First World War. The world is marked by rising and declining powers –
especially the U.S. and Russia – anxious to retain or expand their
privilege and power. We have arms races with new technologies,
resurgent and in some cases neo-fascist nationalism, territorial
disputes, resource competition, complex and increasingly fluid
alliance arrangements, economic integration and competition,
aggressive autocratic leaders and wild card actors, certainly
including Trump. These dynamics won’t disappear even if Trump and
Putin find themselves in bed together, along with those women of the
night whose virtues Putin has praised.

Although the U.S. elite – including Trump – remains committed to U.S.
“primacy” and is preparing vast increases in U.S. military spending,
the Russian elite remains scarred by the memories of devastating
invasions of Russia from the west by Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler.
But it is not all defense. Putin is committed to restoring Russia’s
20th century sphere of influence, if not its empire, whose roots trace
back to Kievian Rus, as well as restoring Crimea as Russia’s warm
water port from the 19th century. It’s no wonder that with NATO
expansion and Washington’s conventional, high-tech, and space weapons
superiority, Putin warned us three years ago that “If you compress the
spring all the way…it will snap back hard.” That snapping apparently
hit our political system when and where most of us were not looking.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev correctly pointed to the roots
of the current crisis when he castigated U.S. post-Cold War
“triumphalism,” the treatment of Russia like a “dismissed serf,” and
NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders despite the 1991 Bush-Gorbachev
agreement not to move NATO a centimeter closer to Moscow.

NATO’s Ambitions

You don’t have to embrace Putin to acknowledge that NATO was founded
“to keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in.”
NATO’s founding led directly to the creation of the Warsaw Pact, and
NATO’s recent expansion has been less than benign.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, once President Carter’s national security
advisor, argued that whoever dominated the Eurasian heartland would be
the world’s dominant power. To project coercive power into the
Eurasian heartland as an “island power,” not located in Eurasia, the
U.S. requires, he asserted, toeholds on Eurasia’s western, southern,
and eastern peripheries. NATO provides that toehold, he wrote, with
“vassal state” NATO allies making possible “entrench[ment of] American
political influence and military power on the Eurasian mainland.”

Despite his campaign rhetoric, this is not something Trump is ready to
surrender. The British press reports that Trump’s people are signaling
that Europe can either have the European Army that Germany and France
are planning in the wake of Brexit, or it can have NATO, but not both.

Beyond the ostensible goal of containing the Soviet Union, NATO made
it possible to integrate European governments, economies, militaries,
technologies, and societies into U.S.-dominated systems. It has
ensured U.S. access to military bases for interventions across the
Greater Middle East and Africa. And, as Michael T. Glennon wrote, with
the 1999 war against Serbia, the U.S. and NATO “with little discussion
and less fanfare … effectively abandoned the old U.N. Charter rules
that strictly limit international intervention in local conflicts…in
favor of a vague new system that is much more tolerant of military
intervention but has few hard and fast rules.”

It was the Ukraine crisis, which was not precipitated by Moscow, that
snapped Putin’s spring. Ukraine was (and still is) an E.U. and NATO
aspirant nation. Leading up to the Maidan revolution, Washington and
the E.U. poured billions of dollars into nurturing Ukrainian allies to
turn the former Soviet republic toward the West. Then came the
European Union’s ultimatum that Ukraine could take the next step
toward E.U. membership only by burning its bridges to Moscow. Eastern
Ukraine has been economically tied to Russia for decades and
religiously for centuries. As tensions built in Kiev, CIA Director
Brennan, Assistant Secretary of State Nuland – famous for her “fuck
the E.U.” disrespect of Washington’s vassals – and Senator McCain
journeyed to the Maidan to encourage revolution. When the shooting
began, the U.S. and the E.U. conveniently failed to hold their
Ukrainian allies to the previously negotiated power-sharing agreement.

From early on, the realistic alternative was creation of a neutral
Ukraine, tied economically to both the E.U. and Russia. Despite the
far right here in the U.S. (apparently including Trump) and Putin
seeking to undermine the European Union, creating a reunified and
neutral Ukraine could be one dimension of the Common Security
diplomacy that we should be demanding.

Since Russia launched its proxy war in eastern Ukraine, competing NATO
and Russian military exercises have ratcheted up military tensions to
the point that Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier
condemned last year’s NATO Anaconda-16 military exercises, the largest
war game in Eastern Europe since the Cold War, as “warmongering.”

In Syria, meanwhile, Russia’s murderous intervention should be seen as
a continuation of its Cold-War-era support for the Assad regime, as a
means to reinforce its access to the Tartus naval base on the
Mediterranean, and as a way to demonstrate its reemergence as a world
power and to chip away at declining U.S. Middle East regional
hegemony.

Both the Ukraine and Syrian Wars have brought us back to the nuclear
brink. Again, we need to worry about what might happen if a U.S.,
Russian or Polish soldier, in anger or by accident, fires an
anti-aircraft missile that brings down a U.S., NATO, or Russian
warplane. As the trilateral European-Russian-U.S. Deep Cuts Commission
concluded, “In the atmosphere of deep mutual mistrust, the increased
intensity of potentially hostile military activities in close
proximity – and particularly air force and naval activities in the
Baltic and the Black Sea areas…. may lead to miscalculation and/or
accidents and spin off in unintended ways.”

Putin said that he considered the possible use of nuclear weapons to
reinforce Russian control of Crimea. And now General Breedlove, until
recently NATO’s Supreme Commander, insists that the U.S. must enhance
its nuclear exercises with its NATO allies to demonstrate their
“resolve and capability.” Let’s not underestimate the dangers.

What to Do?

We can be hopeful and encourage some relaxation in U.S.-Russian
tensions. But, we also need to be on guard against the possible
creation of an authoritarian, racist, Christocentric U.S.-Russian
axis, which seems to be where Senior Advisor Steve Bannon may want to
take us. There is also the possibility that the pressures from the
Deep State, congressional war hawks, and Trump’s egomania and need to
dominate, could spark a major crisis if and when Putin takes
provocative actions or makes unacceptable demands. Either way, we have
to struggle for democracy and demilitarization and to prevent a crisis
escalating to the unimaginable.

This is a time to take seriously the recommendations of the Back from
the Brink report, which I am going to embellish slightly:

We need to build on the call for a new détente with Russia, even as we
oppose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarianism and domestic policies.
Places to begin would be nuclear weapons reductions, withdrawal – not
expansion – of “missile defenses,” and reversing the military buildup
in the Baltic region.

We should educate ourselves and others about the role of the OSCE
(Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,) “the single
multilateral platform on which dialogue on relevant security concerns
can and should be resumed.” Over the longer term, we can work to
replace NATO with the OSCE.

Although the Back from the Brink Commission called for restraining
nuclear weapons modernization, our goal must be ending the development
and deployment of these omnicidal weapons. This also means opposing
the $1 trillion nuclear weapons upgrade and pressing for the
withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. Negotiating
treaties to outlaw cyber and space warfare wouldn’t be a bad idea
either.

Finally, while it is not all that we want, we need to educate about
and promote a “common security” foreign policy. Common security
reflects the truth that neither a person nor a nation can be secure if
their actions lead their rivals to be more fearful. At the height of
the Cold War, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme brought together
leading U.S., European and Soviet figures to explore ways to step back
from the brink. Common security was their answer. As European friends
tell us, it requires that “the interests of others are seen as
legitimate and have to be taken into account in decision making
processes…[it] means negotiation, dialog and cooperation; it implies
peaceful resolution of conflicts. [And that] Security can be achieved
only by a joint effort or not at all.” This is how we won the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which functionally ended the Cold
War in 1987, and it may provide our way forward.

Much more will be required of us. In addition to the uncertainties and
tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, Trump has gone out of his way to
increase military and economic tensions with China. Millions of
immigrants and Muslims among us are under threat, as is the climate
and what remains of our democracy itself. The dangers are as great as
we know they are, but we also know that it is darkest before the dawn,
and that is we who bend the arc of history toward justice, peace, and
environmental sustainability.

Joseph Gerson is director of the American Friends Service Committee’s
Peace & Economic Security Program and vice president of the
International Peace Bureau. His most recent book is Empire and the
Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World. This
essay is adapted from a presentation at the conference “Challenging
Trumpism, Militarism and War” at American University, January 22,
2017.


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Peace Is Doable