Tulsi Gabbard doing her Trumpista left-right mishmash act - it's pretty much just "right" at this point - with economist Jeffrey Sachs. My first take on this video is that Gabbard is pitching an Old Right isolationist narrative in the tradition of the original America First movement, memorialized in this song by Woody Guthrie's song "Lindbergh":
"They say America First but they mean America Next."
Gabbard's show, Russia, Ukraine and Preventing Nuclear Holocaust with Jeffrey Sachs 10/18/2022:
Tulsi Gabbard on who the Real Warmongers Are
Gabbard at 14:35 in the video: "The Democratic Party is led by war hawks, warmongers, who are firmly in the grips of the military-industrial complex."
True enough, honestly. But much more true of the Republican Party. There's a difference between truth and half-truth, something particularly important to keep in mind with this Trumpista America-Firster type narrative.
"They don't know or care about the costs of war. And they certainly don't know who pays the price," she continues.
What was true of the America Firsters and Trumpistas old and new is that they are hardcore nationalists and militarists. The fact that they sometimes pimp pacifist-sounding rhetoric doesn't change that core orientation. It makes me a bit nauseous to share it, but here is a webpage from the rightwing, neo-Confederate Mises Institute presenting a rogue's gallery of Old Right isolationist advocacy, The Literature of Isolationism, 1972-1983 from The Journal of Libertarian Studies.
The classic text of this more-than-dubious school of thought is Charles Beard's President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948). Former President Herbert Hoover was also part of this tradition, as seen in the massive posthumously published Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (2011)
Gabbart proceeds to trash those well-known tools of militarism and reaction, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Yes, trolls, I'm being sarcastic!)
Gabbard and Sachs on the Russia-Ukraine War
Dave Troy, a journalist who writes for the left-leaning Washington Spectator, harshes on both Gabbard and Sachs in a Twitter thread. Bruce Wilson, a longtime critical researcher on far-right politics and Christian nationalism, joins in to amplify Troy's criticism.
It takes Gabbard 13 minutes before she launches in to defending Trump against "Russiagate" attacks. The corporate Dems did handle that whole issue fairly dumbly. But there were real and substantial issues with Trump's crew and Russia connections. See: Flynn, Michael.
Sachs uses the term "proxy war," which has become a bit of a propaganda touchstone with Russia saying it's a US-NATO proxy war and NATO saying, no, no, it's just about Russia and Ukraine. Splitting hairs over propaganda phrasing can be entertaining. But it's kind of frivolous here. I suppose since Russia is, you know, a direct combatant in the war, it's not really "proxy" on their side. On the US-NATO side, though, it is, whatever the correct propaganda terms may be.
The most important thing to recognize about this is that the after the internal conflicts in Turkey and Greece just after the Second World War, the USSR and the US managed to avoid any further proxy wars in Europe. They found other places for that activity.
After 29:00 in the video, Sachs states bluntly that the US committed to Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that if Moscow dissolved the Warsaw Pact, the US would never, ever expand NATO. That is simply not so. For one thing, the alleged agreement in question was about the unification of Germany, not about the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact. (Hannes Adomeit, Gorbachev's Consent to Unified Germany's Membership in NATO SWG 11/01/2006)
Gorbachev himself up until his passing earlier this year himself stated that this was not the case, even though he publicly supported Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The alleged agreement was that the Bush I Administration agreed not to station NATO troops in the former East Germany if Moscow agreed to German unification.
And the US held to that agreement. So did the USSR. But there was no formal agreement of the kind Sachs invokes. And neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw Pact have existed in decades.
Parsing the background of the war
I agree with the "realist" critics from George Kennan to Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer who thought NATO expansion was a bad idea. But we don't have to invoke a non-existing American agreement to think that. (In any case, that ship has long since sailed! But it is important in understanding the historical sequence that led to where we are in 2022.)
Sachs, on the other hand, says that the agreement he claims happen was "extremely clear." No, it wasn't. To the extent such an agreement existed at all, it was a fuzzy, non-explicit assurance that the US wouldn't expand NATO any time soon. And at least until the second Bush Presidency in the US and the ascendency of Vladimir Putin to the Russia Presidency, there was still some more-or-less serious notion by the US and major European nations that we could and should try to incorporate Russia into some kind of over-arching European security structure.
Otherwise, his description of NATO expansion is matter-of-fact. And he's also right to highlight the significance of the US intervention in Serbia/Kosovo in 1999 in US-Russia relations.
But then he misses a key part about NATO's 2008 Bucharest Declaration that he mentions, but he doesn't explain that it created the worst of both worlds on Georgia and Ukraine. It didn't start formal accession for Georgia or Ukraine, but simultaneously stated unequivocally that both would become part of NATO in the future.
Once he gets to 2014 and the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, he pretty much goes into a justification of Russia's seizure of Crimea and the invasion this year. I'm no fan of Victoria Nuland, who played a dubious role in Ukraine in 2014. But its at best a big oversimplification to treat the change in government in 2014 as a simple US regime-change operation.
This is not a straightforward to make in light of the fact that Petro Poroshenko, the man elected President in 2014 after the Maidan Revolution currently faces treason charges for allegedly assisting pro-Russian separatists: "A prosecutor has alleged Poroshenko was involved in the sale of large amounts of coal that helped finance Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015." (Petro Poroshenko: Ex-president returns to Ukraine to face treason charges Euronews 01/19/2022)
Current President Volodymyr Zelensky defeated him in the Presidential election of 2019. Poroshenko claims to be actively supporting the Ukrainian position in the current war. (David Brennan, How Zelensky's Presidential Rival Would Try To Defeat Putin Newsweek 08/02/2022) Brennan also reports, "Recent weeks have seen Zelensky's government dismiss top officials, citing alleged involvement with or sympathies for the Russia occupiers." So alleged Western control of Ukraine's government since 2014 has evidently been less than total. As I've noted here before, there have been strong indications that the Biden Administration sees Zelensky himself as a bit of a loose cannon on some issues.
Sachs says (around 26:40), "Biden has [just] played the Deep State game" on Ukraine. Sachs may be fuzzy on some things. But I'm assuming that he knows that the "Deep State" term has been pretty much exclusively a Trumpista one since 2016 or so. He adds, "I don't know who's really calling the shorts, frankly." After have just said it was the "Deep State" doing so.
Sachs borrows some phrases from the "realist" foreign policy narrative. But his own tale of how the Russia-Ukraine war wound up happening is superficial, to put it generously.
Couldn't they at least be a little bit substantive on nuclear war?
Ironically, even though Gabbert frames the entire discussion in terms of nuclear war and Sachs picks up the theme in a superficial way, neither of them mentions this:
In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country. Those assurances played a key role in persuading the Ukrainian government in Kyiv to give up what amounted to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads. (Steven Pifer, Why care about Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum Brookings Institute 12/05/2019)Some of the New Cold Warriors have argued that this was tantamount to a US and British commitment to defend Ukraine against any invasion. It wasn't.
But it's certainly a serious setback to nuclear nonproliferation efforts that Russia explicitly pledged in that agreement to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Every other country in the world negotiating on whether or not they should have or keep nuclear weapons will be very clear on the implications of this precedent: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and Russia invaded it and has been annexing big chunks of its territory. Stephen Walt argued at the time that it was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nukes. Would Russia have acted the same way since 2014 if Ukraine had an operative nuclear deterrent?
I've also pointed out before that both Iraq and Libya also gave up their "weapons of mass destruction" programs, though not as part of the Budapest agreement. And what happened? The US invaded Iraq in 2003. And along with France conducted a military regime-change operation in Libya in 2012.
Gabbard and Sachs talk about the nuclear war risk here almost as though they are scarcely familiar with nuclear deterrence strategies that have been the highest-of-high-stakes concerns of the US and other nuclear powers for decades. There's an awful lot more to this than saying, "Nuclear war, yikes!" The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been an excellent source for real-world discussion on this for decades and remains so today. It's not as though they pull their punches on nuclear war risk, just the opposite. At the time this was drafted, the lead story on their website is titled, Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you—and almost everyone else.
There has been a lot of actual critical analysis of the current Russia-Ukraine war. And that is something that is really needed.
But Tulsi Gabbard in this video is just carrying on the ugly tradition of rightwing isolationism, the America First mentality that is actually hardcore nationalism and militarism dressed up with superficial peace rhetoric.
Jeffrey Sachs himself would need to be the one to explain why he boosting Gabbard's particular project.
Dave Troy's Twitter thread provides several references on Sachs' apparently oddball political trajectory in recent years. This outing with Tulsi Gabbard doesn't speak very well for him, I'm afraid.
I wrote about Old Right isolationism in August, Paleocons we have with us always? America First isolationism from right to "left" 08/15/2022.
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