The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

I hold no brief for Vladimir Putin. I never met him nor even visited his country.

I do know that he deeply distrusts the collective west and believes it is trying to militarily encircle his country. In this, he is at one with China’s leader Xi Jinping, and for precisely the same reasons.

I also hold no brief against the population of any western nation. In fact that is where most of my social and educational connections lie. I closely identify in many respects with “the west”.

But affiliations should not determine perspective. If they did, then the world would be a tribalised war zone of people unable to make objective judgments of principle across lines of identity.

And to make such judgments, we need to go beyond merely listening to what politicians (be they Putin, Biden, Macron, or Xi) tell us about themselves and about each other and look instead to primary sources like facts and figures, historical contexts and (most of all) our own experience.

And it is these judgments, applied objectively, which tell me that in his ongoing conflict with the west (long pre-dating today’s war), Mr Putin is broadly right, and the western world is broadly wrong – though neither is an angel or a demon, nor should be expected to be.

To start with, the background context of the western narrative, which is its deep-seated belief in its own intrinsic benignity, simply defies the empirical evidence of the recent and historic past.

In my lifetime, western nations have been intervening in some or other country without interruption. Of those, only the ones that successfully resisted such intervention (Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, now probably Syria) have remained basically intact, despite the crippling, inhumane sanctions that have been spitefully imposed on them often for generations afterwards.

And “sanctions” is simply a euphemism for economic genocide. According to UNICEF, around 500,000 Iraqi children died as a direct result of western sanctions against their country in the years before the war. A similar pattern is developing right now in Afghanistan, following the west’s exit.

In my lifetime, there has not been one single instance where western military intervention has improved the welfare of the people of a foreign state. It simply defies credibility to believe that that has ever been its genuine intent.

In fact, what has invariably followed western intervention is the reversal of policies protecting the state’s resources from foreign ownership and the emergence of new opportunities for western oil corporations and ‘defence contractors’ – once known as “mercenaries”.

And no benefit from these wars has accrued to the west’s own populations either, whose incomes and living standards have stagnated and become less equal since the 1970’s.

On leaving office, General Eisenhower warned that the corrupt relationship between politics, the military and big business would lead to a ‘military industrial complex’ with a life of its own and no concern for the citizenry. Even he could not foresee that the media would also be joining the party.

True to Eisenhower’s predictions, war has become a primarily commercial pursuit in the west, while the maintenance of dominance, rather than balance or respect for others, is the driving principle of its policy. The media then sells this policy by demonising foes and oversimplifying conflicts.

In this context, if we measure what Mr Putin says against what we already know about both recent Russian history and the ways of the modern west, too much of it rings true to simply ignore.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a weakened Russia desperately welcomed western investment and friendship. It disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance and expected NATO to do the same. It did not. In fact, despite assurances to Gorbachev that it would expand no eastward of Germany, it has continued to inch toward Russia’s borders.

If Ukraine (where a right-wing coup deposed the elected president in 2014) ever acceded to NATO, this could mean the positioning on Russia’s borders of weapons of such destructive capacity that the United States would never tolerate them being placed by another power anywhere in the entire western hemisphere. Understandably.

Similarly understandably, Mr Putin viewed his request for security assurances on this issue (which was unreasonably denied by the western powers and Ukraine) as a “red line” issue. In line with this, he made clear that the subsequent invasion was intended to “demilitarise” Ukraine, degrading its military capacities, rather than occupying its cities.

Yet if we are to believe the narratives being spun by western media, his failure to capture all the cities is evidence of “poor execution”, while successful attacks on military facilities near the Polish border (known entry points for NATO-supplied weapons) are mere “outrages”. Yet both these developments precisely support Mr. Putin’s narrative and precisely negate the western media’s.

Further, according to western media and military sources, Russia has lost four generals and over 7,000 soldiers in this war. This dwarfs the “at least 816” Ukrainian civilians estimated to have died through the 17th of March by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In the Iraq war, 185,000 civilians died, as against 5,000 US soldiers. This contrast, immensely in Mr Putin’s favour from a humanitarian perspective, also supports his assertion that he is not there to attack civilians, but to destroy military hardware, armaments and other “hard targets” - which of course fight back, unlike Iraqi wedding parties.

While these observable facts undermine western media narratives about Mr Putin’s objectives, others clearly support his assertion that he is achieving them.

The first and most obvious of these is that Mr Zelensky, having refused to rule out joining NATO in the run up to this war, now frantically offers to do so if the Russians would call off their invasion.

The second is the reaction of western leaders themselves, which range from the desperate to the hysterical. Imagine a “winning side” so desperate for friends in this dispute that it is suddenly courting Nicolas Maduro, a man it was attempting to overthrow and allegedly even kill just a year ago. This is not the reaction of a confident rival to a “failing” opponent.

And Mr Biden is now even urging China to take the side of the west in this dispute.

But China didn’t get to be 5,000 years old by being stupid. It is fully aware that it is western nations (located thousands of miles away) that have bullied, attacked, partitioned and threatened it dozens of times in the last two centuries, rather than Russia, with which it shares a 3,000 mile border, yet has had only one serious skirmish.

Indeed, Chinese leaders frequently remind sanctimonious western politicians that their first interaction was when a western power (Britain) invaded it in 1839 to “defend” its citizens’ right to get addicted to British-supplied opium, which the Qing dynasty had the sheer temerity to ban.

With such historic memory, we can safely assume that China remembers that distant year of 2021, when it was the designated target of a new strategic alliance of Australia, Britain and the USA, involving advanced nuclear attack submarines.

Who do you think China supposes will be next in line after it helps the usual suspects “isolate” Russia?

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

March 20, 2022.