[When we think about our latest war — the one that began with
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a hidden benefit. As long as
American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary
climate disruption. ]
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LIVING ON A WAR PLANET  
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David Bromwich
August 29, 2023
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ When we think about our latest war — the one that began with the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a hidden benefit. As long as
American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary
climate disruption. _

A boy looks at dust rising from the site of airstrikes in Saada,
Yemen, on February 27, 2018. , Naif Rahma / Reuters

 

A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war — the one
that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after
our Afghan War ended so catastrophically — there is a hidden
benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking
about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction
obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called
_displacement. _An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the
substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to
avoid.

Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s
latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another
function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires
which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state
of Alabama and 1,000 of which
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are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is
always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a
“contained” to a nuclear war
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as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly
assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under
careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir
Putin) and — thanks to both the U.S. and NATO — a great many good
people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?

A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they
believe, is the “good war
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people like them have been searching for since 1945. “This is our
Spain,” young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the
Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s,
unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not
falter but will go on “as long as it takes.” Also, the climate
cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier
of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from
both.

That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of
Russia’s Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed
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disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign
minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks
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to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation.
The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable
mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed
its own
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invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a
February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh traced the attack
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to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his
conclusion by assigning credit
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to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting
on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped
is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war
are now estimated at nearly half a million
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with no end in sight.

The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within
the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage
on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism,
causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet.
According to a report
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in _Forbes, _“The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases… was
equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark’s annual emissions
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but
the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is
“unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing
cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO,
always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years
from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider
the look of such a policy to the country –- no longer Communist and
barely a great power — which, in 2013, American leaders again began
to describe as an adversary. 

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that
gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the
alliance accelerated
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dramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former
members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004
witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR:
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia,
all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest
Summit [[link removed]]
Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of
state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for
membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his
advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia,
look at a map
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COUNTERFEIT SOLIDARITY

The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of
weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to
work the interoperable targeting
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equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022,
NATO drilled
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at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of
warfare. In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily
from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks
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(whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon
of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs
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and most recently the promise of F-16s
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All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers
of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May
2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden
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personally for his kindness. F-16s
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after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that
ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground
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by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.

Wars and their escalation — the mass destruction of human life that
is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world
— happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to
the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on. That was
certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation
that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not
the exception in time of war.

Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to
the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary
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_The Day After Trinity, _the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober
analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb:

“Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say:
it’s almost inevitable that it would have happened — simply
because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it.
The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big
airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could
operate. The whole machinery was ready.”

In the same sense, all the apparatus was in place for the war in
Ukraine. Joe Biden, a conventional cold warrior, has always had a
temperament rather like that of President Harry Truman. The Biden of
2023, like the Truman of 1945, comes across as impulsive, not
deliberate. He likes to pop off, thinks he is appreciated for taking
risks, and fancies himself particularly good under pressure. This
state of mind partly accounts for his decision to label Vladimir Putin
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criminal”: never mind that such a description would apply with equal
truth to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for launching the invasion of
Iraq in 2003 — a war that Biden, as chair of the Senate foreign
relations committee, supported
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unreservedly. His insistence that “this man [Putin] cannot remain in
power for god’s sake” and his belief
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(as of mid-July 2023) that “Putin has already lost the war”
exhibit the same pattern of effusive moralism accompanied by a denial
of inconvenient facts.  

A different perspective was offered by Anatol Lieven at the
Responsible Statecraft website
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“We are repeatedly told
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that the war in Ukraine is a war to defend democracy and help secure
it across the world. Our American, French and British ancestors (and
even the Russians, from March to October 1917) were also told the same
about the Allied side in the First World War. It did not quite work
out that way, and nothing guarantees that it will happen that way in
Ukraine.”

In the case of Ukraine, such false hopes have been pushed far more
freely by the media than by the military. War is a drug, and they have
chosen to be the dealers. 

THE MEDIA AIRBRUSH

War propaganda can be delivered in picturesque as well as popular
ways. A prime example of the former approach was Roger Cohen’s
August 6th front-page _New York Times_ story, “Putin’s Forever War
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based on a recent visit. (“I spent a month in Russia.”) The
apologetic intent here is underscored in the headline, which picks up
an epithet once applied to the disastrous American wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq and slyly transfers it to Russia. The coverage is all in the
same key, over six full pages of the paper _Times_, bulked out with
color photographs of cheerleaders, churches, dank stairways, military
processions, statues, tombs, and models on a fashion shoot.

From the start, Cohen adopts the voice of a prophetic observer of a
new war, even as he makes it sound a good deal like the old war with
the Soviet Union. “Along the way,” he writes,

“I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn
patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus_,_ far
from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of
subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state
television, the old Putin playbook — money, mythmaking and menace of
murder — has just about held.”

The name Putin appears with great regularity as the article proceeds,
doing extra duty for the historical analysis and exposition that are
mostly absent.

“I first visited Moscow,” writes Cohen, “four decades ago, when
it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the
penury of Communism.” But Moscow has changed and the reason is
Putin: “He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also
modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past
unbroken.” So here, as in many Western accounts, the problem turns
out to be not just Putin but the fact that he _embodies _a backward,
naturally vengeful, country and its irretrievable past. The people of
Russia are lost and — a few courageous dissidents excepted — they
are given over to primitivism, hopeless nostalgia, and of course
aggression. Putin is their epitome.

He “governs from the shadows” — no point in skipping the vampire
trope — “unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no
cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery
has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches
all.” There is, in other words, a cult of personality without either
the personality or the display that belong to such a cult: “Putinism
is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish
Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox
Church with the spread of broken families.” It did not take a month
in Russia to write those sentences. A day at the _New York Times_
would have sufficed.

The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero
of this story. Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between
2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds
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to the _New York Times_, the sixth of which focused on climate change
and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms
race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush’s decision to
withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin
called
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a “mistake”) and Donald Trump’s similar decision to pull out of
the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that
Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden
administration’s virtual severance
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of diplomatic relations with Russia?

In an October 25, 2018, op-ed, Gorbachev summed up the American
tendency throughout the preceding two decades: “The United States
has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of
international treaties and accords that served as the underlying
foundation for peace and security following World War II.” Notice
that the bellicose American “initiative” began well before the
ascent of Vladimir Putin and, according to Gorbachev, it possessed —
like the expansion of NATO — a dynamism that operated independently
of developments inside Russia.

RETURN TO EARTH

The major news of the summer, besides the apparent lack of success
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of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, has been Russia’s sudden
cancellation of the Black Sea grain deal
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in some measure by a July 17th Ukrainian drone attack
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on the Kerch Bridge. This is the bridge that has served to connect
Russia to Crimea, after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014; and
the drone strike was part of a  continuing Ukrainian-NATO effort
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to undermine — by sanctions, among other means — Russia’s export
of its own grain. A typical Western media
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report about these developments in the _Washington Post _declined to
associate the two events; as if the Ukrainian attack had occurred by
coincidence just “hours before” the Russian termination of the
deal and its own attacks
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on Ukrainian grain storage facilities. The events are referred to as
“twin developments,” and that is all.

In a recent article [[link removed]] at
_TomDispatch_, Michael Klare recalled the public shame that never
properly attached to U.S. energy companies for “_choosing_ to
perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global
devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives
of the ExxonMobil Corporation — the world’s largest and wealthiest
privately-owned oil company — to continue pumping oil and gas for
endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of
global warming.”  

Such environmental indifference, as Klare rightly notes, persisted
long after the reality of climate disruption was recognized by the
polluters. No less irresponsible has been the _choice_ to perpetuate
the war habit even as we recognize the inseparable role wars have
always played in the destruction of the planet. The Ukraine war was
launched by Russia in an exertion of brutal short-term opportunism,
but it was also provoked by the United States as one of a long series
of wars and regime-change operations that were meant to give the U.S.
uncontested leadership of a unipolar world.

All of us now inhabit a war planet threatened in other devastating
ways as well. Our escape will not be achieved through a
new “norms-based
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international order in which NATO, with the U.S. at the helm, replaces
the United Nations as the global authority presiding over war and
peace. The “next war on the horizon,” whether in the Baltic Sea,
the Persian Gulf, or Taiwan, is a matter of grave interest to the
citizens on all those horizons who may want anything but to serve as
its field of exercise. Meanwhile, the lesson for the United States
should be simple enough: the survival of the planet cannot wait for
the world’s last superpower to complete our endless business of war.

Copyright 2023 David Bromwich

DAVID BROMWICH, a _TomDispatch_ regular
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is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, _On Empire,
Liberty, and Reform_, has written on the Constitution and America's
wars for _The New York Review of Books_ and The Huffington Post and is
the author of _American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell
Us
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_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, _Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel _Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s _A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s _In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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John Dower’s _The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
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_and Ann Jones’s_ They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* Russian Invasion of Ukraine; US Military Industrial Complex;
Ukraine; Putin;
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