Harry Targ
“The United States and its allies are making preparations for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, officials said, as the Biden administration attempts to deny Russia victory by surging military aid to Kyiv while scrambling to ease the war’s destabilizing effects on world hunger and the global economy.”
“The decision to supply Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated arms such as anti-ship missiles and long-range mobile artillery — capable of destroying significant military assets or striking deep into Russia — reflects a growing willingness in Western capitals to risk unintended escalation with Russia.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/long-war-ukraine/
From the Cuban Missile Crisis Moment
The story published in the semi-official Washington Post on June 17, suggests once again that the United States and allied countries have no intentions of negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.
An alternative approach to
endless war, and/or nuclear war, is diplomacy and creating the environment for
negotiations with all parties to the Ukrainian war. And prioritizing negotiations means
“everything is on the table.” Great power confrontation between the former
Soviet Union and the United States over Soviet missiles assembled on Cuban soil
in 1962 may be an apt historical experience worthy of study. Studies of the
Cuban Missile crisis suggest several things:
1.Informal negotiations were going on between spokespersons from the Soviet Union and the US during the crisis.
2.Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, made compromises at great personal political costs.
3.President John Kennedy reluctantly agreed to dismantle a base in Turkey (that was obsolete).
4.In the aftermath of the crisis, with estimates of a 50/50 chance for nuclear war, Khrushchev called for “peaceful coexistence” and even JFK at American University endorsed tension reduction with the Soviet Union.
5.While JFK took another Bay of Pigs invasion off the table, Cuba was not consulted about the agreed defusing of the crisis. (Of course a US crippling economic blockade of Cuba remains).
And the Relevance for Today?
Among the lessons to be learned from the Cuban Missile crisis are the following:
1.Nuclear war has a high probability as long as “big powers” have nuclear weapons
2.Negotiations are an essential feature of conflict reduction even though the deep structures of global conflicts remain.
3.Both the Soviet Union, pulling the missiles out of Cuba, and the US, privately promising to close the Turkish base, facilitated ending the crisis.
Addressing the issue of Russian troop withdrawal, and even more so, stopping the violence have to be on the table for negotiations. Also, for sure, an end and reversal of the transfer of US/NATO arms must be on the table. In addition the issues of NATO membership, the EU, the autonomous regions, and Crimea would inevitably have to be discussed.
In my opinion the peace movement still must demand that the fighting stop, the arms transfers stop, and negotiations begin. Admittedly this is a long shot but what the US is doing now, the opposite, is precisely a recipe for disaster in Ukraine and the world. https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2022/05/on-graduated-reciprocation-in-tension.html
In the longer term, the peace movement should begin to map out a vision of what we used to call “a New World Order”. It should include a revitalization of the UN system that gives the General Assembly more power, addresses fundamental global economic and climate issues, and establishes a new global security system that does not give legitimacy to regional military pacts instead of UN mandated security arrangements. Revisiting the impacts of regional economic organizations on global economic justice, such as the European Union, should be part of such reconsideration. In short, this could be a time for reconsidering a broken system of international relations: military, economic, climate, etc.
Finally, militarism again is expanding in the US, penetrating every institution in our society. I self-servingly post a link to one example of this, the university. And it is convenient timing now that “Top Gun, ” a movie of high tech militarism is being shown around the country.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-militaryindustrial-academic-complex.html
