Sunday, March 19, 2023

Tom Palley on the Causes and Consequences of the War in Ukraine

 By Thomas Palley

(1) The origins of the Ukraine conflict lie in the ambitions of US Neocons. Those ambitions threatened Russian national security by fuelling eastward expansion of NATO and anti-Russian regime change in the Republics of the former Soviet Union.

(2) The Ukraine conflict is now a proxy war. The US is using Ukraine to attack and weaken Russia.

(3) Russia will eventually prevail. We may already be approaching “game over” because Ukraine’s forces have been eviscerated. Ukraine is now press-ganging military conscripts in Kiev and Lviv.

(4) Once Russia imposes its will, the US will be forced to step back but it will have achieved its strategic goal of weakening Russia and separating Western Europe (especially Germany) from Russia.

(5) Ukraine will be effectively destroyed. It will be half-occupied by Russia; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have died; millions will have fled; and the Ukrainian Nazis will be in charge of what is left.

(6) We have all been played by the Biden administration and the US Neocons.

The biggest losers are the ordinary people of Ukraine. They were cheated by the US Neocons of the possibility of a peaceful accord with Russia.

But we have all lost, especially Western Europe. Higher inflation and energy prices today; lost future economic opportunities; a worsened outlook for climate change; a dangerously deteriorated global security outlook that includes risk of nuclear war; and renewed militarism that will disfigure our societies for decades to come.

(7) Western Europe’s political elites are deeply culpable for their venal capitulation to US Neocon pressures.

(8) The US is guilty of provoking the war. But it will never be charged because this is a proxy war and it tacitly controls the International Court in The Hague.

Published originally here.

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