Ukraine, Russia, and American Empire

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Ukraine, Russia, and American Empire

This is a transcript of a presentation delivered in person as part of the 'Does Peace Have a Chance?' panel organized by Climate Reality Finland, Women for Peace, and the Finnish Foreign Scholars Forum at the Finnish Social Forum 2023 on 3 September.

1: Introduction

It may seem almost banal to say it at this point, but what we’ve been living through since 2008 is a multidimensional crisis of neoliberal global capitalism. From the global financial crash to the global covid pandemic, we’ve seen a wide variety of ‘morbid symptoms’, ranging from massively growing economic inequality and social exclusion, the waning of the neoliberal centrist parties and the rise of the far-right, and of course the growing centrality of the climate emergency.

Further aggravated by Trump, Brexit, and growing Western tensions with Russia and China, this crisis has made it increasingly difficult for the American state to maintain its unipolar dominance, sustain the neoliberal international order this dominance enabled, and confine imperialist geopolitics to advanced capitalist states’ policing of marginalized countries in the Global South.

But nevertheless, while the current regional conflicts in Ukraine and the South China Sea undoubtedly go beyond what was conceivable at the peak of the ‘unipolar moment’, they hardly signal a return to interimperial rivalry of the kind which plagued Europe’s ‘Thirty Years’ Crisis’ between 1914 and 1945. So-called ‘multipolarity’ remains a distant prospect at best, while American power retains considerable staying power. And indeed, far from any simple decline of American hegemony, what we’ve seen since the Russian invasion of Ukraine is Washington embark on a dual offensive – a dual offensive to re-establish the foundations of its informal empire in both the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions.

So that’s what I want to talk about for the next 20 minutes or so. My three sets of remarks will focus on the civil conflict in Ukraine, the Russian imperialist invasion this paved the way for, and the response of the American empire.

2: Ukraine

So let’s start with the civil conflict in Ukraine. As Volodymyr Ishchenko in particular has highlighted, far from consolidating free markets and democracy, the transition from Soviet ‘state socialism’ to neoliberalism after 1991 inaugurated a hegemonic crisis of political representation in the post-Soviet countries. In the case of Ukraine, this crisis unfolded within a geographically and geostrategically significant yet vulnerable and divided state, one prone to intrusion by foreign powers, often at the invitation of local forces. So as the USSR’s Russian plurality was transformed into large minorities within post-Soviet states, Ukraine’s ruling class – which was politically, economically, and linguistically divided – became split, split between its industrialized eastern regions (which leaned towards Russia) and a more agrarian and conservative western Ukraine looking to the US, EU, and NATO.

Within the terms of this regionalized class division, a neoliberal-nationalist bloc aligning the western Ukrainian middle classes and far-right fractions with Western states and multinational capital struggled against Ukrainian oligarchs instrumentalizing anti-Russian nationalism but ultimately dependent on Russian support to consolidate power. This intractable conflict produced a vicious cycle of authoritarian consolidation and Maidan revolutions, a cycle that has only deepened the post-Soviet crisis of representation and laid the basis for its growing militarization.

Far from challenging the material bases of capitalism and imperialism, the dynamics of Ukraine’s three ‘deficient’ Maidan revolutions have seen the growing equation of Ukrainian sovereignty and self-determination with domestic neoliberal restructuring, with radical-nationalist identity politics, and with the side-lining of military neutrality – basically the reconstruction of Ukraine as a ‘white’, ‘European’, and ‘de-Russified’ bulwark of the West.

After pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych’s last-minute refusal to sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement in 2014 sparked the Euromaidan revolution, the new government’s removal of linguistic protections for Russian speakers triggered an armed civil conflict with Donbas rebels, one that quickly internationalized into a geopolitical tug-of-war between the US and Russia. While president Petro Poroshenko’s governing ‘neoliberal-nationalist’ bloc was united by antipathy towards Russia and the ideology of Euromaidan as a democratic revolution supposedly mobilizing all Ukrainians against authoritarianism, the eastern majority initially favored greater regional autonomy within a more federalized Ukraine, one that would remain open to integration with Russia through projects such as the Eurasian Economic Union.

And following Russia’s relatively bloodless annexation of majority Russian-speaking Crimea in 2014, Putin declined to annex the so-called Donbas ‘people’s republics’ and instead pressed their representatives to sign the Minsk accords brokered with France and Germany (which, if implemented, would have seen Ukraine adopt a more confederal constitution). The post-Maidan government, in turn, became more dependent on the US, which sanctioned Russia, tacitly supported Ukrainian nationalist and far-right opposition to Minsk (now cast as ‘capitulation’), armed and trained Kyiv forces, and strengthened Ukraine’s ‘partnership’ with the US military and NATO.

3: Russia

So that’s the origin of the civil conflict in Ukraine as I see it. Now I want to turn to how this armed stalemate between local forces inviting Russian and American interventions ultimately paved the way for Putin’s invasion. And the main point I want to emphasise is that this invasion was part of an ambiguously oscillating double war – a double war waged by Putin against both Ukraine and NATO. Described by Susan Watkins in the New Left Review as one part ‘defensive gamble against the advance of US military power’, another part ‘neo-imperialist war of conquest or partition’, this ‘decisive escalation’ reflected both NATO’s status as an offensive US-led military alliance targeting Russia and the political restoration of Greater Russian nationalism that its post-Cold War expansion helped to enable. Facing no direct military threat from Moscow, Washington’s refusal to negotiate ‘helped to tip Russia’s defensive posture against NATO into an aggressive neo-imperialist one towards Ukraine’.

So while NATO expansion has most certainly been a factor in the conflict, it’s also hardly the case that Russia’s response to that expansion has been – at least as some on the left are arguing – 'purely defensive’. Behind the Kremlin’s realist rhetoric of ‘national survival’ lies a reactionary backlash against neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ and NATO expansion. As part of that backlash, a rapacious sub-imperialist power is seeking to secure the long-term interests of its oligarchic capitalist class by consolidating authoritarianism at home, by asserting monopoly control over annexed territory, and by repressing multiple uprisings in its periphery (in Ukraine but also in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus).

4: American Empire

Given this decisive escalation instigated by Russian imperialism, I now want to take up a final set of points by asking how has the American state adapted to the war in Ukraine? And I think the answer is by marshalling the growing chasm between Russia and Ukraine to advance its own long-term project of maintaining global hegemony. And on this front, I think it’s also fair to say that Putin’s invasion triggered a US-led mobilization of such remarkable scale and scope as to have been virtually inconceivable to those predicting the end of American hegemony. Despite its waning unipolar dominance, the American state has seized the opportunity afforded by the war to reassert its global pre-eminence, restart NATO expansion, and preclude the emergence of any future imperialist rival through a two-pronged strategy in Europe and Asia.

So, in the first instance, it’s quite clear that the US is less concerned with strengthening Ukraine’s security than with weakening Russia. By eschewing open confrontation with the Kremlin, Washington has set about indirectly guiding Ukraine’s war of self-defense toward a long stalemate. This strategy aims to prop up the Ukrainian military just enough to avoid a Minsk-style ‘capitulationist’ settlement, but not so much as to drag NATO into a direct war with Russia. And since this steering mechanism requires war rather than peace in the region, we’ve seen a near-constant demonisation of diplomacy, while Ukrainian sovereignty has been all but erased by the combined economic and fiscal-military dependency on the West required to continue waging what is ultimately an unwinnable war.

Turning secondly to Western Europe, the war has afforded Washington a convenient device for displacing bottlenecks within the Western imperialist camp over Ukraine. Both swift and dramatic, this reassertion of US imperial leadership is evident within NATO, where meetings of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group take place at the American airbase in Ramstein – which is formally under US sovereignty – rather than the alliance’s nominally multinational headquarters in Brussels. Gone are the criticisms of US-led ‘special operations’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, of the unprecedented arms build-up occasioned by the ‘war on terror’, and the unilateral termination of existing arms control agreements, while Europe’s political centre has decisively shifted towards Washington’s view that European leaders enabled the invasion by trading with and appeasing Putin. So, whereas France and Germany’s greater dependence on Russian energy, exposure to the effects of a European land war, and efforts to assert some at least limited ‘strategic autonomy’ from the US by avoiding escalation with Putin – whereas these had threatened to dovetail with Russia’s ‘defensive’ strategy vis-à-vis NATO expansion, today French and especially German capitlaism are in decline and there is no meaningful prospect of European states beginning the long process of decoupling from American structural power. This much is evident from how Europe has implemented sanctions against Russia regardless of the threat of blowback, substituted dependence on US natural gas for their prior dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and bolstered the profits of American arms manufacturers queuing up to benefit from rising military expenditure, most notably in Germany.

And it must be said that – alongside weakening Russia and ‘uniting the West’ (i.e., resubordinating European regional security to American global hegemony) – Washington is also using the military stalemate in Ukraine to enable greater flexibility in its efforts to ‘contain’ China. In this respect, the flipside of the ‘hot war’ in Ukraine has been a revival of the ‘pivot to Asia’ begun under Obama. We’ve seen the emergence of a new ‘cold war’ in the Indo-Pacific as Japan follows Germany by nearly doubling its military budget, as Australia joins the AUKUS trilateral partnership to purchase nuclear submarines from the US and Britain, and as the US expands its military presence in the Philippines and elsewhere while seeking to refashion Taiwan into an armoured bulwark against China.

5: Conclusion

So where does this all leave us? By way of conclusion, it’s worth reiterating that the origins of the war in Ukraine lie with specific class and regional dynamics stemming from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The growing internationalization and militarization of these dynamics paved the way for the Russian invasion, which in turn sparked a Ukrainian war of self-defence that is now being channelled away from a negotiated settlement as part of the American state’s wider strategy to reconstitute its global hegemony.

Alongside weakening Russia, this strategy has seen the revival of the transatlantic alliance. But the relationship between Europe and America is now much more lopsided. In 2008 the US and EU economies were roughly the same size, but the American economy today is over 50% larger than the post-Brexit EU, while Washington still accounts for around 70% of total NATO military spending. Analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations have even gone so far as to say that Europe is currently being ‘vassalised’ by the United States – turned into a vassal. Pointing to the EU’s lack of institutional cohesion, they predict that the US ‘will use its leadership position to ensure’ that the EU and UK ‘fall in line behind its China strategy’. In other words, EU aspirations for more ‘strategic autonomy’ have once again been unveiled as nothing but a pipedream.

As a small country bordering Russia, Finland faces the dilemmas posed by Europe’s ongoing vassalisation by America in an even starker form. While its drift towards NATO was permissible during the ‘unipolar moment’ of American hegemony in the 1990s and 2000s, the waning of this moment and Russia’s growing independence from Washington in foreign policy have transformed it into a recipe for disaster. Amidst growing rivalry between the US and Russia, Finland’s security looks very unlikely to be increased by the permanent military tension and souring of diplomatic relations that will inevitably flow from being NATO’s frontline country.

A world increasingly divided into rival military camps led by nuclear-armed great powers is not the way forward for humanity. Such a world cannot provide the basis for lasting peace and security or address the existential emergency of climate change. Today – more than ever – we need a strong non-aligned movement to challenge war, militarism, and colonialism, one grounded in independent working-class and socialist politics rather than neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism and capable of cohering mass support for peace, diplomacy, and disarmament against further escalations by either camp. If this revitalized anti-war movement cannot make itself heard in opposing the ultra-militarized imperialism of both the US and Russia, then there will be no independent voices left to challenge the death and destruction rained down by the dominant institutions of global capitalism.

Thank you very much.