Friday, 28 February 2025
The End of the American Illusion
With Donald Trump in the White House, the political climate can change with the wind. The grotesque spectacle of the tangerine tyrant and JD Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (and him giving as good as he got) has revealed the truth of American power in its naked obscenity. What normally takes place behind closed doors was allowed to hang out. Or, to be more accurate, was contrived to be shown off. And with the huge wave of revulsion sweeping over a broad range of political opinion, swathes of the establishment here and in Europe have finally seen what the USA is: a rapacious, ruthless power. The jitters that Keir Starmer tried settling on Thursday among his base are well and truly back.
Liberal illusions in what the United States is about lie shredded. And the disgust among polite circles at Trump and Vance's behaviour will find a corresponding echo among the public at large here, in Europe, and in the US itself. The basic injustice of Putin's invasion plus the reams of friendly media coverage hitherto enjoyed by the Ukrainian cause will guarantee a popular reaction against Trump. But amid the disgust, I'm reminded of the hypocrisies of those elites who styled themselves as the "resistance" to Trump in his first term. What they found intolerable (abandoning the Paris Agreement, North Korean peace talks, moving the embassy to Jerusalem) were occasions for excusing, minimising, ignoring, and sometimes endorsing similar when it was their turn in power again. And so it is this evening. "The most disgusting thing I've ever seen" is the consensus liberal view, accidentally-on-purpose failing to remember that the previous administration shovelled money and weapons to a regime that livestreamed and boasted about its massacre of tens of thousands of people. Attacking Zelenskyy in front of the world's press was really bad form, as are tasteless social media stunts, but none of that is as damning as aiding and abetting a genocide and lying about it.
Therefore, while for some this might be an eye-opening moment that leads to a deeper understanding of US power and imperialism for some, most will put this episode down to the repugnant personalities of those who run the US. Once they're gone, everything will be alright again. Nothing structural going on, everything else is fine under the hood. Change the drivers and it will be a-okay. Theirs are not illusions discarded, but illusions suspended. Assuming the next set of presidential elections (if they happen) turf out the Trump crew and a new Democrat replaces him, the bulk of establishment opinion will go back to how it was before Trump took office a month ago. But this won't change the facts of US behaviour on the world stage. West Europeans, liberal media elites, and establishment figures are seeing the face the US routinely presents to the nations of the global south. And the truly shocking thing is they're now getting the same treatment.
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9 comments:
The worst thing about this is the sop to the complacency of controlling interests in the Democratic Party. They will believe that they can win another election based on offering nothing but empty platitudes.
It's the stripping back of all the comfy cloaking fabric that is so disconcerting. The US which pushed Ukraine into this for its own reasons, has now done a complete reversal and left Ukraine hanging. The new adminstration (sic) puts the blame square on VZ, with a sideswipe at Biden, and paints Putin as the innocent victim. Why? Because their 'interests' have changed.
NATO only exists because it was a key part of the US hegemony - allowing them to paint their dominance as a shared 'defensive' project, rather than an extractive, exploitative empire. Now they are pretending it was a favour, purely to help their 'friends'. For which they expect some sort of return. And , as they see it, Europe has reneged.
Orangino sees everything as a deal, where any weakness are an opportunity for upping his demands, and he always has to win - and be seen to win. Which means if you offer him something he wants, in a way that makes him look strong, he's happy to accept and be pleasant. If you try to bargain in an obvious way, pushing him for a concession, he gets stroppy. VZ made that error. He was provoked, but he didn't seem to realise that making Orangino look bad or weak is unforgivable. He was expected to grovel.
It's complicated by the fact that DT clearly sees Putin very differently from the conventional American government view we are used to. No longer a keystone in the Axis of Evil. Now, someone business can be done with. Which leaves Ukraine as a messy complication DT doesn't need.
It never ceases to amaze me that most of the Left seem uninterested in doing any basic research into the reasons for the eruption of the Ukraine proxy war. The decades long betrayal of solemn promises by the US and its European vassals to every post Soviet Union breakup Russian leader not to expand NATO membership (and NATO missiles) ever-nearer to its borders is ignored. The constant US led subversion, with bribary on a , colossal scale of local elites, colour revolution subversion of surrounding ex soviet states, is ignored.
The 2014 US funded and organised Maidan revolution coup, muscled by nazi militias, which overthrew the democratically elected president, is ignored. As is the ten years of shelling of the Russian ethnic minority population of the Donbass by those same fascist militias when the Donbass ethnic Russians fought the anti Russian culture extremes of the post coup government.
Decades long US led subversion caused the 2022 Russian invasion and subsequent Ukraine war. And bad faith by the West on agreements to end the war, Minsk 1, 2 And 3, and the Istanbul Agreement, has kept the bloodbath going. It is not necessary to view the Putin oligarchy as anything but a corrupt bourgeois capitalist class to see that it was overwhelmingly the US and its European vassals who bear responsibility for this bloodbath, not the Russians. Similarly, despite Trump being a corrupt US oligarch surrounded by far right libertarian capitalist oligarchs, on this war he has possibly provided an opportunity to avoid thermonuclear escalation in Ukraine. Trump and his faction want a war with China, not Russia, so we may get that thermonuclear war yet !
We need a quiz on when, who and how various European countries and the UK will fall in line behind the US. At the moment they are sending notes backing Ukraine for ever and whatever. Suppose they have to since they have spent the last 3 years telling their electorate that it could win, all that was needed was one last push or some new weapon.. Now Vance has told the US electorate the real state of Ukraine and our press is beginning to carry stories of a similar nature.
So European politicians will need to wean us off victory narratives to honourable peace to let us get behind the US peace agreement. How quickly can they do it and who will lead the retreat - Starmer the bridge?
Yes, all of that is the narrative which I saw pushed prior to February 2022 by writers who, it soon became obvious, were essentially doing PR for Putin - when much of that they had written about him was demonstrated openly to be false. Craig Murray is a name that springs to mind.
Try talking to somebody with connections to Ukraine. Unless you choose carefully to be sure of getting a Russian stooge, you'll hear a very different story.
I'm sure that Israel will be leaning on them to do exactly this. Putin will have told Netanyahu and friends that they won't get any more hypersonic surprises from Yemen, just as long as he gets enough of what he wants in Ukraine.
Anon here isn't a BBC reader, I guess (and further guess, based on their apparent enthusiasm for getting information from Vance, that they're one of Auntie's modern gutter haters).
That Ukraine is in no position to win the war any time soon comes as no surprise to anyone following the BBC coverage.
And whatever Trump's loathsome toady said about it probably isn't to be trusted any more than anything which comes out of the Orange One's mouth.
It comes as no surprise to read that someone who mocks others for lack of research trots out the favoured simplified tale of how it was all the West's fault that the patient and strategic Putin was obliged to invade Ukraine. Because, despite how much he hated the idea, he had no other option. It's easy to forget how he has a long record of heavy handed interference in a number of neighbouring ex-Soviet states, and satellite nations. Usually involving violence and destruction. And that the security of Ukraine was guaranteed - by Russia - in return for giving up nuclear weapons. The irony!
Admittedly if you assume the CIA rule book on geopolitics is the only one, then this argument has some footing. The Yanks have been interfering by funding opponents, bribing, corrupting, spreading lies, subourning, arming, and even staging coups for more than a century. Having set up the 'international rule based order' as means of softish power to manipulate others, they tended to resort to invasion only when all else failed. But 9-11 changed that, and invasion as a form of self-defence was the new fashion. Now everybody is doing it!
But. Just because the Yanks are hypocrites, and happy to invade when it suits, doesn't automatically mean when Putin does the same he gets a free pass. If it's wrong when the US do it, it is also wrong when Russia does. The real reason they invaded in 2022 was that they thought they could overwhelm Ukraine quickly, and that the West would just let it happen - like Crimea in 2014. The US had pulled out of Afghanistan and looked weak. Europe was dependent on Russian gas. It would be over in a month. Why the hell not!
Now the tale is that Putin is a genius who knew that he would win a war of attrition and gradually bring NATO down by undermining support and unity across it. He planned all along to get Trump in, and to fund the right wing resurgence that would shatter the EU and NATO. In fact, he got lucky and after the intial attack failed, found that his ability to accept huge casualties and find buyers for his gas and oil meant he could keep going despite all the problems it caused. After all, it was ordinary Russians who suffered, not him or his pals. Not so different from our comfortable elites with their motto - Let them eat kak.
I'm often struck reading this (very good) blog, and it's comments section, and others like it, that after many years of scholarship on both the left and right, and thousands of years of broader human scholarship, we're still generally unable to agree on anything - the left seems to find it almost impossible to articulate a coherent position that everyone can agree on, whilst the right is sometimes able to, but only for long before it fractures. I'm also aware that the internet, quite falsely, gives us all a greater sense of having a hand in human affairs than we actually have or deserve, and always amplifies the negative - had we had the internet during the clashes between ancient Greece and Persia; the Roman invasion of Britain, or the their withdrawal hundreds of years later, or the slow European colonisation of the global South, I've no doubt that these blogs and comments would reflect the same fractured sense of righteousness (no shade on this blog but on the medium/media as a whole). This makes me wonder if political perspectives are useful at all, maybe religions had it after all? But then, no. I'm left, as this blog sometimes is, with that fine medium, science fiction literature, and Philip K Dick's Valis exclamation - 'the empire never ended' (nor does it end). That's about as close as I can get to understanding world affairs.
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