Previous Subchapter → 10.2o Possible Consequences
And it seems that some don’t realise the damage validating this precedent would bring, we’ve mentioned previously that a lot of so-called “anti-war” commentators have essentially encouraged appeasement to Russia, claiming that this is what will bring peace, and while some of them are genuine in these beliefs, others are simply adopting these narratives as excuses, like Richard Medhurst with Scott Ritter’s dubious legal arguments, with these people, the real reason they defend Russia is fairly obvious, geopolitics, they believe that a Russian power bloc would be a positive, as a strong counterweight to the US and the West.
And let’s be honest, we can understand why, in the last 2 decades, the era of the Terror War, Western interventionism has done immense damage, showing the world that Western influence isn’t such a rosy thing, the US has been far from a model country and its influence as the world’s superpower has been destructive.
It’s a country that has constantly preached about freedom, democracy and human rights while making those values into a laughingstock through its actions:
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Illegally stalking people through mass surveillance programs at home and abroad
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Sanctioning countries into starvation
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Waging aggressive wars
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And forming alliances with governments just as authoritarian as its enemies
The list of injustices is long and other NATO members have been participants in them one way or another, and many people are tired of it.
So there’s a certain appeal that comes with the idea of Russia being a strong power, able to say no to the bullies in Washington, but we have to ask ourselves, has Moscow shown us a better example for the world? Watching the war in Ukraine in real time over this past year has given us some insight, and the answer is no, this isn’t like the First Cold War, which saw a struggle between two very differing visions for the future.
This is a struggle between two sides of the same coin, Russia’s leaders don’t really represent an alternative to the American way anymore, if anything, they’ve emulated it;
Creating a crony, capitalist country, waging aggressive foreign wars based on lies, distortions, and victim mentalities
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3661134.stm
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https://unsdg.un.org/latest/announcements/russias-invasion-ukraine-violation-un-charter-un-chief-tells-security-council
and using creative terminology to deny the reality of their actions:
Just as the USA’s conflicts were renamed to avoid the legal need to seek a declaration of war from Congress, with the “Korean War” becoming the “UN Police Action” or the Invasion of Iraq becoming “Operation Iraqi Freedom”,
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the Russians have renamed their conflicts to dodge their own laws against aggressive wars, the Russo-Georgian War became a “Peace Coercion Operation”, the War in Donbas became an “Inter-Ukrainian Conflict”, and now the Invasion of Ukraine becomes a “Special Military Operation”,
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the Putin vision of the 2020s doesn’t look much different from the Bush vision of the 2000s, a vision of imperialism, undeclared wars and delusional saviour narratives, and so the results of that vision should be the same, failure.
Putin’s mistake was to see the defeat of the Bush vision as a defeat for US imperialism, when in reality it was a defeat for imperialism as a whole, that was his key mistake, and now he needs to learn his lesson the hard way. The US got a bloody nose in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now it’s Russia’s turn to get a bloody nose in Ukraine.
A genuine multipolar world, where everyone gets their fair share and a seat at the table, would undoubtedly be a massive improvement, but that’s not what Russia’s offering, the modern Russian doctrine is a step backwards, a return to the power blocs of old, and a return to imperialism, where smaller nations become client states, secondary to the wants of larger powers.
The Russians becoming a counterweight to the US is useless if they rely on the same tactics, the same suppression of independence and the same empire building desires, the hypocrisy of activists who claim to be anti-war and anti-imperialist while excusing Russia’s militarism are just as damaging as the hypocrisy of Western politicians, who lecture on freedom and democracy while supporting dictatorships in the Gulf.
If you trade US imperialism for Russian imperialism, what you get is imperialism, it might be different people suffering from different borders and different wars, with different countries at the top of the hierarchy, but it’s the same mechanisms with the same results.