The remnants of the United States’ moment in the sun as a relatively unchallenged imperial Western power will be buried in the Ukraine settlement. The upcoming negotiated settlement between US President Donald Trump and Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin – leading to an end of the war – will be a deeply symbolic “symptom of our times” – replete with danger and opportunity. The terms of Trump’s accommodation will, above all, represent a belated acceptance that the post-Cold War ambition to co-opt the international rules-based order in an attempt to construct “one world” in the image of the West must be committed to the dustbin of history.
New choices will be forced upon a chastened European Union, and Irish neutrality will emerge as prescient, progressive and a pointer to a new paradigm of autonomous European security architecture somewhat distanced from a US-dominated NATO, based on restored multilateralism, a reformed US Security Council, the Sustainable Development Goals, and mutual respect in a world that can accommodate many worlds. Progressives in Ireland can play an important role as the EU finally delinks from its dependency on a provocative and danger-laden US-led NATO posture as its default foreign policy. Ireland, could, for example, champion the restoration of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as the premiere platform for the development of a new EU security architecture that seeks to embrace Russia as an integral part of a future Euro-Asian space.
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will be painful for Ukrainians and unpalatable for NATO’s cheerleaders in the European Union and in Keir Starmer’s bunker at 10 Downing Street. Territorial concessions in Crimea and the annexation of the Eastern oblasts will signal a rewriting of the end of the Cold War and World War II.
Territorial concessions in the four oblasts on the Eastern border were not inevitable. In the Minsk I and II peace accords – or international agreements designed to end the war between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists – Russia had agreed to an offer of semi-autonomous status for the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts based on similar arrangements in South Tyrol.
A self-serving supremacist narrative scripted by the US Cold Warriors of the “deep state” [now being challenged by the Trump presidency] will be shelved and replaced with a posture of grudging respect for deepening security cooperation with the Russian Federation, a lifting of sanctions and a new trading arrangement. This comes as no surprise to informed observers.
The origins of the US posture can be traced back to 1990 and 1991 when its foreign policy elites embarked on a fatal delusion that it could operate without accountability as the “world’s policeman”. Their imagined world was one defined exclusively as “friends and enemies”, with a special badge of enmity reserved for those espousing neutrality.
James Baker III, then US Secretary of State who oversaw American foreign policy at the end of the Cold War, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Vice Chancellor, informed Russia’s reformist President Mikhail Gorvachev that NATO would not take advantage of the collapse of the old Warsaw Pact and expand Eastward. Instead, in the years that followed the US “deep state” drew up plans to contain Russia and use NATO expansion to deny it access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean with catastrophic consequences flowing from US interference, first in Georgia and now in Ukraine.
After the initial round of NATO expansion into Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1999, and into the Balkan States, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria in 2004, Putin turned up at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and delivered a famous speech in which he warned the US and NATO that enough was enough. One year later, former CIA Director, William Burns, wrote his infamous long memo to then US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, warning US decision makers about the destabilizing consequences for Ukraine and relations with Russia, including a possible outbreak of violence.
Not only did the US and NATO continue to pursue its “open door” policy of incorporating Georgia and the Ukraine, with all the risks of destabilisation that would inevitably follow, the US administration responded to the election of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – on a “neutrality” platform – with a CIA-inspired plan for regime change. The extent of the US interference is a matter of public record thanks to Julian Assange, exposed in a recorded telephone call between Washington’s Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.
The outcome of the so called Ukrainian war – fought as a proxy in the mistaken belief that the US could impose a final, fatal blow to the Russian economy and degrade its military machine – will further expose the hubris of Boris Johnson, who – acting on behalf of his masters in the US State Department – forced Ukraine’s President Zelensky into rejecting an early Turkey-sponsored peace agreement reached within weeks of the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have perished needlessly in the period leading up to the current round of negotiation.
With Ukraine’s de facto defeat in the battlefields of its contested eastern regions, the United States will be forced to step back from the notion that Russia can be contained and reduced to a second-rate power. The Russian Federation will command a new “respect” in a new “multi-polar” post-American international world order, enjoying significant support at the heart of BRICS – a new intergovernmental organization of the world’s emergent powers [Brazil, India, China, South Africa and others] who represent more than half the world’s population and close to a quarter of its GDP.
We’ll all emerge from the post-American landscape into a “multipolar” world, a more unstable world of competing powers and regional hegemons, with a distinctive set of new voices articulating demands from the Global South. This has already been illustrated by South Africa’s leading role in bringing in their Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip in proceedings before the International Court of Justice.
Ireland and its celebrated history of neutrality will be more important than ever, as NATO is exposed as America’s plaything. NATO and its European cheerleaders [including those within the current Irish Government parties] have been badly wrong-footed in their reckless agreement to act as subcontractors for the containment of the Russian Federation. In doing so, the European elites joined the UK in abandoning a quid pro quo for Russia’s agreement to the reunification of Germany: a promise not to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, including Ukraine. To grasp his response to NATO’s eastern expansion up to his country’s borders, imagine how a US President would respond to Russia or China establishing advanced military bases, including missile sites, in Mexico or Canada? This was readily acknowledged in high-level negotiations between the US and the Russian Federation during negotiations on the reunification of Germany, when Russia’s legitimate “security interests” were discussed at length and the notion of NATO expansion to the East was recognized for the dangers it would entail.
Much of what we have been observing since the rise of the American century in the wake of World War II and Britain’s decline has been a series of symptoms of what I have often described as a form of “Post Imperial Stress Disorder” (or “Pis’d” for short).
From the serial wars (from Korea, to Vietnam, through to Kosovo, Iraq, Lybia, Syria and Ukraine the US has been continuously at war since the onset of the Cold War), the translation of violence into a form of recreational pornography, institutional racism (within the prison system and police) and scandalous levels of poverty, through to the slow decay of US democratic institutions and citizenship as the corporate-arms-energy-Israeli lobbies turned the US into the “best democracy money could buy,” the long decline of the US Empire has long betrayed the symptoms of imperial overstretch.
The election of Donald Trump on the back of his car bumper sticker campaign motif, “Make America Great Again,” is a symptom, a symptom of a long decline and an inevitable reckoning with the rise of new challengers to American power and threadbare visions of democracy.
The Trump elections are expressions of a deeply contradictory populist denial of a new geopolitical reckoning. Behind Trump’s bluster is a set of new geopolitical realities that will force the country to abandon its starring role as the violent enforcer (outlaw-sheriff-policeman) of a world constructed in its own craven image.
The world will no longer be dismissed condescendingly as “The West and the Rest.”
Far from chipping away at Ireland’s “Triple Lock” and neutrality, the Irish Government must now commission a Citizens’ Assembly on a New Vision for Neutrality, to take account of the emergent new world order, and the contribution we can make to its peace, security and ecological sustainability. It is time to revisit Ireland’s role in the world, her unique contribution to human rights, efforts to press for a new international economic order [Sean McBride], and principled opposition to nuclear arms. A principled new vision of neutrality, along the lines suggested by President Michael D Higgins, must also integrate a new ecocentric understanding of our ultimate sources of security.
Behind the “deep state’s” US adventure in Ukraine has been a sustained attempt to Europeanize an aggressive posture towards the Russian Federation, in the hope that any nuclear war with Russia can be contained within the European theatre. European counterparts of the US “deep state” are taking up the baton, led by the hapless Keir Starmer, at great risk to global peace.
This makes the current EU attempts to fan the flames of the war all the more absurd, as they cannot or refuse to see that the European theatre is regarded as little more than a buffer for Washington’s historic game of risk with Putin. Several steps have made the prospect of a limited or tactical nuclear exchange in the European theatre all the more likely, with the US decision in 2002 to abandon the critical arms control instrument, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, designed to deter first strikes; the subsequent US decision to base new Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Systems in Poland, and the abandonment of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. For context, in 2022, in the context of exchanges over the future of Ukraine, the former US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, let the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, know in no uncertain terms that the US was ready and willing to place its missiles wherever it wants to.
Featured image President Of Ukraine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
