Exaggerating the Russian threat serves the arms companies

Exaggerating the Russian threat serves arms companies

by Joe Lauria

Putin has neither the means nor the intention of attacking a NATO country. He is a revisionist, not an imperialist.

[This article posted on 2/26/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/welt/das-aufbauschen-der-russischen-gefahr-dient-ruestungskonzernen/.]


Ed. Joe Lauria is editor in chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe and other newspapers. Subtitle by the editorial team.


The media and politicians had unanimously condemned the interview by Tucker Carlson with Vladimir Putin even before it was broadcast. For example, The Guardian wrote:

“A spokesperson for the EU Commission said that the interview could be expected to give Putin a platform for his crazy plan to rebuild the Russian empire: 'We can all anticipate what Putin will say, I mean, he is a chronic liar [...] He is trying to kill as many Ukrainians as possible for no reason. The only reason is his crazy desire to rebuild the now imperialist Russian Empire, in which he controls all of its neighboring countries and imposes his will. But we in Europe and the world in the 21st century cannot and will not tolerate that.”

Under the European Digital Services Act passed last year, Tucker Carlson's interview could even be deemed “illegal,” The Guardian warns:

“The law aims to get illegal or harmful content that fuels violence or hate speech off social media. All the big platforms, except X, have accepted a code of conduct that helps them speed up and expand their internal procedures to comply with the law...

The platforms themselves are responsible for ensuring that their content is lawful, said a spokesperson for the European Commissioner for Digital Services, Thierry Breton [...] If a social media platform fails to comply with the new EU law, it can be subject to heavy fines or banned entirely in the EU.”
The Russians are coming – again...

Predictably, Western media condemned the interview for various reasons, including its alleged promotion of Russian “imperialism.” The Economist wrote:

“Putin's] obsession with Russia's historic claim on Ukraine is backed by nuclear weapons [...] He has denied any interest in invading Poland or Lithuania, but he said the same about Ukraine.”

Western rhetoric about a resurgent “Russian imperialism” began in 2014, when Russia supported the Donbas in resisting the unconstitutional, US-backed coup in Kyiv. At the time, Western politicians tried to portray the Russian action [in Crimea and the Donbas] as an “invasion” or “occupation”. It was part of Putin's grand plan to restore the Russian empire and even threaten Western Europe.

In March 2014, a month after the coup, Hillary Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. The Washington Post reported:

“If this sounds familiar, it's the same thing Hitler did in the 1930s,” Clinton said, according to the Long Beach Press Telegram. “Hitler kept saying that in countries like Czechoslovakia, Romania and others, ethnic Germans, native Germans, were not being treated well, and that was what made everybody so nervous.”

Later, Clinton tried to downplay comparisons to Hitler by saying Putin is not as irrational as wanting to conquer all of Europe. But the claim that the Russian president is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire and then threaten Western Europe is one often repeated in the West.

At the forefront of this was the Atlantic Council in promoting the idea of [Russian imperialism].

A restoration of the Soviet empire would mean that Moscow would regain control over the Central Asian republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and not least the states of the Baltic and the former Warsaw Pact that are now part of NATO.

Since the Russian invasion of 2022, numerous articles have echoed this tune, for example:

The Hill:

“The U.S. has a chance to defeat Russian imperialism for good“;

Foreign Policy:

“What history tells us about fallen empires trying to restore their former possessions.”

Salon:

“How Russian colonialism bamboozled the Western anti-imperialist left”.

[Ed. Large media in Switzerland and Germany often repeat it: If Ukraine (and the West) leave the Donbas region and Crimea to Russia, imperialist Russia will see this as an invitation to attack the Baltic states and Poland.

The same Western politicians and media make fun of how disastrous the situation of Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield supposedly is, or how, in the words of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Russia has to resort to washing machine parts to keep its military running. These contradictions make it clear how absurd the claim that Russian “imperialism” is threatening the West is: how can Russia be so weak and incompetent and yet such an acute threat at the same time?

“Dangerous demonizations of Russia”

The late Russia specialist Stephen F. Cohen has dismissed these fears as dangerous demonizations of Russia and Putin. Cohen repeatedly stated that Russia has neither the ability nor the will to start a war against NATO and is acting defensively towards the alliance.

This is evidenced by Russia's decades-long protests against NATO's eastward expansion (which Putin mentioned to Carlson). These protests began as early as the 1990s, when Russia was dominated by the US and Wall Street, which plundered the formerly state-owned industries for their own enrichment and plunged the Russian people into misery.
This is evidenced by Russia's support for the Minsk Agreement, which would have left the Donbas an autonomous part of Ukraine rather than unified with Russia.
It is also evidenced by the offers of negotiations with NATO and the U.S. that Russia extended in December 2021 to prevent a military escalation in Ukraine.

The West rejected all three of Russia's diplomatic initiatives.

While realists in Washington and Europe are beginning to admit that Ukraine may be losing the war, neoconservative ideologues are once again raising the issue of the Russian threat to the West. They want to use this to influence the US Congress, which is expressing increasing concern about wasting more and more money and lives.

The exaggeration of the Russian threat is notorious

The fear of Russia has served the US ruling circles [and the military-industrial complex] well for more than seventy years. From 1947 to 1949, there was no mention of a Soviet threat in the CIA's intelligence reports, there was no infrastructure that could have facilitated such a threat, and apparently there was no desire for a confrontation with the United States.

Nevertheless, in 1948 they began to stir up fear of war in order to save the US aircraft industry, which almost collapsed at the end of the Second World War.

Then, in 1954, we heard about the bomber gap and in 1957 about the missile gap with the Soviet Union – it is now common knowledge that these were deliberate false reports. In 1979, the then CIA director George H.W. Bush approved a project called Team B, the aim of which was again to exaggerate the alleged strength of the Soviet military.

George Kennan, former US ambassador to Moscow and the most respected Soviet expert in the US, always opposed such exaggerations, even in his later years, when he criticized NATO's eastward expansion.

Today, we are once again being fed a fictitious story about the Russian threat to the West in order to save face for the US and Europe – and to save Joe Biden's presidency.

But in fact it is a projection, to cover up their own imperialism and to turn a blind eye to the real threat felt by Russia.

Revisionism and imperialism

At issue is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revisionism. Western critics confuse the two terms out of ignorance or deliberately because it serves their interests.

The difference is this: an imperialist takes control of another country that does not want it and resists it. A revisionist, on the other hand, wants to regain territory that used to belong to his country, whose population is mostly of the same ethnicity and which welcomes the revisionist power as protection against a foreign threat.

Hitler was revisionist when he defended the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. But in his case, it was only a first step in an imperialist plan to conquer countries that opposed him.

Calling Putin's actions in Ukraine “imperialistic” is saying that these territories never belonged to Russia in the first place, and that Putin may then want to conquer other countries that Russia has never controlled – such as Western Europe.

Russian imperialism in Ukraine occurred 250 years ago under the reign of Catherine the Great. At that time, the Russians defeated the Turks and occupied an area that was then called Novorossiya. Putin went further back in history to assert Russian claims, and he openly expressed his sentiment that this area and Russia should be one. He also spoke about this in detail in his interviews with Oliver Stone in 2017.

Despite this revisionist or irredentist attitude towards Ukraine, Putin did not attack Ukraine until 2022. Carlson asked Putin twice why he did not invade Ukraine earlier if he thought this way. Putin avoided the question each time.

According to the Western media, Putin is lying when he claims that he defended the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas. His real goal was territorial expansion.

In fact, however, Putin's approach defended the Russians in the Donbas, who were suffering from constant attacks by Ukrainians in February 2022. At the same time, he saw it as an opportunity to reunite these areas of the old Tsarist Empire with Russia. The Kremlin saw this as necessary after the West rejected Moscow's attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically.

The four regional referendums in 2022 in the Donbas and the 2014 referendum in Crimea clearly show that the people of these regions – after the coup in Kyiv and the rise of Ukrainian right-wing extremism – preferred to be united with Russia.

You can condemn or criticize revisionism. But you can't call it imperialism.