WALTER L. HIXSON
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2022, pp. 16-17
History’s Shadows
By Walter L. Hixson
THERE IS NO DEFENSE for Tsar Vladimir Putin’s blood-drenched assault on neighboring Ukraine. But there is plenty of historical myopia and human rights hypocrisy, if not outright racism, in the U.S. reaction to Russia’s war.
Media cover a press conference given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 23, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Ukrainian president renewed calls for more weapons and other forms of support from allied countries as Ukraine defends itself from Russia’s assault. (JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES).
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States failed to seize a historic opportunity to do everything possible to forge closer economic, cultural and political ties with post-communist Russia. Even a new Marshall Plan for Russia might have been in order. Washington chose instead to promote neoliberal economic policies, which enabled oligarchs to amass wealth by plundering Russian resources. At the same time, U.S. security policy centered on the expansion of NATO, which since its creation in 1949 has served as an anti-Russian military alliance.
In 1997, the legendary diplomat George F. Kennan—the architect of the Cold War containment strategy and the preeminent expert on all things Russian—warned that NATO enlargement would inflame “the nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies in Russian opinion…restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations” and would be “a strategic blunder of epic proportions.” History has now taught us the bitter lesson that Kennan was right.
Since he came to power in 2000, Putin’s rage has been fueled by resentment of the provocative decision to expand NATO eastward incorporating several former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies. Hardly purely defensive in orientation, NATO has engaged in large offensive operations, notably in Libya and especially the former Yugoslavia. Both NATO and the United States—along with their ally Israel—promote militarism through large-scale arms sales and development of all manner of weapons systems.
Russia could hardly be indifferent to an array of formerly allied states being armed with nuclear missiles on the same borders through which it was twice invaded in the 20th century. Just imagine the U.S. response if a hostile alliance attempted such a gambit in Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean (recall the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis).
None of this justifies or excuses the brutal Russian invasion or the mendacious claim that Ukraine is part of Russia, but it does help explain the origins of the war and why most Russians support it.
Ultimately only a diplomatic solution—which if pursued more vigorously at the outset might have headed off the horrific war—can resolve the conflict. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex (the term may be hackneyed but the complex is thriving) is happily manufacturing weapons for Ukraine, while the Cold War adversaries arm to the teeth and face off with weapons of mass destruction. This situation is as scary as it is stupid, particularly in an era in which climate change, poverty, disease control and other pressing issues should be the top priorities in world affairs.
MEDIA MYOPIA
Compare the saturated American mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the war in Ukraine with the coverage of Middle East conflicts. Just imagine if Israel’s ongoing illegal and brutal repression of Palestine—the assassinations, massacres, illegal settlements, home demolitions, beatings and incarceration, including children—received remotely the type of around-the-clock media coverage and demonization of the aggressor, day after day for weeks on end, as we have seen in the case of the Ukraine war.
Well, you indeed need to imagine such coverage because U.S. national security elites and the MSM bow to Israel and its lobby in refusing to report responsibly the ongoing human rights nightmare in Palestine. What conclusions should we draw when U.S. national security elites and the MSM gloss over the repression and killing of brown-skinned Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and Yemenis while offering saturation coverage of the victimization of white, European Ukrainians?
Western media condemns Putin, and rightfully so, as a war-making dictator who has plundered Russian resources, amassed a vast personal fortune, and is a ruthless autocrat who silences criticism and dispenses with political opponents through repression and murder. Well, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) embodies these very same “qualities,” including waging the endless, blood-drenched war in Yemen, which has produced vastly more casualties than the war in Ukraine yet receives little coverage in the MSM. Meanwhile, MBS remains an American ally whose human rights violations are routinely overlooked.
The United States has a long history of bolstering the dictators that it likes and condemning and seeking to overthrow those that it doesn’t. The MSM, and thus most of the public, plays along.
A more even-handed, human rights-conscious, and conflict resolution-focused foreign policy would lead to fewer wars and a much safer world.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.
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