Ukraine is the latest neocon disaster

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.  The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).

Main message of the neocons:
US military domination everywhere

The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
    This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG)¹ written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement.² Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.³

Aware of fatal consequences

The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008.  They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance.  Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
    “[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “colour revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union – in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?”⁴
    Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement.  He quotes one expert as saying, “The Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.”  After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defence and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well.  Shades of the Crimean War (1853–1856), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
    Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence.  In addition to serving as Bush’s Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-–2017, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden’s Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.

False premises and disregard for reality

The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.  It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence.  Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated.  Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
    The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defence contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: “[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”
    The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise.  The West’s economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their “boomerang” effect on the rest of the world has been large.  Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s.  Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
    The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary⁵ consequences of war and sanctions. The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the US rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America’s faded military glory through dangerous escalation.
    Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity •

¹cf. https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf. Paul Wolfowitz was Undersecretary of Defense from 1989–1993. The partially released document “Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994–1999” dates from spring 1992.
²Cf. e. g., Shifrinson, Joshua R. Itzkowitz. Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion. In it, he cites various official documents and minutes of the diplomatic talks at the time, which have since been declassified, as well as official statements. https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/003-ISEC_a_00236-Shifrinson.pdf 
³see, for example, the statement by General Wesley Clark at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8ityb0Ips4 
⁴Kagan, Robert. “League of Dictators?” In: The Washington Post of 30 April 2006
⁵Stagflation is when economic stagnation (high unemployment and inflation) occurs simultaneously. (Editor’s note).

Source: https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/m6rb2a5tskpcxzesjk8hhzf96zh7w7  of 27 June 2022 

*Jeffrey David Sachs (* 5 November 1954 in Detroit) is an American economist. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He was Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University from 2002 to 2016 and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals from 2002 to 2006, advisor to the IMF, World Bank, OECD, WTO and UNDP.
    In the 1980s and 1990s, he was active in an advisory capacity for several states: from 1985 in Bolivia, from 1989 in Poland, from 1991 in Russia. Above all, the policy of rapid privatisation that he recommended earned him criticism.
    Together with the academics Heiner Flassbeck, Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis, Sachs published an open letter to Angela Merkel during the Greek sovereign debt crisis in July 2015, calling on her to reduce Greece’s debt and give the government there a long period of time to repay the remaining debt.
    Sachs is committed to extensive debt relief for extremely poor states and in the fight against diseases, especially HIV/Aids in developing countries. He criticises the WTO and the IMF because the donors of these organisations are not prepared to provide effective aid for the extreme poor.
    In September 2020, Sachs and others founded the Regenerative Society Foundation in Parma, Italy. The aim of the foundation is to “to promote a new regenerative socio-economic model with the objective of generating environmental and social benefits.”
Source: Wikipedia