Nigel Farage may be an archetype for the political right, but he stood up for a view shared by the opposite end of the political spectrum, when he claimed that NATO is responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Various commentators of the left, including Benjamin Abelow, various left-wing newspapers, Noam Chomsky, and most prominently John Mearsheimer, have repeated the insistence that the West is responsible for the Ukraine-Russia war. Their contention, which is initially worth considering, is that NATO expansionism threatened Russian security, leading Putin to strike aggressively and prematurely out of self-defence.
This displacement of responsibility onto the West is becoming a staple of the political discourse regarding the war, with mostly centrist and liberal platforms maintaining that Putin bears the greater responsibility. The problem, however, is that this ‘moral masochism’ of the left is disingenuous, and if we (the left) are to provide practical solutions, the situation must be critically reassessed according to three points: Firstly, the contradictions in Russia’s justifications for the war. Secondly, Russian aggression preceding NATO expansion towards Ukraine, and thirdly, the questionable validity of any ‘pre-emptive strike’ argument.
Firstly, figures on both sides of politics insist that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was purely pre-emptive, acting as a defence against the threat of a potential NATO country on their border. Yet a brief glance at the shifting justifications of Putin and his advisers reveals the fault in this insistence. The widely influential patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, makes no appeal to geopolitical concerns when he argued that military actions towards the West constitute a ‘holy war’ and are justified by ‘inexcusable’ Western decadence: allowing the open expression of homosexuality is, for example, a transgression against the absolute ethical order which the Orthodox Church submits to. Yet any appeal to an ethical absolutism is reversed by Alexander Dugin, ‘Putin’s brain’, who instead reasons that “postmodernism teaches us” that there are no absolute truths, but rather relative truths, and that the West must accept the ‘Russian truth’ which ultimately justifies the invasion.
At the same time, Putin has on several occasions insisted that the invasion is justified by historical standards (that Ukraine ‘truly’ always belonged to Russia) and that the invasion returns things to how they should be. These mutually contradicting justifications reminds us of Freud’s famous kettle-joke: upon returning a broken kettle to his neighbour, a man is asked to explain the damage, to which he replies with a string of contradictory justifications. ‘The kettle was undamaged when I returned it’, ‘The damage was in fact there when I borrowed it’, and ‘I never even borrowed your kettle’. By themselves, these justifications might make sense, but taken together, they reveal the man’s evident disingenuousness. The ‘pre-emptive strike’ argument is precisely such an explanation, which cancels itself out when posited alongside another series of contradicting justifications.
Secondly, if the invasion was purely a result of NATO expansion towards Ukraine, what are we to make of the mounting aggressive rhetoric of Russia towards its neighbours which preceded Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO. As Georgetown University historian Gregory Afinogenov has pointed out, “NATO has no more devoted accomplice than Vladimir Putin”. Putin’s aggressive tactics and insistence on a unification of historically Russian populations has led many political leaders and voters to see in NATO, despite its many flaws (which will be returned to), a potential safe space. A decade ago, a minor percentage of the Ukrainian population supported a NATO membership, yet with Putin’s military activity since the annexation of Crimea (2014), a majority now support joining NATO. Ultimately, the causality between NATO membership and Russian aggression must be reversed: it is not merely a case of defensive military action following a perceived threat of the ‘Westernisation’ of Eastern European countries, but of appeals for NATO aid in the face of Putin’s overarching wish for a ‘Russification’ of Belarus and Ukraine. This being said, NATO is far from an innocent organisation, yet the duty of the left is to continually reconsider its presuppositions, and to learn to criticise freely, which brings me to the third point.
NATO is by no means an organisation which should be romanticised. Its foreign policy, as many dissident sources have demonstrated for decades, has often thinly veiled a desire for economic hegemony, and it has often intervened directly with military action or indirectly by funding in democratically elected regimes which threatened Western power. In many cases, as figures such as Chomsky have exposed, the justification used by NATO countries was of a pre-emptive attack such as the 1998 bombing by the Clinton administration of the Khartoum pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, under the suspicion that they may be developing chemical weapons., in the name of security and to avoid potential future threats. The pre-emptive strike argument is almost always insufficient and should, as many have done already with the West, be criticised. Yet by a simple inference, when it is inexcusable for one economic bloc (the West) to use this justification, it is equally as inexplicable for another one (Russia) to use it.
The left’s responsibility is to criticise unjust acts of political and institutional aggression. The responsibility for these has many times fallen on the West, yet if the West is a ‘monster’ in the eyes of the left, it must be admitted to not being the only monster. In the case of Ukraine, there are only contradictory reasons for justifying Putin’s invasion.
Image: Press-Sluzhba Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii
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