The West’s arms industry, as well as impoverished people all over the world desperately seeking livelihoods even in war zones, must be watching US President Donald Trump’s historic move to end the Ukraine war with some trepidation. But much of the rest of global society, must see this as yet more cynical manipulation of whole nations by powerful empires.
The world’s nations, having watched a historically unprecedented, globally televised, publicly genocidal war against Palestine by West-backed Israel, are now being treated to the stark betrayal by that same Western power bloc of another geopolitical proxy, Ukraine. After over a decade of financing and arming of Ukraine’s defiance of giant neighbour Russia.
Last week, US President Donald Trump suddenly announced he had initiated peace negotiations with Russia through a 90-minute telephone conversation with President Vladimir Putin.
Aggressive interventionism
While much of the world’s ‘liberals’, in the West and also elsewhere, were reacting in surprise, it was crystal clear that within weeks of his inauguration of a second US Presidency, Trump had begun his promised reversal of the decades-long American foreign policy of aggressive interventionism around the world through his “America First” mantra.
As these columns predicted last week, Trump, while trumpeting ethnic cleansing against genocide victim Gaza purely as anti-Palestinian rhetoric (which even embarrassed Israel), was deadly serious about his parallel disclosure of talks to end the Ukraine war. His moves with Moscow were echoed by several formal statements by both his Defence and State Secretaries (Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio), made at the Munich Security Conference (MSC): the Ukraine War must end even at the cost of Ukrainian territory invaded by Russia (around 20 percent of Ukraine’s land area, apart from Crimea) and the huge cost in Ukrainian lives and its economy; and Ukrainian enrolment in the NATO military alliance will not happen.
The financial, diplomatic and military support for Ukraine by the Western power bloc and its First World allies around the globe, has been extended for over a decade. The Ukraine War effort is actually billed by NATO-EU as part of the larger, half-century-long, European continental expansion of the NATO military alliance since the collapse of NATO’s rival Soviet Russia-led Warsaw Pact.
Global encirclement
Initially, the Cold War victor, NATO, had reassured a transformed, post-Communist Russia, itself divested of the military might of the Communist Bloc, that the Western powers would not continue anti-Soviet Russia geopolitics. At the time, during the early 1990’s transition regime of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow took this Western ‘reassurance’ to mean that the sustained global encirclement of Russia by the Western power bloc would now be halted, if not actually reversed by the retraction of several Cold War military alliances.
But the ensuing decades saw the slow reneging of this Western ‘reassurance’ of peaceful coexistence with former enemy and now reformed Russia. This geopolitical backsliding continued even as Moscow kept asking for the sustaining of the ‘co-existence’ framework in Europe that was initiated by both Moscow and Brussels (NATO-EU) for ensuring stability after the Cold War.
As many non-Western analysts suspected at the time, this grandiose diplomatic architecture (only affordable in the First World), was actually the Cold War victorious West deceiving Moscow about its real hegemonist intentions.
Too late, by the turn of the century, Moscow found itself being surrounded on its immediate European borders by a succession of former East European states joining NATO. Moscow then began protesting, demanding NATO explain its continuing military expansion around Russia even after everyone had acknowledged the ending of the Cold War. Brussels and Washington simply ignored the protestations of several Russian regimes.
Once Putin – an arch-conservative former Communist bureaucrat and a former KGB operative – came to power (by popular election), he shifted geopolitical gear into an explicit acknowledgment by Russia of the West’s continuation of the Cold War geopolitics of East-West rivalry. After the Western attempts to push Georgia into NATO (causing chaos in the Caucasian country on Russia’s southern border), Putin finally insisted that attempts to recruit any other of Russia’s neighbouring states into NATO would be taken as a military threat and provocation by Brussels/Washington.
The West, however, with the fatal misperception that Russia was too weak now to resist such NATO expansionism, persisted in its brinkmanship right at Moscow’s doorstep. Latvia and Estonia were then seduced into joining NATO and Brussels began overtures to Ukraine. That was the last straw for Moscow which, early on, kept warning the West that its moves on Ukraine would provoke confrontation. It did in 2022.
Ukraine is part of the greater Russian civilisation, having been, for literally centuries, the lead region of the growing Russian Empire during the late medieval period. Kyiv was the Russian capital, no less. Indeed, Ukrainian movements were central to the broader Russian social movements that struggled to end Russian feudalism and monarchy. Ukrainian movements were also integral to the Russian Communist Revolution.
In the West, it has been subsequently acknowledged by many analysts, that the massive western military-industrial complex greatly influenced the West’s continuation of NATO both as an existing military apparatus and also as a militarily active alliance that continued to conduct wars. After all, in the entirety of the West, the biggest consumers of the products of the military-industrial complex were the Western States themselves.
In fact, Western economic and political managers quickly realised that the Cold War had sustained and further boosted the growth of the arms and military equipment industry. The Western arms industry was the biggest economic force to emerge from the two World Wars. Indeed, it was the arms industry originally created by the vast European colonial project that then grew into the powerhouse it became during the World Wars.
When US President Dwight Eisenhower, a Five-Star General, first mentioned the ‘military-industrial complex’ (during his now-famous Presidential farewell speech), he was pointing out to humanity the potential dangers of this vast new industrial behemoth. Today, all the worldwide aggression meted out by or, indirectly encouraged by, the Western power bloc in a seamless continuity ever since the end of World War II, has ensured the Western arms industry its continued dominance of the global capitalist economy.
Arms industry
The flourishing of the arms industry (including related vehicle manufacturing, electronics industries and, many other sectors) is the key to the economic well-being of that industry’s traditional host countries of the West and also the new host countries such as China, Russia, India, et al. During the Vietnam War, America’s own industrial workers’ trade unions were hostile to the American anti-war movement.
But Western domestic interests are shifting. The newly emergent American radical Right that supports Trump is exploiting a mix of domestic social aspirations that stem from a prioritising of internal social conflicts or perceived conflicts.
For the currently dominant Radical Right Movement in Washington, a successful Ukraine peace deal will vindicate its own xenophobic politics – in the removal of Russia as a perceived major threat to the security of American society. Russia, given the weakened state it is in today, will appreciate the respite from constant military pressure, and would likely be happy to let up (at least publicly) on hostile actions against America, its only formidable enemy.
For Europe, there is the current outrage of being crudely sidelined in Washington’s peace moves and the embarrassment of being seen as a sidelined ally in the eyes of the watching world community. Certainly, the ongoing spat between Washington and the rest of NATO affirms the growing internal dynamics that are slowly undermining the once-strong political unity that had made NATO the world’s greatest ever hegemon to date.
Emerging great powers such as China and the larger Global South have been noting this internal degradation since at least 2016. Donald Trump, in his first Presidential Election campaign in that year, shook the world by threatening not to honour NATO’s Article 5 policy cornerstone of collective security guarantees to all individual Member States – the famous “one for all and all for one” doctrine.
And who actually cares about Ukraine itself? In the great game of geopolitics, it is the proxy polities that are the pawns of bigger powers that have no real security, as Kyiv is learning. Other proxy States now opportunistically collaborating as pawns of bigger powers can observe the workings of great power machinations. But do they see their own fate?
