Why Ukraine

"Why Ukraine" is a book published by the publishing house Icono, a compendium of interviews that the Spanish journalist Pablo Bustinduy conducted with Noam Chomsky, a linguist, philosopher and political scientist of Jewish-Ukrainian origin, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most outstanding intellectuals in the United States. 

In a revealing book, Noam Chomsky points out that the war in Ukraine is the result of the systematic policy of the United States of 30 years of expansion into Russia's spheres of influence, through the NATO military apparatus, which it controls in a monarchical manner. In his opinion, Ukraine's accession to NATO is like Mexico joining a military alliance, conducting joint exercises and taking in Chinese weapons directed against Washington. He argues that Ukraine should be a neutral state with a federal political structure as proposed in the Minsk agreements. It questions the US policy of NATO's eastward expansion, which brought 14 former Soviet republics into its fold. For obvious reasons, Russia's reactions have been strong as its strategic security has been left vulnerable.

After World War II, as a consequence of the imperial confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, NATO was born as a military power to defend Western Europe from attack by Moscow, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that justification no longer made sense. At the time, US geo-strategists feared that Europe could become a third global political force, an independent political actor in the global domain. Therefore, they did not end NATO in order to keep the Europeans in check.

Noam Chomsky says that the agreement between George Bush (senior) and Secretary of State James Baker and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to unify Germany was on the condition that NATO would not expand "an inch eastward". In his view, Gorbachev's mistake was to accept a verbal promise and not put it into a written agreement. "It was a verbal pact that was immediately violated" by the United States. Indeed, under Clinton, NATO expanded to Russia's borders, continued under Bush Jr. and then Obama proposed NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine.  

For US foreign policy in Europe and Central Asia, the incorporation of Ukraine into its sphere of influence has been a vital aspect. This is discussed by Zbigniew Brezezinski, the former National Security Advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration, in his book "The World's Big Board. Brezezinski is one of the most important US geopolitical strategists of the last decades of the 20th century. Much of US foreign policy today is based on his recommendations. Hence, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of US policy in Europe and Asia, and certainly to understand the escalating tensions with the Putin regime. 

It is also a key text for understanding how the policy of provocation against Russia that has led to the Russia-Ukraine war has been structured. For the US, control of Ukraine is vital to its hegemonic dominance in Eurasia. "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire and would not be able to compete for imperial status" and preponderant to become a predominant imperial state in Asia.

For Brezezinski, "if Russia controls Ukraine it will have sufficient resources to become a powerful imperial state over Europe and part of Asia" and concludes: "Ukraine's loss of independence would have immediate consequences for the control of Central Europe".  

Noam Chomsky says the US did not dissolve NATO, because it transformed it into an instrument of control of its global energy system. Westerners "strive to understand what drives Putin to behave as he does, but we rarely ask them what drives the United States. It is clear that "America's behaviour is comical; it flouts the principle of sovereignty that it so proudly claims". So its determination to maintain the Atlantic order in Europe is because the United States reigns as absolute monarch".  

For the US, the worrying thing is that the old world order it shaped after the Second World War, subject to its leadership, is breaking down with the re-emergence of a new world order led by China, India and Russia with the support of other regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil.  

The Ukraine war and economic sanctions against Russia have had the opposite effect, strengthening the economies of Russia, China and India and weakening the US and European economies. Europe has been ruined and transformed into a continent of perfumed vassals. In the United States, on the other hand, imperial decline has accelerated with the end of the petrodollar system and the rise of the petroyuan, which is giving way to a process of de-dollarisation, yuanisation and rupialisation of global commercial transactions. 

@j15mosquera