Chomsky: US Push To “Reign Supreme” Stokes The Ukraine Conflict

Noam Chomsky

Irrational political panic is as American a phenomenon as apple pie. It often arises as a result of a potential inability on the part of the powers-that-be to control the outcome of developments that may pose challenges to the interests of the existing socioeconomic order or to the status quo of the geostrategic environment. The era of the Cold War speaks volumes about this phenomenon, but it’s also evident in earlier periods — for example, the first Red Scare in the wake of World War I — and we can see clear parallels in the present-day situation with reactions to Ukraine and the rise of China as a global power.

In the interview that follows, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky delves into the phenomenon of irrational political panics in the U.S., with an emphasis on current developments on the foreign policy front — and the dangers of seeking to maintain global hegemony in a multipolar world.

C.J. Polychroniou: The political culture in the United States seems to have a propensity toward alarmism when it comes to political developments that are not in tune with the economic interests, ideological mindset and strategic interests of the powers-that-be. Indeed, from the anti-Spanish panic of the late 1890s to today’s rage about Russia’s security concerns over Ukraine, and China’s growing role in world affairs and everything in between, the political establishment and the media of this country tend to respond with full-blown alarm to developments that are not in alignment with U.S. interests, values and goals. Can you comment about this peculiar state of affairs, with particular emphasis on what’s happening today in connection with Ukraine and China?

Noam Chomsky: Quite true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. One of the most significant and revealing examples is the rhetorical framework of the major internal planning document of the early Cold War years, NSC-68 of 1950, shortly after “the loss of China,” which set off a frenzy in the U.S. The document set the stage for huge expansion of the military budget. It’s worth recalling today when strains of this madness are reverberating — not for the first time; it’s perennial.

The policy recommendations of NSC-68 have been widely discussed in scholarship, though avoiding the hysterical rhetoric. It reads like a fairytale: ultimate evil confronted by absolute purity and noble idealism. On one side is the “slave state” with its “fundamental design” and inherent “compulsion” to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” destroying all governments and the “structure of society” everywhere. Its ultimate evil contrasts with our sheer perfection. The “fundamental purpose” of the United States is to assure “the dignity and worth of the individual” everywhere. Its leaders are animated by “generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations,” which is particularly evident in the traditional domains of U.S. influence, the Western hemisphere, long the beneficiary of Washington’s tender solicitude as its inhabitants can testify.

Anyone familiar with history and the actual balance of global power at the time would have reacted to this performance with utter bewilderment. Its State Department authors couldn’t have believed what they were writing. Some later gave an indication of what they were up to. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in his memoirs that in order to ram through the huge planned military expansion, it was necessary to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” in ways that were “clearer than truth.” The highly influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg surely understood this as well when advising [in 1947] that the government must “scare the hell out of the American people” to rouse them from their pacifist backwardness.

There are many precedents, and the drums are beating right now with warnings about American complacency and naivete about the intentions of the “mad dog” Putin to destroy democracy everywhere and subdue the world to his will, now in alliance with the other “Great Satan,” Xi Jinping.

The February 4 Putin-Xi summit, timed with the opening of the Olympic games, was recognized to be a major event in world affairs. Its review in a major article in The New York Times is headlined “A New Axis,” the allusion unconcealed. The review reported the intentions of the reincarnation of the Axis powers: “The message that China and Russia have sent to other countries is clear,” David Leonhardt writes. “They will not pressure other governments to respect human rights or hold elections.” And to Washington’s dismay, the Axis is attracting two countries from “the American camp,” Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stellar examples of how the U.S. respects human rights and elections in its camp — by providing a massive flow of weapons to these brutal dictatorships and directly participating in their crimes. The New Axis also maintains that “a powerful country should be able to impose its will within its declared sphere of influence. The country should even be able to topple a weaker nearby government without the world interfering” — an idea that the U.S. has always abhorred, as the historical record reveals.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Delphi Oracle issued a maxim: “Know Thyself.” Worth remembering, perhaps.

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“Politics as Usual” Will Never Be A Solution To The Current Climate Threat

Richard Falk

There is an ever-growing consensus that the climate crisis represents humanity’s greatest problem. Indeed, global warming is more than an environmental crisis — there are social, political, ethical and economic dimensions to it. Even the role of science should be exposed to critical inquiry when discussing the dimensions of the climate crisis, considering that technology bears such responsibility for bringing us to the brink of global disaster. This is the theme of my interview with renowned scholar Richard Falk.

For decades, Richard Falk has made immense contributions in the areas of international affairs and international law from what may be loosely defined as the humanist perspective, which makes a break with political realism and its emphasis on the nation-state and military power. He is professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly half a century, and currently chair of Global Law at Queen Mary University London, which has launched a new center for climate crime and justice; Falk is also the Olaf Palme Visiting Professor in Stockholm and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, University of Malta. In 2008, Falk was appointed as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. He is the author of some 50 books, the most recent of which is a moving memoir, titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim (2021).

C.J. Polychroniou: The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time, but, so far, we seem to be losing the battle to avoid driving the planet to dangerous “tipping points.” Indeed, a climate apocalypse appears to be a rather distinct possibility given the current levels of climate inaction. Having said that, it is quite obvious that the climate crisis has more than one dimension. It is surely about the environment, but it is also about science, ethics, politics and economics. Let’s start with the relationship between science and the environment. Does science bear responsibility for global warming and the ensuing environmental breakdown, given the role that technologies have played in the modern age?

Richard Falk: I think science bears some responsibility for adopting the outlook that freedom of scientific inquiry takes precedence over considering the real-world consequences of scientific knowledge — the exemplary case being the process by which science and scientists contributed to the making of the nuclear bomb. In this instance, some of the most ethically inclined scientists and knowledge workers, above all, Albert Einstein, were contributors who later regretted their role. And, of course, the continuous post-Hiroshima developments of weaponry of mass destruction have enlisted leading biologists, chemists and physicists in their professional roles to produce ever more deadly weaponry, and there has been little scientific pushback.

With respect to the environmental breakdown that is highlighted by your question, the situation is more obscure. There were scientific warnings about a variety of potential catastrophic threats to ecological balance that go back to the early 1970s. These warnings were contested by reputable scientists until the end of the 20th century, but if the precautionary principle included in the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment (1972) would have been implemented, then certainly scientists bore some responsibility for continuing to work toward more capital-efficient means of finding technological applications for oil, gas and coal. As with adverse health effects, post-Enlightenment beliefs that human progress depended on scientific knowledge inhibited regulation for the benefit of the public good. Only when civil society began to sound the alarm were certain adjustments made, although often insufficient in substance, deferring to private interests in profitability, and public interests in the enhancement of military capabilities and governmental control.

Overall, despite the climate change crisis, there remains a reluctance to hamper scientific “progress” by an insistence on respecting the carrying capacity of the Earth. Also, science and scientists have yet to relate the search for knowledge to the avoidance of ecologically dangerous technological applications, and even more so in relation to political and cultural activities. There is also the representational issue involving the selection of environmental guardians and their discretionary authority, if a more prudential approach were to be adopted.

The climate crisis also raises important ethical questions, although it is not clear from current efforts to tame global warming that many of the world’s governments take them seriously. Be that as it may, how should ethics inform the debate about global warming and environmental breakdown?

The most obvious ethical issues arise when deciding how to spread the economic burdens of regulating greenhouse gas emissions in ways that ensure an equitable distribution of costs within and among countries. The relevance of “climate justice” to relations among social classes and between rich and poor countries is contested and controversial. As the world continues to be organized along state-centric axes of authority and responsibility, ethical metrics are so delimited. Given the global nature of the challenges associated with global warming, this way of calculating climate justice and ethical accountability in political space is significantly dysfunctional.

Similar observations are relevant with respect to time. Although the idea of “responsibility to future generations” received some recognition at the UN, nothing tangible by way of implementation was done. Political elites, without exception, were fixed on short-term performance criteria, whether satisfying corporate shareholders or the voting public. The tyranny of the present in policy domains worked against implementing the laudatory ethical recognition of the claims of [future generations] to a healthy and materially sufficient future.

Taking account of the relevance of the past seems an ethical imperative that is neglected because it is seen as unfairly burdening the present for past injustices. For instance, reparations claims on behalf of victimized people, whether descendants of slavery or otherwise exploited peoples, rarely are satisfied, however ethically meritorious. There is one revealing exception: reparations imposed by the victorious powers in a war.

In the environmental domain, the past is very important to the allocation of responsibility for the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gas emissions. Most Western countries are more responsible for global warming than the vast majority of the Global South, and many parts of Africa and the Middle East face the dual facts of minimal responsibility for global warming yet maximal vulnerability to its harmful effects.

These various ethical concerns are being forced onto the agendas of global conferences. This was evident at the 2021 COP-26 Glasgow Climate Summit under UN auspices. The intergovernmental response was disappointing, and reflected capitalist and geopolitical disregard of the ethical dimensions of the climate change challenge.

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Israeli Policies Satisfy The Definition Of Apartheid Under International Law

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Richard Falk

A furor has enveloped Washington, D.C. as Democrats and Republicans alike scramble to denounce Amnesty International for the report it released this month, which describes Israel as an “apartheid state” and alleges that the human rights abuses committed against Palestinians by the State of Israel constitute crimes against humanity under international law.

In many respects, there is nothing new in the report, as many other human rights organizations, including the UN, have long ago drawn the same conclusions. In fact, many Israelis themselves agree with the assessment of Israel as an apartheid state. Even the late Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who served as minister of education and the environment back in the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, said the following in 2008 for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

Even so, the report provoked an explosion of rage in the United States — most likely among the same group of people who used to object to critiques of South Africa’s system of apartheid and who viewed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. The same frenzy of rage also surfaced in the U.S. back in 2017, when Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian occupied territories, produced a United Nations report charging Israel with crimes against humanity and labelling it an apartheid state.

In light of Amnesty International’s new report, we asked Richard Falk to share his thoughts on the latest findings about Israeli apartheid and crimes against humanity. Falk is professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly half a century, and chair of Global Law at Queen Mary University London, which has launched a new center for climate crime and justice. He is also the Olaf Palme Visiting Professor in Stockholm and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, University of Malta. In 2008, Falk was appointed as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. He is the author of some 50 books, the most recent of which is a memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim (2021).

C.J. Polychroniou: Amnesty International’s new report exposes Israeli abuses against Palestinians. The report shows that Israel imposes a form of domination and oppression against Palestinians under its control that qualifies as a system of apartheid under international law. In this context, it affirms the 2017 United Nations report that you had helped produce and for which you were personally attacked by Nikki Haley at the Security Council. But Israel is arguing that the report is full of lies, and some of its strongest allies (the U.S., the U.K. and Germany) are rejecting the description of Israel as an apartheid state. Let’s start with the most basic question of all: Is there anything in the report that is not true? If not, why has it caused such a bipartisan fury in the U.S.?

Richard Falk: I think it is important to assess the Amnesty International report in the wider context of the perception of Israeli apartheid over the course of the last five years, since the issuance of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia’s (ESCWA) “Report on Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” in 2017.

In 2021, two comprehensive reports by widely respected human rights organizations added weight to the apartheid allegations. The first one — titled “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid” — was published in 2021 by the most established and internationally trusted Israeli NGO devoted to the protection of human rights, B’Tselem. It has developed an outstanding reputation for professionalism over the years. The second report — titled “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution” — was issued in April 2021 by Human Rights Watch, the flagship human rights civil society organization in the United States with offices around the world.

The Amnesty International report released this February — titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity” — should be seen as the culmination of a trend validating allegations of Israeli apartheid, at least within international civil society.

To dismiss and denigrate these reports adhering to the highest human rights research standards — as Israeli and American leaders and spokespersons have attempted to do, calling the Amnesty International report full of “lies” and the work of “anti-Semites” — is a shameless slander. Such inflammatory language is designed to shift the conversation from the message to the messenger. This interpretation of the tactics of those rejecting the Amnesty International report is strengthened by the absence of any serious effort to refute the substantive charges. So far there has been a bipartisan angry rejection of the Amnesty International report in Congress, and virtual silence in the mainstream TV and print media. How different would be the U.S. reaction to an Amnesty report summarizing the breakup of Hong Kong demonstrations or damning the Chinese denial of human rights to the Uyghur minority. The inevitable conclusion reached is that international law and human rights function for the U.S. government as geopolitical tools rather than normative principles.

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Is California Backsliding On Its Plan To Reach Zero Carbon Emissions By Mid-Century?

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

CJ Polychroniou

In reality, California does not actually have a detailed roadmap for slashing greenhouse gas emissions in order to fulfill the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

California is one of the world’s largest economies. It is also a liberal state that acts as a leader in efforts to combat the climate crisis. Indeed, California is said to have revolutionized climate policy, advancing many key pieces of climate legislation that seek to combat global warming and its catastrophic effects. Among them is a plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles statewide by 2035. California leaders also pride themselves in seeking to meet climate goals while maximizing jobs and economic growth.

The passage of climate bill AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, set the stage for the state’s transition to an ecologically sustainable future. It was a bipartisan clean energy action requiring the Air Resources Board to develop regulations and market mechanisms to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020. The state met the goal of AB-32 four years ahead of schedule. In 2016, California’s legislature voted to extend the state’s climate change targets. SB-32 set  a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emission levels by 2030 to 40 percent of 1990 levels, while in 2018 an Executive Order was signed requiring state agencies to reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

California’s emissions reduction program has a number of key features, which include the development of California’s Climate Scoping Plan and a cap-and-trade program.

Pursuant to AB 32 and SB 32, a number of other key climate policies were introduced as part of an apparently overall roadmap in the state’s efforts to achieve its emission reduction goals and become ultimately a clean energy economy. They include the Green Building Standards Code, which requires commercial and residential buildings to meet minimum energy efficiency standards, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a program designed to decrease the carbon intensity of fuels used within the state, and the Advanced Clean Cars Program, which seeks to limit vehicle emissions.

Nonetheless, California’s valiant effort to confront the climate crisis is encountering increasing difficulties. California is not on pace to meet the 2030 goal of a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels, according to a recent report by California State Auditor Elaine Howle. The problem seems to be that while California, as Mary Creasman of California Environmental Voters put it, has passed a number of good environmental laws, most of them are incremental.

In reality, California does not actually have a detailed roadmap for slashing greenhouse gas emissions in order to fulfill the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. For instance, while transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, the state lacks an identifiable path to decarbonize the sector. Worse still, the state’s legally mandated emissions goals do not go beyond 2030. And when a new bill, the Climate Crisis Act (AB 1395), co-authored by Assembly members Al Muratsuchi and Cristina Garcia, was introduced on the last day of last year’s legislative session, it was soundly defeated.

If passed, AB 1395 would have codified into law the climate goals set by former Governor Brown in 2018 and backed up by Governor Newsom. In fact, Governor Newsom has expressed the hope that a pathway can be identified by the Air Resources Board to achieve carbon neutrality even a full decade earlier than the existing target of 2045 set in Executive Order 2018.
AB 1395 went down in defeat at the hands of various organized interest groups, ranging from the oil industry, labor, California Chamber Commerce, and agricultural groups. This was a devastating blow to progressive lawmakers and climate activists who had hoped for the passing of a bill that would ensure the attainment of a carbon-neutral future for the state of California by mid-century.

Among labor groups that strongly opposed AB 1395 was the State Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO, which represents nearly half a million workers. The organization opposed the bill on the basis of the argument that a reduction target of 90 percent of carbon emissions would cripple investment and innovation. In the same context, in a letter to the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Deputy Legislative Director of State Building and Construction Trade Council urged California lawmakers to embrace carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies as a strategy to mitigating climate change.

Unions representing fossil fuel workers also opposed AB 1395, but it is uncertain whether this was simply due to the fact that the bill did not include a just transition program. Unions representing fossil fuel workers also happen to be in support of CCS strategies as well as expanding oil and gas infrastructure. Assembly member Muratsuchi had another bill on just transition for fossil fuel industry employees last year, AB 1453, but it was held in Assembly Appropriations Committee.

AB 1395 may not, however, be entirely dead. It is still eligible to move and Assembly member Muratsuchi and some of his associates will be talking with stakeholders later this year, according to Ashley Labar, Chief of Staff at California State Assembly. But judging from the way organized interests mobilized in opposition to AB 1395, it is highly doubtful that the bill’s fate will be reversed.

The irony behind California’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis by reducing carbon emissions and eventually attain carbon neutrality by mid-century is that there is a detailed pathway available for the state and for immediate implementation. It was produced in the summer of 2021 by a group of researchers headed by Robert Pollin at the renowned Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has already received the endorsement of over 20 unions, including three fossil fuel unions.  It is a study that demonstrates that California can reach zero emissions by 2045 while also experiencing economic growth, including the creation of over 1 million new jobs statewide through investment programs in energy efficiency, public infrastructure, land restoration and agriculture. The study also includes a robust just transition program, which is absolutely essential since fossil fuel workers will not give up easily what they have managed to secure for themselves (relatively high-paying union jobs with benefits) after many years of hard work.

In sum, it might be time that California lawmakers took a close look at the PERI Program for Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Transition in California. It seems to be an ultimate win-win situation for all.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

The Problem Of Fortress Europe And Russia

• by: Mati Shemoelof

Mati Shemoelof – Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

Imagine that the US was surrounded by missiles in all its borders, both in Mexico and Cuba, in both Canada and South America. Would it allow countries to receive missiles from Russia or China and continue to behave as usual? Of course not. We have already seen the missile crisis in Cuba.

The threat that Russian armies (on the border with Ukraine) posed to the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty falls into the long history of the Cold War.

Commentators explaining Putin’s move in response to a US weakness that has emanated from Afghanistan and Iraq. But behind all the Western propaganda and hysteria of the media lies a remarkably simple narrative. The NATO alliance as a continuation of the US seeks to expand its borders and surround Russia with missiles, troops, and weapons. Putin seeks to return to the agreement that NATO will not expand to all countries surrounding Russia, as well as Georgia and more.

The countries of the world that see the situation in black and white, immediately mobilized to help Ukraine as well as the Baltic states. How? Send more weapons, ships and announce military collaborations. They are doing so without thinking about deepening the conflict, and how to really get the cat (Putin) off the tree.

But what if there is an effortless way? Why did European countries establish a military alliance and a supranational army after World War II? All European countries have armies, and some also have nuclear weapons. What is NATO’s goal? Well on paper, NATO will always say that its goal is to preserve and protect democracy. But we know the laundering of the words of democracy. The United States conquered Afghanistan (with the help of European countries) and Iraq (with the help of Britain and some European countries) to establish democracy. And we saw that this was not the goal.
The other way around, we saw the economic interests as well as the deep collaboration with weapons industry.

Now, instead of the diplomats convincing NATO, which is the cat that climbed the tree, to get off it and assure the Russians that Ukraine will not join their alliance, they are sending increased weapons to Ukraine and other countries. The only sane country in this story is Germany that refuses to send weapons to the developing conflict and arm Ukraine (Thanks to the SPD leader that understand well, what would happen to Europe without the Russian Gas, as well as, have a great fear to go to another war with Russia after WW2). Now, because of that, Germany is facing the hawkish side of NATO.

In other words, this whole war, if it breaks out, is not really a war for the protection of Ukraine’s borders, or a bending of the hand of the terrible dictator Putin who threatens the democratic fabric of Europe. This war if it breaks out is for the benefit of the military industries, NATO’s vast forces and to provide more resources to European countries. One of the nicknames of the European Union today is ‘Fortress of Europe’ and it was granted to it, after the fortress was closed to refugees from other countries (except as mentioned Germany which took in about a million refugees). But this fortress of Europe today takes on a contrasting character, which is the one behind a war that is brewing and is not willing to compromise. And ask yourself again, would you be willing to sit in a country surrounded by missiles and armies?

Putin is terrified of the revolutions in Ukraine and in Belarus and Kazakhstan. He feels his power is waning. An economic crisis is gripping Russia, and the corona is also biting into the shortened lives of Russia’s residents. It is said that all this operation is to wag his tail, to gain more power within Russia.
This is because it also falls in the polls. NATO should not grant him this rope.  It will be for the better interest of the people of Russia, Ukraine, and Europe.

The article was first published on ‘Haaretz‘ newspaper and translated by the author

Mati Shemoelof: https://mati-s.com

Chomsky: US Approach To Ukraine And Russia Has “Left The Domain Of Rational Discourse”

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Noam Chomsky

The Russia-Ukraine crisis continues unabated as the United States ignores all of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s security demands and spreads a frenzy of fear by claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.

In a new exclusive interview for Truthout on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky outlines the deadly dangers of U.S. intransigence over Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even when key Western allies have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts in that direction. He also seeks to shed some light on the reasons why Republicans today seem to be divided on Russia.

Chomsky — whose intellectual contributions have been compared to those of Galileo, Newton and Descartes — has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), as well as dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

C.J. Polychroniou: Tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, and there is little room for optimism since the U.S. offer for de-escalation fails to meet any of Russia’s security demands. As such, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the Russia-Ukraine border crisis stems in reality from the U.S.’s intransigent position over Ukrainian membership in NATO? In the same context, is it hard to imagine what might have been Washington’s response to the hypothetical event that Mexico wanted to join a Moscow-driven military alliance?

Noam Chomsky: We hardly need to linger on the latter question. No country would dare to make such a move in what former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson called “Our little region over here,” when he was condemning all spheres of influence (except for our own — which in reality, is hardly limited to the Western hemisphere). Secretary of State Antony Blinken is no less adamant today in condemning Russia’s claim to a “sphere of influence,” a concept we firmly reject (with the same reservation).

There was of course one famous case when a country in our little region came close to a military alliance with Russia, the 1962 missile crisis. The circumstances, however, were quite unlike Ukraine. President John F. Kennedy was escalating his terrorist war against Cuba to a threat of invasion; Ukraine, in sharp contrast, faces threats as a result of its potentially joining a hostile military alliance. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless decision to provide Cuba with missiles was also an effort to slightly rectify the enormous U.S. preponderance of military force after JFK had responded to Khrushchev’s offer of mutual reduction of offensive weapons with the largest military buildup in peacetime history, though the U.S. was already far ahead. We know what that led to.

The tensions over Ukraine are extremely severe, with Russia’s concentration of military forces at Ukraine’s borders. The Russian position has been quite explicit for some time. It was stated clearly by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his press conference at the United Nations: “The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Much the same was reiterated shortly after by Putin, as he had often said before.

There is a simple way to deal with deployment of weapons: Don’t deploy them. There is no justification for doing so. The U.S. may claim that they are defensive, but Russia surely doesn’t see it that way, and with reason.

The question of further expansion is more complex. The issue goes back over 30 years, to when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was collapsing. There were extensive negotiations among Russia, the U.S. and Germany. (The core issue was German unification.) Two visions were presented. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. The U.S. rejected it: NATO stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.

For obvious reasons, German reunification within a hostile military alliance is no small matter for Russia. Nevertheless, Gorbachev agreed to it, with a quid pro quo: No expansion to the East. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed. In their words to Gorbachev: “Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

“East” meant East Germany. No one had a thought about anything beyond, at least in public. That’s agreed on all sides. German leaders were even more explicit about it. They were overjoyed just to have Russian agreement to unification, and the last thing they wanted was new problems.

There is extensive scholarship on the matter — Mary Sarotte, Joshua Shifrinson, and others, debating exactly who said what, what they meant, what’s its status, and so on. It is interesting and illuminating work, but what it comes down to, when the dust settles, is what I quoted from the declassified record.

President H.W. Bush pretty much lived up to these commitments. So did President Bill Clinton at first, until 1999, the 50th anniversary of NATO; with an eye on the Polish vote in the upcoming election, some have speculated. He admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. President George W. Bush — the lovable goofy grandpa who was celebrated in the press on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan — let down all the bars. He brought in the Baltic states and others. In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join NATO, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population. Germany and France vetoed Bush’s reckless invitation, but it’s still on the table. No Russian leader would accept that, surely not Gorbachev, as he made clear.

As in the case of deployment of offensive weapons on the Russian border, there is a straightforward answer. Ukraine can have the same status as Austria and two Nordic countries throughout the whole Cold War: neutral, but tightly linked to the West and quite secure, part of the European Union to the extent they chose to be.

The U.S. adamantly rejects this outcome, loftily proclaiming its passionate dedication to the sovereignty of nations, which cannot be infringed: Ukraine’s right to join NATO must be honored. This principled stand may be lauded in the U.S., but it surely is eliciting loud guffaws in much of the world, including the Kremlin. The world is hardly unaware of our inspiring dedication to sovereignty, notably in the three cases that particularly enraged Russia: Iraq, Libya and Kosovo-Serbia.

Iraq need not be discussed: U.S. aggression enraged almost everyone. The NATO assaults on Libya and Serbia, both a slap in Russia’s face during its sharp decline in the ‘90s, is clothed in righteous humanitarian terms in U.S. propaganda. It all quickly dissolves under scrutiny, as amply documented elsewhere. And the richer record of U.S. reverence for the sovereignty of nations needs no review.

It is sometimes claimed that NATO membership increases security for Poland and others. A much stronger case can be made that NATO membership threatens their security by heightening tensions. Historian Richard Sakwa, a specialist on East Europe, observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.

There is much more to say about Ukraine and how to deal with the very dangerous and mounting crisis there, but perhaps this is enough to suggest that there is no need to inflame the situation and to move on to what might well turn out to be a catastrophic war.

There is, in fact, a surreal quality to the U.S. rejection of Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine. U.S. policy makers know perfectly well that admission of Ukraine to NATO is not an option for the foreseeable future. We can, of course, put aside the ridiculous posturing about the sanctity of sovereignty. So, for the sake of a principle in which they do not believe for a moment, and in pursuit of an objective that they know is out of reach, the U.S. is risking what may turn into a shocking catastrophe. On the surface, it seems incomprehensible, but there are plausible imperial calculations.

We might ask why Putin has taken such a belligerent stance on the ground. There is a cottage industry seeking to solve this mystery: Is he a madman? Is he planning to force Europe to become a Russian satellite? What is he up to?

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