Michael Brenner: American Dissent on Ukraine Is Dying in Darkness, excerpts, bold added:
[Scheer] These voices are becoming fewer and further between as a wave of feverish backlash engulfs any dissent on the subject. One of these voices belongs to Professor Michael J. Brenner, a lifelong academic, Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, as well as former Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner’s credentials also include having worked at the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense and Westinghouse, and written several books on American foreign policy. From the vantage point of decades of experience and studies, the intellectual regularly shared his thoughts on topics of interest through a mailing list sent to thousands of readers—that is until the response to his Ukraine analysis made him question why he bothered in the first place.
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In an email with the subject line “Quittin’ Time,” Brenner recently declared that, aside from having already said his piece on Ukraine, one of the main reasons he sees for giving up on expressing his opinions on the subject is that “it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.”
Interview with Robert Scheer, excerpts from transcript
[Brenner] Yes, it came only partially as a surprise. I’ve been writing these commentaries and distributing them to a personal list of roughly 5,000 for more than a decade. Some of those persons are abroad, most are in the U.S.; they’re all educated people who’ve been involved one way or another with international affairs, including quite a number who have had experience in and around government or journalism or the world of punditry.
What happened on this occasion was that I had expressed highly skeptical views about what I believe is the fictional storyline and account of what has been happening in Ukraine, back over the past year and most pointedly in regard to the acute crisis that has arisen with the Russian invasion and attack on Ukraine. I received not only an unusually large number of critical replies, but it was the nature of them that was deeply dismaying.
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One, many—most of them came from people whom I did know, whom I knew as level-headed, sober minds, engaged and well informed on foreign policy issues and international matters generally. Second, they were highly personalized, and I had rarely been the object of that sort of criticism or attack—sort of ad hominem remarks questioning my patriotism; had I been paid by, you know, by Putin; my motivations, my sanity, et cetera, et cetera.
Third was the extremity of the content of these hostile messages. And the last characteristic, which really stunned me, was that these people bought into—hook, line and sinker—every aspect of the sort of fictional story that has been propagated by the administration, accepted and swallowed whole by the media and our political-intellectual class, which includes many academics and the entire galaxy of Washington think tanks.
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In effect, this was an intellectual and political nihilism. And one cannot make any contribution to endeavor to correct that simply by conventional means. So I felt for the first time that I was no part of this world, and of course this is also a reflection of trends and attitudes that have become rather pervasive in the country at large, sort of over time.
I mean, what we’re getting is not only a cartoon caricature, but a portrait of the country and its leadership—and by the way, Putin is not a dictator. He is not all-powerful. The Soviet (sic) government is far more complex in its processes of decision-making.
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And he is, Putin himself, an extraordinarily sophisticated thinker. But people don’t bother to read what he writes, or to listen to what he says.
I know, in fact, of no national leader that has laid out in the detail and the precision and the sophistication his view of the world, Russia’s place in it, the character of interstate relations, with the candor and acuity that he has. It’s not a question of whether you believe that that depiction he offers is entirely correct, or the conclusion that he draws from it, with regard to policy. But you are dealing with a person and a regime which in vital respects is the antithesis of the one that is caricatured and almost universally accepted, not only in the Biden administration but in the foreign policy community and the political class, and in general.
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I think we have to look in the mirror and say, well, we’ve seen—[unclear] the source of our disquiet, and it’s within us; it’s not out there, and it is leading to gross distortions of the way in which we see, we depict and we interpret the world, all across the board. By which I mean geographically and in terms of sort of different arenas and dimensions of international relations. And of course, continuing along this course can only have one endpoint, and that’s disaster of some form or other.
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[Scheer] And what surprised me about your farewell address, you were talking about intelligent people that you and I have rubbed shoulders with at arms control conferences; we’ve taken seriously their arguments. This is not just a fringe of neoconservatives who seem to have encamped now in the Democratic Party, whereas they before were in the Republican Party, the same kind of extreme Cold War hawks.
[Brenner] And that question is the one that should preoccupy us. Because it really cuts deepest into, you know, contemporary America. It’s what contemporary America is. And I think the intellectual tools to be used in trying to interpret it must come from anthropology and psychology at least as much, if not more, than political science or sociology or economics. I truly believe that we are talking about collective psychopathology. And of course, collective psychopathology is what you get in a nihilistic society in which all sort of standard, conventional sort of reference points cease to serve as markers and guideposts on how individuals behave.
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And one expression of that is in the erasure of history. We live in the existential—I think in this case the word can be properly used—moment, or week, or month, or year or whatever. So we totally, almost totally forget about the reality of nuclear weapons. I mean, as you said, and you’re absolutely right, in the past, every national leader and every national government that had custody of nuclear weapons came to the conclusion and absorbed the fundamental truth that they served no utilitarian function. And that the overriding, the imperative was to avoid situations not only in which they were used as part of some calculated military strategy, but to avoid situations in which circumstances might develop where, as you said, they would use them because of accident, misjudgment, or something of the sort.
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I’m not suggesting that Joe Biden has sort of sublimated all of this. But he seems to be in a state, hard to describe, in which certainly [unclear] could permit the kind of encounter with the Russians that all his predecessors avoided.
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One, this crisis, in leading to the Russian invasion, has little to do with Ukraine per se. Certainly not for Washington; for Moscow it’s otherwise. It’s had to do with Russia from the beginning. It’s been the objective of American foreign policy for at least a decade to render Russia weak and unable to assert itself in any manner of speaking in European affairs. We want it marginalized, we want to neuter it, as a power in Europe. And the ability of Putin to reconstitute a Russia that was stable, that also had its own sense of national interest, and a vision of the world different from ours, has been deeply frustrating to the political elites and the foreign policy elites of Washington.
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Two, Putin and Russia are not interested in conquest or expansion. Three, Ukraine is prominent to them, not only for historical and cultural reasons, et cetera, but because it is linked to the expansion of NATO and an obvious attempt, as became tangible at the time of the Maidan coup [unclear], that they wished to turn Ukraine into a forward base for NATO. And against the background of Russian history, that is simply intolerable.
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The Donbass, and that is not just Russian-speaking but a highly concentrated Russian region of Eastern Ukraine, which tried to separate itself after the Maidan coup—and by the way, Russian speakers in the country as a whole represent 40% of the population. You know, Russians, quite apart from intermarriage and cultural fusion—you know, Russians are not some small, marginal minority in the Ukraine.
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I believe there is growing and now totally persuasive evidence that when the Biden people came to office, they made a decision to create a crisis over Donbass to provoke a Russian military reaction, and to use that as the basis for consolidating the West, unifying the West, in a program whose centerpiece was massive economic sanctions, with the aim of tanking the Russian economy and possibly and hopefully leading to a rebellion by the oligarchs that would topple Putin.
Now, no person who really knows Russia believes that it was ever at all plausible. But this was an idea which was very prominent in foreign policy circles in Washington, and certainly the Biden administration, and people like Blinken and Sullivan and Nuland believe in it. And so they set about strengthening even further the Ukrainian army, something we’ve been doing for eight years—Ukrainian army, thanks to our efforts, armaments, training advisors.
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...it is now growing evident that in effect, an assault on the Donbass was planned. And that it was in November that the final decision was taken to go ahead with it, and the time set for February. And that is why Joe Biden and other members of the administration could begin to say, with complete confidence, in January that the Russians would be invading Ukraine. Because they knew and committed themselves to a major, a major military attack on the Donbass, and they knew that the Russians would respond. They didn’t know how large a response, how aggressive a response it would be, but they knew there would be a response.
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...and the final blow came when the Ukrainians began massive artillery barrages on cities in the Donbass. Now, there had always been exchanges over the past eight years. On February 18, there was a 30-fold increase in the number of artillery shells, five (sic?) from the Ukrainians into the Donbass, to which the Donbass militias did not retaliate in kind. It peaked on the 21st and continued to the 24th. And this apparently was the last confirmation that the assault would be coming soon, and forced Putin’s hand to preempt by activating plans which no doubt they’d had for some time to invade.
Now, this is of course the diametrical opposite of the fictional story that pervades all public discourse. And you can say “all” and only count on the fingers of your hands and toes the number of dissenters, right, that prevails. Now, let’s leave open the question of do you defend Putin’s actions. I, like you, find it very hard to defend, justify, any major military action that has the consequences that this does. Except in absolute, you know, self-defense.
But you know, that’s where we are. And if there had been the Ukrainian assault that was planned on the Donbass, Putin and Russia would have been in real, real trouble, if they limited themselves to resupplying the Donbass militias.
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[Scheer] You know, what’s at the heart of this really is the denial of anyone else’s nationalism. It’s kind of been the theme of the post-World War II U.S. posture. We are identified with universal values of freedom, justice, liberty—and whatever we do, sometimes it’s admitted to have been a mistake...
I personally don’t like nationalism and think it’s a sort of great mischief and evil in the world. But nonetheless, you cannot cope with the world if you don’t understand nationalism. When Nixon went to China, he actually conceded that Mao was a representative of Chinese nationalism and had to be listened to. The same thing was true in the arms control with Russia. That is lost now, and the idea that there might be Russian aspirations, concerns—that’s pushed to the side.
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The irony is that the United States... has accomplished something that communist ideology was not able to accomplish. Because the Chinese communists and the Russian communists were at war even before the Chinese communist revolution succeeded.
Now, you have still communist China uniting with anti-communist Putin Russia—why? Because of a common fear of a U.S. hegemony. Isn’t that really the big story here that’s being ignored?
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[Brenner] Of course the world system is being transformed by the formation of this Sino-Russian bloc, which is increasingly incorporating other countries. You know, Iran is already part of it. And you know, we will note that there are only two countries outside the Western world—about which I’m speaking politically and socially, not geographically—who have supported the sanctions: South Korea and Japan. All of Asia, Southwest Asia, Africa and Latin America is not observing them, has not signed on to them. Some are exercising self-restraint and slowing down deliveries of certain things, out of sheer prudence and fear of American retaliation. But we’ve gotten no support from them. So, yeah, the gross underestimation of this, Bob.
Now, in what passes for grand strategy among the American foreign policy community, not just the Biden people, they still—they’ve had a dual hope: one, that they could drive a wedge between Russia and China, an idea they entertain only because they know nothing or have forgotten anything they might have known about each of those countries. Or, second, to in effect neutralize Russia by what we talked about: breaking the Russian economy, maybe getting some regime change, so that they would be a negligible contributor, if at all, to ally with the Chinese. And of course we have failed utterly, because all of those mistaken premises were mistaken.
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And this utterly unprecedented hubris, of course, is peculiarly American. I mean, from day one, we’ve always had the faith that we were born in a condition of original virtue, and we were born with some kind of providential mission to lead the world to a better, more enlightened condition. That we were therefore the singular exceptional nation, and that gave us the freedom and the liberty to judge all others. Now, that’s—and we’ve done a lot of good things in part because of that [unclear] dubious things.
But now that’s become so perverted. And as you said, it encourages or justifies the United States setting it up as the judge of what’s legitimate and what isn’t, what government’s legitimate and what isn’t, what policies are legitimate and which aren’t. Which self-defined national interests by other governments we can accept, and which we won’t accept. Of course, this is absurd in its hubris...
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And currently, though, we don’t exercise restraint based either upon a certain political-ideological humility, nor on realism grounds. And that’s why I say we’re living in a world of fantasy—a fantasy which clearly serves some vital psychological needs of the country of America, and especially of its political elites. Because they are the people who are supposed to have taken on the custodial responsibility for the welfare of the country and its people, and that requires maintaining a certain perspective and distance on who we are, on what we can and cannot do, of reality testing even the most basic and fundamental of American premises. And now we don’t do any of that.
And in that sense, I do believe it’s fair to say that we have been betrayed by our political elites, and I use that term, you know, fairly broadly. The susceptibility to propaganda, the susceptibility to allowing the popular mindset to be set the way it’s going on now, in giving in to hysterical impulse, means that yeah, there’s something wrong with society and culture as a whole. But even saying that is up to your political leaders and elites to protect you from that, to protect the populace from that, and to protect themselves from falling prey to similar fantasies and irrationalities, and instead we see just the opposite.
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...there is simply no place in the American conception of what’s real and natural for a United States that is not number one. And I think that’s ultimately what drives this anxiety and paranoia about China, and that is why we have not seriously entertained the alternative. Which is, you develop a dialogue with the Chinese that’s going to take years, that will be continual, in which you try to work out the terms of a relationship, about a world which will be different from the one we’re in now, but will certainly satisfy our basic interests and concerns as well as China’s. To agree on rules of the road, to carve out areas of convergence as well. You know, a dialogue of civilizations.
That’s the kind of thing which Chas Freeman, one of the most distinguished diplomats, and who was the interpreter as a young man for Nixon when he went to Beijing. And he’s been writing and saying this since his retirement 10, 12 years ago, and the man is ostracized, he is shunned...
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And he still writes, and incredibly intelligent, acute, sophisticated, I mean, by orders of magnitude superior to the kinds of clowns who are making our China policy today. And recently published a breathtaking long essay on the nature and character of diplomacy. So he’s the kind of person who could, you know, be involved in and help to shape the kind of dialogue I’m talking about.
And instead we’ve taken this sort of simplistic path of saying the other guy is the enemy, he’s the bad guy, and we’re going to confront him across the board. And I think this is going to lead to, sooner or later, to confrontation and crisis, probably over Taiwan, which will be the equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis, and hope that we survive it, because we’re going to lose a conventional war if we choose to defend Taiwan. And everybody who knows China says the Chinese leadership is watching the Ukraine affair very closely, and thinking to themselves, ah, maybe Russia has given us a glimpse of what the dynamic might be if we go ahead and invade Taiwan.
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