Wag the Dog is a 1997 American political satire film centering on a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract from a presidential sex scandal.
War is may be just the thing a fragmented US ruling class and its Frankenstein Monster military industrial complex can unite behind, like the old days against the USSR.
Hence, the big story of the week is diplomatic conversations with Russia, where the US is again pressing for war in a distant land.
After a coup in 2014, Ukrainian nationalists have been seeking to involve the US against Russia. Ukraine amended its constitution in 2019 to enable the country to join the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR. In September 2021, Ukraine conducted military exercises with NATO forces. The Kremlin warned that NATO expanding military infrastructure in Ukraine would cross "red lines" for the Russian President Putin.
In November 2021, the Russian Defense Ministry described the deployment of the U.S. warships to the Black Sea as a "threat to regional security and strategic stability." The ministry said in a statement, "The real goal behind the U.S. activities in the Black Sea region is exploring the theater of operations in case of Kyiv’s attempts to settle the conflict in the southeast by force."
In response, Russia has massed nearly 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, and its president, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to secure his country’s interests in the region, as Russian troops did in 2014.
Ukraine joining NATO would be disastrous for Russia’s security, putting threatening armies less than 600 miles from Moscow. Putin is demanding that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO, that no European country house missiles that could reach Russia, and that no former Soviet satellite country that has joined NATO house weapons or troops that could threaten Russia. This would essentially dismantle the continued march east of US imperialism after the fall of the USSR.
The U.S. and its junior imperialists reject those demands, and are looking to further weaken Russia, and, possibly, break up the country.
This week, members of the Biden administration will meet with their Russian counterparts in Geneva, Switzerland, to try to deescalate the situation, although the U.S. has claimed that these talks are exploratory only and that they will not be making any firm commitments.
Over the weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the much-derided comment “I think one lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave,” at the tail-end of the press conference, without irony considering how the US has occupied and refused to leave several countries.
The State Department and the Biden administration have worked hard to rally junior imperialists that frayed under Trump, who favored a more transactional approach to international arrangements. Blinken emphasized that the U.S. will not act unilaterally; it is working with its juniors to push against Russia.
That coalition will exert pressure on Russia through the economic strength of the U.S. and its allies. “The G7, the leading democratic economies in the world, made clear there would be massive consequences for renewed Russian aggression,” Blinken said, “So has the European Union, so has NATO.”
While he declined to identify exactly what he meant by “economic, financial, other measures,” he said that “Russia has a pretty good idea of the kinds of things it would face if it renews its aggression.” Observers speculate that Blinken is alluding to shutting Russia out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, which facilitates international banking transfers.
Blinken and President Joe Biden have made it clear since the beginning of Biden‘s term that they see rallying the capitalist class (“our democracy”) as being global as well as local. Blinken has said that in our era, “distinctions between domestic and foreign policy have simply fallen away. Our domestic renewal and our strength in the world are completely entwined.”
The weakening of the US ruling class stems in part from the shifts caused by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, almost exactly 30 years ago, after the oligarch-backed leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine announced they were creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States, in defiance of the people’s overwhelming vote to preserve the USSR. When almost all the other Soviet republics announced that they were joining the new alliance, the leader of the USSR, president Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down, handing power to the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.
The oligarchs looted the formerly communist countries and laundered their illicit money in the U.S. and the U.K., which were celebrating the ‘end of history’ and allowed their own oligarchs to begin squabbling over the spoils.
In the 1990s, Vladimir Putin was working to tame the oligarchs in Russia, and by the 2000s, Ukrainian right wing nationalism worried him. In 2010 a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, won the Ukraine presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO.
Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, he pulled Ukraine out of the process of joining the European Union, sparking a US-coup that threw him from power in 2014. Putin’s fears of a US dagger put at Russia’s throat were being realized.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs. Paul Manafort went to work for candidate Donald Trump in 2016, apparently working with Russian operatives to undermine Clinton, while Biden’s son Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky.
Biden’s election changed the international equation as the US Frankenstein Monster military industrial complex was freed from constraint by a diffident Trump. Concerned by the erosion of ruling class consensus at home and abroad, Biden vowed to rebuild alliances and to fight oligarchs which do not support his faction of the ruling class.
Picking a war with Russia, like the old USSR, will be a way to unite the US ruling class, like the old days.
The purge of US populist dissidents continues apace as part of that process. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is looking into whether Trump was the head of a criminal conspiracy to stop Congress from declaring Biden the president. They are looking not just at his communications with lawmakers, but also at whether he was part of an effort to coordinate the attack on the Capitol with the counting of the certified ballots. Having been impeached twice, this is political theater.
Provoking a nuclear power into conflict is a rather large risk to take to promote ruling class consensus, but with the Frankenstein Monster military industrial complex in the driver’s seat, it’s a risk they are apparently willing to take.
A nuclear exchange will have the benefit, though, of taking Covid policy failure off the front page.
