ENDING THE DISASTER IN UKRAINE:
AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Benjamin Abelow [1][16:43]

Let me start off with a few basics. I have a medical background and a background in history and studying arms control, and it's a truism in medicine, of course, that if you have an incorrect diagnosis of a problem, you're going to apply a treatment that may well be unhelpful or damaging or even kill the patient. And I think that analogy applies very well to what we're seeing here, where the “diagnosis” of the deep causes of this war that we've been presented in the public media and from our governments and from the EU and from NATO are completely incorrect. So I'm going to focus for just a few minutes on some of the basics, and I'm going to try to simplify things.

Obviously, there are many factors that have led to this war, and in the superficial, immediate level, of course, the war started when Vladimir Putin invaded on February 24, 2022. So there's no denying that that was the initiation, or what I call the proximal cause of the war. But as for the deeper causes, there are two main narratives or stories that are presented by different sources about how the war started. One is that Vladimir Putin is a sort of Hitler-like character who was involved in a land grab, or as trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. And as a shorthand, I label this the Hitler land grab thesis. And this is what we've heard over and over again.

The main alternative view, which is the one I'll be describing here, is that the expansion of NATO toward and to Russia's borders actually provoked the war by creating a sense of military threat for Russia. This view has often been described as Russian propaganda, but in fact, virtually all the evidence supports it. So I'm going to focus on that evidence and for just a few minutes run through a few of the basic facts in the form of quotations, which I'll actually be reading, just to provide some background that may help people who are not that familiar with this information, and also may provide some good background for some of the other presentations, for understanding some of the more in-depth analyses that you'll be getting.

So, something truly remarkable happened in 2023.  Jens Stoltenberg, who at that time was the Secretary General of NATO, gave a talk to the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs. And his aim in that talk, or part of it, was to embarrass and humiliate Putin by describing how all these other countries that previously were not members of NATO are now eager to join NATO. And I'm going to read you a passage of what he said, and very interestingly, he gave away the entire story in this passage. Although he had previously argued that NATO played no role, this time, he kind of lost himself when he was trying to embarrass Putin, and he did what Professor Jeffrey Sachs described as a Washington gaffe, which Dr. Sachs defined as what happens when somebody accidentally blurts out the truth. So I'm going to read you that passage now:

President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and he actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement. Of course, we didn't sign that. He wanted us to sign that promise never to enlarge NATO. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO close to his borders. He got the exact opposite.

Really an incredible statement, and that in itself really should put an end to any discussion about whether NATO expansion played an important role in this.

But I'm going to read another quotation, this one from a February 28, 2022 interview in the online publication Politico, with Fiona Hill, who is a real hawk and was also a Russia specialist in the US National Intelligence Council. Now, the US National Intelligence Council is one of the many intelligence bodies in the United States, and their particular role is to synthesize information from a variety of other intelligence sources and provide them to the different wings of the US government. So this is really a top level intelligence analysis, and I'm going to read you the passage from that interview where the interviewer from Politico says, “So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan.” And then Fiona Hill, correcting the interviewer, says:

 I think there's been a logical plan, a logical, methodical plan that goes back a long way, at least to 2007 when he [Putin] put the world and certainly Europe on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. Back then, I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO policy regarding Ukraine and Georgia.  One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine.

This is a remarkable assessment coming from a high-level US National Intelligence body in 2007 or early 2008 that described and predicted the future with incredible accuracy. Eight years before the annexation of Crimea, US intelligence predicted that, in response to NATO policy regarding Ukraine, Crimea might be annexed, and 14 years before the 2022 invasion, they predicted there might be a larger action. Even aside from what Jens Stoltenberg said, this statement makes it hard to imagine that anyone could think seriously that NATO policy did not play an important role in bringing about this invasion.

Let me say one more thing briefly, about the opening question you asked on how all this misinformation got going. I'm speaking about government misinformation, and misinformation being promulgated through the mainstream media. And the answer, I think, can be well described by a term that Noam Chomsky popularized, but that has actually been prevalent, I think, since the 1920s and it refers to “the manufacture of consent,” which pertains to democratic regimes.  By way of contrast, in an authoritarian regime, the coercive powers of the government can be freely unleashed against the populace; you don't need quite so much to engage the populace and to gain support for policies. But in a democratic establishment or a democratic realm, if the elite wants to push through a policy, they have to gain the consent of the people who are governed. And this “manufacture of consent” is the idea that the government through its public mouthpiece can manipulate public opinion, and in fact, “manufacture consent” for its preferred policies.  And the media, which is ostensibly independent but in fact is beholden to the government, plays a central role.

And I think that's what we've seen now. And one of the things, of course, that's so disturbing is the extent to which we are all so susceptible to relying on certain sources, whether it be The New York Times, The Washington Post, or different publications in Italy. And in fact, we have to rely on sources because we don't have time to research everything ourselves. But when those sources start to misrepresent information to us, we can readily be taken in, and we are much more gullible than we would like to believe. And in fact, this is exactly what happened in this war where overwhelming evidence that NATO played a crucial role in the precipitation of this war has been thoroughly obscured by the actions of our government, by the media, by NATO, by the European Union.