Noam Chomsky Is Right U.S. Should Work To Negotiate An End To The War In Ukraine

In an interview with Nathan Robinson in the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, Chomsky accused the United States of being willing to “fight to the last Ukraine” instead of seeking a negotiated settlement that, while imperfect, would at least stop the bloodshed in Ukraine. . A mutually acceptable recession would have the added advantage of putting a brake on a dangerous escalation of tensions between the US and Russia. The prevailing tone of the responses on Twitter was angry and dismissive. More than a few people made comparisons with Chamberlain, who capitulated to Hitler in Munich. Others called Chomsky a puppet of Putin or even claimed that the linguist wanted Russia’s “genocide war” to succeed more quickly. Even more vocal critics have suggested that what he said was incompatible with the general right of people facing foreign attack to defend themselves – and with Chomsky’s own support, for example, for Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation. A closer look at the interview, however, shows that nothing Chomsky said is worth the criticism. In fact, in an atmosphere less charged with warlike fervor, it would be easy to imagine the New York Times editorial board saying many of the same things. And there is no inconsistency in Chomsky’s approach to Russian and Western imperialism. Nowhere in the interview did he suggest that the Ukrainians should simply lay down their arms, without asking for anything in return. Neither Chomsky blamed Ukraine for the Russian invasion, nor did he deny that the Ukrainian government had any authority to determine its own course of action. In fact, he repeatedly praised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for being “an honorable person” who has shown “great courage” and “great integrity.” Even those of Zelensky’s demands that could have really disastrous consequences for the world, such as his call on Western powers to create a No-Flight Zone, are, Chomsky said, understandable from the Ukrainian point of view. In other interviews, Chomsky also said that Zelensky was right in rejecting Russia’s immediate demands and that the Ukrainian president’s public response to Putin in March was “prudent and appropriate.” None of this means that Chomsky and his critics do not have real and deep disagreements about US policy toward the war in Ukraine. The source of this disagreement is simply elsewhere. Chomsky’s analysis is that the choices are, on the one hand, a serious impetus for Russia, Ukraine, the United States and other powers to sit down and reach a settlement through negotiations to end the conflict or, on the other , the continuation of the escalation in which, at best, countless additional lives of Ukrainians will be lost. In the worst case, the regional war could escalate into a wider conflict that could lead to World War III. A common objection to this kind of argument is that concern about World War III leaves the United States and its allies open to “nuclear blackmail” by Putin and other evil nuclear weapons agents. But it is unthinkable to treat this as a new precedent. Concerns about proxy wars between a nuclear power and a peripheral country backed by an opposing force escalating into direct clashes between the superpowers have been a key element of the great powers’ policy for many decades. This is one of the reasons why the LBJ has avoided a large-scale invasion of North Vietnam. And it is a concern that would surely have been borne by then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his advisers, if they had ever seriously considered getting more directly involved in the war. Even if we assume for argument that there is only a 1% 1% chance that tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine could escalate into World War III, that should be more than enough to hold decision-makers back. awake at night. Think about how excited you would be if the chances of winning a multi-million dollar lottery jackpot were only 200-1. “Even if we assume for argument that there is only a one-half percent chance that tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine could escalate into World War III, that should be more than enough to hold decision makers awake at night. . » And, even if we leave aside the small but scary chance of World III, Chomsky still has one point. The line on “Russia’s war to the last Ukrainian” was borrowed from Chomsky by Chase Freeman, Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense in the early 1990s. Freeman before him, is that, although the Biden government was generous in its military assistance to Ukraine and willing to inflict maximum financial pain on Russia through sanctions, it showed no interest in US direct involvement in the peace talks. This suggests that the US is currently holding out hope for a complete victory for Ukraine and is not ready to accept a messy de-escalation process through negotiations. Perhaps pushing hard for an absolute Russian defeat, no matter how long it takes or how many lives are lost, is the right course of action. A common blockchain by Chomsky’s less stubborn critics is that the United States should not engage in peace negotiations because, as national security commentator Nicholas Grossman puts it, when and if Ukrainians accept a peace deal should be “the their call “. Others have suggested that there is an inconsistency here. Researcher Zaid Jilani asks if Chomsky would advise “Palestinians or Kurds” to “give up their national ambitions” just to avoid bloodshed. In fact, Chomsky has advocated much deeper compromises in the Palestinian case than the Ukrainian. He has been a supporter of a two-state solution for decades. He was also a critic of the BDS (Sales and Sanctions Boycott) movement. In his discussion with Robinson, Chomsky suggested that a peace deal in Ukraine could include a diplomatic commitment to Ukrainian neutrality as well as “some level of adjustment for the Donbass region, with a high degree of autonomy, perhaps within a federal structure in Ukraine.” recognizing that, whether we like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. “ The recapture of Crimea and NATO membership were ambitions that Ukraine was never likely to fulfill, and it is difficult to see how a negotiated compromise would not involve some level of adjustment for the separatist Russian client states in the region. Donbass. The fact is that any such settlement would sacrifice Ukrainian “national ambitions” to a much lesser extent than a two-state solution in Israel / Palestine would jeopardize historic Palestinian ambitions. Even in the best version of such a solution, where Israel retreated to its pre-1967 borders to allow the formation of a Palestinian state throughout the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the vast majority of total Israeli / US territory Palestine would end up in the hands of Israel. And given Israel’s settlement policy over the past decades, it is likely that any two-state settlement would leave the Palestinians with even less territory. In addition, for a good ratio, the US would first have to change sides and then channel huge quantities of weapons to Hamas and Fatah to fight the Israeli army – while showing no interest in seeking a negotiated settlement. , as imperfect as it would create at least one Palestinian state. Would many of Chomsky’s critics really support such a policy? The allegation that Chomsky and Freeman deny Ukrainian service when they accuse the United States of being willing to “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian” or that US involvement in peace talks would deprive Ukrainians of the right to make such decisions. loses its meaning. on multiple levels. First, there are reports of Zelensky himself urging the “West” to “get more involved in the negotiations to end the war.” UK Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace has said he “knows” the Ukrainians want the UK and other powers at the table. And it is a matter of public history that Zelensky said that “the world” and not just Ukraine “needs to talk to Putin.” Therefore, there are at least some indications that the US and other Western powers pursuing a less deadlocked approach to the negotiations would respect Ukraine’s wishes. Second, even if Zelensky did not want the US at the table, the US has a long history of working to both entice both sides of the conflict to engage in peace talks and play a direct role in the negotiations. Was it illegal, for example, for the US to pressure both the United Kingdom and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to make peace in the 1990s? This is not Chomsky, but his critics, who want to apply strange new standards to world diplomacy. It is one thing to argue that the US should reduce its role in the world to a point where it would no longer make sense to engage in conflict negotiations in remote parts of the world. Many Americans would unequivocally reject this proposal as “isolationism.” I am not one of them. But whatever you think about this question, we can not have it both ways – if the US can get involved by flooding the conflict zone with weapons to help the side we favor win, then it certainly is not much great involvement for us in promoting peace negotiations. One last point about this: US-led international sanctions have caused deep pain to the Russian economy. Certainly, US diplomats who were directly involved in the talks and offered to lift those sanctions would be a major temptation for Russia to agree to the kind of peace deal that Professor Chomsky describes – an agreement that would involve Russia abandoning most of the original its war targets. Remember Putin …