Lessons From Gorbachev’s Peace Vision Betrayed By U.S.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev may be resting in peace. But the rest of the world is not.

Three decades since the supposed end of the Cold War, unrelenting U.S. aggression and countless NATO wars around the world have demonstrated the complete futility and naivety of trying to make peace with American imperialism.

There is no appeasing or reasoning with a predator.

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week at the age of 91 is a timely reminder of how much has changed, or perhaps not changed, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Gorbachev was the last leader (1985-1991) of the Soviet Union (1917-1991) whose final dissolution he oversaw. That historic event was supposed to hail the end of the Cold War that had frozen international relations over nearly five decades since the end of the Second World War. The dread of a nuclear conflagration was henceforth presumed to have been removed. Who can honestly say that now given the NATO-backed war in Ukraine on Russia’s doorstep?

In 1990, Gorbachev declared that the reforms he was pursuing laid the foundations for a new era of world peace. Back then, the United States and Western allies likewise were crowing about the “end of history” and a “new world order” of peaceful relations based on so-called “liberal democracy”. The Cold War was purportedly over and decades of militarism would, in theory, be replaced by the harmonious coexistence of nations able to enjoy a transformative peace dividend from economic revival without the drain of a non-stop arms race.

That rosy view of history has been cruelly demolished by subsequent events.

Admittedly, there were some apparent gains from significant reductions in nuclear arsenals held by the United States and the Russian Federation, the successor of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and his American counterpart Ronald Reagan had signed the breakthrough Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 1987 and other arms control agreements.

In 1991, Moscow was assured that there would be no expansion of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance whose founding credo in 1949 was based on confronting the Soviet Union. The assurances were bogus if not deliberate deception. The military bloc has since more than doubled its member nations to 30, some of which are bordering Russia and are marked by regimes that spout rabid Russophobia and nostalgia for fascism.

How spectacularly wrong Gorbachev’s earlier vision of peace has turned out to be. Many other people around the world have been thwarted in their hopes for a peace dividend.

The past 30 years have witnessed relentless U.S.-led wars in the Middle East and Africa all of which have made a mockery of international law. Millions of lives have been destroyed and whole nations raped and gutted. The unprecedented expansion of NATO members has resulted in American missiles being placed ever closer to Russia’s borders.

The present war in Ukraine is the culmination of this U.S.-led aggression.

Today, the United States and its NATO allies are spending more on military weapons and forces than at the height of the Cold War.

Indeed, regrettably, one can say with total confidence that the Cold War never ended. The U.S. has unceremoniously dumped the INF and other arms-control treaties. It has pursued a remorseless and duplicitous policy of encircling Russia with existential threats to its national security.

Not only that, but the United States and its Western allies have adopted a parallel policy of wanton confrontation against China. Arming Taiwan duplicates the provocative weaponizing of Ukraine. War, war, and more war is the only objective, it seems, that drives the United States. It’s a war junkie that needs a fix.

Meanwhile, as America and its NATO partners spend grotesque amounts of money on militarism, the citizens of these nations are subjected to ever-more deterioration in their social conditions from economic austerity. That ludicrous contradiction is surely a clarion call for definitive condemnation.

The heinous fact is that U.S.-led Western capitalism cannot possibly exist without militarism, wars and constant aggression. The notion of peaceful relations and a new order of mutual cooperation is a pathetic delusion. It is also a dangerous delusion if indulged.

Russia, China and a growing number of other nations have repeatedly called for a multipolar world based on genuine cooperation, partnership and on the founding charter no less of the United Nations that was established in 1945 amid the ashes and horrors of World War Two.

In recent years, the United States and its Western lackeys have brazenly resisted any such progressive development precisely because such a development is anathema to the war economy that underpins Western capitalism. The euphemism of “rules-based order” is in actuality the law of the jungle according to the U.S. and its NATO acolytes.

One could further posit that the vain, self-serving euphemisms of the United States are not unlike the self-righteous, self-justifying pronouncements of the Nazi Third Reich. There is a long and odious deeper history here of systematic connections between Western capitalism and fascism, connections that are increasingly becoming visible in today’s world.

The eight-year build up of NATO militarism in Ukraine since the CIA coup in 2014 is testimony to the inherent warmongering that resides in the dark heart of U.S.-led imperialism. All diplomatic attempts by Russia to negotiate a detente with NATO and for a peace settlement in Ukraine in particular have failed. Washington and its minions have rebuffed all of those principled efforts through diplomacy for a security treaty.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was right to remark in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for international relations. The last three decades and the NATO-backed war in Ukraine in which the Kiev regime is being armed to the teeth to threaten Russia are proof of that conclusion. Western media, however, turn that objective observation upside-down by trying to cast Putin as a Soviet revanchist.

Putin offered his condolences this week and paid respects at Gorbachev’s coffin. He generously said that the former president had tried his best to bring about reforms to the Soviet Union and to make world peace. But ultimately, it can be said that Gorbachev’s reforms only led to years of turmoil for the Russian people and economic chaos. His successor Boris Yeltsin took those reforms to an even lower level of disorder and ruin for the Russian Federation, owing to the ransacking of the Russian economy by Western capitalists and their cronies.

Russia has recovered remarkably from that period of economic mayhem. The country is much stronger and more stable largely because the Western exploitation of its resources was decisively checked. Russia’s military strength has also been rebuilt to a formidable level. That no doubt is partly the background to the resurgence in U.S.-led aggression towards Russia. The only kind of Russia that Washington wants and would accept is a weak one.

Crucially, too, Moscow is no longer harbouring delusions of peaceful coexistence with the U.S.-led Western order. Gorbachev’s vision was naive and delusional. It nearly led to the entire collapse and subjugation of Russia by NATO. No wonder Western leaders and media were this week eulogizing Gorbachev as a “great statesman”. Ironically, there were disingenuous attempts in the Western media to try to portray Putin as “betraying” Gorbachev’s supposed peace legacy.

What legacy? All the evidence shows that U.S.-led imperialism has moved like a serial predator on Russia as well as China and other nations deemed to be obstacles to American hegemonic ambitions.

A line has been drawn in Ukraine. The present danger is that the war could turn into a nuclear World War Three. Russia’s military strength might hold the line. But the reality is: that there can be peace with the U.S.-led order.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev may be resting in peace. But the rest of the world is not.

Original article: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/09/02/lessons-from-gorbachev-peace-vision-betrayed-by-us/