Andrew Bacevich is a conservative critical of American ‘foreign policy’/imperialism.
Note the absence of the political economic factors of the US involvement in supporting Ukraine. In fact, not a single economic factor is mentioned, which – even when the reader doesn’t believe in “democracy vs. autocracy” or “rules of internal order” rhetoric as Bacevich correctly highlights – is left wondering about the reasons of American involvement in the war.
Furthermore, he is treating the involvement as exclusively directed against Russia, excluding the main threat for Washington’s imperialist hegemony – China. “In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary,” Bacevich states. It is a narrow way of looking at the global geopolitics.
There is no reference either to the domestic social factors in the US in influencing the state’s decisions in going to war. Quoting a critic of Bacevich, there has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constituencies in the US with a direct stake in imperial expansion. It is arguable that something similar may have been at work in the steady escalation." This was written more than 20 years ago. Today one should engage with the question: How do we apply that to the intervention in Ukraine? Who has a direct stake in the American intervention against Russia? If there is a ‘class conflict behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine’, is there a similar conflict in the U.S. behind the American intervention?
One or two good things in the article is that Bacevich cannot be called a Russian sympathiser or a Putin defender when he makes his case against ‘American global intervention’, including the on-going intervention in support of Ukraine. He also keeps American readers away from Amnesia by recalling the millions of lives lost and the destruction caused by decades of US-led global interventions.
Comments