DON CORLEONE TRUMP’S SHAKEDOWN OF UKRAINE
- Gonzalo Santos
- Feb 26
- 3 min read
Tom Friedman, foreign policy wonk at the New York Times, just wrote a very revealing essay, accurately exposing the crass, mafioso behavior of the Trump administration, shamelessly shaking down Ukraine at their highest hour of peril. Enough to give any proud American imbued with the “we’re-the-good-guys” affliction called American Exceptionalism, the vapors. But ask any Latin American and they will regale you with plenty of examples from past “Gun Boat Diplomacy” and later the U.S.’s “Cold War” interventions throughout the continent – nothing new, they’ll say.
Friedman also exposes the wet fantasy world the Trumpians have been laboring under, filled with grand delusions regarding how they’ll handle Putin and his ruthless band of Russian neoimperialists, who has been playing them like a violin since 2016.
"Whom who" is the essence of international relations in today's era of renewed inter-imperialist rivalries (Lenin coined that term in the previous era that led to WW I); and entirely absent from the Friedman’s analysis is any reference to who's benefiting from all this violent madness in Europe at the end of the day. Well, China is the actual winner of that entirely misbegotten, criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent proxy war it provoked between the overly ambitious US/NATO and the equally overly ambitious Russia.
This will become apparent once the Atlantic NATO alliance collapses, as it probably will soon under Trump, on the one side, and it becomes clear just how extensively and deeply the Russian third-rate extractivist economy falls entirely under the Chinese global circuits of accumulation, on the other.
If this sounds familiar, it should! That's pretty much what happened as a result of the disastrous land wars foolishly launched and sustained by Bush II/Obama/Trump/Biden in Central Asia after the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11/01... an area that it’s become clear now is increasingly hegemonized by China (and partially Iran), on the one hand, while the US got saddled with a US war debt to China in the many trillions of dollars. (Trump's tariff wars since his first term, continued by Biden, are an ineffective, self-defeating attempt to get out of that deep hole).
Back to the way the Ukrainian proxy war is winding down to an unmistakable, ignominious U.S. surrender to Putin’s Russia. Of course, absent from Tom Friedman's analysis, as liberals are wont to do, is any sober self-critique of Biden’s actual (and unrealistic) US imperialist goals behind the funding, sustaining and prolonging the bloody war "to the last Ukrainian": Biden's war hawks sought to keep it going indefinitely to militarily degrade, economically bring to heel, and bleed the Russian Bear as much as possible, while shoring up the U.S.’s own very anemic hegemony over the European Union/NATO, and discipline Europe back to the pliable instrument of US global ambitions vis-a-vis Russia, the entire Global South, and especially China.
So, you have to take this liberal "critique" of Trump's admittedly debased mafioso delusions with a grain of (Black Sea) salt. The fact is that this entire disaster in Central Europe will not end well for either the U.S., Europe, or Russia - not to mention devastated, portioned, and recolonized Ukraine -, but end quite well geo-strategically for China. It shows, on a higher plane of analysis, that we have reached the limits of the Western World's previously tight grip on the present course and the future destiny of the world.
Another world is possible, another world order is necessary. It isn’t going to be through inter-imperialist war that we'll get a new or old world order back, though we may very well destroy the chaotic world we still have battered and limping along. The dark clouds of nuclear war, or climate change catastrophe, are gathering inexorably, due to the folly of our flawed visions, broken structures, and blind ambitions.
We await the vision to how to get out of this dead end in time, and the global social revolt to demand and usher in a better alternative.
Peoples of the world - Global North and Global South alike - arise!
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