Why Retaliation Rhymes with Negotiation, US – Russia Edition

This essay was cross-posted on nakedcapitalism.com

Note to international readers: following the launch of Russia’s SMO in 2022, the American left substantially sided with the Biden administration, and against the judgment of the global south, to proclaim Russia to be the aggressor in the conflict. Since then, the left press’s coverage of the war has mirrored that of the corporate press, which has been Russophobic, militaristic, and jingoistic. This is the context for comments below regarding the American left.

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Why Retaliation Rhymes with Negotiation, US – Russia Edition

The intellectual, and with it political, bind that the West is in with respect to the conflict in Ukraine is that two different US administrations have--- purposely or not, mis-diagnosed the genesis of the conflict. Joe Biden did so, one would imagine, because the thirty-year lead-up to the launch of Russia’s SMO in 2022 is more favorable to Russia’s case than it is to the West’s.

Likewise, Donald Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ implies that the conflict can be resolved using military force. However, when a single nation can end all human life on the planet with nuclear weapons, peace through strength is a formula for nuclear annihilation. That neither Biden nor Trump appear to understand this places them both in a pre-nuclear age.

Correct diagnosis is essential to solving the problem. Mr. Trump’s infantile treatment of the conflict in Ukraine as a fight between two children that he must mediate is the least honest framing of the war to date. In the first place, the US is the lead belligerent in the war because it both assumed political control of Ukraine with the US-led coup there in 2014, and as the New York Times reported over a year ago, it was the CIA that organized, armed, funded, and built-out the only army that is at war with Russia in the present, the CIA’s (links below).

Whether Donald Trump was aware or not, US preparations for war (see here, here) were solidified during his first term in office. Moving the CIA’s war forward was the central motivation for the Russiagate fraud. Having promised to improve relations between Washington and Moscow, Mr. Trump was occupied with accusations that he had been compromised by Russia. Reams of ‘evidence’ faked by MI6, the CIA, and the FBI were used to persuade Americans that the CIA assuming control of domestic US politics was actually ‘the Russians.’

In terms of left-wing politics, the American left broke with the international left to support the US war against Russia under the dubious theory that US foreign policy is a liberatory force. The mutually-exclusive propositions that the US is 1) imperialist and 2) yet US foreign policy is liberatory, are now held by the supporting cast of American empire, Question, how liberated are the Palestinians in Gaza feeling right now? Gaza is the pure product of US foreign policy. The only people surprised that Gazans aren’t flourishing are American liberals.

This is an important aspect of the unsolvable predicament that the US has been placed in by the people running the place. The political interests and prerogatives of elected officials and the permanent government differ from those of the American people. Conventional wisdom has it that admitting defeat in Ukraine would destroy the political fortunes of the politicians / party whose name is on the deed, as well as the sense of unipolar might that George W. Bush imagined that he was revivifying with his catastrophe in Iraq.

"Joe Biden, whom I talked to about this at length, thought that Russia should be destroyed. And Europe, which held a middle-ground position for some time, finally sided with Washington and now is spending billions to rearm itself. That concerns me. If you keep speaking only about war there will never be peace," Brazilian President Lula da Silva, 2025, Tass.

Joe Biden has long been a Cold Warrior who believes the Manichean pablum that 1) ‘we’ are good and 2) the Russians are bad. Following from Woodrow Wilson, Biden is also a racist crank. But the object of his racial hatred, Slavs, makes it acceptable in US ruling class circles. Many of the anti-Slavs in the US were also antisemites. From the Bolshevik Revolution forward, Judaism and communism were conflated in Western eyes. Western anti-communism was, in its European incarnation, also antisemitism.

In terms of contemporary politics, Woodrow Wilson was 1) Progressive, and 2) a racist crank. Progressive race science in the US, along with the Eugenics movement, formed the basis of Nazi race ‘science.’ The Progressive desire to ‘improve’ humanity most often meant ridding it of ‘undesirables.’ While this history may be uncomfortable for modern Progressives, the Progressive ‘position,’ meaning the CIA’s, on the war in Ukraine, is racist to its core. How many American Senators need be quoted regarding ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’ for this to be clear?

In recent comments made about the US - British attacks on Russian nuclear assets inside Russia. V. Putin offered two possible paths for Russian retaliation. One would be an Oreshnik attack that is intended to end the Ukrainian regime. The other would be substantial, but more restrained than the first option, with the intention of continuing the peace talks restarted in Istanbul. This follows the US double-daring the Russians to nuke Washington, New York, and Los Angeles.

Mr. Trump and his band of one-half, one-quarter, and one-tenth wits, are working from their precepts about the war rather than from what the Russians are saying. They are aging ideologues sitting together in a closed room without input from the outside world, just making shit up. Recall Elon Musk’s promise that DOGE would find $2 trillion in Federal waste and fraud. DOGE didn’t find it because it doesn’t exist. The claim was the result of an ideological closed circuit. The rest of Trump’s program is dubious for similar reasons.

Donald Trump both 1) does know and 2) doesn’t know that the Russians have not only agreed to negotiations to end hostilities, but have been requesting meetings with the Americans to resolve outstanding Russian security concerns, including NATO expansion, for thirty years. Not only this, but having prevailed militarily in Ukraine, the Russians were acting with relative restraint until the Americans and the Brits tried to assassinate the President of Russia while crafting a fake nuclear attack on Russia to see how it would respond.

That the American political leadership is criminally stupid, and is apparently too stupid to know how stupid it is, is a problem for the world. Rumor had it in DC-world that the nation that recently changed its nuclear doctrine in response to Western provocations in and around Ukraine would treat an assault on its nuclear assets favorably (not). In terms of sheer numbers of nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump’s measure is a mercy 6” compared to Mr. Putin’s 10” of hardened steel. Translation: the US, irrespective of who is president, loses ‘peace through strength’ when it comes to nuclear weapons.

By analogy, in reading a press account of a murder where one person walks up to another and shoots them in the head, most readers conclude that the act was ‘unprovoked.’ After all, the victim was unarmed and was minding their own business when he / she was shot. However, what if the person who was shot had raped the shooter’s spouse, murdered his / her family, and burned down his / her house the week before? The point is that history matters. How events are interpreted is a matter of context every bit as much as the proximate facts.

Readers may recognize here a crude parallel to the American response to the launch of Russia’s SMO in February, 2022. The obvious question of that day was why? Why was a border crossed to carry out a military assault against a hapless victim--- Ukraine? Question: which foreign invasion of Ukraine are the Americans responding to so unfavorably, the one carried out by Russia in 2022, or the one carried out by the US in 2014? In 2025, 98% of the educated bourgeois in the US still have no knowledge of the American regime-change coup in Ukraine in 2014.

The American bourgeois conceit that the US is helping Ukraine misses that since the US and the Brits interfered to halt the first agreement to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, the so-called Istanbul Accord of April – May 2022, over one million Ukrainians have been killed. In Istanbul, Ukraine had agreed to the peace deal that it had negotiated with Russia. The Ukrainians were happy. The Russians were happy. It was only Ukraine’s American and British ‘helpers’ who objected to one million Ukrainians still being alive.

Recall the quote from Lula da Silva above that Joe Biden’s intention was to use the military of the US to destroy Russia, with zero regard for what is best for the US. Biden hated Russia and Russians, and filled his foreign policy team with the intellectual equivalents of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team. This is the rot that accompanies imperial decline. There is no way out for the US because the people who run the country have contrary interests to those of the American people.

In ways that American liberals and progressives likely haven’t considered, the American coalition in favor of war against Russia today is class-analogous to the majority of Americans who supported the US war in Vietnam to the very end. Chicken hawks in the White House and Congress allied with the ‘my country, right or wrong’ contingent of urban bourgeois and rural soldier culture to pose themselves as the saviors of the world’s downtrodden through bombing rural, agrarian, Vietnam into dust.

Three-and-one-half-million Vietnamese died (per former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) in a war that was explained to the American people as benefitting the South Vietnamese. A tiny nation of plucky fighters was being saved from the unspeakable horrors of widespread literacy, health care, and human flourishing, went the Western spiel. The liberals in 1968 (I was there) chided the anti-war movement for not understanding the larger geopolitical issues in play. History has been quite unkind to the supporters of that war.

Within Clausewitz’s ‘war is politics by other means’ logic; the question arises of what politics the Russians were pursuing when they launched their SMO in 2022? What Russian President Vladimir Putin offered at the time was 1) an end to NATO expansion along Russia’s Western border, 2) an end to US political control over Ukraine achieved through the US coup in 2014, and 3) an end to Ukrainian fascists committing ethnic cleansing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas. The wording varied, but this is the gist.

From the perspective of the self-interest of Russia, these are reasonable requests. With respect to the ‘freedom’ of nations to join NATO, certainly Russia has the same right to coup the Mexican government and set up a wall of nuclear weapons along the US – Mexico border pointed at Washington, New York and Los Angeles, right? Isn’t this what the Americans are telling the world? That NATO has a right to do this to Russia?

Quite obviously, the US view is based in a sense of military hegemony that George W. Bush threw into the trash with his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Political power represents an agreement between nations as to who possesses it and who doesn’t. Volunteering to demonstrate to the world that a nation’s power is less than the world had perceived it to be, as Bush did with his assault on Iraq, is strategically debilitating. The US couldn’t have demonstrated itself to be stronger than perception had it. Only weaker. This was Bush’s gift to the US.

And it is why the American regime-change coup in Ukraine in 2014 is unknown to the Western bourgeois who get their news from establishment sources. Had it been understood that the Americans and Brits have controlled Ukraine politically since early 2014, it would be difficult to explain how precisely the Russians ‘invaded’ it in 2022? And it is doubly hard to explain how such an invasion would be ‘unprovoked.’ What Russia is doing in Ukraine is a gentle version of what the US would do to chase the Russians out of Mexico, were they to enter.

Ironically, CIA mouthpiece, the New York Times, again comes in handy here. In his second installment, Times reporter Adam Entous offered that the US and the Europeans have actually been running the war in Ukraine, meaning telling the Ukrainians what to do and when to do it, from remote locations including Wiesbaden, Germany, since the onset of war. The result, the CIA organized, armed, funded and built the ‘Ukrainian’ army while the US State Department enlisted the Ukrainians to be cannon fodder in an American war.

Russia has prevailed militarily against Ukraine. The only thing keeping Ukraine in the battle are Western arms shipments. Had Donald Trump wanted to end the US war in Ukraine, he would have ended the arms shipments. He has not done so. He has surrounded himself with morons, meaning people who develop their ideas in closed forums, thereby doing an end-run around their capacity for informed thought. To those of us who have studied this war, nothing that has come from Washington regarding the conflict has been either informed or true.

American and European politicians, having created this mess, are now engaged in a furious effort to rewrite the history of the war to portray it in terms that are untrue. Curious readers can find V. Putin’s speeches from 2022 onward, online. In them he states in clear language why the Russians launched the SMO, both the proximate and long-term causes, and how the conflict could be resolved. The security guarantees from the US that the Russians have requested would have been considered reasonable were the goal us the US not to overthrow Russia to claim its resources.

A problem that surely the Russians have considered is that with the breadth of Western opposition to Russia being in Ukraine, even if a deal were negotiated between the Trump administration and Russia, neither Congress nor future administrations will abide by it. In 2020, it was the Democrats who were the dim ideologues who promised a new way forward. In 2024, it is the Republicans who are the dim ideologues promising a new way forward. The pattern isn’t difficult to read.

Americans imagining that such a result would be a victory for the West should look the word ‘empathy’ up in the dictionary and ponder its meaning. By posing the Western position as: unless Russia stops us, we will never, ever, ever end the attacks on Russia, provides a strong incentive for the Russians to end the threat once-and-for-all. From what I’ve heard from V. Putin’s speeches, this isn’t his desire. Which makes Western regime change comments as clueless as the people making them.

What this means is that the Americans are going to have to speak with the Russians to solve the political differences between them. The empire-in-freefall nature of the US at present means that the worst that the US has to offer (e.g. Biden, Trump) will be on the receiving end of Russian entreaties. While the Russians are reportedly happy to have someone to answer the phone on the American side, getting a lecture from Marco Rubio on the fake genesis of the conflict in Ukraine every time that they call will quickly grow tiresome.

With respect to retaliation for the US attacking Russian nuclear assets, V. Putin is cautious and conservative. As long as Russia sees a path, however improbable, to resolving US – Russian differences peacefully, he will remain cautious. Where the mismatch will be found, however, will be between Mr. Putin’s actions and Western interpretation of them. To quote Upton Sinclair. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Mr. Putin will likely expect the US to consider, and possibly to understand, the military logic of the Russian retaliation. However, the Trump administration is still trying to figure out the drive-through window at the local Burger King. And the vested interests of the people doing the interpreting will be very different from the interests of the American people.