A month into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, picturing an endgame is challenging, with the White House poised to heap more pressure on the Kremlin while ignoring Moscow’s demands for security.
During the crisis, the United States, guided by its self-interests, has added fuel to the fire by delivering lethal weapons to Ukraine and imposing unprecedented sanctions on Russia.
All U.S. moves run counter to global efforts to de-escalate the conflict and won’t inspire an urgently needed ceasefire. Instead, Washington’s actions aim to shore up its global domination, and other countries are paying the price.
“STRATEGIC MISTAKE”
Before the fighting broke out, the United States had intentionally hyped up tensions between Russia and Ukraine instead of pooling efforts to smooth things over. With the situation worsening, the country is wielding its political heft and flexing its economic muscles to corner Russia, many experts have said.
For the United States, “the relative ease of imposing economic sanctions has made them the foreign-policy option of first resort, despite a growing body of evidence that they often fail to achieve their goals,” Fortune magazine wrote on Feb. 24, when Russia launched the special military operation.
“In some cases, experience has shown that sanctions only entrench undesirable behavior from the parties they target,” it added.
“The tool of sanctions has become a tired tool,” Stephen Biegun, former U.S. deputy secretary of state under ex-president Donald Trump, was quoted in the report as saying.
The use of sanctions, Biegun added, “has not seemed to significantly alter the behavior of any foreign party whose actions are of concern to the United States.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview with Xinhua on Wednesday that the continuous expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has reached an “extreme” point and that the Russian reaction of launching its military operation “was predictable.”
“In that sense, we made a strategic mistake,” he said.
To further isolate Moscow, the United States has proposed excluding Russia from the Group of 20, attempting to blur the line between global economic cooperation and political security.
The U.S.-led response to Russia laid bare double standards and was “hysterical,” which even includes sanctions on cats and dogs, Jin Canrong, professor at the School of International Studies of Renmin University of China, told Xinhua on Thursday.
U.S. DOUBLE STANDARDS
The double standards employed by Washington on Ukraine have once again revealed the essence of its foreign policy — which put America’s interests first — despite politically-glorified slogans of defending peace, democracy, human rights and freedom.
While chanting freedom of speech, the United States forced Russia’s English news channel RT America to cease production earlier this month as part of its whole-of-the-system information campaign to mute Russia. Furthermore, several U.S. social media platforms have rushed to close accounts and delete content seen as pro-Moscow.
“They’re afraid of even a single voice coming out as challenging the power elite, questioning them, daring to hold a dissenting view,” former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard said recently. “And they’re afraid because their arguments are so weak that they know they will not withstand the light of the truth.”
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., concluded as early as 2018 that the United States has had “too many foreign policy double standards.” However, its leaders like to portray the nation “as an exemplar of ethical conduct in the international system.”
“Such blatant hypocrisy and double standards continue today,” Carpenter said. “U.S. leaders need to be candid with the American people and acknowledge that their decisions are based on cold calculations of national interest, not ethical considerations.”
Double standards were boldly on display when the U.S. urged European countries to absorb people fleeing Ukraine while indifferent to refugees from certain war-torn places in the Middle East and parts of Asia, whose suffering has stemmed mainly from years-long, hegemony-sustaining military operations led by the United States.
Residents of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, took to the streets in mid-February to condemn the White House for its decision to free up 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in Afghan assets held in the United States for families of 9/11 victims and urged America to provide financial compensation for the tens of thousands of Afghans killed during 20 years of war in the landlocked nation.
“Money stolen from Afghans, an economy destroyed,” tweeted Sana Saeed, a host and senior producer of AJ+, a social media publisher owned by Al Jazeera Media Network. “The depravity of this current crisis could have been avoided but instead the U.S. chose to starve an entire people.”
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has waged numerous wars under the guise of “human rights over sovereignty,” putting hegemonism above the international order and domestic law above international law, Jin said.
DANGERS OF U.S. SELF-ABSORPTION
With a fixation on political coercing and economic bullying, Washington has tried to shore up its leadership while letting European countries foot the bill for soaring energy prices, rising military expenses and the heavy burden of absorbing a massive influx of refugees.
The United States is the “remote controller” of the current Russia-Ukraine crisis while Ukraine has become the “cannon fodder,” Chen Fengying, a researcher with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Chen said “the sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia are limitless and unprecedented,” adding that the current international order has been “disrupted,” which might make more countries take an interests-first stance.
William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the U.S. publication Executive Intelligence Review, told Xinhua in a recent interview that Russia’s main concern about NATO eastward expansion has never been heeded by the United States, “which is only interested in maintaining its hegemonic status in Europe, and which has been steadily retreating from that collaborative policy which the West committed itself to after the Cold War.”
A major exporter of some of the world’s most essential commodities as Russia is, massive U.S. economic sanctions would undoubtedly shock the trade in commodities, disrupt global supply chains and thus weigh heavily on the fragile post-pandemic recovery of the global economy.
Ira Kalish, the chief global economist at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, said the sanctions “create a risk that trade in commodities could become disrupted, especially exports of oil and gas commodities to Europe.”
“This risk is manifested in a sizable increase in the prices of key commodities, potentially leading to even higher global inflation and weaker global growth,” said Kalish.
