JEFFREY D SACHS
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world falls further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. He Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight.
El The world's biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its situation as the victim of a US-Russian proxy war that broke out in 2014.
The United States has been arming and heavily financing Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding NATO and weakening Russia. America's proxy wars typically last for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.
Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience in Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. You could also consider the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As he explained later President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States' goal was to provoke the intervention of the Soviet Union in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan was collateral damage did not concern American leaders.
The Soviet Army entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the United States expected, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, US-backed fighters established Al-Qaeda in the 1980s and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The American "trick" to the Soviet Union had had a boomerang effect.
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Although sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.
Afghanistan is in ruins. While the US wasted more than $2 trillion in military spending, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person. As a parting "gift" in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan's small currency holdings, crippling the banking system.
The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the ouster of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych's sin from the US point of view was his attempt to maintain Ukraine's neutrality despite Washington's desire to expand NATO to include Ukraine (and Georgia). The US goal was for the NATO countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the United States has been massively arming and financing Ukraine since 2014.
The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government's point person in Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is now Assistant Secretary of State. In 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, the current national security adviser to President Joe Biden, who served in the same role for Vice President Biden in 2014.
The United States overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
The second is that NATO's enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian red line. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from bringing Ukraine into NATO.
The US repeatedly asserts that NATO is a defensive alliance. However, NATO bombarded Russia-allied Serbia for 78 days in 1999 to separate Kosovo from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. NATO forces similarly ousted Russian ally Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, sparking a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia will certainly never accept NATO in Ukraine.
At the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin made three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of NATO; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and Donbas should become autonomous in accordance with the Minsk II Agreement.
The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations on NATO enlargement, eight years after the same group backed the ouster of Yanukovych. With Putin's demands for negotiations roundly rejected by the United States, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
In March 2022, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine's dire situation as the victim of a US-Russian proxy war. He publicly declared that Ukraine would become a neutral country and called for security guarantees. He also publicly acknowledged that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.
Israel's prime minister at the time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine were close to reaching an agreement. However, as Bennett has recently explained, the United States "blocked" the peace process.
Since then, the war has intensified. According to the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have pledged to send tanks, long-range missiles and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.
The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral country outside of NATO. Crimea would remain the home of Russia's Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for Donbas, such as territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.
Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and its sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Said agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.
Above all, the Ukrainian government and people would tell Russia and the US that their country refuses to remain the battleground of a proxy war. Faced with deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive to seek peace, rather than believe that an external power will spare them the need to compromise.
