Truths, Half-Truths, Lies and Anti-Communists

To say that Vladimir Putin is a communist; that he is a totalitarian-minded man; that he was part of the “sinister” KGB; that he is a misogynist; that since the demise of the Soviet Union he has always aspired to its reconstruction; that the political and security motivation he has used as arguments to invade Ukraine is one of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century — all are incontrovertible truths.

But to say that the U.S. supports Ukraine because the U.S. is committed to democracy and the “rules-based international order” is, at best, a half-truth. The U.S. helps dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates commit war crimes in Yemen; it applies economic sanctions against countries that do not conform to Western values; and it refuses to practice the rule of law. It refuses to engage in free market economy, thus subjecting millions of human beings to hunger and to diseases that could be overcome, while prohibiting sanctioned countries from establishing trade relationships in order to import food, medicines and supplies and equipment for their internal production that would allow them to help save the lives of ordinary citizens.

Plus: The U.S. breaks international agreements; signs with other countries unilaterally whenever it feels like it — as it did with the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Agreement on climate — not to mention that it threatens courts around the world with imprisonment if they investigate the U.S. or Israel.

The truth is that Russian autocracy and tyranny have always prevailed, which has made the Russian people bitter slaves of their own decisions first under tsarism, then during the Soviet era and, currently, under Putin, who is trying to recover the lost laurels of a country of the past. Unfortunately, this keeps him from seeing or accepting a present capable of guaranteeing his people freedom, dignity and civil rights. Putin refuses to accept that the communist utopia collapsed on Dec. 25, 1991. With that collapse, Lenin’s dream died, ending a revolutionary experience that had effectively transformed — from top to bottom — a country that went from a traditional and absolute monarchy with an agrarian base to an industrial society with class totalitarianism. Putin refuses to accept that, geopolitically, that vast continental territory between Asia and Europe, which was able to contend for power with the United States, no longer exists.

While that happened to Russia, it should also be noted that the United States has lost the world hegemony it had held since World War II. That is to say, the United States today no longer has the economic, political, cultural and military preponderance it held during the Cold War, which allowed it to impose its conditions in international relations on the rest of the world without major problems. Today, the world is developing in a transitional system that is still far from constituting a clear and stable geopolitical game board. The complex international structure of institutions that was formed in July 1944 at a U.N. conference in the U.S. in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, when representatives of 44 countries created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which established the dollar as the global currency backed by gold. Through this system, fixed exchange rates were established, allowing for easier control of exchange rate growth and stabilization of international prices, which in turn allowed balance of payment imbalances to be adjusted automatically in view of the relatively free movement of gold across borders.

But this complex international structure of institutions, following the financial crises of recent times, is in transition, given that the resources managed by the IMF and the World Bank have not been sufficient to face the growth of the world commodity and capital markets. The IMF’s economic policy conditionality has not allowed countries to return to conditions of macroeconomic credibility, stability and certainty.

We should also add that since the 1980s, the globalization process has meant a progressive shift of economic weight from the West to Asia, with China appearing on the economic and geopolitical scene with remarkable dynamism. Thus, China became so prominently integrated into the international order that in 2001 it became a member of the World Trade Organization.

All the above reflection shows that globalization has caused an interdependence between China and the U.S., which led transnational companies from the U.S. and other Western countries to move part of their production to China, resulting in a complex system of global value chains that made China the world’s factory, as well as the world’s leading technological power. To all described above, it should be added that the financial crisis of 2008 made China’s development strategists recognize that the much touted quality of service of some U.S. companies was nothing more than a publicity strategy. “Since the 1990s, the quality levels of some of the existing U.S. companies were no longer competitive internationally because of the relationship between national policy regarding R&D spending, and market structures and behavior that can reasonably be found in industrial markets. Slow economic growth causes industrial concentration, whereby firms attempt to form cartels to solve their problems, and tariffs and protection against more efficient imports are demanded, which if achieved shows the cycle of liberalization-protectionism as a result of technological progress” (James V. Koch’s Economics of Industrial Organization Text).*

These truths, half-truths, lies and anti-communists intentionally distort the dangerous war being waged today between Russia and Ukraine. Let’s look at a few things: At the end of 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry published proposals to the U.S. and NATO on security guarantees in Europe, in which it urged Washington to reciprocally renounce the deployment of nuclear weapons outside the national territory and to repatriate those already stationed.

It also urged the Atlantic alliance to return to the 1997 positions and to commit itself to stop the expansion of the bloc [NATO] to the east and to exclude the entry of the nations of the former Soviet Union — above all, the entry of Ukraine — into the bloc.

On Jan. 26, 2022, the U.S. and NATO submitted written responses to Russia’s initiative. In this response, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out that Washington had left unanswered the most important point, about NATO’s non-expansion to the east. From then on, tensions escalated as Russia began to build up troops on its border with Ukraine. In this context, Russia has insisted before and during its invasion of Ukraine that its objective is not to annex Ukraine, but to enforce the repeatedly unfulfilled promise that NATO would not expand eastward, while NATO has stated that Ukraine has the right to defend itself against its neighbor.

However, in view of this NATO response, there are a couple of questions. One: If at this moment Ukraine is not part of NATO and has nearly total military support from the West, what would happen if it were a NATO member? Two: What would happen if Mexico were a member of an international organization of political and military character similar to NATO?

There are no good invasions or bad invasions, because it all depends on who is telling the story.

Behold: There are truths, half-truths and lies in all of them.

*Translator’s Note: This citation has not been verified.