The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has recently been set to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has come to termination. The analysts who set the clock cited the two most salient reasons: the growing threat of nuclear war and the failure to take the required measures to prevent global heating from reaching a point where it will be too late, not a remote contingency.
We can add a third reason: the lack of public understanding of the urgency of these crises. This is illustrated graphically in a recent Pew Research Center poll that offered respondents a set of issues to rank in order of urgency. Nuclear war didn’t even make the list. Climate change was ranked close to last; among Republicans, only 13 percent said mitigating climate change should be a top priority.
The poll’s results, while disastrous, are not surprising, given the prevailing discourse. Nuclear war is mentioned now and then, but treated rather casually: If it occurs, so what? There is little recognition that nuclear war between major powers is pretty much the end of everything.
A major corporate propaganda offensive has sought for decades to downplay concern about an impending environmental catastrophe, if not to deny the threat altogether. The logic of unrestrained capitalism entails that species’ survival is far outranked by concern for profit and market share. With the profitability of our suicide soaring, the oil majors are abandoning their limited efforts to add sustainable energy to the mix.
Within the current institutional framework, the choice of action is limited: governments must bribe those who are destroying the environment to desist. This is nothing new. As the United States was mobilizing for war eighty years ago, then Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained: “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”
The absurdity of the institutional trap is clear enough. It’s akin to the Mexican government trying to bribe the drug cartels to cease their mass slaughter. It’s not that alternatives are lacking; they are simply outside the framework of doctrinal orthodoxy—for now, at least.
Doctrinal orthodoxy registers other impressive achievements. February and March 2023 mark two important anniversaries: the twentieth anniversary of the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, and the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—both examples of the “supreme international crime” of aggression; the second is awful enough, although it doesn’t approach the first in horror, by any rational measure.
The Iraq War has not passed without criticism, within narrow doctrinal limits. It is virtually impossible to find criticism in mainstream discourse that goes beyond “It was a strategic blunder”—Barack Obama, for example, echoed Russian officials who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan on similar grounds.
The war has been reconstructed as a mercy mission to rescue Iraqis from the grip of an evil dictator. Only small minds recollect that Saddam Hussein’s worst crimes were committed with strong U.S. support. We have descended to the point that Harvard University is praised for running a debate on whether the Iraq mission qualified as humanitarian intervention. The then-director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Michael Ignatieff, took the affirmative. Small minds, again, might ask how we would react to such a performance at Moscow State University.
To top it off, the Navy has just announced a new amphibious assault vessel: the U.S.S. Fallujah, named to commemorate one of the most atrocious crimes of the invasion. Some don’t find that amusing—Iraqis, for example.
Journalist Nabil Salih writes that “U.S. savagery didn’t end” with the wholesale massacre of women and children and “showering Fallujah in depleted uranium and white phosphorus . . . . Twenty years and incalculable birth defects later, the U.S. Navy is naming one of its warships the U.S.S. Fallujah . . . . This is how the U.S. Empire continues its war against Iraqis. Fallujah’s name, bleached in white phosphorus implanted in mothers’ wombs for generations, is a spoil of war, too . . . . What is left is the haunting absence of family members, homes bombed into nonexistence, and photographs incinerated along with the smiling faces. Instead, a lethally corrupt system of cross-sectarian camaraderie-in-theft was bequeathed to us by the unpunished war criminals of Downing Street and the Beltway.”
The United Nations records about 7,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine, surely a serious underestimate. If we multiply by thirty, we will reach the toll of former President Ronald Reagan’s Central American crimes. Iraq is far out of reach, not to speak of the U.S. wars in mainland Southeast Asia, a class by themselves in the post-World War II era, and also immune to mainstream criticism beyond the word “mistake.”
The supreme international crime is not being overlooked in Ukraine. The European Union is responding favorably to a call for an international tribunal to hold top leadership “accountable for the crime of aggression,” a European official involved in the plans told The Intercept. He is referring to “the moral, political, and also legal need to hold the top Russian leadership accountable for the crime of aggression in Ukraine.” The U.S. State Department’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, Beth Van Schaack, strongly supports this noble cause, explaining that it is proper to single out Ukraine: “The reality is that Russian aggression is so egregious, it’s such a clear and manifest violation of the U.N. charter. And the conduct of the war is so different from anything that we have seen really since World War II.”
We might recall Harold Pinter’s Nobel Literature Prize address:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
That’s a bit unfair. There is no “American exceptionalism.” The United States is simply following the script of its savage predecessors in imperial violence—always overflowing with righteousness as they exterminate the brutes for the greater good.
Ukraine is being devastated as Russia is slowly turning to the U.S.-U.K. “Shock and Awe” style of war: rapidly destroying whatever allows the society to function. The crimes reach far beyond: Millions are facing starvation as the resources of the Black Sea region are severely curtailed. Europe, too, is suffering severely, perhaps even heading toward limited deindustrialization as it is cut off from its resource-rich natural trading partner to the east. The threat of escalation to nuclear war intensifies. Perhaps worst of all, in terms of long-term consequences, the meager efforts to address global heating have been largely reversed.
Some are doing fine. The U.S. military and fossil fuel industries are drowning in profit, with great prospects for their missions of destruction many years ahead. For a small fraction of its colossal military budget, the United States is severely degrading the forces of a major military adversary. In the geopolitical dimension, Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression handed the United States its fondest wish: driving Europe deeper into the U.S.-run NATO-based system.
A major question throughout the postwar period has been whether Europe would adopt an independent course, perhaps along Gaullist lines or in terms of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. The question arose sharply when the Soviet Union collapsed and then President Mikhail Gorbachev called for a “common European home” from Lisbon to Vladivostok, with no military alliances and moves toward social democracy. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton undermined that threat by rescinding former President George H.W. Bush’s clear and unambiguous promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Gorbachev agreed to allow unified Germany to join NATO—quite a concession in the light of history. There has been so much misrepresentation on the matter that it is worth checking the original documents, readily available at the National Security Archive website.
The highest level of the U.S. diplomatic corps, virtually all historians, and prominent political analysts warned that NATO expansion to Russia’s borders was reckless and provocative—particularly the invitation of Georgia and Ukraine to join Washington’s military alliance—to no avail. Now Washington has escaped the concern of the loss of control of Europe, at least temporarily.
NATO has since expanded its influence to the Indo-Pacific region to “encircle” China, in official terminology. Europe is being drawn into the U.S. campaign to prevent China’s technological development, at severe cost to advanced European industries in chip manufacturing, the core of modern industry; South Korea and Japan are as well. These are further steps in the decline of a Western industrial world in thrall to Washington, while the United States seeks to sustain its fading global dominance. By now, the United States offers no positive programs for the world beyond pious phrases that elicit justified ridicule outside the Western bubble. Washington’s primary program is preventing adversaries from developing independently.
China is undeterred. It continues to expand its loan and development programs through Eurasia, extending to the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America, much to Washington’s discomfiture.
The world outside of the Anglosphere and Western Europe has been unwilling to join what most see as a U.S.-Russia proxy war fought with Ukrainian bodies. New alliances are forming, along with commercial interactions and novel financial arrangements that are not dependent on the United States and its fierce reprisals by sanctions and other means.
Meanwhile, scarce resources that are desperately needed to salvage a livable world, and to create a much better one, are being wasted in destruction and slaughter, and planning for even greater catastrophes.
Ninety seconds may be too generous an appraisal, unless those who want to save the world from worse horrors act quickly, firmly, and decisively.
(Noam Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. He is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, the author of some 150 books, and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards. Courtesy: The Progressive Magazine, an American magazine and website of politics, culture and progressivism with a socialist perspective.)
