In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

12th November, 2022

Suddenly there are two possible deals emerging: on the one hand, Washington agrees to recognise the four regions which have been incorporated into Russia on the basis of a vote which the West had declared invalid and the Republicans, the GOP, agrees to recognise the result of an election  which the OSCE was not permitted to monitor. The two are logically connected: the USA accepts it’s defeat in Ukraine and at the same time US ruling class pulls together abandoning any semblance of democracy as it negotiates the dangerous rapids of imperial retrenchment.

The problem I have with this scenario is how Russia can accept a rump Ukraine which can still be weaponised as an anti-Russian state. In other words, if they cannot denazify it themselves, how can they trust the Americans to do it for them? The question could be put in another way: is the collective West prepared to denazify itself, to sideline the mad warmongers, the neocon, and address all the Russian concerns expressed before the Ukraine war began? That would be a turn-up for the books!

However, something extraordinary has to happen. If Sullivan has given the Russians an ultimatum not to launch a final, decisive winter offensive then the prospect of nuclear war looms large and terrifying. If the war is allowed to run it’s course, the rout of NATO would have revolutionary consequences for the West- no ruling elite in history has survived anything comparable. If elite survival is the goal then neither of these scenarios is credible and the only remaining option of a fudged compromise, no matter how unlikely, remains the only solution, the only way out of the labyrinth in which the illusory manifest destiny loses itself while the lights go out on the City on the Hill.

Stranger things have happened: who would have imagined that the last Roman emperor Romulus Augustalus would do a deal with the Goths: but it preserved the ascendancy of the Senatorial elite. If elites hang together they  won’t hang separately. The US ruling class has given an object lesson in class solidarity as millions of popular votes disappear. Kali Lake has had to be censured for taking it personally. She should remember that the democracy stuff only ever was talk. But the time for such talk is over. It’s time to walk the walk- and the walk is a retreat.