Citing "democracy promotion" and "anti-corruption," the Obama administration backed the creation of a coup regime that has relied on neo-Nazi and Islamist militias to serve as its tip of the spear against ethnic Russian Ukrainians who have resisted the ouster of Yanukovych. Thousands -- mostly eastern Ukrainians -- have died. Of course, all this was explained to the American people as a simple case of "Russian aggression."
After the coup, when the ethnic Russians of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, that became a "Russian invasion," justifying harsh economic sanctions against Moscow, with the Obama administration strong-arming the Europeans to forgo their profitable trade relations with Russia to punish the Russian economy. But that also added to the pressure on the European economy.
As this madness has escalated, the neocons and their liberal-hawk pals now envision destabilizing the Putin government in nuclear-armed Russia. They don't seem to recognize that the guy who might follow Putin may not be some obliging Boris Yeltsin but a hard-line ultranationalist ready to brandish the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal in defense of Mother Russia.
Misguided Interventions
While these various U.S. "hard" and "soft" power interventions are justified by the principles of "human rights," they often end up working against that goal. A discrete example is the case of Sudan and South Sudan, a crisis that traces back to the demands for a "humanitarian intervention" over Sudan's alleged genocide in Darfur in 2003.
That horrible conflict was painted in stark black and white colors in the U.S. press, innocent good guys versus evil bad guys, but was actually much more nuanced than what was shown to the American people. The war was touched off by Darfur rebels, but the Sudanese army struck back brutally. The "human rights" community settled on Sudan's President Bashir as the designated villain, who now faces an indictment in the International Criminal Court.
So, there was great sympathy for carving South Sudan away from Sudan in 2011 and making it an independent country (although oddly Darfur remained part of Sudan). But South Sudan, which possesses significant oil reserves, could sustain itself only if it could get its oil to market and the pipelines went north through Sudan.
And, since the United States and other countries were busy sanctioning Sudan for not turning over Bashir to the ICC, oil companies were unable to assist South Sudan in exploiting its valuable resource, which in turn caused hardship in South Sudan and contributed to a bloody civil war pitting one tribe against another. That led to, you guessed it, calls to sanction South Sudan.
The ongoing tragedy of Sudan/South Sudan is horrific enough, but it is only emblematic of the unintended consequences of rigid neocon/liberal interventionist ideology, which rejects negotiations with "bad guys," insisting instead on "regime change" or endless punishment of entire populations through sanctions even when those "solutions" inflict more hardship and death.
But now these destructive strategies are going global. They are threatening the economic well-being of the entire planet -- taking their place along with other misguided theories such as "free-market" absolutism and "austerity" in the face of recessions. The cumulative impact from these various follies has been to put the West's Middle Class under severe pressure regarding income and purchasing power, which finally has slowed China's growth and prompted a crash of its financial markets.
That, in turn, is reverberating back across the rest of the world's stock markets, erasing trillions of dollars in wealth and further reducing the savings of the Middle Class. As this vicious cycle starts spinning, that could mean even less consumer spending and further economic retrenchment.
The prospects for a global recession, if not a full-scale depression, can no longer be ignored. And such economic hardship would only contribute to more death, devastation and destabilization.
Pragmatic Solutions
So what can be done? As dark as the gathering economic storm may be, one silver lining could be that Americans and other Westerners will finally begin pushing back against the powerful neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist fellow-travelers.
Perhaps, instead of President Obama's Iranian nuclear deal being a one-off affair that may barely survive a determined neocon assault in the U.S. Congress, it could become a model for pragmatic approaches to other international crises. The core of this pragmatism would be that one doesn't have to love or even like the leadership of another country to cooperate on global concerns, whether they are economic, geopolitical or environmental.
There also should be a recognition that no country has all the answers or a monopoly on morality. American self-righteousness is not only hypocritical -- given the many flaws in the U.S. political system from the buying of our campaigns to our repeated violations of international law -- but it is self-defeating, requiring the endless expenditure of blood and treasure to act as self-appointed global "policeman" whether the world wants it or not.
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