Amid all the news of the UK General Election (including Nigel Farage’s late intervention in Clacton), the D-Day 80th Anniversary celebrations, and the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, the Ukraine War continues. In his book “How the West brought War to Ukraine: Understanding how the US and NATO Policies led to Crisis, War and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe” (paperback edition August 2022), Benjamin Abelow argues that it was the relentless eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, pushing Russia into increasing isolation, that led to the conflict. Farage has been vilified for repeating that view, although he is careful to say that it does not justify Putin’s invasion.
Whether or not the 1960 “promise” of James Baker (US Secretary of State for George H W Bush) to Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not happen was ever official US policy, Russia certainly understood it in that way. There were early attempts to build a more “neutral” relationship, such as the Partnership for Peace, and the North Atlantic Cooperation Council: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_Peace; https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_69344.htm. But these collapsed, partly through Eastern European suspicions of Russia, but also because of the growing US euphoria at becoming the world’s “only remaining super-power”.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft https://quincyinst.org/ argues that the United States’ traditional isolationism (which led Congress to refuse to join the League of Nations in 1920) ended in World War 2, and the US began to see itself as the “world’s policeman”, pledged to bring democracy and free market capitalism to all people. The result seems only to be a revival of the antagonism of “Empires”, with Russia, Iran, China and North Korea seen as our “enemies”, and the United States setting its foreign policies wholly from that perspective in the Middle East and Israel/Palestine, as it did before in Latin America and South-East Asia.
A world divided between rival empires was the whole background of the New Testament, with Rome, as the self-appointed “world leader”, facing its rival Parthian (Persian) Empire to the east. In Luke’s Gospel (chapter 12, verses 32 to 40), Jesus tells his disciples neither to fear nor trust in these powers, but to build their security on the community of God’s justice that can support one another as the Empires collapse. That collapse may be inevitable, but its timing is as unpredictable as a burglar coming in the middle of the night- so they must always be prepared.
In many ways our future is as unpredictable as theirs, with Climate Change seeming to threaten humanity’s survival, and economic growth already having driven many species into extinction. So the question is: what is inevitable? Is it inevitable that the way we are living now and organising our society will end by destroying the earth we depend on for everything we have? Or is it inevitable that our “Empire” of economic and political control will collapse, because it is ultimately unsustainable? And is the New Testament right to say that such a collapse provides precisely the opportunity for a community dedicated to justice, peace and co-operation to build something better? Or is that foolishly naïve and over-optimistic?