It was during the special session of Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917 that US Senator and staunch opponent of the United States’ entry into World War I, Hiram Johnson, is said to have coined the phrase “the first casualty of war is the truth”. Twenty-five years later, in World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “In times of war, the truth is so precious that it must always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”
If it is true that the US is sincerely interested in defending Ukrainian political sovereignty and territorial integrity, the lack of concrete evidence in the US government’s statements that Russia is about to start a military occupation has eroded the credibility of the Joe Biden government. . It also caused cracks in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), leading important European member countries of the alliance, such as France and Germany, to distance themselves from war rhetoric and seek understanding through dialogue.
Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, without ruling out the possibility of a war with Russia, countered the US, saying that satellite imagery alone is insufficient to assess the extent of Moscow’s military buildup on the border. More than once, he has accused Americans of stoking a sense of panic that is crippling his country’s economy.
On the other hand, since the beginning of tensions, when he stationed more than 100,000 soldiers and military equipment on the border with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has repeated that he only wants to defend Russian interests and denies that he has any intention of invading his neighbor. So far, sincere or just strategic, he’s been able to demonstrate that he’s serious.
In the opposite direction of Biden – who carried out the threat made on January 28 to send American troops to Eastern Europe even without NATO support -, since January 31, according to the Russian news agency Interfax, 10,000 troops and Moscow equipment that was stationed on the nearby Ukrainian border has since returned to areas of fixed deployment in other parts of the country.
The Ukrainian standoff gives us the first indications that the days when the US could act nonchalantly like the world’s police may be coming to an end.
It is not new that military actions by American governments, Republicans or Democrats, are accused of being based on false pretenses: the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, victims of the fraudulent accusation that Saddam Hussein produced and exported weapons of mass destruction; the military intervention in Libya, which was supposed to protect the country’s population against the regime’s aggression, but ended with the assassination of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and left the country abandoned in the hands of armed militias and terrorist groups; and, finally, the abandonment of Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation, with desperate young people falling alive from fleeing planes and with Biden lightly asserting that the goal had never been to participate in nation building.
Americans are prone to believe that good always triumphs over evil and that no government is inherently as good as that envisioned by the founders of their republic.
John Rawls, the greatest American political and moral philosopher in recent times, distilled the works of great European philosophers who inspired the founders of the American republic, warning how much the US political, economic and cultural system had departed from its fundamental principles.
Freedom, limitation and division of state powers and individual responsibility, values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution may be going out of fashion in hypercapitalist society, but countries that were previously practically isolated —mainly in Asia and post-Soviet Russia itself— absorbed many of the American practices in the areas of politics, economics, science and technology.
One reason the US can no longer dominate international politics on its own is that the rest of the world has learned from the US itself.
Putin may not represent values considered noble, and it is true that we do not live in a perfect world, but all European countries know that they have achieved a lot since the two World Wars.
America’s politics of global supremacy is on the wane, and modern Europe is no longer the disunited and impoverished continent it once was. Therefore, there is no reason to allow empty allegations, apparently paved with good intentions, to repeat in Ukraine the crimes that caused the hell experienced by Iraqis, Libyans and Afghans.
The warning contained in the phrases of Hiram Johnson and Churchill, each very true in its own time and historical context, seems to have been rejuvenated by the military tension on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Fortunately.
