PicoBlog

I recently wrote that Jeffrey Sachs believes the world may be on the brink of World War III.

Sachs offered a chilling view of what is driving the conflict in eastern Europe and preventing peace: “The US has an agenda. The agenda is hegemony.”

The idea that the USA could be as responsible for the war in Ukraine as Putin—or even more responsible—is probably shocking to many people.

But Sachs, an American economist, professor at Columbia University, and the bestselling author of To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace, is no crank to be summarily dismissed.

Seeing what forces are driving history is always difficult in the present, and the fog of war only compounds this challenge. But beyond its quest for global hegemony, Sachs sees another primal force driving the US toward war with Russia: fear.

Fear of Russia is nothing new, of course. I’m old enough to remember being instructed to take shelter under our desks at school because of fears of a nuclear showdown between the USA and USSR, two rival empires competing for global dominance.

The fear of Russia we’re witnessing today, evidenced by bans on Russians from global athletic competitions and tourism in Europe, are reminiscent of Cold War fears. But fears of Russia stretch back much further than the Cold War.

In his interview with The Duran, Sachs describes a kind of Russophobia that permeated the British Empire after the fall of Napoleon.

"I want to take it back to the 1840s, to the real roots of hegemony, which is Great Britain. Never was there a hegemon with such ambition and such a curious view of the world. But Britain wanted to run the world in the 19th century and taught America everything it knows.

Recently, I read a fascinating book by a historian named J.H. Gleason, published by Harvard University Press in 1950. It's an incredibly interesting book called The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain.

The question is, where did England's hate of Russia come from? Because it's actually a little surprising.

Britain has HATED Russia since the 1840s and launched the Crimean War that was a war of choice in modern Parliament—a war of choice by Palmerston in the 1850s—because it hated Russia. So, this author tries to understand where this hate came from, because it was the same kind of iterative hate that we have now.

And by the way, we hated the Soviet Union because it was Communist, but we hated Russia afterwards when it wasn't communist. It doesn't matter. So, it's a deeper phenomenon, and he tries to trace where this hatred came from.

The fascinating point is, Russia and Britain were on the same side in the Napoleonic Wars from 1812 to 1815, from the Battle of Moscow in Russia to Napoleon's defeat in Waterloo. They were on the same side, and in fact, for many years, the relations weren't great, but they were kind of normal. So, this historian reads every snippet of the newspapers, what's written, of the speeches, to try to understand where the hatred arose.

The key point is there was no reason for it. There was nothing that Russia did. Russia didn't behave in some perfidious way. It wasn't Russian evil; it wasn't that the tsar was somehow off the rails. There wasn't anything except a self-fulfilling lather built up over time because Russia was a big power and therefore an affront to British hegemony.

This is the same reason why the US hates China: not for anything China actually does but because it's big. It's the same reason, until today, that the United States and Britain hate Russia—because it's big. So, the author comes to the conclusion that the hate really arose around 1840 because it wasn't instantaneous, and there was no single triggering event. The British got it into their crazy heads that Russia was going to invade India through Central Asia and Afghanistan—one of the most bizarre, phony, wrongheaded ideas imaginable—but they took it quite literally.

And they told themselves this:

'We're the imperialists. How dare Russia presume to invade India?' when it had no intention of doing so. So, my point is, it's possible to have hate to the point of war and now to the point of nuclear annihilation for no fundamental reason. Talk to each other."

What Sachs was describing was a kind of irrational fear of Russia that existed in the British Empire.

I believe a similar phenomenon is at work today. This line in particular seems to reflect our current situation: “Russia was a big power and therefore an affront to British hegemony.”

Substitute the word “British” with “American,” and I think it describes the undercurrent driving Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Ukrainians and Russians continue to die daily in Ukraine because the Pentagon and politicians in DC long ago convinced themselves that Russia was a rival superpower that must be stopped. Their policy was to corner Russia, isolate it, sever it from trade with Europe, and extend an “Atlantic” military alliance to its doorstep.

The result of these policies was predictable, and it was largely driven by fear of a Russian boogeyman that poses little threat to the United States, at least beyond its quest for global dominance.

H/T to Sonny Thank for providing the transcript.

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