What does the most gigantic economic rebuilding program of all time announced in the US under the title "Build Back Better" have to do with the increasingly fierce internal American culture war over issues such as abortion or theories of race and racism? At first glance, nothing, but for the world power, its leadership and its people, apparently a great deal. In our article on the subject, you can read about what the US is actually suffering from and why its leaders are so single-minded in thinking that they have to take care of the "soul of America."
The Cuban leadership has decided on far-reaching reforms. Promoting foreign exchange–earning economic sectors and attracting foreign capital; committing state-owned companies to profit-oriented production standards; dismissing at least one million state employees; considerably expanding the small-scale private sector and promoting private farmers; abolishing what remains of state-guaranteed basic services as soon as possible. The government justifies its list of measures by pointing to the country’s catastrophic budget situation, which makes painful corrections unavoidable. At the same time, however, it promises that these measures will “preserve socialism, strengthen it and make it truly irreversible.” (Raúl Castro)
GᴇɢᴇɴSᴛᴀɴᴅᴘᴜɴᴋᴛ takes the reforms as an opportunity to critically assess the current end point as well as the general intentions, barriers, contradictions, and negative progress of fifty years of Cuban “socialism” — with an epilogue on Cuban friendship and enmity past and present.
In wartime, the morality of bourgeois society is turned upside down. What people must never do in peacetime — kill other people ---- they are now ordered to do. The right to life, one of the inalienable rights protected by basic law, now gives way to the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the state. This revaluation of values makes war the ultimate moral challenge. It provokes the need for justification, of all things.
For months now, a dispute has been raging in Israel acknowledged to be dividing the nation and throwing the state into crisis. It has seized both the political class democratically organized into parties, and large sections of the population. On the surface, the issue is a reform of certain aspects of Israel’s judicial system and, above all, the relation of the judicial to the executive and legislative “powers,” especially in terms of the reciprocal veto rights of the parliament and the Supreme Court. It is in fact clear to all those involved in the national divide that the reform of the judiciary, while presenting a significant change to the separation of state powers, is as such merely a part and, above all, a symbol of a dispute that goes far beyond the question of how the state is organized. What is it all about?
The question of what the war in Ukraine is all about, what’s at stake there, is not asked in the West’s democratic public sphere (example: Germany), but rather is outstripped by a politico-moral answer. To wit: the Kremlin is all about conquering, suppressing democracy in Ukraine and in general, embarking on a new Russian imperialism; the Supreme Commander-in-Chief wants personal power. Ukraine is fighting to defend itself against illegal aggression and protect democratic values. The NATO states are helping the victim of an attack that violates international law, promoting the European peace order and the rules-based world order overall. After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, the world is more ideologically in order than it’s been for a long time.
Experts and government advisors of the two nuclear powers involved in Ukraine quite seriously pose the question of what is at stake in Ukraine for each of them and in general, and as professional partisans they give somewhat different answers. In Russia, there is debate about the pros and cons of using nuclear weapons; in the USA, there are firm views on this. Both are documented below in order to draw some conclusions about the nature of the deterrent relationship between the USA and Russia.
A year of war in Ukraine leaves the country looking accordingly.
Last fall, the destruction already caused by both sides started to include widespread Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. They target Ukraine's combat and resilience capabilities, hitting often enough to make quite a few parts of the country hardly inhabitable and challenge the viability of both its economy and its rule.
Despite all this, the Ukrainian government’s military goal has not changed. It remains the sacred right of Ukrainian nationhood to achieve complete territorial integrity of the country, reconquering all territories annexed and occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Those in charge are also certain that their people are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to be liberated or reborn as a (Russian-)free nation at last, fully ‘anchored’ in the European West. However, this ambitious claim is blatantly disproportionate to the current military situation.
America’s money dominates world markets for commodities and capital. America’s cyber industries dominate global communications. America’s navy controls the world’s oceans. America’s strategic weapons can demolish any enemy’s strategic potential as needed. The USA is on its way to making sure Russia is ostracized around the world and its power destroyed. It is countering China’s efforts to revise the prevailing world order by declaring a cold war of good guys — democracies — against bad guys — autocrats.
So what’s missing?
After a year of war in Ukraine, there are about as many Russian soldiers dead or injured as reported for the “special military operation” a year ago. What for? After the first year of war, Ukraine is devastated; the government has sacrificed a significant portion of the population to its fight against the Russian invasion. What for? A year after Chancellor Scholz’s “historical turning point,” the West is surveying the costs of its anti-Russian intervention in Ukraine. What is it all for?
Back to the starting point: Russia conducts a “special military operation” targeting Kiev and eastern Ukraine with the explicit aim of ousting the government that complies with the West — the EU and NATO — and replacing it with a pro-Russia one. Occupying territories bordering the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the east of the country that are loyal to Moscow is supposed to protect them against constant incursions and attacks by Ukrainian forces and secure the annexation of Crimea by military means. At the same time, Russia declares that its much broader strategic goal is to secure its own existence against the advance of the Western military alliance up to its western border. It sees NATO and the EU’s co-opting of its Black Sea neighbor as an anti-Russian outpost, possibly also for stationing American medium-range missiles, as a fundamental threat to its own strategic defense capability — a threat that must be repelled.
These two objectives are on quite different levels.
Three parties are involved in the war in Ukraine: Russia as the aggressor that is carrying out a “special military operation”; Ukraine as the attacked state with its USA/NATO–trained and equipped army; and the West, i.e., USA and NATO in a newly united front including the EU. This third one may not be a direct party to the war, but it is a double one. It is firstly financing the Ukrainian state and organizing its military power.