Owen Jones: The hypocrisy of the Great Powers is on display again in Ukraine

Anti-war protester demonstrating against Russia's intervention in Ukraine arrested in Moscow.

Stop the War Coalition 
Owen Jones

“Rogue state” is not a term that applies to countries that violate international law, says Owen Jones, but rather to those that have failed to bend to the will of the West.

A mushroom cloud of testosterone has descended on social media; would-be Dr Strangeloves are even demanding military action against Russia, otherwise known as “stage 1 of the nuclear extermination of the human race”. The approach of Western governments, thankfully, has been rather more restrained, though hardly for peace-loving reasons: the City of London-funded Conservative party wants Russia’s money to keep flowing into financial institutions, and the German government wants its gas.

But bluster and self-interest aside, Russia’s invasion helps hold up a mirror to the West’s foreign policy, however much that makes us flinch. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson was reported to have said in 1918; in the Ukrainian crisis, the first casualty has been irony. “You just don’t invade another country on a phoney pretext in order to assert your interests,” declares John Kerry, Secretary of State for a country which infamously did just that almost exactly 11 years ago. “The world cannot say it’s OK to violate the sovereignty of another nation in this way,” solemnly proclaims William Hague, who merrily waltzed through the division lobby in support of the Iraq war in 2003.

Let’s just think through how both the Russian government and Russian civilians are rationalising aggression in Ukraine. A democratically elected government has been violently overthrown. Prominent among the victorious uprising are right-wing extremists, who have been handed key government posts. There was an attempt to scrap Russian as an official language, moves to ban political parties, and unelected oligarchs have been imposed on Ukraine’s regions, indicative of a growing threat to the Russian minority, many of whom have Russian passports. Russia’s security needs are informed by the fact it has been repeatedly – and catastrophically – attacked from the West, and an agreement with Ukraine allows for the stationing of thousands of troops in Crimea.

Such rationalisations can be easily challenged, of course. A democratic mandate does not grant a government carte blanche to act as it wishes. This was not a coup, but a genuinely popular uprising in the country’s western and central regions, if not in its east and south. It is true that the AK-47-wielding far-right Right Sector did play a decisive role in the revolt’s success, and won respect from more moderate factions for doing so: there is a frightening tradition of conservatives and liberals helping fascists into power.

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