Debacle in Ukraine: Imperial Hubris and the Corporate Capture of US Foreign Policy

By Aaron Good, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

In recent weeks, even the most enthusiastic American cheerleaders for the Ukraine War have been forced to acknowledge reality. On December 13, The New York Times reported that the US-backed regime in Kiev “faces dwindling reserves of ammunition, personnel and Western support.” Contradicting some of the paper’s earlier reporting on the subject, the “paper of record” flatly acknowledged that the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 “has failed.” Meanwhile, Russia “is celebrating its capacity to sustain a drawn-out war.”

True to form, the Times story is still riddled with imperial spin. The authors—Paul Sonne and Andrew E. Kramer—cannot help but inject disinformation into their assessment. Perhaps the most obvious example is their statement that Russia “bungled the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.” The truth which the Times cannot bring itself to report, is that it appears increasingly likely that the initial, small Russian invasion force was designed to bring Kiev to the negotiating table. This was, it seems, an initially successful strategy. Newsweek, on November 27, quoted a Ukrainian official present during those early Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations. At the time, he stated, Russia was “ready to end the war if we took...neutrality and made commitments that we would not join NATO. This was the key point.”

“We Create Our Own Reality”

One struggles to describe the US foreign policy mindset. It was a Bush administration official who perhaps best captured the hubris and depravity of the 21st-century US Empire. In a now famous aside, the official (presumably Karl Rove) chided journalist Ron Suskind for his quaint belief that objective reality and human reason should inform US policy. The official explained it thusly:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Karl Rove, Assistant to the President, Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor White House Archives

While the world has recently been focused on Israel’s siege of Gaza, the situation in Ukraine has deteriorated. The quote above may help Americans understand how the world’s richest, most technologically advanced country could willfully pursue such catastrophically stupid policies—the results of which we have seen unfold in Ukraine. Policy advisors actually believe their own spin, “We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This kind of hubris arises in all empires. In the US case, the Empire’s cosmology was forged by an oligarchy of corporate wealth. To rise in these higher circles, one is required to internalize this mindset. For objective observers—members of the reality-based community—it is easy to see how this inevitably gives rise to foreign policy groupthink or imperial hubris.

Confronting US Illusions 

In contrast to official Washington, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked how he would end the war in Ukraine, his answer was clear and direct:

Settle it. The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons…

Scene from February 18, 2014, during the ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev, Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons

For a more detailed rundown on the history of the Ukraine War, I recommend this Kennedy Beacon piece from Professor Jeffrey Sachs: “The Real History of the War in Ukraine.” The proximate cause of the ongoing war traces back to 2014 when Ukraine’s elected president was steering the country on a neutral course between the US and Russia. This displeased the US foreign policy establishment. Eventually, as Seumas Milne reported in The Guardian, “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover.” A look at Ukraine’s 2010 electoral map helps explain why the East and Southeast of Ukraine were so hostile to the coup regime installed in 2014.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with a small force. Though this was obscured in the US, it is now clear (as mentioned previously) that Russia invaded with such a small force because the strategic aim was to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table in order to secure Russia’s main existential concern—NATO enlargement. In March, one month after the invasion began, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky publicly announced that Ukraine was ready to come to an agreement with Russia, saying, “Security guarantees and neutrality, the non-nuclear status of our state—we’re ready to do that. That’s the most important point ... they started the war because of it.” In April, unfortunately, the American side intervened to scuttle the peace agreement. This colossal blunder of April 2022 exacerbated the earlier colossal blunder—the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. This mistake would cost Ukraine much territory and the lives of a generation of young men.

Putin holding “draft peace agreement” with Ukraine (Photo: UK Independent)

The Manufacture of Imperial Consent

The debacle in Ukraine offers a chance to reflect on the broad arc of the US Empire. In various places, I have written about how the plans for US global dominance were formulated in the War and Peace Studies Project, carried out by Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) during World War II. Though the CFR’s influence has waxed and waned, the broader trend regarding the formulation of US imperial grand strategy has continued. For many decades, corporate oligarchs have tasked their hirelings to contrive schemes for the US to dominate the world indefinitely. 

As Lawrence Shoup and Harold Minter wrote in their book Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy, the CFR “represents a conscious initiative of … the New York financial oligarchy.” This was the same milieu behind the creation of the CIA. This symbiosis between corporate America and the national security state only deepened over time—with entities like the CFR functioning as unofficial intermediaries. Sociologist Donald Gibson details: “By the early 1960’s the Council on Foreign Relations, Morgan and Rockefeller interests, and the intelligence community were so extensively inbred as to be virtually a single entity.” As Gibson explains, “The Morgan and Rockefeller groups had always been the dominant forces within the CFR.” 

On an individual level, the two “founding fathers” of US intelligence—William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Allen Dulles—were Wall Street legmen. Gibson points out that before founding the World War II intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Donovan began his career in intelligence as an operator for JP Morgan. Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer who, at the time that he was fired by JFK in 1963, was the senior-most of CFR’s board of directors, serving since 1927. Before becoming CIA spymaster, Dulles had been co-leader of the Security and Armaments Group, one of the four main areas of the CFR’s World War II planning which, incidentally, was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Needless to say, the influence of the CFR was not confined to the decades after World War II. A few years after the end of the Cold War, the CFR commissioned something of a sequel to the War and Peace Studies Project, a book entitled The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Written by Rockefeller man par excellence Zbigniew Brzezinski, the book explicitly spells out the importance of Ukraine for US imperial strategy:

Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. […] However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

Given this mindset, it is no wonder that the US reacted so brazenly in 2014 when an elected Ukrainian president was about to sign an agreement which would have deepened Russian-Ukrainian ties. It should also come as no surprise that the CFR has since continued to act as an “imperial brain trust,” producing strategic analysis steeped in myths of American exceptionalism. In May of 2022, CFR President Richard Haass offered this breathtakingly dishonest summary of the war in Ukraine:

The conventional wisdom was that Russia was going to do extremely well extremely quickly, might actually succeed in replacing the government, that militarily [Ukraine] wasn’t much of a match. Ukrainian resistance was not just valiant but effective. [The West] rallied behind it considerably both with military help, with intelligence help [...] and serious sanctions were imposed on Russia. [Then] Russia, essentially, defined its ambitions somewhat more modestly…

In fact, Russia did not invade Ukraine with a force anywhere near capable of overthrowing the regime in Kiev because that was not the goal. Russia’s goal was to compel Ukraine to negotiate over neutrality and security arrangements. After the US scuttled the peace negotiations—an episode elided by Haass—it was not that Russia “defined its ambitions somewhat more modestly.” In fact, Russia was forced to devise more ambitious aims: the taking of more historically and ethnically Russian territory in Ukraine—territory that would have been returned to Ukraine if the US had not scuttled those peace negotiations in April of 2021.

Reality Slowly Dawns

In November of 2023, Wall Street’s imperial hive mind at the CFR was forced to grudgingly acknowledge a very grim reality. In a recent article in the CFR’s official magazine, Foreign Affairs, now former CFR president Haass and Charles Kupchan wrote,

Russia [...] cannot simply hope to outlast Ukraine and the West’s willingness to support it. That realization may eventually convince Moscow to move from the battlefield to the negotiating table […] Russia has succeeded, at least for now, in using force to seize a sizable piece of Ukraine’s territory. Despite Ukraine’s much-heralded counteroffensive, Russia has actually gained more territory over the course of 2023 than Ukraine has. Overall, neither side has made significant advances. Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought to an effective standstill: a stalemate has set in.

The truth that Haass and others cannot acknowledge is that Russia in fact can “simply hope to outlast Ukraine and the West’s willingness to support it.” The economic sanctions have not seriously damaged Russia, and Russian arms production capacity has grown rather than diminished. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a stalemate as “a situation in which neither group involved in an argument can win or get an advantage and no action can be taken.” In reality, Russia can win by taking a number of actions, including the slow destruction of Ukrainian military capacity as Russia defends the fortified front lines in the war zone. As Time magazine reported, the war “has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years.” Even if the US can maintain arms shipments, the Ukrainian men who can use those arms are getting fewer and older. This sad result follows from a tragedy that Haass cannot acknowledge: Because of US imperial hubris, hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have been sacrificed in a war that Ukraine never had a chance to win.

That recent piece from Haass is entitled, ridiculously, “Redefining Success in Ukraine: A New Strategy Must Balance Means and Ends.” What is Haass’ new definition of success? By all appearances, success redefined means failure. “Balancing means and ends” is imperial-speak for coping with the fact that Ukraine cannot possibly defeat Russia militarily. Haass closes his article with a stunning passage: “[The US and Ukraine should] pivot to a new strategy that reflects military and political realities. To do otherwise is to recklessly gamble on Ukraine’s future.” What should we make of a well-heeled imperialist like Haass cautioning against gambling on Ukraine’s future after he himself previously spent so much energy urging US leaders to gamble on Ukraine’s future—a losing gamble which wiped out a generation of Ukrainian men?

One of the few sober-minded and prominent US International Relations specialists, Professor John Mearsheimer, summed it up well in a recent article: “It is becoming increasingly clear that in the case of Ukraine, the level of foolishness and dishonesty among Western elites and the mainstream Western media is stunning.”

Perhaps Karl Rove and the rest of the US Empire’s managers need a new dictum “that reflects military and political realities.” Something like this might suffice:

We need some help from the reality-based community—from people who believe that solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality. Imperial hubris blinded us from seeing the way the world works and has always worked. We were an empire. We thought that when we chose to act, we could create our own reality. And while reality-based people were busy judiciously studying that reality, we thought we could just act again, creating other new realities, which they could study too, and that that would be how things would sort out. We believed that we alone were history’s actors, and that all the earnest scholars and journalists would be left to just study what we did. As it turned out, when we tried to impose our new realities on the world, we only hastened the day when the US would meet the fate of all empires.

Alone among the 2024 presidential contenders, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to dramatically reorient US foreign policy from its disastrous course. Like his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, RFK Jr. understands that the US made a tragic mistake when it chose not “to dissolve the British empire [and instead chose to] take it over.” During World War II, Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations led the US Establishment’s campaign for empire, leading directly to the Cold War. After the Cold War, the CFR was again a leading advocate for the imperialist policies which led to disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. 

Robert Kennedy Jr. says, “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign, and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.” This issue goes beyond corporate corruption in the United States itself. The sordid history of the Council on Foreign Relations reveals that the rise and the decline of US global dominance have been propelled by the same forces—“the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.” It is long past time to end the Empire and restore a measure of democracy to US foreign policy. Kennedy is the only 2024 presidential candidate seeking to do just that.