What Climate Finance Means for the Global South in the Run-up to COP26

Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis.

Chances for a proxy war between Washington and Moscow spiked after the United States refused to provide written guarantees that NATO would neither expand into nor deploy forces to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet states that are not members of the U.S.-led alliance.

However, a reading of the situation indicates Ukraine would be devastated by a NATO-Russia war, which Moscow has been preparing for as diplomatic talks go nowhere. Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest remarks indicate the United States may be inviting Russia to make a move into Ukraine.

Crossing the ‘Red Line’

In early January, Russian and U.S. representatives held talks over Ukraine, but apparently did not find a common ground. Russian demands were clear: No NATO in Ukraine, and no Ukraine in NATO.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia would have no say over who should be allowed to join the bloc. And that was the outcome of the U.S.-Russia negotiations. No compromise has been reached.

Given that it was Russia that initially issued an “ultimatum” to its Western partners, it was not surprising that—after the failure of their recent summits—Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on January 13 that “there is no need for a new round of talks in the near future.” However, his boss, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, reportedly agreed to meet with the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the two diplomats are expected to hold another round of talks on January 21. Such Russian hesitance gives Washington the upper hand over the Kremlin, and the United States and its allies can simply continue demonstrating they do not take Russian demands, “ultimatums” and “red lines” too seriously.

🇬🇧 передала #ЗСУ легкі протитанкові засоби
Це зміцнюватиме 🛡 спроможності України, а надані засоби будуть використані виключно з оборонною метою pic.twitter.com/ipGpqPfInG

— Defence of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 18, 2022

Although Russian officials repeated on several occasions that NATO presence in Ukraine is one of the Kremlin’s “red lines,” NATO member United Kingdom continues to supply weapons to the former Soviet republic. Besides that, reports suggest Canadian special forces have been deployed to Ukraine to deter alleged Russian aggression. Plus, Kiev already has purchased and used U.S.-made Javelin anti-tank missiles, as well as Turkey-produced Bayraktar drones. All that, however, does not mean NATO will go to war with Russia over Ukraine. But such actions clearly demonstrate the West still has significant leverage over the Russian Federation.

Russia Prepares for Conflict

Moscow, for its part, has been flexing its military muscle. Russia and its only European ally, Belarus, announced joint drills will be held in February, aimed against Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian military build-up. According to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Ukraine continues concentrating its radical nationalists from the National Guard next to the Belarusian border, while more than 30,000 military personnel as well as equipment and weapons are concentrated in neighboring Poland and the Baltic states. As the Russian defense ministry announced, the joint exercises will be held at five training grounds, most of them located in the central and eastern parts of Belarus, not in the south close to the Ukrainian border. Still, the United States has inferred Russia and Belarus could use military drills to invade Ukraine, capture the country’s capital, Kiev, and overthrow the government. How likely is such a scenario?

On January 14, Ukraine was hit with a cyber attack that took down the websites of several government departments including the ministries of foreign affairs and education. The authorities have accused both Russia and Belarus of orchestrating the attack. It is worth remembering that in 2008, three weeks before Russia invaded Georgia to protect its proxies in South Ossetia following Georgia’s offensive against the breakaway region, the Caucasus nation started facing cyber attacks alleged deployed by Russia.

Thus, it is entirely possible that what Ukrainian websites experienced is a message that the eastern European country could experience the same fate if it decides to launch a large-scale offensive against Russia-backed self-proclaimed regions that broke away from Ukraine—the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic in the Donbass region.

However, unless there is a huge provocation against Russian and Belarusian forces, or even against the Donbass republics, Moscow is unlikely to engage in a military campaign against Kiev. Ever since the Donbass conflict erupted in 2014, Russia has been trying to avoid a direct military confrontation against Ukraine at any cost. Back then, the Ukrainian army was on the brink of collapse, and Russia had an opportunity to seize not just Crimea, but all Russian-speaking regions in southeast Ukraine. It remains unclear why the Kremlin would launch an invasion now, when Ukrainian Armed Forces are well equipped and motivated to fight.

Spheres of Influence

It is worth remembering, however, that many in Russia, as well as in southeast Ukraine, hoped in 2014 that the Kremlin would establish a new state dubbed Novorossiya—an entity whose borders would have spanned from the city of Kharkov in the east to the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea. However, in 2015 Alexander Borodai, who served as the first prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and is now a member of the Russian Parliament, said Novorossiya was a “false start.” Has now the time come for a de facto division of Ukraine?

As Biden stressed on January 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin will move into Ukraine “because he has to do something.”

“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do,” Biden told reporters during a White House news conference marking his first year in office.

Could it be that the U.S. President de facto gave the green light to Putin for a “minor incursion” into the eastern European country? Does that mean Washington will turn a blind eye if Russia intervenes in the Donbass to protect the self-proclaimed republics in case of a Ukrainian military offensive? 

Western officials, however, keep threatening Russia that it will pay a “high price” if it decides to invade Ukraine. But what if the Kremlin’s calculation shows the price is acceptable? From a purely military perspective, the longer Russia waits, the higher price it will have to pay. Ukraine will have more sophisticated weapons, which means that Russia’s potential invasion will not go as smoothly as some might hope. Even if Russian troops eventually capture Kiev and other Ukrainian regions, that does not mean all troubles for the Kremlin will be over. The West is expected to impose severe sanctions on the Russian Federation, and Moscow will have to find ways to fund what most Ukrainians would call a “occupation apparatus” if Russia happened to occupy more than just the Donbass region, where the majority ethnically Russian population has welcomed Russian backup. But Moscow would also need to find ways to feed millions of people.

The problem, however, is tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine have reached such a high level that a proxy war—be it on Ukrainian territory or elsewhere—is unlikely to be prevented. It can be postponed, though. The United States is evidently trying to buy time to supply more weapons to Ukraine, which the West helped manufacture a coup inside of in 2014 by funding neo-Nazis, who now make up a portion of Ukraine’s military. Russia could respond by deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba and Venezuela—countries Washington sees as part of its sphere of influence, or as it calls the Western Hemisphere, its “backyard.” At the same time, the United States does not accept Russia can have its own sphere of influence. That means Moscow—if it aims to be accepted as a serious actor in the international arena—will have to fight for the right to have its own geopolitical orbit.

Finally, Ukraine—as the weakest link in the geopolitical game played by the United States and Russia—is expected to pay the heaviest price, and will be treated like collateral damage in a new cold war.

Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.

The U.S. government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted.

The Joe Biden administration took the extraordinarily aggressive action this month of blocking China from importing most semiconductors, machines to create chips and supercomputer parts.

A former Pentagon official acknowledged that this was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, amounting to a “form of economic containment.”

He said this in an article in Foreign Policy, the magazine of the D.C. political class, titled “Biden Is Now All-In on Taking Out China.”

Jon Bateman, an ex-analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who served in several important policy roles in the Pentagon, wrote that U.S. officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “strong-armed others into compliance.”

Washington’s “mindset all but guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling,” he concluded.

Bateman stated that the “increasing boldness of U.S. unilateral actions, and Washington’s open embrace of a quasi-containment strategy” reflect the U.S. government’s new cold war goal: “China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.”

Today, Bateman is a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a powerful Washington-based think tank that helps Washington craft policy – with plentiful funding from the U.S. government, its allies, large corporations and banks, and billionaire oligarch family foundations.

Bateman is by no means a pro-China advocate. In April, he published a report for Carnegie called “U.S.-China Technological ‘Decoupling’: A Strategy and Policy Framework.”

In the lengthy document, Bateman “offered a concrete picture of what centrist decoupling might look like and how implementation could work at the agency level.”

Bateman wrote the Foreign Policy article as part of a debate with more hard-line hawks in elite Washington policy-making circles. He warned that their “maximalist” strategy could backfire and hurt the U.S. and its allies, and instead promoted a more cautious, incrementalist approach.

“America’s restrictionists—zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling—have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration,” he warned.

“More cautious voices—technocrats and centrists who advocate incremental curbs on select aspects of China’s tech ties—have lost,” Bateman lamented.

He acknowledged that Washington’s new cold war on China has been completely bipartisan, but “Donald Trump’s scattershot regulation and erratic public statements offered little clarity to allies, adversaries, and companies around the world,” whereas “Joe Biden’s actions have been more systematic.”

“The United States has waged low-grade economic warfare against China for at least four years now—firing volley after volley of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa limits, and much more,” he wrote.

Bateman said the Biden administration’s new sanctions, however, “more so than any earlier U.S. action, reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level.”

“Although framed as a national security measure, the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns,” he wrote.

He added, “The U.S. government imposed the new rules after limited consultation with partner countries and companies, proving that its quest to hobble China ranks well above concerns about the diplomatic or economic repercussions.”

Bateman noted that the United States is trying to pressure allies to join its new cold war on China, leading an international campaign to economically isolate Beijing by building a “Chip 4” alliance with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan – which control the vast majority of the global semiconductor industry.

Bateman’s fears that these aggressive new cold war policies could backfire have already come true. Washington’s rapid attempt to decouple the U.S. economy from China is taking a toll on U.S. universities.

At least 1,400 scientists of Chinese descent have left U.S. research institutions and instead gone to China, according to a report published this October by academics at Harvard, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The South China Morning Post reported that the “high number illustrates a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from U.S. government policies deterring research and academic activity by scientists of Chinese descent and suggests American research could suffer.”

The tech press has sounded similar alarm bells about Washington’s bellicose attacks on Beijing.

Electronics industry website EE Times quoted a corporate analyst who said the U.S. “sanctions put a temporary checkmate on China developing their foundry industry at more advanced nodes.”

The website also used cold war rhetoric to refer to the aggressive U.S. policies, writing:

The latest U.S. salvo in the chip war against China will set back its domestic chipmakers by generations, while global suppliers of semiconductors and fab tools will incur billions of dollars in lost sales because of a giant dent in demand out of China, analysts told EE Times.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has strengthened Cold War measures from longer than 40 years ago. In its new rivalry, the U.S. aims to freeze China’s advancement on a new front: chip technology that is critical for economic development and military superiority.

Wired magazine came to the same conclusion, reporting that the U.S. sanctions aimed to “kneecap” China’s tech industry.

Wired said Washington’s “sweeping new controls are designed to keep [China’s] AI industry stuck in the dark ages while the U.S. and other Western countries advance.”

The tech magazine quoted Gregory Allen, director of the AI governance project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an influential neoconservative think tank in Washington that is bankrolled by the weapons industry, U.S. government, and Washington’s allies.

Allen summed it up: “The United States is saying to China, ‘AI technology is the future; we and our allies are going there—and you can’t come.’”

Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.

From Here to Equality by William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kristen Mullen (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

This year represents a pivotal moment in U.S. history and presents a unique opportunity to explore the primary cause behind its great wealth. In August 1619, about 20 enslaved Africans aboard an English ship called “White Lion” arrived from present-day Angola on the shores of what is now Hampton, Virginia. Over the next three centuries, multitudes of enslaved Africans would go on to endure some of the most oppressive, degrading and inhumane treatment in world history under the rule of U.S. law, while helping build the economic foundation that would allow the United States to become one of the wealthiest countries.

On July 4, 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed into law, thus declaring the original 13 colonies free from British rule and paving the way for the formation of the United States of America. July 4, 2022, marked the 246th anniversary of this document. What cannot be overlooked is the amount of time that has passed between July 1776 and now: 246 years and three months. In the meantime, slavery in United States officially began in August 1619 and was legally abolished on December 18, 1865, due to the 13th Amendment. From August 1619 to December 18, 1865, is a timespan of 246 years and four months. That means that the institution of slavery in the United States is one month older than the country’s history as a state free from British rule.

The nearly equidistant relationship between the duration of slavery and the history of the United States as a “free nation” is relevant for several reasons. History is essentially the study of events that have taken place over a given time-period. Some people seek to minimize U.S. slavery’s economic and social impact by pushing it into the distant past. When Joe Biden was running for the U.S. presidency in 2020, his remarks from the 1970s about reparations resurfaced: “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” At the time, the United States was barely 100 years removed from slavery. The issue with his declaration is it not only lacks a factual foundation. It also goes against the wartime order of “40 acres and a mule” that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made in 1865 during the Civil War. Following his presidential victory in 1865, Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that reversed Sherman’s attempt to redistribute land to former slaves. Nearly all the land redistributed during the war was restored to its pre-war white owners.

What makes From Here to Equality (2020) poignant is its ability to effectively quantify the economic and social impact of slavery, while elucidating a simple and just solution: Reparations. The book begins with Darity and Mullen highlighting initial attempts for reparations by Black activists like Frederick Douglass, Callie D. Guy House and others following the aftermath of slavery. In 1898, House joined forces with Isaiah Dickerson to charter the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association (MRBP) in Nashville, Tennessee. According to Darity and Mullen (pg. 24), the MRBP’s mission was four-fold: 

1. “identify ex-slaves and add their names to the petition for a pension;
2. lobby Congress to provide pensions for the nation’s estimated 1.9 million ex-slaves—21 percent of all African-Americans by 1899;
3. start local chapters and provide members with financial assistance when they became incapacitated by illness; and
4. provide a burial assistance payment when the member died.”

However, many people within the U.S. government felt threatened by the organization’s push for reparations.

As a result, House was convicted and jailed for almost a year due to claims that (pg. 25) “they (MRBP) had obtained money from the formerly enslaved by fraudulent circulars proclaiming that pensions and reparations were forthcoming.” The practice of U.S. government officials interfering with organizations that seek the liberation of Black people would continue well into the 1900s. Black leaders like Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others would all experience U.S. government repression. In 1999, the U.S. government was found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Dr. King.

From Here to Equality effectively articulates the relationship between slavery and the extreme wealth gap that exists between Black people and white people. (pg. 26)

“It is important to acknowledge that whites control political and economic power in this country. No shift in the power relationship will be possible unless the society as a whole takes action to transform the structural conditions to make racial equality a real possibility. Given the existing distribution of financial and real resources, blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by independent and autonomous action.”

According to the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, “median black household net worth ($17,600) is only one-tenth of white net worth ($171,000).” The main reason is because after slavery ended, no lasting reparations were given to Black people in the form of land or wealth. Therefore, the myth that Black people can close the wealth gap through “hard work and determination” is completely illogical.

From Here to Equality is unlike any other book written about slavery, its impact on the global economy, and what’s owed to the descendants of slaves. The present moment represents a unique opportunity for the U.S. government to earnestly reckon with one of the greatest sins of its past and implement a reparations program that can help repair the conditions of Black people in the United States. Darity and Mullen close out their work by introducing (pg. 487) “several compelling calculations for monetary restitution.”

One of the more conservative estimates shows that each eligible Black descendant of U.S. slavery is owed $267,000. While H.R. 40, the 2021 congressional bill that establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans is a step in the right direction, significant pressure should be applied to not only Congress but all politicians to ensure that reparations are paid out to the Black descendants of U.S. slavery.

Timothy Harun is a writer and actor based in Los Angeles. He holds a B.A. in journalism from Hampton University.