In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.
Now we have the Ukraine case, and we need not bother with “ample reason.” It is open-and-shut evident at this point that we witness two wars as the Armed Forces of Ukraine face off with the Russian military. There is the presented war, the meta-war, you might say, and there is the waged war, the war taking place on the ground, nothing meta about it.
Imagine then if you had a vantage point from outer space:You would see a massive dark cloud circling the tiny and fragile earth. No one would escape the effects.
There’s a long tradition in the West wherein foreign policy is the preserve of an elite not answerable to any electorate. This has been the case in the U.S. since it first had a foreign policy to speak of, in the late 19th century.
THE ABSOLUTE IMPERATIVE OF PARTNERSHIP NOW. We have the need the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions as a global mobilization. But to do that we need some dialogue serious dialogue, we need partnership. We can't have this rhetoric, what I call a Manichaean rhetoric, that we're good and they're bad. We have to accept the world: It's not pretty and we all have flaws, and we can argue about who is worse or who is better but that's not the point. The point is we have to partner with China, with Russia, with India, with Brazil, with a lot of countries we have massive disagreements with, but whatever those disagreements are the climate continues to warm as it is. We're putting more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every day, and it's going to last in many cases for hundreds of years. This is another disaster and we've got to mobilize. We can have more than a million people in Central Park again: We need people all over the world, and we need to wake people up to the problem substantively but with the absolute imperative of partnership now. Jerry Brown, Executive Chair of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
"The insistence is upon the United States exercising global primacy of continuing to be number one, a position we've become accustomed to having ever since the end of World War II. I think that conviction remains and is taken seriously, so it's less about a mission to spread democracy [and] it's more about a conviction of history having chosen the United States uniquely to preside over the future of humankind."
President Biden has asked the U.S. Congress to give $33 billion more. It will overwhelmingly go to military weapons, presumably, some humanitarian aid.
The war in Ukraine is intimately linked to the real existential crisis we face – the climate crisis. The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and be nearly halved this decade, to thwart global catastrophe….Triggered by war in Ukraine, soaring energy prices have pushed the US and other countries to call on domestic oil producers to increase fossil fuel extraction and exacerbate the climate crisis. Oil and gas lobbyists are demanding the Biden administration lift prohibitions on offshore drilling and on federal lands.
Ecological effects of war in Ukraine and war in general: The overweening and unconscionable plodding response of industry will take years! We have the tools with solar panels and wind energy, but the war and gas and oil industries with inexcusable help from Washington/Congress are blocking the swift action needed. Nor is nuclear power a solution.
The proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2023 continues to take our country in the wrong direction. This massive proposed budget would continue to keep military spending at 37% of the current federal spending with $1.7 trillion being dedicated to past and present military expenses.
Organizing to end the Russia-Ukraine War
"The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler. The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing on Saturday an additional $200 million in military assistance."
