International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, Balkans and around the world. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura, Professor of International Politics and National Security, Faculty of Law, St. Andrew's University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) and Member of IFIMES Council prepared an article entitled “The War in Ukraine as an inevitable manifestation of globalism vs. nationalism” about the war in Ukraine as struggle between nationalist Russia and the globalist United States. The article is published in its entirety.
After two years and four months since its outbreak, the War in Ukraine has turned out to be arguably the most significant event in contemporary international relations. Although its warfare is limited to the geographic areas centered on eastern and southeastern parts of the country, the War has involved global political and economic confrontation between Russia and the U.S.-led West. Evidently, with the BRICS and major Global South countries having taken non-U.S., if not anti-U.S., stances, the War is rapidly transforming the already severely declined U.S. hegemony into an embryonic multipolar world order.
It is now of great importance to comprehend the essential nature of the War from a macro-historical perspective on modern and contemporary international relations. Such an approach will likely enable going beyond conventional current event commentary, policy analysis, and regular IR/comparative analysis.
This study is particularly interested in the Jewish question as a vantage point from which to look at the interplay of historical, geo-political, and ethno-political factors in historic and today’s Ukraine and to grasp the cross-national dynamics of national security and foreign policy lines, specially across the U.S., the Soviet Union/Russia, and Ukraine. The approach is based on the understanding that the Judeo-Christian Western history and the Jewish question[2] are the head and tail of the same coin. This necessarily manifests as the struggle between, on one hand, the politico-economic confinement and socio-economic marginalization of the Jewish peoples within the framework of the Western nation-state and, on the other hand, the total emancipation of them from the state through market liberalization and globalization: nationalism vs. globalism.
Based on such an approach, this essay aims to hold the understanding that the War in Ukraine is an inevitable manifestation of the heightened struggle between nationalist Russia and the globalist United States. It is hoped that the understanding will be instrumental to explore an exit out of the current predicament of world politics.
Historically, Ukraine is a troublesome border area located between Europe and Eurasia, involving the contest for control between the two sides. In other words, defining the domain of Ukraine involves demarcating the boundary of the two, and constitutes a highly conflictual and occasionally confrontational international political act that affects regional and international power balance. This also means that Ukraine can be a strategic buffer and a factor of stability, should there exist power equilibrium between the two.
Already in the early modern times, the overall pattern of the contest was conspicuous, with the spheres of influence in the western parts of Ukraine by European powers, the eastern and southeastern parts by Eurasian powers, and the areas in-between where the two sides struggled for dominance but often faced dynamic gradation of their spheres. More specifically, the triune Russian nation – White, Little and Great Russians (respectively, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Russians) – has shared their linguistic origin in the Old East Slavic, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the overall political culture based on them, with a notable exception of the Eastern Catholic population in the western Ukraine centered in Galicia which used to a part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795), the Austrian Empire (1804-1864), and the Austro-Hungary Empire (1867-1918). Consequently, Ukraine as a whole long lacked a solid national identity among its total population and suffered the great built-in potential for extensive ethnic conflicts[3].
To make the matter more complicated, there was a large Ashkenazi[4] Jewish population as a highly heterogeneous element in Ukraine that had suffered “pogroms”[5]. According to Encyclopedia Britannica online, the term means ‘devastation’ or ‘riot’ in Russian, or a mob attack either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. It is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Notably, as a result of the pogroms of 1881 and policies under both Alexander III and his successor, Nicholas II, there is a significant population in the United States that has been descended from Ukrainian Jewish immigrants[6]. This works as a preliminary in analyzing the current globalist U.S. policy toward Ukraine as discussed later in this essay.
Shortly before the Russian October Revolution of 1917, a Jewish revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin returned from exile in Switzerland to the then-capital of the Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg[7], and led the revolution to seize power and establish the new Bolshevik regime in 1918. The power nucleus of it was predominantly Jewish revolutionaries, as Russian President Vladimir Putin once mentioned that “at least 80 percent of the members of the first Soviet government was Jewish”[8]. To further discuss about the current U.S.-Russia confrontation over the War in Ukraine, however, it is adequate to only acknowledge the Jewish factor, with no need to enter mazes of controversies about the imperial German conspiracy behind the sealed train[9] and the antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory of Jewish Bolshevism[10]
After the Revolution, Bolsheviks and pro-European forces set up several political entities side by side in Ukraine, largely corresponding to the aforementioned historic spheres of influence between European and Eurasian/Russian powers. Bolsheviks formed the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets (December 12, 1917 – 1918), the Odessa Soviet Republic (January-March 1918), and the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic (1918), which were later merged into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (March 1918-1991). The pro-European side built the West Ukrainian National Republic (November 1918- July 1919) that controlled historic Eastern Galicia. With the Bolshevik success in the October Revolution, its revolutionary regime prevailed across the former Russian Empire. After the collapse of the West Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian SSR controlled the whole of Ukraine that later became as an integral part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Deeply entrenched in this reunification process, there was obviously a strategic calculation of the Lenin-led regime on how to create a pro-Soviet Ukrainian state with multi-ethnic populations (Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and other East European minorities as well as Russians) that involved the historico-political divide between pro-European and pro-Russian political forces. This means that, from a Soviet point of view, the key lay in how to include or exclude individual multi-ethnic regions in a new state and then how to retain a significant presence of pro-Russian populations in it, preventing the birth of a pro-European state. In fact, this had largely been achieved prior to the collapse of the West Ukrainian National Republic through the merger of the aforementioned two regional Soviet republics, roughly equal to the domain of historic Novorossiya, into the Ukrainian SSR[11].
As seen in the above circumstances, the birth of the Ukrainian SSR was a compromise imposed by the Lenin-led regime between its Greater Russia policy and Ukrainian nationalism, particularly strong in Western Ukraine[12]. This case is a prime example of the institutional expression of Greater Russia with national SSRs under the aegis of the USSR. Also, the Ukraine SSR is a leading case in which powerful nationalism had been contained and kept latent, involving the great potential for ethnic conflict. In this sense, the endogenous root cause of the current War in Ukraine is ascribable to the forcible formation of the Ukraine SSR in the early post-revolution period.
Lenin is well known as a prime advocate of the international communist movement and one of the founders of the Communist International that was set up in 1919 and controlled by the Lenin-led USSR Communist Party. The movement aimed to promote world revolution by overthrowing the international bourgeoisie and creating an international soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state. The form of internationalism is highly acceptable for Lenin, Leon Trosky, and other Jewish revolutionary leaders to emancipate the Jewish diasporas across the world which has been confined and oppressed within the framework of the nation-state under the inter-state system.
After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin and Trotsky faced multifaceted political and policy conflicts and struggled for supreme political power under the Soviet regime. Notably, Stalin won the struggle and advocated one-state socialism in the Soviet Union over communist internationalism. Stalin put priority on first securing and strengthening the Soviet Union as the base from which to later export revolution, rather than immediately accelerating the international communist movement. The differences between the two approaches are conceptually the matter of path selection to the same political goal but also practically that of great strategic importance. Consequently, the Stalin-led regime purged and eventually assassinated Trotsky, and then wiped Trotskyists out from the Soviet regime.
This means that, by having shifted from international communism to one-state socialism, Stalin, a Georgian revolutionary leader, in fact kept confining the Jewish population within the framework of the Soviet state, although having taken failed remedial measures to establish the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East in 1934. To seek political emancipation of the Jews, Trotskyists have died hard since then, and survived in the West, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, or the current and former hegemons in international politics. Given the total population of the Jewish diasporas in the world very limited and dispersed, it is natural for Trotskyists at the brink of defeat to strive for revival and rise by penetrating into major Western civil societies and states.
Trotskyists found a new place of belonging in the emerging movement of neoconservatism[13] during the protracted Vietnam War. It was a reaction to increasing war-weariness and pacifism to the Democratic Party in the United States, the New Left in Western Europe, and counterculture of the 1960 across the West. The hawks in foreign and security policy across the political spectrum from the right to the left became increasingly disenchanted with this political atmosphere. In particular, the liberal hawks pursued hardline policy lines and even armed intervention toward global democratic enlargement, ultimately a global empire of democracy, at least at the ideational level. Thus, there is strong affinity between an international soviet republic and an empire of democracy, or between international communism and neoconservatism in the sense that the Jewish diasporas across the world would surely enjoy total emancipation in the framework of a new world order that transcends the nation-state and the inter-state system, regardless the ideological confrontation of communism vs. capitalism and the political one of communist dictatorship vs. liberal democracy. It is no wonder that Trotskyists found a golden opportunity in neoconservatism, dubbed as neoconservatives (or neocons).
More specifically, the early neocon movement in the United States had its intellectual roots in the Commentary, a Jewish monthly journal of opinion published between 1960 to 1995, edited by Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish American. He is a son of Jewish parents who immigrated from Galicia, then part of Poland, now Ukraine. Leading figures included Irving Kristol, a Jewish American of East European origin and a neocon public intellectual, as well as non-Jewish occasional contributors to the journal, such as Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Monihan served as an adviser to the Republican President Richard Nixon and then a Democratic Senator. Necon’s anti-Soviet hardline foreign and security policy line, involving implications to the political life of the Jews in the Soviet Union, had strong affinity with the liberal hawks, such as Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who confronted a majority of pacifist Democratic Senators.
Consequently, anti-Soviet Republic conservative hawks, particularly the Republican Ronald Reagan Presidency were approached by the second generation of Jewish neocon thinkers and public intellectuals. They included high-ranking political-appointee officials in foreign and security policy, such as Jeane Duane Kirkpatrick (US ambassador to the U.N., 1981-1985), Richard N. Perle (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, 1981-1987), Paul Wolfowitz (Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, 1981-1982; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, 1982-1986). Wolfowitz also served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (1989-1993) under the George H. W. Bush Presidency, in the period that covers the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) in which the administration followed a prudent realist approach to not overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime and kept the dual containment of Iran and Iraq to maintain the stability of the Middle East. Based on this experience, Wolfowitz formulated the Defense Planning Guidelines in 1992[14], which put forth the first neocon hardline strategy involving the use of armed intervention toward a U.S. unipolarity on which to build the succeeding globalist strategy documents.
Thereafter, neocons played pivotal roles under Republican George W. Bush Presidency that had taken an exemplary globalist hardline through hyper-active armed intervention in the greater Middle East after the 911 terrorist attacks, including the Afghan and Iraq wars. Notably, William Kristol, a son of Irving Kristol, was the founder and editor-at-large of a political magazine, The Weekly Standard (1995-2018), and had played a hub role of neocon individuals, until the magazine was shut down in December 2018. He and Robert Kagan, another neocon of Lithuanian Jewish descent, together with non-Jewish hardline conservatives, founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a non-profit advocacy group, from which to produce top cabinet- and subcabinet-level officials of the G.W. Bush administration. Concretely, in addition to conservative hardliners, such as Vice President Richard Cheney (2001-2009) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfled (2001-2006), there were Jewish neocons, such as Elliott Abrams (United States Deputy National Security Advisor, 2005-2009 ), Elliot Cohen (Counselor of the State Department, 2008-2009), Scooter Libby (Chief of Staff to the Vice President, 2001-2005), Peter Rodman (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, 2001-2007), and Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2001-2005), among others.
Given that all of these Jewish neocons served as policy planners or makers in specific issue-areas or geographic regions at the sub-cabinet or lower levels, they were unlikely involved in important grand strategic decision making, with a probable exception of Wolfowitz. Rather, they were effective only when aligned with conservative hardliners at the cabinet- or higher-levels who were buttressed by wider domestic political forces, such as the defense-industrial complex[15] and the Evangelical fundamentalist movements[16]. Jewish neocons, therefore, took the brunt of criticism due to their high visibility, yet with the veiled motive of Jewish emancipation, but were only the spearhead of American globalist hardline forces. This negates the Jewish conspiracy theory.
Due to the early alignment of Jewish neocons with the Republican Presidencies, they initially lost power footholds in the Democratic Barack Obama Presidency. Yet, it was compelled to take over the continuing global war on terrorism and faced serious imperial overstretch that required cutting and curbing defense spendings[17], while the liberal hawk Senators and Congressmen continued vigorously pursuing a similar globalist strategy.
Under these constraints, the Obama administration (2009-2017) relied on diplomatic and covert methods to pursue its globalist policy to Ukraine, perhaps, initially reluctantly but later proactively. In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (2009-2013), known as a liberal hawk, used Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland (2013-2017) to implement globalist diplomacy to Ukraine through intervention and interference, including her own presence on the spot at the occasion of the Euromaidan uprising, which led to a change of Kiev’s pro-Russian government to a pro-U.S. one[18]. Nuland is a career diplomat but known as a neocon who is descendant of East European Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, contiguous to Ukraine. She is the wife of Robert Kagan, a major neocon public intellectual, who served as an influential member of the Secretary of State’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board during the similar period. Most notably, Vice President Joseph Biden (2009-2017) had been in charge of Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. He had paid several visits to Kiev and had extensive contacts with Ukrainian political leaders and committed active interference to Ukrainian domestic politics toward the country’s constitutional amendments for NATO and EU memberships[19].
After the Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration has continued a hyper-active globalist policy to support Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia through military and other aids that have required large war chests. Under Secretary of State Anthony Blinken who was national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden (2009 to 2013), Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2021-2024) and Acting Deputy Secretary of State (July 2023-February 2024), had played a leading role in Ukraine War policy. Blinken is known as a globalist who is descended from Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and his great-grandfather from Kiev. In addition, it has to be noted that the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a think tank based in Washington DC, has taken a strong anti-Russian policy position and provided detailed War analyses, which resonates well with the Biden administration’s globalist strategy and Ukraine War policy. Kimbery Kagan is ISW Founder & President and the Jewish wife of Donald Kagan, a major Jewish neocon, who is the younger brother of Robert Kagan.
Clearly, Jewish neocons have occupied pivotal political appointee positions in foreign and security policy and consistently taken a globalist line across the Republican and Democratic administrations. In other words, their party affiliation is not an effective indicator to grasp the significance of their political action, since their allegiance is based on the creed of globalism.
Hitherto, this study has explored the essential nature of the War in Ukraine from a macro-historical perspective on modern and contemporary international relations. Its analytical focus has been put on the odd continuity of the early Soviet and the current U.S. grand strategic approaches, with diasporic Jewish leaders at either political or policy levels as an intervening variable. More specifically, the discussion has centered on the dynamic linkage of ①historic Ukraine and the Ashkenazi Jewish, ➁the birth of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, ➂Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin as communist internationalism vs. nationalism, ④the emergence and rise of neoconservatism, and ⑤the U.S. globalist policy toward the War in Ukraine.
The study has found that Jewish neocons as the modern variant of Trotskyists exerted a deadly catalytic effect on the current interplay of U.S. and Russian geostrategic interaction. It has to be noted that Trotsky once vainly aspired to the accelerated realization of an international soviet republic, while both American conservative hardliners and liberal hawks today like to see a global empire of democracy, if feasible, as built in the creeds of the American Independence Revolution. Evidently, there has been great opportunity for Jewish Trotskyist intellectuals in the U.S, now dubbed as neocons, to take advantage of U.S. hegemonic power in pursuing an unrealized dream of their total emancipation from the modern nation state and the inter-state system. Thus, Russia’s head-on collision with the globalist U.S. is inevitable because today’s Russia follows a nationalist approach to foreign and security policy as a result of the early Soviet’s choice of one-state socialism over international communism that still continues essentially until today. It is well known that the post-Lenin Soviet Union had not put top priority on realization of world revolution up to its demise.
Hence, the current U.S.-Russia confrontation, especially the War in the Ukraine, should be comprehended in the context of globalism vs. nationalism. The dominant narrative of democracy vs. authoritarianism is off the mark but may be useful war propaganda to enhance solidarity among the U.S.-led West’s liberal democracies, but only when Ukrainian armed forces are not inferior to Russia on the battlegrounds. However, Ukraine now is totally inferior as demonstrated by the de facto compelled resignation of U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland in March 2022, due to the failed implementation of Ukraine policy that she had led.
Even after a defeat on the Ukrainian battleground, the U.S.-led West could continue its global geopolitical confrontation with Russia, while the Global South refuses to side with the West. This inert approach would only further weaken the U.S.-led West economically and politically as significant symptoms have been widely observed. It is high time that the U.S. should make a decisive shift from hyper-globalism to prudent realism in world politics. In this sense, the coming U.S. presidential election in fall 2024 is very important in judging the near future course of the U.S.-led West in world politics.
About the author:
Prof. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics and National Security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, and currently a 2024 ROC-MOFA Taiwan Fellow-in-Residence at NCCU-IIR Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei. He is Member of IFIMES Council.
The views expressed in this explanatory note are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Osaka, August 6, 2024
[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has Special Consultative status at ECOSOC/UN since 2018. and it’s publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”.
[2] As a classical work, Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, 1884, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/.
[3] Masahiro Matsumura, “Handling the Ukraine Crisis: A Geopolitical Perspective”, Ifimes Analysis, February 22, 2022, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/handling-the-ukraine-crisis-a-geopolitical-perspective/4998.
[4] According to Encyclopedia Britannica online, the Jews are divided into two groups: Ashkenazi and Sephardi. The former means “member of the Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th century) and their descendants”. The latter is “Sephardi, member or descendant of the Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal from at least the later centuries of the Roman Empire until their persecution and mass expulsion from those countries in the last decades of the 15th century”.For the history of Jews in Ukraine, see, “Ukraine”, European Jewish Congress, no date, https://eurojewcong.org/communities/ukraine/. “History of Ukraine”, Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, no date, https://www.jewishportland.org/history-of-ukraine.
[5] A pogrom is well depicted in an American musical, “The Fedler on the Roof”.
[6] “History of Ukraine”, op.cit.
[7] Ted Widmer, “Lenin and the Russian Spark”, New Yorker, April 20, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/lenin-and-the-russian-spark.
[8] “Putin: First Soviet government was mostly Jewish”, The Time of Israel, June 20, 2013, https://www.timesofisrael.com/putin-first-soviet-government-was-mostly-jewish/.
[9] Sean Mcmeekin, “Was Lenin a German Agent?”, New York Times, June 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html.
[10] Victor de Kayville, Downfall of Russia: Bolshevism and Judaism, pamphlet. 1934, https://digital-collections.csun.edu/digital/collection/InOurOwnBackyard/id/7/.
[11] Ironically, this merger process was completed by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), a Ukrainian himself, willy-nilly incorporated the Crimea Peninsula into Ukraine despite the significant modern and current historical ties with Russia and ethnic Russians as an overwhelming majority of local population, on the no-longer tenable assumption that the Soviet Union shall exist forever.
[12] Ironically, this merger process was completed by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), a Ukrainian himself, willy-nilly incorporated the Crimea Peninsula into Ukraine despite the significant modern and current historical ties with Russia and ethnic Russians as an overwhelming majority of local population, on the no-longer tenable assumption that the Soviet Union shall exist forever.
[13] The term was coined by Edward M. Harrington, an American democratic socialist who published many articles in Commentary as well as other major leftists journals.
[14] U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidelines”, April 16, 1992, https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf.
[15] T. N. Vance and Walter J. Oakes, The Permanent War Economy, Createspace Independent Publishing, 2010.
[16] Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Oxford University Press, 2008.
[17] “America is not the world's policeman: Text of Barack Obama's speech on Syria”, NDTV World, September 11, 2013, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/america-is-not-the-worlds-policeman-text-of-barack-obamas-speech-on-syria-534239.
[18] “F*** the EU: Alleged audio of US diplomat Victoria Nuland swearing”, On Demand News, no date, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2XNN0Yt6D8.
[19] Masahiro Matsumura, “Ukraine as Biden’s Sacrificed Pawn: A Mismanagement under the Declining U.S. Hegemony”, Ifimes Analysis, March 12, 2022, https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/ukraine-as-bidens-sacrificed-pawn-a-mismanagement-under-the-declining-us-hegemony/5011.
