Vladimir Roosevelt and Franklin Putin
What President Franklin Roosevelt started almost 80 years ago may finally come to fruition because of what Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine in 2022. It will take a while to get there and there are plenty of pitfalls on the path to be avoided – nuclear war being the big one – but life on this planet, human and other, will be better for it if it comes to pass. We can pick up the story shortly before the USA joined the World War II hostilities.
The prevailing popular understanding is Roosevelt and Churchill saw eye to eye on World War II grand strategy. In fact there were fundamental differences between them from the outset, as indicated by this exchange between the two heads of government at the Atlantic Charter conference held aboard ships anchored in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941:
“I [Roosevelt] am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now – “
“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?” [replied Prime Minister Winston Churchill]
“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation – by making sure they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”
This disagreement was no mere tempest in a teapot. It played out in the deliberations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that established the joint UK/USA strategy to be pursued, which in turn determined why, where and how many soldiers, sailors and airmen would be dying. From FDR down the Americans were determined no Americans should die to preserve the British colonial empire, and Churchill was determined the sun would not set on that Empire on his watch.
When the United States declared war on Germany four days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the USSR was very much on its back foot and would remain so for another year. The three Baltic republics as well as Ukraine and Belarus had been captured, as well as much of its industrial heartland in western Russia. Leningrad had been under siege for two months, and the Wehrmacht had reached the exurbs of Moscow. Stalin and his general staff pleaded that the USA and Britain take steps to open a second front somewhere in northwestern Europe as soon as possible, and that they be included in the Lend-Lease program the USA had set up with Britain prior to formally joining in the hostilities. It was premature to consider second fronts and both Britain and the USA military brass opposed extending Lend-Lease to the USSR because of their own urgent needs. However FDR feared blowing off of Stalin’s plea might induce him to seek a separate peace with Germany, so he pushed through the USA support of the USSR war effort through the Lend-Lease program. Thus began a generally cordial relationship, albeit at a distance, between the president and the leader of the USSR.
The relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin was cemented when they met in person and got along well with each other at the Tehran Conference in late 1943. By that time the USSR had won the two pivotal eastern front battles – Stalingrad and Kursk – and the Axis armies were in retreat. Churchill & company were still focused on the preservation of its colonial empire after the hostilities ceased. They had two objectives in mind. The first was to retain its control of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East so as to maintain access to India, its imperial crown Jewel. The other was to enable Germany to prolong bleeding Russia, which it perceived to be the greatest long term threat to its interests in Asia.
As we have seen President Roosevelt believed colonialism was the underlying cause of the wars of the 20th century. However he saw that a much more imminent threats existed and that were Facism and Nazism. Their appeal extended beyond Europe to the dictators the USA supported in Latin America and also, most disturbingly, to more than a few of America’s elite financiers and industrialists. Not to mention the southern wing of his own party, representing states the racist laws of which Hitler used as templates for Nazi legislation. Roosevelt felt it was so urgent the USA join the hostilities against Germany that he risked political suicide by deliberately putting the Pacific Fleet at risk. He understood that only a direct attack on the USA would overcome the America First movement that held sway right up to December 6, 1941. For Roosevelt, World War II was all about defeating Nazism in Germany so thoroughly the movement would never raise its ugly head again. Also it was likely the reason he pushed for the controversial phrase “unconditional surrender” as the ultimate war objective to be included in the Casablanca Conferences communique.
Well before World War II ended President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Treasury economist Harry Dexter White and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles began planning for a post-war international structure intended to promote widespread prosperity, while minimizing incentives toward war. Historians have dubbed their program “Rooseveltian Internationalism,” and it envisioned two main thrusts: to foster the recovery of the war-torn countries; and to assist former colonies to become prosperous and truly independent sovereign states now that the decolonization movement was re-energized by the exhaustion of the European colonial metropoles. The plan was fully fleshed out when it was presented to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in the summer of 1944.
That gathering is better known by the name of the small resort town in New Hampshire where it was held, Bretton Woods. 44 countries were represented at the negotiating tables and others, including the USSR, were non-voting observers. There were 3 major accomplishments, the first of which was formal agreement that gold and the US$, pegged at $35/oz, would be the post-war unit of international settlement account. The other two were authorizations to stand up the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as overseers of the post-war financial regime soon after the hostilities were brought to a close.
The most eventful negotiations held at Bretton Woods were those between the chiefs of the UK and USA delegations, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Holding the high cards, White pushed through language in the charters of both the World Bank and IMF that gave the USA de facto veto power. The reason the USA sought this was to prevent Britain, France and the other European colonial metropoles from uniting to deny colonized countries access to loans and other services from these international institutions, thus preserving their empires against the will of the colonized peoples. Rooseveltian internationalism envisioned the services provided by the Bretton Woods institutions would be available to all countries on an egalitarian basis. The delegates also agreed that the post war finance and trade regime would be overseen jointly by the USA, Great Britain, the USSR and China.
But President Roosevelt died in April of 1945, 26 days before the end of the war in Europe and 4 ½ months before the surrender of Japan. This is widely assumed to be the turning point toward the demise of the Rooseveltian vision of the post-war world, however an equally significant pivot took place nine months earlier during the Democratic National Convention. About 10:00 PM July 20, 1944, the delegates were returning to their seats after marching around the floor of the Chicago Stadium celebrating the renomination of President Roosevelt by acclamation, and they were in a mood to do likewise for the incumbent Vice President Henry Wallace. At that point a cabal of southern Democrats and big city party bosses buttonholed the temporary chairman and leaned on him to gavel the session closed. There followed a sleepless night of wheeling and dealing. Wallace led the votes on the 1st ballot the following day, but he was short of the majority needed for the nomination. His support collapsed and Harry Truman, a machine pol from Kansas City in the border state of Missouri won the necessary majority on the 2nd ballot. Wallace was fully on board with Roosevelt’s domestic and internationalist agendas. Truman was not.
It’s tempting to think about “might-have-beens,” beginning with the fact that had Roosevelt been at the convention his prestige and personal intervention might have kept Wallace on the ticket. But he had a war to run and was on his way to Hawaii to settle Pacific theater strategy differences between Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur.
Harry Truman had had very little experience in foreign affairs, and during his less than 3 months as vice president he had received virtually no briefings from FDR or his senior associates. What ensued immediately after he was sworn into office was a battle for the new president’s mind. Like many USA politicians of all stripes, Truman held a skeptical view of the USSR in spite of their being our most essential ally in the war. One of the key players in the contest was the Wall Street connected ambassador Averell Harriman, who arrived from Moscow less than a week after FDR’s death to join the fight. He brought with him the embassy staff’s animosity to the USSR, and especially Stalin himself, engendered by years of confinement to the embassy grounds unless accompanied by NKVD agents. He and his allies won the contest and the slide into the Cold War began.
Relations between the Truman administration and the USSR went into decline almost immediately, due in no small part to the freelancing machinations of Allen Dulles. While president Roosevelt was still living Dulles launched Operation Sunrise, unauthorized negotiations with the German command in Italy for a separate peace. When the president learned of it he insisted the USSR be kept informed but after he died Dulles, the senior OSS officer in Europe based in Bern, let it slide. After VE day Dulles doubled down first by shielding SS General Reinhard Gehlen, commander of the eastern front’s intelligence and behind-the-linse terrorist operation, from arrest for war crimes, and then absorbing that operation into the rump OSS with Gehlen as its commander. The Soviets were furious.
During the 1946 election cycle a candidate for Congress from southern California by the name of Nixon successfully test marketed flimsily based accusations of being a “communist sympathizer” as a political cudgel. His campaign was partially funded by his poker winnings while an REMF Naval officer in the Pacific theater during the war. Meanwhile Harriman, Kennan, et al of the wartime embassy staff in the Moscow were now in Washington bending the ears of members of Congress and recent Truman appointees. As for FDR’s determination to fight the restoration of colonialism, in 1947 it was honored in the breech, on behalf of the British in Greece and the French in Vietnam. By 1948 the rationalization for abandoning Roosevelt’s vision was fully in place:
“ . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
“Report by the Policy Planning Staff,” 1948, George Kennan, Director.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d4
There it is. Rooseveltian Internationalism explicitly cast onto the ash heap of history. That same year the USSR threw in the towel on any chance of cooperative relationship with the USA and its western European allies, and launched the Berlin Blockade. The next year they successfully detonated a nuclear explosion.
Now let’s fast-forward to 1972, when Michael Hudson first published Super Imperialism, The book describes how the USA de facto veto power in the World Bank and IMF, which had been embedded in their charters for the purpose of preventing the European colonial metropoles from reverting to the status quo ante after World War II, was being used to knock the ladders down on which countries were trying to climb to prosperity and independence. The veto power has been co-opted to establish an empire of nominally sovereign but de facto colonized states, of which empire the USA is the metropole. So much for President Roosevelt’s “Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation – by making sure they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.” Super Imperialism remains so pertinent that Hudson published its 3rd edition in 2021.
In that same year retired USAF Col. L. Fletcher Prouty published The Secret Team in which he recounts his quarter century at the nexus of the military, the OSS and the CIA. In the “Author’s Note” that opens the second edition that came out a quarter century later he describes how that first edition was literally “disappeared” from the shelves of bookstores world wide. Prouty describes the multitude of ways below-the-radar insiders control what happens by manipulating the information and alternatives made available to the nominal decision makers.
30 years later John Perkins blew the whistle on aother dark side of Super Imperialism. About 1970 he took a job with an engineering and construction firm that specialized in electrical infrastructure in developing countries. His training included a stint at a 3 letter federal agency where he learned his real job was to produce estimates of developing countries’ economic potentials that were as close to absurdly optimistic as possible without falling over the edge. This increased the likelihood of default on loans funding the projects, thus enabling the lenders to take predatory action. These measures included reducing government subsidies, raising taxes and selling government owned assets such as utilities to western investors, with a cut going to the ruling elites. These actions often resulted in protests. When the local elites suppressed them they could expect USA officials to look the other way. But if the government stood up for the people the consequences for its leaders could be dire. All this was billed to the USA public as necessary in the name of anti-communism.
Decades pass and in the early ‘90s the Red Menace of the USSR is no more. But the Super Imperialism gravy train delivered too much sauce to its beneficiaries in Wall Street, the Texas oil patch, and arms factories around the country to be allowed to go off the rails. All those years the Super Imperialism was camouflaged from the general public, but now the Cold War is no more. What to do? Let’s rebrand it! We’ll call it the “Rules Based Order.” We’ll insinuate to the hoi polloi it was made official at some international conference. Which it was; but not in the way it was originally envisioned.
The two countries that had been the raisons d'être for the anti-communism crusade, the USSR and China, had been at the pointiest end of the super imperialism stick. Both had histories as world powers far older than that of the USA, and as the 21st century dawned both were on their way back from difficult times. The China turnaround began in earnest when the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader in the early 1980s, and his successors have since continued on the trail he blazed. The turnaround in Russia began a few hours before the turn of the millennium. As the Russian society and economy was being devastated during the 1990s by the “help” the USA was providing in the form of a cold-turkey conversion from state communism to neoliberal capitalism, a quietly competent, mid-level former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin found himself flung onto a career escalator that landed him in the office of the President on December 31, 1999. A few months after his appointment he was elected to the office for a full four year term whereupon, much to the surprise of the USA string-pullers, he began acting like a Russian patriot. During the subsequent 22 years he has overseen a dramatic turnaround in the well-being of his country’s citizens just as impressive as has occurred in China.
Based on Putin’s actions on the international front it soon dawned on the USA that he was not the pushover they expected him to be, but was instead a Russian patriot. After his 2007 address to the OSCE security conference in Munich in which he strongly objected to the USA’s ongoing violations of its 1991 promise to Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward, the west began demonizing him personally while doubling down on its efforts to foment unrest in Russia. The USA-instigated 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine convinced Putin and his team that Russia would sooner or later have to defend its vital national security interests by force of arms, and they then launched a crash program of weapons development, arms manufacturing capability, and general economic autarky to be prepared to do so. In December 2021 Russia initiated a final attempt to get to a peaceful resolution of its security concerns by publishing two draft treaties identifying its “red lines.” The accompanying communique noted that if agreement wasn’t reached Russia would address its vital national security interests by “other means.” After the USA and its NATO vassals blew off the Russian initiative, those “other means” began on February 24 2022 in the form of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
Two days earlier Russia formally recognized the embattled Russophone Ukraine oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk as sovereign states, thus setting the stage for legally intervening based on the same UN charter “Responsibility to Protect” articles the USA had used to justify its many interventions other countries’ internal affairs. The USA immediately imposed a list of sanctions that were expected to lead to profound hardship in Russia that would undermine its government, and urged countries around the world to follow suit. But the only ones that did so were were the European countries to Russia’s west, the other four Anglophone “Five Eyes” nations, Japan and Singapore. Not one country in Latin America, Africa and the rest of Eurasia signed up.
As for the anticipated crushing effects of the sanctions? They fell mainly on the countries of Europe imposing them, not on Russia. Less than a month later the backfiring sanctions set in motion the beginning of the end of the world-side reach of the USA’s super empire. Depriving Russia from access to the SWIFT international financial settlement system had been expected to be the most crushing sanction, and indeed the cost of a dollar shot up from 77 ₱ in early February to 134 ₱ on March 12. But on Monday March 14 that cost started dropping faster than it had risen. What happened? India agreed to pay for Russian oil exports in rubles. This encouraged other countries to do the same, first with Russia and then with other trading partners as well. The USA policy makers had expected the the ruble to devalue to the neighborhood of 200 to the dollar, but instead it rose to 60 ₱ by mid July, around which it fluctuated until late in the year. Russia had anticipated heavy sanctions, had taken steps to mitigate their impact, and largely succeeded. Their most devastating effects were on the countries in Europe that saw energy costs soar after being cut off from their previous Russian suppliers.
Since the dawn of the new millennium Russia and/or China have been the drivers of five multi-national organizations or initiatives involving mostly Eurasian states. These are:
EAEU – Eurasian Economic Union
BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, & South Africa
SCO – Shanghai Cooperative Organization
BRI – Belt & Road Initiative
GEAP – Greater Eurasia Partnership
During the same Ides of March week in 2022 in which India made its pivotal decision these five entities announced they are collaborating to stand up an alternative to the Rules Based Order. I’m not aware they’ve put a name to the multi-faceted plan so let’s call it the New International Finance & Trade Order – NIFTO for short. According to press releases and comments of participants present at the creation, NIFTO will have a charter that will embody the level playing field and non-predatory practices envisioned by the Roosevelt internationalists 80 years ago. Countries that seek to participate in it will have to agree to the terms of the charter. NIFTO will likely be under the auspices of BRICS+, for which the original BRICS organization is now taking applications for expanding its membership.
NIFTO spoxpeople claim it will have institutions functionally similar to the USA-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but without their exploitive aspects. For example, per Michael Hudson, the World Bank generally doesn’t lend for programs and projects that enhance a nation’s self-sufficiency, and when the IMF is called in to “help” a nation deal with an economic crisis its bias is to impose win/lose “solutions” such as austerity measures that affect the common people (but not the elites), and the sale of public assets fo foreign speculators. The NIFTO team also plans to stand up an alternative to the US dollar as a unit of international account settlement, one that resembles the Bancor proposed at Bretton Woods by the chief UK delegate John Maynard Keynes. This will be no trivial effort, as explained by Yves Smith in a series of two posts published in December 2022 at her blog Naked Capitalism. The first addresses the structural, legal and sovereignty issues involved, and the second focuses on the related information technology challenges.
So! Where are we? Where we’re at is that the USA’s decades-long efforts to compel two proud, independent-minded countries to remain subjugated to the predatory hold on the world economy it’s had for the past three quarters of a century, has instead set in motion a course of events that will either eventually see 80% of the world’s population escape from those predatory clutches or perhaps the end of human civilization as we know it. That latter would happen if the USA foreign policy makers and doers, in panic or rage, resort to the Samsonian alternative of using its nuclear arsenal.
I am reminded of a quote I read while browsing a biography of Otto von Bismarck in the library of a Cape Cod Bed & Breakfast while on the college tour with our daughter 35 years ago, which as best as I remember goes:
“The task of the statesman is to put his ear to the ground, listen for the hoof beats of the horse of history, determine which direction he’s running, and prepare himself to jump on its back when it comes by and hang on for dear life.”
The hooves of the decolonization steed have been beating the gound for over a century, and now they’re louder than ever. The only thing that can stop them is nuclear war, and that will almost certainly end human civilization as we know it. We USA citizens must take back our Potemkin democracy from the greed classes who are the profiteers of super colonoalism before they they press the red button in panic or a rage of Samsonian nihilism.