How the Democratic Party prepared the war in Ukraine

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Part One | Part Two

The 2016 election and the Mueller investigation

The “Russian question” was put back on the US agenda in the course of the 2016 presidential election. Democrat Hillary Clinton ran openly as the preferred candidate of the national-security apparatus and a strident advocate of stepped-up intervention in the territories of the former Soviet Union.

Soon after the Republican convention nominated Trump, and on the eve of the Democratic convention that would do the same for Clinton, the Democrats began a carefully prepared attack on Trump for his alleged ties to Russia. The signal came from the New York Times, which questioned Trump on the NATO pledge to go to war if any member state, including the small Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, came into military conflict with Russia. Trump gave an ambiguous response, and a media barrage began immediately.

Left: Hillary Clinton campaigns for president in 2016; Right: Trump campaigns for president in 2016 (Both photos by Gage Skidmore)

A column by Paul Krugman in the Times branded Trump “The Siberian candidate,” (a takeoff on the Cold War thriller, “The Manchurian Candidate”), suggesting he was a Russian agent. Similar columns, with less lurid headlines but equally inflammatory arguments, appeared in The Atlantic magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Clinton took up this theme and made it central to her general election campaign.

The WSWS wrote that the anti-Russia media campaign was “a measure of how central the military buildup and war preparations against Russia are to US imperialist policy around the globe.” The commentary continued:

It also provides a window into the real character of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. At its heart, it consists of a fusion of identity politics—the relentless promotion of race, gender and sexual orientation as the motive forces of US society—and a viciously pro-war imperialist policy. The objective of this poisonous mix is to sow divisions in the working class while fashioning a new constituency for imperialist war from among privileged layers of the upper-middle class and the pseudo-left satellites of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats were not just using the corporate media to advance the “Trump is a Russian agent” smear. Clinton contacted the military-intelligence apparatus directly, leading to the opening of an FBI probe of Trump and his entourage, which would ultimately be transformed into the Mueller investigation. At the same time, Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort came under fire for his past work as a lobbyist for the pro-Russian ex-president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, and was forced to step down, only three months before the election. He was replaced by Steve Bannon, an out-and-out fascist.

The Clinton campaign mobilized hundreds of former national security officials to endorse her candidacy and denounced Trump as a danger to the overseas interests of the United States. These included many of the architects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader “war on terror,” and the use of torture in secret CIA prisons and illegal mass spying by the National Security Agency.

Left: James Comey, Director of the FBI 2013-2017; Right: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI 2001-2013 (Both photos by Federal Bureau of Investigation)

The near-unanimous support for Clinton in the military-intelligence apparatus was in sharp contrast to the indifference and outright hostility among wide sections of the working class, particularly after the eight years of the Obama administration had resulted in a general decline in their living standards and social conditions. Trump was able to capitalize on these sentiments, as well as making a demagogic appeal to mass disaffection with the “forever wars” in the Middle East. He won a narrow victory in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by three million.

This shock result touched off a furious response within the capitalist state. Within weeks of the election, before Trump had even taken office, leaks from the CIA and other agencies generated media reports of supposedly massive Russian interference in the presidential election. There were claims that politically damaging transcripts of Clinton’s closed-door talks to Wall Street audiences, published by WikiLeaks before the election, had been leaked to the anti-censorship group by Moscow, and that Russian military intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee to obtain emails proving that the DNC favored Clinton over her principal primary challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders.

A huge hue and cry arose over an alleged Russian media campaign that at most had produced a small number of Facebook ads promoting Trump’s campaign. Even if these ads could be attributed to Russia, the total outlay was in the range of $100,000, a drop in the bucket for an election contest whose total cost approached $10 billion.

Enormous pressure was placed on the White House through the corporate media and leaks from the FBI. In response, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, setting off a political firestorm in Washington. Trump was compelled to agree to the appointment of a special prosecutor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, to investigate all aspects of supposed Russian intervention into the 2016 election and any coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.

In the early stages of this political crisis, the WSWS published a statement of the Political Committee of the Socialist Equality Party, written by Joseph Kishore and David North, “Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class.” The “palace coup” against Trump was based not on mobilizing any genuine popular opposition to his ultra-right policies, but on “behind-the-scenes plotting with elements within the military/intelligence establishment and corporate-financial elite.”

This statement identified three separate social sources of the opposition to the Trump administration: his ruling class opponents, with differences centered primarily on foreign policy; sections of the upper-middle-class, oriented to issues of race and gender, and incapable of genuine independence from the ruling class; and the working class, driven by profound socio-economic concerns, above all the massive growth of economic inequality and social distress.

In relation to the factions of the ruling class opposed to Trump, the statement pointed out:

Their differences with the Trump administration are centered primarily on issues of foreign policy. Their real concern is not with Russia’s supposed “subversion” of American democracy, as if this could compare to the subversion of American democracy by the ruling class itself, but with Russia’s actions in Syria, which have frustrated US efforts to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. They are determined to prevent Trump from weakening the anti-Russia policy developed under Obama, which the Hillary Clinton campaign was dedicated to expanding.

The statement declared that the working class would gain nothing from the removal of Trump and the shift in US foreign policy sought by his ruling class opponents. It outlined the principled basis for the working class to oppose both sides in this bitter factional struggle within the ruling
class, maintaining its political independence from the efforts of the Democratic Party to divert mounting opposition to the Trump administration into the blind alley of militarism and anti-Russia chauvinism.

The Mueller investigation continued for nearly two years, culminating in a report, delivered in April 2019, which found no evidence that Russian actions in the course of the 2016 election played any significant role in its outcome, or that there was any direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state. While indicting more than a dozen Russian officials and agents—all of whom were inaccessible to the US courts and unlikely to respond to the charges against them—the Mueller probe indicted only a few minor Trump advisers on charges of lying to investigators, essentially crimes triggered by the probe itself.

But long before it ended as a legal whimper, the Mueller investigation and the unrelenting pressure from the military-intelligence apparatus had succeeded in accomplishing one of the main goals of the Democratic Party: reorienting American national security strategy to target Russia and China openly.

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