Nicholas Kristof: Peace Journalism versus American Warmongers
I am a fan of Nick Kristof, an exceptional journalist and the strongest opinion columnist in the New York Times. I was therefore dismayed to read his ideas for promoting more war in Ukraine: “Biden should give Ukraine what it needs to win.” Kristof, like me, opposed the American war in Iraq. As you can read below, I responded to Kristof, challenging his military approach and asking him to offer us some Ukraine Peace Journalism instead.
In his OpEd, Kristof quoted a succession of American generals: James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and NATO supreme allied commander; Wesley Clark, a retired four-star general and NATO supreme allied commander; Ben Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and commander of Army forces in Europe.
You can read their predictable opinions in Kristof’s article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opinion/biden-should-give-ukraine-what-it-needs-to-win.html
What do you expect these guys to say? Generals want more weapons and more war (as president Obama discovered to he dismay, after he appointed marine general James Jones to be his National Security Advisor 2009-10: Obama quickly changed his mind and replace him with civilian Thomas Donilon to get more balance).
A Promised Land did not include making war: Obama was stuck with the wars of his predecessor George W. Bush. Having denounced the Iraq war, Obama as Commander-in-Chief found himself stuck with the Afghan fiasco, which was none of his making.
Nicholas Donabet Kristof (born April 27, 1959) is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor as well as NYT op-ed columnist. In 1990, Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for their 1989 reporting on the pro-democracy student movement in Tiananmen Square. After Harvard, Kristof won a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen College Oxford, where he gained a First in his law degree. After which he studied Arabic in Cairo. With the NYT he worked in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and he has often covered Africa, especially Darfur.
All Kristof’s books are co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn.
According to Wikipedia, Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists, said in 2013: "Nick Kristof is the conscience of international journalism."
The Washington Post wrote that Kristof "rewrote opinion journalism" with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa described Kristof as an "honorary African" for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts in the continent. Similar things were written about Robert Lacville, my alter ego who used to write a column in The Guardian Weekly providing insights on development and poverty in West Africa. You can now read Robert Lacville’s articles on this website, if you go to the “books” page, as well as here.
MY LETTER TO NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Dear Nicholas Kristof
I am an admirer of your writing and commitment to economic and social justice. I am delighted that you are back writing in the NYT, but I did NOT enjoy your article on Ukraine. All you offered were military solutions ….. the only people you quoted were soldiers.
There are three broad options, of course:
1) USA wins its proxy war against Putin in Ukraine (and Ukraine gets destroyed …. and maybe Putin gets destroyed as well, who knows?);
2) Russia wins its proxy war against NATO in Ukraine (and Ukraine gets destroyed; and maybe nuclear war begins and the rest of Europe is destroyed as well …. who knows? );
3) or we find a way towards PEACE, and the destruction of Ukraine stops.
Only the peace option does not involve the destruction of Ukraine and the lives of its people.
Peace possibilities are never promoted by the mainstream Western press, but they are explored through Peace Journalism by academics and journalists on sites like TRANSCEND.org, and in places like the NonZero Newsletter, Substack, or in the Peace section of my own Blog.
Peace journalism recognizes that UKRAINE has long been a BUFFER STATE between the Russian and Germanic worlds, and that Buffer States create peace by maintaining distance between historic enemies. Neutrality may not provide an ideal lifestyle for citizens of Buffer States, but neutrality is better than war.
Peace journalism does not lace its reporting with subtle insults like “butcher" Asad or “Putin’s unprovoked attack" on Ukraine - nuances that transform reporting into propaganda, and which deny any form of humanity or reasoning to the other protagonist.
Peace journalism looks at maps, seeks to understand causes, and looks for compromise.
This National Geographic map shows the Crimea and the Sea of Azov.
A peace journalist will quickly realize that any end to the war in Ukraine must recognize that the Crimea and the Sea of Azov are critical for the security of Russia and its naval forces. Khrushchev (who spent a lot of his early political career in Donbass and in Kiyv) should never have given Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, which he did for internal political reasons. When George W. Bush threatened to allow Ukraine to join NATO, he made Russia’s seizing of Crimea inevitable.
Bush’s Neocon advisors perfectly understood this, although I assume Bush himself was too naive to grasp its significance for Russia or Crimea, or even of Ukraine’s (and Poland’s and others’) NATO membership.
The Pentagon does not like Buffer States. Military hawks seek to dominate.
Inside NATO, the USA shamelessly dominates its weaker European partners (or simply ignores them, as I witnessed in Afghanistan). Pentagon hawks and Neo-cons have bullied their allies to allow NATO to swallow up Buffer States with disastrous results. This has brought failure after failure, creating war after war: Afghanistan, Syria, now Ukraine, are all essential Buffer States that kept the peace for generations until US and Russian interventions created war.
try: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/02/sy-hersh-the-way-we-live-now/
try: https://robinpoulton.com/peace/ukraine-there-is-a-better-way-a-europe-collective-security-alliance-ecsa
This cartoon from Global Times neatly illustrates the results of NATO’s War in Ukraine: Russian gas is blocked, the Nordstream pipeline has been destroyed, and US corporations are reaping vast profits from weapons, munitions, and selling liquefied natural gas to the EU.
Keeping the peace is not what turns on military leaders. American generals have new weapons they are longing to try out on the battlefield. You should not be giving these people a platform, Mr Kristof. You should be talking to the Peace Makers, and providing a platform to people who seek to end the war.
America’s military leaders seem to learn nothing from their military failures: 60 years of stalemate in Korea; humiliation in Vietnam; genocide and 30 years of civil war in Cambodia; communism in Laos; the failure of the Shah in Iran; the mismanagement of Taliban in Afghanistan; the rise of Al Qaida and the destabilization of the Sahel; creating the Islamic State in Iraq; the invasion of Syria by US Sunni extremist allies and the failed genocide of the Alawites; and let’s not even discuss Chile or Nicaragua or Colombia…. What a lot of destruction!
Failed generals in USA never seem to lose their posts. America’s generals are promoted as a reward for failure. These are the people you are listening to?
Please give us the Nicholas Kristof version of Peace Journalism.
With best wishes
Robin-Edward Poulton