My distinguished colleague and good friend Melvin Goodman has had some terrific items up at Counterpunch just lately, together with nice, searing critiques of Pres. Biden’s rehabilitation of Eliott Abrams, and of David Ignatius’s newest piece of compacent lunacy relating to Ukraine and Russia.
So think about my shock once I learn Goodman’s newest piece there, during which he proposed that, “Implementing a grain airlift for Ukraine can be the apparent method to have fun the seventy fifth anniversary yr of the Berlin Airlift, which was carried out from June 1948 to September 1949.”
This may be to take care of the worldwide “disaster” of meals availability/costs spurred by Russia’s resolution to not regain the Black Sea grain association that was reached final yr beneath the joint auspices of the UN and the Authorities of Turkey. This disaster has, as you’ve got in all probability seen, been a lot hyped by the Western company media.
Goodman appears to be urging in his piece that the U.S. army lead the airlift effort he proposes. He writes,
[T]right here is not any query that the US has the moxie and the airlift functionality to conduct such an operation…. The U.S. Air Pressure has greater than 200 C-17s for such an airlift in addition to three sorts of air refueling plane (KC-135 Stratotankers, Okay-10 Extenders, and KC-46 Pegasus).
This proposal strikes me as fairly batty and (have been it to be be carried out, which I dearly hope it by no means is) very critically escalatory.
Goodman, by the best way, just isn’t the one individual at the moment proposing forceful, unilateral (or anyway, non-UN-authorized) U.S. motion to assist Ukraine export its grain. The reliably hawkish retired U.S. admiral James Stavridis can be proposing that “NATO convoys can shield Ukraine’s grain.”
So right here, simply shortly, are my objections:
First, and most vital, is that really, world wheat costs have just lately been significantly decrease than they have been final yr. (See e.g. this.) In order that they’ve gone up a bit after the Black Sea Grain deal collapsed? Not the tip of the world…
After all the craven company media on this nation desires to make it seem that Russia’s assaults on Odessa and so forth are harming the International South. However that’s not precisely the case and I don’t hear any leaders within the International South shopping for that argument… Certainly, all essentially the most influential ones are in South Africa proper now, planning for the massive BRICS summit resulting from be held there in a month’s time– at which Russia’s Overseas Minister Lavros can be an apparently valued participant.
Second, the idea of a Berlin-style airlift is after all not practically so simple as it sounds. It will contain the airlifting planes flying into Ukraine and touchdown at airports there to load up their cargoes. Zero civilian planes are flying into Ukrainian airspace today for the superb purpose that the Russian air pressure workouts broad management over practically all of it. So now, Goodman proposes that convoys of U.S. army planes fly in.
World Warfare 3 alert, folks! That’s fairly a bit completely different than simply demonstrating Goodman’s “moxie”.
(The Berlin airlift, which concerned having U.S. and British army planes fly briefly into Berlin to speedily dump the humanitarian cargoes they have been taking in, have been a deliberate and realizing problem to the Soviet army’s management of the airspace of East German, in the midst of which sat beleaguered West Berlin. It concerned clear dangers. However within the chaos of these early post-1945 years, these have been dangers that London and Washington judged price taking. Fwiw, the Soviet Union didn’t display its acquisition of nuclear weapons functionality till a yr later.)
Third, the Black Sea Grain deal had at the very least three vital elements: (a) The Ukrainians obtained to export their grain beneath worldwide supervision, and beneath an association that concerned having Ukrainian pilots information the ships by way of the Ukrainian minefields close to their ports after which Russian pilots information them by way of the Russian minefields additional out. (b) There was rigorous and trusted worldwide inspection (by Türkiye and the UN) of cargoes going each out and in of Ukrainian ports. As a result of you realize, Ukraine may need been bringing arms and so forth in on those self same boats. Gasp! (c) In return for its participation, Russia obtained assurances that the monetary sanctions and different impediments imposed by Western nations on its exports of grains and different agricultural exports can be lifted.
When renewal time got here up, the Russians said that the third of these situations was not realized/revered. Therefore, no renewal.
So as we speak, with a US/Western “airlift” of grains out of Ukraine, what physique, trusted by each side would do the inspecting of planes going into Ukraine to choose up the shipments? Simply price asking!
Lastly: all of the monetary and big environmental prices of utilizing air transport to move grain?? These would get borne by whom? And to make what level?
(Perhaps the East Europeans could possibly be pushed to do a bit extra to assist Ukrainian grain exports– one thing they’ve till now been very reluctant to do?)
