How the media downplays NATO expansion as a cause of the Ukraine war

How the media downplays NATO expansion as a cause of the Ukraine war
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
14 February 2024

With Russia and Ukraine seemingly trapped in a bloody stalemate, a new peer-reviewed journal article provides an important insight into the Western media’s reporting of the war.

Dr Florian Zollmann, a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Newcastle University, has conducted a quantitative and qualitative content study of how the causes of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine were framed in the UK, US and German press in the first two weeks of the conflict.

Zollmann, who is also the author of the essential 2017 book Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention, notes two competing explanatory frameworks have been presented to the public.

The first is the official narrative pushed by Western governments and much of the news media: Russia is responsible, with Russian president Putin pursuing an imperialist and expansionist Greater Russia policy. The second narrative, endorsed by high-level Western diplomats, many historians and some journalists, “suggests Western co-responsibility in the sense that NATO expansion provoked the invasion.”

Anyone who has opened a newspaper, looked at a news website or turned on the television since February 2022 will be familiar with the first framing. Paul Mason and other liberal interventionists have been vigorously pushing this line, calling for ever more US and UK military support to Ukraine.

The second narrative is supported by a wealth of expert testimony. In 1997 George F. Kennan, one of the most revered diplomats in US history, argued “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”. Zollmann quotes the respected Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis who, writing about NATO expansion in 1998, says he could “recall no other moment in my own experience as a practicing historian at which there was less support, within the community of historians, for an announced policy position.”

Likewise, when he was US Ambassador to Moscow in 2008 the current CIA Director William J. Burns warned “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He continued: “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

And just last year NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament that President Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

So what are Zollmann’s conclusions? “Overall, the press across the countries [the UK, US and Germany]… emphasized frames that depicted Russian actions as an aggressive war to foster Russian’s imperial interests.” At the same time, “the press de-emphasized frames that depicted Russia as a country with a national interest struggling against NATO expansion.”

The German press published the least number of articles critical of NATO’s role. Some questioning pieces did make it into the comment pages of the US and UK press, though Zollmann notes “on a macro-level, such commentaries were scattered deviations from the dominant range of permissible opinion.”

This press consensus, Zollmann argues, “was facilitated by the fact that the Russian invasion was obviously criminal, reckless and unjustifiable” (elsewhere he notes it was “a crime of aggression” under international law).

Nevertheless, it’s a serious problem if the press downplays a crucial explanatory framing confirmed by the diplomatic and historical record.

Moreover, this memory holing has wider implications. Zollmann: “the dominant causal framing links to remedies that have been evoked to solve the conflict”, with Western governments and the news media focussing on military rather than diplomatic solutions.

The media’s war bias continues regardless of a December New York Times report noting Putin has signalled, through intermediaries, he is open to peace negotiations on three occasions – in March-April 2022, autumn 2022 and September 2023. Of course, Russia may well not be serious, their terms a non-starter, and their peace feelers simply a political ploy. However, statements from people close to negotiations suggest a greater focus on diplomacy might have been, and might be, fruitful.

“Russia’s goal was to put pressure on us so that we would accept neutrality,” David Arakhamia, head of President Zelensky’s party in the Ukrainian parliament, and also the head of the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with Russia in Belarus and Turkey in early 2022, explained in a November interview. “This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality… and we would give an obligation that we would not join NATO.”

“Everything else,” according to Arakhamia, “was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification,’ the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah.”

He also noted Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv in April 2022 to say the UK would not sign anything with the Russians and “let’s just fight” (Arakhamia has since claimed what he said about the former UK Prime Minister has been distorted by Russia).

Yet, in February 2023 former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who acted as an intermediary between Russian and Ukraine in early 2022, said “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire” but the West stopped the peace talks. Gerhard Schroeder provides a similar account. Speaking to Berliner Zeitung newspaper in October, the ex-German Chancellor said the US refused to accept a deal as it wanted to “keep the Russians down” [Google translation] – presumably by fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.

Frustratingly, these testimonies, which strongly suggest the US and UK have played an underhanded and escalatory role in the conflict, have been largely ignored by the Western media. Sadly, it’s likely Zollmann’s journal article will go the same way.

A War Foretold: How Western Mainstream News Media Omitted NATO Eastward Expansion As A Contributing Factor To Russia’s 2022 Invasion Of The Ukraine is published in Media, War & Conflict journal.

By rejecting the pro-Palestinian protests the government is making a terror attack more likely

By rejecting the pro-Palestinian protests the government is making a terror attack more likely
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
24-25 February 2024

There have now been nine national pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 7 2023.

Every two or three weeks hundreds of thousands of people have marched through London – and cities and towns across the UK – to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The biggest protest took place on November 11 2023, with organisers estimating 750,000 people on the streets of the capital. After climbing over a fence in Hyde Park (the opened gates couldn’t deal with the enormous number of people trying to get onto Park Lane to start marching) it took me a couple of hours to shuffle about a kilometre before I gave up and headed for home.

This tenacious movement has almost certainly had important impacts – think of how the government has become more critical of Israel, Keir Starmer’s shift to saying the “fighting must stop now”, and how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted being worried about “the huge demonstrations in western capitals”. However, it has been unable to compel the government to end its support for Israel and call for a ceasefire.

No doubt some in Number 10 are revelling in the fact they have been able to stand firm in the face of this intense pressure. But it would be naïve to think at the end of every march people have simply gone home grumbling that nothing has changed.

Consider, for a moment, just how strongly someone must feel to give up one day of their weekend, travel to central London and walk achingly slowly in very cold temperatures. And then do it again and again. Seeing the passion and anger on display when I have marched it seems unlikely people will forget how the government and Starmer’s Labour Party have backed Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians.

As Iraq War architect Alastair Campbell told the Iraq Inquiry: “I always have a rule of thumb that, if somebody goes on a march, there are probably ten others who thought about it.” Fast forward to today and polls have repeatedly found a majority of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza – 71 per cent of respondents in a December 2023 YouGov survey.

Campbell was commenting on the February  15 2003 anti-Iraq War march, which was also broadly reflective of wider public opinion. And though it’s often dismissed as being a complete failure, it provides a teachable case study, and an important warning, about the significant and unexpected influence large demonstrations can have on participants, national politics and society.

The biggest demonstration in British history, February 15 was the high point of an anti-war movement that started in the wake of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and continued putting large numbers of people on British streets several years into the US-UK occupation of Iraq.

In the May 2005 general election, the first since the invasion, support for Labour fell by five per cent, with their governing majority dropping from 167 to 66 seats. “One of the last polls conducted [before the election] by the BBC… suggests hostility to the war was a bigger issue than has so far been acknowledged,” the Guardian noted. “The poll found 23% of people surveyed cited opposition to the war as a reason for being reluctant to vote Labour, while 21% said they did not trust Mr Blair”. There are echoes of this today with reports of Labour scrambling to stop the exodus of Muslim supporters, and voters “in affluent, predominantly white parts of the country, such as Bournemouth, Bristol and Brighton, where many voters also feel strongly about the Palestinian cause.”

And the strength of the anti-Iraq War movement arguably played a key role in terminating Tony Blair’s premiership and political career. By 2010 a ComRes poll found 37 per cent of voters thought the former prime minister should be put on trial for invading Iraq. Starmer, who is still only the leader of the opposition, has already been on the receiving end of a huge amount of flak over the war in Gaza.

The anti-Iraq War movement also led to a shift in activist tactics. Groups like anti-airport expansion group Plane Stupid and anti-austerity UK Uncut turned to nimble, media-friendly direct actions out of a frustration with the A to B marches of the anti-Iraq War movement. Ditto Black Bloc, the now largely forgotten masked activists who vandalised shops and banks during 2011 in opposition to the savage Tory cuts. “All of them said the failure of the peaceful anti-Iraq war march to overturn government policy was formative in their decision to turn to violence,” the Guardian reported after speaking to a number of people involved in actions.

Sadly, another small group of people turned to far more deadly violent action. We know at least one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, Germaine Lindsay, and three of the 21/7 failed suicide bombers – Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar and Hussain Osman – attended an anti-Iraq War protest. When he was captured in Rome, Osman said “I am against war. I’ve marched in peace rallies and nobody listened to me.”

Speaking to me for my book on the anti-Iraq War movement, author and activist Mike Marqusee provided a plausible explanation for this journey from non-violent protest to suicide bombings: “It is definitely true that the more you reject a community’s legal, lawful and non-violent expressions and aspirations the more some of them are going to turn to illegal and violent responses”.

When I asked terrorism expert Raffaello Pantucci about this in 2014, he urged caution about making any sweeping claims. “The link between the non-violent protest, subsequent frustration and action is not as linear as you might suggest”, he told me. “I would say that in both the 21/7 and 7/7 lot, there is considerable evidence that they were very radical before the invasion of Iraq. Iraq seems to have acted as an accelerator, but I would say that they were headed down that path long before the 2003 rally.”

The 7/7 atrocities will not have been a surprise to the government – before the Iraq War Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director General of UK security service MI5, warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain.

Similarly, in January the head of counter-terrorism policing in the UK warned there has been an “unprecedented” spike in terrorism threats since October 2023, with Israel’s war on Gaza creating a “radicalisation moment” with the potential to push more people towards terrorism. This follows European security officials reporting in November 2023 they are seeing a growing risk of attacks by Islamists radicalised by the war. “A British security official said the war in Gaza was likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since the Iraq war in 2003,” according to Reuters.

As with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, these warnings confirm the UK government, by continuing to support Israel diplomatically and militarily, and therefore prolonging the brutal onslaught, is fuelling an increase in the terror threat in the UK. So, far from protecting British citizens, the government is actually endangering Britons. Indeed, the repeated expert warnings point to a dark truth: the safety of British citizens is ultimately a low priority for the government, and certainly a lower priority than supporting Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza.

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press. Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.