Advertisement in NYT: “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World”
In the week gone by the New York Times published a full page advertisement under the heading cited above. The dense basic text is remarkable. The subtitles are eye-catching: ‘The Potential for Peace,’ ‘U.S. Actions and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,’ and most particularly ‘Seeing the War Through Russia’s Eyes.’ You involuntarily ask yourself when is the last time that a mainstream U.S. media outlet cared to see anything through Russia’s eyes.
The Timeline on the right of the page shows key events in the chain of causality that led from the 1990 pledge by the U.S. to Russia that NATO would not expand towards its border to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
The point of the advertisement is set out in three sentences in the opening section of the dense text:
We deplore the violence, war crimes, indiscriminate missile strikes, terrorism, and other atrocities that are part of this war. The solution to this shocking violence is not more weapons or more war, with their guarantee of further death and destruction.
As Americans and national security experts, we urge President Biden and Congress to use their full power to end the war speedily through diplomacy, especially given the grave dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.
Wow! This runs directly against the editorial line and daily pro-Kiev reporting of the newspaper hosting the advertisement! And the publication of this message has to be seen as an important political action given that serious money stands behind it. I assume that the Eisenhower Media Network, who paid for it and promote it on their website home page, paid the going rate for such advertising in the print edition, meaning between $100,000 and $150,000.
Yet, to the present day, I see almost no discussion of this advertisement among our political commentators of all stripes. In Google Search, I came across just one online article by a certain Matt Bivens, who is not a household name. In the 1990s, for some years Matt was the editor in chief of the leading English language daily newspaper in Russia, The Moscow Times. He later changed careers, took a degree in medicine and is a practicing emergency room doctor today. However, he clearly never lost his interest in big issues: he is a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Regrettably, Matt’s essay on the advertisement is rambling, unfocused to my reading. And there are serious questions open for discussion. So let’s begin.
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First, I call attention to the 14 Signers of the appeal who are named at the bottom of the advertisement. Besides the Director and Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network, all but two are experts connected to the EMN; and all of those experts, like the directors, have career backgrounds in the U.S. military or intelligence. The two “outsiders” are Jack Matlock and Jeffrey Sachs. Matlock was the close adviser to President Reagan in his summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, and ended his government career as U.S. Ambassador to the USSR just months before the Union dissolved and the Russian Federation emerged. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University with a long involvement in Russian economic and political affairs going back to the 1990s and also with service to secretaries general of the United Nations on environmentalism and other big causes.
Over the past three months there have been various public appeals to end the war that were structured rather differently from the NYT advertisement. I think of the appeal made in Germany by the Leftist Member of the Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht on one side and by a feminist cause champion on the other side. They called upon Chancellor Scholz to stop sending arms to Ukraine. In support of this message the appeal was opened to signing by the broad public, aiming to obtain 500,000 signatures. In fact, they harvested more than 700,000.
Then there was the far more modest appeal of four Members of the European Parliament and representatives of various social and political groupings across Europe published following a Round Table discussion in the European Parliament building on 20 March. I have written about this in a couple of essays and most recently I posted a video taken within that Round Table discussion. The appeal to end the war at once and without preconditions attracted several hundred signers.
I mention these facts because they highlight the special nature of the EMN advertisement, which did not seek support from outside its own ranks, with the exception of the two named trophy experts.
The really big question is where did the money come from? Did the EMN take it from its own budget or was there an unnamed backer?
The website of the EMN has a page soliciting donations. They ask interested parties to send in $50, $100, etc. And I suppose some people do that. But that seems an improbable way to build a budget sufficient to cover a spontaneous 150,000 dollar outlay for one advertisement in one newspaper.
Usually such organizations have corporate sponsors, government sponsors and the like. There is no mention of such financial backers on the website and my email to the EMN asking for clarification got no response.
The default explanation of financing could be someone like George Soros, who keeps this kind of money for small change and who would enjoy supporting the logical contradiction that exists in the text of the appeal. This would be in line with his general practice of sowing discord and chaos in whatever he touches. If anyone has a better name to put forward, please do not be bashful.
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What is the logical contradiction in the text of the appeal?
On the one hand the overarching argument of the appeal is that actions by the U.S. over the course of decades set the stage for the war in Ukraine.
The immediate cause of this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears. And Russian leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy led to war. Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.
On the other hand the perfect clarity of the foregoing is muddied by the following sentence further down the page.
Our attempt at understanding the Russian perspective on their war does not endorse the invasion and occupation, nor does it imply the Russians had no other option but this war.
And what “other option” Vladimir Putin may have had in February 2022 the authors do not say.
I am not surprised by the explicit statement that the authors “do not endorse the invasion and occupation.” I see this as the Hail Mary that had to be included if the advertisement would be accepted by The New York Times. The aforementioned appeal by Sahra Wagenknecht tried even harder to get past the Russia-bashing political thinking in Germany by putting right at the front of their text a direct condemnation of Russia for waging a war of aggression. Less than that would have been a non-starter in Germany.
The contradiction in the EMN text seems to have touched off a public discussion in the United States though without mention of the advertisement itself. The day after the advertisement appeared, Jeffrey Sachs published an article in Common Dreams that goes further than the advertisement in hammering home the message in its title: “The War in Ukraine Was Provoked – and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace.” Sachs pulls back the fig leaf and shows what big game he is going after:
The Biden team uses the word ‘unprovoked’ incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as ‘unprovoked’ no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!
Understandably these are things that Sachs could not work into the advertising text being submitted to the NYT but which he believes must be said.
Quite separately, the former CIA analyst and founding member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern published on his website this past Monday an article entitled ‘Did Putin Have Other Options on Ukraine.’ And McGovern followed this up and expanded upon it in an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano (Judging Freedom) on Tuesday. I am uncertain if the NYT advertisement sparked this exchange but the contradiction I have called out is addressed directly in their talk on air, now available on the internet.
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I close this brief examination of the NYT advertisement with a message of gratitude to all those responsible for preparing the text (if we may overlook the line on “other options”) and paying for its publication. Bravo! May others also come forward in public space with the message of immediate peace with no pre-conditions.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023