Seamus Milne's shoddy arguments for Putin
In the Guardian of 5 March, Seumas Milne, associate editor of the paper, argued for blaming the conflict in Ukraine entirely, or almost entirely, on the USA and the EU. “The clash in Crimea is the fruit of western expansion”. Of course the USA and the EU wish to pull Ukraine more fully into the capitalist world market, as a rich source of raw materials and cheap labour-power. But Milne’s objection is not to the logic of the capitalist world market. He does not, for example, raise the call for the USA and the EU to cancel Ukraine’s crippling foreign debt and thus short-circuit IMF plans to...