A Realistic Path to Peace: From Genocide to Global War... And How We Can Stop It

PRAISE FOR

A Realistic Path to Peace

This book of excellent essays, many written in the heat of events and conveying their urgency, analyzes the current U.S. drive for war, against Russia and beyond, in the longer historical perspective of the U.S. foreign policy as studied by its most important critics. Distilling long years in the peace movement, Knight exposes its roots and points to the only path to peace: opposition to the U.S. war machine.

— Radhika Desai, Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group; and Convenor, International Manifesto Group.

"Dee Knight has put together a critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy informed by years of experience in the peace movement and rigorous research into the inner workings of the empire. This book is a must read for anyone wanting to understand how the U.S. is pursuing war with Russia and China, genocide against Palestine, and even global war, and why it must be stopped."

— Danny Haiphong, Co-author of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News.

Drawing on his lifetime of experience at the front lines of resistance to empire, Dee Knight details the multitude of struggles at home and abroad against the empire, and for building a new, multipolar world in which no single nation dominates, and all nations can live and thrive together. He shows we are now at a tipping point, when the old world of war and exploitation is ending, and a new world is coming into being. Read his book and see the pieces of the new world coming together, piece by struggling piece.

— Michael Wong, National Vice President of Veterans for Peace; Co-founder of Pivot To Peace.

"With the escalating genocide in Palestine, New Cold War on China, and its proxy war against Russia, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the U.S. ruling class has lost any semblance of sanity. Motivated by their mission of hegemony – of creating a ‘favorable business environment’ around the world – these people are pushing humanity towards World War 3. This volume by veteran campaigner Dee Knight provides a timely and much-needed voice of sanity; a passionate plea for peace, and a call for unity and bold action against imperialism. As Huey P. Newton warned us, ‘There can be no real freedom until the imperialist – world enemy number one – has been stripped of his power.’ Essential reading."

— Carlos Martinez, Editor, Invent the Future, Co-founder, Friends of Socialist China

Dee Knight’s incisive chronicling of the massacres in Palestine, hybrid war against China, and Ukraine war developments hones closely to one essential truth: the greatest threat to humankind today is the aggressive war-making of the United States, as it desperately seeks to stem the decline of its waning empire. Dee Knight’s own experience as a longtime antiwar activist leads us to one inevitable conclusion: We Must Resist!

— Gerry Condon, Vietnam era GI resister and former president of Veterans for Peace, coordinator of VFP’s Golden Rule project.

The corporate media in the U.S. and its NATO allies, and in Australia, South Korea and Japan, mobilized a propaganda campaign to demonize Putin and Russia in Europe, slandering Beijing’s policies, and covering up genocide in Palestine. Dee Knight’s book combats this propaganda offensive and can serve as a tool in the anti-war struggle. It is an education in how the imperialists move toward war while distorting and disguising their aims.

— John Catalinotto, Editor, Workers World

"Dee Knight’s book A Realistic Path to Peace offers keen insights into the Biden administration’s reckless provocations towards Russia and China and morally bankrupt policy in the Middle East, contextualizing it amidst a larger history of U.S. imperialism and war mongering. Knight writes clearly and lucidly and shows the urgency of the need to revitalize the peace movement in the US today."

— Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing editor, CovertAction Magazine, author of War Monger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Shaped the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden

Copyright © 2025, Dee Knight.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored

in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher

is an infringement of the copyright law.

Solidarity Publications

Bronx, New York

info​@Real​Path​To​Peace​.com

Cover design by Shelley Savoy (shelley​@booknook​.biz)

Some of the essays in this book were previously published in

LA Progressive or Covert Action Magazine

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9925306-2-9; Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9925306-3-6;

Kindle ISBN: 979-8-9925306-4-3; Audiobook: 979-8-9925306-5-0

DVD: 979-8-9925306-6-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024902057

First Edition June 2023

Second Edition March 2024

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Knight, Dee, author

Title: A Realistic Path to Peace: From Genocide to Global War

and How We Can Stop It / Dee Knight

Description: [Bronx, New York] : Solidarity Publications, [2024]

Includes bibliographic references LCCN and index.

Identifiers: ISBN: 979-8-9925306-2-9 (paperback) | 979-8-9925306-3-6 (EPUB) | 979-8-9925306-4-3 (Kindle) | LCCN: 2024902057

Subjects: LCSH: Ukraine Conflict, 2014- | United States–Foreign relations–Russia (Federation) | North Atlantic Treaty Organization–Ukraine. | Europe–Foreign relations–Russia (Federation)–21st century. | United States–Foreign relations–China–21st century | Europe–Foreign relations–China–21st century. | United States–Foreign relations–Middle East. | Geopolitics. | World Politics. | International Relations. | Political Science. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Peace | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Commentary & Opinion | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Geopolitics | Imperialism | Political Ideologies / Democracy |

LC record available at https​://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2024​9020​57

Digital book(s) produced by Booknook.biz.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the people of Palestine,

and to all of the Global South,

whose centuries-old oppression under colonialism,

is now changing, because they refuse to submit any longer.

Also to the internally colonized people in the Americas —

the Indigenous & Mexican people whose land was stolen,

to the descendants of African slaves dragged here in chains;

and to About Face/Veterans Against the War,

whose lives were significantly damaged,

and often cut tragically short, by the U.S. war machine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ben Norton, editor of the Geopolitical Economy Report, together with co-editors Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson were sources and inspiration for much of the analysis that appears here. Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in both Iraq and Russia, and author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, provided essential factual support about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, as did retired U.S. Colonel Douglas MacGregor.

On the genocide in Gaza, I am indebted to Electronic Intifada, The Palestine Chronicle, and Mondoweiss.

For analysis of prospects for an effective antiwar movement, I thank Sara Flounders, coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), Ajamu Baraka, national director of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), Margaret Kimberley, editor of Black Agenda Report, and Brian Becker, director of the ANSWER coalition.

Gerry Condon, former national president of Veterans For Peace, with whom I have collaborated since we were part of the AMEX-Canada collective in Toronto in the early 1970s, contributed valuable advice, as did Medea Benjamin of CodePink, co-author of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. I’m grateful to both of them and appreciate their patience in spite of some differences of emphasis.

Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine, provided invaluable advice and guidance.

I thank the editors Chris Agee and Jeremy Kuzmarov of Covert Action Magazine, as well as Sharon Kyle and Dick Price of LA Progressive and Hollywood Progressive, for permission to re-publish articles they originally published from 2021 to 2024.

All information and analysis in this book is carefully documented in the text. I take full responsibility for any errors or omissions.

CONTENTS

Foreword: The Threat Continues

Preface: Danger… & Opportunity

Introduction: The Long Fight Ahead

I    Palestine & The End of Apartheid and Colonialism

  1   Restore Historic Palestine/End Zionist Apartheid

  2   Blinken Blames Hamas for Broken Truce

  3   What Does Strategic Defeat Look Like?

II   Ukraine Conflict: U.S. Proxy War Against Russia

  4   Shock and Awe: Then and Now

  5   What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine

  6   Buildup to War: Threats and Counter-threats—Who’s To Blame?

  7   This Battle Will Not Be Won in Days or Months

  8   Showdown at Credibility Gulch

  9   Anti-Russian Hysteria Limits Peace Prospects

IIII  A Peace Movement Emerges

10   A Real Path to Peace – A Movement Is Launched

11   We Won’t Be Silent Anymore!

12   Pivot To Peace!

IV   China Is Not Our Enemy

13   Biden’s Saber-Rattling Against China Could Lead to World War III

14   Threats Against China Endanger the World

15   Does China’s Rise Really Threaten the U.S.?

16   Democracy and Human Rights: China vs. USA

17   Yankees Go Home, Asians Say

18   Biden Travels East in Clouds of Mistrust

19   With Us or Against Us Fails

V    What Makes the War Machine So Monstrous?

20   Dr. Strangelove Is No Longer Satire

21   Why It’s So Hard to Stop the U.S. War Machine

22   Empire’s Debt Trap: How to Resist Gluttonous Greed

23   Neoliberalism Has Been Far From Liberal

24   Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a World Economy

VI   Looking Backward to See Ahead

25   Dissenting Soldiers Challenge the War Machine

26   The Socialist Antiwar Tradition

VII  From Genocide in Gaza, To Global War?

27   From Genocide to Global War?

Afterword – 2024 and Beyond

About the Author

Index

Endnotes

FOREWORD

The Threat Continues

Things are changing fast since Trump came to power. On the home front it’s all bad news — roundups and deportations of migrants, firing many government workers, attempts to reverse everything won in the Civil Rights movement, and much more. Elsewhere it’s mixed.

Trump has shocked the leaders of Western Europe with bold moves to end the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia — calling for long-delayed elections in Ukraine, signaling that the United States may no longer need NATO, and declaring the Ukraine disaster was Biden’s war. The famous author of The Art of the Deal appears ready to make a deal with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin.

How fast a deal can happen is uncertain. President Trump’s high-speed effort to end the war in Ukraine is on a collision course with… President Vladimir Putin’s goals in the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported February 24, 2025. Trump wants a quick result with substantial carrots for the U.S. economy, while Russia wants what it has demanded since before the war began: guaranteed permanent neutrality for Ukraine outside NATO, and self-determination for the Donbas and other Russian-speakers inside a Russian umbrella. These were its terms back in December 2021, which the U.S. ignored and then rejected. All this is explained in detail in earlier editions of A Realistic Path to Peace, and is just as relevant today for Russia. And Russia is winning on the battlefield.

Meanwhile in the Arab world, Trump has persisted with outrageous, fanciful threats to own Gaza, and remove the Palestinians, but neighboring Arab countries refuse to go along. Trump has also continued to bolster Israeli threats against Iran. He and his team of neocon re-treads, led by new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have chosen Saudi Arabia as the key mediator for talks with Russia, and possibly also for discussions about the future of Palestine and Israel.

The contrast is stark between the themes of talks with Russia and the Palestine-Israel conflict. A true peace between Palestine and Israel is overshadowed by hopes of a long-sought deal with the Saudis — as if a year and a half of genocidal slaughter hadn’t happened. It doesn’t seem to register on U.S. leaders that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) has insisted the U.S. must recognize a Palestinian state before anything else can happen. I argue in this book that a real solution is a unitary secular state of Palestine, with equal rights for all, regardless of religious belief or ethnicity.

The Palestinians have established key facts on the ground: their steadfast refusal to move, and the unshakeable strength of their resistance. Unless and until both Israel and the U.S. take them seriously, the Palestinians will continue their long-term struggle to get their land back. Like the Vietnamese half a century ago, they are sure to win, no matter how long it might take. Israel has failed in its aims of forcing the Palestinians out, and of dislodging Hamas and its allies from leadership of the Palestinians.

Regarding Russia, everything is on the table for Trump — ending both the war and sanctions, and re-opening trade in major ways. Trump has expressed hopes of breaking up Russia’s close friendship with China, copying the Nixon-Kissinger trick of the 1970s. That trick benefited from an existing Sino-Soviet split at that time, which led to the collapse of the USSR. Both the Russian and Chinese leaders are living a new reality today, as co-leaders of the BRICS coalition, which Trump also wants to break up.

A break-up of NATO is more likely. The leadership of Western Europe is in disarray. The UK has gone from one Prime Minister to another several times in recent years. French President Macron’s hold on power is ever more tenuous. In both France and Germany, far-rightists are scheming to scuttle NATO, with likelier prospects of success than ever before.

The economies of Western Europe have been in recession for at least two years. Now Trump is pressuring these allies to invest more in defense, even as he himself scuttles NATO. As Kissinger famously quipped, to be an enemy of the U.S. is dangerous, but to be a friend can be fatal. While new leaders emerge in Europe, only change can be predicted. Will the Europeans end sanctions against Russia? Will they become even more captive to the U.S., both in economic and geopolitical terms? Or will they take the opportunities for a lifeline offered by China?

China’s leaders also face numerous challenges. Trump’s trade war is already raging, and hot war threatens from nearly every voice in Washington, and also from U.S. military encirclement. To date China has parried every threat, and has made it clear that aggression from the U.S. is unwise. Trump should take the hint, and opt for more deals instead of threats.

That would be good for the world.

Is there any hope for an alternative to more war? Until Trump’s arrival in DC, the prospect was for continuing the endless wars of the past quarter century, really the past 75 years. War has, in fact, been a perverse kind of investment for U.S. leaders. The war machine is the most profitable sector of the U.S. economy. It crowds out infrastructure, as well as nearly all people-oriented priorities in the national budget. And wars of aggression can open up markets and sources of raw materials — at least for the winning side. But the U.S. has not been the winner since it lost in Vietnam five decades ago, with the rare exceptions of destroying Libya and Yugoslavia.

Trump has made noises about being a peace president. He has even called for cuts in the military budget. He also signed an order to close USAID, ending billions in U.S. foreign aid. That has caused panic among hundreds of U.S.-funded media operations and independent journalists across the globe. Traditional targets of U.S. regime change campaigns — like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and China — can hope for a break, though they won’t breathe easily as long as Marco Rubio is Secretary of State.

So what’s going on? Trump seems to be engaged in retrenchment; for example, recognizing that the U.S./NATO adventure in Ukraine is a lost cause. Perhaps the massive trade deficit and gargantuan public debt are signs of money trouble, especially in view of the rise of China and BRICS. That would explain Trump’s penchant for tariffs, which provide a way to pull in much-needed cash, and possibly tip the scales to make U.S. exports more competitive globally.

But there’s a problem. Tariffs can backfire. Trading partners may find more attractive alternatives. Even converting the slight boost in cash flow to real gains could prove elusive. The U.S. de-industrialization took place over five decades. Rebuilding can’t happen overnight. The economy is shaky.

Trump says he wants to bring back the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, reasserting U.S. domination in the Americas, and somehow eliminating would-be competitors. The main competitor is China, which has become the largest trading partner for several Latin American countries. Mexico is poised to launch an EV industry in partnership with China. So is Brazil. Even Canada may find it wise to make some deals with China, if only to hedge bets against U.S. takeover fantasies. Maybe Trump can make deals with China instead of waging war.

Realistic prospects for peace continue to depend on factors outside the control of the U.S. government and its backers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Trump is unlikely to get everything he wants. But ordinary people on the home front need to play a role. We need solidarity, remembering if the sweeps against migrants continue, there will be more to follow, some of it even worse.

Some unions have moved to protect members without papers, realizing that if the government can pick off their most vulnerable members, it won’t stop there. Civil rights leaders are thinking much the same. So are families under attack from attempted abortion bans. Gender-variant people are subject to attack on all sides.

Trump is threatening students with visas who express solidarity with Palestine. University administrations are firing professors and suspending students who protest against genocide.

What’s next? It’s tough to predict. But pulling together all who are threatened may be the most realistic way to stop both the war machine and the fascist juggernaut we’re facing. Together we can do it.

PREFACE

Danger… and Opportunity

The world is in a crisis now. As its empire declines toward collapse, the United States leadership is making a series of disastrous errors. The neocons in Washington, DC, are determined to maintain U.S. global domination regardless of what it might take. The stakes are high for them. They seem to believe that if they allow any other country to challenge their global leadership, their whole system could fall apart. They consider it crucial to control global trade, especially the trade in energy.

So they are prepared to do whatever it takes. Supporting genocide in Israel—by providing weapons, money, and a bizarre moral justification for horrific genocidal bombing—is a sign of what it takes. Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was another sign of what it can take. That was a desperate, last-ditch measure, after efforts to persuade their strongest European ally to cut off Russian energy supplies didn’t work. Europeans are now paying much higher prices for natural gas and oil than they did before. The result has been a drastic change in living standards for ordinary people in Europe, and major economic problems across the entire world.

Western European leaders have been rounded up and bludgeoned into a unified NATO alliance against Russia, and in support of Israeli genocide against Palestinians. This alliance—originally composed of north Atlantic countries under U.S. leadership at the end of World War II—is now also being extended to Asia. It’s a quest to curb China’s historic economic success, which threatens Western domination of global trade. Now most countries around the world have stronger trade relations with China than with the U.S. or its European allies. The BRICS coalition, composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—and now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—has in recent years actually surpassed the Group of 7 rich countries in Gross Domestic Product. Many more countries want to join BRICS. It offers them an alternative to western domination.

The leaders of the G7 countries—the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada—met in Hiroshima, Japan in May 2023, to forge a stronger alliance, and denounce Russian threats of nuclear aggression. U.S. President Biden did not use the occasion to apologize to Japan for the first and only nuclear attacks the world has ever experienced, by the U.S., on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of World War II. These new super bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people and permanently injured many more. Historians have made convincing arguments that the true purpose of these nuclear attacks was to warn the Soviet Union that it could be next. But the Soviets were able to develop their own nuclear potential. Ever since that time, the people of the world have lived with a balance of terror, never knowing if one or another of the superpowers would start a global conflagration.

It could be considered ironic, if not obscene, for the United States and its G7 allies to use Hiroshima as the place to denounce Russian nuclear threats. But projection, and big lies, have been a key part of official justifications for war many times. Weapons of mass destruction was the rallying cry to invade Iraq at the start of the current century. The real reason for the U.S. invasion was determination to control Iraq’s oil resources. At the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam in 1964, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a North Vietnamese patrol boat was accused of attacking a U.S. Navy ship. It led to the nightmare of war in Vietnam that killed millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of young Americans. But the Vietnamese won.

The fact that U.S. Navy ships now surround China, and patrol the Taiwan strait, can be seen as continuation of a pattern. The U.S. fosters and fortifies elements inside a country it wants to dominate, then positions its military dangerously close to its chosen enemy. It then accuses the chosen enemy of aggression. That has been the pattern in the buildup to the current conflict with Russia, starting long before February 2022. In 2004 a color revolution in Ukraine toppled a government friendly to Russia. It was an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing, reported Ian Traynor in The Guardian (25 Nov 2004). It included U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organizations.¹ The same pattern was used in Serbia, Georgia, and Belarus—all allies of Russia. In December 2013, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991.²

The results of the 2004 color revolution were reversed in 2010, which set the stage for the Maidan events of 2013 and early 2014. Meanwhile the U.S. and NATO built up forces in the region. In summer 2021, 30,000 U.S. troops led Operation Defender Europe 2021, a set of NATO exercises from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.³ In December the U.S. staged simulation bombing raids within 12 miles of Russian airspace. NATO warplanes confronted Russian aircraft 290 times in 2021.

The U.S. strategy of using Ukraine to attack Russia has existed for a long time. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski summed it up in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: Ukraine is a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard… because its very existence as an independent country [means] Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. He proposed a loosely confederated Russia—composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic. He wrote that what happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy. He added that a sovereign Ukraine is a critically important component of such a policy.

The Eurasian landmass includes both China and Russia, of course. That helps to explain why U.S. leaders tend to link the two countries in their war plans.

In 2013, after the democratically elected leaders of Ukraine decided not to redirect the country’s economy away from Russia and toward western Europe, the United States helped foment a coup d’etat. It encouraged far-right forces to take over the government and launch an anti-Russian crusade. The Russian language, spoken by about a third of the country’s people, was outlawed. The people of the Donbas, where Russian-speakers are the majority, resisted, demanding autonomy and forging independent people’s republics. The people of Crimea broke away from Ukraine, rejoining Russia. A civil war ensued, with fascist-led Ukrainian forces terrorizing the Donbas regions, causing an estimated 14,000 deaths.

In 2021, NATO war games and simulated bombing attacks took place along the Russian border, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. In the seven years prior to Russia’s intervention, NATO trainers helped re-shape the Ukrainian military. In December 2021, the Russian government proposed a peace plan based on the Minsk II accords: autonomy for the Donbas regions, separation of Crimea, and strict neutrality for Ukraine. U.S. leaders called the proposal a non-starter.

A month after the Russian special military operation began, the governments of Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle to a peace deal, mediated by Turkey, their Black Sea neighbor. That deal was nixed by the U.S. and UK leaders. The U.S. managed to snatch war from the jaws of peace.

The evidence to prove all this can be found in the chapters of this book. It shows that the conflict in Ukraine didn’t have to happen, that China is not an enemy of the U.S., and that the Palestinian people have a right to stop Israeli apartheid. A new peace movement is emerging. It faces enormous obstacles, including a gigantic wave of war hysteria engineered in Washington, magnified exponentially by a captive mainstream media that seems to have abandoned all pretense of critical journalistic independence and objectivity. But as facts emerge and truth surfaces, the movement for peace will intensify. Combined with the horrific results of sanctions and war, these facts and truths can be expected to bring ever greater waves of opposition and