Revealed: The Insane Imperial Racism of US Proxy Warfare | Rob Urie

## The moral calculus of proxy wars: expendability as policy The conversation lays bare an ugly strategic arithmetic at the heart of contemporary Western foreign policy: if it is not worth sending American soldiers, then it is acceptable — even desirable — to let others die in our stead. This is not merely a critique of prudence or strategy; it is a moral indictment. The practice of using the manpower of one nation to extinguish another’s lives — whether framed as defense, liberation, or deterrence — carries ethical assumptions that treat non-Western bodies as fungible. The participants in the exchange, led intellectually by Rob Urie’s interventions, argue that this tendency is not incidental but systemic: it is woven into the living fabric of the United States’ postwar security posture and its contemporary management of conflicts like the one in Ukraine. What the conversation identifies as imperial racism is not simply racial vitriol in the usual sense. It is a hierarchical valuation of human life embedded in policy choices and public rhetoric. The enthusiasm with which some commentators and officials have crowed about “smart” ways to enable proxy forces to inflict casualties on adversaries betrays a deeper cultural and institutional blindness. That blindness makes it easier to rationalize prolonged slaughter as acceptable collateral in a geopolitical contest. Far from being an aberration, this calculus finds intellectual and practical support in the structures of power that shape how strategies are conceived and how wars are prosecuted. ## The New York Times moment: narrative recalibration, not revelation A pivotal strand of the discussion centers on two major New York Times pieces that reframed — if not reversed — the mainstream account of American involvement in Ukraine. These articles, one exposing deep CIA footprints and another detailing granular U.S. operational involvement, punctured the sanitized storyline that Washington was a distant benefactor rather than an active manager. But the conversation warns against mistaking a narrative shift for moral reckoning. The press’s new posture is not necessarily a confession of culpability; it may be better read as a strategic recalibration intended to set the terms for a politically manageable exit and a palatable public memory. Rob Urie’s analysis, echoed across the exchange, stresses that the Times’ treatment is selective. The paper’s deeper reporting on operational control omits the historical genesis of the conflict — the 2013–2014 political upheaval in Kyiv and the layered role of Western intelligence and diplomacy. By localizing the story to command-and-control questions and operational misalignment, the Times can both assert the expertise and indispensability of Western planners and implicitly veil the ethical core: the decision to mobilize another country’s population as the blood price of geopolitical strategy. The participants in the conversation argue that such reporting functions less as illumination and more as a waystation on the route from triumphalist interventionism to a narrative of managerially handled defeat. ## Militarized economies and the ideological substrate of war The conversation turns thoughtful when it links these tactical decisions to material interests. The United States, it is argued, never disassembled the wartime-industrial scaffolding erected after World War II; instead, successive administrations retooled it into a permanent engine of employment, innovation, and political influence. This militarized economy — with its intimate ties to private equity, defense contractors, and think tanks — creates a feedback loop: the state purchases security; private actors profit by supplying it; and political narratives are then shaped to justify continued demand. Urie and the interlocutors push further, diagnosing a culture in which intellectual and material incentives conspire. Prominent think tanks and policy outfits, many with clear ideological commitments, populate the sources lists of influential journalists. When reporting cites them alongside anonymous “officials,” the resulting narrative can appear empirical while remaining ideologically freighted. In practice, this means that strategic choices are rarely adjudicated on purely security grounds; they reflect the equilibrium of interests among military planners, corporate suppliers, and policy influencers. The result is an institutional appetite for proxies that reduces human casualties to inputs in a profit-driven, prestige-sustaining machinery. ## Economics as ideology: Zen Economics and the critique of orthodoxy The conversation’s detour into economic theory is not tangential; it illuminates the epistemic habits that permit and normalize such foreign-policy choices. Rob Urie’s book Zen Economics serves as more than a credential — it’s a lens through which the panel reads modern policy discourse. The central claim is stark: much of what passes for mainstream economics is an ideological apparatus dressed in mathematical garb. By borrowing the formal aesthetics of physics and presenting axioms as universal truths, neoclassical economics masks value-laden assumptions about individualism, rationality, and the social order. This matters politically because policy elites are trained within these frameworks. If decision-makers internalize models that start from atomized agents with “perfect foresight,” they are predisposed to design policies that privilege market mechanics and strategic calculus over collective well-being. War, in such a worldview, becomes an optimization problem — a matter of resource allocation and constraint management rather than a social catastrophe requiring moral reckoning. The conversation stresses that presenting economics as neutral science facilitates an uncritical acceptance of a world in which proxy wars can be spun as efficient substitutes for direct involvement. ## Propaganda, deniability, and the role of elite media Beyond the structural critique of economics and industry is a granular scrutiny of media practices. The exchange interrogates how outlets of record, historically gatekeepers of acceptable discourse, can channel and codify official narratives. The New York Times is singled out not only for its specific articles but for its function as a public filter that helps demarcate what can be said and what cannot. The conversation suggests this filter has enabled policy elites to shape public sentiment, obfuscate responsibility, and legitimate ongoing intervention through seemingly balanced — yet partial — reporting. There is a technique at play: deploy copious detail and authority-laden sourcing to give stories a veneer of comprehensiveness while omitting inconvenient origins or moral contexts. The rhetorical split that the conversation exposes — between “we were not deeply involved” and “we were advising, directing, and managing” — is less a correction than a hedging strategy. By acknowledging involvement in managerial terms, the media can preserve a narrative of competent stewardship even as the human cost mounted. This maintains political cover for elites, framing outcomes as the product of technical failure rather than of a policy that treated foreign lives as acceptable losses. ## Historical continuities and the normalized expendability of lives The dialogue repeatedly returns to history to show that these patterns are not new. Post-World War II America institutionalized a wartime economy and attendant modes of thought. Earlier examples — colonial wars, Cold War interventions, Vietnam — exhibit the same logic: outsiders decide that other peoples can bear the burden of conflicts which the interveners prefer not to fight themselves. The conversation insists that recognizing this continuity is essential to understanding current events. Crises like the Ukraine war are not isolated misfortunes; they are episodes in a long-running script where strategic advantage and domestic

Revealed: The Insane Imperial Racism of US Proxy Warfare | Rob Urie „Fighting to the last Ukrainian“ — the US and European core strategy on the Ukrainian battlefield — was always predicated on their abhorrence for both, Russian AND Ukrainian lives. Using the men and women of one former Soviet Republic to eradicate as many as possible of another, is a neocon dream come true. The glee with which a recent New York Times articles speaks about the „ingenious ways“ in which the US has enabled Ukrainians to kill Russians, and how their own losses on the battlefield are due to Ukrainian incompetence (rather than Russian military abilities) shows how insanely racist the entire proxy war narrative is constructed. These attitudes are not new at all, and are a core-driver of US proxy warfare. Today I’m talking to Rob Urie, an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books and he regularly publishes on the Counter Punch online magazine as well as on his own Substack. Links: Rob's book “Zen Economics”: https://www.counterpunch.org/product/zen-economics/ Rob's Substack: https://substack.com/@roburie #M3 These proxy wars are grotesque. If it is an American war, then Americans need to fight it. If it's not worth having Americans fight it, then it's not worth doing. And so, as an American and a longtime anti-war activist, when I heard the Americans saying, "This is wonderful, we can get all these Ukrainians to die for us, and we don't have to send Americans to die over there," that reminds me of ethnic and racial attitudes that emerged from the Second World War that are untenable. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Rob Urie, who's an artist and political economist. His book, Zen Economics, is published by CounterPunch Books, and he regularly publishes on the CounterPunch online magazine as well as on his own Substack. Rob wrote a very good appraisal of the New York Times article that recently threw Ukraine under the bus with its hagiography of those wise U.S. generals and its condemnation of Ukrainian insubordination when it comes to orders from Washington. So I thought we should really discuss that since it's quite a significant change in the narrative, I believe. Rob, welcome. #M3 Thank you, Pascal. I'm glad to be on your show, so thank you for having me. #M2 -- 1 of 16 -- Thanks for taking the time. Oh, sorry, maybe just before we start, I was really curious about your book, Zen Economics. Can you tell me a little bit about how you bring Zen and economics together? #M3 Sure, I'd be glad to. So this is a project that I've been working on for about 30 years, and I was finally able to take the time to write it. My background is in both economics and philosophy. I've studied the philosophy of science, the history of science, and spent quite a bit of time with scientific methods. I also worked for 25 years in finance and was a career quant, which is a skill set, not a specific job, and so it's applied to different jobs. I had some insight into how statistics work and the practical application of statistics, which is quite different from the way that statistics are usually explained. What I did was take continental philosophy, really from the late 19th and early 20th century, and apply it to the Western economics that I was taught. I use it to take apart the premises of Western economics, which a number of other philosophers of economics have done. But I believe that I've done it in a fairly unique way. I give a number of concrete examples of how economics works and then what the intellectual challenges to the premises of the statistics are. Essentially, there's an infinite regress process behind all the statistics, just like there is in mathematics, where you don't have concrete foundations to the premises. They're movable, and they really depend on what people's interests are that are brought to the statistics. It's a long- winded way of saying that there are deep philosophical premises embedded in the way that we understand the world in the West, particularly in the United States, and that once these are taken apart, people are able to see the world in a different way and the way that the world is explained in a different way than they have been seeing it. #M2 I have always been fascinated by the trick that modern, let's call it, academic economics managed to pull. It's basically the only subject in the humanities, the only behavioral science that managed to distance itself and pretend that it is physics. I find that quite interesting because a lot of the foundations are actually very dogmatic. Let's say the assumption that economic agents have perfect foresight. It's kind of ludicrous, but it is axiomatic. And so you look at these kinds of premises. #M3 Absolutely, and the axiomatic nature of modern academic economics is really a large part of the problem. When I was in grad school, I was told that there are these things called stylized facts, which are just agreements. There's an implied agreement amongst economists to not ask too many questions about this set of facts that they are working from. And not only are the facts dubious on their face, I've gone back through the academic papers to the 1970s and the neoliberal revolution that started in the 1970s. Methodology is used really as a cover for fairly thin foundations. Once the -- 2 of 16 -- premises of modern academic economics are explained to ordinary humans, people who haven't been through the educational process, they seem ludicrous because, and I'm sorry to say this, they are. There are premises about what it means to be human that are highly questionable. There's the individual versus society framing that gives a particular political perspective to Western economics, which Western economists absolutely deny. They say that they're empiricists—many do. But there are concrete philosophical foundations that are hidden by modern economics. Once the method, on the one hand, is approached and the content, on the other hand, is approached, neither makes sense. And the two together are an ideological project, if you will, and it's one of the major findings of Zen economics. #M2 This is something that maybe also leads us into the discussion that I want to have today, which is about ideology and ingrained ideology. Economics is a wonderful example because students take these classes at thousands of universities, not just in the US, but in Europe as well, and in Japan and so on. They take these Economics 101, Micro 101, Macro 101 classes, and they're never told that what they're actually being taught is not economics in general. It's just one school of thought within the history of economic thinking. It is neoliberal, neoclassical economic theory. They're not even taught that this is what it is. I'm just worried about how many instances in scholastic learning we've got these moments when actually what we teach is ideology and not a holistic approach to the entire subject, which feeds into these ideological views that we find in newspapers time and again. Do you share that assessment too? #M3 I really do. And the older I get and the more time that I spend reading philosophy and economics and whatnot, the more convinced I am that it's inculcation and indoctrination into ideology. The precepts of neoclassical economics are straightforward capitalist ideology. You mentioned physics earlier. The physics comes from the late 19th, early 20th century when physics models were adopted by largely American economists. They took the content that they had, which was much vaguer than might have been believed, and crammed it into these physics models, and then took the resulting product and created a theory, a method out of that. But at its base, it's a capitalist ideology. And what I mean by that is that it's a premise of how societies are organized and how people act in the world that has very specific ideological roots. For instance, Marxism and Marxism-Leninism have a social view, whereas neoclassical economics has an individual view. The 40 years of efforts to create what are called microfoundations for neoclassical economics haven't worked. There are good reasons for that, because that's not how societies work. #M2 -- 3 of 16 -- I'm laughing just because this microfoundations view builds its entire premise upon the idea that if we can reduce everything to the tiny interactions, the way everybody interacts, we can build macroeconomic models that are going to accurately predict the future. And then everybody goes, like, why did it not work the way that it is supposed to? It's like, well, because that's not how people work. They don't have perfect foresight, and there are a lot of other things they don't have. So if you build something on that kind of foundation, it's just weird that we do that. And this is still accepted dogma today, I would say, in most econ classes in the West. #M3 Absolutely. It is. And it really hinders the West's ability to move forward because the people who are advising those in power are educated at elite schools. I've met a number of economists from these elite schools. I went to a state school for my graduate degree in economics. But I've met a lot of people from the elite schools, and they're ideologues for the most part. That's a generalization. If you look at something like the Harvard Economics Department, it's a massive department. They've got, I believe, hundreds of people working there. So you've got a lot of different views of the world. But the people who run the Ivy League economics departments are neoclassical and many times neoliberal. They have very narrow focuses, and they're really not that interested in asking questions because they get to advise political leaders without the questions. If they ask the questions, then they're fairly well exiled from both the economics profession and from being in positions of advising political leaders. #M2 Now, we tend to discard the role of ideology because we, of course, always assume that we ourselves are free of ideology, right? We see the world objectively as it actually is. And now what we find, especially in big publications like The New York Times and Forbes, is a lot of political issues. I mean, I would cite The Economist as a typical example of one of these neoclassical ideological school of thought outlets that then frames the world as such. But if we go to The New York Times, there's a constant framing, an ideological framing applied to everything. And the job of analysts, especially if you work in the finance profession, is to take that apart and discern between fact and fiction, right? And how stuff really works. Now, what do you think are, apart from the economics, the biggest ideological fictions that we are currently being fed with in mainstream discourse or media? #M3 That's a really interesting question. My take, from having a practical view of government and how government works, is that wars are the biggest areas of misinformation, propaganda, and disinformation coming from state sources. America came out of the Second World War with the fear -- 4 of 16 -- that the Great Depression was going to return and decided to place a lot of the make-work programs that came out of the New Deal into the military-industrial complex. Unfortunately, this has led to, as Eisenhower put it, the growth of the military-industrial complex. But really, what we're seeing in the United States right now, and I would suggest that this is spreading into Europe like a virus, is this dependence or voluntary dependence being created in excess of what has already been established to focus Western economies on military production. And so we have a concrete basis, a material basis from which the interests of the military-industrial complex and, say, private equity funds that own a lot of the military-industrial complex are propagating. I'm old enough to have been a politically aware c