Russia-Ukraine week 16B: Chomsky dialogues with, refutes Ukrainians

Specifically, a longform at Counterpunch has Noam Chomsky responding to four Ukrainian economists in the US and their previous critique of him, them responding to this response, and basically, a final wrap-up.

I say "refutes" because the introduction to the piece notes that the Gang of Four (sic) attributed to Chomsky a number of things he simply did not say. In other cases, he showed that statements of his that they claimed were false were actually true.

Then came an issue of whether "background" is relevant or not. This "background" in this case, as I noted in the Goldilocks Three Bears and Pope Francis calling for peace talks, is NATO siccing Ukraine on Russia, or as Francis said with a bon mot, NATO "barking" at Russia.

Specifically, the Gang of Four seemed to have

Strawmanned Chomsky on Crimea;

Conflated Ukrainian foreign policy free agency with the issue of proxy war;

Tried to minimize the broken NATO no-expansion promises on the "background" and also somewhat conflated his take on NATO with John Mearsheimer (who I think expresses it more strongly);

Strawmanned his presentation on peace talks (notably, that they require concessions by BOTH sides);

Simply rejected Chomsky's claim that it would be both hypocrisy and bad US geopolitics to haul Putin before the International Criminal Court when US presidents who could, and should, go there never will. On this, I'm totally with Chomsky, and definitely on the back geopolitics. This will only make the Chinas, North Koreas and Irans of the world retrench even more.

Outside of the above, per the author of the intro and editor of the piece, the Gang of Four seems disinclined to look at the reality of the Maidan, 2014 war in the Donbas, etc.

Given that of the Gang of Four, one is a visiting scholar at the NY Fed,another teaches at CCNY, a third teaches at Berkeley, and a fourth writes for the Ukrainian version of Vox, I'm sure that none of them will accept the conclusions of the Counterpunch piece. Both Chomsky (leftist duopolist, never forget), and Jeffrey Sommers tried.