“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”,
Sept / Oct, 2014, John J. Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, pp. 1 – 12.
“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”, December 14, 2015, Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, at < https://www.thenation.com/
“The U.S. is Arming and Assissting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: While Congress Debates Prohibition”, April 7, 2018, Max Blumenthal, The Gray Zone, at < https://thegrayzone.com/2018/
~~ posted for dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista:
The war in Ukraine was preceeded by an 8-year smoldering Civil War. Included in this process was a major effort to train and arm Neo-Fascists (such groups as C-14, the Azov Regiment, Svoboda, Right Sector, and many other fascist groups large and small). Various intellectual figures and policy analysts, who are either totally outside of the political establishment or who are at the margins, have warned that Ukraine was a potentially disastrous situation and that the U.S. policies to expand NATO were playing the major role in provoking some sort of expanded war. Included here are 3 articles that were written from 4 to 8 years before the recent war that warned of impending disaster. The Measheimer Article (“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”) was published in the major establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, in 2014. The debates that take place in that journal are policy setting debates, engaged in by establishment figures or experts that the establishment thinks they should provide some space to. Foreign Affairs is the house organ of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. This is not some marginal publication. Anybody who likes podcasts of talks better than written articles can go to “Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer”, University of Chicago talk, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The late Richard Cohen, a Russian expert who studied the U.S.S.R. and Russia during his entire nearly 50 year career, while teaching at Princeton University and New York University, wrote the second article (“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”). It appeared in The Nation, where his wife Katrina Van Den Heuvel was, and still is, the chief editor. He took a similar view to that of Mearsheimer in his December 2015 article in The Nation. The article in The Nation was adapted from a talk that Cohen gave to the Commonwealth Club of California. The talk was “Stephen F. Cohen: The Ukrainian Crisis - It's not All Putin's Fault” (Recorded in 2015), at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Finally a more recent article, but still 4 years old, from The Gray Zone (“The U.S. is Arming and Assissting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: While Congress Debates Prohibition”). That article provides some details of the arms shipments and training for the Far-right fascist militias in Ukraine and their activities as of 2018.
The war in Ukraine did not leap out like a newly born baby. It was many years in gestation and the simplistic Official Story propaganda and disinformation media blitz is attempting to keep the American and other Western populations from figuring out what is going on, until it is all over and in the bailwick of historians.
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Mearsheimer Article Here:
“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”,
Sept / Oct, 2014, John J. Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, pp. 1 – 12.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin's decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU'S expansion eastward and the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a "coup" -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin's pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia's backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia's border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO'S 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, "This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation's borders…. The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe." But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO'S eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.
Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO'S members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, "These countries will become members of NATO."
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia's deputy foreign minister, said, "Georgia's and Ukraine's membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security." Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a "direct threat" to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, "very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist."
Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin's determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided -- and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country's interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a "sphere of influence" in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.
The West's final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve "the future it deserves." As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED'S president, Carl Gershman, has called that country "the biggest prize." After Yanukovych won Ukraine's presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country's democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents." He added: "Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
CREATING A CRISIS
The West's triple package of policies -- NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych's toppling that it was "a day for the history books." As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych's ouster.
For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.
Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia's doorstep. Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Putin's actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow's mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
Washington may not like Moscow's position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.
Officials from the United States and its European allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.
To understand why the West, especially the United States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained.
But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies," he said. "I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else."
Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the "indispensable nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.
And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU'S past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about "the ideals" that motivate Western policy and how those ideals "have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power." Secretary of State John Kerry's response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: "You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext."
In essence, the two sides have been operating with different play-books: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.
BLAME GAME
In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would "say that we always told you that is how the Russians are." As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was "in another world." Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia's borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia's neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe.
This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force. Putin's actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych's ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind.
Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine's population -- live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia's mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.
But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.
A WAY OUT
Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin's behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that "all options are on the table," neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy.
Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule.
Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, "This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution." John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.
The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, "We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to us." And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members' foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. "No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement," announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO'S secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to improve Ukraine's military capabilities in such areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the West's response to the crisis will only make a bad situation worse.
There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however -- although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria's position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.
To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO'S expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian speakers.
Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine's interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.
Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.
Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time -- and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia's recent power play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.
Sticking with the current policy would also complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs Russia's assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama's chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia's help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together.
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process -- a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
~~~~~~~~
By John J. Mearsheimer
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Cohen Article Here
https://www.thenation.com/
“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”, December 14, 2015, Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, at < https://www.thenation.com/
December 14, 2015
Editor’s Note: The following are adapted from remarks by Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University and New York University, delivered at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on November 24, 2015.
I am delighted to be here in San Francisco with you. The farther you go from Washington and the mainstream media, the better introductions you get!
Some of you may know that the small group of us who have been protesting against the American policy since the Ukraine crisis began two years ago have been described in harsh and derogatory language as “Putin’s apologists, Putin’s useful idiots and Putin’s best friends in America.”
Paris should have changed everything, but for these people it hasn’t. I clicked on the Internet this morning and there it was again. So let me begin with a word about myself.
My answer to these charges is that, “No, I, not you, am a patriot of American national security.” And I actually have been since I started studying Russia about 50 years ago. I started out in Kentucky and then went to Indiana University, and old friends here today can testify that I was doing this many years ago. Along the way I came to a conviction, exactly how and why doesn’t matter, that American national security runs through Moscow. It means that an American president must have a partner in the Kremlin—not a friend, but a partner. This was true when the Soviet Union existed, and this is true today.
And it is true whichever existential or grave world threat you may emphasize. For some people it is climate change, for others it is human rights, for some it is the spread of democracy. For me, for quite a while, it has been the new kind of terrorism that afflicts the world today. These terrorists are no longer “non-state actors.” These guys are organized, they have an army, they have a self-professed state, they have ample funds and they have the ability to hurt us gravely in many parts of the world. Everyone seems to have forgotten 9/11 and Boston, but Paris should have reminded us of what’s at stake.
So for me, international terrorism is the threat in the world today that should be America’s national-security priority. And I mean it should be the top priority for the president of the United States, whether he or she is a Republican or Democrat. It is the existential threat represented by a combination of this new kind of terrorism, religious, ethnic, zealous civil wars—and, still worse, these guys desperately want the raw materials for making weapons of mass destruction. A cup of radioactive material in those planes on 9/11 would have made Lower Manhattan uninhabitable even today.
Terrorists today are using conventional weapons, bombs, mortars, and guns. But if they had a cup of this radioactive material in Paris, Paris would have needed to be evacuated. This is the real threat today. This kind of threat cannot be diminished, contained, still less eradicated unless we have a partner in the Kremlin. That is the long and short of it; note again, I didn’t say a “friend” but a partner. Nixon and Clinton went on about their dear friend Brezhnev and their friend Yeltsin; it was all for show. I don’t care whether we like the Kremlin leader or not; what we need is recognition of our common interests for a partnership—the way two people in business make a contract. They have the same interests and they have to trust each other—because if one person violates the agreement, then the other person’s interests are harmed.
We don’t have this with Russia, even after Paris, and this is essentially what I’ve been saying we need for the past several years. In return people say that my view is “pro-Putin” and unpatriotic, to which I say, “No, this is the very highest form of patriotism in regard to American national security.”
So I will make a few points today, very briefly and rather starkly, rather than give a lecture. I’m less interested in lecturing than in finding out what others here have to say.
My first point is this: The chance for a durable Washington-Moscow strategic partnership was lost in the 1990s after the Soviet Union ended. Actually, it began to be lost earlier, because it was Reagan and Gorbachev who gave us the opportunity for a strategic partnership between 1985–89. And it certainly ended under the Clinton administration, and it didn’t end in Moscow. It ended in Washington—it was squandered and lost in Washington. And it was lost so badly that today, and for at least the last several years (and I would argue since the Georgian war in 2008), we have literally been in a new cold war with Russia. Many people in politics and in the media don’t want to call it this, because if they admit, “Yes, we are in a cold war,” they would have to explain what they were doing during the past 20 years. So they instead say, “No, it is not a cold war.”
Here is my next point. This new cold war has all of the potential to be even more dangerous than the preceding 40-year Cold War, for several reasons. First of all, think about it. The epicenter of the earlier Cold War was in Berlin, not close to Russia. There was a vast buffer zone between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe. Today, the epicenter is in Ukraine, literally on Russia’s borders. It was the Ukrainian conflict that set this off, and politically Ukraine remains a ticking time bomb. Today’s confrontation is not only on Russia’s borders, but it’s in the heart of Russian-Ukrainian “Slavic civilization.” This is a civil war as profound in some ways as was America’s Civil War.
Many Ukrainian antagonists were raised in the same faith, speak the same language, and are intermarried. Does anyone know how many Russian and Ukrainian intermarriages there are today? Millions. Nearly all of their families are intermixed. This continues to be a ticking time bomb that can cause a lot more damage and even greater dangers. The fact that it is right on Russia’s border, and in effect right in the middle of the Russian/Ukrainian soul… or at least half of Ukraine’s soul… since the half of Ukraine yearns to be in Western Europe, this makes it even more dangerous.
My next point and still worse: You will remember that after the Cuban missile crisis, Washington and Moscow developed certain rules of mutual conduct. They saw how dangerously close they had come to a nuclear war, so they adopted “no-nos,” whether they were encoded in treaties or in unofficial understandings. Each side knew where the other’s red line was. Both sides tripped over them on occasion but immediately pulled back because there was a mutual understanding that there were red lines. Today there are no red lines. One of the things that Putin and his predecessor President Medvedev, keep saying to Washington is: You are crossing our red lines! And Washington said and continues to say, “You don’t have any red lines. We have red lines, and we can have all the bases we want around your borders, but you can’t have bases in Canada or Mexico. Your red lines don’t exist.” This clearly illustrates that today there are no mutual rules of conduct.
In recent years, for example there have already been three proxy wars between the United States and Russia; Georgia in 2008, Ukraine beginning in 2014, and prior to Paris… it appeared Syria would be the third. We don’t know yet what position Washington is going to take on Syria. Hollande made his decision; he declared a coalition with Russia. Washington, as they understand in Russia, “is silent or opposed to a coalition with Moscow.”
Another important point: Today there is absolutely no organized anti–cold war or pro-détente political force or movement in the United States at all—not in our political parties, not in the White house, not in the State Department, not in the mainstream media, not in the universities or the “think tanks.” I see a colleague here, nodding her head, because we remember when, in the 1970s through the 1980s, we had allies even in the White House, among aides of the president. We had allies in the State Department, and we had senators and members of the House who were pro-détente and who supported us, who spoke out themselves and listened carefully to our points of view. None of this exists today. Without this kind of openness and advocacy in a democracy, what can we do? We can’t throw bombs to get attention; we can’t get printed in mainstream media, we can’t be heard across the country. This lack of debate in our society is exceedingly dangerous.
My next point is a question: Who is responsible for this new cold war? I don’t ask this question because I want to point a finger at anyone. I am interested in a change in US policy that can only come from the White House, although Congress could help. But we need to know what went wrong with the US-Russia relationship after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and why… or there won’t be any new thinking. And there will be no new policy. At this point, there is no new thinking in the American political-media establishment. There is a lot of new thinking in the European Parliament. There is a lot of angst in the French media and in Germany and in the Netherlands and even Cameron in London is rethinking.
The position of the current American political media establishment is that this new cold war is all Putin’s fault—all of it, everything. We in America didn’t do anything wrong. At every stage, we were virtuous and wise and Putin was aggressive and a bad man. And therefore, what’s to rethink? Putin has to do all of the rethinking, not us.
I disagree. And this is what has brought the outrageous attacks down on me and my colleagues. I was raised in Kentucky on the adage, “There are two sides to every story.” And these people are saying, “No, to this story, the history of Russian and American relations, there is only one side. There is no need to see any of it through the other side’s eyes. Just get out there and repeat the conventional mainstream establishment narrative.” If we continue doing this, and don’t address the existing situation, we are going to have another “Paris” and not only in the United States.
This is why I say we must be patriots of America’s national security and rethink everything. For whatever reason, the Clinton Administration declared a “winner-takes-all policy” toward post-Soviet Russia. It said, “We won the Cold War.” This isn’t true. Former ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock during the Reagan-Gorbachev era explains in his books what happened as he stood by Reagan’s side at every step of the negotiations with Gorbachev. The reality is that the Clinton administration adopted unwise policies in its winner-take-all approach. What were the consequences of these policies? There were a lot of consequences. The worst was, it blew the chance for a strategic partnership with Russia at a turning point moment in history.
The four US policies that have most offended Russia and still offend them today are obviously the following:
1) The decision to expand NATO right to Russia’s borders: It’s nonsense when we say Putin has violated the post–Cold War order of Europe. Russia was excluded from the post–Cold War order of Europe by NATO’s expansion. Russia was pushed “somewhere out there” (beyond a zone of security). Russia kept saying, “Let’s do a Pan-European Security Arrangement like Gorbachev and Reagan proposed.” The NATO-expanders said, “This is not military, this is about democracy and free trade, it’s going to be good for Russia, swallow your poison with a smile.” And when the Russians had no choice in the 1990s, they did; but when they grew stronger and had a choice, they no longer stood by silently.
Russia started pushing back, as any Russian leader would have done who was sober and had the support his own country. I don’t say this as a joke. By the end, Yeltsin could barely walk. He was pushed out of the presidency, he didn’t resign voluntarily. But the point is, anyone could have predicted this situation back in the 1990s—and some of us did so, often and as loudly as we were permitted.
2) The refusal on the part of the United States to negotiate on missile defense: Missile defense is now a NATO project. That means missile-defense installations, whether on land or sea (sea is more dangerous) are now part of NATO expansion and its encirclement of Russia. Missile defense is part of the same military system. Russians are absolutely convinced that it is targeted at their nuclear retaliatory capabilities. We say, “Oh no, it’s about Iran, it’s not about you.” But go talk to Ted Postel at MIT. He explains that latter-stage missile defense is an offensive weapon that can hit Russia’s installations. It also violates the IMF Agreement because it can fire cruise missiles. Meanwhile we are accusing Russia of developing cruise missiles again; and they have begun doing so again because we are back in an unnecessary tit-for-tat arms race for the first time in many years.
3) Meddling in Russia’s internal affairs in the name of democracy promotion: In addition to funding the National Endowment for Democracy’s “opposition politics” programs across Russia and Ukraine—are you aware that when Medvedev was president of Russia and Ms. Clinton and Michael McFaul had their wondrous “reset” (which was a rigged diplomatic game, if you looked at the terms of it), that Vice President Biden went to Moscow State University and said that Putin should not return to the presidency. He then said it directly to Putin’s face. Imagine, Putin comes here in the next few weeks and tells Rubio or Clinton they should drop out of the US presidential race!
Are there any red lines left anymore when it comes to our behavior toward Russia. Do we have the right to say or do anything we wish? This extends to everything, and it certainly extends to politics. The White House simply can’t keep its mouth shut, being egged on by vested anti-Russian lobbies and mainstream media. We all believe in democracy, but like it or not, we will not be able to impose democracy on Russia; and if we could, we might not like the democratic outcomes that might result.
So ask yourself, Is there a Russian position that needs to be carefully thought through in the aftermath of Paris? And does Russia have any legitimate interests in the world at all? And if so, what are they? What about their borders? Do they have legitimate interests in Syria?
4) My last point is a prescriptive hope (until Paris, I didn’t think there was much hope at all). Now there is still a chance to achieve the lost partnership with Russia, at least in three realms.
• Ukraine: You know what the Minsk Accords are. They were formulated by Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko, and President Putin. They call for a negotiated end to the civil war in Ukraine. They recognize that the conflict has been primarily a civil war and only secondarily a matter of Russian aggression. I don’t care what American mainstream media says—this has been basically a Ukrainian civil war. To put an end to that civil war would be exceedingly security-building today.
• Syria: before Paris I thought there was almost no chance for an American coalition with Russia. Part of it… and I’m not big on psychological analyses, but at least in part it was due to Obama’s mind-fix about Putin. He resents him and speaks out about him in ways that are not helpful. But with Paris and Hollande announcing that there is now a French-Russian coalition, with Germany agreeing, and I would say almost all of Western Europe is on board, there is a chance, but only if the White House seizes the opportunity. We will see very soon.
• The false idea that the nuclear threat ended with the Soviet Union: In fact, the threat became more diverse and difficult. This is something the political elite forgot. It was another disservice of the Clinton administration (and to a certain extent the first President Bush in his reelection campaign) saying that the nuclear dangers of the preceding Cold War era no longer existed after 1991. The reality is that the threat grew, whether by inattention or accident, and is now more dangerous than ever.
Last year, in an unwise pique of anger, Russia withdrew from the Nunn-Lugar Initiative which you may remember was one of the wisest pieces of legislation that Congress ever passed. In the 1990s, we gave Russia money to lock down and secure their materials for making weapons of mass destruction. In addition we paid salaries to their scientists who knew how to make and use these materials and who might otherwise have gone to Syria, Yemen, or the Caucasus to sell their knowledge in order to employ themselves. Russia did withdraw but said it wants to renegotiate Nunn-Lugar on different terms. The White House has refused. After Paris, one hopes that Obama picked up the phone and said, “I’m sending someone over, let’s get this done.”
Unfortunately, today’s reports seem to indicate that the White House and State Department are thinking primarily how to counter Russia’s actions in Syria. They are worried, it was reported, that Russia is diminishing America’s leadership in the world.
Here is the bottom line: We in the United States cannot lead the world alone any longer, if we ever could. Long before Paris, globalization and other developments have occurred that ended the monopolar, US-dominated world. That world is over. A multipolar world has emerged before our eyes, not just in Russia but in five or six capitals around the world. Washington’s stubborn refusal to embrace this new reality has become part of the problem and not part of the solution. This is where we are today… even after Paris.
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“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”,
Sept / Oct, 2014, John J. Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, pp. 1 – 12.
“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”, December 14, 2015, Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, at < https://www.thenation.com/
“The U.S. is Arming and Assissting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: While Congress Debates Prohibition”, April 7, 2018, Max Blumenthal, The Gray Zone, at < https://thegrayzone.com/2018/
Introduction:
The war in Ukraine was preceeded by an 8-year smoldering Civil War. Included in this process was a major effort to train and arm Neo-Fascists (such groups as C-14, the Azov Regiment, Svoboda, Right Sector, and many other fascist groups large and small). Various intellectual figures and policy analysts, who are either totally outside of the political establishment or who are at the margins, have warned that Ukraine was a potentially disastrous situation and that the U.S. policies to expand NATO were playing the major role in provoking some sort of expanded war. Included here are 3 articles that were written from 4 to 8 years before the recent war that warned of impending disaster. The Measheimer Article (“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”) was published in the major establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, in 2014. The debates that take place in that journal are policy setting debates, engaged in by establishment figures or experts that the establishment thinks they should provide some space to. Foreign Affairs is the house organ of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. This is not some marginal publication. Anybody who likes podcasts of talks better than written articles can go to “Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer”, University of Chicago talk, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The late Richard Cohen, a Russian expert who studied the U.S.S.R. and Russia during his entire nearly 50 year career, while teaching at Princeton University and New York University, wrote the second article (“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”). It appeared in The Nation, where his wife Katrina Van Den Heuvel was, and still is, the chief editor. He took a similar view to that of Mearsheimer in his December 2015 article in The Nation. The article in The Nation was adapted from a talk that Cohen gave to the Commonwealth Club of California. The talk was “Stephen F. Cohen: The Ukrainian Crisis - It's not All Putin's Fault” (Recorded in 2015), at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Finally a more recent article, but still 4 years old, from The Gray Zone (“The U.S. is Arming and Assissting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: While Congress Debates Prohibition”). That article provides some details of the arms shipments and training for the Far-right fascist militias in Ukraine and their activities as of 2018.
The war in Ukraine did not leap out like a newly born baby. It was many years in gestation and the simplistic Official Story propaganda and disinformation media blitz is attempting to keep the American and other Western populations from figuring out what is going on, until it is all over and in the bailwick of historians.
Mearsheimer Article Here:
“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”,
Sept / Oct, 2014, John J. Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, pp. 1 – 12.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin's decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU'S expansion eastward and the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a "coup" -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin's pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia's backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia's border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO'S 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, "This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation's borders…. The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe." But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO'S eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.
Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO'S members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, "These countries will become members of NATO."
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia's deputy foreign minister, said, "Georgia's and Ukraine's membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security." Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a "direct threat" to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, "very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist."
Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin's determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided -- and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country's interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a "sphere of influence" in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.
The West's final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve "the future it deserves." As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED'S president, Carl Gershman, has called that country "the biggest prize." After Yanukovych won Ukraine's presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country's democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents." He added: "Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
CREATING A CRISIS
The West's triple package of policies -- NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych's toppling that it was "a day for the history books." As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych's ouster.
For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.
Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia's doorstep. Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Putin's actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow's mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
Washington may not like Moscow's position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.
Officials from the United States and its European allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.
To understand why the West, especially the United States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained.
But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies," he said. "I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else."
Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the "indispensable nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.
And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU'S past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about "the ideals" that motivate Western policy and how those ideals "have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power." Secretary of State John Kerry's response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: "You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext."
In essence, the two sides have been operating with different play-books: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.
BLAME GAME
In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would "say that we always told you that is how the Russians are." As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was "in another world." Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia's borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia's neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe.
This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force. Putin's actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych's ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind.
Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine's population -- live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia's mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.
But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.
A WAY OUT
Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin's behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that "all options are on the table," neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy.
Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule.
Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, "This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution." John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.
The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, "We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to us." And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members' foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. "No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement," announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO'S secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to improve Ukraine's military capabilities in such areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the West's response to the crisis will only make a bad situation worse.
There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however -- although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria's position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.
To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO'S expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian speakers.
Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine's interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.
Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.
Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time -- and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia's recent power play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.
Sticking with the current policy would also complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs Russia's assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama's chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia's help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together.
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process -- a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
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By John J. Mearsheimer
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
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“The Ukrainian Crisis: It’s Not All Putin’s Fault: Here are the four US policies that have most offended Russia”, December 14, 2015, Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, at < https://www.thenation.com/
December 14, 2015
Editor’s Note: The following are adapted from remarks by Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University and New York University, delivered at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on November 24, 2015.
I am delighted to be here in San Francisco with you. The farther you go from Washington and the mainstream media, the better introductions you get!
Some of you may know that the small group of us who have been protesting against the American policy since the Ukraine crisis began two years ago have been described in harsh and derogatory language as “Putin’s apologists, Putin’s useful idiots and Putin’s best friends in America.”
Paris should have changed everything, but for these people it hasn’t. I clicked on the Internet this morning and there it was again. So let me begin with a word about myself.
My answer to these charges is that, “No, I, not you, am a patriot of American national security.” And I actually have been since I started studying Russia about 50 years ago. I started out in Kentucky and then went to Indiana University, and old friends here today can testify that I was doing this many years ago. Along the way I came to a conviction, exactly how and why doesn’t matter, that American national security runs through Moscow. It means that an American president must have a partner in the Kremlin—not a friend, but a partner. This was true when the Soviet Union existed, and this is true today.
And it is true whichever existential or grave world threat you may emphasize. For some people it is climate change, for others it is human rights, for some it is the spread of democracy. For me, for quite a while, it has been the new kind of terrorism that afflicts the world today. These terrorists are no longer “non-state actors.” These guys are organized, they have an army, they have a self-professed state, they have ample funds and they have the ability to hurt us gravely in many parts of the world. Everyone seems to have forgotten 9/11 and Boston, but Paris should have reminded us of what’s at stake.
So for me, international terrorism is the threat in the world today that should be America’s national-security priority. And I mean it should be the top priority for the president of the United States, whether he or she is a Republican or Democrat. It is the existential threat represented by a combination of this new kind of terrorism, religious, ethnic, zealous civil wars—and, still worse, these guys desperately want the raw materials for making weapons of mass destruction. A cup of radioactive material in those planes on 9/11 would have made Lower Manhattan uninhabitable even today.
Terrorists today are using conventional weapons, bombs, mortars, and guns. But if they had a cup of this radioactive material in Paris, Paris would have needed to be evacuated. This is the real threat today. This kind of threat cannot be diminished, contained, still less eradicated unless we have a partner in the Kremlin. That is the long and short of it; note again, I didn’t say a “friend” but a partner. Nixon and Clinton went on about their dear friend Brezhnev and their friend Yeltsin; it was all for show. I don’t care whether we like the Kremlin leader or not; what we need is recognition of our common interests for a partnership—the way two people in business make a contract. They have the same interests and they have to trust each other—because if one person violates the agreement, then the other person’s interests are harmed.
We don’t have this with Russia, even after Paris, and this is essentially what I’ve been saying we need for the past several years. In return people say that my view is “pro-Putin” and unpatriotic, to which I say, “No, this is the very highest form of patriotism in regard to American national security.”
So I will make a few points today, very briefly and rather starkly, rather than give a lecture. I’m less interested in lecturing than in finding out what others here have to say.
My first point is this: The chance for a durable Washington-Moscow strategic partnership was lost in the 1990s after the Soviet Union ended. Actually, it began to be lost earlier, because it was Reagan and Gorbachev who gave us the opportunity for a strategic partnership between 1985–89. And it certainly ended under the Clinton administration, and it didn’t end in Moscow. It ended in Washington—it was squandered and lost in Washington. And it was lost so badly that today, and for at least the last several years (and I would argue since the Georgian war in 2008), we have literally been in a new cold war with Russia. Many people in politics and in the media don’t want to call it this, because if they admit, “Yes, we are in a cold war,” they would have to explain what they were doing during the past 20 years. So they instead say, “No, it is not a cold war.”
Here is my next point. This new cold war has all of the potential to be even more dangerous than the preceding 40-year Cold War, for several reasons. First of all, think about it. The epicenter of the earlier Cold War was in Berlin, not close to Russia. There was a vast buffer zone between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe. Today, the epicenter is in Ukraine, literally on Russia’s borders. It was the Ukrainian conflict that set this off, and politically Ukraine remains a ticking time bomb. Today’s confrontation is not only on Russia’s borders, but it’s in the heart of Russian-Ukrainian “Slavic civilization.” This is a civil war as profound in some ways as was America’s Civil War.
Many Ukrainian antagonists were raised in the same faith, speak the same language, and are intermarried. Does anyone know how many Russian and Ukrainian intermarriages there are today? Millions. Nearly all of their families are intermixed. This continues to be a ticking time bomb that can cause a lot more damage and even greater dangers. The fact that it is right on Russia’s border, and in effect right in the middle of the Russian/Ukrainian soul… or at least half of Ukraine’s soul… since the half of Ukraine yearns to be in Western Europe, this makes it even more dangerous.
My next point and still worse: You will remember that after the Cuban missile crisis, Washington and Moscow developed certain rules of mutual conduct. They saw how dangerously close they had come to a nuclear war, so they adopted “no-nos,” whether they were encoded in treaties or in unofficial understandings. Each side knew where the other’s red line was. Both sides tripped over them on occasion but immediately pulled back because there was a mutual understanding that there were red lines. Today there are no red lines. One of the things that Putin and his predecessor President Medvedev, keep saying to Washington is: You are crossing our red lines! And Washington said and continues to say, “You don’t have any red lines. We have red lines, and we can have all the bases we want around your borders, but you can’t have bases in Canada or Mexico. Your red lines don’t exist.” This clearly illustrates that today there are no mutual rules of conduct.
In recent years, for example there have already been three proxy wars between the United States and Russia; Georgia in 2008, Ukraine beginning in 2014, and prior to Paris… it appeared Syria would be the third. We don’t know yet what position Washington is going to take on Syria. Hollande made his decision; he declared a coalition with Russia. Washington, as they understand in Russia, “is silent or opposed to a coalition with Moscow.”
Another important point: Today there is absolutely no organized anti–cold war or pro-détente political force or movement in the United States at all—not in our political parties, not in the White house, not in the State Department, not in the mainstream media, not in the universities or the “think tanks.” I see a colleague here, nodding her head, because we remember when, in the 1970s through the 1980s, we had allies even in the White House, among aides of the president. We had allies in the State Department, and we had senators and members of the House who were pro-détente and who supported us, who spoke out themselves and listened carefully to our points of view. None of this exists today. Without this kind of openness and advocacy in a democracy, what can we do? We can’t throw bombs to get attention; we can’t get printed in mainstream media, we can’t be heard across the country. This lack of debate in our society is exceedingly dangerous.
My next point is a question: Who is responsible for this new cold war? I don’t ask this question because I want to point a finger at anyone. I am interested in a change in US policy that can only come from the White House, although Congress could help. But we need to know what went wrong with the US-Russia relationship after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and why… or there won’t be any new thinking. And there will be no new policy. At this point, there is no new thinking in the American political-media establishment. There is a lot of new thinking in the European Parliament. There is a lot of angst in the French media and in Germany and in the Netherlands and even Cameron in London is rethinking.
The position of the current American political media establishment is that this new cold war is all Putin’s fault—all of it, everything. We in America didn’t do anything wrong. At every stage, we were virtuous and wise and Putin was aggressive and a bad man. And therefore, what’s to rethink? Putin has to do all of the rethinking, not us.
I disagree. And this is what has brought the outrageous attacks down on me and my colleagues. I was raised in Kentucky on the adage, “There are two sides to every story.” And these people are saying, “No, to this story, the history of Russian and American relations, there is only one side. There is no need to see any of it through the other side’s eyes. Just get out there and repeat the conventional mainstream establishment narrative.” If we continue doing this, and don’t address the existing situation, we are going to have another “Paris” and not only in the United States.
This is why I say we must be patriots of America’s national security and rethink everything. For whatever reason, the Clinton Administration declared a “winner-takes-all policy” toward post-Soviet Russia. It said, “We won the Cold War.” This isn’t true. Former ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock during the Reagan-Gorbachev era explains in his books what happened as he stood by Reagan’s side at every step of the negotiations with Gorbachev. The reality is that the Clinton administration adopted unwise policies in its winner-take-all approach. What were the consequences of these policies? There were a lot of consequences. The worst was, it blew the chance for a strategic partnership with Russia at a turning point moment in history.
The four US policies that have most offended Russia and still offend them today are obviously the following:
1) The decision to expand NATO right to Russia’s borders: It’s nonsense when we say Putin has violated the post–Cold War order of Europe. Russia was excluded from the post–Cold War order of Europe by NATO’s expansion. Russia was pushed “somewhere out there” (beyond a zone of security). Russia kept saying, “Let’s do a Pan-European Security Arrangement like Gorbachev and Reagan proposed.” The NATO-expanders said, “This is not military, this is about democracy and free trade, it’s going to be good for Russia, swallow your poison with a smile.” And when the Russians had no choice in the 1990s, they did; but when they grew stronger and had a choice, they no longer stood by silently.
Russia started pushing back, as any Russian leader would have done who was sober and had the support his own country. I don’t say this as a joke. By the end, Yeltsin could barely walk. He was pushed out of the presidency, he didn’t resign voluntarily. But the point is, anyone could have predicted this situation back in the 1990s—and some of us did so, often and as loudly as we were permitted.
2) The refusal on the part of the United States to negotiate on missile defense: Missile defense is now a NATO project. That means missile-defense installations, whether on land or sea (sea is more dangerous) are now part of NATO expansion and its encirclement of Russia. Missile defense is part of the same military system. Russians are absolutely convinced that it is targeted at their nuclear retaliatory capabilities. We say, “Oh no, it’s about Iran, it’s not about you.” But go talk to Ted Postel at MIT. He explains that latter-stage missile defense is an offensive weapon that can hit Russia’s installations. It also violates the IMF Agreement because it can fire cruise missiles. Meanwhile we are accusing Russia of developing cruise missiles again; and they have begun doing so again because we are back in an unnecessary tit-for-tat arms race for the first time in many years.
3) Meddling in Russia’s internal affairs in the name of democracy promotion: In addition to funding the National Endowment for Democracy’s “opposition politics” programs across Russia and Ukraine—are you aware that when Medvedev was president of Russia and Ms. Clinton and Michael McFaul had their wondrous “reset” (which was a rigged diplomatic game, if you looked at the terms of it), that Vice President Biden went to Moscow State University and said that Putin should not return to the presidency. He then said it directly to Putin’s face. Imagine, Putin comes here in the next few weeks and tells Rubio or Clinton they should drop out of the US presidential race!
Are there any red lines left anymore when it comes to our behavior toward Russia. Do we have the right to say or do anything we wish? This extends to everything, and it certainly extends to politics. The White House simply can’t keep its mouth shut, being egged on by vested anti-Russian lobbies and mainstream media. We all believe in democracy, but like it or not, we will not be able to impose democracy on Russia; and if we could, we might not like the democratic outcomes that might result.
So ask yourself, Is there a Russian position that needs to be carefully thought through in the aftermath of Paris? And does Russia have any legitimate interests in the world at all? And if so, what are they? What about their borders? Do they have legitimate interests in Syria?
4) My last point is a prescriptive hope (until Paris, I didn’t think there was much hope at all). Now there is still a chance to achieve the lost partnership with Russia, at least in three realms.
• Ukraine: You know what the Minsk Accords are. They were formulated by Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko, and President Putin. They call for a negotiated end to the civil war in Ukraine. They recognize that the conflict has been primarily a civil war and only secondarily a matter of Russian aggression. I don’t care what American mainstream media says—this has been basically a Ukrainian civil war. To put an end to that civil war would be exceedingly security-building today.
• Syria: before Paris I thought there was almost no chance for an American coalition with Russia. Part of it… and I’m not big on psychological analyses, but at least in part it was due to Obama’s mind-fix about Putin. He resents him and speaks out about him in ways that are not helpful. But with Paris and Hollande announcing that there is now a French-Russian coalition, with Germany agreeing, and I would say almost all of Western Europe is on board, there is a chance, but only if the White House seizes the opportunity. We will see very soon.
• The false idea that the nuclear threat ended with the Soviet Union: In fact, the threat became more diverse and difficult. This is something the political elite forgot. It was another disservice of the Clinton administration (and to a certain extent the first President Bush in his reelection campaign) saying that the nuclear dangers of the preceding Cold War era no longer existed after 1991. The reality is that the threat grew, whether by inattention or accident, and is now more dangerous than ever.
Last year, in an unwise pique of anger, Russia withdrew from the Nunn-Lugar Initiative which you may remember was one of the wisest pieces of legislation that Congress ever passed. In the 1990s, we gave Russia money to lock down and secure their materials for making weapons of mass destruction. In addition we paid salaries to their scientists who knew how to make and use these materials and who might otherwise have gone to Syria, Yemen, or the Caucasus to sell their knowledge in order to employ themselves. Russia did withdraw but said it wants to renegotiate Nunn-Lugar on different terms. The White House has refused. After Paris, one hopes that Obama picked up the phone and said, “I’m sending someone over, let’s get this done.”
Unfortunately, today’s reports seem to indicate that the White House and State Department are thinking primarily how to counter Russia’s actions in Syria. They are worried, it was reported, that Russia is diminishing America’s leadership in the world.
Here is the bottom line: We in the United States cannot lead the world alone any longer, if we ever could. Long before Paris, globalization and other developments have occurred that ended the monopolar, US-dominated world. That world is over. A multipolar world has emerged before our eyes, not just in Russia but in five or six capitals around the world. Washington’s stubborn refusal to embrace this new reality has become part of the problem and not part of the solution. This is where we are today… even after Paris.
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The U.S. is Arming and Assissting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: While Congress Debates Prohibitionhe US is aM
Known as a bastion of neo-Nazism, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion has received teams of American military advisors and high powered US-made weapons.
Last November, an American military inspection team visited the Azov Battalion on the front lines of the Ukrainian civil war to discuss logistics and deepening cooperation. Images of the encounter showed American army officers poring over maps with their Ukrainian counterparts, palling around and ignoring the Nazi-inspired Wolfangel patches emblazoned on their sleeves.
Azov is a militia that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, and is considered one of the most effective units in the field against pro-Russian separatists. But it also widely known as a bastion of neo-Nazism within the ranks of the Ukrainian military that has been criticized by international human rights groups, tied to an international fascist network and even a major terror plot.
According to Lower Class Magazine, a leftist German publication, Azov maintains a semi-underground outfit called the “Misanthropic Division” that recruits heavily among the ranks of neo-Nazi youth in France, Germany and Scandinavia. Foreign fighters are promised training with heavy weapons, including tanks, at Ukrainian camps filled with fascist fellow travelers. They even include military veterans like Mikael Skillit, a Swedish former army sniper turned neo-Nazi volunteer for Azov. “After World War Two, the victors wrote their history,” Skillit told the BBC. “They decided that it’s always a bad thing to say I am white and I am proud.”
Foreign Azov volunteers are driven by the call of the “Reconquista,” or the mission to place eastern European nations under the control of a white supremacist dictatorship modeled after the Nazi Reichskommissariat dictatorship that ruled Ukraine during World War II. The mission is promoted effusively by Azov’s chief ideologue, Andriy Biletsky, a veteran fascist organizer who leads the Social National Assembly in Ukraine’s parliament. Biletsky’s assembly has pledged to outlaw interracial contacts and vowed “to prepare Ukraine for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race from the domination of the internationalist speculative capital.”
Perhaps the most notorious of the racist European youth drawn to the military training camps of Ukraine was a 25-year-old French farm worker named Gregoire Montaux. In June 2016, Moutaux was arrested on Ukraine’s border by the country’s SBU security services with a staggering arsenal of assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives. He had even managed to gain possession of two anti-tank grenade launchers.
Driven by hardcore neo-Nazi ideology, Moutaux planned to blow up “a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organizations, police patrol units,” and attack the Euro 2016 soccer championship. According to the SBU, the would-be terrorist had been in communication “with military units fighting in Donbas” — the eastern Ukrainian area where Azov maintains its training camps.
While mobilizing racist youth across Europe, Azov leadership has also managed to foster a warm relationship with the American military. In one photo posted to Azov’s website last November, an American military officer can be seen shaking hands with an Azov officer whose uniform was emblazoned with the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patch that serves as the militia’s symbol. The images highlighted a burgeoning relationship that has been largely conducted in secret, but whose disturbing details are slowly emerging.
Though Washington has not embarked on anything in Ukraine like the billion dollar train-and-equip program it implemented in Syria to promote regime change through a proxy force of so-called “moderate rebels,” there are clear and disturbing similarities between the two projects. Just as heavy weapons ostensibly intended for the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army went straight into the hands of Salafi-jihadi insurgent forces, including ISIS, American weapons in Ukraine are flowing directly to the extremists of Azov. And once again, in its single minded determination to turn up the heat on Russia, Washington seems willing to ignore the unsettling political orientations of its front line proxies.
In recent months, a wide spectrum of observers of the Ukrainian civil war have documented the transfer of heavy weapons made in the USA to the Azov Battalion, and right under the nose of the US State Department.
Made in Texas, tested by Azov
The story of how American arms began flowing towards the Nazi-inspired militia began in October 2016, when the Texas-based AirTronic company announced a contract to deliver $5.5 million dollars worth of PSRL-1 rocket propelled grenade launchers to “an Allied European military customer.” In June 2017, photos turned up on Azov’s website showing its fighters testing PSRL-1 grenade launchers in the field. The images raised questions about whether Ukraine was AirTronic’s unnamed “customer.”
Two months later, the pro-Russian military analysis site Southfront published a leaked contract indicating that 100 PSRL-1 Launchers worth $554,575 — about 1/10th of the total deal — had been produced in partnership with a Ukrainian arms company for distribution to the country’s fighting units.
In an interview last December with the US-backed Voice of America, AirTronic Chief Operating Officer Richard Vandiver emphasized that the sale of grenade launchers was authorized through “very close coordination with the U.S. Embassy, with the U.S. State Department, with the U.S. Pentagon and with the Ukrainian government.”
Finally, this January, the transfer of the lethal weapons to Azov was confirmed by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL). Aric Toler, a DFRL researcher, asserted that “the US Embassy did absolutely help facilitate this transfer, and I’m not sure if they were aware that Azov would be the first to train with them.”
As NATO’s de facto lobbyist in Washington, and one of the most fervent advocates in Washington for arming the Ukrainian military, the Atlantic Council was an extremely unlikely source for such a disclosure. While the think tank’s motives for exposing Azov’s use of American arms remains unclear, its researchers wound up highlighting a truly scandalous episode of semi-covert American support for neo-Nazis.
A day after the Atlantic Council reported on Azov’s acquisition of American arms, the Ukrainian National Guard insisted in an official statement that the grenade launchers were no longer in Azov’s possession. Meanwhile, the heightened scrutiny prompted Azov to delete all photos of its soldiers testing the weapons.
When the House of Representatives passed its Defense Appropriations act last September, it included a provision ensuring that “none of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” But the provision has yet to be authorized. Back in 2015, pressure from the Pentagon prompted Congress to strip out a similar restriction, and questions remain about whether it will ever be enforced.
In the meantime, Azov officers like Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv have revealed to American reporters that “U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers” have been working closely with his battalion. And as the photographs posted in November on Azov’s website indicated, US officers have met with Azov commanders two months to provide them with “training, or other assistance” that is explicitly forbidden by the congressional provision.
“Your struggle is our struggle”
The American government’s collaboration with committed Nazi ideologues to undercut Russian geopolitical goals is not new, nor has it been a particularly well-kept secret. In his 1988 book length expose, “Blowback,” investigative journalist Christopher Simpson lifted the cover off the CIA’s program of rehabilitating former assets of Nazi Germany, including documented war criminals, and revealed how it employed them counter the spread of communism in Europe.
According to Simpson, the CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of the Ukrainian OUN militia who oversaw the torture and slaughter of Jews in Krakow, to help bolster West Germany’s intelligence services in 1947. Two years later, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the US under a false name. He was promptly hired by the Pentagon and dispatched on widely promoted speaking tours that rallied support for Ukrainian guerillas. For the next several decades, Lebed advanced the anti-communist cause through the Prolog Research Corporation, a New York City-based publishing house that was eventually revealed as a CIA front.
In his 1991 book, “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, journalist Russ Bellant provided a new layer of disturbing detail to the history of US collaboration with former Ukrainian Nazis. Bellant documented how the Ukrainian OUN-B militia reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts.” The Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan even welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.
“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”
The “imaginary Nazis” come to life
The relationship came full circle after the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the 2014 coup known as Euro-Maidan. From the ranks of the neo-fascist street toughs that waged a pitched battle against national riot police in Kiev’s Maidan Square, the Azov Battalion was formed to do battle with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east. The militia’s commander, Andriy Biletsky, had earned his stripes as a leader of the fascist group, Patriot of Ukraine. And he made no secret of his Nazism, proclaiming that his mission was to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
At the time, supporters of the NATO-inspired coup painted any and all reports of the presence of neo-Nazis in post-Maidan Ukraine as Kremlin propaganda. Jamie Kirchick, a neoconservative operative, made the most obtuse attempt at spinning the fascist surge in Ukraine, erasing militias like Azov as “Putin’s Imaginary Nazis.” Liberal historian Timothy Snyder also dismissed the problem of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, defending the Maidan putsch as “a classic popular revolution.”
But it was not long before the wave of Nazi nostalgia and anti-Semitism sweeping across the country became impossible to deny. In Ukraine’s parliament, the veteran fascist Social-National Party founder Andriy Parubiy has risen to the role of Speaker. Vadym Troyan, a leader of Biletsky’s neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine organization who served as a deputy commander of Azov, was appointed police chief of the province of Kiev.
Massive torchlit rallies pour out into the streets of Kiev on regular occasions, showcasing columns of Azov members marching beneath the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel banner that serves as the militia’s symbol. Author and columnist Lev Golinkin noted that the neo-Nazis who violently paraded through Charlottesville, Virginia last year bore flags emblazoned with the another symbol displayed by Azov: the Sonnengrad, or Nazi SS-inspired black sun.
Across Ukraine, Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera have been celebrated with memorials and rallies proclaiming them as national heroes. Bandera was the commander of the wartime militia the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), which fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Despite his OUN-B militia’s role in the massacre of Jews and ethnic Poles during the war, including a pogrom that left 7,000 Jews dead in Lviv, a major boulevard in Kiev has been named for Bandera. In today’s Ukraine, even mainstream nationalists revere Bandera as a freedom fighter.
Last May, Azov supporters held a torchlit rally in Lviv, in honor of General Roman Shukhevych, the late commander of the UPA insurgent militia that helped massacre thousands of Jews in Lviv. (Ironically, the massacre has been documented in detail by Timothy Snyder, the historian-turned-apologist for Ukraine’s government).
Two months later — on the anniversary of the pogrom — the city of Lviv held “Shukhevychfest,” celebrating the blood stained general as a “successful musician, an athlete, a businessman.” During the festival, neo-Nazis tossed a molotov cocktail into a local synagogue and vandalized the Jewish house of worship with graffiti reading, “Yids, remember July 1 [the date of the Lviv massacre].”
The explosion of pro-Nazi memorials across Ukraine has provoked harsh condemnation from the World Jewish Congress and prompted anti-Nazi activist Efraim Zuroff to openly lament that “Ukraine has more statues for killers of Jews than any other country.” But even as Ukraine’s Jewish community reels at the developments in horror, the US government has been mostly silent.
American reporters who visited Azov in the field have had a much harder time denying the uncomfortable reality of Nazi mobilization, however. When USA Today’s Oren Dorell toured an Azov training camp, he met a drill sergeant named Alex who “admitted he is a Nazi and said with a laugh that no more than half his comrades are fellow Nazis.” The Azov soldier also told Dorell he “supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II.”
“[Alex] vowed that when the war ends, his comrades will march on the capital, Kiev, to oust a government they consider corrupt,” Dorell reported. Another Azov volunteer told the Guardian that Ukraine needs “a junta that will restrict civil rights for a while but help bring order and unite the country.”
While the hapless liberal-oligarchic government in Kiev struggles for legitimacy, the neo-Nazis of Azov yearn for the “Reconquista.” Until their dream is realized, however, the militia is likely to be bogged down in an intractable conflict with pro-Russian forces and hoping that an influx of American weapons can turn the tide.
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