How the World Ends: Baiting Russia is Not Good Policy
05/24/2016
ED Noor: It is interesting how Hillary’s
busting of the State Department secrecy takes forever to investigate
and all these mitigating circumstances are popping up in the MSM. At the
same time, there are sufficient legal resources to investigate the
Russians for alleged doping since they popped-out a Visa or MC whilst in
the US. But the World has nothing to worry about since nobody is above
the fairly applied US laws. The MSM are used both for suppression of the
real news and for the creation of false narratives.
More info about Montenegro. This
statelet was much more important to the Russians that it is to the US.
Thus, swallowing Montenegro into NATO is purely to spite the Russians.
Montenegro has very advantageous still water Boka harbor, but the
Russians could never supply it when the US controls the entrance to the
Adriatic Sea, the Strait of Otranto from its both sides (Albanian and
Italian).
Therefore, this is not another strategic
story like ABM Defense etc. Over the past 20 years, the new Russian
mid-tier well-offs have purchased beachfront properties on the
Montenegrin coast. Montenegro is the warmest Mediterranean seaside
relatively close and relatively friendly to Russia, much warmer than any
Black Sea beachside. Montenegro was becoming close to a
dream-retirement location for the upper-middle and lower-top Russians.
Then US/NATO decided that Russia should
be denied this small and sunny domain and they turned the leading
Montenegrin mafia kingpin, its Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, to their
side. Milo is the king of the cigarette smuggling for the whole of the
Balkans and Southern Europe, his tribe’s fortune counted close to a
billion dollars. It is this fortune which keeps the tribe in power in
the statelet. Controlling the smuggling also requires eliminating
competition and uncooperative police and judiciary. It is the same old:
he may be a son-of-a-bitch but he is our son-of-a-bitch. The arrangement
with NATO will be highly unstable, not only because it is another
unnecessary poke in the Russian eye then because the dominant ethnic
group in Montenegro are the pro-Russian Serbs (more than half).
Therefore, Montenegro could be back in the news again soon, in a bad
way.
May 24, 2016
Last week I attended a foreign policy conference in Washington that featured a number of prominent academics and former government officials who have been highly critical
of the way the Bush and Obama Administrations have interacted with the
rest of the world. Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of
Chicago was on a panel and was asked what, in his opinion, has been the
most notable foreign policy success and the most significant failure in
the past twenty-five years. The success was hard to identify and there
was some suggestion that it might be the balancing of relationships in
strategically vital Northeast Asia, which “we have not yet screwed up.”
If I had been on the panel I would have suggested the Iran nuclear
agreement as a plus.
As for the leading foreign policy
failure there was an easy answer, “Iraq” which was on everyone in the
room’s lips, but Mearsheimer urged one not to be so hasty. In reality
the Iraq disaster has killed hundreds of thousands, has cost trillions
of dollars and has unleashed serious problems for the Mideast region in
general while allowing the rise of ISIS, but in “realistic foreign
policy terms” it has not been a catastrophic event for the United
States, which had hardly been seriously injured by it apart from
financially and in terms of reputation.
Mearsheimer went on to say that, in his
opinion, there is a far greater disaster lurking and that is the total
mismanagement of the relationship with Russia ever since the downfall of
communism. He cited the drive by Washington democracy promoters to push
Ukraine into the western economic and political sphere as a major
miscalculation as they failed to realize or did not care that what takes
place in Kiev was to Moscow a vital interest. To that observation I
would add the legacy of the spoliation of Russia’s natural resources
carried out by Western carpetbaggers working with local grifters turned
oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, the expansion of NATO to Russia’s
doorstep initiated by Bill Clinton, and the interference in Russia’s
internal affairs by the U.S. government, to include the Magnitsky Act.
There have also been unnecessary slights and insults delivered along the
way, to include sanctions on Russian officials and refusal to attend
the Sochi Olympics, to cite only two examples.
It should also be noted that much of the
negative interaction between Washington and Moscow is driven by the
consensus among the western media and the inside the beltway crowd that
Russia is again or perhaps is still the enemy du jour.
Ironically, the increasingly negative perception of Russia is rarely
justified as a reaction in defense of any identifiable serious U.S.
interests, not even in the fevered minds of Senator John McCain and his
supporting neocon claque. But even though the consequences of U.S.
hostility towards Russia can be deadly serious, the Obama Administration
is already treating Georgia and Ukraine as if they were de facto
members of NATO. Hillary Clinton, who has called Vladimir Putin another
Adolf Hitler, has pledged to bring about their admittance into the
alliance, which would not in any way make Americans more secure, quite
the contrary, as Moscow would surely be forced to react.
A number of speakers observed that while
Russia is no longer a superpower in a bipolar system it is nevertheless
a major international player, evident most recently in its successful
intervention in Syria. Moscow has both nuclear and advanced conventional
arsenals that would be able to inflict severe or even fatal damage on
the United States if animosity should somehow turn to armed conflict.
Given that reality, if the United States has but a single foreign policy
imperative it would be to maintain a solid working relationship with
Russia but somehow the hubris inspired re-calibration of the U.S. role
in the world post the Cold War never quite figured that out, opting
instead to see Washington as the “decider” anywhere and everywhere in
the world, able to use the “greatest military ever seen” to do its
thinking for it. This blindness eventually led to a de facto policy of regime change in the Middle East and a turn away from détente with the Russians.
The comments of John Mearsheimer and
other speakers became particularly relevant when I returned home and
flipped on my computer to discover two news items. First, NATO, with
Washington’s blessing, has admitted Montenegro
into the alliance. I must confess that I had not thought about
Montenegro very much since reading how Jay Gatsby showed narrator Nick
Carraway his World War I medal from that country in chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby.
But perhaps in a “Lafayette We Are Here” moment to return the favor
bestowed on Gatsby, the inclusion of Montenegro now means that under
Article 5 of the NATO treaty the United States is obligated to go to war
to defend Montenegran territorial integrity, something that few
Americans would find comprehensible. Russia, which is directly
threatened by the NATO alliance even though NATO claims that that is not
the case, protested to no avail.
And the second article was far, far worse. It was in The New York Times,
so it must be true: “The United States Justice Department has opened an
investigation into state-sponsored doping by dozens of Russia’s top
athletes…The United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of
New York is scrutinizing Russian government officials, athletes,
coaches, anti-doping authorities and anyone who might have benefited
unfairly from a doping regimen…Prosecutors are believed to be pursuing
conspiracy and fraud charges.”
Yes folks, the United States government,
which has long claimed jurisdiction over any and all groups and
individuals worldwide who might even implausibly be linked to terrorism
is now extending its writ to athletes who take performance enhancing
drugs anywhere in the world. Particularly if those athletes are Russians.
Having read the article with disbelief I slapped myself in the face a
couple of times just to make sure that I wasn’t imagining the whole
thing but after the post-concussive vertigo abated there it was still
sitting there looking back at me in black and white with a banner
headline and a color photo, Justice Department Opens Investigation Into Russian Doping Scandal.
Being somewhat of a skeptic, I looked at
the byline, expecting to see Judith Miller of weapons of mass
destruction fame, but no it was Rebecca Ruiz. Could it be a nom de plume?
I thought I might be on to something so I reread the piece more slowly
second time around. How does Washington justify going after the
Russkies? The article noted “In their inquiry, United States prosecutors
are expected to scrutinize anyone who might have facilitated unclean
competition in the United States or used the United States banking
system to conduct a doping program.” The article added that some Russian
athletes allegedly have run in the Boston Marathon, though they did not
win, place or show. If they popped an amphetamine before using their
Visa card to dine at Chuck e Cheese when sojourning in Bean Town they
are toast, as the expression goes. Likewise for the handful of Russian
athletes who have apparently participated in international bobsled and
skeleton championships in Lake Placid, N.Y.
And of course there is a Vladimir Putin
angle. The Russian sports minister, who has been implicated in the
scandal, was appointed by Putin in 2008, so it’s all about Russia and
Putin which makes it fair game. FBI investigators and U.S. courts are
now prepared to go after Russians living in Russia for alleged crimes
that may or may not have occurred in the United States based on the
flimsiest of grounds to establish jurisdiction. Since much of the
world’s financial dealings transit through American banks in some way or
another the whole world becomes vulnerable to unpleasant encounters
with the U.S. criminal justice system. If the accused choose to offer no
defense to the frivolous prosecutions they will be found guilty in absentia and fined billions of dollars before having their assets seized, as happened recently to the Iranians, who had nothing to do with 9/11 but are nevertheless being hounded to prove themselves innocent.
My point is that the Russians are not
exactly failing to notice what is going on. No one but Victoria Nuland
and the Kagans actually want a war but Moscow is being backed into a
corner with more and more influential Russian voices raised against
détente with a Washington that seems to be intent on humiliating
Russians at every turn as part of a new project for regime change. Many
Russian military leaders have quite plausibly come to believe that the
continuous NATO expansion and the stationing of more army units right
along the border means that the United States wants war.
Russia’s generals base their perception
on what they have very clearly and unambiguously observed. When Russia
acts defensively, as it did in Georgia and Ukraine, it is accused of
aggressive action, is sanctioned and punished. When the Western powers
probe Russian borders with their warships and surveillance aircraft they
claim that it is likewise aggression when Moscow scrambles a plane to
monitor the activity. Washington in its own warped view is always
behaving defensively from the purest of motives and Moscow is always in
the wrong. But picture for a moment a reverse scenario to include a
Russian missile cruiser lounging just outside the territorial limits off
Boston or New York to imagine what the U.S. reaction might be.
Washington’s misguided policy towards
Russia under both Republican and Democratic presidents indeed has the
potential to become the greatest international catastrophe of all time,
as Professor Mearsheimer observed. U.S. provocations and the regular
promotion of a false narrative that Russia is both threatening and
seeking to recreate the Soviet Union together suggest to that country’s
leaders that Washington is an implacable foe. The bellicose posturing
inadvertently strengthens the hands of hard line nationalists in Russia
while weakening those who seek a formula for accommodation with the
West. To be sure, Russia is no innocent in the international
one-up-manship game but it has been more sinned against than sinned. And
the nearly constant animosity directed against Russia by the Obama
Administration should be seen as madness as the stakes in the game, a
possible nuclear war, are, or should be, unthinkable.
No comments:
Post a Comment