The Avoidable War

It's not that the US lacks competent experts. It's the fact that nobody in Washington heeds their advice.

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The war in Ukraine is still raging 16 months after its start. Sadly, a totally neglected aspect of the conflict is being deliberately brushed aside by mainstream American politicians and military brass alike.

I am referring to the fact that for the United States this was very clearly an avoidable war. It took Russia 8 years and two abortive Minsk agreements to decide to put a military stop to NATO's designs in Ukraine, which were perceived by Moscow as an imminent threat to its security. During all this time no major American diplomatic initiative took place to lessen the tensions in the region and to avoid the outbreak of a war. This, to be sure, is a first in the diplomatic relations between the US and Russia.

Connected to all this is the fact that for almost a decade the bureaucrats in charge of framing American foreign policy have ignored their own experts' warnings about the high probability of an outbreak of hostilities with Moscow. 

Thus, James W Carden, former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the State Department during the Obama administration, explains in a recent article how the current impasse was reached:

 "For years, the U.S. national security establishment was warned by voices from the right, left, and center that America needed to change its policy toward Russia. It was warned that Russia could not be defeated in their near abroad. It was warned that Kiev—by launching an “anti-terrorist” campaign against its Russian speaking citizens—was recklessly antagonizing Russia. It was warned that making a semi-deity out of a corrupt tool of Ukrainian oligarchs was an obvious mistake. It was warned against conflating the interests of ethno-nationalist far-right factions in Kiev and Lviv (and their allies in Warsaw, Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius) with U.S. national interests. It was warned to take President Putin’s numerous protestations against NATO expansion seriously. Yet America’s bipartisan ruling elite decided to ignore these warnings, and the results speak for themselves."

This geopolitical entanglement in Europe is not only unnecessary for the US, but it has the potential, if unchecked in a timely fashion, to lead to an all-out nuclear war between America and Russia. 

The wisdom of reversing course in Ukraine and starting peace negotiations with Russia is clear for all to see. Alas, to date no one can claim that the current US administration has the required statecraft skills and political wisdom to come up with a negotiated solution.

How and Why the Democrats Botched the "Reset" with Russia

 Every American administration since Ronald Reagan has attempted to get on the Russians' good side and normalise diplomatic relations with Moscow. 

Some presidents, most notably Bill Clinton but also Donald Trump, have been more successful than others in this endeavour. The worst performer in this area -until now- has been president Obama with his ill-inspired choice of advisers and Russia policies.

The key actor responsible for Obama's failure was Stanford professor Michael McFaul, a mediocre Russia expert. In 2007 he was approached by then-senator Obama and was subsequently put in charge of the Russian Department in the National Security Council after 2008. In this capacity he initiated the ill-fated policy of the "reset" of relations between the two countries. 

McFaul's main helper was Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State at the time. Together with the neocons still lurking within the State Department's structures after the Iraq debacle, McFaul and Hillary Clinton tried to torpedo Vladimir Putin's 2012 presidential campaign through a plethora of American-backed NGOs. 

Such gross interference in Russia's internal affairs was quite unprecedented, save for the brief Yeltsin interlude during the 1990s. 

For all McFaul's multiple academic credentials, he failed to grasp a basic fact, namely that liberal democracy is totally ill-suited for a country like Russia.

All Obama's intended "reset" policy achieved in practical terms, therefore, was a near-total breakdown of relations between Washington and Moscow.

Obama's vice-president at the time, Joe Biden, took over from McFaul and since 2014 until today he oversaw the Maidan Square coup d'etat and the gradual but relentless escalation of US and Nato conflict with Russia.

As much as his political enemies would like to assign all the blame on Joe Biden's administration for the disastrous state of America's relationship with Russia, the truth is that the seeds of the discord were planted more than a decade ago by Obama's decision to appoint McFaul as his top Russia affairs adviser. 

THE CRISIS OF DIPLOMACY II : " MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR " ☺

 

With each passing day, Western states are taking resolute steps towards becoming  irrelevant.

Woke ideology, left-wing feminism, critical race theory  are all undermining a civilization that seems determined to shed its  past achievements and give up the pre-eminent role it has played until recently.

States that are much less economically developed or that are more primitive from a social or political point of view are, as a result, becoming much more insolent and confident that they will soon take over the world.

A last-minute trend in the demise of the West is the so-called " feminist foreign policy, " which is sure to strike a blow at the diplomatic profession,  already badly affected  by the changes of the past 30 years.

Feminists who fancy themselves  as diplomats do not seem to understand that the essential role of diplomats is to sign peace treaties, to settle conflicts between states, not to catalyze them. Feminist assumptions about diplomacy being mistaken, their "contributions"  are useless. It's enough to consider the performance in office  of Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton or  Victoria Nuland and one gets the picture.

Thus, if  Albright had tempered the Baltic states' desire to become NATO members, for example, Russia would not have a casus belli today against the West. She was also responsible for botching the peace negotiations with Milosevic and for the bombings in Bosnia and Serbia from 1999. There are a few American IR specialists who have deplored the way NATO turned out after 1989. Thus from a military alliance tasked with keeping the peace in Europe, NATO has emerged as an aggressive organisation which started quite a few wars since 1999. In no small measure, this shocking shift in NATO's mission is the legacy of the first woman to become Secretary of State in the history of the US, and not that of  any "toxic" NATO general.

We should also remember the disaster in Libya patronized by the then head of American diplomacy, Hillary Clinton. Counter to the advice of the Defence Department , which was opposed to military action against Gaddafi, Hillary Clinton convinced Obama to authorize the bombing campaign in Libya, with devastating consequences .

One should not forget the "contribution" to peace in Ukraine made by Nuland , who personally oversaw the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime in Kiev...

So far, therefore, the presence of women in diplomacy has not shown that they are better negotiators, less aggressive than men, or better trained professionally. So where are the exaggerated claims of German feminists coming from?

Brexit and a Two-Union Europe

Because of the shock of Brexit, one may be forgiven for overlooking the fact that this week could rightfully be called “the week of trade bloc summits”.

In Europe, the 27 remaining leaders of the EU have gathered for two days in Brussels to adopt a common position concerning the upcoming withdrawal of Great Britain from the union.

On the North American continent, President Obama has met with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts in a last-ditch attempt to safeguard NAFTA against the relentless attacks it is facing from the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Last but not least, the leaders of the Pacific Alliance – the newest Latin American trade bloc made up of Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico – have held a two-day summit of their own to further cooperation in the areas of trade and investment.

The most important summit is by far the one which took place in Brussels, where political leaders were trying hard to reach a common position concerning the terms under which would take place the departure of Britain from the bloc. The initial anger generated by Brexit is slowly giving way to the realisation that the very existence of the world’s oldest trade bloc is now under threat.

With the future of the Union in doubt, federalization plans sold to the European public under the guise of an “ever-closer union” were stopped in their tracks by British voters. The project of a “United States of Europe” – as initially conceived by the CIA in the ‘fifties and advanced by stealth by like-minded European politicians over the span of decades – will in all likelihood have to be abandoned for good.

In order for readers to grasp the folly of such a project, let’s assume that the leaders of NAFTA decided to launch a trade bloc conceived only as a stepping stone to full monetary, fiscal and ultimately political union between the US, Mexico and Canada. To push our comparison further, let’s also imagine that the initial nucleus of NAFTA countries started expanding to Central and South America with the aim of eventually becoming a pan-American economic and political bloc dominating the entire Western hemisphere.

The Germans are currently trying to convince British conservative politicians that once outside the EU, the UK should adopt the Norwegian model. In other words, a country like Britain with a population of some 65 million and a 3-trillion dollar GDP is supposed to be treated like the small members of the European Economic Area (EEA), the latter of which comprises, beside Norway, geopolitically insignificant states like Liechtenstein, Andorra or San Marino.

So far, British Brexiters have called for informal negotiations with Brussels before invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. What in fact they should be doing is having informal talks with the leaders of like-minded EU states that are most likely to follow Britain’s lead. Once these negotiations are concluded, the formation of a brand new, competing trade bloc should be announced to the European public.

The obvious candidates for such a trade bloc would first and foremost be the Nordic kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark, with a combined population of 15 million and an aggregate GDP of some 850 billion USD. The second group that could be persuaded to join would be the Visegrad-4, made up of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. The combined population of the latter is about 65 million, with an aggregate GDP of 1.9 trillion USD.

Together with Britain, the new trade bloc would thus have a total population of 145 million and an aggregate GDP of close to 6 trillion USD. It would be sure to have a much better bargaining position than the UK all by itself in negotiating trade agreements with what is going to be left of the European Union. This is in fact exactly what is happening on the Latin American continent, where the 5 year-old Pacific Alliance co-exists side by side with Mercosur, the older trade bloc which comprises the bulk of the countries in the region.

Our continent could certainly accommodate a two-union Europe and two competing trade blocs that could only improve the overall economic performance of both. With political integration now behind them, the remaining members of the EU could themselves start to concentrate their efforts more on improving trade and investment and less on geographic expansion.

Russia, the Eurasian Union and the US

 May 11, 2014

Current developments in Ukraine might lead us to forget why the crisis has erupted in the first place. In short, Putin’s project for an Eurasian Union and his desire to include Ukraine within it had prompted the Maidan protests and the overthrow of the Yanukovych administration.

Less debated these days is Mrs Clinton’s role in the chain of events which were set in motion in Dublin in 2012. On that occasion, she participated at an OSCE conference where she made it clear that the US was adamantly opposed to Putin’s Eurasian Union, wrongly dubbing it “a move to re-sovietize the region”.

In a highly prophetic article from 2012, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a Security Studies professor at the US Naval War College, contended however the following:

“The U.S. position, as stated by Clinton, is that Washington would not like to see any sort of Eurasian Union emerge, in any way, shape or form. Given the process already underway in terms of forging closer economic links between Russia and other post-Soviet states, this is not a realistic approach to take. Instead, U.S. policymakers should be asking themselves two questions: Is the cooperation being proffered by Moscow on other issues of concern to the U.S. of sufficient value to accept a greater degree of Russian influence and control in the Eurasian space? And are fundamental U.S. interests, as opposed to American preferences, threatened if Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan adopt institutions modeled on the European Union?

If the answers to the previous questions are yes and no, respectively, shifting the U.S. position from all-out opposition to any form of Eurasian integration in favor of a process that builds stronger protections for individual state sovereignty and preserves some degree of openness in the Eurasian space for countries to have trade and security relationships with the West makes more sense. A Eurasian Union that is simply a more developed customs union in which post-Soviet states freely participate — in part because the free flow of goods, capital and labor across the Eurasian space makes good economic sense for all parties concerned — should not be viewed in the same vein as attempts to forcibly recreate the Soviet Union.

If the Obama administration adopts this more flexible position, then it will be able to manage the tension between the Russian preference for a more consolidated Eurasian space and the U.S. desire for preserving the independence of the post-Soviet states. But if Clinton’s position as expressed in Dublin is enshrined as the U.S. perspective, this will become an area for conflict between the two countries, one that will very likely nullify the reset once and for all.”

Mrs Clinton’s foreign policy exploits has left us with the Ukrainian crisis. Today she is considering running for President. Should we prepare for WW III in case she wins the elections in the US ?
Link to the full article below:
The Realist Prism: U.S. Stance on Eurasian Union Threatens Russia Reset

The US' Strategic Defence Review Assessed

 January 28, 2012

The Defense Strategic Review (DSR) released by the Pentagon on the 5th of January 2012 summarises the Obama Administration’s geopolitical agenda and strategic priorities. From it, experts can discern which country is considered the new enemy of the USA, although President Obama’s speech on the occasion does not mention China by name.

In France, the refocusing of the US strategy on the Asia-Pacific region is viewed by Professor Jean-Jacques Roche from ISAD as a positive development. Whilst he observes that some of the new EU members (countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and even Romania) might express their misgivings about the planned US troops withdrawal , Western suppliers of military hardware should supposedly rejoice. Professor Roche believes that the Pentagon’s DSR could kick-start the accelerated development of the European Defence Agency (EDA) and increase the mutualisation of the defence capabilities of the EU’s member countries.

The two reasons given by the US for the elaboration of the new military doctrine are the changed geopolitical environment and the radically different fiscal circumstances. In other words, the adoption of the new strategy is supposed to save the US some $450 billion over ten years, fiscal consolidation being nowadays regarded by Washington as a national security imperative…

We can also gauge from the document who the US’ current friends and enemies are. Unfortunately, China is identified as a potential foe, in the same paragraph with Iran. In the Middle East, America’s friends and allies are the Gulf countries and Israel. In Asia, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the allies supposed to offer the US the means of putting in place – if needed – a balance of power mechanism against China. This time around, the US needs Russia on its side, especially in the wake of the upheavals in the Middle East – hence the reset.

Interestingly enough, the Indians are advised by their own experts to refuse bandwagoning on the issue. Thus R.S. Kalha, an ex-Secretary of the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, notes that in the past the US had forced India to settle on Kashmir. He rightly observes that South-East Asian nations are loath to become close allies of either China or the United States, for such an option could prove disastrous for them. R.S. Kalha believes that the Indian leadership should be prudent on the matter, as a clear-cut alliance with the US might prove detrimental to Indian interests. He knows that the nature of the US – China relationship is very complex and that a military conflict between the two giants seems highly unlikely, as long as China needs the American export markets and the US needs China to continue to buy its T-bills. To be sure, the relationship between the two powers is deeper and more complex than the one established by Washington with its Soviet counterpart during the Cold War.

The reception of the Pentagon’s DSR by the Chinese government was a rather cool one. The Chinese leadership seems unwilling to intensify confrontation and to become a new cold war target for Washington. The People’s Daily has insisted that China should continue with its economic development and avoid being dragged into a military competition with the US, as the Russians had. Still, the Chinese intend to continue to take care of what they call their ‘peripheral security interests’, in spite of the new assertiveness of the new US defence policy in Asia. For all other issues, the Chinese apparently intend to cooperate with the US in solving potential tensions via dialogue. (sources: Le Monde, Pentagon Paper, People’s Daily, IDSA India)