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. 

US DIPLOMACY AND THE SPHERES OF INFLUENCE

 Today's American diplomacy refuses to accept the existence of spheres of influence. Both Hillary Clinton and Blinken have unequivocally stated that spheres of influence belong to the past, although the 50-year long peace that characterized the Cold War period was based on the existence of two spheres of influence, one American and the other Soviet.

The United States has consistently pursued a foreign policy based on spheres of influence since the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, completed in 1904 by the Roosevelt Corollary . Thus, the United States has reserved for itself the status of regional policeman in the Western Hemisphere and the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of any South or Central American state.

The hypocrisy of American diplomacy and its current representatives is devoid of pragmatism and could lead to serious military conflicts, which can be avoided by simply acknowledging that there are other great nations in the world - such as Russia or China - with major geostrategic interests in their immediate vicinity.

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?

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