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?

Where Both the US and the Hungarian Government's Are Wrong

 October 29, 2014

In the wake of Maidan, a new diplomatic scandal has erupted, this time in the heart of Europe, in Hungary. Like in Kiev, it again involves an old acquaintance of ours: Victoria Nuland, the diplomat responsible for European Affairs within the US State Department.

Hungary is currently in the process of converting Swiss franc- and euro-denominated home loans into forints in order to prevent a massive number of defaults on mortgages contracted by Hungarian citizens during the nineties. Unpleasant as that might be for foreign banks operating in Hungary, Fidesz cannot be faulted for taking the side of its citizens.

As the Orban government had proved less willing to endorse the Nuland-inspired hate campaign against Russia, six of its officials were recently put on an American visa blacklist.

Last Sunday, a probably ill-conceived tax on Internet usage contemplated by the Orban government has ignited a 100,000-strong street protest in Budapest and a few other Hungarian cities. The demonstration has provided yet another opportunity for a major US diplomatic gaffe, one that a seasoned professional would have easily avoided. The US chargé d’affaires in Budapest, Mr. A. Goodfriend, actively took part in the protest, thus endorsing an offensive action against the government of his host country, which is rather unprecedented in the history of diplomacy.

Whilst it is true that most neoconservatives and Victoria Nuland herself are of Jewish origin, it is wrong for the Orban government to even tacitly accept anti-Semitic parties like Jobbik’s racist hate speeches in the political arena or the Hungarian media. The race of the persons involved in anti-Hungarian attacks is irrelevant. The actions themselves is what matters.

Granted, some officials of Jewish origin are the children of World War II victims and as such are themselves personally affected by an irrational hate of Europe and especially of Russia. The fault of being put in charge of the affairs of the same continent where their ancestors have suffered continuous discrimination and unspeakable victimization, however, is not theirs but that of US Presidents and Secretaries of State who appointed them in the first place.

As a specialist in international relations myself, and as an European historian I would like to strongly condemn the policy of appointing diplomatic personnel and key decision makers who actively do more harm than good to the normal US-EU trans-Atlantic relationship.

What do Iraq and Ukraine Have in Common ?

 

September 22, 2014

Two states from two very different regions of the world, steeped in different cultures and religions, are these days in the throes of civil war and face disintegration.

I am referring, of course, to Iraq in the Middle East and Ukraine in Eastern Europe.

If anyone had the curiosity to ask why two such different states find themselves in a similar predicament, the answer would not be difficult to find: because of the unwise promotion of democracy by American neoconservatives in these countries. The process is usually accompanied by a hidden geopolitical or geoeconomic agenda. One of the problems is that neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Victoria Nuland are not political scientists. Had that been the case, they would have known from the outset that, as Francis Fukuyama explains,

“Long before you have a liberal democracy, you have to have a functioning state (something that never disappeared in Germany or Japan after they were defeated in World War II). This is something that cannot be taken for granted in countries like Iraq.” Or Ukraine …

Neoconservatives were oblivious to the fact that this essential prerequisite was not in place when they started their ill-advised drive to promote democracy in Iraq in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2013. After all, getting to the Iraqi oil or tweaking the Russians’ nose in Ukraine were very important goals of the US’s involvement in the two countries.

Victoria Nuland, wife of The New American Century Project co-founder Robert Kagan , takes a dim view not only of Ukrainians, but of the whole EU, as we all know by now. In actual fact, she helped duplicate on our continent the same mega-error committed by neocons in Iraq, and the results now speak for themselves. This calls into question the latter’s ability to learn from past experiences and “experiments” (a basic quality of truly intelligent people).

Although thoroughly discredited following the disaster in Iraq, leading neoconservatives are curiously still able to steer American foreign policy in order to advance their group’s aims, plunging entire regions of the world into war as they go along.

Their political partners in Kiev have just inaugurated the construction of “the Great Wall of Ukraine” on the Russian border, which is intended to break the unity of the Eurasian continent at a reported cost of some 3 billion dollars. This mad project, unheard of in Europe since the times of the Roman Empire, makes a mockery of neoconservatives’ emphatic claims that the United States are not about imperialism and that NATO is a purely defensive military organization.

The fact remains that as long as the Obama or any other subsequent US administration gives members of this group access to key posts in government, the peace and security of whole geographical regions will again be put at serious risk.