WHO WiLL TAKE OVER NATO'S TOP JOB ?

 The mature Western liberal democracies are lately in the habit of promoting representatives of some Lilliputian states, devoid of any military importance within the alliance, to fill NATO's top job.

This explains the fact that President Obama, himself a representative of a minority, promoted a Danish citizen as Secretary General of NATO in 2009, namely Anders Fogh Rasmussen, representing a minority of small states within the alliance.

In 2014, the same Barack Obama promoted Jens Stoltenberg, the representative of a state of only 5 million people, as Secretary General. (This may also be related to the decline of NATO's importance as a politico-military organization after the demise of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.)

Compare this situation with the one before 2003, when the job of NATO Secretary General was occupied by the representatives of the great European nations: Britain (Lord Ismay, Lord Carrington or George Robertson), Germany (Manfred Worner) , Spain (Javier Solana), or Italy (Manlio Brosio), with two or three Belgians or Dutch among them when tensions during the Cold War were lower in intensity.

If the appointments of new NATO Secretaries-General continue in the same tradition, we can expect Estonians, Lithuanians or Latvians to be appointed to this post. They have in common with their Danish and Norwegian predecessors the fact that their states, although tiny and insignificant militarily, are close to Russia or have a common border with it. This is because NATO's number one enemy is no longer the USSR, but Russia.

EUROPE v USA : TWO CENTURIES OF IR HISTORY COMPARED

 Compared to the US' attitude to border changes today, the leaders of the Great European Powers of the 19th century - although generally opposed to territorial modifications themselves - proved to be much more flexible when these occurred, as illustrated by the examples of Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Romania. As leaders of land-based powers, they knew from historical experience that border changes can never be completely avoided.

 I believe that the current crisis in Ukraine gives us historians the opportunity to make a comparison between two centuries of modern world history, the one between 1815 and 1914 and the period of American hegemony between 1920 and 2020, as well as one between autocrats and democrats.

The 19th century was dominated by several great European powers, united in alliances designed to prevent the spread of secularism and border changes in Europe. Beginning with the Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia and Austria), continuing with the so-called European Concert (Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and Great Britain) and ending after the unification of Germany with the Bismarckian League of Emperors (Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) the 19th century was, with a few small exceptions, one of peace.

The promoters of this formula for managing military conflicts on the European continent were, with the exception of the French or British leaders, autocratic emperors, namely the rulers of  Germany, Russia or Austria. The collective guarantee of the great powers, as it is known in the history of diplomacy, prevented major armed conflicts, promoted Christian spiritual values, and in 1848 opposed the violent changes via revolutions of the states they ruled.

However, the European concert did not oppose the independence and neutrality of Switzerland, for example, or the appearance of Belgium, Italy, Germany or Romania on the map, which are still among the solidly built states of Europe.

Between 1920 and 2020, the United States was the leader of global affairs, the champion of liberal democracies, and since 1945 the number one military power, becoming the only superpower since 1989.

Although official propaganda has always affirmed that the democracies in the American camp are essentially peaceful or peace-seeking, the conflicts of this period have unfortunately proved otherwise.

Since the end of World War II and continuing with the wars in Korea (1953) Vietnam (1960s and 1970s) or those in Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Yemen, the list of military conflicts, most  of them initiated by the US and/or NATO , is getting longer. 

Both in the 19th century and between 1920 and 2020, new state constructions appeared on the map of Europe or the world. The most solid were and remained the states formed during the time of the autocrats,  namely Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy or Romania.

States which appeard after 1920 based on the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, did not last long. Thus, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia disappeared from the map after 1990, while Romania lost the territories it  acquired after 1920 in the east and in the north, which have not been recovered. Puppet states like South Vietnam have disappeared, and South Korea lives daily under the military threat of North Korea and with American troops who have been there for decades.

However, since neoconservatives have taken over the management of American foreign affairs, things have gotten worse. The post-1989 period, which led to the implosion of the USSR, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, proved to be very turbulent. The construction of new states under the auspices of the Americans began with the creation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, which has never experienced political stability and is in the process of disintegration.

After 2000, the United States tried its luck in the Orient, sponsoring nation-building in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in North Africa, where Libya is still a deeply divided and dysfunctional state. Since 2014, the American neoconservatives have also become deeply involved in the internal affairs and administrative reforms of Ukraine, with dismal results .

The fashion of allied occupation of a defeated enemy began with the occupation of post-Napoleonic France. Its occupation by Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain and Bavaria started in 1815 and lasted until 1818.

During the 20th century, a new coalition of victors at the end of WWII occupied defeated Germany. The Soviets remained in East Germany between 1945 - 1990 and were the first to retire their troops from Germany. The last French battalion, however, left Germany only in 2014; the British contingent left in 2020; while the US still has 20 military bases and around 35,000 soldiers on German soil. Worse still, the NATO military alliance has not been wound up after the end of the Cold War and it even expanded to the Russian border.

Undaunted, however, Antony Blinken has commented - during the recent Russian-CSTO military intervention in Kazakhstan - that it is the Russians who are in the habit of overstaying their welcome in the countries they offer military assistance to.

After a brief review of the two formulas for managing global international affairs, one from the 19th century and today's,  one will be able to judge for themselves whether and to what extent the Americans have succeeded in giving the world more peace and stability than their 19th century predecessors, the crowned autocrats of Europe.

The US are Acting on the Wrong Philosophical Assumptions about History

 When foreigners or Americans themselves are complaining about the US, they usually take aim at its political and economic elite, institutions, its foreign policy, the military or America's cultural or global ambitions.

Few, however, are aware of the fact that powerful nations are run according to an agenda that incorporates a specific interpretation of history:  a historical algorithm, so to speak. By and large, this philosophical interpretation of world history goes a long way towards explaining why nations like the United States behave the way they do.

From the Age of Enlightenment we have inherited a conception about the historical evolution of humanity which in most cases is depicted as both irreversible and unidirectional, or as some specialists call it, linear. In the 19th century Hegel, a German philosopher of history, refined this approach by adding a final destination to this linear historical evolution, which he called "the end of history" (in his view, German history ended with the formation of the Prussian state). Karl Marx was one of his students and he devised his own end-of-history , which was supposed to happen when the proletariat would get on top of the capitalist class for good. The type of society he imagined was called communism, in which exploitation of any kind would completely disappear and  perfect equality would reign among all members of society.

One of the legacies that Marxist philosophy of history left behind was a partition of history according to different types of societies, defined by their specific modes of production. Thus, humanity advanced from prehistorical hunter/gatherers to the classical, slave-owning ancient societies, on to feudal societies, which gave birth to what Marx called capitalist societies, in their turn the harbinger of future communist societies. And herein lies one of his biggest errors. According to a number of social scientists like Eugene Buret, or renowned economists such as J.A. Schumpeter,  capitalist society is not a new and entirely different type of society if compared to the feudal one, but just the decaying phase of medieval Western society. 

In other words, what we were conditioned by Marx to believe about the existence of capitalist and communist societies is basically wrong. If, on the other hand, we look at capitalism (in the west) and communism (in the east) as simply the decomposing phases of feudal societies, many aspects about the organisation and functioning of capitalist or communist societies become more comprehensible from a sociological point of view. What is important to note at this point is that whereas decaying medieval Western societies turned capitalist, decaying feudal Eurasian or Asian societies turned communist. 

It is useful to remember that both capitalism and communism have facilitated the transition of entire nations from agricultural countries to industrialised and urbanised ones in a relatively short period of time, albeit using vastly different methods in achieving these goals. Both types of transition, however, have been marred by extremely painful dislocation, misery and in some cases millions of casualties.

The most problematic part of the historical algorithm used to elaborate political, geostrategic and military agendas is that which refers to the evolution of humanity as a whole. Thus, if Hegel and Marx were right, then under certain conditions historical evolution will stop after reaching a peak, after which the history pages in the book of life will remain blank. A version of this misguided interpretation of historical evolution was given to the American public by Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 published his essay "The End of History and the Last Man".

Like Hegel before him, Fukuyama believed that after the 1991 implosion of the USSR the end of history was in sight. In his view this consists of the universal adoption of market economics principles and of liberal democracy as a political system. His interpretation of world history and especially his end-of-history thesis has informed  the political action of the US and that of American neoconservatives since 2000. To this day, neocons wrongly believe that because the US is the only superpower left, it should retain the status of world hegemon for at least another century.

What actually happened after the implosion of the bipolar world was - after a brief unipolar moment - the advent of the multipolar world, which the US alone adamantly opposes.

In fact, a much more fruitful approach to understanding the historical evolution of humanity could be found in the writings of Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. In his "Scienza Nuova", he postulated that human societies have a cyclical - instead of linear - evolution. Vico's definition of progress differs from that of Kant or Hegel, for example, who were firm believers in the infallibility of human reason. For Vico too, reason was the catalyst for human progress. However, Vico believed in the possible collapse of reason at some point, which in turn could cause civilisational collapse. In other words, he was convinced that a breakdown in reason can cause man to revert to an earlier, barbarous state.( His approach could for example better explain how the excesses of nazism and even communism were ever possible.)

In this cyclical paradigm of evolution, a fallen empire like Rome, for example, partially re-emerged in a different form in 800 under the name of The Holy Roman Empire (considered by Popes as the secular arm of the Church), and it was arguably the most powerful European feudal state during the Middle Ages. The Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years until 1806, when it was replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine by Francis II, the Austrian emperor. After the reunification of German states around Prussia in the 19th century, the rise and the fall of the German empire in the 20th century, the partition of Germany after 1945 and its reunification in 1991, the German federal state is still the most powerful country in the EU.

Yet another example is the recent re-emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, after what the Chinese call "the century of humiliation", with the Chinese share of global GDP  approaching again 25 percent, as it did around the year 1800. 

Russia, too, has put the trials and tribulations of empire collapse and 70 years of communism behind her and is fast re-emerging as the leading Eurasian military power, a status that it used to hold undisputed from the middle of the 18th century. 

Such examples conclusively prove that today's American policymakers would be well-advised to discard theories of history, like Fukuyama's, that can only lead to huge errors, especially in foreign policy. Adopting a cyclical approach to assessing historical developments could indeed yield much more positive outcomes for American experts and politicians alike.

Accordingly, German reunification and de facto leadership of the EU, the re-emergence of Russia as a major military power in Eurasia, or China's rise as a global economic actor should be considered normal historical developments . Moreover, even these countries' quest to have their spheres of influence recognised has deep historical roots and should be considered by Washington as legitimate, instead of being treated as offensive, as it is now the case.

A WAR AND TWO OLYMPICS

 

 Following the 5-day war which started on August 7, 2008 in Georgia, Swiss diplomat Tagliavini prepared a report on the incident for the EU and the OSCE. The report holds Saakashvili, Georgia's then president, responsible for triggering the armed conflict.

There are many analysts who have made analogies between the situation in Georgia at the time and what is happening in Ukraine today. Few, however,  make the connection between these two conflicts and two events that took place or are about to take place thousands of kilometers away : the summer Olympics in  August 8, 2008 and the winter Olympics, which must begin on February 4, 2022 , both hosted in China.

It is very likely that now, as in 2008, the neoconservatives of the US administration have hoped to trigger a similar incident, which would kill 2 birds with one stone. On the one hand, such a conflict would create the conditions for drastic sanctions on Russia. On the other hand, the attention of the international public would have been diverted from the Winter Olympics, depriving the Chinese authorities of the global audience expected for such an event.

So far, however, it appears that no Ukrainian Saakashvili has been found to provoke the Russian army by attacking the Donbas insurgents, thus re-editing a scenario first used on August 7, 2008.

US: from Nation-Building to all-out War

"Billions spent on the Kennedy School, grand strategies seminars, and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service has bought us an elite that's about to blunder us into a Ukraine war."(J.D. Vance)

In a few days from now, President Biden will host German Chancellor Scholz in Washington. The expectation of Washington neocons is that he will succeed in pressuring Germany to join a pan-European alliance against Russia. 

To be sure, the German refusal to send weapons to Ukraine - and thus help ignite a fratricide war between Ukraine and Russia - makes sense. Germany was right in refusing to join the neocon-inspired war against Iraq in 2003 and is even more justified in refusing to join NATO in sponsoring a war against Russia now.

Unfortunately, France is no longer led by a president as experienced or astute as Jacques Chirac: Macron seems willing to send troops to Romania, regardless of how pointless this is from a military point of view.

Since 2001 the US have embarked in quite a few military interventions or coups around the world, which were followed by a disastrous drive to promote nation-building: in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Ukraine (2014). All these ill-conceived nation-building efforts have backfired miserably. Undaunted, the Washington neocons who have monopolised American foreign policy for the last two decades are now promoting a war by proxy, encouraging the Ukrainians to fight the Russians.

Since 2007 onwards, Vladimir Putin has cautioned the West against pushing the boundaries of NATO eastwards. His pleas went ignored and - at the NATO summit in Bucharest one year later -  the George W Bush administration officially announced the intention of the US to include countries like Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance (these efforts were thwarted by the refusal of France and Germany to endorse the expansion). In 2014, the US engineered a coup d'etat in Kiev, replacing Yanukovich with an American puppet regime that ultimately bled Ukraine dry and is at the origin of today's crisis.

Unfortunately, after 14 years of unsuccessfully calling for a stop to NATO's eastward expansion, the Russians were deliberately left with no other option by US negotiators than to put a stop to this expansion through military action against Ukraine. 

The fact is that the treaty they are seeking to guarantee Russia's security can only be concluded after fighting a war, not before.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, Western intellectuals have elaborated projects aimed at achieving "perpetual peace". Some of the fruits of this labour have been the multilateral institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Sadly, however, humanity has been confronted with some of its biggest and most devastating military conflicts regardless of such well-intentioned efforts. To this day, no lasting peace treaty has been able to be concluded without fighting it out on the battlefield first.

The recent, ill-conceived US nation-building efforts abroad have coincided with a period in American history when consensus has evaporated, the nation is deeply divided and American society itself is in danger of internal collapse. Sure, the Pentagon and the US Defence Department are against a war breaking out in Ukraine, but the neocons in Washington and their supporters in the military-industrial complex want it and will most probably get it. 

As long as the American polity remains unable to expunge from their ranks the neocons putting America's future in jeopardy, however, the string of military and nation-building failures experienced by the US is set to continue.

Vladimir Putin's Take on Russian History

 

British historian Dominic Sandbrook tries to explain to Western audiences bored with the study of history that for the nations of Eastern Europe history matters enormously.

He claims that Vladimir Putin is by no means the successor of Stalin - who was Georgian - but that he considers himself as a successor at the helm of the Russian state built by Peter the Great . Thus, in a historical essay published on the website of the Russian presidency, Vladimir Putin states unequivocally that the Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians all have the same origin and hail from the Ancient Rus, even if throughout history there have been divisions between them.

Romanians can very well relate to this approach to Russian history. For at least two centuries, all Romanian intellectuals have stated with one voice that Moldovans, Wallachians and Transylvanians "all hail from Rome", that they belong to the same people, sharing a common origin and language. Putin says exactly the same thing about Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, and I - as an historian - don't think he is wrong .

In other words, Putin is not a kind of post-Soviet leader like Nazarbayev, for example, eager to rebuild the USSR, as the recent neocon campaign in the US would have us believe. No, he is a nationalist leader and is mainly interested in restoring unity to the Russian world. That's why I don't think Putin is a danger to the former Soviet satellites, like  Romania . Bringing the USSR back to life in a  new form is not on the Kremlin's geopolitical agenda.

What is happening now with regard to Ukraine is therefore the consequence of Putin's nationalist approach to the history of Russia, which in his view involves a multidimensional effort aimed at restoring in time the economic and political unity of the Russian world, in the sense that it was first achieved  by Peter the Great in the 18th century.

A NEOCON FOREIGN MINISTER IN TITULESCU'S COUNTRY

 

 I have lived to see this one too! In Titulescu's country, they have installed as  foreign minister a certain Bogdan Aurescu, who acts abroad as if he were an employee of the US State Department and his boss were Blinken, not the president of Romania.

On January 24, Aurescu proposed - without his EU counterparts paying any attention - that the next regular meeting of EU foreign ministers be held in Kiev, in an apparent show of "solidarity" with Ukraine. Without mentioning a single word about the Ukrainian government's policies of denationalization through the language suffered by the 500,000 Romanians who actually live in the middle of the Ukrainian nightmare, Aurescu is worried about the fate of Ukraine! (I won't mention here the fact that in 2015 the same Romanians living in Ukraine complained that the Kiev authorities were forcibly recruiting them and sending them to fight the Russophones in the Donbas.)

As a matter of interest, in 1998 - anticipating trouble in the region - I sent a letter to Romanian President Emil Constantinescu, advising him to try to relocate the Romanians from Ukrainian Bukovina to the villages in Transylvania left empty after the massive migration of Transylvanian Saxons to Germany after 1989. Naturally, the former president turned a typical deaf ear , as if those Romanians did not exist for Bucharest. President Iohannis can find the letter in the archives of the Presidency and could try, as a fellow Transylvanian Saxon, to save willing Romanians of Ukraine from  Kiev's nationalist excesses in the way I proposed back then. He could consider that, of course, once the ski season comes to an end...

As for Aurescu, a resignation of honour would be the most appropriate exit from the scene, even more necessary than that of Prime Minister Ciuca. I am sure that just as the Ukrainians have found a job for the former Georgian president Shakashvili, Aurescu too would be able to find a job over there with the help of American neocons, maybe even as Kiev's foreign minister.