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.

Who's to Blame for the Crisis in Ukraine ?

 September 14, 2014

After almost a year of sustained anti-Russian propaganda in the Western press, Foreign Policy – published by the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – has decided to print an article by John J. Mearsheimer which reads like a veritable Western mea culpa for the crisis in Ukraine.

From the very start, the article denounces the anti-Russian narrative as flawed and makes it clear that the West has knowingly crossed a Russian “red line” in Ukraine. As the author puts it, the main culprit in the events that started to unfold in Ukraine in December 2013 is the West’s triple package of policies consisting of NATO enlargement, EU expansion and the promotion of democracy in Ukraine to the tune of some 5 billion dollars.

Anyone reading the article will agree that the current Ukrainian premier, Arseny Yahtsenyuk, behaves like nothing more than Victoria Nuland’s poodle in Kiev and that his anti-Russian jibes should therefore be discarded accordingly.

Blaming the Russians for the West’s wrongdoings is a time-honored tradition in Washington. Unfortunately, American decision-makers are not known for recognizing the error of their ways or for making amends. What boggles the mind in the Ukrainian crisis is the fact that the problems and the legitimate security interests of a huge country like Russia are being “handled” within the State Department by a low-ranking official like Nuland.

It remains to be seen whether Western officialdom is still capable of taking into account the assessments of its own specialized think tanks, such as the American CFR or the European Council on Foreign Relations, and of getting Europe out of the geostrategic mess it is currently in.

 

The SCO Expands

 August 15, 2014

The EU’s expansion into Ukraine obeys the law of unintended consequences. Alliances that were probably decades into the making are starting to take shape in months, if not weeks.

Thus, after ten years of protracted negotiation, Russia agreed to sign the huge gas-supply contract with China last June. The two countries have reinforced their diplomatic and military cooperation within the SCO and are now poised to enlarge this organization to ten members.

Russia and China have recently announced that India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia will be accepted as new members at the forthcoming SCO summit in Dushanbe to be held on the 11th-12th September 2014. This is how the enlargement process is perceived in New Delhi:

“With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India’s admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting. That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide — as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.”

In a not-too-distant future we could expect Turkey to respond positively to President Nazarbayev’s invitation to join the Eurasian Union. There is also a very strong possibility that Turkey’s observer status within the SCO will morph into full membership of the organization.

In hindsight, the EU’s and NATO’s ill-inspired eastward drive and subsequent sanctions against Russia have greatly accelerated the latent integration plans in Asia and have increased the bonds of solidarity and economic cooperation within the BRICS group of countries.

 

Ukraine: It's High Time for Plan B

 July 29, 2014

One hundred years to the day, the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state model received its first major blow. A few years later in the wake the first world war, the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed and was replaced by a plethora of new national states.

Not all of these states, however, were built as purely ethnic entities. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, for example, tried to uphold the model for another 70 years, with the help of the Soviet Union.

We all know the ending by now. Both countries, including the Soviet Union, imploded and new national states emerged from their ashes: Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Belarus and, last but not least, Ukraine.

Alas, from its inception, the brand new Ukrainian state contained the seeds of its own destruction. As Samuel Huntington rightly predicted in “The Clash”, the faultline which separates western Ukraine from eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians proper from the Russophones, has become the theatre of a bloody civil war.

For reasons unknown to international relations and diplomacy, current western leaders prefer to ignore the fact that Ukraine is about to disintegrate along ethnic lines and that keping it within its current borders is not only unfeasible but downright dangerous for the peace of Europe. The stupidity of singling out Vladimir Putin’s administration for the situation there and of slapping sanctions after sanctions on Russia could only make matters worse.

It is high time therefore to search for a diplomatic way out of the Ukrainian quagmire. One such solution has been offered by two American historians and geopoliticians, James D. Hardy and Leonard J. Hochberg. In a series of articles from the 6th of May, 2014 (“The Ukrainian Crisis, Part III – the Deal”), the two American specialists outlined the so-called Plan B to the current sanctions campaign against Russia:

 

“It is ‘Plan B’. But a least worst position is not by definition either unreasonable nor undesirable. In this case, a divided Ukraine – provided the border is along the civilizational fault line – between Russia and the west makes sense on every level. It reduces tensions, encourages economic growth, takes account of real, not artificial, cultural and ethnic borders, increases the chances for Russian-European cooperation, prevents Ukrainian disintegration, and rescues America from another foreign policy blunder. A partial win, all around.”

In truth, western and Russian politicians are well-advised to arrive at a diplomatic solution for Ukraine sooner rather than later, as the performance of the global economy has started to be seriously affected by this geopolitical tug-of-war between the US and Russia. Furthermore, no politician worth his name could these days advocate the pumping of money and military assistance into a multi-ethnic state in turmoil that has no real chance of surviving as such within its current borders.

As a Romanian historian and geopolitician, I endorse such a diplomatic solution, with the amendment that the territories of south-western Ukraine inhabited by a Romanian-speaking majority, which had been taken away as a result of Stalin’s Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, are allowed to reunite with Romania.

 

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

Can Ukrainians Avoid a Break-up of their Country ?

 February 23, 2014

Saturday’s collapse of the accord brokered on Friday by the three EU foreign ministers in Kiev calls into question the wisdom of Western involvement in Ukraine. Over here we all knew that Ukraine was not only a new country on the map of Europe, but also very vulnerable to being partitioned in two by superpowers with geopolitical designs in the region. The 2004 US-inspired “orange” revolution in Russia’s “near-abroad” security zone has led nowhere. Once again, the direct involvement of the US will conceivably have similar results and the victim is going to be the Ukrainian population.

Following the events in Kiev, Russia has announced that it will suspend its promised financial assistance package to the country and, presumably, cheap gas prices are gone as well. Ukraine is facing economic ruin, social strife and an uncertain political future.

To their credit, no EU politician has supported calls for the demise of the President and the EU is not in any way responsible for the subsequent implosion of the Ukrainian political system. Nation-building is a difficult endeavor at the best of times, and Ukrainians are in desperately short supply of capable, un-corrupt politicians or specialists with statecraft skills.

If the country is to avoid partition, a few useful lessons learned by neighbouring Romania might come in handy. As Ukraine has 25 million citizens living in its pro-Russian zone, it should always elect a President hailing from that region.
In order to satisfy the aspirations of its Western, pro-European citizens, a future Ukrainian constitution should mandate that the job of prime minister be allotted to a Western Ukrainian political leader. Last but not least, executive power should be exercised equally by the President and the chosen prime minister. The former should be henceforth elected directly by the population, whereas the prime minister should be chosen by Parliament. The president of the country should be relieved of his duties only via referendum, whilst the prime minister could be replaced by a vote of the majority of parliamentarians.

These are but a few constitutional changes that might help prevent the break-up of Ukraine and improve the functioning of state institutions in the future. The rest is up to the Ukrainian people themselves.