The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: Ukraine

Truths and lies about pledges made to Russia

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is a senseless one. However, we must realise that much of the blame for this war lies at the door steps of the USA, NATO, and the EU. In this article, author Guy Mettan demolishes the myths put out by the Western press, and highlights the real causes of the war. TPF is delighted in republishing this excellent article by the eminent author, journalist, and parliamentarian. He responded to our request with a refreshing candour –

“I would be very pleased and honoured if you republish my article. I know that Indian people have a very balanced, non-aligned vision of the world that doesn’t exist any more in the West. But I think – and hope – that this hegemonic way of thinking and doing will soon end for a more equitable world.”

– TPF Editorial Team

Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of the famous book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, in which he explains why the United States should definitely grab Ukraine

In particular, it is necessary to correct numerous articles that claimed that the pledge made by the United States to Gorbachev in 1991, according to which NATO “would not move an inch in the East” in exchange for German reunification and the withdrawal of Red Army troops from Eastern Europe, was a “myth” forged by the Kremlin in order to neutralise or even invade Ukraine.

This thesis is based on an article published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2014, at the time of the Ukrainian crisis, and reaffirmed in a book published last November. Its author, Mary E. Sarote, is a member of the most influential think tank in U.S. imperial politics, the Council on Foreign Relations, whose opinions are more propaganda than impartial study.

For this so-called “myth” could not be truer. It is essential to be aware of it if we want to both understand what is happening and find a negotiated solution to the conflict.

“we consider that the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism should provide a guarantee that German reunification will not lead to an expansion of the NATO military organisation to the east”

– James Baker, US Secretary of State, February 9, 1990.

On February 9, 1990, James Baker, then U.S. Secretary of State, said exactly this: “we consider that the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism should provide a guarantee that German reunification will not lead to an expansion of the NATO military organisation to the east.” The next day, Chancellor Helmut Kohl echoed, “We consider that NATO should not expand its sphere of activity.”

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major and Woerner.

In December 2017, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published memos, minutes and telegrams from that time, from which it emerges that Western assurances appear in numerous documents recorded or written during chancellery exchanges in 1990 and 1991. All the details can be found on the university’s dedicated website, under the heading “NATO Expansion: what Gorbachev Heard. Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major and Woerner. Slavic Studies Panel Addresses ‘Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?’”

Former American ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, also confirmed these facts in his various publications. Guarantees have therefore been given, even if they are not contained in a treaty signed in due form.

But you have to be willing to take note and recognise that a word is a word.

President Bill Clinton decided to ignore them and succeeded, in 1997, in expanding NATO eastwards by admitting new members in exchange for a $4 billion “bribe” to his friend Boris Yeltsin, as Yeltsin later called this gift.

It was only later, with the rise of the neoconservatives, that President Bill Clinton decided to ignore them and succeeded, in 1997, in expanding NATO eastwards by admitting new members in exchange for a $4 billion “bribe” to his friend Boris Yeltsin, as Yeltsin later called this gift.

At that time, the most resolute anti-Russian in the American administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of the famous book “The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, in which he explains why the United States should definitely grab Ukraine, foresaw what would happen today: “If Russia is dismissed or rejected, it will be filled with resentment and its vision of itself will become more anti-European and anti-Western.” And he urged Clinton to hurry: “The longer we wait, the louder Moscow’s objections will be,” he predicted in the mid-1990s, while warning against an overly abrupt expansion.

George Kennan, in a February 5, 1997 New York Times article, prophesized the current situation by writing that, following the breach of the given word to Gorbachev, the expansion of NATO is a ‘Fateful Error’.

This danger was not overlooked by the father of the Soviet Union’s containment, George Kennan. In a 1997 New York Times article, he prophesized the current situation by writing that, following the breach of the given word to Gorbachev, the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO would be “the biggest mistake of post-Cold War American politics and would only serve to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in the Russian public.”

Since then, NATO has only made things worse, admitting seven new states in 2004 and promising membership to Ukraine and Georgia in April 2008, before encouraging the latter to attack South Ossetia in August of the same year. This was barely ten months after Putin’s speech at the Munich conference, in which he had expressed the wish that NATO should stop expanding! In 25 years, NATO has doubled the number of its members, all in the East.

At the same time, it accumulated aggressions by brazenly lying and twisting international law: the Gulf War in 1991 (with the fabricated affair of the babies thrown out of Kuwaiti incubators); the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1992, the illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999 and secession of Kosovo (justified by the pseudo-massacre of Raçak and the so-called Operation Horseshoe imputed to Serbia); the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the Iraq war in 2003 (started thanks to Colin Powell’s lies to the UN); the destruction of Libya and the assassination of Gaddafi (falsely accused of slaughtering his own population) in 2011; the attempted destruction of Syria and the overthrow of its president between 2011 and 2019; the war in Yemen since 2015, carried out under Saudi flag and considered by the UN to be the most important humanitarian catastrophe of our time.

It is therefore very difficult to regard the American-led NATO as an innocent and harmless bridge club.

It should therefore come as no surprise that, after the U.S.-organised coup in February 2014 to overthrow democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose mistake was to wish for Ukraine to seek a balance between Russia and Europe, Russia regained control of Crimea while the Donbass provinces rebelled against this forfeiture.

The United States and NATO are of course free to renege on their word and continue their aggressive course at the risk of starting a war. But at least the public has the right to know why and how it has come to this without being misled about who is really responsible for what would be a real mess for Europe.

This article was published earlier in MRonline. It is republished under Creative Commons License,

Feature Image: www.ft.com

James Baker Image: www.bakerinstitute.org

George Kennan Image: Foreign Policy and his article ‘A Fatefull Error’ in NYT.

March 20, 2022
10 Bangladeshis Evacuated By India From Ukraine: PM Hasina Dials To Thank PM Modi

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has expressed her gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for rescuing nine stranded Bangladeshi students from Sumy, the north-eastern city of besieged Ukraine and other areas.

At least two more Bangladeshi nationals are still stuck in Mariupol, shared Ambassador Sultana Laila Hossain, Bangladesh’s envoy to Poland and Ukraine in an exclusive interaction with The New Indian. Ambassador Hossain also thanked India for saving 10 Bangladeshi lives.

Nine Bangladeshis have been evacuated by India under its pilot evacuation drive Operation Ganga on March 9, and one Bangladeshi was airlifted on March 4. The nine evacuees are on the way to the domicile via transit route in Poland.

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March 15, 2022
Sanctions on Russia: How will they play out?

The rich nations supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia have imposed sanctions on the latter. They cannot intervene militarily directly since that would lead to a much wider conflagration and a possible catastrophic Third World War, as the Russian Foreign Minister has warned. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization realizes that and has not sent its troops to Ukraine, in spite of pleadings by the Ukrainian government. Instead, it is providing arms and other support to Ukraine to resist the invasion. The situation remains dangerous and tricky.

Sanctions are supposed to punish the Russians for their aggression. It won’t halt the war but will it hurt the Russians enough that they will regret the invasion and not embark on future adventures? If the war drags on the costs could mount. This could lead to pressures for a regime change in Moscow and that may lead to a ratcheting up of the war. If sanctions are successful, will it be a lesson to China? Severe sanctions against Iran (0.3 per cent of the World’s Gross Domestic Product [GDP]) did not bring it to its knees. Given that the Russian economy is bigger (1.7 per cent of the World’s GDP) and much more advanced technologically, its economy may be much less impacted.

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March 15, 2022
The Russia-Ukraine War: Putin’s Reasons, Objectives and the Way Out

In 3 weeks since Russia’s president, Putin ordered on February 24 this year, a “special military operation” against Ukraine, many questions were asked on his reasons and goals.

Putin answered those questions in the early morning address to the nation on February 24. He referred to Russia’s particular concern and anxiety over the NATO expansion to the east and the US policy of containment of Russia through the military “settlement” of the Ukrainian territory. Transformation of Ukraine, historically a part of the Russian state, into an “anti-Russia” controlled and guided by the U.S. was nothing less, in Putin’s view than a real threat to Russia’s very existence.

Putin went on to mention Ukraine’s use of armed forces against the pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, the potential threat that the Ukrainian nationalists could present for Russia-annexed Crimea, and Kyiv’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons. “Russia’s clash with these forces is inevitable.”

This was the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Few of us believed it would actually happen, but it did, nonetheless. Let’s start by trying to understand, why.

Russia’s red lines

According to John Mearsheimer, the West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the current crisis, which actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, with the US pushing the alliance to announce a plan for Ukraine and Georgia’s prospective membership. Russian leaders characterized the move as an existential threat to Russia and promises to thwart it. Putin warned the West then and there: “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”

Nobody listened, or paid attention, thus underscoring the second point from Putin’s pre-invasion speech: the West no longer treats Russia as a great power and will do whatever it deems necessary without taking heed of Russia’s legitimate interests. Instead, Ukraine was actively encouraged to expand its collaboration with NATO and crush the pro-Russian rebellion in Donbas by force. The U.S. and NATO supplied lethal weapons for Ukraine’s civil war, trained its armed forces and turned a blind eye to reports of atrocities that Kyiv and Kyiv-affiliated militias had committed in the region.

Ukraine started hosting joint land-based and naval exercises with NATO countries, effectively blocking Russia’s Black Sea fleet in its base in Sevastopol. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. In November 2021, the U.S. conducted its annual Global Thunder 22 exercises, which included strategic aviation practising nuclear strikes against Russia over the Black Sea and only 20 km from Russia’s borders. In parallel to that, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Defense announced his country’s aspirations to put as many US/NATO training centers in Ukraine as possible, which effectively amounted to a request for additional U.S. military personnel in the country.

As John Mearsheimer observed, Ukraine was fast becoming a de facto member of NATO. It wanted to use NATO’s rearmaments and the US political and strategic back-up to crush the separatist rebellion in Donbas and ensure “de-occupation and reintegration” of Crimea, now an integral part of the Russian Federation, by all necessary means, not excluding “military measures.” Russia’s fears of NATO’s ballistic missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border, within 7-8 minutes of flying time to Moscow no longer seemed overly exaggerated. Putin described such a potentiality as NATO’s holding a knife to Russia’s throat and made an explicit connection between Ukraine’s aspirations of NATO membership and Kyiv’s plan to return Donbas and Crimea by force. Both were equally unacceptable.

Russia’s goals

According to the Russian leader, if Ukraine joined NATO, it would be tempted to implement its “de-occupation strategy” for Crimea through the use of force. NATO would then be obliged to help Ukraine under its Article V mutual defence clause. “This means that there will be a military confrontation between Russia and NATO,” Putin said. Such a war would soon turn nuclear. The Kremlin came to a conclusion that a pre-emptive strike on Ukraine was the only way to stave off a future Russia-NATO war over Crimea.

We haven’t seen it coming. It was hard to anticipate because Ukraine’s turning away from Russia and drawing closer to NATO did not start yesterday. Ukraine’s Yavoriv training ground hosted the first joint manoeuvres with NATO back in 1995. In 1997, Ukraine and NATO signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership. In 2000, the Ukrainian parliament ratified the Status of Forces Agreement, which enabled the stationing of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil. In 2002, Ukraine’s goal of eventual NATO membership was first voiced by its President; that goal has since become a part of the country’s official foreign policy doctrine. Ukraine’s forces took part in numerous NATO-led operations and missions over the years, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq. And Russia observed all of these developments over the period of near 20 years with calm and reserve, leaving an impression that Ukraine is free to proceed as it wants.

Moscow’s calm evaporated after Ukraine’s Maidan revolution of 2014 deposed Russia-leaning president Yanukovych and, through the revolutionary powers’ first acts, indicated a clear break with the last memories of the Russian influence. Symbolically, the very first move was to strip the Russian language of its semi-official status in the areas where significant numbers of Russian-speaking minorities lived. A clear indication was given as to the status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet naval base in Sevastopol – the new powers would prefer the Russian navy relocate to Russia proper at its earliest convenience. Plans were underway to offer these naval facilities to NATO.

Putin moved on to annex Crimea, which, in his view, was an act of strategic necessity. He apparently anticipated Ukraine’s eventually acquiescing to the fact.

It did not happen. Instead, Ukraine grew more nationalistic, and a significant number of its nationalists embraced anti-Russianism together with far-right politics and symbology. Hence, the Russian goals in the present war include “de-Nazification,” which must be read as Ukraine’s abandonment of anti-Russian nationalism and return to the quasi-Soviet ideology of “one people” with Russians and Belarusians. In other words, Russia would seek to reaffirm, if not impose, a version of the Ukrainian identity that was supported through both the imperial and the Soviet times — Ukrainians as a junior kinfolk to the Russian “older brother.”

The way out

With Ukraine’s capital Kyiv under assault and the southern port of Mariupol nearing utter destruction, calls for peace have intensified on all sides, including from Russia’s most important backers in China. Unfortunately, the search for a working compromise has not yet started in earnest. Ukraine’s original position at peace talks focused on the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from all of Ukraine, Crimea and Donbas included. From the Russian perspective, that would be equal to capitulation and surrender of a part of its own territory (Crimea), plus legal denunciation of a friendship and support treaty just concluded with Donbas.

Russia’s present terms for ending the war are equally unrealistic. They include Ukraine’s adoption of a neutral status and the abandonment of its hopes for NATO membership; acknowledgement of the Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the independence of separatist regions in the country’s east; and demilitarization. The objective of the regime change, disguised by the “de-Nazification” rhetoric, has not been voiced much as of recent.

Given the very fact of the ongoing war with Russia, the demand for demilitarization is clearly a non-starter. Russia’s insistence on Ukraine’s constitutional neutrality could, perhaps, be taken back to Ukraine’s parliament for a serious discussion; however, a ceasefire must be reached first for such a discussion to happen. As for Ukraine’s acknowledgement of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea or independence of Donbas, these Russia-pushed items look more like the terms of surrender and cannot form the basis of a peace agreement.

A more plausible ground for a compromise could be the two states’ mutual pledge to refrain from all attempts to solve any outstanding issues by force in the future. That would stop short from Ukraine’s recognition of either Crimea or Donbas but would assure Russia that Ukraine has no plans to regain the lost territories by force. Russia would need to withdraw its army from all areas of Ukraine proper. Ukraine would have to accept that its fight for the return of Crimea and Donbas would now be restricted in its choice of means to mostly diplomatic and legal instruments. The assurances of a non-aligned, non-bloc status that Ukraine could give to Russia should be matched with Russia’s assurances of full compensation for the losses that this war inflicted on Ukraine’s economy and society. While such a compromise will most probably draw the rage of hawkish nationalists on both sides, it might actually form the foundation of a peace agreement that everyone needs.

Image Credits:

Feature Image: www.militarytimes.com

Putin Image: Al Jazeera

Map: Al Jazeera

March 14, 2022
The Ukraine crisis: Its impact on India

India has to tread a fine line in this imbroglio: Taking care of the welfare and evacuation of Indian students and the possibility of an oil price hike.

The face-off over Ukraine between Russia and the United States and its Nato allies has been dominating the headlines for a while now with tensions ratcheting up as we receive dire public warnings every day of a Russian invasion any day now. Clearly, the possibility of Russian intervention there, and the consequent escalation of sanctions against them, is very real and concerning.

While Ukraine may be a developing country and the poorest in Europe, by no means is it a pushover. It is the second-largest country there, behind Russia, by area, and in terms of population the eighth largest with its 42 million inhabitants. It has been independent since 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, though it had been a part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union since the 18th century. If there is one lesson that Putin and the Russian military should have learnt from America’s disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan is that invasions are relatively easy to accomplish, but keeping restive and hostile populations under control is a wholly different proposition.

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March 7, 2022
100 Years after the End of the First World War: Are we slipping again into a World War?

In view of the developments in Ukraine, the question arises whether there could be a repetition of the First World War in slipping into a new World War that no one intended. This original thesis is accentuated in different ways, whether in the form that European politicians behaved like “somnambulists (Clark) or just failed (Münkler). The blame for the war was also sought in Serbia or Vienna. Hereby the original thesis of the main war guilt of Germany is questioned, as it was fixed in the Treaty of Versailles and by the historian Fritz Fischer as the “grip on the world power” of Germany. However, if the causes of the First World War and, above all, its escalation are no longer seen in the German Empire alone, but are more or less equally distributed among the major European powers, this does not mean that “nothing and nobody” is responsible for the primordial catastrophe of the 20th century: Nationalism, arms race, industrialized warfare, pure power politics – all these are factors that contributed decisively to the First World War. Moreover, it should be emphasized, which even today is far from being overcome in many parts of the world. Against the backdrop of the Ukraine War, a much-discussed book by the highly influential American political scientist Robert Kagan takes on a whole new relevance. Kagan suggests the idea that Europeans could live in a paradise of peace and order after World War II only because the Americans were prepared to confront possible threats to that peace decisively and violently. Thanks to America’s power, Europeans could have indulged in the belief that (military) power was no longer important. But does the principle follow from this that law and order must be upheld in dealings with one another, but in the violent “jungle, we must follow the laws of the jungle”? Or, conversely, is it not the case that state warfare and the exercise of violence that does not adhere to its self-imposed conventions and limitations will stir up more violent resistance than they, in turn, can fight?

Kagan is partly correct. All modern states are based on the state’s monopoly on the use of force, and almost all of them have emerged through a violent process-remember the English, American, and French Revolutions, the German wars of unification, the wars of decolonization, and the emergence of new nation-states after World Wars I and II. Therefore, however, states do not as such embody an order of violence. Hegel had argued that violence is the appearing beginning of the state, but not its substantial principle. Nor is order powerlessness, as Robert Kagan’s much-discussed book on “Power and Powerlessness” in the New World Order suggests. Does political power come from the barrels of guns, as Mao Tse Tung suggested? If so, the Soviet Union should never have collapsed because gun barrels were more than enough for the Red Army.

Kagan assigns the opposition of power and order thinking to contemporary American and European thinking but admits this has not always been the case. As he points out, the situation was just the opposite for a long time. The Americans up to Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the last century, he says, were committed to thinking of order and a world-political idealism of spreading human rights, while the Europeans remained committed to pure thinking of power until World War II. What is astonishing, if we take Kagan’s own analysis seriously, is why he does not ask to what final conclusion this “pure power thinking” among Europeans led – to nothing other than the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Kagan may be right about one thing: in view of the “state-failure” problems in numerous Third World states on the one hand (emphasized by the Europeans in the anti-terror struggle) and those of the so-called “rogue states” on the other (on which American interest focused under Bush), illusions about the end of history and a largely peaceful, because economically determined, 21st century is fast fading. However, this cannot mean developing a new metaphysics of struggle and self-assertion that only force can enforce.

Historical Traditions

In determining the political sphere in categories of power or order, Kagan finds himself in a long ancestral line of the history of political ideas. Dolf Sternberger distinguished three different roots of the concept of politics: cooperation, following Aristotle; demonology, starting from Machiavelli; and eschatology, as he essentially saw it realized in Marxism, starting from the church father, Augustine. Sternberger’s distinction is phenomenological still valid today, even if his evaluations are problematic because he saw himself in the tradition of the Aristotelian concept of politics and – as the term demonology already shows – fiercely fought the opposite position.

How are these distinctions to be understood? Here are two quotations: Aristotle begins his work on politics with the definition: “Everything that is called state is obviously a kind of community, and every community is formed and exists for the purpose of obtaining some good.” In contrast, Jean Bodin, perhaps the most important constitutionalist of the 16th century, referred directly to Aristotle. However, his position should be read as his deliberate inversion: “Republic is a lawful government over several households and what is common to them, with sovereign power.” Precisely because Bodin modelled his work on Aristotle’s, the contrast between the two determinations jumps out all the more clearly: on the one hand, a community for the sake of a common goal; on the other, rule endowed with sovereign power. Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis best describes the third dimension of Sternberger’s distinction: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it.” In contrast to Sternberger’s notion of demonology, however, one side of this line of tradition is by no means “Machiavellianism,” a struggle for power for power’s sake. Instead, it claims to constitute an (absolute) power out of insight into the violence of human nature, which prevents the struggle of all against all.

Sternberger emphasizes the fundamental difference between the first two concepts of politics when he asks in summary: “Is it the conflict of interests, powers, beliefs, and wills that thus characterizes the political in its peculiar essence? Or is it rather the balance, the compromise, the contract, the common rule of life. And conversely asked: should we interpret peace – civil peace as well as peace among nations – as the abolition and overcoming, as the negation of politics, or, on the contrary, as its completion?”

Struggle for power and domination, on the one hand, negotiation and the establishment of order on the other, are the two opposite definitions of the essence of politics that run through the history of political ideas. As antipodes may be mentioned only: Thucydides and Plato resp. Aristotle, Machiavelli and Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hegel and Kant, Schmitt and Arendt, recently Foucault, resp. Luhmann and Habermas.

If we take a closer look at this line of ancestors, it should be enough reason to warn us not to reduce politics to pure power politics. Thomas Hobbes, for example, with his conception of the state monopoly on the use of force, justified internal peace and the avoidance of civil war, but at the same time advocated an absolute sovereign. And Carl Schmitt stands paradigmatically for the problem of reducing politics to pure power politics. For it was not personal opportunism or immoderate ambition that justified his closeness to the National Socialists, but the extreme consequence of his reduction of the political to the distinction between friend and foe in a crisis-ridden world-historical situation. Carl Schmitt wrote in this regard: A total state “does not allow any anti-state, state-inhibiting or state-dividing forces to arise within it. It does not think of handing over the new means of power to its own enemies and destroyers. Such a state can distinguish friend from foe.” The reduction of the political to only one of two sides, the exercise of power or reliance on the establishment of order, has always led to problematic consequences in historical development. Against the false alternative between power or order and their immediate connection in order of power, the “middle” between power and order has to be found again. Violence cannot establish peace, but it can limit other violence to such an extent that other than violent structures come into play. Perhaps America and Europe have more to learn from each other than either side realizes.

Developments after September 11

Especially after the attacks of September 11, hardly any author in his assessment of the events could do without reference to Carl Schmitt’s world-famous definition of the political as the distinction between friend and foe. Even before the attacks, however, the political theory had already noted the shift from “Kant to Schmitt” as a consequence of the crisis of the political. Finally, George W. Bush elevated Schmitt’s definition of the political to a quasi-official governmental program in the United States. In this perspective, Robert Kagan denies that Europe and the USA still have a common view of the world at all. “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.” By this, he means that Europe lives in a Kantian fantasy world of eternal peace, while America is called upon and alone empowered to create order in Hobbesian anarchy on a global scale.

Schmitt as the “mastermind” of the Western world? The tendency to refer back to Schmitt is not unproblematic, however. The possible linking of politics and political theory to Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political cannot, in principle, disregard Schmitt’s temporary proximity to the National Socialists. For it was not personal opportunism or immoderate ambition that justified this closeness, but the extreme consequence of his reduction of the political to the distinction between friend and foe in a crisis-like world-historical situation. Carl Schmitt wrote about this, as indicated: A total state “does not allow any anti-state, state-inhibiting or state-dividing forces to arise within it. It does not think of handing over the new means of power to its own enemies and destroyers……. Such a state can distinguish friend from foe.” Are we not already living in such a total surveillance state?

The reduction of the political to a pure struggle for power, to a pure friend-enemy distinction, has problematic consequences, as is revealed especially in Schmitt. Conversely, the reduction of the political to the establishment of the agreement, of acting together, leads either to “apolitical” idealism or violent utopianism, as was shown especially in Marxism/communism. But which is now the solution? The distinction between friend and foe is a precondition of political action, but it is not its goal – the goal of politics regarding war and violence is the “mediation” of friend and foe. Or as Yitzhak Rabin described it: Peace is not made with friends, but with enemies! This is the art of politics, to enable a peaceful conflict resolution with opponents instead of falling into the traps of pure power politics – this is the lesson of the First World War then and today.

Feature Image Credit: powervertical.org

March 6, 2022
US Foreign Policy Is a Cruel Sport

The Russia- Ukraine conflict escalated into a full-blown as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered special military operations into Ukraine. In this global geopolitical chessboard, Ukraine is a pawn and a tragic victim. However, the causes of this war lie squarely in the decades-long aggressive strategy employed by the US and its European allies in expanding NATO at the expense of Russia’s security and strategic interests. Henry Kissinger’s, in his 2014 article, sounded prophetic – “if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.” He categorically stated Ukraine must not join NATO. Diana Johnston’s article clearly brings out the reasons for the current mess and how the USA’s aggressive and deeply self-centred foreign policy has created much of the mess in today’s world.

The Peninsula Foundation is happy to republish this article with the author’s permission. The opinions expressed are the author’s own.

The article was published earlier in Consortium News.

– Editorial Team

In the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, British royal circles enjoyed watching fierce dogs torment a captive bear for the fun of it. The bear had done no harm to anyone, but the dogs were trained to provoke the imprisoned beast and goad it into fighting back. Blood flowing from the excited animals delighted the spectators.

This cruel practice has long since been banned as inhumane.

And yet today, a version of bear baiting is being practised every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale. It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.

United States leaders, secure in their arrogance as “the indispensable nation,” have no more respect for other countries than the Elizabethans had for the animals they tormented. The list is long of targets of U.S. bear-baiting, but Russia stands out as a prime example of constant harassment. And this is no accident. The baiting is deliberately and elaborately planned.

As evidence, I call attention to a 2019 report by the RAND Corporation to the U.S. Army chief of staff entitled “Extending Russia.” Actually, the RAND study itself is fairly cautious in its recommendations and warns that many perfidious tricks might not work. However, I consider the very existence of this report scandalous, not so much for its content as for the fact that this is what the Pentagon pays its top intellectuals to do: figure out ways to lure other nations into troubles U.S. leaders hope to exploit.

The official U.S. line is that the Kremlin threatens Europe by its aggressive expansionism, but when the strategists talk among themselves the story is very different. Their goal is to use sanctions, propaganda and other measures to provoke Russia into taking the very sort of negative measures (“over-extension”) that the U.S. can exploit to Russia’s detriment.

The RAND study explains its goals:

“We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”

Clearly, in U.S. ruling circles, this is considered “normal” behaviour, just as teasing is normal behaviour for the schoolyard bully, and sting operations are normal for corrupt FBI agents.

This description perfectly fits U.S. operations in Ukraine, intended to “exploit Russia’s vulnerabilities and anxieties” by advancing a hostile military alliance onto its doorstep, while describing Russia’s totally predictable reactions as gratuitous aggression. Diplomacy involves understanding the position of the other party. But verbal bear baiting requires total refusal to understand the other, and constant deliberate misinterpretation of whatever the other party says or does.

What is truly diabolical is that, while constantly accusing the Russian bear of plotting to expand, the whole policy is directed at goading it into expanding! Because then we can issue punishing sanctions, raise the Pentagon budget a few notches higher and tighten the NATO Protection Racket noose tighter around our precious European “allies.”

For a generation, Russian leaders have made extraordinary efforts to build a peaceful partnership with “the West,” institutionalized as the European Union and above all, NATO. They truly believed that the end of the artificial Cold War could produce a peace-loving European neighbourhood. But arrogant United States leaders, despite contrary advice from their best experts, rejected treating Russia as the great nation it is and preferred to treat it as the harassed bear in a circus.

The expansion of NATO was a form of bear-baiting, the clear way to transform a potential friend into an enemy. That was the way chosen by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and following administrations. Moscow had accepted the independence of former members of the Soviet Union. Bear-baiting involved constantly accusing Moscow of plotting to take them back by force.

Russia’s Borderland

An unpaved road to Lysychansk, Lugansk, March 2015. (Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Ukraine is a word meaning borderlands, essentially the borderlands between Russia and the territories to the West that were sometimes part of Poland, or Lithuania, or Habsburg lands. As a part of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine was expanded to include large swaths of both. History had created very contrasting identities on the two extremities, with the result that the independent nation of Ukraine, which came into existence only in 1991, was deeply divided from the start. And from the start, Washington strategies, in cahoots with a large, hyperactive anti-communist anti-Russian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, contrived to use the bitterness of Ukraine’s divisions to weaken first the U.S.S.R. and then Russia. Billions of dollars were invested in order to “strengthen democracy” – meaning the pro-Western west of Ukraine against its semi-Russian east.

The 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Viktor Yukanovych, solidly supported by the east of the country, brought to power pro-West forces determined to bring Ukraine into NATO, whose designation of Russia as the prime enemy had become ever more blatant. This caused the prospect of an eventual NATO capture of Russia’s major naval base at Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula.

Since the Crimean population had never wanted to be part of Ukraine, the peril was averted by organizing a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to return to Russia, from which they had been severed by an autocratic Khrushchev ruling in 1954. Western propagandists relentlessly denounced this act of self-determination as a “Russian invasion” foreshadowing a program of Russian military conquest of its Western neighbours – a fantasy supported by neither facts nor motivation.

Appalled by the coup overthrowing the president they had voted for, by nationalists threatening to outlaw the Russian language they spoke, the people of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence.

March 2015: Civilians pass by as OSCE monitors the movement of heavy weaponry in eastern Ukraine. (OSCE, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Russia did not support this move but instead supported the Minsk agreement, signed in February 2015 and endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution. The gist of the accord was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine by a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in return for their local autonomy.

The Minsk agreement set out a few steps to end the internal Ukrainian crisis. First, Ukraine was supposed to immediately adopt a law granting self-government to eastern regions (in March 2015). Next, Kyiv would negotiate with eastern territories over guidelines for local elections to be held that year under OSCE supervision. Then Kyiv would implement a constitutional reform guaranteeing eastern rights. After the elections, Kyiv would take full control of Donetsk and Lugansk, including the border with Russia. A general amnesty would cover soldiers on both sides.

However, although it signed the agreement, Kyiv has never implemented any of these points and refuses to negotiate with the eastern rebels. Under the so-called Normandy agreement, France and Germany were expected to put pressure on Kyiv to accept this peaceful settlement, but nothing happened. Instead, the West has accused Russia of failing to implement the agreement, which makes no sense inasmuch as the obligations to implement fall on Kyiv, not on Moscow. Kyiv officials regularly reiterate their refusal to negotiate with the rebels, while demanding more and more weaponry from NATO powers in order to deal with the problem in their own way.

Meanwhile, major parties in the Russian Duma and public opinion have long expressed concern for the Russian-speaking population of the eastern provinces, suffering from privations and military attack from the central government for eight years. This concern is naturally interpreted in the West as a remake of Hitler’s drive to conquest neighbouring countries. However, as usual, the inevitable Hitler analogy is baseless. For one thing, Russia is too large to need to conquer Lebensraum.

You Want an Enemy? Now You’ve Got One

Germany has found the perfect formula for Western relations with Russia: Are you or are you not a “Putinversteher,” a “Putin understander?” By Putin, they mean Russia, since the standard Western propaganda ploy is to personify the targeted country with the name of its president, Vladimir Putin, necessarily a dictatorial autocrat. If you “understand” Putin or Russia, then you are under deep suspicion of disloyalty to the West. So, all together now, let us make sure that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND Russia!

Image Credit: metro.co.uk

Russian leaders claim to feel threatened by members of a huge hostile alliance, holding regular military manoeuvers on their doorstep? They feel uneasy about nuclear missiles aimed at their territory from nearby NATO member states? Why, that’s just paranoia, or a sign of sly, aggressive intentions. There is nothing to understand.

So, the West has treated Russia like a baited bear. And what it’s getting is a nuclear-armed, militarily powerful adversary nation led by people vastly more thoughtful and intelligent than the mediocre politicians in office in Washington, London and a few other places.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his Deep State never wanted a peaceful solution in Ukraine, because troubled Ukraine acts as a permanent barrier between Russia and Western Europe, ensuring U.S. control over the latter. They have spent years treating Russia as an adversary, and Russia is now drawing the inevitable conclusion that the West will accept it only as an adversary. The patience is at an end. And this is a game-changer.

First reaction: the West will punish the bear with sanctions! Germany is stopping certification of the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline. Germany thus refuses to buy the Russian gas it needs in order to make sure Russia won’t be able to cut off the gas it needs some time in the future. Now that’s a clever trick, isn’t it! And meanwhile, with a growing gas shortage and rising prices, Russia will have no trouble selling its gas somewhere else in Asia.

When “our values” include refusal to understand, there is no limit to how much we can fail to understand.

To be continued.

Feature Image: nato.int

March 1, 2022