DOES RUSSIA HAVE A FUTURE?

COLLECTED (NONCONFORMIST) ESSAYS ON RUSSIAN,
AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN RELATIONS, 2013-15

Gilbert Doctorow

Copyright © 2015 Mr Gilbert S. Doctorow

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1514665336

ISBN 13: 9781514665336

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910347

Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

North Charleston, South Carolina

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1.Does Russia Have a Future?

2.A Russianist Who Cares: Thane Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune

3.America’s Neocon Mainstream

4.The Indefatigable Bill Browder: Selling the Magnitsky Act to Europe

5.Vote rigging in Estonia: Anti-Russian freedom fighter falls on her own sword

6.Russia’s Finest Hour

7.De-funding Title VIII Financial Aid to Russian Language Studies: a blessing in disguise?

8.Bill Browder, Master of Bait and Switch

9.Ukraine, between East and West: What Lessons can be Drawn?

10.Rebuttal to Timothy Snyder’s essay on Ukraine in The New York Review of Books

11.Making sense of Vladimir Putin’s State of the Nation Address, 12 December 2013

12.Ukraine-Russia Rapprochement, 17 December 2013: Point, Set, Match

13.Push-back to Sylvie Kauffmann’s op-ed page essay “How Europe Can Help Kiev” in

The International New York Times

14.Victoria Nuland: whence the ill wind blows

15.Cool under Fire: Measured Responses to the ‘Trash Sochi, Trash Russia, Trash Putin’ Propaganda Offensive

16.Russian State Television and the Information War

17.Two peoples under one national roof: Ukraine’s constitutional dilemma and solutions made in Belgium

18.The Bear is Back? Meet the New Mischa!

19.Foreign Affairs magazine as a comic strip: the 28 February online issue

20.Vladimir Putin, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu: Grammar lessons for today

21.EU-US Sanctions and the Russian Annexation of Crimea

22.Latvia’s 300,000 Non-Citizens and the Ukrainian Crisis Today

23.‘Apologists for Putin’ and America’s discussion of the Ukraine crisis

24.Vladimir Putin’s Speech to the Federal Assembly on Crimean Accession: Commentary

25.The War Party in Washington and the Sanctions Toolkit

26.Preparing the Way for the New G-8

27.Barack Obama’s Speech in Bozar: Is there a New Cold War?

28.Further lessons in Realpolitik: last chance to engage with Russia

29.4th EU-Africa Summit and the Ukrainian Crisis: gossip in the corridors

30.Creation of U.S. and European Chapters of a Committee on East-West Accord: A call to men and women of good will and common sense

31.What your cleaning lady can explain to you about the Ukrainian crisis

32.The uncivil war being waged in America’s East Coast-based, liberal magazines of commentary

33.Latvia’s failed U.S.-inspired policies towards Russia and Russians

34.Foreign Affairs magazine, May-June 2014 issue: The false debate over “The Return of Geopolitics”

35.An Open Letter to Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger

36.Angela Merkel’s Ultimatum

37.The Worm Turns: Russian Pundits on the Ukrainian Crisis and Western Sanctions

38.House of Cards and the Obama Administration’s Policy on Russia

39.Speech to the US-Russia Forum, Hotel Arbat, Moscow, 8 September 2014

40.Foreign Affairs magazine, September-October 2014 issue: “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” John Mearsheimer

41.Khodorkovsky for President!

42.American civil society - hostage to the sanctions policy

43.Alphabet Soup is Good for You: United Left in the European Parliament

44.Twilight of the Gods: George Soros in Brussels

45.Foreign Affairs magazine, November-December 2014: the Mearsheimer Debate

46.The American Peace Movement and the New Cold War

47.Richard Haass: The Absent Voice at Valdai – Sochi

48.The Fragile Triangle: The West, Ukraine and Russia

49.American War Plans Would Fail if Europe Stumbles

50.Putin, the Public Speaker

51.Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mitteleuropa, or why Germany is as responsible for the growing disaster in Ukraine as the USA

52.Stratfor’s George Friedman and Realism in American Foreign Policy

53.Why the Minsk-2 Settlement of the Ukrainian Crisis Will Hold

54.Merkel, the Peacemaker

55.Boris Nemtsov, R.I.P., 27 February 2015

56.A youtube.com documentary worth viewing: Round Table in Brussels 2 March 2015

57.A Push-back to the CEPS Task Force Report on “More Union in European Defence”

58.Crimea. A Way Home: Important Public Diplomacy Messages from Russia on the Ukraine Crisis

59.Speech to the World Russia Forum

60.A fresh look at Strobe Talbott’s The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy

61.Moscow’s 70th Anniversary Victory Day Celebrations: as reported by a fly on the wall

62.2015 Schlangenbad Dialogue: the East-West Confrontation in Microcosm

FOREWORD

As professionals in the book trade know well, there are few concepts harder to sell to a publisher than collections of essays like this one. The industry’s clear preference is for monographs, i.e. thoroughly integrated texts around a single theme from a fixed perspective in time. Such writing has the advantage of reducing repetition of message to the bare minimum of questions at the start and conclusions at the end.

However, collections have their own virtue in showing the evolution of thinking on the subjects under examination as new facts come in, and this is what I offer the reader here. I have exercised my author’s prerogative of editing the selected essays, as appropriate, to curtail repetition while leaving in place the changes in my views over the period covered with respect to such questions as the existence of a “New Cold War” or Russian intentions in Crimea and in Ukraine more generally. Another benefit of this format is that I have been able to delve deeply into the argumentation of several specific thinkers, in a way that might be unbalanced in a monograph but here, I believe, contributes real substance.

For those who have read my 2013 book Stepping Out of Line, there will be few surprises in the “nonconformist” political viewpoint which I pursue in this follow-on collection of essays. Moreover, the several genres in which I work will be familiar. These are a mixture of journalism, by which I mean first-hand accounts of significant events of our times in which I am present as witness either in person or via live television broadcasts uninterrupted by commentary; book reviews intended to explore issues that go well beyond the bounds of the given author and his work under examination to constitute dissections of the Zeitgeist; and polemics with leading politicians and public intellectuals.

In addition, there is in this collection one new genre, speeches I have delivered at public gatherings devoted to the issues of international relations that otherwise fill these pages. This reflects my broader range of activities since 2012, going beyond essayist who spends his time exclusively in front of a computer screen to part-time political activist who is co-founder of the renascent American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA) and is the organizer of round tables and public debates in Brussels and Berlin.

My changed status, in turn, is a reaction to the change in global affairs from the mildly distasteful to the positively threatening, with the contours of a looming Third World War appearing on the horizon over the past twelve months. In this charged atmosphere, it was patently no longer enough to spin out essays and hope for an unseen readership. Moreover, another logic entered, one which has its origins in mid-19th century Russian literature and two thinkers who greatly influenced the intelligentsia down to our day: these are Alexander Herzen, author of Who is Guilty? And his follower of the next generation, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who moved on to the question to What is to be Done?

In the context of grave crisis, pointing fingers became a luxury none of us can afford. The time arrived to swing into action and unite people around positive objectives.

Clearly few analysts and critics have the disposition or the ability to move from words to deeds, but some do, and we are morally bound to get out of our armchairs and enter the fray of politics.

That explains the ‘push’ side of this transformation in my activities. But necessarily there has also been a ‘pull’ side.

Russianists had been out of favor ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 when this expertise no longer seemed relevant to national security. And, of course, after 9/11 there was a massive personnel turnover among area specialists, as those who came up via the Soviet field and knowledge of Russian were finally retired from the CIA and other US security institutions, and specialists in other, newly relevant fields replaced them. Even the decades-long federal support for the language training was discontinued two years ago. With diminished career opportunities, the field of Russian studies became much less popular on university campuses.

By the summer of 2014, when the depth of the crisis in relations with Russia became evident even to jack-of-all-trades television presenters, the profession of Russia expert suddenly came into great demand. Some renowned experts even had the cheek to boast that the crisis ensured that people like us were now assured of lifetime employment.

The selfishness of this perspective speaks for itself. But the broader truth is that Russianists are now a sought-after group by the media for comments on the daily shock waves around Russia and Ukraine. This has even reached to those of us with dissident views on the subject, though more on the part of the Russian media who are searching for voices in support of their country under siege.

In an age of blatant and shameless propaganda, perhaps it is quixotic to believe in persuasive fact-based arguments winning over opponents or those without firm convictions. It may be still more quixotic to believe that creation of a majority for a non-ideological foreign policy based on national interests will lead to the implementation of such a foreign policy by the Presidential administration acting with the consent of the Senate. But we are condemned to accept these challenges and wage our campaign for common sense.

Without succumbing to an exaggerated sense of my own importance or of our collective ability to divert the flow of events from its current fateful course, in my new role of activist I have at times felt a divine hand at my back. My psychologist sister suggests as the more plausible explanation that this is just the empowerment that comes from being part of a dedicated and highly talented team of fellow thinkers and doers.

In this connection, I call out in particular with pride and pleasure the friendship and common purpose that has developed over the past 18 months with Professor Stephen F. Cohen, who moved heaven and earth to establish ACEWA and people its Board with distinguished diplomats, businessmen and academics who are a credit to our cause. For the Mission Statement and an account of ACEWA activities, see www.eastwestaccord.com.

One key facilitator of my achieving a new role as activist was Professor Edward Lozansky, a tireless campaigner for normal, mutually beneficial relations between Russia and the United States to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. He generously promoted me and the cause of the still to be formed ACEWA at his World Russia Forum in Moscow in September 2014. This resulted in a fair amount of media attention.

If I may take a step backward to my parallel work as essayist, the writings which I set out in this volume, as in the 2013 volume, all appeared first on the portal of the mainstream Belgian daily newspaper La Libre belgique. But they did not end there. Professor Lozansky gave many of them a second life on his website www.us-russia.org.

In similar vein, another long-time activist, Dr. Vladislav Krasnov, president of the Russian-American Goodwill Association, kindly introduced my writings to his readership on www.raga.org at regular intervals.

And I especially express my appreciation to Charles Bausman and his team of editors and production staff at Russia Insider who have featured many of the essays in this book on their portal www.russia-insider.com within hours of their publication in Belgium. They applied their editorial skills to attach new names to the articles especially calculated to pique reader interest. The success of Russia Insider in building a mass audience since setting up shop in October 2014 provided me with statistics that would delight any author: 4,000 even 6,000 readers of given essays from viewers across the globe within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of initial posting.

The past couple of years opened up further opportunities to disseminate words of tolerance and reason via radio and cable television both live and more especially in packaged segments made available to viewers on youtube.com and other portals. I have been an occasional guest on English language broadcasting of Russia Today. An appearance in three-way debate on the Euronews program The Network this past spring facing down none other than Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, was a rare chance to take our case to the mainstream audience of viewers across the Continent. This collection includes a couple of brief notes introducing web links to video proceedings of Round Tables I organized, as well as the transcript of a radio interview in which I was able to spell out some key observations that do not appear elsewhere among the essays.

Readers of Stepping Out of Line, know that my essays covered a wide array of issues and events within the overarching scope of Russia and relations with the United States. This volume is more narrowly focused thematically. The issues surrounding European dependence on Russian energy sources and ‘pipeline diplomacy’ are absent. Analysis of the public appearances and personality of Vladimir Putin takes much less space. But at the same time the center of attention is broader geographically: the subtitle here specifically includes “Europe” as one corner in a three-way relationship. Whereas previously it was safe to assume that Europe’s relations with Russia were scripted in Washington, in the past 18 months Europe emerged as an independent factor. It has been a key objective of my research in the period covered to explore Europe’s role in the unfolding crisis drawing upon its own philosophical wellsprings and internal political dynamics. This subject has received remarkably little attention in Western media and professional commentaries.

Throughout 2013, many of my essays dealt with the virulent black PR campaign being waged against Russia from the United States and Europe over a kaleidoscope of unrelated issues. These included the detention of prisoners of conscience, alleged discrimination and violence perpetrated against gays and lesbians, inflated investment costs in building the infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics, and the risk to the lives of athletes competing in Sochi due to terrorism coming from the Chechen and other aggrieved Caucasus peoples living nearby.

The commonality, such as it was, came from the image of a failing, corrupt state ruled over by an authoritarian if not dictatorial regime that oppressed its people. This venomous campaign against Russia swept not only mass media, but also the beacons of educated, liberal East Coast society including university centers. The sum result is a kind of McCarthyism that I detail in a number of essays here. The Western offensive elicited a propaganda counter-offensive in Russian media, which I also describe.

Beginning in 2014, the anti-Russian campaigners in the West found a single issue worthy of their animus in the Russian response to the 22 February regime change in Kiev. The resulting East-West conflict over Ukraine assumed a preponderant role in international relations. While the fast-evolving confrontation over Ukraine fills many of the pages in my essays of 2014 and 2015, the present volume is not a narrative history of that conflict. Acting as a journalist, I record only what I have seen, not what I have received second or third hand. This makes my coverage episodic rather than comprehensive. Moreover, I write only about events or topics where I believe I have relevant experience and exceptional knowledge.

If my essays have merit, it is because I have attempted to come to grips with the logic of the competing narratives in the unfolding crisis, in the underlying mindsets against the background of an ongoing information war that is setting the preconditions for an end of the world scenario. In that sense, I believe the reader will find in this volume a kind of intellectual history of our times which may be incomplete but does touch many of the essential issues.

Finally, I call the reader’s attention to a couple of technical issues. Compared to the 4-year time span of essays in Stepping Out of Line, I decided to shorten the period covered here so that the texts would appear in print while the events and issues described are still fresh in readers’ memory. From this perspective, it made sense to present the essays chronologically from the earliest to the most recent. There is one exception. I open with the essay “Does Russia Have a Future?” which lends its name to the whole collection. This is, to my way of thinking, the mother of questions and informs the behavior of all the actors in Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Moscow and places in between who appear in these pages.

Gilbert Doctorow

Brussels, July 2015

INTRODUCTION

As I write this Introduction in July 2015, we are one year beyond the centenary of the outbreak of World War I which touched off not only a spate of empty speeches by politicians on how time flies but also a thoughtful essay or two on the sleepwalking of the crowned heads of state in the months and days that preceded what has been aptly called Europe’s act of suicide in August 1914.

The progression of the confrontation between Russia and the West over the past year to a point of intensity that approaches the worst times of the Cold War has led some political observers to wonder if world leaders are not once again sleepwalking into war, which, in our nuclear age, could be the war to end all wars.

However, in the broader population the dangers of the crisis in and around Ukraine are not felt with the same acuity. When President Barack Obama said in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last September that the three major challenges facing the world are the Ebola virus, Russian aggression in Ukraine, and ISIS jihadists in Syria and Iraq, in that order, he was setting out an appreciation of international affairs shared by a large majority of my compatriots. Sad to say, I must include in this majority classmates from Harvard whom I otherwise hold in high esteem for their brilliance, profound learning in their areas of specialization, globe-trotting travels and related sophistication. This is all to no avail in providing discernment of genuine, uncontrollable risks as opposed to synthetic problems that are not life threatening.

As I explain in one article in this volume reporting on my participation in a peace day symposium at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the level of threat to their cause arising from the Ukraine conflict is completely missed even by those social milieux which once were in the vanguard of noisy opposition to America’s militarized foreign policy. They do not begin to fathom how they, too, have been manipulated by the mainstream media for which they may otherwise express contempt.

Political commentators have been playing the nomenclature game, trying to qualify what we are experiencing by reference to the past. Hence, some call our present times a ‘New Cold War.’ However, others rightfully object that the original Cold War was about ideology, whereas Communism as a state ideology disappeared from the European continent in 1992.

To be sure, there is a difference in values between liberal, secular Europe and the United States on the one side, professing globalization principles that supposedly bind us all together and seeing their mission on the world stage to defend democracy, human rights and the rule of law, versus traditionalist, religious-minded Russia living in a world of national interests on the other side of the divide. However, these differences are more of degree than of kind and are not so comprehensive as to constitute ideologies.

Then there is the absence of a permanent existential threat of nuclear Armageddon such as characterized the first Cold War in its heyday. When at the beginning of the year the brash leading anchor on Russian state television Dmitry Kiselyov said that his country is the only one that can reduce the United States to radioactive ash, that assertion was widely seen in the West as gauche and overblown. The notion that nuclear weapons exist not merely as a paper threat but as means of fighting wars if it comes to that had been considered passé, so very ‘20th century’ and inappropriate to the realities of the 21st century, when the United States, without having to say it, believes it has first strike capability and effective missile defense, such that no one would dare threaten it, let alone consider using against it their nuclear arsenal.

It was the very skillful, virtually bloodless capture of Crimea in March 2014 by Russian special forces which changed Western thinking about Russian military prowess, and forced a closer look at the new materiel that Moscow is putting on the ground in its premiere fighting units. The result has been a lot of plumage display – NATO exercises in Central and Eastern Europe up to the Russian borders – and also the decision to move heavy military equipment to Europe to begin to off set the perceived capabilities of modern Russian armor for a ground conflict that since 1991 seemed unthinkable, not for lack of will or motivation but for lack of wherewithal on the Russian side.

The very latest news is that the United States is considering basing nuclear tipped cruise missiles in Europe to give a clear sign to Moscow of its determination to stand behind NATO. Meanwhile, the Russians threaten to put their own similar weapons in Kaliningrad. In effect, the threshold for decisions on whether to launch missiles in the European theater in response to an incoming missile alert will be reduced to just several minutes, a frightening situation that was considered intolerable by the public and statesmen alike in the 1980s, prior to the negotiation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

Whereas over time there developed clear rules of the road between the two super powers during the original Cold War, today we are in an age of combat without rules. Most importantly, we see a breakdown in trust between the sides so deep that the inevitable incidents or accidents which arose in the past and will arise in the future can lead to catastrophic decisions to escalate up to nuclear war, first by tactical weapons in the European theater and ultimately deploying strategic intercontinental weapons systems.

Russian jets buzzing American naval vessels in the Black Sea, American and British military trainers accompanying Ukrainian forces into the field, these and many other provocative activities by both sides can easily get out of control.

In fact, in recent weeks steps have been taken to reinstate ‘hot lines’ between Moscow and NATO headquarters to provide a means of communication as a last-ditch means of averting open clashes of forces on the ground or in the air. But the NATO Russia Council set up in 2002 precisely for the sake of good communications between the various military commands has been effectively suspended in the name of punishing and isolating Russia over Ukraine. To call this worrisome is to put it mildly.

Today we see a clear predisposition in the West and in Russia not to believe in the good will of the other side. Worse still, each is uncertain about the very sanity of the other side. That by itself puts in question the premises of Mutually Assured Destruction, the body of rational thinking that predominated in the 1970s and 1980s and kept the peace. This came across when Vladimir Putin dismissed some outrageous comment about Moscow by Senator McCain to the effect that Russia is just a gas station parading as a country. Said Putin, one could not expect better from McCain given that the poor Senator had “flipped out’’ after his years of detention in Viet Cong cells. Denial of predictability or rationality on the part of Russian leaders is evidenced in Angela Merkel’s deadly serious remark in the spring of 2014 that Vladimir Putin had lost all sense of reality, had become unhinged. This was taken up with alacrity by American media.

The high emotionality and lack of diplomatic restraint that we see in civilian politicians extends on the US side even to the active military leadership, a milieu traditionally imbued with the engineers’ calm technical and problem-solving approach to tasks. Instead we have the highest officer of the US command in Europe, Philip Breedlove, a four-star General in the United States Air Force, repeatedly embarrassing his European colleagues by making unsubstantiated allegations about Russian intentions and deeds in and around the Ukraine theater, and spreading similar personal speculations about possible Russian threats to the Baltic states and Poland.

Until very recently the kind of arms race which was a permanent feature of the original Cold War was only a hypothetical danger. But that comfort is receding day by day. The Russians have been claiming for several years that they would respond to the Americans’ unabated implementation of a European-based anti-ballistic missile system over their objections. On 16 June 2015, speaking over the heads of participants at the opening of the International Military-Technology Forum “Army 2015” and addressing himself to Washington and world media, President Putin announced the deployment this year of 40 new-generation nuclear armed ICBMs which, he claimed, were equipped to overcome all known ABM defense systems. With that development we are well and truly in the midst of a new arms race.

This volume is dedicated to the principle that the best protection against further moves into a New Cold War, if not into a final and conclusive hot war, will be an informed public which sees more clearly than today where we may be headed, still believes in free will over predetermination and acts accordingly to avert the worst by bringing our sleep-walking heads of state to their senses.

DOES RUSSIA HAVE A FUTURE?

14/06/2015

The break-up of the Soviet Union smashes the mold of conceptualization of empire. It is the only case I can think of where the nation supposedly running the show was among the first to abandon ship and opt for sovereignty…

I periodically return to an unfinished, in fact barely begun chat in our parlor in early March with one of the leading exponents of the Realist school of international relations in America over the question of whether Russia has a future as a great power and a justified seat at the world’s governing board. My interlocutor was fairly certain it has no future and based his judgment on economic indicators, in particular GDP/per capita, but also on the loss of half the population of what was the USSR, on the de-industrialization that took place in the 1990s, on the over-dependence today on extractive industries, and so forth. His position is, without doubt, shared by the overwhelming majority of expert opinion in the United States within the disciplines of economics and political science. I won’t mention history, because historians have run for cover and plead ignorance of the present and especially the future.

This is not a minor issue. Indeed, I think it is the fundamental issue over how we are dealing with Russia today. If Russia is a declining power, there is no reason to show it mercy and many good reasons to cut it down to size in the international community. This is exactly what bipartisan US foreign policy is trying to do today, with mixed success (or possibly with disastrous results if you look closely at the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership that is flowering as we talk). On the other hand, if it is a rising power, kicking the dog will not play out well. It also is obvious that the clamorous minority who insist that resolution of many key international challenges depends on a strategic partnership between the US and Russia is totally misguided if the Russian future is oblivion.

Therefore, I want to go public with a few thoughts that upend the certitudes on which even Realists who are unsympathetic to the Washington narrative on Ukraine have built their argument.

First, the notion that the downsizing of the Soviet Union to the borders of its “continuer state,” the Russian Federation, means a proportional loss of military, economic strength misses the point of the dysfunctional imperialism that the Soviet Union represented.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is hardly the only thinker in Russia today who sees the Soviet Union as having been a great drain on Russia’s strength and watches like a hawk to ensure that no new commitments are made to real or pretended ideological soul-mates, let alone the resurrection of a new Soviet Union under a different name. Add to that the further drain of resources to maintain the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Russia was exchanging its gas and oil with the Comecon countries and was receiving in return shoddy consumer goods that would have been unsaleable on world markets.

While economic historians may debate forever whether the European colonies were a net benefit or loss to the home countries, as opposed to the imperial ruling castes and classes, there is nothing to debate in the Soviet case. The break-up of the Soviet Union smashes the mold of conceptualization of empire. It is the only case I can think of where the nation supposedly running the show was among the first (second republic in fact) to abandon ship and opt for sovereignty, leaving all the other republics in the lurch to find their own identity. Compare that with the Hapsburg, the Ottoman and other traditional empires where the titular nation was always the last to find its feet and its identity, where it was what remained when the others left, and you see that we have not begun to comprehend what the break-up of the Soviet Union means for Russia today.

Regarding Russia’s military potential, the truisms about its dependence on its nuclear strike force as its equalizer have been overturned since March 2014 and the display of the new Russian army’s prowess. The latest military gear may not yet be in wide circulation but it is in production. The latest S400 missile defense system is potent proof of the country’s cutting edge military technology (just ask the Chinese who cannot wait to install it on their southern coast). The latest tanks shown off on the 70th anniversary celebrations on Red Square also give the lie to the idea that Russia will be down and out if its nuclear arm is neutralized by US ABMs.

All of this is being done on a relatively tiny budget. Russia is spending 4% of GDP on arms today, whereas the Soviet Union spent an unsustainable 25%. Why doesn’t this fact figure in our calculations of the Russian challenge?

The economy: from the moment Putin came to power, the Kremlin was pursuing the neo-liberal economic agenda that swept the world and swept Russia itself in the 1990s. However, the difference under Putin from the start was the restoration of the vertical of power, the re-centralization of political authority and the curbing of excesses of the oligarchical rule that underpinned the weak, shambolic Yeltsin regime. Russia pursued globalization and national specialization in the diversified world economy by exploiting to greatest advantage its position as the world’s best endowed territory for hydrocarbons and metals.. WTO membership was accepted even though it threatened nascent re-industrialization and brought immediate harm to Russian agriculture which desperately needed state credit subsidies for purchase of farm equipment, seed, breeding cattle to become globally competitive.

The US/EU sanctions policy has now overthrown the shackles of globalization and introduced direct rewards for protectionism and re-industrialization. It is beginning to put Russian agriculture on a pre-WTO footing, and it is beginning to address the dire state of farm machinery production, where 40,000 of last year’s 41,000 tractors put into operation across the country were imported.

In brief, the Russian economy is in a transition phase with the recessionary statistics covering up a wholly new phenomenon of import substitution and recovery of domestic manufacturing potential. This is taking place in an atmosphere of very cautious dirigisme, because the market principles have not been swept aside, merely been given more modest room to act where they do not collide with national defense potential. Mr Kudrin’s ideas have been fenced in. Even the IMF has recently shown respect for the way that the Bank of Russia has managed the country’s economic policies amidst a perfect storm.

Are we about to witness an ascent of the free Russian economy similar to what happened in the five years after Peter Stolypin’s reforms of 1907? Watch this space. Given the history of the country and its record over centuries as a hammer rather than an anvil, I believe it is a grave mistake to dismiss this ‘traditional competitor,’ as Hillary so diplomatically put it in her NYC campaign speech yesterday.

A RUSSIANIST WHO CARES: THANE GUSTAFSON’S WHEEL OF FORTUNE

09/04/2013

It is a rare day to find an American-authored work on modern Russian history which meets the simple criteria of deep knowledge of the chosen topic, the author’s readiness to call things as he sees them without sideways glance at the prevailing wisdom and a basic affinity for the people and culture. In his latest monograph, Thane Gustafson meets these desiderata with ease.

Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Harvard University Press, 2012) is a master work and inescapable reading for anyone who seeks to understand contemporary Russia.

Gustafson is one of the best known American academics specializing in Russia’s oil and gas industry. He was long a principal in a business consultancy providing detailed analyses of the sector. He has several leading books on the subject to his credit, and his opinion is regularly sought by the financial press whenever some major development concerning the energy industry in Russia occurs. Gustafson is now a professor of political science at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Upon opening Wheel of Fortune, the first tip-off that the author operates on another plane from the vast majority of American political scientists writing about Russia is the book’s dedication to the memory of a Russian academician, whom he calls his ‘mentor, colleague, friend.’ And from everything which follows, it is clear the author is someone who has penetrated deeply into Russian society. Over the course of thirty years, he traveled extensively around the country, visiting its most remote locations and inhospitable climatic conditions, where the oil and gas industry operates. That had to mean a lot of bonding with his fellow travelers and hosts. Gustafson tries to understand why the Russians do things the way they do, even if it is often 180 degrees at variance with what he knows back home, and he is not judgmental.

The book focuses on Russia’s single most important industry, one which largely finances the state budget, which underpins the national prosperity, and which both shapes and is shaped by the national political structure. While the issues of democracy versus autocracy, defense of human rights, opening up and rollback of liberty may take all top of mind space in most Western literature on Russia, 1991-2012, these are off the table in Gustafson’s work. Instead our attention is drawn to how economics is the social and political driver, and to how the legacies of the Soviet past, both material and immaterial, continue to influence Russian behavior. The effect, whether intended or not, is to reveal the shallowness of what we usually read about Russia both in the mass media and in the academic domain. This is the great virtue of the book, because Russia is a complex society and merits study in its many different aspects, not just the democracy passion play.

Wheel of Fortune tells the story of the Russian oil industry from Perestroika to the present day. But given the importance of the oil industry to the Russian economy and to the finances of the state, and given the high level of state intervention both to deconstruct the industry in the 1990s and to renationalize the industry in the 2000s under Vladimir Putin, it is also a history of the Russian state in the period covered.

As an historian, Gustafson combines two important virtues: appreciation of the big forces driving history, the underwater currents, and appreciation of the contingent factors, including personalities with their unfathomable and unpredictable elements that can at given periods have decisive importance.

His delineation of the economic and technical factors has admirable sophistication. I think in particular of his breakdown of future prospects for the Russian oil industry into the brownfields, the green fields and the blue fields, each with its own very different requirements in terms of skills and scale of the operators, as well as capital demands. In this way he reveals the difficulties of plotting how and whether the Russian government will be able to face up to its challenges: propping up lagging production in the Soviet-era resources of Western Siberia and/or adding new capacity in Eastern Siberia and on the continental shelf either on their own or with international participation.

His mastery of the interplay of underlying drivers and contingency is shown to great advantage in his treatment of the Yukos Affair, which is the central event in the book. The setting for the Yukos Affair is taken straight back to the first days of the post-Soviet period and the 1992 energy law, which stated clearly that mineral wealth in the soil belonged to the state. That right and the regulatory framework controlling the industry, including the field development plans, may have been dead letter during the 1990s, when the central government was weak. But they remained in place and were ready for immediate implementation to reinstate effective state controls early in the new millennium when the government of Vladimir Putin acted to restore the federal administration and to tap the rapidly growing oil rents to finance a national revival.

And the consequences of the Yukos Affair were, as Gustafson makes clear, of decisive importance for the evolution of the whole economic strategy of the Russian government under Putin, from the mixture of neo-liberal and social market ideas before the Yukos challenge to predominantly dirigiste policies of state capitalism in Putin’s second term and beyond. It is one of the major achievements of this book that Gustafson shows how Putin came to power with no particular plan for the energy industry but developed one in a pragmatic manner in response to the challenges and opportunities before him.

The single greatest challenge on the domestic economic front was posed by Yukos and its arrogant boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky who, Gustafson tells us, ‘stepped on the third rail’ and misjudged both his strength and his vulnerability when directly flaunting the conventions of the industry and denying the leading role of the central government. Whether Yukos violated Russian law by its aggressive tax optimization may be debatable (though such debates with a sovereign state usually do not play out well); however, we learn that the company also acted in such manner as to be perceived by the industry establishment as engaging in ‘rape and pillage’ of the state assets over which it was merely custodian under law, and so invited destruction.

In Gustafson’s words, the actions taken against Khodorkovsky were in accordance with the beliefs of Russia’s business as well as political elites. This interpretation, which is manifestly persuasive, runs directly against the myths of a victimized private entrepreneur emblematic of a new style of transparent corporate management and seeking autonomy from a corrupt and incompetent state leadership, the view promoted by Russia’s pro-democracy opposition movements with the active encouragement of official Washington.

Indeed, from the scenario Gustafson presents, one may understand that by his imprudent and baiting behavior Mikhail Khodorkovsky summoned not only a personal tragedy and the destruction of Yukos as a company, but also brought about the ascendancy of the most conservative elements in the Kremlin for several years following the Yukos Affair, to the detriment of the general investment climate. It also led to a multi-year rejection of foreign involvement in the oil and gas industry, a hiatus which compromised Russia’s access to the very quickly changing world technologies it needs to stay competitive and continue to produce rents for the state.

Gustafson tells us that confiscation of the wealth generated by Yukos was not the objective of the government’s action against Khodorkovsky; rather it was a result, an unplanned byproduct of the decapitation of his company. Moreover, the usual headline issue in accounts of the Yukos Affair, a clash between the siloviki and the presidential ambitions of an oligarch turns out to be only one of many factors in the conflict. Besides the already mentioned tax optimization and flagrant departure from the officially approved field development plans, there was interference in Russia’s foreign policy in the form of Khodorkovsky’s bid to do a deal with the Chinese which would bypass the state pipeline monopoly, and his plans to sell the nation’s crown jewels to International Oil, either Exxon or Chevron, among other factors.

Another major contribution of this book is to deepen our understanding of the shares-for-loans scheme of 1995-96, which both in the West and in Russia is used as shorthand for the takeover of the natural resource wealth of Russia by the oligarchs under the weak Russian presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Gustafson says the oil firms were already under the control of financial engineers like Khodorkovsky even before title changed hands; that the oil generals were not quick enough in mastering the market levers and had lost control both of oil flows and cash flows before the fateful auctions.

Having issued this very interesting insight, it is regrettable that the constraints of his subject focus keep Gustafson from delving further into the ostensible result of the auctions: how they provided money for Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, which seemed in jeopardy. Indeed, there seems to be a taboo among historians to decipher what contribution exactly the oligarchs made to the reelection. Aside from money, we know they made available to the Yeltsin campaign the strong support of the media assets which they controlled. But where did the money itself go: was there vote-buying, rigging of vote counting or other hanky-panky with oligarch connivance? Logic would suggest, yes. Otherwise it is hard to see how Yeltsin was able to win the run-off vote when, by the words of Gustafson elsewhere in the book, we are given to understand that even today Russians lean heavily towards a socialist kind of economy rather than towards the neo-liberalism which Yeltsin stood for.

The following overview of the Russian social and political scene from Wheel of Fortune may seem unexceptional to the casual reader, but it provides substantive explanation for why Vladimir Putin may be said to represent Russia’s political mood ever since the time he won his first presidential election:

“The real driver of events in Russia…is the unresolved conflict among Russians over the principles by which society and the economy should be run. There is no consensus among Russians about the most basic issues in economic and political life. There is no common view that capitalism is better; on the contrary, two decades on, many Russians – although not all – prefer a Russian brand of populist socialism largely unchanged from Soviet times. There is no agreement over who should own and run the essential assets of the country, or which goods should be public or private. There is no unanimity among Russians about their place in the world or their relationship to the global economy and international players in it. At most there is a vague nostalgia for the Soviet past – not for communism as an ideology but rather for an era in which Russia was powerful and the central state provided.” (page 482)

Gustafson shows how Putin was from the beginning able to appeal to both left and right, to traditionalists and modernizers in the Russian political arena. And even when, as after the Yukos Affair, he leaned heavily on the siloviki, he eventually bounced back and re-occupied a position of balancer between the Kremlin clans representing both interests and political philosophies.

One particularly interesting chapter in Wheel of Fortune is devoted to the ‘brothers of Saint Petersburg,’ the mixed team of lawyers and economists, military officers and intelligence operatives whom Putin brought with him to Moscow when he assumed the presidency. He takes the time to delineate relationships and acknowledges the merits of individuals which go well beyond being in the right place at the right time.

However, Gustafson also holds to the conventional view that the ‘brothers’ are something specific to Russia, the personalization of politics which is pre-modern. I beg to differ: what we have here is just a Russian version of the ‘old school tie’ that was, and in some places still is, the bond of elites everywhere. And, if I recall, newly elected American presidents including the incumbent, are known to arrive in the District of Columbia with more than one loyal retainer from their home town.

At one point in Wheel of Fortune Gustafson acknowledges that the ‘best and the brightest’ whom Putin recruited to restore order after the chaotic 90s were to be found among the security services and army. That was true for the Kremlin HR services. He also points out that it was true for entrepreneurs like Alekperov of Lukoil when he was selecting his own two top assistants. And yet, in somewhat contradictory fashion, when describing how Putin established his ‘vertical of power’ and staffed the seven federal okrugs, Gustafson reverts to the notion commonly held among American political scientists, that taking on such personnel was tantamount to reinstating KGB control over the country.

I agree that the distinction between human resources and the institution candidates come from is subtle, but it is essential and should be respected. The FSB was not placed over society. Moreover, a predisposition to coercion is not the same as coercion.

Finally, I would call attention to Gustafson’s deft handling of the issue of corruption and incompetence with which the neo-liberal opposition has sought to tar and feather the government. Gustafson demonstrates clearly that the explanation for mediocre performance of the Russian bureaucracy is much more complicated than what the loudmouths in the street want us to believe. And he does so on the basis of his extensive contacts on the ground with a great many decent and hard-working state servants.

The book will bitterly disappoint those who are seeking cloak and dagger material, puppet masters from the Lubyanka who control the Kremlin and other sensationalism. It will also disappoint the great many peddlers of alarmism over how the Kremlin allegedly uses its energy resources for political purposes to punish former satellites or Soviet republics or to apply a policy of divide and conquer within and between Member States of the European Union.

Among the most valuable statements about Russian energy policy which Gustafson drops in a matter of fact way is the following:

“Russia’s influence in global energy matters is modest compared with the scale of its energy resources. In oil markets it is a passive price taker, and it has shown little desire to join with other oil producers to influence output levels or prices. In gas markets it has leverage only in Europe, and even that is limited by the high degree of interconnectedness of the European gas market and the availability of storage, together with the growing role of LNG. The only real sense in which Russia is a great power in energy is in its ability to put pressure on its near neighbors, and even there, as the examples of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan show, there is little that Russia can do when those countries decide to diversify their outlets.”

This statement from page 487 is entirely true and reasonable, though it contradicts the universally disseminated view in America that Russia has an energy monopoly in Europe, or, at the very least, that Europe is overdependent on Russian gas and oil supplies, an issue that I have explored extensively on these pages.

For this and many other reasons, I say ‘kudos’ to Thane Gustafson for his integrity and human understanding, both of which are in short supply in the profession of Russia-watchers.

Having tossed the author a well-deserved bouquet, I would like to point out now that Gustafson cannot totally escape the conceptual limitations of his own milieu in the American elite of higher education. In this he is no more successful than the Russians have been in escaping from the value system of their Soviet past. The political, or ideological preference of the author is neo-liberal, in favor of small government and balanced budgets, all of which is supposed to allow private entrepreneurship and innovation to flourish as it has in recent years in the US oil industry, resulting in the rising production and reserves of both oil and gas, to everyone’s astonishment.

Like the vast majority of American Russianists, though with more justification given his specialization in the oil industry, where the global tune is called from Houston, Gustafson tends to describe and judge Russia in a head-to-head with America, ignoring the broader Continental traditions, of which Russia always was and remains a part. It is the Old Continent, and not merely Russia which has enduring traditions of statism and dirigisme, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon traditions of laissez-faire.

In this context, it might have amused Professor Gustafson to attend a recent talk by the outgoing American ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium, Howard Gutman, in which he spoke admiringly of Russians for their job flexibility, for operating 24 hour food catering and retail stores in Moscow and other cities, demonstrating an entrepreneurial oomph which is lacking in tired and socialist-minded Belgium, where labor costs are too high.

Another of Gustafson’s shortcomings is the direct consequence of his strengths as a scholarly researcher and teacher. Although his chosen area is the oil industry, in particular, private enterprise in that industry, he clearly has not worked inside corporations. If he had, he would be less severe with Russian oil companies, including Yukos, for their rough command structures. Open space office configuration does not a democracy make. We should not be fooled by our own public relations. A great many large U.S. corporations are run in an autocratic manner through their own ‘vertical of power.’ And the oxymoron of elections to the board of directors comes to mind.

In the same spirit, it is somewhat naïve for Gustafson to find anything striking in the recruitment of Russians in epaulettes and chevrons to run the state-owned companies, or to run the country itself. Examination of American corporate hierarchies from after the Second World War, from after the Korean War, and even more recently shows that military discipline and loyalty always received preference in the civilian economy. Why should it be different in Russia, all the more so after a ten year run when academic economists heading the government left the country in chaos, with both business and regional administrations in the hands of common criminals.

Before closing this review, let us consider how Gustafson’s sophisticated master work is being presented to the foreign policy community. In the November-December 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, we find a sampler article drawn largely from the last chapter of his book, which is where most political scientists begin and possibly also end their examination of new works by their peers. This is where it is customary to present the forecast, the prognosis of future developments based on the foregoing. Gustafson’s final chapter of the book “Oil and the Future of Russia” has now been personalized to suit the expectations of FA’s readership into “Putin’s Petroleum Problem.” This, in turn, is given the teaser title “Oil’s Well That Ends Well for Russia” on the front cover of the magazine.

Comparing the journal article to the book proper, the noteworthy change in content is a slimming down of complexities. For example, the all-important Yukos Affair now is attributed firstly to Khodorkovsky’s political ambitions, which were in conflict with Putin. However, the greater issue is that futurology is probably the least important contribution of the book.

Those readers who are seeking certitudes of the way forward in Russia from Gustafson will be disappointed. Perhaps for that reason, the review article on Wheel of Fortune by Robert Legvold that appeared in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs twists the message from Gustafson to suit those expecting outcomes in Russia more to their liking than a cautious ‘watch and see’ how the Russians handle their sectorial dilemma. Legvold raises the question of ‘a grim future.’ He also gives a finality which is lacking in Gustafson: “the system cannot be maintained.” Which system? Gustafson was primarily addressing a number of different though inter-related issues surrounding Russian fiscal policy and regulatory policy as they affect the oil industry. From Legvold’s review, one might suppose it is the entire Russian political system that will collapse like a deck of cards.

Moreover, in the book Gustafson left open the possibility that the Russians would, selectively, find solutions to their industrial problems though partnership with IOCs. In fact, we read in the daily press how this is proceeding with remarkable speed and scope. Today’s financial news reported on the frame agreement signed between Gazprom and Royal Dutch Shell yesterday in Amsterdam in which a one-third stake in important new off shore licenses will be ceded to the Dutch and under which the much needed international exposure of Russian companies will be furthered by Gazprom taking one-third positions in new and promising off shore prospects of Shell, as in South Africa. This latest announcement is just a new variation on the deal which Rosneft holds with ExxonMobil.

We also see that the Russian monopolies and national champion status are not permanent and unchanging. The Gazprom monopoly on gas exports is likely to be punctured, at least as regards LNG. The respective champions of gas and oil are encroaching on one another’s sector. In a word, nothing can be taken for granted in an area that the Kremlin leadership recognizes, no less than Gustafson, to be of critical importance to the nation.

Considering the closed-minded intermediaries responsible for promoting Gustafson, I have to express all the more admiration for his soldiering on and producing as worthy a work as Wheel of Fortune proves to be.

AMERICA’S NEOCON MAINSTREAM

30/05/2013

America’s conduct of foreign relations remains enthralled to Neocon ideology. Only when this false religion is dispatched can the U.S. begin to address lost opportunities with Russia…and with many other powers as well.

It is a tall order to explain in brief why and how the Neoconservative movement has captured the high ground in the American foreign policy establishment so that its anti-Kremlin and more broadly anti-Russian propaganda is repeated daily by the mass media with barely a peep of protest in the land. A book is the more appropriate medium for the purpose. Accordingly what I propose to do here is to present some key talking points which distill arguments I have made in more complete and substantiated form elsewhere.

While the Neoconservative label is today most commonly associated in the public mind with Republicans and with an aggressive, militarized pursuit of American foreign policy objectives across the globe, Russia was a key factor shaping the Neoconservative movement from the very beginning. The movement was born in the late 1970s, early 1980s among alienated former Leftists who were disillusioned with Soviet Communism and ardently criticized the Realpolitik policy of détente with the USSR begun by President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and continued under Gerald Ford. They rejected merely managing relations with the Communist homeland and called instead for action to overturn Communism and bring freedom to the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe.

Americans in both parties shared a predisposition to listen to their critique of détente and were skeptical about its practical benefits. Moreover, their insistence on a values-based conduct of foreign policy tapped into a traditional current of American political discourse going back to the Founding Fathers.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 touched off a triumphalist mood in America at large, where the negotiated understandings between Reagan and Gorbachev and the Kremlin’s freely chosen decision to part with empire were barely understood in the public, while the political class scrambled to claim the honors of ‘victory.’ The ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 was conflated with the liberation of Eastern Europe and was viewed as further vindication of a foreign policy based on clear principles.

The first major work of political science to explain what was happening in historical-philosophical terms and to set out roadmaps for the future of a post-Cold War world was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), which brilliantly harnessed the new triumphalism to Neoconservative principles with their Positivist certitude about mankind’s eventual destiny. Others in the movement carried the torch further, insisting that with this knowledge of the future the pace of change could be hastened. In a world where, it was now asserted, only democratically governed nations can live in peace, America’s security would be ensured through democracy promotion and the removal of all vestiges of autocracy around the globe. In this form the thinking became the common property of Democrats and Republicans alike.

With Europe in safe hands at the end of the 1990s, the Neocons turned their attention to the Middle East, and calls went out to resume unfinished business of regime change in Iraq, which, it was said, would bring human progress and freedoms to the hapless region.

Meanwhile, the latent Russophobe prejudices of the Neoconservatives and their fellow-thinkers lay dormant. To be sure, U.S. foreign policy objectives diverged from those of the Russian Federation already as early as 1994, when Washington quietly overlooked Russia’s expectation of an invitation to join NATO and chose instead to extend the Alliance to the former subject member states of the Warsaw Pact without its founder and leading spirit. Russia was in economic disarray and politically feeble under Boris Yeltsin, so that its interests and demands barely figured in American consciousness. Indeed following the Russian default of 1998, the American establishment assumed its erstwhile foe was finished as a geopolitical force.

Russia’s economic turnaround which began soon after the election of President Vladimir Putin and the step-by-step consolidation of the Kremlin’s position as the dominant political force in the country were as unwelcome in the United States as they were unanticipated. Nonetheless, in the period immediately following 9/11, there was a tangible warming of state-to-state relations due to the spontaneous and substantial assistance which Russia provided by opening its backyard, Central Asia, to American bases.

To be sure, the seeming rapport of the two presidents did not last long. George Bush failed to reciprocate in kind and quashed the Russians’ hopes for a new security arrangement in Europe bringing them in from the cold. Instead the United States proceeded unilaterally to scrap the ABM Treaty while NATO expansion proceeded apace, moving into the Baltics, i.e. into former Soviet space, violating yet again commitments made to Gorbachev not to take advantage of the Russian withdrawal.

Against this background as a spurned suitor, Russia joined Belgium, France and Germany in vociferously objecting to the coming US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Their position on the UN Security Council denied the cover of international law to the U.S., necessitating resort to a less than convincing ‘coalition of the willing.’ The unbridled unilateralism which had taken hold of US foreign policy set the stage for the country’s shame and loss of credibility globally when its invasion was followed by a scandal-beleaguered and largely unsuccessful occupation of Iraq.

American fury at perceived French perfidy from before the launch of the attack on Saddam Hussein, the boycott of French cheeses and wines, the renaming of French fries, was intense but quickly dissipated when Jacques Chirac backtracked and made his peace with Washington. In the case of Russia, however, the perceived insubordination to the world’s pecking order, the moral posturing before a global audience by a revisionist power, incited a long-lasting and deep current of resentment in the American foreign policy establishment. Neocons, who had been the cheerleaders of George W. Bush’s Iraqi invasion in the first place, now took the lead in retaliation. Russia would be cast as a recidivist tyrannical state, with which democracies could not, by definition, engage in strategic partnerships.

A key document in the emerging propaganda war was the publication in September 2004 of an Open Letter to the Heads of State and Government of the European Union and NATO authored by Robert Kagan and William Kristol and appearing on the letterhead of the Project for a New American Century, the Neocon mainstay dating from the late 1990s. Nominally occasioned by the Beslan tragedy and the Kremlin’s own war on terrorism at home, the thrust of the Open Letter was an indictment of the Putin regime, which was castigated for backsliding from the mythical democratic achievements of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and for an imperial revival in Russia’s behavior towards its neighbors. Among the signatories from the Republican Right, we find here the intellectual fathers of the Iraqi campaign Randy Scheunemann and Francis Fukuyama, as well as the future presidential candidate, Senator John McCain. And there is an equally important contingent of Democratic politicians, diplomats and thinkers who held high office in the Clinton administration and/or have since then been prominent in the administration of Barack Obama, among them Joe Biden, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Richard Morningstar, Ivo Daalder and Michael McFaul. The letter was intended to highlight the international dimension of the condemnation of Russia and respected freedom fighters Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania, and Lech Walesa of Poland also signed. And there are such leading Western European politicians as Bernard Kouchner of France and Carl Bildt of Sweden.

Over the course of the nine years since then, this formula of soliciting bipartisan United States sign-up together with big name East European freedom fighters and West European statesmen has been used with great skill by the Neoconservative intellectual leadership to arrange highly mediatized anti-Kremlin events. Indeed, over time, many of the same names figure in their public petitions or meetings. The most recent iteration was the gathering in Washington on 4 March 2013, the anniversary of Russia’s last presidential elections, to promote the notion of ‘no business as usual’ with an illegitimate RF Government. The venue, a Senate office building, and the main hosts, the US-Government funded ‘NGO’ Freedom House, were well calculated to provide a bipartisan halo over the event, while the co-sponsor, the Foreign Policy Initiative, is a successor organization to the PNAC, with the same founders, Kagan and Kristol. In this case, the role of senior West European statesman was played by Guy Verhofstadt, chairman of the ALDE (neo)-Liberal bloc in the European Parliament and a strong ally of the Magnitsky Bill authors and supporters who were also speakers. The role of Eastern freedom fighters was assumed by a delegation from Moscow including Mikhail Kasyanov, former Russian premier and leader in the PARNAS opposition group that is one of ALDE’s local partners in Russia.

In between 2004 and 2013, there have been a number of public relations blows directed against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Government that have been orchestrated at moments associated with notable Russian acts of insubordination to American global hegemony. The Neocon toolkit is varied, including release to the media of fraudulent documents purporting to show the outrage of respected foreign politicians over Kremlin misbehavior.

One such case is worthy of note because it was carried in the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, America’s most prestigious and widely read journal in the field. The nominal author of the article ‘Containing Russia’ was the leader of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, though textual analysis makes plain what the magazine’s editors surely knew at the time: that it was ghostwritten by persons with a turn of mind that is inconceivable in someone of Tymoshenko’s education and life experience. The piece threw every accusation about Russian villainy, corruption and degradation from the Neocon handbook at Mr. Putin’s Kremlin. And the article just happened to appear several months after Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary speech at the Munich Security Conference of February 2007, in which he delivered his discursive and extemporaneous critique of America’s policies towards Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, an address that left its American attendees, including Senator John McCain, dumbfounded by its frankness and severity.

A new major anti-Kremlin offensive came in the wake of the Russian-Georgian War of August 2008, during which American-Russian relations hit a low point not seen since the worst days of the Cold War. Here, Democrats and Republicans stood shoulder to shoulder in their condemnation, with Russian military action denounced first as wanton aggression and then, as the facts of the casus belli became better known to international investigators, for excessive use of force against a puny foe. American media were closed to counter arguments in defense of the Russian side, apart from the perplexed coverage of their favorite Metropolitan Opera conductor Valery Gergiev leading the Mariinsky in a concert held in Southern Ossetia shortly after its liberation by Russian forces. Among the loudest denouncers of Russia was one of the cohort of West European sympathizers of the Neocons cited above, Carl Bildt. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs issued a pungent sound bite for the press, comparing the Russian entry into Georgian territory with Hitler’s march into the Sudetenland.

Still another wave of Neocon inspired and/or led anti-Russian propaganda followed President Obama’s launch of the ‘reset’ policy and his constructive summit with President Dmitry Medvedev in London in April 2009. An extraordinary item from this campaign was the Open Letter to President Obama signed by Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and the other major names from among the East European liberation movements of the 1980s.

This appeal to the American President to ensure greater U.S. attention to the security of their region had a number of explicitly Russophobe points, including insistence that Russia’s policy towards their countries is revisionist and threatening. Russia was said to be using overt and covert economic warfare in pursuit of its aims. The text of the Open Letter reveals a perspective coming from outside the region and well calculated to the susceptibilities of the American psyche. Indeed, as was later revealed by the journal The National Interest (The Nixon Center), the document was written by ghostwriters on commission from the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, which was at the time headed by Neocon Robert Kagan’s comrade-in-arms, Ron Asmus. The New York Times and other mainstream media carried it bona fide and the American public received it as a cri de coeur of freedom fighters.

I mention these dirty tricks to highlight the Neocons’ overriding principle of ‘the end justifies the means.’ Double standards and cynical distortions are apparent in most criticism of Kremlin policies they have fed to the media. Meanwhile, the Neocon brain trust brandishes their academic credentials as doctors of political science and humanities to enhance their authority, luring their would-be debating partners into what is a hopeless poker match with card cheats.

The individual Neocon thinkers whom I have cited are merely the most visible and egregious off enders against truth. Despite fine words about independence of spirit, America’s universities and the intellectual agora were swept up by Neoconservative principles and triumphalism from the 1990s along with the general public. A politically engaged professorate, the legacy of the 1960s revolution in American higher education, turned area studies away from fact-based knowledge of the world into something supposedly more relevant. Pro-democracy activism, shorthand for meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, has been the guiding principle in the training of an entire generation of specialists on Eastern Europe and Russia. In turn, the graduates of these programs moved into the leading U.S. diplomatic posts, think tanks and university professorships in the first decade of the new millennium. Even cursory perusal of the public lectures and conferences on present-day Russia featured at American universities reveals they are almost exclusively showcasing seditious Russian opposition personalities who are presented as the freedom fighters of our day.

During the 2012 American presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney made what was widely lampooned as a serious gaffe when he remarked that Russia is America’s number one geopolitical opponent, or, as the press rushed to clarify in plain English, number one enemy. In fact his apt observation erred only in failing to pay obeisance to political correctness. There can be no denying that ever since it registered its strong opposition to American plans to invade Iraq in 2003, Russia has fairly regularly been obstructing U.S.-led initiatives to remake the world in its image. The very latest case has been over the conflict in Syria, which is quickly becoming the Spanish Civil War of our day.

Need it be this way? Of course not!

However, for a more constructive relationship with Russia to come about, a first and essential step is for Americans to acknowledge the grip which Neoconservative thinking has had on the country’s foreign policy establishment these past 20 years. The fundamental premises of international relations which have been taken on faith for too long must be openly debated. Only then can we begin to address lost opportunities with Russia…and with many other powers as well.

THE INDEFATIGABLE BILL BROWDER: SELLING THE MAGNITSKY ACT TO EUROPE

06/06/2013

Refusal to apply common sense to issues of current EU-Russian relations has so far blinded commentators to the peculiar behavior of the Magnitsky Act’s number one lobbyist before the European Union. In the following reportage on a seminar devoted to these matters sponsored by the ALDE bloc and held at the European Parliament building on Wednesday, I propose to break that taboo…

THE EVENT, THE PANEL, THE VENUE

It was billed as a seminar on “Russian political prisoners,” organized by the neo-liberal ALDE bloc of the European Parliament and held in one of the EP conference rooms on 5 June. The semicircular rows of seats could accommodate perhaps 250. In fact the audience numbered about half that. By age, 20 to 30 year olds predominated, and among them mostly representatives of the fair sex. There was a sprinkling of silver haired males, like myself, with, one may presume, a professional interest in the proceedings. Judging by the use of headphones for translation, more than half of those present were Russian speakers with sufficient fluency to dispense with English translation.

Most interestingly, the inner circle of seats closest to the dais was specifically reserved for MEPs, of whom only one, the Greens deputy from Germany, Werner Schultz, actually took a place. Indeed, apart from the panel, the only other European Parliamentarian present was the ever vigilant Russophobe Vytautas Landsbergis, MEP from Lithuania, an intellectual and freedom fighter of long standing, the first head of state of post-Communist Lithuania, who came in to audit the event at midway.

However, the absence of the supposed target audience for the event is misleading. The seminar was scheduled to take place one day after the publication of an Address to Foreign and Interior Ministers of the EU signed by 47 European Parliamentarians pressing on the EU executive the adoption of a law similar to the so-called Magnitsky Act passed by the US Congress and signed by President Obama last fall. And, notwithstanding the various particular messages and particular concerns of the diverse panel, united only in its opposition to the Putin regime, the event was called to promote such a Magnitsky bill and those on the podium spoke in unison in its favor, disseminating the (manifestly false) idea that the bill enjoys broad support within Russia and is only opposed by the regime itself. The entire proceedings were video recorded, presumably for future use in the halls of power by the event’s sponsors.

Further on, we will come back to the question of who those 47 MEP signatories calling for a European Magnitsky Act were and what the political weight of their action may be. But first I would like to say a few words about the panelists, who were all stars in their own right, about their remarks to the audience and about the brief question period which followed their two hours and 45 minutes of lectures to us in this “seminar” which, by its structure and relative weighting of time, tells a great deal about the interactive disposition of the self-proclaimed democrats who were our hosts.

The meeting was opened and moderated by ALDE MEP from Lithuania Leonidas Donskis, member of the EP Subcommittee on Human Rights. It is noted in his biographical sketch that Donskis was EP Rapporteur for the Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the World 2011, and that his activities as defender of human rights have extended across the globe and are not limited to Russian issues. At the same time it is apparent that his concerns for dealing with evil have not motivated him to sponsor legislation similar to that now recommended for application against Russia to other parts of the world that raise the hackles of rights defenders. I mention this to call out the exceptionalism that runs through and through the intent of the seminar organizers.

In any case, the short speech by Donskis was slick enough though it had a number of debatable assumptions tucked in: that the West won the Cold War, that the post-Communist period in Russia under Boris Yeltsin was very promising in terms of human rights, and that Russia is now slipping back to Soviet era legislation with the new law on NGOs and other recent repressive measures. In the foreground, the speaker’s main purpose was to underscore the existence of political prisoners in Russia, among whom the most important is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Indeed Donskis called Khodorkovsky a ‘European political prisoner,’ someone who fought for the rights of us all and around whom European human rights defenders should rally today as they once did in honor of the brave Russians like Sakharov during Soviet times.

The highest ranking Russian opposition figure on the panel spoke next. Mikhail Kasyanov, Russian premier from 2000-2004 in Vladimir Putin’s first presidential term, but thereafter acrimonious foe of the Kremlin over its alleged authoritarianism, chose to address the audience in Russian, perhaps mindful of the bitter criticism to which the State Duma later subjected Russian participants who spoke English in a similar conference held on 4 March in the Senate Office Building in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House. And indeed in other ways Mr. Kasyanov minded his P’s and Q’s in his speech, in line with the fears stated later during the seminar that the Russian panelists could expect to find themselves under the close scrutiny of the investigative authorities upon their return home.

Nonetheless, Kasyanov, as a co-leader of ALDE’s main local partners in the Russian Federation, the PARNAS political grouping, did not disappoint his hosts. He waxed eloquent on the point that Russia does have political prisoners today, whatever denials President Putin and his entourage may make. In his words, these prisoners go beyond Khodorkovsky to take in the dozen prisoners from the Bolotnaya Square riot of May 2012 whose trial is scheduled to open on 6 June and the Pussy Riot case defendants now serving time in their prison colonies, as well as many other unnamed victims of the regime. Kasyanov brought with him and had distributed in the hall a brochure detailing the case of the prisoners taken by the authorities at Bolotnaya, whom, he claims, were the innocent victims of a state supervised provocation. The intent of the authorities was in this interpretation to scoop up, in Noah’s ark fashion, exhibits from right and left political movements for show trials that will serve to instill fear in the yuppies who came out against the authorities in December 2011 and May 2012 calling for the regime’s fall. In the view of Kasyanov, Russia is living through times of state lawlessness. But he finished his oration with nothing more dramatic than a call for the Russian government to declare amnesty, and there is nothing seditious in that, to be sure.

Looking at the other speakers, it is worth noting the diversity of their backgrounds and of their areas of principal activity in the opposition today. The point in their being brought before us was obviously to show the heterogeneity of the opposition and to put faces on it. As to their arguments, they can be summarized in collective fashion because, except for one of them, Bill Browder, they were all playing supportive roles, and seemed to be in nodding agreement over one another’s remarks. They came together on the repressive turn of Putin’s regime in his third presidential term now that the social contract between the authorities and the people of exchanging growing prosperity for political passivity was violated by the government’s inability to ensure further income growth. They bemoaned the fate of young people who had done nothing on Bolotnaya and whose lives were now about to be ruined in the forthcoming trials and likely extended terms of imprisonment. They sagely agreed that it is a universal rule that no one should strike back at police, the charge leveled against the defendants, but added the qualification ‘except when the police act unlawfully’ – intentionally leaving unanswered the question of who is to define unlawful action by the state’s defenders in the midst of a demonstration turned riot and when.

It was pointed out from the dais that the Putin regime has been repeatedly found guilty by the European Court of Human Rights for violation of its commitments as a member of the Council of Europe and has been forced to pay awards amounting to 5,000 euros to some, 7,000 euros to other claimants over abridgment by the state of their human rights. As the speaker said with barely concealed sarcasm, Russia’s sales of gas and oil to Europe are sufficient to cover all of these fines and they remain a taboo subject.

The speakers came together on the similarities between the present regime and the Brezhnev epoch which first spawned the Russian (and European) human rights movement in terms of its corruption, inability to reform and growing arbitrariness, and they pointed to the dissimilarity in terms of the susceptibility of the present ruling elites to pressure from the West over their fondness for travel to Europe and ownership of real estate and bank accounts abroad. Beyond this commonality of assertions, these speakers were there to confirm and approve the initiatives of one man, their fellow panelist William Browder, to whom I shall devote special attention below.

I begin my brief sketch of panelists with the venerable Ludmila Alexeeva, the 86-year old member of the Moscow Helsinki Committee, the living bridge to the golden age of Russian dissidents, the times of Andrei Sakharov. Alexeeva is rightly respected for her decades-long dedication and activism in Europe-wide human rights campaigning. She bears international honors, including those from the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, where she spent 16 years starting with her emigration from the USSR in 1977 till her return to post-Communist Russia in 1993. The first cavil in her case is that she has perhaps kept the umbilical cord connecting her to Washington for a bit too long. The biographical notes show that even today she broadcasts as a freelancer on a weekly human rights program for Radio Liberty, that holdover of America’s Cold War propaganda machine. And judging by her speech, she enjoys all too well the illusion that the Cause goes on. The notion of Russia slipping into Soviet era repression serves her vanity and blinds her to realities. Her references to 1937 in her condemnation of the government’s current crackdown on sedition show a serious failure of judgment.

At the other end of the age spectrum was Pavel Khodorkovsky, son of the cause célèbre former billionaire serving his tenth year in confinement. Twenty-eight years old, Pavel is the perfect embodiment of the yuppies who constituted the spontaneous social-networkers, the tweets and facebook folks behind the mass demonstrations against Putin and also the foot soldiers in the demonstrations. In recent years, Pavel has been an ardent defender of his father’s innocence, or martyrdom, at public forums on several continents. In his words, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was guilty only of daring to promote pluralism and of challenging the Kremlin’s stranglehold on power; that and the fault of excessive philanthropic spending did him in.

The apple does not fall far from the tree, and Pavel succeeded in demonstrating to the audience that he received a good dose of his father’s arrogance and presumption. In answer to one of the handful of questions which closed out the seminar, he spoke on behalf of all 142 million Russians in confirming their pride in their European heritage and eagerness to join the European Union. Quite apart from the improbability that he knows what he is talking about, I doubt this was a statement that will go down well with MEPs of all political persuasions.

Panelist Vadim Klyuvgant has been the lead lawyer on the defense team for Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was present on the panel to lend a non-political and expert validation to the condemnations of the arbitrary and authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin issued by fellow panelists who are politically engaged. Rounding out the panel there was Anna Karetnikova, from the emblematic human rights center “Memorial” that, like the Helsinki Watch Group, traces its history back to the bad old days of the Soviet Union. And, finally, there was Vladimir Kara-Murza a sharp-tongued debater from the PARNAS movement of Kasyanov and Nemtsov who as final speaker ensured no stone in the anti-Putin repertoire was left unturned.

Taken all together, the aforementioned panelists denigrated the Putin regime, exposed its repression, celebrated its victims and unfurled a weapon to keep the dragons in the Kremlin at bay, the cross before which the Russian Dracula would shrink back: a European Magnitsky Act.

And this brings us to the unique panelist who has been the guiding spirit behind the Magnitsky Act in the United States and now is leading the lobbying effort to bring it to Europe, Mr. Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, the employer of the unfortunate lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who was caught in the system while protecting the interests of his boss and paid with his life.

No blushing violet, Bill Browder treated the audience to a brief history of his personal efforts to make those Russian officials whom he believes were guilty of Magnitsky’s death pay a heavy price, all the while blackening the image of Russia in the world and setting the stage for the use of visa bans to punish the Putin regime in the future. The outstanding feature of the bill he promoted on Capitol Hill was the extraterritorial jurisdictional claims of American justice and its imposition of penalties on foreign officials without proven guilt. The second feature was elasticity in extending the sanctions that make it a promising lever, or perhaps cudgel, to bend Russian policies in any domain to what best suits Washington in the future.

After several years of intense lobbying, Browder and his allies, drawn chiefly from the Neocon camp, succeeded in winning bipartisan support in the Congress for their bill. And they were then astute in using the opportunity opened by Russia’s WTO accession to pressure the administration into accepting the Act in exchange for removal of the long outdated Jackson-Vanik amendment which now put America in violation of its own WTO obligations.

Browder exulted in the confusion and dismay he says passage of the Magnitsky Act dealt the Kremlin, which for a time did not know how to respond to this public slap. And when the Putin team did find its own antidote, its “anti-Magnitsky Act,” which featured the cut-off of American adoptions of handicapped and ailing Russian orphans, then that only further tarnished the Kremlin’s image, exposing its heartlessness and cynicism in making the defenseless pay for the sins of its own highly placed officials. (Never mind that the handicapped constituted no more than 10% of the overall number of international adoptions or that the global numbers of such adoptions had been falling precipitously for five years before the new ban.)

Now that America had acted, Browder told us, he had shifted his lobbying work to Europe, where the opportunities for exerting leverage on the Kremlin were many times bigger given the proximity of Russia to Europe and the far greater need of its elite to enjoy unrestricted travel and the fruits of property ownership just a few hours by plane from Moscow.

At first Browder tried to bring his message to EU Member States one by one. He began in Ireland and believed he was making traction in winning over their parliament to his position on the Magnitsky legislation. However, the Russian embassy struck back, threatening the Irish with a ban on their adopting Russian orphans. To listen to Browder’s explanation, this adoption issue was of such overriding importance in Ireland that it amounted to blackmail, and the Irish folded.

This experience persuaded Browder that he must go straight to the European Parliament and take the Union in one go. Hence the joining of forces with ALDE, the latest address of the 47 signatory MEPs and the seminar we were attending.

QUESTION TIME

There were only 15 minutes left for questions from the floor after all the panelists had had their say and the audience of sweet young things did not appear very promising of challenges to the authority from the dais. But appearances can be deceptive, and from one young Russian male and from a matronly British lady and from some other speaker or two, the panelists were given to understand that the enemy is not sleeping.

The lady from the UK was a bit disorganized and rambling in presenting her rhetorical question to the effect that we know there are more than 10,000 Palestinians who have been rotting in Israeli detention camps for more than 10 years under conditions less favorable than those which Mikhail Khodorkovsky endures, yet why is the European Parliament taking no energetic action to defend their rights similar to what it now proposes to direct against the Russian Federation. There was no proper answer from the dais to this suggestion of double standards, although it was pointed out that the EU has statutory restriction of entry onto its territory by members of Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe and Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus.

Another question from the floor delivered in Russian was more skillfully prepared: if as the speakers insist, Russia has lost cases brought by its citizens in the European Court of Human Rights and has had to pay out a great deal of compensation to buy off its victims, then why has the Khodorkovsky case not been recognized by the same Court as a politically motivated case, i.e., why has the judgment against Khodorkovsky not been overturned? This unexpected blow caught the members of the otherwise complacent panel off guard. They tried to sidestep the issue by saying that only the first of several complaints filed by Khodorkovsky was rejected by the Court, which found that his trial was not politically motivated and “that the charges against him were grounded in ‘reasonable suspicion.’” But in saying that the other complaints simply have not yet been heard, the panelists produced a shabby impression: they could hardly take the Court to task after having boasted of its findings against the Russian government in other, petty cases.

THE QUESTION THAT WAS NOT ASKED:

And now I would like to present the question which was not asked, one which examines the postulate at the very center of the whole notion that Europe has significant leverage over Russia in the form of visa liberalization.

It was alleged by speaker after speaker that the objective of the Russian government is to obtain visa free travel to the EU for 15,000 service passport holders. These are holders of biometric passports, thus satisfying technical conditions of the EU to ensure third country nationals from the CIS and further afield do not take advantage of open borders. And they are by definition privileged officialdom, the ruling elite of Russia. These are the people who have accounts and property in the EU our panelists told us.

However, this is an intentional misrepresentation of the objectives of Vladimir Putin’s government, which are precisely to end visas for the 142 million Russian citizens and 500 million Europeans over two way travel for all purposes whatsoever. And there is nothing peculiar to Europe as a travel destination in this proposal. It is part of an across the board endeavor by the Russian Federation to enable its citizens to travel the world freely and it has been going on for more than a decade. It is an objective they have already reached with several dozen countries, all of which have enjoyed a surge in Russian tourism since introducing the reform. It helps to explain the enormous rise in foreign travel by ordinary Russian citizens since the year 2000, now on the level of 10 million persons going abroad each year. At the same time, the notion that ownership of property in the EU and bank accounts is limited to the elite of 15,000 is totally nonsensical.

Let us be plain about it: for at least the past five years the objections to visa free travel to Europe for the general population of Russians have come exclusively from the side of the EU and were spearheaded by the Baltics, by Poland and by others in the New Europe who were taking their revenge for Soviet domination of their countries in the past. The step by step liberalization of visa regimes, including the special regime for service passport holders has been imposed on the Russians by the EU. In this context, the proposition that withholding the privilege from service passport holders is a self-standing issue is a deplorable distortion of the political facts.

ADDRESS OF EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARIANS ISSUED 4 JUNE 2013

Let us now take a step back and look at what events immediately preceded the seminar on “Russian Political Prisoners” at the European Parliament. It must be noted that the release of the Address signed by 47 MEPs and opposing further visa liberalization with Russia until a Magnitsky Act is put in place was timed to coincide with the semi-annual EU-Russia Summit going on in the city of Yekaterinburg, where it was widely expected that the representatives of the European Commission and of the European Council would sign an agreement on visa free regime for 15,000 service passport holders. The Address by the Parliamentarians served notice on the EU executive bodies that legislators would vote against such liberalization.

Who were the signers of this Address and what immediate results did their action have on the outcome of talks in Yekaterinburg?

In terms of nationality, we find that among “normal” countries, the UK and Germany have the largest presence, with 5 and 4 deputies respectively. If we speak of New Europe, meaning the former Communist bloc countries, then they account for 21 out of 47. The Baltic States, at 11, formed the largest contingent among the signatories, with Estonia alone accounting for 6. It is no secret that Estonia’s MEP Kristiina Ojuland has been one of the most energetic organizers of all initiatives on Russia undertaken by ALDE in the past couple of years and has acted as the seeing eye-dog to ALDE chairman Guy Verhofstadt in his various trips to Moscow to coordinate anti-Putin activities with PARNAS. How useful to Verhofstadt, to ALDE and to the anti-Russian cause with its Magnitsky Act spearhead she will be going forward remains to be seen now that she has been ejected from her Reform Party in Estonia over a vote-rigging scandal that broke the day before the seminar opened (rendering her unable to be present as ‘host,’ per the printed and online invitations).

Looking at the signatories by party, it is not surprising that ALDE (20) of the center-right and their comrades in arms on foreign policy issues, the Greens (6), account for more than half the deputies. However, the presence of 11 members of the European People’s Party delegates is possibly more significant for the ultimate political impact because this center-right group is the single largest party family in the European Parliament generally, holding down 13 of the 27 heads of state and government in the European Council and 13 of the commissioners in the European Commission.

Yet, in raw numbers the 47 deputies only account for about 6% of the 754 members of the European Parliament. It is hard to see how they can capture the will of the Parliament as a whole or how the Parliament can frustrate the will of the EU executive bodies in reaching some accommodation with Russia over visas and much else.

At the same time it remains a fact that the sides made no progress in Yekaterinburg over the visa issue. In his speech summarizing the results of the Summit, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso mentioned still unresolved technical issues as having prevented any signed agreement on visa liberalization though he sounded customarily upbeat about the issue’s being eventually solved to mutual satisfaction.

The visa liberalization issue has been and remains a bellwether of the EU-Russian relationship. And this relationship has entered stormy times of late with a couple of key issues ready to hand by way of explanation. First there has been the issue of the Russian crackdown on NGOs and the selected measures of the tightened state security since Putin’s inauguration. Second there has been the yawning gap between Russian and EU positions over the Syrian civil war. Both disputes are by themselves sufficient to explain the breakdown in negotiations over visa liberalization at this time without any reference to the Address of the MEPs and the proposed Magnitsky legislation.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF THIS EUROPEAN MAGNITSKY BILL GOING FORWARD?

More generally, it is hard to see any comparability in the situation which prevailed in the US and that facing the European Union with respect to Russia. The US has no strategic economic interests in common with Russia. Europe does. Where it is cheap to posture in Washington, where no business can be hurt, that is not at all the case in Brussels, where the $350 billion in bilateral trade with Russia has mobilized substantial two way capital investments of private business as well and supports very large numbers of jobs in each camp.

A practical problem with the proposed law is that the initiators are using the Sergei Magnitsky case to ram through restrictions on travel that are, in effect elastic, and can be extended at will by EU political authorities whenever there is a new hot issue on which the EU and Russia take different sides. The notion of violation of human rights that would justify any group of officials being added to the list is not defined. If the intentions of its backers including Browder and Kasyanov were to be followed, the logic is that the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, should head the list, in which case relations between the EU and Russia would be put on a war footing.

Without going into the merits of the arguments over culpability for Sergei Magnitsky’s death and the degree of due diligence in the investigation of the circumstances carried out by Russian authorities, one thing is clear: we are witnessing the reemergence of a Cold War issue that once upon a time, particularly in the United States, went under the heading “better dead than Red” or vice versa, and which can be restated in more universal and timeless manner as: do we prioritize justice or peace? By prioritizing justice as is the wont of the ALDE party, the EU would be consciously rejecting the mission for which it received the Nobel Prize for Peace last year, namely ensuring a European continent free of the blight of war that turned much of the 20th century into a living hell.

AND NOW FOR MR. BROWDER

Finally, it does seem appropriate to ask a few questions about the performance of the indefatigable Mr. Browder in lobbying for the Magnitsky Act.

Is this how top level businessmen behave? Do they spend three years actively lobbying Congress over an issue of this nature? Do they launch a new personally led campaign in Europe? In short, do we take Mr. Browder’s avowals of concern over Russian villainy at face value?

Let us consider for a moment what the norm is in business. This past Monday, 3 June, I attended a gathering of alumni of a leading American business school which is attached to one of the Ivy League campuses. Our guest speaker was a very accomplished and well regarded executive who had a successful career in a succession of multinational corporations in several different domains. His job responsibilities put him in charge of what may be described as the most successful and large scale Western high-tech joint venture in China. He now holds a non-executive position on the boards of several major Belgian corporations.

This executive came away from his time in close working association with the Chinese fully sharing their view of the superiority of their meritocracy model for economic and scientific management. He is left uncertain how to reconcile his open admiration for an authoritarian, nominally Communist regime over the democracies of the Western world which seem to him to have inverted their values, giving unjustified advantage to lawyers and finance personnel over the technological innovators, and who suffer from short-termism.

I would argue that our speaker was broadly representative of the senior corporate executives I met in my 25 year career in international business: they seemed never to have met a dictator they didn’t like. After all, big businesses are not democracies. They are embodiments of the ‘vertical of power’ and their open floor plan offices, first name terms of address and delayering of personal assistant positions in no way change that stark reality.

So where does Mr. Browder and his one-man crusade against Russian officialdom fit in this setting? Should he be taken at his word as a disinterested fighter for human rights?

I posed this question directly to our moderator, Leonidas Donskis, during the little cocktail reception that followed the panel presentation. To his credit, Dr. Donskis replied that no, he did not know the details surrounding Bill Browder. As always, dear MEPs, the devil is in the details.

VOTE RIGGING IN ESTONIA: ANTI-RUSSIAN FREEDOM FIGHTER FALLS ON HER OWN SWORD

10/06/2013

“Our credibility to inspire change in Russia depends on our honesty.” Guy Verhofstadt, Keynote Speech at PARNAS conference “European Union and Russian Federation,” Moscow, 7 December 2012

A Greek tragedy is being played out in tiny Estonia ever since allegations of vote rigging were leveled against one of the most prominent leaders of the ruling Reform Party, Kristiina Ojuland and she was expelled from the party on 5 June. Ojuland has told the press that she is innocent, that others were responsible, and she is consulting with her lawyers on next steps. However, whatever the outcome of any investigation may be, the damage to her credibility has been done: a significant and real incident of violation of the new e-election procedures in Estonia has been exposed right under her nose.

It is more than curious that this scandal and her removal from the party have not brought Ojuland to the attention of Euronews or any other media outside of Estonia, where the story was carried by the website of Estonian Public Broadcasting and other sites. The last time Ojuland was at the center of a major scandal, in February 2005, when she was fired from her post as Foreign Minister of Estonia over secret files which disappeared from her ministry, BBC News was quick to inform its worldwide audience. To be exact, 92 secret documents had gone missing, and the Prime Minister at the time justified her sacking with the comment: “Foreign policy is based on trust, and Kristiina Ojuland has lost it.” Her removal was sufficiently important to have raised the possibility of the nation’s coalition government falling.

Perhaps the current disinterest of the world media in Mme Ojuland’s travails results from her being just an MEP rather than national minister. After all, the European Parliament is perceived as a kind of Siberian exile destination, if not a cemetery for failed politicians. Moreover, Estonia is one of the European Union’s smallest Member States and does not carry much brand awareness on the Continent.

However, it must be recalled that Mme. Ojuland was a rising star with pan-European ambitions going back to the start of the new millennium. In June 2004, she even ran for the post of Secretary General of the Council of Europe. She attracted only 51 of 299 votes, but certainly made herself known outside the Baltic States.

And her ejection from the Estonian government in 2005 did not prevent her from climbing the ladder of power in the all-European family of neo-liberal parties immediately thereafter. From 2007, she was already a Vice Chair for the ALDE-PACE Group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. As from 2009, she became an MEP, where she joined the neo-liberal ALDE bloc and moved up to become the right-hand (wo)man to bloc president Guy Verhofstadt (Open VLD, Belgium) in his growing campaign against alleged failings of rule of law and political corruption in Russia.

Ojuland had long been skilled at riding fashionable human rights issues to keep the spotlight on herself. Here she easily found common ground with a fellow grand-stander Guy Verhofstadt. Previously she had spoken out about the problem of violence against women. From 2009, she could ride the wave of anti-Russian emotions of a large swathe of her countrymen while helping ALDE make common cause with Russia’s borderline seditious opposition of the Parnas party grouping. She took Verhofstadt around Moscow, helped him forge common positions, common press releases, common op-ed publications with Mikhail Kasyanov and others in the PARNAS leadership, as well as with isolated opposition personalities like Gary Kasparov who have no following in their homeland but who have avid supporters in Washington, D.C.

Verhofstadt’s selection of Ojuland as Russia expert for ALDE was wrong on two counts. First, there were the questions about her ethical compass which gave rise to her dismissal as Foreign Minister in her home country. Second, there were the problems with her home country itself. It is a matter of public record that Estonia, alongside Latvia, has been guilty of daily violations of the human rights of its substantial Russian-speaking minority, which is largely disenfranchised and stateless by the wishes of the ruling majority. And with diabolical consistency, Estonia has positioned itself as a leading voice in the fight against the ‘Putin regime,’ including opposition to liberalization of the EU’s visa regime for Russian nationals. This is the case notwithstanding the country’s dependence on substantial tourist flows from Russia and notwithstanding the considerable ownership of Estonian resort properties by Petersburgers and Muscovites dating from before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It should have been patently obvious to Verhofstadt that fair mindedness and due diligence would not be likely to characterize ALDE policies on Russia under Ojuland’s stewardship.

It was in her capacity as ALDE spokesperson on Russia that Ojuland drove ALDE into the welcoming arms of Bill Browder and his global Magnitsky Act campaign. Thus, Ojuland organized and was scheduled to host a conference entitled “Russian Political Prisoners” in the European Parliament building on 5 June where Browder and some stellar personalities from the Russian opposition would denounce the regime and urge passage of the European equivalent to the Magnitsky Act. The date was selected to follow directly upon publication of an Address to Foreign and Interior Ministers of the EU signed by 47 MEPs rejecting any visa liberalization for Russia unless a Magnitsky Act were passed in tandem, allegedly to punish human rights violators in the Putin regime by denying them access to the EU and freezing their real estate and liquid assets. And that publication date was timed to coincide with the semi-annual EU-Russia Summit then going on in Yekaterinburg, where a partial end to the visa regime was due to be concluded. This very nice dog and pony show went ahead without her since the scandal in Tallinn was just then reaching its climax.

Ojuland’s last-minute replacement was another ALDE human rights defender, Leonidas Donskis. However, I am told she has returned to Brussels to resume her duties as MEP. It will be interesting to see whether Verhofstadt follows the logic of his Keynote Speech in Moscow last December and removes this disgraced figure from his entourage now that she is no longer a member of the affiliated ALDE party in Estonia. Or will he follow expediency and continue to rely on the services of someone who has been so useful to his anti-Kremlin campaign.

In case the objection is made that the possible and still unproven moral weakness and flawed judgment of one overly ambitious person cannot be taken as significant for an entire movement, allow me to draw the reader’s attention to a still greater catastrophe for the cause of the Russian opposition and their allies in ALDE which is waiting to happen. I have in mind the eventual public airing of the questions surrounding Mr. Bill Browder and his global anti-Russian campaign.

In an essay I issued last week, I suggested that Browder’s personal efforts to wreak vengeance on the Putin regime for the death in police custody of his attorney Sergei Magnitsky have gone way beyond the normal behavior of top international executives, who tend to ‘move on’ and avoid head-butting with sovereign states. That the American press has passed over in silence all the peculiarities of this would-be heroic human rights defender is understandable given the nearly total conformism of American elites with respect to things Russian.

That being said, an Op-Ed piece entitled “Russia’s Newest Dissenters” by Russian journalist Vadim Nikitin published in The New York Times last week broke the ice. Amidst an exposé of several current darlings of the American media who are faux dissidents, faux martyrs of Russian villainy, Nikitin speaks of the “shady money” Browder accumulated “while talking up Putin to foreign investors until their game was up.” As Nikitin rightly points out about Browder, Pavel Borodin and Sergei Guriev: “For years, they reaped the fruits of such collaboration…”

To this first stone in the water, I can suggest a few more: how did Browder manage to rise so swiftly in the Russian financial world and add such value to his overseas investors in Russian equities that his company Hermitage Capital grew in a few years to be the single largest portfolio investment manager in Moscow? In Russia’s roaring nineties, this would have been possible only with a “krysha” – some very highly placed protectors. Moreover, Browder boasts about his whistle-blowing activities on behalf of minority investors in state-owned concerns. It is inconceivable that he could have carried on these activities for any period of time without more of the same protectors. Finally it is inconceivable that he could have operated so profitably without doing as other Russians and foreigners did at the time and aggressively pursued tax optimization, risking direct confrontation with the authorities at one point or another.

These and a host of other questions demand full disclosure before Browder’s horror stories about the Russian regime can be weighed judiciously. It is high time for Mr. Verhofstadt’s colleagues to ask their leader where is the hard talk.

RUSSIA’S FINEST HOUR

20/09/2013

The essential fact about Vladimir Putin is his remarkable ability to grow. The consummate statesman, respectful and yet firm with his opponents, who has dominated both the world stage and domestic politics these past three weeks is worlds apart from the hesitant and inexperienced newly minted President of Russia who famously responded to Larry King’s question about what happened to the submarine Kursk with the tight-lipped remark: “It sank.”

Vladimir Putin’s 11 September essay in The New York Times is a remarkable document well worthy of analysis in its own right for what it tells us about the thinking processes of its author. Many commentators have concentrated on the essay’s tactical intent, to influence American public opinion on the urgent issue of a potential military attack by their government on Syria now that the ultimate decision of war and peace was put back in the hands of Congress by President Obama.

In this context, members of the American elite expressed outrage, none more vividly and less diplomatically than the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who had successfully steered the President’s resolution on use of military force through the skeptical questioning of his colleagues only to see Russian diplomacy change the script and his President make a U-turn. Menendez was quoted by CNN as saying Putin’s essay ‘made him want to vomit.’

Foreign Affairs magazine has taken slightly higher ground by opening the pages of its 20 September online edition to a Texas professor who explains with reference to American history why outsiders rarely succeed in changing public perceptions by their efforts at speaking directly to the American people (Jeremi Suri, “Offensive Charm”). It is difficult to gauge to what degree Babbitt-ry is a trait of today’s American public or just of its leadership. But in any case this is to ignore the effect Putin’s brilliantly-argued message to America might have on the rest of the world, enhancing America’s self-imposed isolation and appearance as a rogue state.

Putin’s essay also must be read for its strategic content. In it, he is pursuing doggedly the fight against United States unilateralism which he initiated behind closed doors at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, denouncing hegemony by the world’s sole remaining superpower and promoting a multi-polar world in which Russia plays a leading part. Now he edged a step further in taking on the notion of American exceptionalism which underpins the arrogant American overseas behavior that Putin finds so repugnant.

At the same time the thought piece in The New York Times must be seen within the continuum of a hyperactive period of three weeks for Russian diplomacy and exercise of soft power. It all began with Putin’s stewardship of the G-20 conference in St Petersburg on 5-6 September where he facilitated a civilized discussion among world leaders of the Syrian crisis and made it obvious to all but the blind that there is no consensus of the “international community” under American leadership, and that in fact many countries, representing a substantial part of the world’s population, oppose military intervention by the Western powers.

The initiative moved on to gain traction on Monday, 9 September, when the Russians took up Secretary of State John Kerry’s off hand remark about Syria turning over its chemical weapons to international control and destruction and made the Obama Administration an offer it could not refuse, thereby taking the crisis from the military plane back firmly into diplomatic channels with Russia as key participant.

Putin’s NYT piece two days later hammered home the constructive and principled role Russia is prepared to assume in resolving international tensions and guarding the peace.

And the charm offensive has continued right up to Putin’s keynote speech on 19 September at the festive tenth anniversary session of the Valdai Discussion Club, where he delivered a tour d’horizon of the principles of domestic harmony, of the humanistic ideals that he seeks to further in the Russian Federation during his presidency, with outreach to opposition leaders and to minorities, while staying clear of political correctness and frankly looking after majority interests. This was done in the presence of unusually high level foreign guests on the dais and in the hall; and, for the first time, the proceedings were broadcast live and in full on state television, carried globally via satellite.

It would be no exaggeration to say that September 2013 has seen the most intense burst of Russian diplomacy since September 2008, when, in the aftermath of the Russian-Georgian War, the country marshaled all its resources to lock in relationships with friendly governments around the world in the face of threats by US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to subject Russia to the world’s opprobrium, to isolate it and punish it for alleged aggression.

But where the hyper-active September of 2008 was an exercise in self-preservation, the activity of 2013 has served to project Russian statesmanship and responsibility. It has been a demonstration that Russia also can stand tall, see further and resolutely defend international law and shared values.

Whether out in front as the author of the op-ed page piece in the NYT or standing back somewhat as the father of the diplomatic solution over Syria now being implemented, Vladimir Putin’s persona has been in the world news daily and has forced the attention of pundits everywhere. It is entirely in line with this preeminence that the latest issue of Time magazine, has placed Putin’s portrait on its cover (in all but the US edition).

Some commentators have retreated into their ad hominem attacks to avoid facing facts which might overturn their Russophobe prejudices. In this regard, Newt Gingrich with his casual dropping of the words ‘dictator and thug’ in his television interview was not alone. Others have sought to suggest that what was attractive in Putin’s message had been purchased from a Western PR agency.

But still other American thought leaders have, like some of Putin’s domestic opposition at Valdai, grudgingly conceded that there is magnetism about the man, a strength that is hardly seen among other world leaders. As an example, I would point to Fiona Hill’s article in Foreign Affairs of September 11th, “Putin Scores on Syria.” Hill seeks to understand the sources of this strength, of this successful statecraft, and identifies Putin’s practice of judo and martial arts since childhood.

In this regard, looking to the distant past to understand Putin today, Hill is close to the standard American media script on Putin, where every article on the man necessarily reminds the reader that he once was ‘a KGB spy.’

All of this peering into the distant past misses what I believe is the essential fact about Vladimir Putin: his remarkable ability to grow. The consummate statesman, respectful and yet firm with his opponents, who has dominated both the world stage and domestic politics these past three weeks is worlds apart from the hesitant and inexperienced newly minted President of Russia who famously responded to Larry King’s question about what happened to the submarine Kursk with the tight-lipped remark: “It sank.”

And let us be very clear about the meaning of the foregoing remarks: such an ability to grow intellectually, and, as we saw most persuasively in his Valdai speech, spiritually and morally, as well as to become a grand master in the skills of statecraft, to deal easily with fellow world leaders in periods of great tension just as on the sporting field, is a very rare trait. Other world leaders have tread water before our eyes, Angela Merkel coming firmly to mind. Then there are those, like our own President Barack Obama, who has become steadily smaller and regressed in office. It was painful to recall that we elected an editor of the Harvard Law Review when on 6 September we saw him mishandle his press conference following the conclusion of the G-20 meeting. Anyone watching his stumbling and offensive response to a question about NSA spying on the Brazilian president must regret the course of America’s political fortunes under his inattentive watch.

DE-FUNDING TITLE VIII FINANCIAL AID TO RUSSIAN LANGUAGE STUDIES: A BLESSING IN DISGUISE?

08/11/2013

Given the venomous treatment of Russia by the present-day professoriate in the United States, it may not be a bad thing if we lose a generation of Russianists and the field starts over from ashes like the phoenix.

The State Department’s recent decision to de-fund Title VIII financial aid to students of the Russian language and area studies (as well as related studies covering the broader area of the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) has stirred up feelings in the otherwise slumbering community of American Russianists. The Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies has issued a ‘Title VIII Alert’ on its website. Laura Adams, a leading Harvard administrator and academic adviser to the M.A. program in Russian Studies has spoken out on the russia-direct.org website in a lengthy article criticizing the cut of federal aid amounting to a mere $3.3 million in 2012 as a poorly chosen savings given the major contribution of the program to maintaining U.S. expertise in what she considers to be an important part of the world. And The Moscow Times in its 4 November edition has published a feature article bemoaning the loss of the Title VIII aid and quoting extensively from former U.S. Ambassador to Russia James Collins, who is current director of the Russian and Eurasia program at the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

These defenders of Title VIII have pointed to famous alumni of the program including current U.S. Ambassador in Moscow Michael McFaul and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as arguments in favor of the effectiveness and value of grants. Of course, with a bit of detachment one might reason that the very same evidence proves conclusively why the Title VIII financial aid in the context of the anti-Russian orientation of U.S. institutions of higher learning today is NOT deserving of further funding. I will come back to that point in a moment. And in the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that I was a beneficiary of the predecessor program to Title VIII in 1966 at Indiana University’s summer language program in the Soviet Union.

First, I note that well before the State Department decided to save a few dollars on Russian studies, the field had fallen victim to self-destruction. Or rather it died a second death: the first death came with the collapse of Soviet studies in the mid-1980s, a development which antedated the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and which was posthumously shown to be justified by the inability of nearly all specialists in the field to predict the demise of the USSR.

The death of Soviet studies was brilliantly explained by Stephen Cohen in a 1985 book entitled Rethinking the Soviet Experience. As Cohen remarked, the field had gone stale. It had answered to its own satisfaction everything one needed to know about the totalitarian Communist state, which was assumed to be unchangeable and not subject to reform. With no open issues, Soviet studies could no longer attract high quality students and was condemned to backbiting and recriminations among aging scholars.

In the 1990s the field of Russian studies reconstituted itself following the break-up of the Soviet Union. There was a flush of excitement as Russia opened up and rushed headlong into frenzied catch-up with a destiny from which it was derailed in 1917. Everything seemed possible at the outset and both seasoned professors and youthful aspirants taking their first steps in the Russian language and studies went over to Moscow and beyond into the regions to participate in the change and possibly to make their fortunes.

The chaos of the Yeltsin times ended in the crash of 1998, from which followed the consolidation of state power and re-establishment of many Russian traditions in a unique blend with modern features of capitalist market economies. Russian national interests on the world stage also began to assert themselves, most notably in the run-up to America’s invasion of Iraq when Russia locked arms with France and Germany in open opposition to George W. Bush. America’s final verdict on the new Russia hardened at that point and in the decade since the end of history, in Francis Fukuyama’s sense, has fully descended on the Russian Federation. We are told that under the Putin regime, autocracy has rolled back democracy and stability, or stagnation to put it less kindly, has become the highest virtue of statecraft.

Once again there are no open questions in the field. Once again the life of this vast and complex country is largely ignored and our Russian experts are following only one issue: the passion play of human rights and pro-democracy figures. There are no debates about how to deal with Russia in our foreign policy journals. We know everything we need to know. Under these circumstances, the net contribution of the field to understanding where Russia is going today and where our interests meet or compete is close to nil.

Of course, this very narrow and stultifying focus on the progress or reversal of democracy is not exclusive to Russian studies on American campuses today. A year ago educators in the field of Latin American studies complained in Foreign Affairs magazine that future American diplomats, journalists and bankers dealing with Brazil or Argentina, for example, graduate knowing very little because the syllabus is cluttered with courses on human rights.

At the same time, without any relation to Title VIII or other federal programs, major American schools of international affairs, including the SIPA at Columbia University, which was one of the founders of the area studies programs in the period immediately following WWII, have dropped language and history requirements to obtain the master’s degree.

Two interrelated developments have replaced in-depth factual knowledge about one or two regions in the international affairs programs: the decision to go global and comparative, taking the methodology of one discipline across the world instead of drilling down; and the decision to shift from concrete facts to data processing techniques, stressing the numerical skills which job recruiters for transnational corporations, banks and NGOs are seeking.

It must be borne in mind that the ‘factual knowledge’ including languages that was once the core contribution of area studies programs fit into an approach to international relations, namely Realpolitik or interests-based foreign policy, which is largely discredited in the United States today. It has been vanquished by Wilsonian idealism and values-based foreign policy. Hence, the universalist models of economic, political and social development which sit very well with the triumphalist world view that swept America when we “won” the Cold War in 1991 and which provide the content of our international affairs programs.

The de-linkage between area studies and the broad mainstream of international affairs degree programs means that area studies become more parochial and instructors may shift the focus of their courses to their own pet topics of research at the expense of providing students with a common core of basic knowledge about the history and culture of the given area. The field becomes ever less relevant to policy makers and to federal funding.

And so we seem to be headed for the situation which prevailed in the 1920s when there were still no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and no school of Russian studies worthy of the name existed. This is a situation in which George Kennan, lately so much in the public eye thanks to the authorized biography by John Gaddis, found himself when he was sent abroad to Germany to train for a career in Russia.

But given the venomous treatment of Russia by the present-day professoriate in the United States, it may not be a bad thing if we lose a generation of Russianists and the field starts over from ashes like the phoenix. May the malice of McFaul, Condy Rice and their many colleagues in our think tanks, universities and diplomatic corps be interred with their bones.

BILL BROWDER, MASTER OF BAIT AND SWITCH

20/11/2013

At a Brussels Press Club event on 12 November entitled “EU-Russia Relations before the Summit,” Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder treated a select audience of journalists and human rights activists to a variety show which included the launch of a book he has financed, ‘Why Europe Needs a Magnitsky Law.’ The ultimate objective of his campaign, which now hits the road to the USA, is regime change in Russia.

“Despite the fact that we are still using his name, for many people this has become the Magnitsky list case, the adoption case, the information service case, the Obama administration partisan case, the case of the trial of Bill Browder or his business, or the Butyrka case. And it is not. It is the Magnitsky case. And these are the facts that we need to grasp if we don’t want to be sucked into a confusion strategy that is only in the interests of certain parties.” Ignacio Sanchez Amor, deputy in Spanish Congress of Deputies, Why Europe needs a Magnitsky Law, p. 248

In what follows, I offer the reader some critical insights into a remarkable event held at the Brussels Press Club on 12 November 2013 entitled “EU-Russia Relations before the Summit” and into a newly issued book promoted at that event entitled Why Europe needs a Magnitsky Law: Should the EU follow the US? The link connecting the event and the book is Mr. Bill Browder, who was the sponsor of both. The event and the book have the same strengths and limitations, which I intend to explore here. These follow from Browder’s mastery of the business art of ‘bait and switch,’ meaning concretely spreading not merely among his audience but also among the ‘stage hands’ or ‘exhibits’ of his road shows and publication projects confusion over his actual objectives, to which many might object if they understood his political project correctly.

The event in Brussels is being repeated at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York City this week, where it is billed as a book launch. We may assume that the road show will move on to other academic and nonacademic centers in the USA and further afield where there is an interest in Russian affairs. It is all part of Mr. Browder’s campaign to discredit and overthrow the Putin regime. In this activity, Browder is taking up the cause and some of the methods of the late Boris Berezovsky, and that separate issue of likenesses and differences will constitute the final section of this essay.

1. THE EVENT

On 12 November, Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder treated a select audience of journalists and human rights activists based in Brussels to a variety show which included inter alia the launch of a book he has financed, Why Europe Needs a Magnitsky Law. However, the invitations to the gathering bore a rather different focus: “EU-Russia Relations before the Summit, Brussels.” That reference is to the upcoming semi-annual bilateral summit in Brussels planned for January. Browder’s last public event in Brussels was held in the European Parliament building at the time of the EU-Russia Summit in June 2013. The apparent intent of these exercises, at a minimum, is to ensure that there is no rapprochement, no détente between the parties around the negotiating table. The maximum objective is regime change in Russia.

Browder engaged as moderator of the panel Fraser Cameron, the (ex)-director of the high-sounding “EU-Russia Centre,” a boutique think tank which worked closely with a variety of freedom-fighting peer organizations and personalities to name and shame Russia until it fell on hard times and lost funding following the crash of 2008. Never mind that Cameron’s Linked-in career resume says that he left the Russia Centre in September 2012 and that his name appears on the website of the EU-Asian Centre as its new director. The same website proudly lists the People’s Republic of China as a key sponsor. We may assume that Cameron is more circumspect about promoting human rights issues on the agenda in China than when wearing his Russian hat. Be that as it may, resting on the laurels of his service with the Russia-focused think tank, Fraser Cameron lent a sought-after gravitas to the panel. His words from the podium struck a chord of fair play and scholarly objectivity.

The program sent in advance to the Press Club membership clearly indicated where Browder intends to direct the thoughts of Members of the European Parliament before the January EU-Russia Summit. Back in June, he highlighted Magnitsky Act issues of visa sanctions so as to prevent a possible agreement on liberalization of the visa regime with Russia which was then expected from the Summit. The panel he brought to the Parliament building in June addressed the highly emotive theme of political prisoners in Russia. Moving with the times and considering that the EU’s negotiations with Ukraine are approaching their climax, Browder now seeks to highlight Russia’s alleged bullying of its neighbors, former Soviet republics, to prevent their signing trade and accession agreements with the EU.

In this context, we were treated to the presence on the panel of Vincent Degert, who is current Head of the Russia Division in the European External Action Service, and so is very much involved in Eastern Partnership questions. Degert was surely expected to condemn the Russians for their strong-arm tactics with Ukraine, Moldova and Armenia to prevent their escape from its orbit into the welcoming embrace of the EU.

However, as the only member of the panel with a job to lose, Degert decided that discretion is the greater part of valor and, while acknowledging that relations with Russia have not been easy, remained diplomatically silent, not sharing any personal thoughts he may harbor with respect to Putin’s Russia. Indeed, Degert used his time before the microphone to scuttle any notion that the EU is going to take up a Magnitsky Act given the need for unanimity within its Council that is not there today; and he questioned the logic of the whole venture to get an EU wide law sanctioning the Russians given that any one of the Schengen country members can presently, by its decision to deny a visa to a Russian applicant, effectively ensure that such a person is barred from traveling on the Continent. Degert even pooh-poohed the idea of withholding visa-free travel to the holders of service passports, a near-term Browder objective, saying that as an EU official he highly valued his ability to travel to Russia at will and so could not support counter-measures.

If Degert was a write-off for Browder, in a rare case where the patron misjudged his pawn, this was more than compensated for by another panelist, the splendidly English-speaking Russian Opposition propagandist Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza got his start in television journalism under the Yeltsin period oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of the NTV channel. After losing his NTV nest when Gusinsky was forced into exile by a resurgent Kremlin, Kara-Murza recovered his footing professionally in the 2000s, joining the anti-Kremlin Ekho Moskvy media complex, where our other panelist of the evening Elena Servettaz, also works part-time in addition to her post with Radio France International. As a political activist, Kara-Murza is a comrade-in-arms of Boris Nemtsov, the eternal presidential hopeful of one of Russia’s neoliberal parties. They have a wide following in Washington, D.C. but their voters are thin on the ground in Russia

Kara-Murza used the Magnitsky case as his point of departure for a sweeping condemnation of Putin’s Russia. In his view, the powers that be remain in place thanks to corruption, fraudulent elections and constant violation of the rule of law. Hence Russia’s rulers are illegitimate, constituting a regime, not a government. Kara-Murza painted a grim canvas of state monopoly of the media, Soviet-style show trials, forced psychiatric treatment of political prisoners, assault on NGOs. He called for a boycott of the Sochi Olympics unless there is a release of political prisoners. And, of course, he called upon Europe to adopt a Magnitsky law, as the United States has done, to punish the regime for its human rights abuses.

Compared to the lies and distortions of Kara-Murza’s presentation, which included very selective use of public opinion poll results, Browder’s little speech was a model of restraint. He delivered his now long familiar tearful recitation of his relationship with Sergei Magnitsky, who, in his view, died only because he refused to succumb to the urgings of his tormentors in prison that he denounce Browder and save his own skin. Now Browder claimed he was merely doing the right thing, seeking posthumous justice for Magnitsky by exposing those responsible for his death, those violators of human rights, to the sanctions of the civilized world, meaning denying them visas and freezing their assets abroad.

The presentation by the final panelist, Elena Servettaz, editor of the book on why Europe should follow the US by promulgating a Magnitsky law, was brief. She was enjoying her moment of celebrity on the dais and awaited her special reward of officiating at a book signing ceremony during the cocktail reception after the panel. Each participant who came up to claim a free copy received her autograph.

So far, so good. However, the evening also included a question and answer period during which one incident of signal importance took place. For a moment, Browder dropped his mask of reasonableness and remarked while responding to a question from the audience that the kind of torture and premeditated murder that happened to Magnitsky in pretrial detention is happening to thousands of people in Russia today. And he went on to say that the Magnitsky Act sanctions should be applied not merely to the 18 persons on the list of the US administration (from among 60 persons implicated in the death of Magnitsky) but to the one million ‘murderers and thieves’ among the Russian elite who are living off the people. With that rabble-rousing claim, Browder showed that he is utterly irresponsible.

2. THE BOOK

My first thought upon taking Why Europe needs a Magnitsky Law in hand was to see who published this and where. However, I found no copyright page, no indication of publisher. Later on I learned that the book does not appear among the millions of books in print listed in internet search. Quite possibly its ISBN number on the back page is a dummy. This is not very promising for what is called the ‘publication of a new high profile book’ by the moderator of the forthcoming book presentation at Columbia University, Professor Alexander Cooley, when he justified to me their rolling out the red carpet to its backer, William Browder, this week.

Leafing through the book on my way home from the panel, I understood that it is a collection of around 50 testimonials in favor of a European Magnitsky Law, several of them representing interviews conducted by the editor, Elena Servettaz, but the great majority in the form of essays ranging from three to eight pages each. And there are among them many of the ‘usual suspects’ in Russia-bashing exercises. Big names stand out particularly among the list of American testimonials in the volume: Senator Ben Cardin and Congressman Jim McGovern, the authors of the Magnitsky Act which became law in the United States; Senator John McCain, who needs no introduction as a vocal, indeed provocative critic of the Kremlin; David Kramer, the director of Freedom House, the US-government financed pseudo-NGO which prides itself on the ‘color revolutions’ it helped foment in former Soviet republics; Ellen Bork, a regular contributor to the Foreign Policy Initiative, the latest incarnation of the Neocon lobby founded by the movement’s leading foreign policy strategists Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Among the Russian contributors, who account for one third of the volume, the borderline seditious ‘systemic’ Opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Gary Kasparov lead the pack, while today’s ‘non-systemic’ Opposition leader Alexander Navalny also stands out as second in the list. Then there are a number of relics from the Soviet dissident age whose names are iconic even if their current relevance to Russian political life is nil.

It occurred to me that with recognizable names like this, an Open Letter showing all the contributors as signatories published in a number of mainstream newspapers of record around Europe might have served Browder’s cause just as well, perhaps better than the book. This seemed all the more the case when I began reading the Russian entries and found that so many of them were almost formulaic repetitions of a very few points, using even the very same words. The essayists tell us that today’s Russia is characterized by the corrupt officials, the torturers and killers of Sergei Magnitsky who, unlike their Soviet vintage predecessors, are folks who spend vacation time in Western Europe, keep their bank accounts there, send their children to school there. The argument goes on to say that for this reason they are vulnerable to sanctions directed against them should Europe decide to act. Hence the promised benefit a European Magnitsky Act.

The more timid or unimaginative Russian testimonials stop there; the more fertile imaginations among them believe the sanctions will split the Kremlin elites, with those under sanction turning against Putin for his inability to protect them, ultimately bringing down the regime. The more timid speak of punishment for those implicated in Magnitsky’s death; the more febrile imaginations seek an open-ended extension of sanctions to all of Russia’s violators of human rights and to application of a notion of collective responsibility whereby not only the violators would be punished: their children would be refused entry in the EU to study and their parents would be refused entry for medical treatment.

At this point I interrupt the narrative to object to the fundamental implication running throughout the Russian testimonials that all Russian money is corrupt and all Russian visitors, bank depositors, home owners, parents of students enrolled in schools are criminals and parasites on the Russian body politic. The facts are that some 10 million Russians travel abroad each year and not only criminals earn healthy salaries and bonuses on their jobs which allow them to invest abroad. The idea of setting up bodies in Europe to hear allegations of corruption and/or human rights violations that Russians may raise against one another in the context of Magnitsky Act sanctions becomes an absurdity.

But before leaving the Russian testimonials, I think it is essential to provide a few ‘sound bites’ which show the violence of many authors’ language, their hyperbole and their seditious intent. Boris Nemtsov tells us that “Putin’s Russia makes heroes out of murderers and corrupt officials.”

From Alexei Navalny we learn that “Putin’s Russia…resembles an organised crime syndicate more than a government…” In his rant, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza likens Putin’s repressive model to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus; he believes that the U.S. Magnitsky Act is ‘the most pro-Russian law ever to have been passed by a foreign parliament’’ and that ‘it strikes at the very heart of the Kremlin’s mafia-style system.’’ Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky tells us: “This is a terrorist regime which will not hesitate to kill. I noticed that since 2000, during Putin’s time in office, the number of political murders has increased, there are more of them than in the entire Soviet era.” Andrey Tolokonnikov, father of a Pussy Riot convict says “[Russia] is slowly evolving towards Stalinist courts or even inquisition tribunals” and ‘the country is seamlessly returning to the ‘Gulag Archipelago.’” Mark Feygin, lawyer for the Pussy Riot activists and for Bolotnaya Square defendants cheekily calls Vladimir Putin ‘a drab functionary’ who is the only beneficiary of the state system, a man who, together with his circle, ‘will hold onto power at any cost, and to the bitter end’’ so that the fate of North African despots in the Arab Spring awaits him. Lilia Shibanova, the Executive Director of Golos, the NGO shut down by authorities for violating the law on state registration as a foreign agent, says that ‘the regime has reached a stage already characteristic of Nazism” and “The situation in Russia today presents a real challenge to the entire civilized world.” Finally, with his unfailing gift for scare mongering, Gary Kasparov reminds us that “Putin’s current political modus operandi is on a par with Assad, only more terrifying: he can press the nuclear button!” In case we didn’t get the message, Kasparov concludes that “Stopping the maniac with the nuclear button is only possible through joint efforts.”

The extensive list of European testimonials come from both mainstream elected parliamentarians at the national or EU level with a special interest in human rights and from professional NGO activists. They are all over the map in their views of Russia and what is to be done. Among them there are a number of sincere and responsible establishment figures who are disposed to Russia but dismayed by the signs of corruption and failure to respect rule of law, which are a genuine problem. In this category, perhaps the most persuasive argument for our paying attention to the Magnitsky tragedy is made by Pieter Omtzigt, Member of Parliament in The Netherlands and member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Such contributors seek, as a matter of conscience, to punish the several dozen Russian officials directly implicated in the murder in detention of Magnitsky.

At the same time other testimonials by Europeans reveal visceral Russophobia, wildly misrepresenting the situation in modern Russia. Luke Harding, foreign correspondent of The Guardian denounces Putin’s fraudulent election in 2012 and proceeds to throw every anti-Kremlin stone in the book at the ruler of what he calls a Mafia State. Alan Mendoza, Executive Director of the think tank The Henry Jackson Society, tells us ‘hysteria is Putin’s weapon.’ Professor of Russian at the University of Rennes Cecile Vaissie tells us (wrongly) that in Russia the state is merely ‘an instrument of coercion’ where embezzlement is ubiquitous and where there is no protection of private property. Barbora Bukovska, a Czech human rights attorney opines that “In Putin’s Russia, dissent, even when expressed through art, can land one in prison. The Pussy Riot case is an example of just how far Russia is prepared to stifle free expression at the grass roots level.”

As one would expect from the foregoing, the range of proposed application of a Magnitsky Law found in the testimonials of the Europeans is still broader than among the Russian participants in this book. Here we even find that recommendations are mutually contradictory. Several contributors seek a universal law providing visa denial and asset freezes for human rights violators from all countries. One universalist undermines the fundamental logic of Browder’s campaign by insisting that ‘while the torture and state-sponsored death of defendants like Sergei Magnitsky is extreme, it is unfortunately not unique and is certainly not limited to Russia.” [Rebecca Schaefer, Fair Trials International].

The book’s structure and the inclusion of not just savvy political activists but also hapless souls like the daughter of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the widow of Sergei Magnitsky reflect the overall tactical approach of its patron, Browder: to try to cast his net as broadly as possible both in the West and within Russia, misrepresenting his real objective of regime change in order to bring on board all potential supporters notwithstanding the difference in their views on most everything else and notwithstanding their varying degrees of commitment to his final objective.

3. BROWDER AND BEREZOVSKY: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

Earlier this year ring-leader and financier of many dirty tricks campaigns against the Kremlin Boris Berezovsky died at one of his homes in the U.K. However, nature abhors a vacuum and there was no chance that following his demise Mr. Putin would be given a respite by his overseas enemies.

In light of Bill Browder’s ongoing campaign of regime change in Russia, it is fair to ask where these two sworn foes of the Kremlin are similar and where they differ.

Some of the likenesses are striking. Both amassed fortunes doing business in the murky milieu around the Kremlin. Both were eventually spit out by the system, sent into exile and deprived of some of their assets.

Both carried their grudge against their nemesis, Vladimir Putin, to extreme lengths, well beyond the normal behavior patterns of senior businessmen. Both misrepresented their activities of de-legitimizing and denigrating the regime in Moscow by posing as values-driven democrats and would-be liberators.

Both frequently work through ‘damaged goods,’ persons who are otherwise discredited and have lost the public trust.

At the same time, there are still noteworthy differences between Boris Berezovsky and Bill Browder. The former was by choice a ‘gray eminence’ lurking in the background while his paid thugs did his bidding under cover, whereas Browder is out in front, taking charge of his minions in the public eye while he lobbies parliaments. Berezovsky was widely suspected of working hand in glove with British and possibly other security services, and he retained a large and visible private security detail; Browder appears to be confident of his personal safety and dispenses with showy body-guards.

The balance between similarities and differences of these two larger than life anti-Kremlin actors remains fluid and is worth monitoring in future.

UKRAINE, BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: WHAT LESSONS CAN BE DRAWN?

03/12/2013

Given the divisions in Ukrainian society over its history, its official languages, and its future civilizational orientation, the only way forward, the only win-win situation that can come out will be arrived at if all interested parties - EU, Russia and Ukraine - sit together at the table to define how Ukraine can move forward…

Events in and about the Ukraine are developing with blinding speed and as we peruse the media incoming information has far outstripped comprehension. One contributing factor to the confusion is the prevailing amnesia of news purveyors, whose frame of reference tends to go back a week or two. Alternatively, those few seeking depth would take us back in time centuries to find the engines driving today’s daily events.

In this brief essay, I propose a time frame that I believe is more relevant, namely the past decade, going back to the period just before the Orange Revolution, and I intend to focus attention on the seeds for what was last week’s top story on Ukraine: the decision of its government to suspend talks on signing a Free Trade agreement and a political association with the EU. That came to a head on Friday evening with the closing of the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius, when the European Union leadership stood before the television cameras with two black eyes over its failed bid to lure Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence and Customs Union and into its own civilizational embrace.

The outcome of the summit was described by some commentators as a clear victory for Russia; others saw it as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ which would cost Russia dearly given Ukraine’s desperate need for financial injections to stay solvent. I maintain that both positions miss the point of Ukraine’s decade long instability as it totters between two nearly equally populous domestic linguistic, industrial, and geographic groupings: Left-Bank, pro-Russian, Right-Bank –pro-European. The Orange Revolution and its overturn at the ballot box bringing the current President to power are precisely indicative of this divisiveness which is unlikely to be resolved in the near term, whatever the outcome of the ongoing struggle for power on the streets of Kiev, Lviv and other Ukrainian cities. Into this very unstable situation, both Russia and the EU have marched in headlong pursuit of their own geopolitical and economic objectives, exacerbating willy-nilly the local tensions.

Our media primarily call attention to Russian arm-twisting. Indeed, there is no denying that the Kremlin has deployed both sticks and carrots to prod the Ukrainian leadership into seeing where its interests lie.

However, from the very beginning of its Eastern Partnership program the EU has been up to the same game, only with no sticks and a serious deficit in carrots. And that deficit reflects the lack of unanimity on the Eastern Partnership among Member States and the opportunistic and superficial way the whole program was launched in 2009 by the Commission.

The immediate context for the launch of the Eastern Partnership program was the Russian-Georgian War of August 2008, during and after which the United States unleashed the fiercest anti-Russian information campaign since the depths of the Cold War, a campaign which was picked up with alacrity by several EU Member States. The second driver was the Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute of January 2009. The cutoff of supplies from Russia to several of the newer Member States which was a byproduct of that conflict greatly embarrassed the Commission by highlighting what the US had long criticized as Europe’s over-dependence on Russian gas.

In fact, the launch of the Eastern Partnership in Prague in May 2009 ran in parallel with a high level meeting to promote the Southern Corridor, a proposed gas pipeline that would bring Caspian Basin natural gas to Europe by a route bypassing Russia and so further diversify the Continent’s energy sources. Both the Partnership and the Nabucco project, which was the core of the Southern Corridor, have moved in sync ever since, straight up to last Friday’s Summit in Vilnius. Hence, the presence of Azerbaijan at the Summit despite its falling afoul of all the EU’s good governance and pro-democracy guidelines, and despite its having delivered the coup de grace to Nabucco by promoting its own pipeline to Western consumers.

In simple English, both intertwined projects were intended to clip Russia’s wings. The pipeline speaks for itself. The Partnership with allegiance of Ukraine as its greatest prize was defined by its sponsors, the Member States Poland and Sweden. Both had their own tradition of competing with Russia for geopolitical control of East Central Europe going back to the 17th century. The initiative had only tepid support from the core Member States. At the founding summit in May 2009 four Member States did not even send their heads of state or government. In line with this, the new money put up by the EU to induce the target countries of the Partnership to sign up was paltry: 300 million euros of new money spread over the 4 years to 2013 and among 6.countries. Similarly, the EU only put up seed money for the Southern Corridor/Nabucco in furtherance of feasibility studies. It assumed the markets would find the investment funds, an assumption that was dashed as Europe entered steep recession and commercial credits for large projects evaporated.

In the time since 2009, the EU never put its money where its mouth was on the Eastern Partnership, so that today, in 2013, it could offer only aspirational political benefits to Ukraine’s population in the form of an eased visa regime, not hard euros in loans and grants to relieve the suffering of present recession and future worsening of salaries and benefits if the restructuring of industrial standards and economic reforms prescribed are implemented.

Leadership of the Eastern Partnership program has changed hands among Member States since its 2009 launch. Poland and Sweden found accommodation with Russia over Nord Stream, over Katyn, over the forestry industry and other key issues which had separated them. The new shock troops of the Eastern Partnership became the Baltic States, meaning in particular Estonia and Lithuania, whose President Dalia Grybaurskaite hoped and expected to bring in the biggest catch, Ukraine, during her 6 month mandate at the head of the rotating Council presidency. Other EU members remained less ardent. David Cameron no doubt spoke for many when in the run-up to the Summit he made clear his displeasure over all the indigent, tired and huddled masses from the East washing up on his shores and looking for handouts. In this sanctimonious and parsimonious spirit, no real money was ever offered to Ukraine.

One of the stock in trade accusations against Russia made by its detractors in the EU is that it plays the Member States off against one another by pursuing bilateral relations with its main trading partners, whom it grants enticing preferential deals in gas and natural resource exploitation. This is described as a tactic of ‘divide and conquer.’ But as we saw last week in the steadfast refusal of the EU Commission to countenance the appeal for 3 way EU-Ukraine-Russia talks put forward by Viktor Yanukovich with backing from Vladimir Putin, the EU is playing exactly the same game in reverse.

So, is there any genuinely win-win situation over and in Ukraine to be had?

If we dig in the recent past, we find that one of the most contentious issues in Russian-Ukrainian-EU relations, the ownership and control of the gas storage and transmission system in Ukraine through which the lion’s share of Russian gas passed to Western Europe since Soviet times found a tentative solution in precisely a three-way consortium that was approved shortly before the Orange Revolution. It was subsequently rejected out of hand by the incoming President Yushchenko as an attack on Ukraine’s sovereign property.

Given the divisions in Ukrainian society over its history, its official languages, and its future civilizational orientation, the only way forward, the only win-win situation that can come out will be arrived at if all interested parties - EU, Russia and Ukraine - sit together at the table to define how Ukraine can move forward on the good governance issues and economic reform issues that so enthuse EU officials while also moving forward on the close industrial cooperation and gas transmission issues that are at the center of the Kremlin’s concerns. Such wise statesmanship alone can ensure that Ukraine gets the financial help it needs to stay solvent and that its long-suffering people see rising, not falling living standards ahead.

REBUTTAL TO TIMOTHY SNYDER’S ESSAY ON UKRAINE IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

10/12/2013

When I learned that the eminent historian on East Central Europe, Yale professor Timothy Snyder, published a commentary article in The New York Review of Books five days ago entitled “A Way Out for Ukraine?” I lost no time bringing it up on the screen for a close read. Disappointment came quickly…

For the moment our media are focused on events in Ukraine, more particularly on the standoff in Independence Square between opposition demonstrators and the authorities. We are being treated to a torrent of commentary, much of it from the usual suspects, political scientists, whose stock in trade is political advocacy, namely what passes for democracy promotion. Long standing or in-depth knowledge of Ukraine is wholly optional for these shapers of public opinion.

Fact-based analysis from historians and other degree-holders in the social sciences with experience in Ukraine is the rare exception. For that reason, when I learned that the eminent historian on East Central Europe, Yale professor Timothy Snyder, published a commentary article in The New York Review of Books five days ago entitled “A Way Out for Ukraine?” I lost no time bringing it up on the screen for a close read.

Snyder’s name was well familiar to me. In April 2011 I heard him speak at the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in Columbia University when he presented his newly published and widely hailed book The Bloodlands. In his address to an audience that included both senior professors and the general public, Snyder impressed with his novel approach to his subject matter entailing a reordering of our conception of very emotive fundamental issues that seemingly were put to rest decades ago: the intellectual dimension of the titanic struggle between Nazism and Stalinism over control of East Central Europe, the lost traction of Operation Barbarossa and the adoption of the Final Solution for European Jewry, the relative weighting of Nazi death camps versus field operations in exterminating the Jews and other undesirable minorities. In his work, Snyder brought together the recent findings of researchers in many countries of the region who had used newly opened archives to rewrite their local history but who most often were not taking in the findings of their peers in other countries. Snyder brought to the task a rare fluency in languages of the region, both those present today and those which have perished (Yiddish). He demonstrated a sophisticated, nuanced mind.

For these reasons I expected his essay on the Ukrainian situation today would be fresh, insightful and well informed. And yet there was also a warning note: Snyder’s essay came to my attention thanks to a laudatory tweet from Europe’s most outspoken Neoconservative, a signatory of Neocon position papers going back to the Project for a New American Century, the viscerally anti-Russian politician, Carl Bildt. The Swedish Foreign Minister has been very much engaged in the EU’s Eastern Partnership program from its very inception as a co-sponsor with his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski. “Excellent historian” said Bildt of Snyder.

Snyder opens his essay with the facile statement that there are two fantasies: one, on Yanukovich’s side which he calls ‘exhausted’: Ukraine still has geopolitical importance and can play off Europe and Russia for the country’s gain. The other, which he calls ‘dangerous,’ is on Putin’s side: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country but a lesser brother to be taken in hand. Both of these attempts to encapsulate the driving issues of today’s Ukrainian predicament are seriously wanting.

The geopolitical significance of Ukraine is by no means exhausted or a figment of the Ukrainian President’s imagination. US and EU pursuit of what most commentators describe as the ‘Ukrainian prize,’ the most populous borderland state between Russia and Europe, can be traced straight back to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 master work The Grand Chessboard, in which the leading foreign policy thinker of the Democratic Party, mentor to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, explained that Russia with Ukraine was an imperial power while Russia without Ukraine would be weak.

The EU’s failure to offer financial aid to Ukraine to induce it to sign free trade and political association agreements has nothing to do with the country’s lacking geopolitical attractiveness. It has everything to do with the EU’s own financial shakiness following the near demise of the Eurozone in the sovereign debt crisis of the past two years. And it is the consequence of a deep malaise within the Union, its ‘expansion fatigue’ from difficulty digesting the new Member States of the past few years.

Meanwhile, Snyder’s taking the ultimate Realist, Vladimir Putin, for a misguided Romantic nationalist shows how little the good professor understands today’s Russia and its leadership.

Snyder’s snarky remark about Russian television and ‘those who still watch it’ employs low-ball argumentation, meaning it is dismissive without being factual. Russian charges of Western financial support for the Ukrainian demonstrations may be debatable, but the blatant meddling by European politicians in the internal Ukrainian standoff is shown daily on Euronews and other Western media. The arrival in Kyiv of a European Parliament delegation from the single largest bloc, the European People’s Party, to show its support for the Opposition; the fraternization of West German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle with protesters in the street before taking his place at the OSCE meeting; the anticipated, uninvited arrival of Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, to help mediate between the Government and Opposition: all of these are unprecedented actions of disrespect for a sovereign state. They are the behavior of a colonial power towards its possessions.

In the midst of his essay, Snyder conjures up the image of ‘another Russian armed adventure in Ukraine.’ He tells us: “A Russian military intervention would bring bloodshed on a scale that people of the region know all too well.” Snyder is willfully confusing Russia today with the Soviet Union of 1956 or 1968. This ignorant and irresponsible presentation of hypotheticals is an abuse of his academic credentials.

The essay then moves on to other equally improbable hypotheticals in search of an exit from Ukraine’s present dilemma. He raises the possibility of Yanukovich ceding power to the Opposition to save his skin while guarantees of his personal security might still be negotiated. Or he suggests that the Ukrainian constitution might now be modified to replace the current presidential system by a system where executive power is vested in the prime minister, easing the way to a transition of power away from Yanukovich to the Opposition.

These scenarios are amateurish and unworthy of our specialist from Yale.

Stepping back from the specific arguments he raises, we see that Snyder is thinking at the level of a sloganeer. High sounding words about ‘visa-free travel’ and ‘normal civilized European life’ cannot substitute for finding solutions to Ukraine’s impending economic melt-down. Foreign currency reserves are exhausted. Eighteen billion dollars in debts fall due in the new year. And the country is in recession, as Snyder acknowledges.

These challenges may be intractable. But if any solution is to be found it can come only through three-way cooperative action by Ukraine and its suitors in West and East.

Postscript:

Timothy Snyder’s anti-Russian bias comes out even more clearly in his contribution to NYRB a week later, on 13 December: “Ukraine: Putin’s Denial.” Snyder has picked the raisins from a fruitcake, by which I mean that he has selected quotes from the highly diverse Russian media to prove alleged Russian imperialism. His bouquet to Carl Bildt, Europe’s leading Neocon politician, is eloquent testimony to where Snyder stands on the political spectrum and reciprocates for Bildt’s tweeted bouquet to him a week earlier.

It is very regrettable that Snyder has allowed himself to be so blatantly partial, so undiplomatic and so over-confident when wading into questions of Russian-Ukrainian relations. That tells us as much about the state of mind of his readers in America’s intellectual elites as it does about Professor Snyder himself.

In a close reading of Snyder’s major opus, Bloodlands, I attempted to identify the sources of the professor’s undisguised biases. See http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2013/12/29/timothy-snyder-american-intellectual-discourse-on-the-holoca-1121703.html. I came up with the following: A pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian predisposition arises, quite naturally, from Snyder’s strongest foreign languages, from where he has done most of his reading (as evidenced by his Notes) and from whom he may engage in exchanges outside the libraries or archives. That is only human, but it nonetheless bears stressing. In his showcasing the Holodomor (Stalin-era famine), we see how Snyder the scholar (as distinct from Snyder the pundit dealing with current affairs) plays into the hands of those many American ideologists who conflate Stalinism with Communism, Communism with Great Russian imperialism, and Great Russian imperialism with Putinism.

Snyder is clearly a man on the make, a scholar who positions himself in the midst of politically sensitive and high-visibility issues.

MAKING SENSE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN’S STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESS, 12 DECEMBER 2013

13/12/2013

In his speech to the Federal Assembly yesterday, Vladimir Putin demonstrated repeatedly that Russia will stand up to the USA intellectually and physically to defend not merely its own national security, but to advance its own values…

Putin’s 12 December Address to the Federal Assembly received a great deal of attention during its delivery. Besides full live coverage on the Russian state television in both domestic and satellite channels, Euronews also provided a live link to global audiences. However, follow-up commentary was tepid. Some journalists remarked that the speech lacked sparkle. One described Putin’s demeanor as that of a khozyaistvennik or prudent manager, husbanding the nation’s reduced resources in times of weak GDP growth to ensure that his major targets for social and economic development are funded. Though admirable, this is not much to excite an audience.

However, as I set out below, through both the domestic issues that took up two-thirds of the speech and in the foreign policy and military affairs sections of the speech making up the balance, Vladimir Putin gave us a very clear understanding of why Russia’s relations with the United States, and through the US, with Europe are likely to be fraught in the coming several years. This is so because he demonstrated repeatedly in his speech that Russia will stand up to the USA intellectually and physically to defend not merely its own national security, but to advance its own values. In this open challenge, he stands virtually alone among the world’s statesmen.

Whereas the Russian President has in the past come across as a pragmatist above all, it seems from this speech that he has finally put together an integral world view, almost an ideology, and by definition ideologies may sacrifice practical results on a higher altar. In effect he repudiated the fundamental points in the current American ideology, which draws so heavily on Neocon thinking and was conveyed graphically by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History in the image of a single train track on which all nations are traveling, some ahead and some further back. Not so, said Putin flatly, defending instead the uniqueness of national traditions and diversity of development paths. We have here an ideological confrontation that is not so comprehensive as during the Cold War, when Marxism was opposed to free market capitalism, but there is an undeniable clash nonetheless. It is backed up by an open arms race that Putin described with unusual frankness.

In arguing for uniqueness, Putin was by no means turning his back on the world. Indeed in a number of points he made reference to global benchmarks, such as the efficiency of labor or the number of days to get official authorization for exports, where Russia lags behind. Moreover, he spoke favorably of solutions to social and administrative problems taken straight from the developed industrial countries, such as for public health services: placing insurance companies between the state Treasury and the citizen. In the military domain, Putin called for introduction of reserve officers training on university campuses in line with American practices. And he cited the number of privates and sergeants on contract in the Russian army as it slowly turns professional, in emulation of the American army.

But in other areas he called for restoring meritorious practices of pre-revolutionary and also Soviet times. I think in particular of his stress at the beginning of his speech on greater public participation in local self-government as the long-range solution to preparing officials with superior skills to enter the competition for elected office at the federal level. He mentioned this in relation to the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Zemstvo reforms, one of the most successful and powerful innovations of Tsar Alexander II. It bears mention that this is a subject which Putin discussed at length in the past with Alexander Solzhenityn, its fervent supporter.

In this address, Putin propounded traditional Russian values of family life and spirituality. He denounced moral relativism. He described the assault on traditions coming from above in many (Western) societies as being undemocratic in nature.

Putin unabashedly declared that his country is a defender of conservatism, which he then explained in terms of the 19th century Russian philosopher Berdyaev, who was no obscurantist. This is all a direct push-back against the political correctness on LGBT and much else coming from Washington and Brussels.

From the section of his speech devoted to foreign affairs, the international media have seized upon his statement that Russia does not seek to be a superpower, without exploring his meaning which was explicit: a nation which exerts hegemonic control at the global or regional level, a country which takes others under its protection, which tries to teach others how to live. All of this, of course, is a lightly veiled and trenchant criticism of America. He did not describe the USA as the ‘empire of evil,’ but he came close.

Putin insists Russia is a key guarantor of world and regional stability, a state which respects international law, national sovereignty and the uniqueness of peoples. Putin held up with pride the two recent cases where Russian insistence on political solutions, not ‘bare fists’ to resolve thorny international problems is winning out over the American-led policies of sanctions amounting to economic warfare or of military intervention itself: in Iran and in Syria.

An hour into the address, Putin took up his final topic, the Armed Forces. From the get-go this was directed at the unseen audience in Washington. His mention of America’s Prompt Global Strike program was intended to influence the debate on this program within the Congress, and within the Pentagon itself, where skeptical voices have been raised over likely responses from adversaries.

One must understand in this context Putin’s stress on Russia’s ongoing modernization of its nuclear triad for land, sea and air implementation. This follows on nicely with the remarks of deputy premier for the defense industry Dmitry Rogozin a few days earlier. Rogozin had called nuclear weapons Russia’s great equalizer and reiterated Russia’s strategic policy of not hesitating over first use if it faced an existential threat from conventional arms.

Putin’s remark that Russia would never allow another country to enjoy military superiority over it was also addressed over the heads of his audience to the USA. He went on to drop a few tantalizing details that do not usually enter the public discourse. He named the figure of appropriations for rearming the army and navy, for modernizing defense industry complex: 23 trillion rubles, or a whopping 500 billion euros. And he said that the complex is fully booked for the rest of the decade. He also put a number on the military industrial complex itself, saying it employs 2 million and so provides a living to 7 million of Russia’s 143 million citizens. These figures tally rather well with the SIPRI statistics on Russia’s share of GDP allocated to the military (4.5%), which is at parity with the USA and three times greater than EU countries. It is also 5 times less than in Soviet days and so is entirely sustainable.

It remains a subject for conjecture whether what is being rolled out as a state ideology for the Russian Federation is strictly reactive and defensive or can assume a life of its own. Moreover, one must ask whether it serves Russian interests to be so exposed to American wrath over its loud and principled rejection of The American Way? Time will tell.

UKRAINE-RUSSIA RAPPROCHEMENT, 17 DECEMBER 2013: POINT, SET, MATCH

18/12/2013

The grim expressions on the faces of Russian ministers seated in the front rows of the Kremlin hall where Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovich announced their agreement on rapprochement yesterday, sealed by $15 billion in loans and a steep discount on natural gas, indicated skepticism that many ordinary Russians also share over the generous handout to their dodgy southern neighbors. Has Putin got it right?

The broadcast on Russian state television yesterday showing Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovich announcing their agreement on rapprochement, sealed by $15 billion in loans and a steep discount on natural gas, was remarkably revealing. One saw uniformly grim expressions on the faces of Russian ministers seated in the front rows of the Kremlin hall. Their obvious skepticism over the generous handout to their dodgy southern neighbors no doubt is shared by many ordinary Russians.

For their part, usually well informed Western journalists like the Moscow-based New York Times reporters Andrew Kramer and David Herszenhorn speak of the deal as “a bold but risky move by Russia given the political chaos in Kiev.” And for more than a month many observers, myself included, have at times described as a ‘booby prize’ the winning over of Ukraine to their exclusive trade cum political alliance by either the European Union or Russia.

However, it we stretch our minds a bit, move our focus beyond the protests and counter-protests on Independence Square in Kiev, beyond the rhetoric of civilizational choices, there are a number of good reasons to consider that Vladimir Putin did his Realist School calculations with great care and may have landed a master stroke yesterday: not a quick fix that will come unstuck, but a genuine shot at point, set, match.

If Russia ‘bought’ Ukraine, as the rabble-rousers on Maidan Nezalezhnosti would have us believe, then he did so with a bid that takes your breath away. He is putting up nearly the entire sum that Ukraine needs to ensure it meets debt repayment and other convertible currency obligations for the coming year or 18 months, thereby buying financial stability which is a precondition to political stability, in the run-up to the next presidential elections in Ukraine. No party in the West was talking numbers like these.

In a match of ‘put up or shut up’ Putin has shown John McCain, Victoria Nuland, Guido Westerwelle, Catherine Ashton and other Western politicians who posed for the cameras among protesters last week to be empty-handed blusterers.

In the same stroke, Putin has struck down the EU accusations of brutal pressure by Russia on its neighbors. All one can say now is that money talks. And all of those who pay homage to the Marshall Plan must now guard their silence on Russian intentions.

Fifteen billion dollars may be a big stake to put up. It is said to amount to nearly 20% of Russia’s National Welfare Fund, the rainy-day piggy bank, from which it will be drawn down, and it is being invested in sovereign bonds which enjoy a lowly B rating from the international rating agencies. However, it is only one third of the amount which Russia has vowed to put up to complete its South Stream project, which serves exactly the same objective as today’s bet on Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is respected even by most political opponents as talking straight, so we may very well take him at his word that there is no secret pact with Viktor Yanukovich committing Ukraine to joining the Customs Union. However, we may be fairly certain that there are understandings over natural gas transmission to Western Europe via the Ukraine infrastructure. A little more than a year ago, when Ukraine was still negotiating earnestly with the EU over an association and when Russia was completing all the paperwork to launch its anti-Ukrainian South Stream project, Yanukovich is said to have proposed returning to the notion of a three way consortium to manage the transit pipelines to Europe which had come close to passage in the year before the Orange Revolution but was then quickly scuttled after that political earthquake. One can easily imagine that one way or another Russia and Ukraine will now find a solution to ownership/management of that critical infrastructure which gives Russia the assurance of reliability which its economic security demands.

The question of an accommodation with Ukraine over gas transmission has taken on special importance in the past several weeks because the EU Commission has overplayed its hand in the broader geopolitical and economic contest with Russia. The ruling of the Commission that South Stream violates its legislation on unbundling energy producers and pipelines, its call for Russia and the 6 EU Member States who are participants in South Stream to rip up their contracts and start over, and its refusal to give any indication of a time frame for accepting any such revised deal was a hostile act which elicited a stern Russian refusal to acknowledge EU law as superior to the international law that the bilateral contracts on South Stream represent.

While it is unlikely that the call of the Commission made during the tenure of the Lithuanian President as head of the rotating Council presidency will survive when the baton is passed to Greece in 2014, one might nonetheless conclude that risks surrounding South Stream are presently greater than risks surrounding a deal with Ukraine for delivering Russian gas to West European consumers.

And what of the risk that in February 2015, at the next presidential elections in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich will be ousted and a pro-European opposition figure takes power? Here everything will depend on whether the EU reverses its anti-Russian stance under pressure from the new powers that be in Germany’s coalition government. However, if Europe continues to be America’s proxy in some new Cold War, it is likely once again to overestimate its leverage in the East and end up with a foreign policy loss still greater than what has occurred over the past month.

A new tug of war in Ukraine in 2015 with Europe attempting to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit can very easily result in the country’s break-up. Several days ago Russian state television laid out the scenario. Were US and European intelligence analysts watching?

The East of Ukraine where most Russian speakers live and where most of the country’s manufacturing industry is located does not have to fall back on Romantic Nationalism or common Slavic roots to justify seceding from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation. They have purely economic reasons which are no less well stated than the secessionist Catalans have in Spain or the Flemish have in Belgium: they are tired of subsidizing what they see as the freeloaders in the West Ukraine. As the biggest consumers, they will now be the biggest beneficiaries of the $268 per cubic meter price on natural gas which Russia is introducing in January. Any future government in Kiev which tries to cut a deal with the EU at the expense of the economic interests of the East may expect serious political problems.

Of course, there are always contingencies which might overturn the logic behind Vladimir Putin’s bet on Ukraine in the coming several months if not years. However, in difficult situations boldness can be the greatest virtue. By contrast, among those in power in the EU, that is one quality massively in deficit.

Postscript: At his annual press conference on 19 December, in response to a couple of questions from journalists about Ukraine at the very start of the 4 hour exercise, Vladimir Putin confirmed my supposition that his understandings with Viktor Yanukovich over a discounted price for natural gas deliveries had a strategic dimension related to the gas storage and transmission system:

“We count on our being able to find some solutions of a long-term nature which will allow us to keep this [discounted] price and will allow us to work together in a more in-depth manner. After all, many years ago in the time of President Kuchma we proposed joint use of Ukraine’s gas storage and transmission infrastructure. In that case we did not intend to buy; we did not intend to take property rights; the system would have remained the property of the Ukrainian state. We proposed to create a consortium of Russian, European and Ukrainian companies to take over its management and maintenance, etc. Everyone said “Yes.” And then it all collapsed. What did that lead to? It led to the fact that we have now built Nord Stream and have begun construction of South Stream. The value of Ukraine’s gas storage and transmission system already is approaching minimal figures.”

Putin also insisted that Russia’s planned purchase of $15 billion in Ukrainian government bonds was not a handout: this money would be returned. And he gave out some details on the mechanism for this operation. The issuance of euro denominated bonds by Ukraine will be listed on the Irish Stock Exchange and will be governed by English law. The placement will be managed by VTB Capital, one of Russia’s leading state owned banks. The notes carry interest of 5% per annum.

PUSH-BACK TO SYLVIE KAUFFMANN’S OP-ED PAGE ESSAY “HOW EUROPE CAN HELP KIEV” IN THE INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

24/12/2013

Kauffmann’s op-ed essay shows that she deals in platitudes and makes foolhardy mistakes of fact and interpretation which, due to her august position in mainstream media, few if any call out. In this brief critique, I will break that silence…

By their calling, journalists should be diligent, hard-working folks. After all, they are by and large generalists with a gift for writing and/or speaking who are called upon to deal with any and all subjects, who are dispatched to the four corners of the globe to cover breaking news and must get into the core facts with great speed.

However, by her past performance and by her op-ed page contribution to The International New York Times this week, the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and its current editorial director has demonstrated that hard work is not her forte.

In this connection I am obliged to point out that Kauffmann’s mental laziness and preference to talk rather than listen first came to my attention in March 2012 when she, together with the editors-in-chief of five other leading world newspapers, took part in a round-table meeting in Novo Ogarevo with then presidential candidate Vladimir Putin just days before the Russian election.[1]They were expected to discuss the points in a 14 page campaign manifesto entitled “Russia and a Changing World” which Putin had just published. Instead they lectured Putin on democracy.

In her article about the event, “In Putin’s Dacha,’ appearing in Le Monde a week later, Kauffmann denounced the Russian position paper as ‘a diatribe.’ However, from the 38 page transcript of the meeting which was published on Putin’s website, it is plain that Kauffmann, like 4 of the other 5 editors, never bothered to read Putin’s 14 pages on the way to the meeting. The only diligent soul was the Japanese editor of Asahi Shimbun. And Kauffmann used her 5 minutes in direct contact with Russia’s top politician to badger Putin on why Russia did not force Syria’s President Assad to release a wounded French journalist then being held hostage. It took Putin to explain that the lady journalist was actually being held not by Syrian state forces but by the rebels, who were refusing to hand her over to a waiting Russian helicopter crew.

Kauffmann’s latest op-ed essay shows that she continues to deal in platitudes, to serve up conventional wisdom and to make foolhardy mistakes of fact and interpretation which, due to her august position in mainstream media, few if any call out. In the following brief critique, I will break that silence: the queen of the French print media is stark naked. And this is all the more to be rued because she has chosen to address one of the key questions of international relations in our day: how to interrelate with rising Russia.

Sylvie Kauffmann strikes a moderate, above-the-fray pose in her essay on the recent European diplomatic fiasco in relations with Ukraine. From the very start, she seeks to minimize the nature of Europe’s defeat by putting her American audience on the defensive and issuing them a put-down that may be well received among intellectual snobs in the Times readership but in no way exculpates Europe for its own grievous obtuseness in handling Russia.

Kauffmann calls to mind President George Bush’s ‘Chicken Kiev” speech of 1991 to demonstrate how wrongly American leaders can read the situation on the ground in far-off places. That Bush erred is undisputable, however, his calculations (concern over nuclear proliferation if the Soviet Union broke up) were graver and deserve greater respect that Kauffmann deals him.

Then with typical Parisian hauteur she notes the antics on Kyiv’s Independence Square last week by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain. Yes, Kauffmann is right: both revealed the American predisposition to reach into the Cold War toolbox to deal with every new development in relations with the East. However, she fails to mention that European politicians were equally keen to mingle with pro-Europe demonstrators in Kyiv and pose for photo opportunities, among them a delegation from the European People’s Party in the European Parliament and the Foreign Minister of Germany, Guido Westerwelle. Such grandstanding is cheap politics and unhelpful meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, whether practiced by Americans or Europeans.

Kauffmann tells us Europe has superior savoir-faire with regard to Russia arising from its new Member States in the East: “Today, some of the younger members – Sweden, Poland, Lithuania – are important players in this drama, bringing new expertise to Brussels.” In this connection she cites in particular the Czech EU Commissioner for enlargement Stefan Fule and the Polish diplomat Jan Tombinski, the EU ambassador to Kyiv. They and others with in-depth experience constitute a ‘new Europe’ that is ‘already bringing East and West together.”

There are grievous flaws in logic and in fact in these assertions. First, on the logic side, we may say that the proof is always in the pudding. What counts is the outcome, which in the case of Ukraine’s decision against signing the political and economic agreements with the EU at the end of November was a pure disaster for the policy set by Brussels. Kauffmann herself quotes Aleksander Kwasniewski to the effect that “Brussels was naïve.” That puts in question the expertise and political wisdom of the EU team.

Moreover, in the broader sense, the New Europe, including Sweden, is precisely part of the problem, not the solution to relations with Russia. Poland, Lithuania and Sweden all have contested control of East Central Europe with Russia going back to the 17th century. On the Old Continent, all political elites have excellent historical memories. And while Poland and Sweden have in the past few years found an accommodation with Moscow and resolved issues of mutual interest, Lithuania and its sister Member States in the Baltics have continued up to the present to lead the charge against Russia and for many years now have frustrated the conclusion of a new strategic agreement at the EU level.

Now for the most inexplicable error of facts: Kaufmann suggests that Ukraine’s signing the EU documents will be good for its economy, which can then be expected to grow as has Poland’s since its accession. Poland now has a per capita GDP which is 3 times higher than Ukraine’s. She goes on: “If, one day, the Ukrainians catch up with the Poles, their Russian counterparts will take note.” Sadly, Mme. Kauffmann did not bother to take two minutes to consult Wikipedia on per capita GDP in the world. Had she done so, she would find that in 2012 Russia ranked number 47 in the world with $14,302 while Poland was number 55, with $12,709.

That blunder is emblematic of her closed mind to new information. Sylvie Kauffmann is, simply put, too full of herself, too complacent to be an intellectual leader. Her own flag waving for Europe is not at all dissimilar from Reagan’s image of America as a beacon, a light on the hill. Per Kauffmann, Europe means “rule of law, government without corruption and solidarity.” Starting from a low base, like all of the post-Soviet states, Russia today is trying hard to tackle those three issues, with greater or lesser success. Meanwhile Europe, with an acknowledged ‘democracy deficit’ that the sovereign debt crisis and austerity have highlighted, is still sitting on its laurels. At a university conference in Brussels last week, experts from the local chapter of Transparency International and the International Chamber of Commerce revealed that a seemingly whistle-clean country like Belgium, ranking 15th in the TI ratings per perceived corruption (Russia is 127th) holds the position chiefly because of the opaqueness of its public services.

Most importantly, and revelatory of her idealist turn of mind, Kaufmann leaves current money matters for the very last paragraph in her essay. She notes that Vladimir Putin offered to Ukraine $15 billion in loans and discounted natural gas, which she calls ‘a big fish.’ Her belief that Europe’s offering instead to ‘teach Ukraine how to fish for itself’ does not stand up to any scrutiny when she is addressing a country in recession, a country which has exhausted its hard currency reserves and is at the brink of default.

It is regrettable that the op-ed page of the International New York Times has no fact or logic checks on the essays it publishes so long as the basic message is in line with the editorial stance of the paper itself. The exclusive showcasing of like-minded authors is not a credit to the paper’s management or an encouragement to its readership to think for themselves.

VICTORIA NULAND: WHENCE THE ILL WIND BLOWS

07/02/2014

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland’s remark “Fuck the EU” let drop within the context of her strategy discussions for Ukraine with Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt, has made the rounds of world media today bringing to the fore the mindset of arrogant world puppet-masters. The ill wind from Washington heralds only rancor and divisive international relations ahead.

In breaking news last night, Bloomberg.com was one of the first media channels to publicize an intercepted phone call dating back several days to the end of January between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt in which the senior State Department official let drop the remark “Fuck the EU.” To its credit, Bloomberg went beyond the shock value of the profanity and exposed the otherwise dispassionate exchange of views between the pair on how to stage-manage the Ukrainian opposition leaders in the formation of a new, pro-Western government in Kiev: which leaders to promote, and which leaders to hold back for the future.

By contrast, other mainstream media like The New York Times and the Financial Times last night initially sought to divert attention from the damaging substance of the leaked tape to the circumstances surrounding its release on YouTube, in particular the Tweet from Dmitry Loskutov, aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin: “Sort of controversial judgment from Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland speaking about the EU.”

However, in the meantime Euronews, a media outlet that in recent days has been in the forefront of the ‘trash the Sochi Olympics’ crowd and is not known for pampering the Russians, put out a fairly complete airing of the damaging tapes, perhaps reflecting the pique of EU Commission personalities. This morning’s editions of the aforementioned newspapers of record are more factual in their reportage of the leak and the blatant meddling American policy it reveals.

The only thing surprising in the Nuland-Pyatt tapes is that their phone conversation was successfully hacked – to the extent that the U.S. officially did not even attempt to deny the veracity, only to shift blame to those who brought the tapes to world attention.

Although Russian intelligence has not been named as responsible for the wiretap, its release at this time was a master stroke for the Russians. It came not merely during the latest visit of Nuland to Kiev for talks with President Viktor Yanukovich and the Opposition, but on the very eve of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, which the American foreign policy establishment has previously identified as a propitious time for taking a free hand on the Ukrainian question given the assumed focus of Russian leadership attention elsewhere, on the Games, and their presumed inability to respond to events in Ukraine in their usual resolute manner for fear of wrecking the Games.

Curiously the State Department has learned nothing from 2008, when, with tacit U.S. backing, then Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili launched his attack on Russia-protected Southern Ossetia precisely during the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, while Vladimir Putin was at the Games and pusillanimous Dmitry Medvedev was minding the home front in Moscow. Even then, when caught on the back foot, the Russian leadership was able to emerge from the contest victorious. The notion that these Olympics will tie Russian hands if there is a geopolitical disaster in their back yard is beneath contempt.

The hacked conversation of Nuland also is not surprising in terms of the author’s thinking processes. You reap what you sow – and Victoria Nuland is the very same spouse and intellectual mate of Neocon foreign policy leader Robert Kagan, 2008 adviser to presidential hopeful John McCain, co-author of our 2003 Iraq invasion disaster, best-selling promoter of American Empire and rabid Russophobe. At the start of his presidency, Barack Obama knew very well what he was getting when he brought her back to Washington, D.C. from her post in Brussels as NATO ambassador to make her spokeswoman to newly appointed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. He later promoted her further to her present post with all its potential for causing trouble. She has performed to script.

Another Obama appointee whose relationship with the President goes back to his earliest days in office has also been in the news in the past week. The announcement by U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul that he was resigning his post at the end of the Sochi Olympic Games to return to academic life in California was widely commented upon in U.S. and world media. His two-year tenure in Moscow has been generally viewed as ineffectual though the expectations laid on him by pundits have been diametrically opposed – ranging from the belief he could breathe new life into the ‘re-set’ policy of which he was said to be the author to the belief that he could use his contacts in the Russian Opposition to bring about the overthrow of the Putin ‘regime.’

One of the more interesting essays discussing McFaul’s resignation appeared on 6 February in The National Interest, a publication of the tiny Realpolitik wing of the Republican Party managed by Dmitry Simes, custodian of Richard Nixon’s political legacy. In “The Fall of McFaul,” analyst James Carden would have us believe that McFaul engineered his appointment to Moscow as a way to remain in government even if the Obama administration lost the November 2012 presidential elections.

According to Carden, the president and others simply overlooked McFaul’s intellectual baggage, his extensive (highly tendentious) scholarly writings on modern Russia and broad exposure in U.S. print and electronic media since the start of the Putin years in which he was a vociferous, at times vitriolic critic of the Russian president on whom he blamed the erosion of democratic institutions.

The factual record does not match Carden’s neat suggestion that Obama or the foreign policy establishment was under-informed or misled about McFaul. In advance of McFaul’s Senate confirmation hearings, no less an establishment figure than editor of Foreign Affairs magazine Gideon Rose used his powers to send up a red alert by republishing an earlier essay by McFaul in which he laid out his anti-Putin, anti-Russian positions.

As I wrote at the time (http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2011/07/15/can-a-u-s-ambassador-to-russia-be-expelled-the-pending-case.html), the McFaul candidacy enjoyed active promotion from Neoconservatives in the Beltway (Robert Kagan) and adherents on the Senate floor (John McCain) precisely because they believed he could take best advantage of his past contacts in Russia to discomfit the Russian leadership during the post-electoral season.

The sad fact is that the election of Barack Obama on a platform of correcting course from the Bush period unilateralism and hegemonic policies abroad was nothing more than a campaign maneuver. The distance separating Republican Neocons like Victoria Nuland and Michael McFaul from Progressive Internationalist Democrats like Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton and… Barack Obama was and remains negligible.

This bipartisan mainstream in America is behind the vicious propaganda offensive directed against the Russian Federation that we have seen in a variety of different but complementary manifestations in the run-up to the Olympics (under the guise of corruption exposes, LGBT defense, heightened terrorist risks). It is behind the aggressive efforts to pick Russia clean of its economic and political allies from among former Soviet republics so as to bring the military cordon sanitaire directly to RF borders. Nuland’s plotting with the Ukrainian Opposition is part and parcel of this very policy. These Washington elites are complacent. They place excessive store by their own inviolability and, in the final analysis, they are tempting fate.

COOL UNDER FIRE: MEASURED RESPONSES TO THE ‘TRASH SOCHI, TRASH RUSSIA, TRASH PUTIN’ PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE

16/02/2014

Paradoxically, the vile propaganda offensive directed against Russia in US and European media these past few weeks has had a positive outcome in the emergence from their relative silence and defensive postures by some of America’s most responsible, experienced and well-informed thinkers on Russia. In this essay I join their dialogue with some related observations.

Paradoxically, the vile propaganda offensive directed against Russia in US and European media these past few weeks in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics and amidst the tug-of-war between the EU-US and Russia over the ‘civilizational choice’ of Ukraine has had a positive outcome in the emergence from their guarded silence by some of America’s most responsible, experienced and well-informed thinkers on Russia who have risen to the challenge with fresh essays.

In what follows, I will take as my starting point writings of the past few days by Professor Emeritus of NYU Stephen Cohen and Professor Graham Allison of Harvard. I will then move on to set out several of my own observations on issues in play in the current media offensive (and counter-offensive) over the nature and prospects of Mr. Putin’s Russia.

I begin with ”Putin’s Olympic Gamble” by Graham Allison in The National Interest, a publication of the Realpolitik wing of the Republican Party which is custodian of Richard Nixon’s political legacy. Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Aff airs, Allison has a record as a leading advisor on security issues, in particular disarmament and nonproliferation, going back to the 1970s. In 2008, when US-Russian relations fell to the last low point following the Russian-Georgian War, Allison was a member of the group of wise men including former US Ambassadors to the Russian Federation, business leaders and academic experts in the Commission on US Policy Toward Russia that prepared the way for the U-turn in relations ultimately known as the ‘re-set.’

Now, when bilateral relations are falling to a new nadir, Allison’s article carries the constructive and reflective approach of his past writings. Like those writings, too, it has definite blind spots, which I will deal with in a moment, and so it is illustrative of the conceptual limitations of even a fair-minded observer of Russia in today’s American establishment.

Allison strikes a blow at the Russophobe tone of nearly all media accounts of Sochi dating from before the opening day, calling them a “chorus of skepticism and criticism that essentially amplified the prevailing refrain about Putin’s Russia as a backward, brutish, bullying relic of the past.” The result, per Allison, has been counterproductive, positioning Vladimir Putin as the defender of national interests and raising his ratings at home. One senses that this outcome is more offensive to Allison than the trampling on truth which underlies the wholly negative, at times lurid reporting.

Under cover of attribution, rather than using the first person singular, Allison gives us a second pragmatic criticism of the negative media coverage: that in the end it does not change the realities of international relations. He cites his Russian official contacts in concluding that, like it or not, Obama will be forced to deal with Putin and Russia to resolve the thorniest international problems including Iran and Syria.

Despite himself, Allison fell under the charm of the opening ceremony in Sochi: “by highlighting Russia’s achievements in the arts, literature, science, sports and style from before Peter the Great to the present, the event conveyed a subliminal message of historical inevitability: the bear is back.”

Among other personal impressions, Allison shares with readers what he heard from one of the young volunteers with whom he chatted: she told him the Games ‘made her so proud she cried.’

Yet at the front and at the back of his essay Allison directs attention to the great risks that Putin has taken by choosing Sochi, on the edge of the unsettled Caucasus region with its Islamic insurgents, for his investment of tens of billions of dollars in tourist infrastructure and as the venue for the Games. He says this bet could easily prove to be ‘foolhardy.’ Reading between the lines, he is suggesting it was reckless.

In saying this, Graham Allison is missing entirely the most basic fact about the Putin years, which has been the determination of Putin, the man, to face up to the many daunting challenges in his path and realize his ambition of transforming Russia from the economic, social, political wreckage he took over from Boris Yeltsin into a self-confident, purposeful nation hitting above its weight at the board of directors of world governance and defending the interests of its future generations.

This started with Putin’s clipping the wings of the oligarchs who had plundered state assets, taken control of the media, weakened state institutions at every level and flourished amidst the ensuing chaos. They were tamed, sent into exile or, in the case of unbending Mikhail Khodorkovsky, dispatched to prison without any concession to howls of criticism in the West.

Though it is commonplace to remark on how rising oil prices underpinned a resurgent Kremlin, that became possible only because Vladimir Putin risked the wrath of world capital when he faced down the oil majors and dramatically rewrote the one-sided contracts on hydrocarbon and mineral extraction signed in the 1990s to make the state the prime beneficiary of the new favorable prices. Moreover, he championed vast investments in new gas pipelines to end Russia’s dependency on transit countries to bring its hydrocarbon exports to end users. In doing so he engaged the US and the EU in the ‘pipeline wars,’ with threatened veto of passage rights and other dirty tricks at the disposal of his detractors abroad. Overcoming the political obstacles, his team gambled and won on the technical feasibility of bringing into operation the Nord Stream pipeline within tight deadlines and a commercial budget. In the initial rounds of what will be a protracted struggle, he has also won out over the EU-US backed Nabucco pipeline and Southern Corridor in favor of Russia’s competing South Stream project with budgets in play as great or greater than the Sochi Olympics.

These were all colossal risks which Vladimir Putin freely assumed for himself and his leadership team. Failure in any one of them could have spelled national disgrace and the political graveyard. And yet the odds were not as fearsome as they might have appeared given the talent and will of the Russians in issues of primary importance to themselves, whereas their opponents came forward as opportunists without matching motivation. In the case of the United States, those driving the anti-Russian policies have often been armchair ideologues, dilettantes in effect. Michael McFaul, Richard Morningstar and Victoria Nuland come immediately to mind.

Over the past decade, there were major risks to the Kremlin which were imposed on it from outside. Here, too, the same elements of steely determination and absence of viable alternatives to victory worked in favor of the Russian team and its boss. Firstly there was Mikheil Saakashvili’s invasion of South Ossetia in August 2008, the Russian-Georgian War and its immediately aftermath, when the US Secretary of State called for the international isolation of the Russian Federation in a propaganda war likening Russian action to Hitler’s move into the Sudetenland.

More recently, Vladimir Putin faced down the non-systemic opposition and the street rallies against his rule that arose in the wake of the controversial fall 2011 parliamentary elections. He rallied the majority of the population to his side for his successful March 2012 presidential election. This was done, once again, in the face of open hostility and backing for the opposition by the US administration and its minions in Western Europe. And his domestic popularity ratings rose once again to the level of 65%.

To bring the record up to present, in December 2014 Putin took on both the external political challenge from the European Union and domestic doubters in his own administration, not to mention the country at large, and concluded his deal with Ukraine, in yet another huge bet. He proposed and then signed accords with Ukraine for $15 billion in loans and a one-third discount on the price of Russian gas, numbers which matched the financial needs of Ukraine to avoid default in the coming year. Putin’s wager on Ukraine was many times the numbers advanced by the EU and IMF and had none of the draconian conditions which the competing side had set for its assistance. It was and remains an open question whether the funds being advanced will ever be returned.

Like the last titan on the European stage, Helmut Kohl of Germany, Vladimir Putin has found the courage to take risks from his reading of the national history. His lodestone has been Russia’s last major statesman in the early 20th century, Petr Stolypin, who defiantly moved to implement his vision of a great Russia notwithstanding the hostility of the royal milieu on the one side or, on the other side, the political rabble in the streets and the seditious majorities in the country’s young parliament. Stolypin may have lost his bet when he fell to an assassin’s bullet, but he set the mark for enlightened patriotism that the Kremlin has rekindled.

In view of this clear pattern, it is hard to accept the faint-heartedness in Graham Allison’s estimation of Vladimir Putin. It is precisely feistiness that has set Putin apart from timid, tongue-tied politicians taking their cues from the polls in the seats of power across Europe and America today or the uninspired bureaucrats beholden to 28 sovereign states for their marching orders bearing the nominal titles of presidents of the European Commission and the European Council.

The second article with which I open this thought piece on the issues flying about in the brouhaha over Russia these days is “Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine” by Stephen Cohen, published in The Nation.

Stephen Cohen is one of America’s leading scholars on 20th century Russia whose books over the years consistently challenged the complacency and generalized lack of intellectual rigor in establishment teachings.

Cohen opens his piece with the observation that “American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.” And he points out that the American penchant for vesting in the Kremlin boss all credit for the (faux) democracy of the 1990s (Boris Yeltsin) has switched seamlessly to personalizing and laying at the door of present incumbent Vladimir Putin all blame for Russia’s alleged reversion to autocracy and imperialism, so that “wanton Putin-bashing is… the dominant narrative in centrist, liberal and progressive media, from the Post, Times and The New Republic to CNN, MSNBC and HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher…” Cohen lists the separate issues in the ongoing misrepresentation and critiques at length several authors and articles to drive home his points.

First in his sites is New Republic’s lead writer on Russia, Julia Ioffe with her latest 10,000-word cover story about Putin: “He Crushed His Opposition and Has Nothing to Show for It But a Country That Is Falling Apart.”

Turning to America’s leading newspapers of record, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Cohen notes their almost exclusive focus in Sochi coverage on either alleged corruption surrounding the $51 billion spent on the Games or on the terrorist dangers to which the selection of Russia and Sochi, in particular, have purportedly exposed the sport. He rightly calls some of this reporting downright ‘pornographic.’

Then Cohen moves on to the tug of war over Ukraine, characterizing US media coverage as “highly selective, partisan and inflammatory.” And he delivers a point for point rebuttal of the latest propaganda piece by Yale professor Timothy Snyder, “Ukraine: The New Dictatorship,” in The New York Review of Books.

Cohen’s remarks fit together rather nicely with my own critiques in blogs.lalibre.be of the political advocacy posing as scholarship that Snyder has been publishing since the Independence Square demonstrations set in last November. Whereas a year ago, the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita described Snyder as ‘Nasz człowiek w Ameryce’ [Our Man in America] because of his pro-Polish bias in his historical writings, the Maidan thugs might just as easily say that about Snyder today given his dissemination of their every seditious allegation about the Yanukovich ‘regime’ in his current affairs pieces.

I substantially agree with Stephen Cohen that the current political chaos in Ukraine may be traced back to the ultimatum from the EU that Ukraine make a civilizational choice in its favor and against Russia. And he very rightly tells us that the truly shocking aspect of the Victoria Nuland tapes was not the profanity directed at the EU, as mainstream American journalism would have us believe, but the disclosure of U.S. attempts to stage manage a coup in Kiev in favor of American stooges.

Cohen speaks of the even division in opinion within Ukraine over its future orientation, East or West. Here a further clarification is due: opinion polls and voting patterns over the past 20 years show a division that rather neatly tracks geography. On the major issues facing the country, voting has been 90:10 in East Ukraine and the inverse in the West. That is to say, each half of the country is roughly homogeneous in its thinking and diametrically opposed to the other half. The net result is to make the country’s possible split-up under pressure from Brussels and Moscow more likely and easier to achieve than one might suppose

The EU, like the US behind it, has been pursuing a winner take all game in Ukraine, as Cohen points out. Meanwhile for weeks now the Russians have been saying unmistakably on their state television that if the Maidan opposition comes to power in Kiev the Eastern Ukraine, Crimea and Odessa may be counted on to secede. The EU and US would be left with the permanently economically dependent remainder.

The Russians will not countenance a geopolitical disaster being inflicted on them in their own back yard by Washington and Brussels. With the expected approval of the population in East Ukraine, they will have every possibility of resisting such defeat without recourse to arms, merely by standing at the ready and waiting for a ripe fruit to fall into their lap.

And yet, if need be, there can be no doubt that Russia will react with military force if presented with an existential threat. It is equally certain that neither the US nor the EU will go to war over Ukraine, which lies well outside their core interests.

The stage is thus being set for a new profound breakdown in Russian-Atlantic Alliance relations. Let us hope that reason will prevail on both sides before we reach that juncture. Back in November both President Yanukovich and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called for the launch of three way talks on the future of Ukraine. Sadly, this was rejected out of hand by the EU. It remains the only viable approach to resolve the crisis and implement much needed financial assistance, reform and trade association agreements for Ukraine.

Finally, I close this essay with some reflections on two important issues about Russia and its governance that have arisen in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics: alleged corruption and embezzlement of funds that brought the final price tag to $51 billion and the phenomenon of this mega-project itself which some journalists have identified as redolent of the wasteful practices of the Soviet past that Putin’s Kremlin prefers to a genuinely market-driven economy.

Regarding the question of embezzlement or price gouging surrounding the Sochi Olympics, it has been no secret that close friends and associates of Putin were awarded contracts for construction of the Olympic venues and infrastructure, that both state companies and oligarchs invested heavily in Sochi often using borrowed funds from VEB bank. Journalists for Western media would have us believe that the absence of competitive bidding is a uniquely Russian phenomenon, that it proves the corrupt nature of the regime.

Without denying that the procedures used could be compatible with the suggested abuses, and the truth will only be known in the future when and if proper audits are conducted, the fact remains that the procedures implemented are not unusual internationally and may well have been fully justified in the context of the Sochi project where so much had to be done in remarkably short timelines.

Since the fault finding over Kremlin cronyism has come from the US, I would like to raise an issue from recent American history which bears directly on the options and decisions taken in Moscow.

In the period following 9/11, the Bush administration decided that the federal government was too slow and lacked the skills and experience to respond quickly to the wholly new threats posed by Islamist terrorism. The gutting of federal government departments followed, with large scale outsourcing of security, intelligence and related services to private industry. In an atmosphere of war hysteria, which only reached still higher levels following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US Congress appropriated funds for the Bush administration’s war on terror without exercising its constitutionally mandated supervisory and control powers. Vast contracts were concluded with Halliburton and other private companies with which the Vice President Dick Cheney had decades-long business relations.

The seemliness of these sweetheart deals has never gotten a full public airing in the United States. The logic was always that the chosen partners were known to have the technical, financial and expert skills necessary to assure prompt and successful implementation of the services and/or production entrusted to them.

And this very same practice may be seen in Pentagon awards of contracts well into the Obama administration as regards urgently needed equipment for troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is precisely the same logic that stands behind the Kremlin’s award of the Sochi projects to its known friends, who alone in Russia were assumed to have the financial, technical and expert characteristics to ensure successful implementation of a project that carried with it the national prestige. So far, in the unfolding Winter Olympics we have seen no reason to question the wisdom of that logic and of the contracts so concluded.

Under normal conditions tenders, even electronic auctions may be the best way to ensure competitive pricing, transparency and the most efficient use of Treasury funds. But exceptional circumstances were operative with regard to Sochi.

Finally, I would like to respond to the criticism of the Sochi mega-project as something intrinsically Soviet in nature and therefore bad for the country. Here again, let us go back to US experience and consider for a moment the race to the moon launched by President John F. Kennedy. The scope and imagination of that project, the depth of its financing and mobilization of talent was entirely comparable to the Sochi/Krasnodar Region infrastructure project surrounding the Winter Olympics though the time line was more generous.

Arguably, the Apollo program redefined American national purpose. The patriotic pride of a generation was confirmed and the technological advance of the US over the world at large was given a step up that private enterprise, left to its own devices, could never have achieved. Though the lessons of that national project are being unlearned today as NASA yields ground to a burgeoning private rocket launch industry in the USA, the verdict on any alleged superiority of private initiative over national mega-projects is a long way off.

RUSSIAN STATE TELEVISION AND THE INFORMATION WAR

18/02/2014

In the rapidly evolving New Cold War, not all Russian responses to the psychological warfare coming from America are healthy. Their mass media and, in particular, state television, show a steadily rising level of propaganda, pushing aside entertainment or news reporting to save the nation’s soul from the falsehoods being disseminated by both Western and homegrown enemies.

In my essay “Cool Under Fire” published two days ago, I noted a positive consequence of the wave of black PR directed against Sochi, Russia and Putin in the past month by US and European media: some of the best American experts on Russia have dropped their guarded silence and joined the fray, countering the distortions point for point in new writings that invite open discussion.

Regrettably, not all responses to the psychological warfare coming from America are healthy. Russian mass media and, in particular, state television, show a steadily rising level of propaganda, pushing aside entertainment or news reporting to save the nation’s soul from the falsehoods being disseminated by both Western and home-grown enemies.

While the likes of CNN have decided to schedule one segment of their relaunched 1998 documentary about the Cold War on 15-16 February, in the midst of the Sochi Olympic Games, lest their viewers take too much pleasure in Russia-hosted sports, Moscow’s Channel 1 has returned the favor, dampening the high spirits of its viewers with a tedious documentary of its own – The Biochemistry of Treason – which it trumpeted for several days leading up to its airing on 17 February by releasing trailers and an interview with project author Konstantin Semin.

Biochemistry is now available for viewing on YouTube and I can recommend it as a vivid demonstration of why propaganda is precisely the last weapon Russia needs in its armory to prevail over its detractors.

In his pre-release interview, the author tells us he had 4 months to research his documentary and it is evident from the end product that he used a generous expense allowance to travel the world. But you don’t send a boy to do a man’s work. This pastiche of archival video materials, testimonials by boastful contemporary traitors and commentary by loyal defenders of the Kremlin wanders all over the waterfront, following the logic that if you cannot convince, then confuse. The only glue holding it together is the memory of General Vlasov and his army of turncoats who fought the USSR in league with the Wehrmacht.

The Vlasov betrayal is stretched every which way in time to serve the author’s purposes of arguing for the timeless nature of Russia’s fifth column in the pay of foreign puppet masters. In normal discourse on Russian history of the 20th century, this would lead to analysis of the October 1917 Revolution, the German Revolutionierungspolitik and the sealed train which brought Vladimir Lenin back to Russia to perform his regime change on German money.

In what is an eye-popping change of historical emphasis, Semin puts the blame for the 1917 regime change on the British and Americans, working through the Russian Liberals (Kadets) to achieve the February Revolution. After all, the anti-Bolshevik Vlasovtsy movement, which is the central antihero of this documentary, and more broadly the White Emigration, hoped to return Russia to where it stood politically after the February 1917 Revolution as a newly proclaimed democratic republic which let go its non-Russian borderlands and was led by a progressive coalition of parties.

Having spared Old Communists the ignominy of the German connection, Biochemistry says the Ur-betrayal was committed by those who forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and whom he denounced at the time for their treachery. Specifically, Semin lays the blame on Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadets in the State Duma, whom he tells us was widely known as ‘the American’ by his colleagues. By implication, the mud reaches to today’s self-described ‘liberal opposition’ to the Kremlin.

This propaganda point does not stand up to scrutiny. To be sure, the notion that the February Revolution was more fateful precisely because it opened the way for October has had serious defenders among professional historians of Russia. I think firstly of Oxford University professor George Katkov’s classic study Russia 1917: The February Revolution. However, Katkov showed conclusively that the overthrow of the monarchy was made possible by a considerably broader slice of Russia’s elites than Milyukov’s party. He traced the quasi-masonic connections which were woven in the Voluntary Organizations (today we would call them ‘civil society’) and particularly in the War Industrial Committees. And he highlighted the culpability of the once loyal conservatives as well as liberals when he described the political maneuvering of Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov.

At the other end of the time line, Semin has pulled the blanket of Vlasovism all the way to the Pussy Riot. The trailer of Biochemistry shows a brief sequence from the band’s notorious performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Church. The far-fetched link to Vlasov in the documentary is via one of their defense attorneys, Mark Feygin, whose oddball political career in his native Samara and in the State Duma during the 1990s included membership in a White émigré association that acted in concert with Vlasov in the 1940s. The fact that Feygin was fired by the punk defendants for abusing their trust and taking their cause célèbre for self-promotion is overlooked by Semin in his rush to do the same for the sake of his documentary.

Looking beyond this one-off piece of cheap propaganda, it is troubling to see how Russia’s most watched news program, the Sunday night round-up of the week on Vesti nedeli is also being weighed down by overly aggressive commentary against those who are getting on the Kremlin’s nerves. This is all the more unfortunate given that the show’s presenter, Dmitry Kiselyov, is now also Putin’s key news manager in his capacity as general director of Rossiya Segodnya.

In particular, this past Sunday Kiselyov permitted himself a 10 minute denunciation of the pundit and writer Viktor Shenderovich whose odious blog published a few days earlier on the site of opposition radio station Ekho Moskvy was so outrageous that it should self-destruct when read by any Russian of sound mind. Shenderovich had compared the ongoing Sochi Olympics with Hitler’s Berlin Olympics of 1936 and likened the sweetheart of Russian sports fans, 15-year old figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya, to the shot putter Hans Woellke, who symbolized the Hitler youth, later served with the Waffen SS and died in Belarus.

One minute reporting on the scandal surrounding Shenderovich should have sufficed. Ten minutes gave the scoundrel undeserved celebrity. And though Kiselyov has a first-rate mind, he unwisely chose to forego subtlety this time. Instead he reminded viewers that Shenderovich would not have had the pleasure of observing the Berlin 1936 games because he would have been interned in a camp or otherwise slated for extermination. Kiselyov also delivered lesser swipes at the two leading anti-Kremlin media outlets, Dozhd and Ekho, reminding both that they exist only at the liberal sufferance of the Kremlin.

Clearly the boys are over doing it, which can only be counterproductive. Of course, the Russians have no monopoly on this type of excess. I recoil at the character assassination of Edward Snowden which leading American politicians engaged in for weeks following his arrival in Moscow, not to mention the murder threats against Snowden which the American media obligingly disseminated.

There are no winners in a shouting match, only the distortion of truth and amplification of cynicism. It behooves all sides to show greater dignity and self-restraint, to wind down the propaganda component of broadcasting.

TWO PEOPLES UNDER ONE NATIONAL ROOF: UKRAINE’S CONSTITUTIONAL DILEMMA AND SOLUTIONS MADE IN BELGIUM

23/02/2014

The greatest lesson of the Belgian experience in governance is that divorce is utterly thinkable and possibly preferable to a bad marriage of peoples who have aspirations, cultural orientation and economies as different as East Ukraine and West Ukraine have today.

The compromise agreement to end the Ukrainian crisis brokered by the EU on 21 February is already in tatters. Responding to demands from the Maidan, the Verkhovna Rada has passed a resolution removing President Yanukovich from power. For his part, Yanukovich has called the parliament’s action illegal and insists that he remains the legitimately elected head of state. The split within the country is once again projected onto big power relations, with EU signatories of the negotiated settlement between Yanukovich and the opposition recognizing the legality of the parliamentary moves. Meanwhile on Saturday a six man delegation from Russia’s State Duma and four of its provinces bordering on Ukraine attended the regional meeting of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking southeast and Crimea in Kharkiv which decried what it called a violent coup d’etat in Kiev and declared itself ready to defend the territory against any chaos arriving from the west of the country and the Maidan.

The stage is set for the break-up of Ukraine into Left bank and Right bank states. We shall see in the coming months whether the leading candidate for the presidency in elections now slated for 25 May, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and her liberal party will have the skills and the resources to take power back in the Western Ukraine from the radicals of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor who today occupy not only downtown Kiev but also the city administrations in Lviv and other key towns. Will the liberals also be able to appease concerns of the Eastern Ukraine, which vociferously objects to the victory of the Maidan in Kiev and refuses to obey the latest federal directives? Though the West Ukraine radicals still speak in the name of one nation, their policies and intents so contradict the beliefs and the economic interests of the East that they are de facto separatist.

What Ukraine has been passing through is a grass roots revolution, not a palace coup. It was the military muscle of the extremists and their armed formations of ‘hundreds’ which made the victory, not Vitali Klitschko or Arseniy Yatsenyuk meeting in the presidential compound with EU representatives. The genie has been released from the bottle. Moderates, technocrats and others whom the IMF, the EU and the US would like to find as interlocutors are unlikely to have an easy ride in the days and weeks ahead as they try to reestablish order in the country.

Meanwhile, the competition for influence and the information war over Ukraine between EU and Russia may be expected to continue, further complicating the political tasks of whoever holds power in Kiev. And looking beyond the formation of a coalition cabinet and the presidential elections, the talks over urgently needed financial assistance from the IMF and Europe are likely to be tied to very unpopular economic reforms bringing down living standards and to the signing of an association agreement with the EU, the issue which touched off the political turbulence in the first place back in November 2013. If their offer of three-way talks over the future economic alignment of Ukraine is once again rejected by the EU as it pursues a winner-take-all policy, the Russians may be expected to reinstate measures to protect their own economy, meaning sharp curtailment of economic cooperation with Ukraine, pushing Ukraine substantially towards default.

If, against all the odds, Ukrainian liberals do succeed in neutralizing the radicals and establishing effective federal control over the entire Ukraine, then the question of managing the sharply differentiated cultural and economic interests of East and West will become timely. And in this context the experience of Belgium may be very relevant.

Many well-meaning folks speak of the need to arrive at a power-sharing solution whereby the two nations now inhabiting the shell of Ukraine might get on peacefully. As a 30-year resident of Belgium, I have seen the pluses and minuses of power-sharing, as well as the arguments surrounding maintaining unhappy marriages within a single state versus “divorces.” In this essay I offer some conclusions drawn from the Belgian experience to help guide discussions over Ukraine and its future evolution.

Power-sharing or “consocial” solutions to ethnic, linguistic or other divisions between peoples were an invention of progressive European academicians who pitched them to the political class. Such solutions presuppose the greater ability of educated elites to maintain peaceful political process within an institutionalized allocation of responsibilities between communities than is the case in free-for-all, first past the gate elections among the entire polity that heat up tensions and, it is feared, can give rise to violence. Though devised in Western Europe to deal with local circumstances, these solutions were also invoked in post-colonial countries in the developing world where artificially drawn national borders created permanent minorities (ethnic, tribal, religious) at the mercy of the majority. Protection of minority interests has been an essential feature of consocial political arrangements. As an example of what this can mean in practice, in Brussels the 5% of Flemish speakers are given equal representation on the regional governing board with the 95% French speakers.

In the 1980s, within the context of an unfolding succession of constitutional reforms that began twenty years before and has continued to our day, the Kingdom of Belgium became a world-leading pioneer in power-sharing arrangements between the Flemish-speaking northern provinces of Flanders and French-speaking southern provinces of Wallonia plus the Brussels capital region. The model seemed so successful that it was emulated elsewhere, most famously in the US-imposed political solution for Bosnia-Herzegovina with its warring Croat, Serb and Muslim communities following the Dayton Accords in 1995.

However, the Belgian political crisis of 2007 – 2011 which had as its low point the record 541 days that parliamentarians were unable to form a new federal government, revealed the ultimate failure of power-sharing as a solution for states with populations that are divided by language, cultural orientation and economic models. The decisive factor leading to this outcome was the triumph in Flanders of a new separatist party (the New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA) led by the tactically astute and charismatic Bart De Wever. Whereas his predecessors among Flemish separatists, the Vlaams Blok (later the Vlaams Belang) had preached backward looking Romantic Nationalism that was xenophobic and was rejected by the large majority of Flemings as extremist and out of step with united Europe, the N-VA has promoted ‘pocket book’ nationalism, stressing the discrepancy in economic models and aspirations between the North and South of the country, stressing its attachment to the European Union and a Europe of regions rather than big nation states.

As the N-VA progressively became the leading party in Flanders, the French speaking South was compelled in 2010 to face the possibility, perhaps the likelihood of a divorce, for which they were largely unprepared in terms of identity. Would Brussels become a ‘free city’ and would Wallonia face merger with France as its only recourse? In fact it took nearly two years for French-speakers to find a new self-awareness in which the Federation of Brussels and Wallonia is their default successor state in case of divorce.

Over the course of decades of reshuffling the power to be shared as the unitary Belgian government became a federal government that progressively devolved powers onto the regions, we have reached the point of no return following the 6th state reform that took the country out of the 2011 deadlock over formation of a cabinet. A break-up may come at any time, particularly if the May 2014 parliamentary elections further amplify N-VA power in the North.

Looking to Ukraine, it is possible to find direct parallels with Belgium’s national consciousness issues and separatism that have ultimately driven power sharing to the wall. Clearly it is the West of the country that has evolved fastest in forming a new self-identity based on integration into Europe. This mythology rests on historical fact: parts of West Ukraine were for lengthy periods part of Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The region is also the home grounds of early Ukrainian militant nationalism that flourished during the Soviet-Polish war of 1921 and again during WWII. It was this part of the country which counted most heavily on the pro-EU policy of the Yanukovich government which went on for the two years leading up to November 2013 when it was abruptly dropped in favor of closer association with Russia. As the poorer and less industrialized part of the country, it has the least to lose from the economic directives imposed by EU association.

Meanwhile, the Russian-speaking South-East, with its rust-belt industry exporting to Russia and its dependence on cheap gas for its inefficient plant, has the most to lose from EU association. But, like Wallonia in Belgium, it has had no national mythology of its own, no identity with which to oppose the essentially separatist posture of the West. The big challenge facing those who attended the Kharkiv meeting yesterday is to invent a party to represent the interests of their region in parliament and a collective identity that can carry them through a possible split with West Ukraine.

Lest anyone imagine that the failure of power-sharing in Belgium to resolve differences between different peoples inhabiting the same national borders is due to unique circumstances or personalities, let us consider what has happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which benefited from a supportive international community rather than the stresses from opposing suitors that Ukraine faces. Belgium’s record 541 day inability to form a national government that ended in 2011 was closely followed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was unable to form a government from October 2010 to December 2011.

The reasons for the failure of power-sharing may be traced back to its fundamental principles, not merely to the rise of charismatic separatist leaders or stubborn political factions. As noted above, there is implicit in power-sharing a disdain for genuine democracy and misplaced confidence in the altruism and superior judgment of elites. Excessive protection for minorities means frustration of the will of the majority which over time leads to cynicism and electoral passivity. When serving as prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, current leader of the Liberal bloc in the European Parliament and candidate for president of the European Council in the upcoming European elections, said famously that Belgium was suffering from a ‘democratic deficit.’ Nothing has happened in the years since his remark to overturn that observation.

Power-sharing means coalition governments where the parties have a common interest in allocating among their followers the spoils of office. It effectively institutionalizes corruption or incompetence, because there are no whistle-blowers. And it thus results in overpriced cost of government services that deliver very modest substance to the citizenry.

The proof of all this was the civil disturbances we saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina in February, beginning in the city of Tuzla and spreading to the capital, Sarajevo. Tellingly, the demonstrators denounced their avaricious and corrupt political elites. Given that this is precisely the outstanding problem facing Ukraine today, it is hard to see how power-sharing between the Eastern and Western halves of the country will help them out.

The greatest lesson of the Belgian experience is that divorce is utterly thinkable and possibly preferable to a bad marriage of peoples which have aspirations, cultural orientation and economies as different as East Ukraine and West Ukraine have today.

THE BEAR IS BACK? MEET THE NEW MISCHA!

26/02/2014

Take a close look at post-Sochi Russia, this new teddy bear or Mischa. And if the unfolding events in Ukraine evoke alarmist remarks about the Kremlin’s encouragement of separatism or designs on Crimea, I advise Western politicians to consult the mirror and reconsider how they are overplaying their hand by spurning Russia’s proposed three-way cooperation in Ukraine.

Reports on the Sochi Olympics disappeared from the world’s television screens soon after the Closing Ceremony on Sunday night, though Western print media still post articles here and there* questioning the investment in Sochi infrastructure and casting doubt on the resort’s future, perhaps as an antidote to the smiling faces of fans and of the competing athletes that so many millions of people saw on their television sets or tablets and to the laudatory televised speech of the IOC President at the Closing Ceremony that I will deal with further on. Oh yes, the American media have moved on and refocused their attention on the U.S. team’s relatively modest showing in medals and particularly poor performance in extreme sports; backbiting and recrimination have set in, pushing aside thoughts of the Russians.

For their part, Russian media, both electronic and print, were yesterday still licking the bones of their Olympic successes. They spoke of their first place standing in the medals count, about their winning positions in disciplines which had never been a national strength in the Soviet past and about their return to glory in figure skating. They also pointed to the hospitality and organizational skills that their compatriots harnessed for the Games, winning plaudits from all sides.

The 24-hour satellite news channel Vesti devoted extensive coverage to the arrival of the Olympics stars in Moscow and in home towns spread across Russia as far east as Krasnoyarsk where they were being feted and decorated with sporting titles and gifts from the localities. The channel also featured a remarkable informal interview on the results of the Olympics which Vladimir Putin gave to journalists from two state television channels and from the private networks NTV and RBK. The full transcript was later published on the presidential website.

I offer a translation below of Vladimir Putin’s responses to questions from two of these veteran journalists because they are so revealing of the thinking processes of this world leader and so remote from the one-dimensional, demonizing portraits we read daily in Western media.

Let’s look first at a snippet from Putin’s big-picture remarks on the concept guiding the Olympics in his exchange with Irada Zeinalova, First Channel presenter of the Sunday news program Vremya:

“From the very beginning we wanted to turn this into a big national sporting holiday for our country…As I have said before, we have many problems and we have grown accustomed to seeing these problems follow us around. But there should be a party on our block as well. It seems to me that we have now had such a party. At the same time, we always thought as well about the world sporting community, about our partners, about foreign athletes. We wanted to create a party for the whole sporting world, for the whole planet. And we are very pleased that this occurred. It happened on a grand scale, in a high-quality and beautiful way.”

Then there was the exchange below between Putin and Alexander Lyubimov of RBK. The subject was the vicious information war directed against the Sochi Olympics in the run-up to the Games unleashed by American and European media. Readers may refer back to my article ‘Cool under Fire’ published on 16 February.

RBK is an independent media holding long associated with the politically active billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. Lyubimov is a gifted linguist, a graduate of the prestigious MGIMO institute that has long trained Russian diplomats and international business cadres. Following a varied career at the top of Russian television journalism, in 2011, he took over the reins at RBK. In 2012, he was elected a member of the Federal Committee of the Civil Platform, a liberal opposition party funded by Prokhorov, meaning that he is no tame Kremlin pet.

A.L. – Vladimir Vladimirovich, at first I experienced confusion over how the foreign mass media began their coverage of the Olympics. Then by the end I’d say I felt an indignation that is not characteristic for me. I’m not a very loyal subject, but even I was bursting with patriotic feelings. It was all so unjust. Is this normal?

V.P. – That’s very good (laughter)

A. Lyubimov - As concerns me – I agree.

V. Putin- You know, I want to tell you that it’s not just you. It got on everyone’s nerves. This means that our foreign colleagues, those who were busy with what you just said, achieved a result which was the opposite of what they expected.

I’d like to share with you several things. First: all these years we worked under conditions of criticism, and above all this was constructive criticism, very well-intended and constructive, from the side of representatives of the International Olympics Committee. From the start…they showed us where to go, how to put together this program from the point of view of organization, planning, even construction. I think that we would have done everything without such well-meaning criticism and support, but honestly I have my doubts we’d have succeeded in doing it on such a qualitative level, because in the end we did not have the huge experience that our friends from the International Olympics Committee possess. They gave us this experience.

But there was, and surely up to now there still is another cohort of critics. They are remote from sports. They are engaged in a competitive fight in the domain of international politics. They have a different essence, a different kind of job, and they used this Olympics project to achieve their own goals in the area of anti-Russian propaganda.

A.L. – And you accepted this calmly?

V.P. – This has nothing to do with sports. I always have been calm about this, and do you know why? Because I know what it is, I know what it is worth, and I know that it is useless to argue with this. Whatever we might have said and however we might have tried to change people’s minds, this was impossible, because they have a different job, they have another goal. I’ll say this again: this is the sphere of competitive struggle in the field of international politics, perhaps even in the geopolitical sphere. It happens when strong competitors appear, in this case Russia, and that causes concern among some; some people really don’t like it; and someone becomes afraid without understanding how profoundly and qualitatively Russian society has changed. In this sense the Olympics were important for us, because, it seems to me (and I would like it to be so) it opened the doors a bit not only on Russia, but onto the Russian soul, the soul of our people, so that people could look and understand that there is nothing to fear, that we are ready for cooperation, we are open for this collaboration. Perhaps even those critics who are not well-wishers in my view – though perhaps we shouldn’t say this, because they have a different task – perhaps some of their fears have been dissipated. I hope that is the case. And if this has been achieved to a certain extent, then that is the success of the Olympics.”

These thoughts about a new openness in Russia were also a key message in the speech which International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach delivered at the Closing Ceremony. Speaking of the thousands of Russian volunteers who assisted at all venues of the Games, he said:

“Through you everybody with an open mind could see the face of a new Russia. Efficient and friendly. Patriotic and open to the world.”

Perhaps the most impressive confirmation of Russia’s new openness to the world was the part played in the country’s gold medal count by ‘’new Russians,” by which I mean foreign born athletes who in the several years prior to the Olympics settled in Russia to pursue their sporting careers, were given citizenship and competed for the Russian national team. Korean short track skater Victor Ahn brought in 3 gold medals. American snowboarder Vic Wild won 2 gold medals. Thus, 5 of Russia’s 13 gold awards had this international dimension.

To fully appreciate what this means, you have to go back in time to the chaotic and impoverished 1990s when Russia was hemorrhaging talent. The joke from those days was that the country’s main export commodities apart from oil and gas were beautiful brides and future Nobel prize winners. And talk of a brain drain has continued straight into the Putin years.

In that spirit, at the very start of the Games, Bloomberg commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote (“Russia’s Squandered Olympic Gold,” 12 February) a touching essay about three Russian nationals, Yuri Podladtchikov, who won the snowboard halfpipe competition for Switzerland, Anastasiya Kuzmina who won gold for Slovakia in the women’s biathlon sprint race and Darya Domracheva, winner of the women’s biathlon 10 kilometer race for Belarus. Bershidsky used these case studies to belittle Russian coaches, the alleged cutthroat internal competition on the Russian team and living conditions in Russia.

In a charitable concession to reality, and with a nod to Victor Ahn who had at that point only won a bronze medal in the competitions, Bershidsky remarked that ‘tactical citizenship changes are common in sports.’ But that did not prevent his concluding that “Russia is unique in having trained so many champions who brought glory to other countries” or that “Talent is one of Russia’s most important exports.”

Opinions about the phenomenal $51 billion cost of the Sochi Olympics, about possible corruption in the construction of venues, about the commercial prospects of Sochi as a year-round resort and other elements of the black PR that preceded the games may go on forever. The facts of the Russian national team’s winning first place in Sochi with its 33 medals are indisputable. So does this mean that “the Bear is back” as some Western journalists wrote provocatively to suggest a resurgent foe? With a view to Putin’s comments cited above and to the remarks of Thomas Bach, I would say only: take a close look at this new teddy bear, Mischa. And if the unfolding events in Ukraine evoke alarmist remarks about the Kremlin’s encouragement of separatism or designs on Crimea, I advise Western politicians to consult the mirror and reconsider how they are overplaying their hand by spurning Russia’s proposed three way cooperation in Ukraine.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE AS A COMIC STRIP: THE 28 FEBRUARY ONLINE ISSUE

01/03/2014

Regrettably, the latest, 28 February online issue of ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine shows that this iconic forum of America’s foreign policy establishment has descended into puerile, cartoon like depictions of the most serious international issues of the day, in this instance the unfolding developments in Ukraine...

Here in Belgium, we have traditional respect for the bande dessinée, the comic strip, of which the country was a pioneer. And although some creators, beginning with Hergé and his Tintin books, strayed at times into politics, even into geopolitics (Tintin in the land of the Soviets), more commonly the medium was and is merely an entertainment for children and…. adults with the minds of adolescents.

Regrettably, the latest, 28 February online issue of Foreign Affairs magazine shows that this iconic forum of America’s foreign policy establishment has descended into puerile, cartoon like depictions of the most serious international issues of the day, in this instance the unfolding developments in Ukraine.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the featured video link to the appearance of FA editor Gideon Rose on The Colbert Report, a televised satirical show from the suitably named production company, Comedy Central: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/press/editor-gideon-rose-colbert-report

Gideon Rose’s comportment in this interview is shocking. Like the presenter, he is pitching jokes to the audience, playing the clown. And the subject of his mockery is Russia and how we, the West won the contest for the allegiance of Ukraine, which has just formed a government according to the script revealed in Victoria Nuland’s tape disclosures of two weeks ago, and the Russians have lost. With all the malicious triumphalism on his face that first entered American consciousness following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Rose says that the task ahead is to get the Russians to accept their medal count at the Sochi Olympics as full consolation while the USA bags Ukraine and raises its country count.

Rose is speaking as if we are back in 1999, when Russian troops landed at Pristina airport in a feeble and doomed effort to stop America and its allies from working their will on the ground in Kosovo over Russian objections. But such condescension is scarcely appropriate to the Russia that Vladimir Putin has resuscitated. As we have just seen this morning, the Russians are effectively sweeping Crimea off the chessboard and into their pocket as a bargaining chip over the future course of Ukraine.

The video aside, the 28 February online edition of Foreign Affairs gives us a broad set of essays from leading authorities dedicated to Ukraine. Close inspection reveals that this is International Relations Lite. In particular I am thinking of the two ‘Letters from Kiev’ by journalist Annabelle Chapman each of which provides a superficial summary of events in Ukraine over the course of a week. Chapman offers fewer insights into causal factors and future trends than we find in daily reports on Bloomberg or The Washington Post, both of which have brought in to their Ukrainian reporting some fairly serious journalists, though they are not professional political scientists.

We have good reason to attach higher expectations to the contribution by Barnard College professor of political science Kimberly Marten, notwithstanding the coy title it has been assigned: “Crimean Punishment.” Marten is a recognized expert in international security issues. Her biography on the barnard.edu site mentions her faculty membership of Columbia University’s Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Deputy Director status in the renowned Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies and life membership of the Council of Foreign Relations, the parent organization of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The subtitle of Marten’s essay “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine” is a conclusion that was trashed by events the same day it appeared on the internet. And that is not in the least surprising given the weak grasp of realities in the Russian-Ukrainian relationship and the flimsy argumentation in the essay.

Marten cites two considerations that will stay the Russians’ hand: not to jeopardize its gas pipelines crossing Ukrainian territory and carrying most of its exports to Europe and not to jeopardize the sanctity of the treaty over its lease on the Sevastopol base for its Black Sea fleet. Moreover, she claims that the Russians are still unprepared militarily to subjugate Ukraine, many of whose officers have now been trained in the U.S.

However, Russian actions so far demonstrated that a full-blown military invasion may not be necessary to work their will and take effective military control of the most strategically important part of Ukraine for Russian interests, the Crimean peninsula. This possibility somehow never entered into Marten’s strategic thinking. At the same time, following the unanimous vote today of the Federation Council (Russia’s upper house of parliament) approving the request of President Vladimir Putin for authorization to introduce Russian armed forces into Ukraine to safeguard citizens, safeguard human rights and maintain order, the possibility of armed conflict with Ukrainian troops can no longer be excluded. Presumably he knows better than Marten whether his men in uniform are ready for a fight.

Along the way to her conclusions, Marten informs or, better to say, misinforms the reader about a number of issues relevant to the present impasse over Ukraine. For example, her account of the past ‘gas wars,’ cut-offs of delivery in 2006 and 2009, are totally one-sided, failing to mention the provocations including nonpayment for past deliveries amounting to billions of dollars and siphoning off of gas from the underground storage facilities serving transmission to the West, which motivated and justified the Russian actions.

The anti-Russian tendentiousness in Marten’s scholarly endeavors is nothing new. For the past year or more, she has been more visible in matters relating to Pussy Riot and alleged Russian persecution of LGBTs than in security issues in what I see as pandering to the susceptibilities of American elites rather than serving scholarship in an area of her own expertise. However, the greater issue has been and obviously remains what I shall call her corruption, i.e. her excluding from consideration those with differing views from her own, which are in fact identical with the American consensus. It is precisely that which leads her to produce such myopic, cartoon-like works as her latest essay in FA.

My reason for identifying this corruption goes back to my experience with her stewardship of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) world convention in April 2013 in her capacity at the time as Acting Director of the host institution, the Harriman Institute. I attended several of the round tables on Russia, all of which shared the same glaring failure: that the panels consisted of intellectually homogeneous friends of friends.

Perhaps the most egregious case was a presentation entitled “Implications of the Pussy Riot Affair.” The 5-person panel was (wo)manned by 4 flaming radical feminists whose knowledge of Russia and its history seemed to be marginal at best, plus one rabidly anti-Russian male from Israel.. From attending several other presentations I saw that for the most part there was a complicity between panelists and the audience, it being assumed that we are all one happy family of Putin/Kremlin/Russia bashers, that we all believe that the ‘regime’ in Moscow is illegitimate and ripe for overthrow, and that any and all charges against it issued from the dais require no back-up because they are common knowledge.

As one of the key organizers, Professor Marten, must be held accountable for such impoverished uniformity of thinking at the 2013 ASN Convention’s Russian presentations. The direct result of impoverished thinking which is not challenged in open debate comes out in writings like her latest essay in Foreign Affairs.

I could dissect the remaining essay on Ukraine in the 28 February FA edition, “Ukraine in Context. What Happens when Authoritarians Fall” by Serhiy Kudelia, but I do not wish to try your patience, respected Reader. Suffice it to say that his cheap historical analogies and comparisons of Viktor Yanukovich with France’s 18th century absolutist monarchs including Louis XVI give us zero guidance on what is going on, not to mention what is coming.

The net result of this little examination of Foreign Affairs today is to illustrate why the United States foreign policy establishment and the government it pitches its observations and recommendations to are stumbling into an avoidable crisis with Russia over Ukraine.

For some time it has been fashionable among revisionist historians to reexamine the onset of the Cold War. In the meantime, when we visit our favorite online news sources each day we are now witnesses to the transition from an Information War between Russia and the West to a full-blown New Cold War. And the tit for tat, action and reaction are there for all to see.

The United States cynically promoted the Maidan and stage-managed the installation of the present provisional government in Kiev. Russia has cynically stage-managed the effective secession of Crimea from control by that government which it does not recognize. In this context, today’s formal vote of Russia’s political class in what amounts to a declaration of war on the Maidan is an inflection point in truthfulness and transparency.

Russia had called for a rollback to the status quo ante on 21 February, the compromise agreement between Yanukovich and the Opposition that was brokered by France, Germany and Poland with their implicit guarantees. Europe was silent, while the United States insisted that the Yatsenyuk team is the legitimate government and rejected any rollback. Hence the deadlock that has prompted Russia’s statement of readiness to use force to resolve what it sees as an existential threat.

It will take great luck and the skills of diplomats and statesmen who are not apparent on the horizon today to avoid the kind of hot war between principals rather than proxies that our better informed and more realistic forebears managed to avoid in the 1960s and 70s.

VLADIMIR PUTIN, CLAUSEWITZ AND SUN TZU: GRAMMAR LESSONS FOR TODAY

04/03/2014

I contend that Vladimir Putin has all along seen the Crimea not as a prospective fruit of conquest or consolation for loss of the Ukraine but as a bargaining chip for ensuring the interests of the substantial populations of Russian nationals and Russian speakers in East Ukraine, the Crimea and the Odessa region are formally taken into account by the constitutional arrangements of the country.

Today’s issue of the British daily The Guardian carries the feature article “Ukraine crisis: US-Europe rifts surfacing as Putin tightens Crimea grip.” I heartily recommend this to anyone dispirited from the morning Euronews and in need of a lift. To be sure, the article shows how the USA is unlikely to win European support for draconian sanctions that would truly raise the international atmosphere to hysterical levels. But the lift comes elsewhere, from the following fatuous observation regarding the military situation in Crimea. It demonstrates just how clueless our mass media have become, how editors, if they exist, do not perform logic checks.

I quote:

“On the ground in Crimea, Russian forces continued to tighten their stranglehold, intimidating and surrounding Ukrainian marines in an attempt to force them to surrender without shots being fired.”

To an alien visitor from Mars, or to the author of a Persian letter, if we may draw from the literary history of this Continent, the phenomenon being described with pejorative intent, is a splendid display of psychological warfare which follows the playbook of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. The journalist team at The Guardian seems oblivious to the fact that Vladimir Putin is a black belt judo master. And I wonder if any of them has ever considered comparing this Russian ‘invasion’ and occupation of the Crimea without a shot being fired, without a soul losing his or her life to the ‘shock and awe’ approach of the USA in Bagdad, for example? That comparison leaves you wondering who is civilized and who is the barbarian?

Now that President Putin has sent the 150,000 troops he had on military maneuvers near the Ukrainian borders back to their home bases, now that peaceful pro-Russian demonstrators in Donetsk, Kharkiv and other East Ukraine cities have taken back government buildings from the Maidan carpetbaggers who invested them in the past week or two, one may reasonably ask whether Putin has all along seen the Crimea not as a prospective fruit of conquest or consolation for loss of the Ukraine but as a bargaining chip. In this way he can ensure that the interests of the substantial local populations of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers are formally taken into account by the constitutional arrangements of the country and that the future of Ukraine is decided by three-way talks between the EU, the representatives of a legitimate government of national unity from Ukraine and the Russian Federation, all of whom are stakeholders in the country’s future.

In a follow-on report on the plight of the 300,000 ‘non-citizens’ of Latvia today, mostly Russian speakers, who were left to their bitter fate by the European Union in the hurried accession proceedings a decade ago, I will show why the Russian Federation has decided this time to step up to bat, cost what it may.

Of course, one never knows how a military intervention will end. Provocations, miscalculations are always possible and it is not clear if the Ukrainian military units will remain in their barracks in East Ukraine, go over to the side of the local population, as happened in Crimea, or use violence against the pro-Russian demonstrators.

But barring any real military clashes, Mr. Putin is setting the stage for a reasonable political solution to the Ukrainian problem that takes into account the interests of all sides, not just the US-backed regime in Kiev – a solution based on the facts on the ground, not tales of the benevolent fairy coming from Brussels and Washington.

EU-US SANCTIONS AND THE RUSSIAN ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA

07/03/2014

Since the United States and Europe have whipped up the anti-Russian rhetoric to the levels of the worst days of the Cold War, no one should be surprised if the Russian approach to Ukraine is following the famous one-liner attributed to Nikita Khrushchev: “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”

Just three days ago I set out the following scenario for the Ukraine crisis as follows:

“Vladimir Putin has all along seen the Crimea not as a prospective fruit of conquest or consolation for loss of the Ukraine but as a bargaining chip for ensuring the interests of the substantial populations of Russian nationals and Russian speakers in East Ukraine, the Crimea and the Odessa region are formally taken into account by the constitutional arrangements of the country.”

However, yesterday’s announcements in Brussels on the sanction resolutions adopted by the European Council at its summit on Ukraine, in combination with the still more assertive sanctions announced earlier in the day by the American president, have changed the situation radically. A bargaining chip is useful only insofar as there can be trade-offs between the opposing sides under mutually agreed rules. The EU has issued ultimatums that exclude bargaining.```

Presidents Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso last night highlighted Europe’s preparedness to impose sanctions on Russia that include freezing of assets. This approaches a declaration of economic war. The trigger will be the Kremlin’s refusal to begin bilateral talks with a Ukrainian government whose legitimacy it does not recognize. For the Russians, the Yatseniuk provisional government came to power in Kiev on the back of a forcible coup d’etat which received financial, technical and political support of the West. It is unconstitutional and not a negotiating partner. Russia instead seeks an overall settlement on the future of Ukraine with the backers of Kiev in Washington and Brussels.

In this situation, the threatened sanctions have in effect freed the Kremlin’s hands to do what will be most popular both on the peninsula of Crimea and with the political establishment of the Russian Federation: await the very predictable outcome of a referendum in Crimea on secession that will now be held on an accelerated schedule, less than two weeks from today, and then proceed with formal annexation. That will look after Russia’s own security interests by removing its Black Sea fleet base in Sevastopol from any further risks over a lease from an unfriendly neighbor.

Some pundits have believed that Russia will repeat in the case of Crimea the scenario it has implemented with Transdnistria, the breakaway province of Moldova that enjoys Kremlin support and which has repeatedly voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation. Over the years, Moscow has not acted on their request. But Transdnistria has no relevance to RF security; Crimea and East Ukraine are vital to RF security.

As regards safeguarding the rights of its nationals in Ukraine and of the substantial Russian-speaking minority there, particularly in East Ukraine, Russia can hold back for the moment and will take no overt actions until and unless there are violent clashes. Yesterday evening such clashes already occurred in Donetsk, where the pro-Maidan forces had recaptured the administrative buildings which were briefly liberated by pro-Russian demonstrators. It is likely there will be more outbreaks in Kharkiv and elsewhere in the region. I maintain that Russia’s response will be calibrated to the stubbornness or reasonableness of the US and EU as the confrontation evolves.

Since the United States and Europe have whipped up the anti-Russian rhetoric to the levels of the worst days of the Cold War, one should not be surprised if the Russian approach to Ukraine is following the famous one-liner attributed to Nikita Khrushchev: “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.”

Though nearly all the Western media have behaved in a giddy, irresponsible way to the unfolding crisis, there are, I am pleased to report, some serious voices emerging from the expert community who try valiantly to provide an appropriate context for the public to understand the interests and motivation of all parties to the conflict. A tentative and timid essay in this direction was penned by Henry Kissinger and published in yesterday’s Washington Post: “How the Ukraine crisis ends.” A sweeping and intellectually bracing article by a widely respected intellectual leader of an American generation 40 years younger than Kissinger, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, appears in today’s on-line edition of Foreign Affairs magazine: “A New Post-Soviet Playbook.” To his credit, Sachs seeks not merely to put out the rising flames of the Ukraine crisis but to go to the root sources of the problems in relations between the West and Russia these past 20 years: the failure to bring Russia in from the cold and accord it a worthy place in European and global security.

However, separate voices get lost in the vast static of war-mongering that we see daily. It is high time for Councils of Wise Men to emerge both in the US and in Europe to bring gravitas to the deliberations of our political leaders. Regrettably, our presidents seem to be surrounded by lightweight crusaders for human rights and other ideologists out of touch with the political and military dangers we are courting by demonizing Russia and stepping on its national interests.

To join that discussion, I invite readers to follow the link:

http://us-russia.org/2164-cuban-missile-crisis-redux-where-are-the-wise-men.html

LATVIA’S 300,000 NON-CITIZENS AND THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS TODAY

07/03/2014

The threat to the safety and security of Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea which Mr. Putin’s government cites as its overriding motive for any military intervention is derided as exaggerated by the West. However, even before the incipient civil war being egged on by Pravy Sektor today spills blood, the experience of the Baltic States shows what shabby treatment awaits Russian speakers in a Ukraine run by the Maidan even with a fairy godmother from Brussels looking on.…

An event held at the Brussels International Press Club this past Monday, 3 March provided an important clarification of one of the most topical issues of the day in European and world affairs: why Ukraine’s Russian-speakers in the Eastern half of the country and in Crimea felt endangered by the coming to power in Kiev of the Maidan-backed provisional government; why Crimea, with its ethnic Russian majority population has effectively seceded from Ukraine; why thousands of pro-Russian activists have come out onto the streets in Donetsk, Kharkiv and other East Ukraine cities to retake local government administrations from the Maidan appointed governors and; above all, why Russia has intervened militarily in Ukraine saying it is ready to protect its nationals and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

The current response of Western media to all these developments has been firstly to speak of Russian aggression and of alleged Russian imperial pretensions in its neighborhood. The threat to the safety and security of Russian-speakers which Mr. Putin’s government cites as its overriding motive is derided as exaggerated.

As we know, one of the very first acts of the Verkhovna Rada following the defeat of the Yanukovich forces was precisely to overturn the language law granting Russian equal state status with Ukrainian in areas with significant minority populations. Apologists for the Yatsenyuk regime remind us that this move was vetoed within a day. But the damage was done. The real face of the Maidan was exposed. Both that face of nationalist extremism and the reassuring magic wand of a benevolent Europe saying they don’t mean it, that the new regime will be inclusive, correspond perfectly to the tale of woe set out by the panelists speaking in Brussels Monday at the conference entitled “Treasure your vote…15% of the Latvian population does not have the right to do so.”

The presentation was organized by a citizen’s group working to get out the vote throughout the European Union in the forthcoming continent-wide elections for the European Parliament. The story of the disfranchised 300,000 Russian-speakers in Latvia was held up as a reminder of how some Europeans are campaigning to obtain and use the vote even as close to 50% of the general European population gives little thought to voting and stays at home.

The key speakers were two co-founders of the Latvian Non-Citizens Congress, Elizabeta Krivcova and Alexander Gaponenko. The Congress was created in 2012-13 when Russian activists in Latvia who had been stripped of their citizenship in the early 1990s elected deputies to represent their interests before the government.

Under the terms of eligibility for citizenship set down by the Latvian government in the 1990s, only those ‘foreigners,’ meaning non-ethnic Latvians, who lived in the country before its 1940 annexation by the Soviet Union were kept on the citizenship rolls. That amounted to roughly half the population of 800,000 Russian-speakers. In the meantime, perhaps 100,000 Russian-speakers have emigrated or died of old age without arriving in the heavenly embrace of citizenship. The others, now numbering 300,000 became and remain ‘non-citizens’ who might apply for naturalization if they took the appropriate language, history, culture tests. Naturalization is not only humiliating for people, like Gaponenko, who were respected members of the Latvian political, social and economic elites but who by word and deed supported and voted for independence from the Soviet Union. Now they all face a set of hurdles that only someone quite determined, well-educated and young might pass. At present only 2,000 ‘non-citizens’ a year pass the tests and get their Latvian passport.

In a book entitled Ethnic Conflicts in the Baltic Countries in the Post-Soviet Period, edited by Gaponenko and distributed to attendees, we learn about the successive efforts of the nationalist Latvian governments from the 1990s to today to encourage Russian speakers to emigrate by subjecting them to economic and cultural discrimination, on top of deprivation of political rights. They are banned not just from public service jobs but from a number of well-paying occupations including the law and senior positions in banks and joint-stock companies. They face reduced pensions. They cannot buy land. Their children cannot be taught Russian in public schools. All interaction with government offices, all public meetings, all business documents must be in Latvian. The list goes on and on.

Another very notable member of the panel was the Briton, Doug Henderson, who served for a time as UK Minister for Europe in the Blair government. In this capacity as liaison with the European Commission in various areas, he saw firsthand the preparation of Latvia and the other candidate members of the EU for their eventual accession to the Union in 2004. He and his colleagues were well aware of the shabby treatment of Russian-speakers and knew that the Commission had issued directives for remedial action on the citizenship issue. Some progress was indeed made, but in Henderson’s view it was too little and it largely ended once accession was approved. Per Henderson, the accession was rushed. Today any discontented Russians in Latvia applying to the Commission for redress are directed back to their national government.

What our still idealistic panelists from Latvia did not know is that the EU was being hypocritical when it tried to impose on the Baltic States rules of fairness in governing ethnic disputes which are not honored even among founding Member States.

In this regard, Brussels and its suburbs are a good place to begin any discussion of the problem. The complaints of 120,000 and more aggrieved French-speakers living in the nearby Flemish-language provinces which form a ring around the city have twice in the last decade been heard in the Council of Europe and led to on-site investigations by its ‘Venice Commission.’ Abuses were reported but this led to no corrective actions and the issue will likely continue simmering until the country finally splits along language lines in the foreseeable future.

In Belgium outright deprivation of citizenship does not exist, to be sure. But business may be conducted with state offices only in the single state language of the given province. All voting materials must be in that language. Commerce must be conducted in that language. Those who do not command the local state language are disqualified from receiving social housing. To take the extreme case, a non-Dutch speaking Walloon who chooses to settle in Flanders has about the same rights as a newly arrived Turkish immigrant even if his family has lived in Belgium for generations going back to 1831.

All of this is possible because Belgium has signed but never ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. In the view of official Belgium, Flemings and Walloons are by definition not minorities because each language group has its respective region to itself. But then again, in the Europe-wide context, Belgium is a step ahead of France, which never even initialed the Framework Convention. On the equally relevant European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, France has signed but not ratified and Belgium has not signed.

To be sure, Belgium, and the European Union of which it is a part, are very likely the most free and comfortable place on earth in which to live. However, as the tragic story of non-citizens in Latvia and the sad story of injustices in this country due to ethnic conflict make clear, Europe is not a paradise for everyone. Only by publicly airing and discussing these issues is there any hope of resolving them.

‘APOLOGISTS FOR PUTIN’ AND AMERICA’S DISCUSSION OF THE UKRAINE CRISIS

16/03/2014

Name calling, i.e. ad hominem arguments, are just one of a whole series of violations of the ancient art of public debate that America’s War Party practices daily with regard to the Ukraine crisis. What we have here is a ‘burn before reading’ mentality, a new know-nothing-ism.

In brief, during his appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN a week ago, and at greater length, in an interview with Newsweek magazine published on 14 March (‘The American Who Dared Make Putin’s Case’), Professor Emeritus of NYU and Princeton Stephen Cohen responded directly to recent attacks from commentators on Russian and Ukrainian affairs who denounce him as an ‘apologist for Putin.’ The brouhaha arose over his recent article ‘Distorting Russia’ in The Nation, where he set out both the issues in the news that have been presented to the American public by its mass media in a wholly irresponsible, unprofessional manner, and also detailed the distortions in the writings on Ukraine of one of the most visible and prolific professors turned pundits today, Timothy Snyder.

Cohen tells the name-callers that he is the only American patriot among them, since he identified Putin as ‘the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security’ whereas the Russophobe policies of his critics have made an active opponent of this potential friend and so have greatly complicated management of global security issues.

Cohen also very gently raps his detractors across the knuckles for using name-calling to avoid engaging him in direct debate over facts and issues:

“If they really disagree with me, let them publish something that says Cohen is wrong about this and he’s wrong about that and here is the way you should look at it. That’s absolutely fine. Maybe I am wrong. But I’d like to hear why.”

Given what I say in my book, Stepping Out of Line, given what I say in each of the essays published here, the charge “apologist for Putin’’ is at least as applicable to me as it is to Stephen Cohen. And while I share with him the defense of being a true patriot where others are false patriots, I have a different case to make for my partiality to Mr. Putin, who is, and I have no sense of embarrassment in saying this, the hero of our times not just for Russia but for world governance.

His being a hero does not mean I would like to have him as a neighbor or that I take an interest in his personal affairs. He is my hero because he is the only figure on the world stage who stands up to American hegemony. The Chinese remain rather circumspect except when something very, very close to their security interests arises, like American presidents receiving the Dalai Lama or the Americans rallying to the Japanese side on the issue of those South China Sea islands. Western Europe is all giving the US the finger in their pockets while lining up like so many ducks on the issues of the day like sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

So, what relevance does Putin’s standing up to American hegemony have to my claims of being a true patriot? It goes back to the principle of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. The post-Cold War triumphalism in America brought in the false notion that the country could finally set about arranging what it saw as global public goods without any concessions to the opinions and interests of other nations. A bipolar world, a musclebound world of two superpowers, one representing the beacon of freedom on the hill and the other, the Evil Empire, to put it concisely in Ronald Reagan’s comic book bullet points, had yielded to a Golden Age of rule by the just.

However, it did not take long for the Just to exercise their military force in ways that were an abomination and in direct contradiction to the stated values of protecting human rights, spreading democracy and the like. The unilateral use of force outside the framework of the United Nations beginning under Clinton, continuing under Bush in his Iraq invasion and extending to Obama and American assistance to regime change and murder of Gaddafi in Libya under the guise of imposing a no-flight zone demonstrated to anyone with a sense of fairness and humane values that only dualism keeps goodness from degenerating into evil. Here is the true sense of Vladimir Putin’s widely cited and almost universally misconstrued statement that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century.

In consequence, over the past 20 years American elites have become deeply corrupt, a corruption of the soul, of the mind. I won’t attempt to characterize the guy or gal in the street, who may or may not be ‘the salt of the earth’ as the American folk culture believes, since the street is not very interested in world affairs.

My second reason for joining the brawl is to expand upon what is wrong with the counter-party’s methodology of argumentation. In a word, it is anti-intellectual, or know-nothing in the literal sense. Name calling, i.e. ad hominem arguments, are just one of a whole series of violations of the ancient art of public debate that America’s War Party practices daily. They are contemptuous of the subject (Putin and Russia) and so also contemptuous of their audience. They do not engage the arguments we put up; they ignore them, speak past them, or pigeonhole them into categories generally considered to be covered with opprobrium such as ‘Cold War thinking.’

The bipartisan War Party of Neocons and Progressive Internationalists is operating under a propaganda cloud that even its directors cannot see through and is stumbling towards the Armageddon that far wiser men than today’s presidential advisers avoided precisely by taking their opponents seriously and measuring risks with dispassionate precision.

During the Cold War, Soviet military capability, in particular its missile arsenal, tended to be exaggerated by our expert community for the sake of getting military appropriations through Congress. Today our elites speak disparagingly of Russian military force as passé, inapplicable to present operational objectives. Both extremes in interpretation were/are wrong, but the second is vastly more dangerous as it removes the element of respect that is vital if wars are to be averted.

On these pages and in Stepping Out of Line, I have systematically analyzed the writings of some of the most eminent American experts on Russia, demonstrating how they are complacent, coddled by never being subjected to direct debate with others of differing views. One such essay, a rebuttal to the analysis of Vladimir Putin’s pre-election policy paper on foreign policy written by the former head of the Carnegie Center Moscow, Andrew Kuchins, and published in Foreign Affairs magazine in March 2012 is highly relevant to what passes for analysis of the Kremlin position on Crimea and Ukraine today:

“Kuchins’ ‘analysis’ of the Putin foreign policy paper is big on emotion and small on cool analysis. It could easily have been written without ever opening the paper. Indeed, in his 3 pages of text Kuchins never engages the Russian leader intellectually, never responds directly to his reasoning. Kuchins believes he says it all when he castigates Putin for a ‘brash posture toward Washington,’ as if being dismissive were enough to close the issue of dealing with the pest in the Kremlin.”

(http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2012/03/13/rebuttal-the-end-of-the-reset-why-putin-s-re-election-means.html)

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S SPEECH TO THE FEDERAL ASSEMBLY ON CRIMEAN ACCESSION: COMMENTARY

20/03/2014

In this interpretive essay, I will focus on what the speech tells us about the hierarchy of considerations driving the Kremlin’s policy with respect to Crimea, with respect to Ukraine, with respect to its ‘Near Abroad’ and the world at large. These are the factors that should determine the Western response if it is to rise from its present amateurism.

The atmosphere in the St George’s Hall of the Kremlin where Vladimir Putin delivered his speech Tuesday on Crimean accession to the Russian Federation was festive. Cameras directed at the deputies of the lower house, senators and governors of the RF regions caught triumphal expressions here and there, joyful tears elsewhere. The speech was interrupted repeatedly by hearty rounds of applause and standing ovations.

The presenters of the live coverage on the Vesti 24 satellite broadcast instilled the sense of being witnesses to history in what was characterized as the most important political development in the country in decades. There can be little doubt, given the near unanimity of feeling among Russia’s elites in the chamber, and, according to the latest public opinion polls, the near unanimity of the broad population of the country these past several days, that yesterday’s events ensured the legacy of Vladimir Putin as the restorer of Russian national pride in their country’s great power status, whatever else he may achieve in his presidency.

The Western media have begun issuing their reportage on the speech. It was long, running nearly 50 minutes, and it provided many choice sound bites that journalists have cited to convey its flavor.

In the interpretive essay which follows below, I will take a different approach. I dispense with summarizing this complex text or cherry-picking the quotable lines throughout. In any case, the whole text is available for viewing on the presidential website kremlin.ru for those who wish to go to the source. I will attempt instead to highlight what the speech tells us about the considerations driving the Kremlin’s policy with respect to Crimea, with respect to Ukraine, with respect to its ‘Near Abroad’ and the world at large. I do so because these are the factors that should determine Western response if it is to rise from its present amateurism and resemble the professionalism we expect of our state authorities.

Nearly all of this material is found in the brief statement setting out the geopolitical necessity of the action and in the considerably longer overview of the background to the present confrontation with the US and EU over Ukraine with the emphasis on lack of respect in the West for Russian national interests. Then there is a second-tier portion of the speech, the legal case Putin made for Russian action over Crimea. It is a subset of the first two points.

In taking this approach, I choose to ignore the lengthy passages of Romantic nationalism that open and close the speech: the assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are practically one people, the shared religious and civilizational orientation; and the historical recitals showing why the Crimea has always remained a deeply Russian territory in the national consciousness of Putin’s compatriots. I insist that these arguments which Putin used to explain his call for accession of Crimea to the RF played no significant role in the Kremlin’s decisions. They are produced out of normal political calculations that the broad public and even the establishment can neither understand nor be motivated to patriotic solidarity by abstractions of Realpolitik, by a geopolitical chess match. By contrast, the call of language, religion, history, bloodlines provide the emotional sustenance people will rally around.

Saying this, I mean that Putin is above and outside the nationalism component. The high spirits we all saw in the St George’s Hall audience Tuesday and later that day at the rally on Red Square which Putin also addressed are well under his control. For that reason we can take at face value Putin’s assurances in the speech that Russia will not seize further pieces of Ukraine, will not split Ukraine or threaten other countries on its borders with Russian minority populations. The actions in Crimea are uniquely targeted at threats and opportunities there, because of the region’s strategic importance. The proof of this will come in the weeks immediately ahead when the appeals of the Russian speakers in Transnistria for merging with Russia will go unanswered, just as they have in past years.

The vital importance of geopolitical considerations and military security to the Russian decision on the Crimea is confirmed by the particulars of accession: it will enter the Russian Federation as two different component parts, one being the wholly Russian city of Sevastopol and the other being the rest of the Crimea with its mix of Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars in what will be power sharing. This ensures that however politics on the multi-cultural peninsula evolve, the port city will be immune to change.

Set against these facts, the ongoing U.S. and NATO show of enhancing its military presence in the Baltics and Poland raises tensions unnecessarily, chasing as it does a bugbear while posing new risks of misunderstandings with unforeseeable consequences. The bleating of Polish and Lithuanian authorities that they need NATO protection against an imperialist and expansionist Russia is coming from the very same authorities who created the disaster in Ukraine by training the thugs and snipers on the Maidan.

The quintessence of Putin’s speech was the assertion that NATO designs on Ukraine, on Crimea and in particular on the home port of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol were the red line which Russia would not tolerate being crossed. The Kremlin saw the coup d’etat in Kiev that brought the anti-Moskali Maidan to power as a prelude to conclusion not merely of EU accession papers but also NATO agreements.

The first iteration of the extreme gravity of this consideration took the following form: “Crimea is our common heritage and the most important factor of stability in the region. And this strategic territory must be under a strong, resilient sovereignty which de facto can only be Russian today.”

Then Putin went out of his way to flesh out his concerns:

“I remind you that in Kiev we already heard about the application for quick entry of Ukraine into NATO. What would this prospect mean for Crimea and Sevastopol? In a city of Russian martial glory the NATO fleet would appear, posing a threat to the entire South of Russia. This is not something ephemeral but rather completely concrete. ….

“Moreover, we have nothing against collaboration with NATO, not at all. What we oppose is that a military alliance, and notwithstanding all internal processes NATO remains a military organization, should operate right alongside our fence, next to our house or on our historic territories. You know, I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to pay a guest visit on NATO sailors. Most of them are great guys, to be sure, but it’s better that they pay a visit to us than the other way around.”

The hint of levity or black humor in the last sentence is the kind of rhetorical relief that we have come to expect from Putin in his better crafted speeches. However, the context was grave.

It is worth noting that by taking control of Crimea and managing its accession to the Russian Federation under conditions that are rejected out of hand by Kiev, Vladimir Putin has guaranteed his broader objective of keeping Ukraine out of NATO. Countries with serious territorial disputes are virtually disqualified from joining the alliance because of article 5 of its charter, the mutual defense clause.

Moving beyond the specifics of the Russian concerns and actions taken in Crimea, the speech of Tuesday was a programmatic statement of Russian foreign policy that follows in a direct line the 3 other statements of similar importance which Vladimir Putin has issued over the past 7 years: first came Putin’s February 2007 behind closed doors address to the Munich Security Conference; then his article “Russia in a Changing World” published in Moskovskie Novosti on 27 February 2012 as the culmination of a series of electoral manifestos leading up to the 4 March 2012 presidential ballot; and most recently his December 2013 annual State of the Nation address to the Federal Assembly.

Each of these speeches set out Russia’s grievances at its shabby treatment by the West, and the USA in particular in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each has hinted at the possibility of a more cooperative relationship with the West up to and including Russian membership in NATO if only mutual respect and consideration of national interests were to guide policy on all sides. And each has been custom tailored to the hot issues of the moment over which Russia and the West are on a collision course.

In 2007 the Russians, and not only the Russians, were very exercised over the mantra of unilateralism still being promoted by the George W. Bush administration. Rejection of the unipolar world and of military interventions of coalitions of the willing, without the approval of the UN Security Council, was the core feature of the speech. In February 2012, the headache of the day for the Kremlin was what it construed as American meddling in Russian domestic affairs: the assumed support of the Americans to the December 2011 mass protests over the contested Duma elections, the arrival of a potentially troublesome new American ambassador who was too closely linked over the years with aggressive Opposition personalities. This all found its way into the presidential policy paper for the presidential election in the spring.

In December 2013, the atmosphere was still heavy from confrontation with the USA and its Western European allies over Syria and Iran, where Russia promoted diplomatic solutions and narrowly, but successfully prevented the West from applying its threatened use of military force in each case. The speech addressed Western disdain for the principles of international law. The speech also set out the principles of a nearly full-blown ideology to justify opposition to the American global hegemony: the declaration that Russia was a conservative nation in moral and ethical values, as well as in geopolitics, standing up to the West’s attempts to impose its own degenerate social ideals on the rest of the world. Vladimir Putin defended diversity and development in keeping with national traditions. The context, of course, was the wave of black PR on Russia preceding the Sochi Olympic Games and the LGBT backlash over Russia’s anti-gay-propaganda laws.

The speech on Tuesday picked up these threads of grievances but refocused on the never ending Western attempts to ‘contain’ Russia for which the Maidan has been instrumentalized. In this view, the regime installed in Kiev answers to the armed radicals who with Western help came to dominate the revolution; while at the same time the regime is also answerable directly to Washington.

The substantial part of the speech making the legal case for the referendum in Crimea and for the republic’s right to declare its independence from Ukraine and enter the Russian Federation is an expose of the double standards of Western leaders and their extraordinary cynicism, as seen from Moscow.

As he remarked with barely contained sarcasm at the outset of this section: “We are being told [by Western Europe and North America] that we are violating the norms of international law. Firstly, it’s a good thing they have remembered that international law exists; and we are thankful for that, since it’s better late than never.”

What followed was a point for point response to all the Western allegations over Russian moves in Crimea. This was a direct answer to Obama’s typically snide remark days before on the quality of the legal advice the Kremlin was receiving.

And so we were reminded that there was no ‘intervention’ or incursion of Russian military forces into Crimea, that the force levels were at all times well below the 25,000 allowed to Russia under the treaty lease terms for the Sevastopol base. The referendum on independence was entirely in keeping with international law since it came under the stipulations on self-determination set into the UN Charter. Moreover, Putin reminded his audience that the Crimean action was in no way different from the declaration of independence from the USSR issued by Ukraine in 1991 which similarly violated the laws of the Union of which it was a part and had not received approval from Moscow.

Of course, the high point of this argumentation which Putin drew out to underscore the perfidy of the West was the Kosovo precedent, where the USA had supported the republic’s independence from Serbia over Belgrade’s strenuous objections. And the principle of this conforming to international law had been restated by the United States in its submissions to the International Court of Justice in 2009 which ruled the independence was legal.

And so, President Putin has had his say, his rebuttal to virtually all arguments in the US-led campaign for sanctions against Russia, the aggressor. Meanwhile the vast majority of his compatriots are indifferent to these fine issues of legal and geopolitical duels; they are rejoicing in what is construed as the righting of an historical wrong and a bloodless military victory worthy of their ancestors.

* * *

In closing, I draw attention to an item in yesterday’s press which comes from a respected U.S. establishment mouthpiece and breaks rank with the nearly uniform condemnatory coverage by American and European media by offering a glimmer of grudging respect for Russia’s actions in Crimea. The article entitled “What we learned in Crimea” in The Washington Post was authored by David Ignatius, a journalist with a long record of dismissiveness towards the Kremlin. However, in this case Ignatius’s material comes from his highly placed contacts in the U.S. military, the government institution which is probably least infected by the ideological prejudices that have swept our politicians and statesmen off their feet.

Among the ‘lessons learned’ by Pentagon officials was that “Russia’s move into Crimea was a study in the speedy deployment of special operations forces to achieve a limited objective.” Ignatius concludes: “…the precision and discipline of Russian forces were crucial. Their professionalism reduced the risk of an incident that could have spiraled out of control.”

To this I would add that throughout the Ukraine crisis the Russians have been professional on the diplomatic front as well as the military front. The puerile efforts of John Kerry to shame and isolate Russia over its actions most likely will end in the same ignominious failure as similar calls by Dick Cheney and Condy Rice back in September 2008. This brings up the question of who is really being ‘delusional.’

It is no accident that in the middle of his speech to the Federal Assembly Vladimir Putin said: “In the case of Ukraine, our Western partners crossed the red line, handled themselves crudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally.” Coming from a former KGB officer, there could be nothing more damning than the last word.

THE WAR PARTY IN WASHINGTON AND THE SANCTIONS TOOLKIT

23/03/2014

Analysts of American foreign policy in the Middle East have long denounced the Israeli lobby for hijacking Congress and tying the President’s hands. However, this is child’s play compared to the publicly financed War Party that is now directing United States policy towards Russia and heading us all into a New Cold War if not nuclear Armageddon.

Imposition of sanctions against Russian elites has been a solution looking for a problem to fix for several years now. The underlying assumptions of its efficacy are deeply flawed. But the greater problem is who has elaborated and promoted this solution and where the funds for this campaign are coming from.

The ‘phase one’ and ‘phase two’ sanctions which were introduced by both the United States and the European Union acting in lock step in the past week to bar entry into their territories and to freeze the assets of highly placed Russian politicians, businessmen and one journalist may be called the embodiment of this solution.

When first rolled out several days ago, the sanctions raised quiet amusement in business circles. World stock markets recovered from their initial swoon at the onset of the East-West confrontation over Crimea. The sanctions were deemed far less threatening to world peace and economic recovery than the forward positioning of American military equipment and personnel that had begun prior to decisions made in Brussels and Washington over coordinated responses to the challenge from the Kremlin. They were also deemed to be toothless, amounting to expressions of disapproval and disdain for a bully or ‘thief,’ as the American ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power called Russia in her characteristically inflammatory manner. Insofar as the sanctions were unilateral, they embodied an exclusionary and commanding posture by the West towards a lesser entity beyond its borders, with whom one deals at arms’ length.

Ineffectual or not, these particular sanctions had a long tail that preceded by years the East-West confrontation over Ukraine in general and Crimea in particular. In slightly more timid form they have been applied by the United States against Russia ever since the Magnitsky Act was signed into law by President Obama in December 2012. The sanctions then were said to address perceived egregious human rights violations that led to the death in detention of Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in the context of tax investigations into his employer, the British-American entrepreneur William Browder. And they reflected a very specific notion of contemporary Russia as a mafia state which could be brought to heel by hitting it at pressure points that had arisen in post-Cold War Russia’s ruling constellation of wealth and power.

Specifically, it was maintained that the Kremlin elites keep their wealth in bank accounts abroad, vacation abroad, send their parents abroad for medical treatment and send their children abroad to be educated. Thus, by cutting off their visas, freezing their assets abroad, they would be deprived of what mattered most to them and would turn against their top leaders, Vladimir Putin in the instance, for betraying their interests, leading, in the preferred scenario, to regime change and, in other scenarios, to a change of behavior at the state level.

The foregoing is exactly what William Browder set out last year before the European Parliament and before the press in his two visits to promote passage of a Magnitsky Act in Europe. I have written about that at length and will not repeat myself.

Indeed, at the time, Browder spoke of a million or more ‘thieves and murderers’ who run Russia and must be punished by the world community.

The first problem with all this is that the view of Russia and of its governing elites does not correspond to reality. It is a malicious lie intended to totally discredit the country and deprive it of its rightful place at the global board of governance. The second problem is that this false premise heads us in one direction: towards war.

Following Browder’s insistent urgings, under the aegis of the substantial neoliberal ALDE bloc headed by former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and with the wholehearted support of Russophobe politicians from the Baltic States, the European Parliament issued resolutions last year calling for sanctions in response to Russia’s human rights violations. But because the EP has only limited legislative initiative and its recommendations are not binding on the European executive bodies, the effort led nowhere….until now.

Of course, the idea of visa bans and asset freezes as suitable instruments for controlling Mr. Putin’s Russia was not the exclusive intellectual property of Mr. Browder. He had strong allies on Capitol Hill, beginning with the lead cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act, Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) and Congressman James McGovern (D-MA) who worked with might and main to win majorities in both houses and impose a fait accompli on the then reluctant President Obama. It is not for nothing that Cardin is one of the 9 American politicians appearing on Russia’s tit-for-tat entry ban list this week.

And there was a whole constellation of think tanks and politically prominent foreign policy experts who worked hand in hand with Browder on the sanctions issue. None was more important than Neocon author and speaker Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Foreign Policy Initiative, Brookings Institute fellow and husband of puppet master of the Maidan, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. In these matters Kagan has worked in close cooperation with David Kramer, the director of the government financed pseudo-NGO Freedom House.

All of these personalities have been the organizers of events in Washington to promote sanctions against Russia from the initial lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill going back three years right up to the present day. They form the nexus of what I will call the War Party, which is a bipartisan working group of Neoconservatives (Republicans) and Progressive Internationalists (Democrats) who seek to strengthen American global hegemony at every turn and to punish mercilessly any statesman, any country which dares express a peep of disagreement with this hegemony. Anyone doubting the reality of this improbable alliance, which gives a sinister meaning to ‘bipartisan foreign policy,’ might consult yesterday’s article in The Washington Post entitled “Clinton and McCain, onetime foes, bond over….Ukraine.”

Given the unique status of Russia on the world stage as vocal critic of American unilateralism, of a unipolar world, of Western cultural domination generally, and given the roots of the Neoconservative movement in anti-Soviet (read anti-Russian) struggle from the late 1970s through the fall of Communism up to time present, the confrontation over Ukraine is the culmination of a long and inevitable process.

On the periphery of the War Party are assorted fellow-travelers and free-booting publicists like chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. In a typically anti-Russian op-ed essay published in yesterday’s issue of The Washington Post, Kasparov set out for the n-th time the vision of Russia that the whole War Party subscribes to:

“Western leaders would be wise to follow the money: Sanction the elites who support Putin, go after the family members they use to hide their assets abroad and scrutinize their companies. If existing laws are inadequate to deal with billionaire thugs who enable a dangerous regime, write new ones.”

The language is uniform, the methods proposed are uniform and it is reasonable to assume that the various personalities who have promoted them in the US and then in Europe, are all feeding at the same trough in Washington, D.C.

The ‘punish Russia’ movement has worked through ever changing reasons – the Magnitsky death, Russia’s prisoners of conscience, its anti-gay-propaganda law and now, finally, something its members can sink their teeth into – Russia’s alleged aggression against Ukraine, its ‘theft’ of Crimea.

The winning over of the European Council, meaning the heads of government and heads of state of all 28 EU members is a stunning success. This is even more true of the leadership position over sanctions that has been assumed by Angela Merkel, who has apparently overturned her country’s Ostpolitik going back several decades and moved to ensure solidarity within Europe including over any shift to ‘phase three’ economic sanctions should Russia move further into Ukraine that would work greatly to the detriment of her own country because of its degree of economic interdependence with Russia.

Let me hazard a guess to dispel the apparent contradiction. What has changed is not the reading of Russia by Merkel and her peers in London and Paris. For them all, Russia was always seen as existing on another moral plane than Europe, as a kind of contagion to the East. This was crystal clear in her and Nicolas Sarkozy’s treatment of then President Dmitri Medvedev at their Deauville summit in October 2010, when they dismissed all talk of a visa free regime for Russia referring to the need to first cure the country of its mafia infestation.

The newfound backbone in the position of Merkel on sanctions may be traced back to the U.S. Very likely it was American insistence that it would proceed with military options if Europe did not join the sanctions campaign.

As I mentioned above, the European sanctions list includes one Russian journalist, Dmitry Kiselyov, who happens to be one of the country’s more popular television news presenters on his weekly Rossiya 1 program. True, since his appointment by Vladimir Putin last December to head the state office which is the successor to RIA Novosti, Kiselyov is also the top administrator for news dissemination; but he remains a practicing journalist nonetheless.

It would be less sad if the bans on Kiselyov set a precedent. But they do not. They are just another manifestation of the information blockade against Russia being erected by both Europe and America, a modern day equivalent of the jamming of broadcasts in the Cold War. I direct attention to the exclusion of Russian journalists which Catherine Ashton has practiced in her Ukraine related news conferences. And the move falls into line with practices in Washington, where Robert Kagan has been leading the fight to discredit Russia’s very successful cable news channel, Russia Today. The past week saw the revelation that the on-line resignation by an American journalist for RT was engineered by Kagan’s Foreign Policy Initiative.

All of the sanctions introduced so far by America and Europe are in themselves just symbolic. Their danger consists in the dreadfully wrong take on Russia as a mafia state bent on imperialist expansion and in the readiness of their sponsors to impose punishment that is manifestly unproductive if not counterproductive. If the threatened economic sanctions follow, they may easily lead to severe economic dislocations that will destabilize the world and could precipitate a war.

The authors of the next, ‘phase three’ economic sanctions that President Obama will be discussing with European leaders in the coming week during his visit choose to ignore Russia’s ability to respond asymmetrically. This begins with direct damage to the Ukrainian economy that will make default and collapse unavoidable. Russia need only expel in a tit for tat imposition of visas with Ukraine the 3 million Ukrainian workers who contribute $20 billion to their national economy. Next, it can suspend all purchases of Ukrainian goods and services. This would result in the closure of factories in the Don-bass, and much further afield. The result would be havoc.

Political scientists are very fond of scenarios. I will not go on further, will not detail the cut-off of energy supplies to Europe or other terribly destructive actions within the scope of Russian options if the West goes ‘nuclear’ and tries to impose financial and other economic exclusions on Russia similar to the Iran sanctions.

Moreover, the Russians have levers to destabilize Southeastern Ukraine politically through referendum demands by the Russian-speaking populations. And they always have the possibility of reversing their cooperative stance over Syria and Iran, which could set in train full-scale proxy wars in those regions similar to the most dangerous days of the Cold War.

Many, myself included, have looked in the past for situations analogous to the threats we face today and have flagged the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, as the confrontation has evolved this past week, it appears we are breaking new ground, that the past is no sure guide to the present and future.

For these reasons, I am hopeful that the various cool and experienced minds that have come forward into the public forum seeking a way forward, none more constructive than former US Ambassador to Moscow under Reagan Jack Matlock, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs and NYU professor emeritus Stephen Cohen will come together in a common stand published in full page advertisements in mainstream media in the USA and in Europe, so that our blinkered politicians can be persuaded to face reality and de-escalate their words and their deeds.

The solution to our existing confrontation will not be more band-aids in the spirit of the ‘re-set.’ It must address the underlying issue of European and global security. It is high time to discard false, propagandistic views of modern Russia and define a worthy place for Russia in the security infrastructure.

PREPARING THE WAY FOR THE NEW G-8

25/03/2014

Washington word games tell it all: the new designation of the G-8 as a format for the ‘world’s biggest industrial economies’ instead of ‘democracies’ prepares the way for China’s accession following Russia’s ejection.

The game of Kremlinology has for some time now found a new application for old skills: reading between the lines of media texts dictated by information managers based in Washington, D.C. In this regard, one would have to be blind to miss the wave coming our way as set out in coverage of yesterday’s meeting of the G-7 in The Hague on the sidelines of the nuclear security gathering.

The huddle of the USA, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan was the gestation of elephants that produced…a mouse. There were no thunderbolts of sanction threats, although the assembled 7 insisted they were in complete accord on tough new sanctions should Russia move into Eastern Ukraine.

Of course, Russian imperialism on the rampage is a scenario invented by Western media with coaching from hyperventilating senior American military officers. Mr. Putin is no idle adventurer. On the contrary, his behavior and that of his team over the past month in the showdown over Crimea and its bloodless takeover reveal strong discipline and deep knowledge of psychological warfare.

Russia has indeed amassed military muscle along the Ukrainian borders to back up its insistence on having a voice in the constitutional reform being planned in Ukraine. Its objectives are crystal clear: to ensure substantial decentralization of the regions and protection of the linguistic and human rights of the Russian-speaking minority of Ukraine. Invasion, incursions into Ukrainian territory would only work against that objective by uniting a nationalistic resistance behind the Maidan.

The only action taken by the G-7 yesterday was to confirm Russia’s suspension from its club for the indefinite future. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded at a press conference, saying that his country would not insist on that format and accepted the decision. It would be more truthful, if less diplomatic, to say that Russia was relieved. It is hard to imagine Vladimir Putin’s participating in talks around the table with 7 interlocutors all on the attack.

Russia has come out of the closet. It has moved to defend its vital strategic interests in Crimea in the firm belief that it is better to be feared than to pursue unrequited love. In this new situation, the only world governing board that matches Russia’s posture is the G-20, where, with the help of BRICS partners, it can muster a majority of votes to its positions and stare down the West if need be.

Russia’s membership in a G-8 was an anomaly from the start. The club had always put the accent on ‘democracies’ and there were doubts that Russia, even under Yeltsin, made it all the way to a true democracy in the Western mold.

G-8 membership was cynically crafted as a consolation prize to the drunkard Yeltsin for the double-cross over Russia’s anticipated invitation into NATO in 1993-94. Yeltsin had acquiesced in NATO membership for Poland in the belief that Russia would soon get its own pass. However, after due discussion on Capitol Hill and depositions that were very negative from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, America’s most prominent thinkers on international affairs at the time, President Clinton finally turned against Russia in NATO.

Russia’s inclusion in a G-8 was predicated on the false assumption that the Russian bear just needed some friendly counseling and prestigious if empty club memberships for it to adapt to its straitened circumstances and powerlessness in a US-dominated world.

Is the indefinite suspension of Russia the end of the G-8 format? The aspirants for membership are many. The day before yesterday, acting president of the interim government in Kiev Yatsenyuk had the temerity or pure cheek to suggest at his joint press conference with PM Stephen Harper of Canada that Ukraine was ready to take over from Russia and keep the seat warm. Moreover, the contemptuous attitude towards others that antedated the creation of a G-8 including Russia still holds sway in Washington. George W. Bush was not the first, nor will he be the last American president to believe that world leaders can be devastated by not being invited to a folksy barbecue at Camp David or some other presidential retreat.

Press coverage of yesterday’s side meetings at The Hague stressed the importance of Obama’s one-on-one chat with Chinese president Xi Jinping. We are told about their excellent personal rapport. And if the official description of the G-8 is to become a club of the world’s biggest industrial economies rather than of the world’s biggest industrial democracies, as was traditionally the case, then the logic for China to take over the vacated seat of Russia is compelling.

Several years ago the media speculated on an American initiative to create a G-2 with China, a sort of new world condominium such as Leonid Brezhnev had hoped to agree with Richard Nixon but failed. In the end, it was clear that the Chinese did not go for the bait. A G-8 invitation might, however, be more appealing to them.

And yet, Xi Jinping is no drunkard and any sober minded statesman will appreciate that Chinese membership will be as chancy and also as potentially humiliating as was Russian membership. When the next round of skirmishes with Japan over the rocky islands in the South China Sea that both claim inevitably occurs, the Chinese leader would find himself at any G-8 as isolated and subject to hostile questioning as Mr. Putin would be at such a meeting in Sochi in June.

Russia’s throwing down the gauntlet to the West over Ukraine is indeed historic. And yet it is just one step in the unraveling of American and Western arrogance and self-delusion.

BARACK OBAMA’S SPEECH IN BOZAR: IS THERE A NEW COLD WAR?

28/03/2014

This analytical essay deals with two news items. One is good news, that the end of the world is not nigh. To all appearances, the storm has blown over and the risk of uncontrolled escalation of the East-West confrontation sparked by the coup d’état in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Moscow has subsided substantially. The bad news is that we are well into the New Cold War.

The crisis sparked by the coup d’état in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea by Russia has subsided substantially. At present it is highly unlikely there will be a move by the U.S. or EU to progress to ‘phase 3,’ meaning going from symbolic sanctions to real economic warfare. Military action against Russia has been taken off the table completely by President Obama in the statements he made in The Hague and Brussels.

In the meantime, the IMF has formulated a tentative proposal to extend loans of between $14 and 18 billion to Ukraine, roughly what Russia had committed to lend back in December and this will stabilize the fragile macroeconomic situation there, a precondition for any political normalization. Equally important, there is reason to believe that behind the scenes the US government is using its muscle to facilitate the suppression of the fascist fringe that controlled the Maidan in its final assault on the Yanukovich government and appeared to dictate terms to the provisional government which followed.

Two days ago one of the most violent criminals who had led the street fighting on Maidan, Oleksandr Musychko of the Right Sector, was killed by police fire when resisting arrest. Subsequent threats against the police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were met by counter threats from Minister Arsen Avakov, who said his forces would go after all illegally armed extremists, including those in the Fatherland Party of acting prime minister Yatsenyuk.

It is inconceivable he could take such a stand without protection from the regime’s Western sponsors.

And on the sidelines of the nuclear security conference in the Hague on Monday, Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov made a small but nonetheless noteworthy gesture of accommodation to Western demands by holding talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, the representative of a government his country does not recognize as legitimate.

That is the good news. The bad news is that notwithstanding Barack Obama’s denial that we are facing a New Cold War during the main speech of his European trip this week, his appearance at the Bozar auditorium in Brussels on Wednesday, his entire mission of shoring up the Atlantic alliance for a lengthy contest of wills with the Kremlin speaks to the reality of ‘containment’ and Cold War Redux.

In his Bozar speech, President Obama said that this is not the time for ‘bluster’ but for straight talk. And yet in both this prepared speech and in his offhand remarks the day before at a press conference in the Hague concluding a nuclear security conference, it is precisely bluster that predominates. This is also evidenced throughout the materials released to the press following a summit with EU leaders. The White House propaganda machine is working overtime.

Regrettably from a look at today’s Western European media accounts, it appears that the editorial boards have allowed their publications to reprint uncritically what they have been hand fed by the news managers from Washington, D.C. Even The Guardian, a British paper which is widely viewed in the States and, possibly on the Continent, as a champion of free speech and media power due to its position in support of Edward Snowden, turns off its thinking cap when the topic in question is Russia, as we see in its lead article on Obama at Bozar.

In what follows, I will first refute Obama’s arguments on why the present situation does not resemble the Cold War. And then we can delve into the absurdities of some of the pervasive statements in the mass media on how Europe and the USA will stand up to Russia by isolating it and crippling it economically, particularly in the energy sector, Russia’s principal export component and contributor to the state budget.

At the press conference in The Hague, Obama went out of his way to poke the Kremlin in the eye while making his argument that the present standoff cannot be compared to the days of the Cold War. Russia is no superpower, said Obama, just a regional power that bullies its neighbors. Unlike the days of the Cold War, Russia has no global bloc in its thrall and is isolated from the world community as it pursues its chosen path of Crimean annexation.

The vote in the UN General Assembly yesterday on the validity of the Crimean referendum to secede from Ukraine gives the lie to Obama’s assertion on Russia’s isolation. Yes, the United States, got the majority it sought condemning the referendum, but as Bloomberg news aptly reported, there was barely a majority of countries in favor. Out of the 193 members, 100 voted in favor, 11 voted against and 58 abstained, while 24 members were absent. And this Pyrrhic victory was on a watered down motion which made no mention of a Russian invasion of Crimea or the annexation which followed. So much for a condemnation of Russia by the entire world community, as Washington would have it.

To be sure, Russia today does not command a bloc as the Soviet Union once did, but its soft power and a number of key formal and informal alliances do ensure its position as a global leader and not a mere regional hegemon. First worthy of mention is Russian membership in BRICS, which, given the combination of population heft and economic dynamics, is a sort of counterweight to the United States and Europe on the world stage. BRICS might reasonably be considered a leadership core of what once was called the non-aligned nations. That, in turn, gives Russia considerable leverage within the G-20, which nowadays performs the role of the world’s board of directors that once was held by the G-8.

Next there is Russia’s de facto co-stewardship with China of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which is focused on managing relations with Central Asia but has ramifications extending to the Indian subcontinent and further afield given the observer status of Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan. Finally there are Russia’s bilateral relations with countries in key areas such as South America and particularly in the Middle East, where it has very productive and mutually beneficial relations with Turkey, Israel and, in the immediate prospect, Egypt, not to mention its strategic commitments with Syria.

All of these diplomatic realities explain how Russia was able to call in IOUs to achieve its respectable showing yesterday at the UN General Assembly in the face of all possible huffing and puffing by the United States and its European allies. In short, isolation of Russia is no more achievable by this Democratic administration than it was achievable by George W. Bush in 2008.

In the terms of the 21st century, Russia is a truly global power even without having military bases outside its borders. Moreover, as we heard loud and clear from Vladimir Putin’s annual speech on the State of the Nation in December 2013, in addition to confrontation with the United States over its national security interests, Russia challenges American and Western pretentions as sole arbiters of human rights, democracy and cultural values worldwide. It promotes a socially conservative ideology.

Before all the latest events surrounding Ukraine, we already had an intense information war between Russia and the West. Anyone doubting that reality need only look over US and European mainstream media sources in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, with their trash Putin, trash Russia slant.

In summary, we today have a bipolar world. We have flash points and charges of aggression and land grab over Crimea. What was missing to demonstrate a new Cold War was the delineation of a Western policy of containment as a substitute for the military option manqué set in a long timeline to match the Mister X essay of George Kennan. Barack Obama kindly filled in that blank by his intemperate words and deeds on his European visit this past week.

As we now turn to the issue of sanctions, let us start with the remarks of President Obama at The Hague when he loftily assured Europe that the United States is prepared to release into export all of the natural (shale) gas required for the Old Continent’s daily use. In the context, he meant that the U.S. could replace Russian sourced gas, which in 2013 amounted to 30% of all of Europe’s gas consumption or 150 billion cubic meters. It should be noted that 2013 marked a high point in Russian gas sales and the trend line has been pointing upwards due to cutbacks in Norwegian supplies and an uptick in consumption with the phase-out of nuclear power.

Obama’s assurances were the quintessence of empty bluster. Whatever his personal disposition and that of the American Congress, reality lies elsewhere. The first American LNG station for exports will only be operational in 2016 and its capacity has already been sold out to Asian customers. Others will, of course, come on line as U.S. production capacity also rises substantially towards 2020, however, it is hard to see how an infrastructure, including, of course, hugely expensive LNG carriers, can be put in place to cover the vast quantities of gas Europe would need to replace Russian sources. Moreover, it is hard to see how such exports could take place without an enormous impact on American domestic prices, which are presently up to four times below world market prices for LNG.

However, we are now in 2014 and American threats to impose Iran type sanctions on the Russian energy and financial sectors, which Obama would like us to believe are still on the table should Russia continue to misbehave, would result only in Europe going dark.

We were treated this week to further bluster coming out of Obama’s summit meeting with Messrs. Barroso and Van Rompuy of the EU Commission and European Council. One key issue was reverse flows of gas from Europe to Ukraine to protect our new friends from a potential cutoff of supplies already threatened a couple of weeks ago with reference to Ukraine’s 2 billion euros in unpaid bills for earlier deliveries. The presentation of the entire issue has been a case study in U.S.-EU propaganda which does not stand up to any scrutiny. Of course, there has been little chance of exposure, since our newspapers have hardly exercised any critical faculties.

The only seeming flaw in the arrangement which made it onto Euronews was the resistance of little Slovakia to providing a missing link in the reverse flow strategy. We were told that the link would cost 20 million euros and Slovakia refused to put up the money, shooting the puck back over to Brussels. But this is really just a cavil. The fundamental issue is that the entire project has been misrepresented. It is all about assuring European energy security, not the Ukraine’s.

The threat to Europe’s gas supplies comes from the potential disputes between Ukraine and Russia spilling over to operation of the transit lines which carry more than 70% of Russian gas to Western Europe. This is exactly what happened already in 2009.

The scheme of reverse flow would ensure that there will be no pretexts for a Russian cut-off because the invoices for gas supplied to Ukraine would effectively be written on West European customers of Gazprom who will reinvoice to Naftogaz in Ukraine and look after payment themselves. For the Russians, this is an optimal solution since it ensures payments and eliminates the need to deal with the Ukrainian authorities whom they do not recognize as legitimate.

However, this solution does nothing to protect gas supplies to Ukraine in case of sanctions being applied to Russia in a ‘phase 3’ scenario. If the gas stops flowing to Western Europe, then there is no gas for reverse flow to Ukraine.

I will stop here and not strain your patience, dear Reader. We may be sure that Washington will not desist in its feverish search for pressure points to apply against Russia as it works on the new containment policy for the New Cold War. All of which is rather sad, because the creativity being diverted into this futile task could be so much better applied to finding a way to jointly govern this newly bipolar world for the prosperity and peace of all.

FURTHER LESSONS IN REALPOLITIK: LAST CHANCE TO ENGAGE WITH RUSSIA

31/03/2014

We are at an inflection point. Free will is still operative. The main actors still can make a choice where to go next. However, at any moment, by the action or inaction of any side, the situation may spin out of their control and determinism may set in, putting us on a collision course in a hot crisis with no obvious denouement and large parts of the globe sucked in as proxy players.

Once again events in and around Ukraine are developing with such speed that the projections we commentators make one day from the standpoint of then available information become outdated the next based on what is coming in. But, embarrassing or not, pursuit of truth requires ‘eating one’s hat’ from time to time.

So it is with my remark in my last posting that we are safely out of the woods and the world can breathe easier now that we have moved on from a hot crisis over Crimea to the daily bilious but inconsequential exchanges of a New Cold War. No, sadly, the tidings this morning show we are on the cusp of a new spasm of tension, of sanctions and counter-actions that can shake the world economy to its roots.

I say this based on media reports of the failure of Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to arrive at any common position on a diplomatic solution to the volatile situation in Ukraine during their 4 hour meeting in Paris yesterday. The summary statements from both sides indicate that the parties are as far apart as ever, notwithstanding their mellow words, smiles and handshakes for press photographers.

Russia is calling for Ukraine to change its constitution to a federal structure with extensive autonomy for the regions, including in the domains of foreign policy and economic models. In truth, what is being urged is closer to confederalism, a concept that weakly binds together under a common name two nearly independent states. They also demand recognition of Russian as the second state language in Ukraine. And they seek to enshrine neutrality of Ukraine, ensuring there is no future NATO membership for the country.

The Russians see the present regime in Kiev as illegitimate, installed by the U.S. and EU. Hence they seek to negotiate the future of the country with those who have put their candidates in the positions of power, not with the puppets in Kiev.

The U.S. is making a drawback of Russian troops from the border area a precondition for any diplomatic progress and is insisting that the future structure of Ukraine cannot be decided without the agreement of the government in Kiev. Meanwhile that government in Kiev, in the person of its president, has indicated that the Russian conditions are unacceptable.

Given these facts, the prospect of a peaceful solution to the Ukrainian crisis appears to be rather dim.

Western commentators and statesmen have spoken of Russia’s violating the post-Cold War rules of the game by its occupation and annexation of Crimea and now by its claims on Ukraine proper. In an essay posted on Foreign Affairs online Friday, inveterate Ukrainian extremist and Russia-baiter, Rutgers University professor Alexander Motyl asked “Is Putin Rational?” The answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ All of the media reports that Russia is a conundrum, that Putin is a sphinx whose moves cannot be predicted only show the lack of imagination and…lack of general education of the authors.

The problem is not that we have too few Russian experts, as many professionals in the field, like Angela Stent, director of the Russian and Eurasian program at Georgetown University has maintained. It is that we have too few truly educated young people coming out of our institutions of higher learning and assuming the government and think tank positions that set out and implement federal policies, including foreign policy. Our higher education has become so caught up in political correctness that the art of debating has disappeared. No one deigns to listen to Putin or to watch Russian state television.

So what is Putin’s game plan? I think it is safe to say that while his objectives are clear and have been explicitly stated by Sergei Lavrov, as noted above, the way to achieve them is wide open. The diplomatic route is now being attempted. If that continues to yield no progress and if the United States ratchets up its economic pressure on Russia by collusion with Saudi Arabia to sink world oil prices or in other ways without waiting for actual Russian ‘aggression’ in Ukraine, then we may assume that Putin will conclude there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by going for broke and securing Russia’s interests in and around Ukraine unilaterally. This might well take the form of the most drastic scenario painted by Pentagon officials: invading the Russian-speaking regions of the Southeast and the Southwest, joining the Transdnistria to the hinterland of Odessa and depriving Ukraine of access to the sea.

As they used to say on the BBC world radio program teaching English, ‘Mr. Grammar’: there is a rule for everything. Rule number one is you strike when the iron is hot.

For the Russians there is little to be gained by waiting. They have already stated that they will not accept the outcome of the planned 25 May presidential and parliamentary elections because they will be held in an atmosphere of violence with Ukrainian extremists marauding in the Russian speaking regions and attacking all who publicly express a pro-Russian stance. Moreover, after all of the deceptions practiced on Russia by the U.S. and its allies starting from 1992, Russia does not look to a brilliant cooperation over Ukraine at some time in the future. It wants the issue sorted out now while its leverage is maximal: while Ukraine has no effective government and the country is at the brink of economic collapse.

We are at an inflection point. Free will is still operative. The main actors still can make a choice where to go next. However, at any moment, by the action or inaction of any side, the situation may spin out of their control and determinism may set in, putting us on a collision course in a hot crisis with no obvious denouement and large parts of the globe sucked in as proxy players. The costs of engaging with Putin and finding a genuine compromise today are vastly less than the alternatives.

4TH EU-AFRICA SUMMIT AND THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS: GOSSIP IN THE CORRIDORS

04/04/2014

One take-away from talking to those close to the Summit is that there is lively enthusiasm over the resurrection of a bipolar if not multipolar world on the Black Continent and Putin’s reputation is riding high.

During the week of 23 March, Brussels was locked down, its center emptied to provide maximum protection for the imperial visit of Barack Obama and his 900 man strong security detail. This week less severe restrictions on pedestrian and automotive traffic were in place, but the many overflights of the city by surveillance helicopters and the presence on the ground of motorcycle police redirecting or speeding vehicular flows along designated corridors were a constant reminder that diplomatic activity in the Capital of Europe was running flat out.

Already on Monday, the city hosted a visit to the European Institutions by Chinese President Xi Jinping. There was also a top-level NATO gathering to re-examine relations with Russia in light of the Ukrainian crisis. Yet the largest event of the week in terms of numbers of participants and venues occupied in the city’s hotels was the 4th EU-Africa Summit on 2-3 April, for which some 30 heads of state arrived, 15 from each side. The African delegations were huge, as a result of major events associated with the Summit on 31 March – 1 April: an EU-Africa Business Forum, a European Parliament- Pan-African Parliamentary Summit and an EU-Africa Youth Leaders’ Summit.

One might be forgiven for not having heard about the EU-Africa Summit and its associated events because they attracted almost no attention in the media. Even Euronews accorded miserly coverage. But then again there was not much to report given that the mood inside the Summit events was glum. It was generally acknowledged to have been badly timed for reasons that were foreseeable long in advance as well as for one major circumstance that was unforeseeable. This argument was made in Brussels-based Yam-bola magazine, a periodical dedicated to African affairs, already in the week before the Summit and was subsequently borne out by events.

Given that this was only the fourth such summit since 2000 and the first one to held in Brussels, it is a pity that the organizers did not appreciate how its timing was unsuitable, coming less than 2 months before the Europe-wide parliamentary elections that will be followed by a change in the presidents of the European Commission, the European Council and the chief of European diplomacy. It should have been obvious that their European colleagues’ minds would be elsewhere.

The unpredictable factor which truly sank the Summit was the crisis in Ukraine. From the perspective of the African delegations, Europe was busy doing its arithmetic over funds available to assist Ukraine and couldn’t be bothered with new commitments in aid or investment in Africa at this juncture.

The generalized disappointment with the way they were received at the European Summit perhaps freed up tongues, because for those of us in the corridors there was some fairly saucy gossip. We were told that members of the African delegations have enormous respect for Putin coming out of the annexation of Crimea in the face of American and European condemnation and sanctions. He is seen by them as a bold leader who stands up for his people. By contrast, Obama is seen as a weakling, a marionette. The way Europe has snapped to attention at American orders over the sanctions also is ridiculed, as I have been told.

In short, one take-away from discussion with those close to the Summit is that there is very lively enthusiasm over the resurrection of a bipolar if not multipolar world on the Black Continent.

CREATION OF U.S. AND EUROPEAN CHAPTERS OF A COMMITTEE ON EAST-WEST ACCORD: A CALL TO MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL AND COMMON SENSE

06/04/2014

Proposal for a collective and authoritative platform to respond to the massive anti-Russian propaganda of the foreign policy establishments in the USA and in Europe.

Over the past several weeks, it has now been widely acknowledged in the media that we have well and truly entered a new and perilous age in international relations, a New Cold War. In many ways, this is something those of us who believed in the Golden Age ushered in by the fall of Communism have feared for the last ten years or more as the paths of Russia and the West diverged with greater insistence and acrimony.

And yet, now that it has occurred, the onset of the New Cold War also has given evidence of some healthy signs that hold promise of a brighter future once we get our minds around the facts and seek a way forward.

For one thing, the air has been cleared of hypocrisy and false illusions. Each side, the US-EU and Russia, has finally expressed in unvarnished terms what it really thinks of the other. Whether the terms are ‘the free world’ versus ‘authoritarian autocracy,’ as seen from one side, or ‘degenerate values and empire of lies,’ as seen from the other side, the phony notion of ‘our friends’ and ‘our partners’ has been thrown out, as it truly should have been years ago.

I include myself among those who have shed harmful illusions. Those of us who once spoke hopefully of Russia in NATO have been compelled by events of the past few weeks to appreciate that the very concept of NATO is an unreformable anachronism which is incompatible with the new world order of rising military and economic powers that it cannot and will not accommodate peacefully since it is predicated on American Diktat.

‘We bark, you jump!’ the American guiding principle so vividly formulated by Michael Moore, is one that Western Europe may reluctantly buy into while it chooses to rely on soft power, but it is not a principle that can be imposed on Russia, on China or on any other self-respecting nation-state among the emerging economies, where hard power is still appreciated properly.

America refused to humor Boris Yeltsin’s claim to equal treatment in an enlarged NATO in 1993-94 when Russia was genuinely weak. It is all the more understandable that America under Bush and Obama has been still more unwilling to accord equal status to the resurgent Russia of Vladimir Putin in a revised European, not to mention global security order.

Worst of all, these direct contradictions were hidden from view so as to avoid spoiling the gloss of the several ‘resets’ that were launched by Washington since 1992. Now that the decorative distractions have fallen away, now that Russia has been booted out of the G-8 and the NATO-Russian relationship has been exposed as truly adversarial rather than cooperative, minds can focus on the structural issues underlying the East-West confrontation and the need for mutual respect.

It has been commented upon from time to time that in America, paradoxically, there was much more respect for Russia and much more even-handed public debate over how to deal with Russia in the midst of the Cold War than at any time since. Triumphalism in the United States and even in Western Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to the death of pluralism in democracies where precisely pluralism was traditionally understood to be one of the highest benefits of a free society.

During my year as a Visiting Scholar to Columbia University’s Harriman Institute (formerly the Russian Institute) in 2010-2011, I made the sad discovery that conformism had swept aside anything approaching free academic enquiry wherever modern Russia was concerned. Anyone daring to draw attention to official positions of the RF government is condemned as an apologist of Putin, if not accused of being in the pay of the KGB altogether. This kind of closed mind among our scholars and experts on Russia is solely responsible for the current belief that Russia is a conundrum, that Putin’s next steps are unforeseeable and other balderdash that our media serve up daily.

Our problem is not a dearth of experts, but the quality of the experts we have. And while, for its part, the CIA is busily dispatching and controlling drones in its new paramilitary activities, its intelligence service appears to be unable to fathom anything the Kremlin is up to without having a double agent in the Russian cabinet or a bug under Vladimir Putin’s pillow. So much for the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money our intelligence consumes every year. No one can be bothered to read a Putin speech or watch Russian state television, where the whole future course of Russian policy and actions is set out for all to see in no uncertain terms.

That was the prologue. What I now propose is an action program built upon the notion that men and women of understanding and of good will need a platform to raise a collective and authoritative voice in response to the massive anti-Russian propaganda of the foreign policy establishments in the USA and in Europe, which are serving their own interests at the expense of national interest. Whereas we now see occasional op-eds or vignette appearances on talk shows by what must be called ‘dissident Russia experts,’ they are lost in the background noise and exert no influence on our policymakers in the Oval Office and in the chanceries of Europe.

What is needed, I argue, is the recreation of a public sounding board of common sense in relations with Russia similar to one that functioned at the highest levels in the 1970s, during the midst of the Cold War: the American Committee on East-West Accord. The outstanding features of that lobbying body were the weighty participation on the board level of the presidents and CEOs of top-drawer American industrial companies like Control Data and Pepsico, as well as by senior statesmen, like George Kennan, the author of the Containment Policy under whose banner the Cold War was initiated and pursued for decades.

If one were to recreate such an entity today, it would be imperative to do so on two continents, with both American and European chapters. That is so because the creation of the European Union and the evolution of its foreign policy mandate have made it a key player in the present confrontation with Russia at the political level, even if Europe’s economic interests are far more intertwined with Russia’s than are American economic interests.

The presence of business leaders on the board of such a Committee would also ensure the funding required for effective promotional campaigns and a permanent forum for seekers of solutions to the dilemmas of the day, such as the present impasse over Ukraine. Indeed, given that European trade and investment with Russia is ten times or more the level of the US, it would be reasonable to find the most enthusiastic business backers of such a project in the Old Continent. The assorted chambers of commerce for Russia would be the most promising rosters for prospecting. As for honored government leaders, one could think of few candidates better qualified than Germany’s Helmut Kohl or Gerhard Schroeder.

In the United States, an obvious candidate for the Board could be Jack Matlock, ambassador to Moscow under Ronald Reagan and an outspoken warrior for common sense in present day relations with Russia who enjoys respect on both sides of the political spectrum. Businesses may be shy, but with billions already invested in plant in Russia, it is inconceivable that companies like McDonalds, Ford and General Motors will passively watch the work of decades go down the drain with the same resignation as Cargill once submitted to the trade embargo cavalierly put in place by President Jimmy Carter on the advice of his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The undertaking outlined above, if realized, will not by itself correct the disastrous policy decisions of the past 20 years that brought us to the New Cold War, but it can be a significant stimulus to righting course.

WHAT YOUR CLEANING LADY CAN EXPLAIN TO YOU ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS

19/04/2014

Western ‘truth’ about the crisis in and about Ukraine is very superficial if not maliciously concocted by Thought Central. Regrettably, your average American has neither the book knowledge nor the life experience to know what is truth and what is propaganda, whereas your average Russian does.

Truth has many dimensions and different people prioritize them in different ways, which is why arriving at some absolute truth recognized by everyone is so problematic if not quixotic.

Historians will tell you how conflicts between Poland, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Russia going back centuries have brought us to the present confrontations in and over Ukraine. There is truth in what they say.

Economists will tell you about the failed reforms that left Ukraine in the dust over the course of the last 23 years of independence while neighbors like Poland and Russia have moved far ahead, fueling the discontent that made possible the latest turbulence and extremist currents in Kiev.

Political scientists will tell you about human aspirations for self-expression and political influence over decisions affecting their lives. These abstractions contain other elements of truth about the Maidan and its consequences.

In this essay I will focus on none of the above ‘big picture’ sides to truth, looking instead to down to earth people and how they understand the unfolding Ukrainian crisis from the context of their own family ties. I begin with the person in the title above: our Ukrainian cleaning lady. Since anecdotal evidence like this is more credible if supported by additional material drawing on statistically relevant samples or on phenomena documented by authoritative sources, I will present some observations that have been widely reported by journalists in respected mainstream American and European media. Where I will differ markedly from their reporting is in the interpretation of the observations as I make the case that Western ‘truth’ about the crisis in and about Ukraine is very superficial if not maliciously concocted by Thought Central in Washington.

* * *

It should come as no surprise to readers in London or Paris or New York, that menial jobs like cleaning lady in middle class households of Brussels are performed by new immigrants. We used to have a succession of Polish ladies helping us once a week with the cleaning of our townhouse. As Poles moved up and out to better paid work, their place has been taken by new arrivals from further East.

Our present cleaning lady, who is from the Western Ukraine, with family roots in the impoverished countryside of Lviv, has been with us for three years. Though she has no higher education, she is bilingual Russian and Ukrainian, with rudimentary French and Polish. As she goes about her duties, she regularly pauses to converse in Russian with my wife about her and our family matters. The women’s talk typically revolved about our grandchildren who are with us on Wednesdays when she works for us and about her daughter and son-in-law who are enrolled in university courses in Warsaw. Politics was always off the table.

Maidan abruptly changed all that, if only briefly. After President Yanukovych was overthrown, Olya arrived at our house in a jubilant mood, speaking proudly about how the crooks had been chased out and Ukraine would soon be on its way into the European Union, with clean government and prosperity sure to follow.

On subsequent weeks, Olya again took up with my wife her narrative of developments back home, developments which she followed both on the phone with relatives in the Lviv region and on Ukrainian satellite television. Her mood changed. When the Russians took Crimea, she saw her homeland as being threatened by the big neighbor to the East. She was very anxious that the newfound freedom would be dashed. Her chat with my Russophile wife became tense.

Two more weeks passed, and Olya came to us completely dismayed, looking embarrassed by her past enthusiasm for the Maidan. She now told us that nothing has changed in the Ukrainian political elites, that aside from a new set of faces, thieves were once again in the seat of power. Looking forward to the presidential elections in May, she could see no candidate worth supporting. Not Tymoshenko, not Klitschko, not Yatsenyuk, the Rabbit. All the candidates were just an embarrassment. The country seemed as far away from the EU as ever. As we understood, Olya has turned off Ukrainian television in disgust.

Since then, the political discussions have ended. Olya and my wife are back talking women’s talk.

* * *

The New York Times and other mainstream Western media reported on the sharp rise of Russian nationalism (negative connotation) in Moscow following the annexation of Crimea. They were stunned to see Russian flags hanging out of office and apartment windows all around the city.

From several meetings with acquaintances as well as total strangers in St Petersburg last week, I can confirm that the same feeling of national pride or patriotism (positive connotation) is not merely a phenomenon in the country’s capital and largest city. Indeed, I find this upsurge in patriotism around me today as I write to you from the Russian countryside, in a hamlet of 200 souls located in the Leningradskaya oblast, 80 km south of St Petersburg.

For the first time in my experience, people other than taxi drivers are keen to talk politics. Moreover, I note that acquaintances who previously only spoke of their government as corrupt and/or incompetent have become great enthusiasts not merely for the annexation of Crimea but for the Kremlin’s standing up to the West over Ukraine and its insistence on federalization. They are saying with gusto how they are ready to undergo Western sanctions if necessary for the country to defend its interests. They are confident that the sanctions will be equally hard on the West, putting a brake on how far the punishment can go. Attitudes like these explain the surge in approval ratings of Vladimir Putin in recent weeks to an incredible 80%.

This sea change in the national mood has been uniformly attributed by Western mainstream media to an aggressive propaganda campaign on Russian state television. This same alleged distortion of the news has been used both in Ukraine and more recently in several of the Baltic States to justify their ordering cable television providers to discontinue their distribution of Russian channels. Western journalists and political commentators would have us believe that their own and Ukrainian state coverage of events in and concerning Ukraine is objective and truthful, whereas the Kremlin is keeping Russian citizens and viewers cut off from the reality of their aggression and bullying of neighbors.

So what is going on? Who is right?

Let’s start with the turn in feelings about Vladimir Putin and his ‘regime’ by Russia’s man in the street and the link to national pride over absorption of the Crimea. Are these feelings that could be manufactured from nothing by effective and unchallenged state propaganda?

Perhaps. But your man in the street was not moved by whatever propaganda content there was on state television before. On the contrary, in December 2012, at least in the capital, he demonstrated his disbelief over official news by taking part in mass demonstrations to protest vote rigging in the Duma elections.

I believe that the capture of Crimea for Russia has been seen by ordinary Russians as a great present to the nation. A Kremlin which only did favors for an inner circle did not command respect. A Kremlin which faces down the West and takes back what people feel was their national legacy is something else. And this statesmanship is all the more powerful given that the government has delivered a public good at its own risk and peril. Personal sanctions on leadership figures were threatened and followed soon afterwards, while the general population was left unscathed, at least up to now.

Here in Russia, everyone knows where Crimea is on the map and what its place is in Russian naval, military and national history. Everyone felt it was an injustice that this Russian territory was transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev and then gifted a second time by Yeltsin when he agreed to the Ukrainian secession from the Soviet Union, taking Crimea along with it.

Why everyone? Because so many of today’s over 35s had been to the children’s summer resorts in Crimea on trips organized by their schools, not to mention the paid family vacations sponsored by major state institutions of the USSR.

As for the situation in Ukraine, here everyone has back channels of information similar to those of my cleaning lady in Brussels. The extent of intermarriage, of Russian families having close relatives in Ukraine is enormous. Reporting on state television cannot stray very far from what people know from their own experience and that of their kin.

The reasons why there is such an intermixing of Russians and Ukrainians in turn requires an explanation. This is not just the consequence of inter-ethnic romances, some Slavic version of West Side Story or the equivalent of intermarriages between Croats and Serbs whose families had lived side by side in Bosnia for centuries. It is the result of both the nasty and the good aspects of the Soviet past which caused the Homo Sovieticus to settle and re-settle across that vast expanse of Eurasia with almost as much abandon as Americans move across their Continent.

The nasty side of the past was the vast resettlement of families and peoples in Soviet times during Collectivization, during the Great Terror, during the Great Patriotic War and the parallel movement of runaways seeking to escape the clutches of the state machine by disappearing to another end of the empire without the helping hand of the KGB.

The good aspect of the past came from the HR policies of the Soviet system whereby graduates were matched with career opportunities across the Union.

The common result of these internal migrations was a great deal of mixing up of peoples even if the titular nationality of each republic in the USSR was in the majority. Hence, today you will find large numbers of Russians, both your man in the street and leadership personalities, who have Ukraine under their skin.

This being the case, state propaganda about Ukraine in Russia runs up against a constant reality check of people’s family experience and informal information feed.

By contrast, in the West, and in America in particular, most folks would have had a hard time locating Crimea on the map, not to mention Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkiv, prior to the onset of the present troubles. They have no store of knowledge or family experience to help them judge whether reporting about Ukraine on their television sets is impartial or pure propaganda from the Neocon dominated majority of their foreign policy establishment.

Case closed.

THE UNCIVIL WAR BEING WAGED IN AMERICA’S EAST COAST-BASED, LIBERAL MAGAZINES OF COMMENTARY

04/05/2014

The ultimate victim of name calling and diatribes as a substitute for reasoned argumentation is the quality of policy being formulated. The claqueurs who rule over our magazines of political commentary written by and for the educated classes are pointing the country and the world in its grip towards disaster.

In Ukraine, a full-blown civil war announced itself in the atrocity perpetrated in Odessa two days ago, when some 46 civilian protesters against the provisional government in Kiev were torched, burned alive in the Trade Unions building by pro-Maidan extremists, with the firefighters and police looking on passively. Thus, calls for the physical extermination of the Moskali which have criss-crossed the Ukrainian informational space, whether originating from the long-time extremist Dmitry Yarosh and his marginally fascist Pravy Sektor movement or from the seemingly upstanding oligarch and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko with her leaked, violently anti-Russian telephone conversation of several weeks ago intended to kick-start her presidential candidacy, these incendiary summons to violence are being realized in the literal sense.

Meanwhile back in the United States, in the country which in February installed the unelected radical nationalist regime in Kiev and which publicly backs the military crackdown on opposition activists in southern and eastern Ukraine, setting the context for the infamous crime in Odessa, an uncivil war of words has broken out within the intellectual community. It is fed by the unfolding disaster in Ukraine and what it means for relations with Mr. Putin’s Russia.

One arm of the offensive has been led by The New York Review of Books, which has published a series of rhetorical bombs by the Yale scholar turned pundit Timothy Snyder. Willingly serving as the mouthpiece of the Maidan on American shores, Snyder has rounded on Putin in each of his lengthy essays appearing at intervals of several weeks over the past six months. Putin is the autocrat, the crusher of liberties in Russia for whom a genuinely democratic Ukraine is anathema; he is the nationalist promoter of Russian hegemony in the region; he is the thief who stole the Crimea and now has designs on large chunks of Ukraine; he is the rogue, the revisionist in power who has upset the entire Post-Cold War security structure put in place by the United States and its allies.

But Snyder does not stop there. He takes on with gusto all those who suggest that the Maidan heroes in power in Kiev might have less than honorable pasts, not to mention their possible fascist inclinations and behavior. See the following remarks in his NYRB article “Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda”:

“Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter, through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist or even Nazi coup d’état.”

Jim Naureckas’ expose of Snyder in Fair Blog, http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/03/07/denying-the-far-right..., called out the dirtiness of Snyder’s line of attack on his political opponents by associating them with the Moscow positions: “In other words, not only Russian and ex-Ukrainian officials, but also various Western media outlets–with the most oddball and marginal listed first–are putting forth the “propaganda” claim that Yanukovych was overthrown by the far right.” Naureckas went on to show that Snyder could not disprove the validity of those arguments in his overly long article that at the very end conceded there was some truth to the role played by extreme nationalists.

Notwithstanding his seeking to discredit countrymen holding views contrary to his own by accusing them of propaganda, the WASP-ish Yale professor would appear to be the perfect gentleman compared to others. I think in particular of the latest attack on the alleged apologist for Putin and his Ukrainian policies, Professor emeritus of Princeton and New York University Stephen F. Cohen.

Julia Ioffe’s article entitled “Putin’s American Toady at ‘The Nation’ Gets Even Toadier’ marks the resurrection in The New Republic, an iconic temple of East Coast liberalism, of the worst hallmarks of McCarthyism. The piece is so obnoxious that James Carden, writing in the American Conservative on 2 May, denounced Ioffe for what he called scurrilous, ad hominem attacks on the work and character of ‘perhaps the country’s foremost scholar of Russian studies.”

Carden wonders what could have evoked the venom in Ioffe’s essay which is nominally just a critique of an article appearing in The Nation a few days before written jointly by Cohen and his wife, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of that magazine. The couple had done nothing more than describe in some detail the obvious: that the Obama administration has rolled out a New Cold War without there being much public debate in the media over this sharp change in the direction of our relations with Russia that carries great risks. Indeed it is clear that the media are lined up like so many ducks on the question of Russia.

The reasons for Ioffe’s biliousness are not so hard to find. The unpleasant thing is that they lurk in the mine field of ad hominem realities, taking us back to issues of national origins and religion where few commentators venture to go lest they lose their virginity. It is all about the history of the Neoconservative ideology that has swept the American political spectrum from right to left ever since the Reagan administration and given us a bipartisan foreign policy in the worst sense, meaning without any internal debates. This is a foreign policy that is uniformly Russophobe whether it is advanced under the Democratic or Republican party label. In what I am about to say, I take comfort from the trail blazed by none other than the greatest popularizer of Neocon ideas, Francis Fukuyama, namely his brief chronicle of the movement in his book After the Neocons, which represented only a tactical retreat and temporary suspension of his membership card.

It is no secret that the Neoconservative movement can be traced back to a cohort in City College in Manhattan among predominantly Jewish intellectuals who were predominantly of Trotskyist political persuasion. As colorfully explained by the godfather and leading publicist of the Neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, these leftists were eventually ‘mugged by reality’ and turned fiercely against their former illusions and against the land which promoted those illusions, the Soviet Union. The successor state to the USSR, today’s Russian Federation, picked up the opprobrium when it stood in the way of the Neocon crusade to sweep the world of all remaining challenges to the American century, beginning with its opposition to their Iraqi adventure in 2003.

Apostasy is always vengeful towards those who do not follow the change of religion, read ideology. Ioffe does not fail to remind us that Cohen is a ‘lefty,’ nor does she let us forget his sympathy for the subject of his past scholarly labors, the political thinker and Bolshevik leader, Bukharin. This and Cohen’s family ancestry were evidently quite sufficient to trigger Ioffe’s rant at the impertinence of Professor Cohen in his questioning America’s present-day Neocon consensus on Russia and much else.

As evidence that however uncivil and ultimately irrational it may be, the hatred otherwise educated people bear for those who do not bend with the wind transcends national borders and is not limited to my American compatriots, I would cite a similar phenomenon in France, where the left revolutionary generation of the 1960s became disillusioned over time with their sympathies for the developing world. Heroes of their youth, like the great American dissident Noam Chomsky, who was once celebrated for his brave opposition to America’s war on Vietnam, are today ignored at best, ridiculed at worst by the apostates who now occupy the leading positions in the French universities and magazines of commentary.

The ultimate victim of name calling and shouting as a substitute for reasoned argumentation is the quality of policy being formulated. In this regard, we have reason for alarm. The light-weight counsellors of our President in foreign policy decision-making and the claqueurs who rule over our magazines of political commentary written by and for the educated classes are pointing the country and the world in its grip towards disaster.

LATVIA’S FAILED U.S.-INSPIRED POLICIES TOWARDS RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS

09/05/2014

Let us look at whom the US promoted/promotes in countries aspiring to escape the Russian orbit of influence as Latvia did after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as Ukraine, or at least its Western half, is aspiring to do today. The American policies have cleaved the local elites from their natural interests. They failed in Latvia and they are doomed to fail elsewhere...

This year Riga proudly bears the designation European Culture Capital 2014 and the local organizing committee has done a splendid job arranging a broad variety of entertainments to draw in visitors from across the EU, including generous packages of free air tickets and accommodation for the press. As an accredited journalist to the event, I express my gratitude to them for the kindness shown, although what I am about to say may not match their expectations on the payback.

While I can give high marks to the purely cultural events and venues which I visited during my four-day stay in Latvia last week, including a concert of newly written oratorio in Riga’s main cathedral and an evening of ballet performances by the local troupe set to works by contemporary Latvian composers, I was more interested in the political dimension of cultural phenomena, such as the KGB Museum or ‘Corner House’ which opened its doors to the public during my stay and the Museum of the Occupation, a must-see for every foreign visitor.

Moreover, I wanted to investigate the retrospective mood on the ground as the 10th anniversary of Latvia’s accession to the European Union approached. And finally, I sought to follow up the issue of Latvia’s 300,000 non-citizens, the Russians living in Latvia who were stripped of their citizenship just after independence. This is something I wrote about in a preliminary way and from afar back in March.

Lest it seem that these objectives of my visit to Riga were disparate, I will demonstrate their commonality in what follows. That commonality arises from US policies, over whom the US promoted/promotes in countries aspiring to escape the Russian orbit of influence as Latvia did after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as Ukraine, or at least its Western half, is aspiring to do today. As stated bluntly in my title above, these policies have failed in Latvia and they are doomed to fail elsewhere.

* * *

The narrative which the organizers of Riga Culture Capital of Europe 2014 have sought to disseminate is one of a flourishing society with a rich heritage that is confident about its identity in the world. Another key element of the narrative is that this is a country that has come through a lot, has experienced a very painful history of oppression. I will begin with the last point and then return to the questions of cultural dynamism, economic prosperity and identity.

Both the long-existing Museum of the Occupation and the brand-new KGB Museum illustrate the strengths and limitations of managing the collective memory we call history to serve the cause of Latvia’s nationalists in power. The story of a martyred people who may be forgiven for their harsh discrimination against compatriots who are not ethnically Latvian is what the leadership obviously wants to hear and both museums deliver. It is not necessarily that truth is distorted but that it is cut to measure, leaving out all that is inconvenient to remember.

The basic focus on these museums is on a free and democratic state that was cruelly conquered by Soviet Russia in 1940, then taken by the Germans in 1941 and re-taken by the Soviets in 1944-5, remaining under Russian occupation until its independence in 1991. Standing by itself, that is unexceptional. However, it omits the fact that in the preceding 1,000 years there had been no Latvian state, that the territory of Courland was always held by one or another of its powerful neighbors, passing from the Germans, to the Poles, to the Swedes and finally to the Russians in 1710, where it remained until the end of the tsarist empire in WWI. In this regard, the Municipal Historical Museum in downtown Tallinn is much more honest, acknowledging that from time immemorial Estonians were a nation of farmers that had no independent state until just after WWI and that it lasted only 20 years, in the period between the two world wars.

Careful cutting of the period under review to suit a propagandistic aim also mars the concept behind the KGB Museum. The curators fail to mention that the building, which indeed served as the headquarters of the Soviet secret police from 1939 to 1991 except for the period of German rule during WWII when the Nazi puppet regime did their dirty work here, had in fact been used by Latvian secret police as early as 1936 and continued to serve the same function in post-independence Latvia right up to 2009.

Riga has succeeded handsomely on the heritage side, which is lovingly preserved and is the wellspring for contemporary culture. But here, too, the Latvian ethnic bias of the powers-that-be omits a substantial if inconvenient component: Russians in the city’s and country’s past and present. The most important residential districts in the city, its rows of magnificent Jugendstil buildings, date from the time when Riga was the third largest city in the Russian Empire with a very mixed population and enjoyed great prosperity. The single most important museum in the country, the palace of the Duke of Courland at Rundale, 80 km south of Riga, was built for the favorite of Czarina Anna I under the direction of the same architect who designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and it is filled with Russian furniture and objects of art brought there from Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1980s when the palace was reopened as a museum.

Strolling through Riga’s shopping districts, you experience a feeling of moderate prosperity. There are no vacant store fronts downtown, unlike in Brussels and other West European capitals. There are no beggars, and the city is remarkably clean and orderly. However, the demographics tell a different story. In the years since independence, the capital’s population has fallen from close to one million to just under 700,000. This has occurred despite an influx from the largely ethnically pure Latvian countryside, which I am told has emptied out to such an extent that there have been extensive closings of schools and other facilities which are no longer required. Ethnic Latvians have moved out to Sweden, to England and to other EU countries in search of work.

The lack of jobs and need to emigrate has been the price of ignoring the map, refusing to accept the necessity of maintaining good relations with the big neighbor to the southeast. In the past, Latvian ports had been among the most important in the Soviet Union, particularly as regards petroleum product exports, and the country also enjoyed a position of privileged supplier of electronics and other manufactured goods to Russia, as well as of comestibles.

By its anti-Russian, pro-NATO policies, Latvia lost the bulk of its Russian commercial relations after independence and found no adequate replacement within the EU. Employment opportunities dried up.

And, ironically, this has led to attempts by the Latvian government to tap into Russian capital at the private investor level as opposed to normal commercial flows. I saw evidence of this on my flight into Riga. Advertising in the Baltic Air onboard magazine was nearly entirely in Russian and devoted to promotion of luxury housing projects in and near the coastal resort of Yurmala, 25 km north of Riga. The advertising texts highlighted the availability of long-term residence permits for the prospective buyer and his family. Later in the trip I had occasion to see firsthand some of these projects, which are almost exclusively subscribed by Russians. The obvious contradiction between this little measure to support the domestic Latvian construction industry, to provide jobs for gardeners, concierges and the like, and the larger policy of repressing native born Russian speakers in the republic has not escaped the attention and censure of the more fervent local nationalists.

Since independence, the ruling elites of Latvia have worked hard to ensure that the titular ethnos dominates economic, cultural and political life. They stripped of citizenship nearly half of the Russian speakers who lived there at the time of independence (more than 15% of the overall population of 2 million today) and applied discriminatory measures against them in the hope they would either leave the country or pass through naturalization and assimilate. While Russians have also left the country, they have done so in lesser numbers than ethnic Latvians, so that the demographic balance has not improved for the Latvians. In Riga they do not hold a majority and are neck and neck with Russian speakers.

The discriminatory measures have included squeezing the Russian language out of public space. As of my visit the local Russian population is very troubled by government plans to end all instruction in Russian at the start of the new school year. At present, teaching in Russian accounts for 40% and in Latvian for 60% of instruction time. This is the number one issue driving anti-Latvian resentment in the Russian population of the country today.

* * *

Western newspapers have reported on the nervousness of governments in the Baltic States over the Russian annexation of Crimea and over the Kremlin-encouraged separatism of southeastern Ukraine, where Russian speakers are the majority. Latvia has officially welcomed the notion of stationing permanent NATO contingents on its soil as a protective measure against Russian aggression.

But the anxiety of Latvian elites does not end there. They look with suspicion on their Russian-speaking citizens and non-citizens, fearing they constitute a fifth column in their midst available for a campaign of subversion at any time if Mr. Putin summons them to action. This led recently to a directive forcing Latvian cable operators to cancel their distribution of certain Russian state television channels. And it has resulted in closer police surveillance of the social activities of Russian speakers

Indeed, during my visit, one of my contacts in the Latvian Congress of Non-Citizens was called in by the political police for 6 hours of interrogation. She was permitted to bring her attorney with her for advice on which questions she could refuse to answer, and she left their offices unassisted. But she was shaken by this intimidation. The reason for the questioning was her role as organizer of a planned evening of Russian songs and peaceful protest that in fact did not take place since it was prohibited by the police.

This kind of cat and mouse game keeps both the ethnic Latvian government and its Russian ‘alien’ subjects on edge. Society has become quite fragile.

At the same time, my visit ended on a totally unexpected note. During a reception at the Chalet in the central Esplanade Park which will be used as a visitor information point during the Riga Cultural Capital festival through December, my main interlocutor was a highly placed public relations officer who serves the municipal administration. In our prior meeting, at the Riga 2014 offices, he had impressed me as being a stern ultra-nationalist, telling me with pride that he speaks no Russian and was not aware of any Russian cultural activities that visitors might want to go to. He also informed me that he fiercely opposed the housing projects being pitched to Russian private investors and seekers of Latvian residence permits. Our chat had been chilly and brief.

Now at the reception he seemed keen to talk and did not object when I said I wanted to make a political observation, namely that I did not see the present situation with the 300,000 stateless in their midst as tenable long term and that they would be obliged to find some political accommodation with the Russian speaking population.

The response was remarkable. Things were indeed very bad now, he said, but Putin’s actions had made it impossible to reach out to strike a deal with the stateless. Still, it had been a terrible mistake back at the time of independence that the Latvians did not grant citizenship to all the Russians. After all, the Russian Latvians had been on the barricades alongside their ethnic Latvian neighbors in the fight for independence against Soviet armed forces and they had voted for independence when a ballot was held.

In this way, the hardline representative of the ethnic Latvian cause before me agreed with the basic argument of the Congress of Non-Citizens regarding the unfairness of the deprivation of citizenship in 1992. With this in hand, the objection that righting that wrong is not possible today can be neutralized rather easily.

The conversation reminded me of discussions I had in Capetown and Johannesburg in my one visit to South Africa in the year before Apartheid was brought down. The end of a brutal discriminatory system is near when the elites enforcing it no longer believe in its supporting principles. However, whereas in the South African case the United States stood on the side of the angels, it is today, in its measures to step up NATO presence on Latvian soil, working actively against the kind of local compromises with reality that are needed.

* * *

Like Ukraine today, the nationalist government of newly independent Latvia received a great many political advisers from the United States in the 1990s. Some of them, like the late Ron Asmus, were awarded Latvian state orders for their services and moved on. Others like CIA operative Paul Goble continue to meddle in Latvian politics to this day, albeit no longer in the name of the agency.

These advisers shared a mission of creating a cleavage between the anti-Russian nationalists in power whom America supported and the genuine interests of the given country. Just as it is doing today, the United States propagated a vision of Russia as hostile and menacing, offering a solution in the form of NATO membership. The scenario of big, bad Russia became selffulfilling and prevented the Latvians from finding their own peace with Russians inside and outside their country. The Americans counselled Latvians against looking closely at the map and understanding where they live. The result is a country much poorer, much less populated and much less secure than it should or could be if other policies were pursued.

These lessons are equally relevant to the situation unfolding in Ukraine, where the United States is actively promoting instability and finds itself again on the wrong side of history, to use a concept favored by the Obama administration.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE, MAY-JUNE 2014 ISSUE: THE FALSE DEBATE OVER “THE RETURN OF GEOPOLITICS”

16/05/2014

Amidst the confrontation between the West and Russia over Ukraine, the world is edging towards the precipice. At this fateful moment, Foreign Affairs magazine has chosen to feature an exchange of views between two of its house philosophers over the angel count on a pinhead.

The debate over the relevance of geopolitics to our understanding of International Relations featured in the May-June 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine pits Professor G. John Ikenberry of Princeton against Professor Walter Russell Mead of Bard College. Their sparring takes place in some abstract universe where pure ideas enter into combat wearing big boxing gloves so as to avoid doing bodily harm. The specific issues of current events intrude only as headings, a sort of ballast that may keep these philosophers anchored to the interests and concerns of their less enlightened readership who seek detailed solutions to the policy problems before them, not just word games or angel counting.

The abstractness of the debate is not the result of some idiosyncrasy of the two authors; it comes with the domain they occupy within the IR discipline – Wilsonian idealism in its late 20th century form, what we recognize as Neocon thinking. Their stock in trade is universal laws. History, language, religion, the economics of any given territory are almost irrelevant, the concerns of the sad lot over in what remains of the Realpolitik school, which is now passé.

Mead, who is editor at large within the magazine founded and run by Neocon popularizer Francis Fukuyama, has his two legs planted in the Wilsonian idealist domain. Ikenberry has always been more of an eclectic thinker. He coined the term structural liberalism to describe his school of thought. You could say he has one leg in the outer fringes of Realpolitik and the other firmly in Wilsonian idealism.

Though Mead’s connection to The American Interest is mentioned by the FA editors, they fail to say that Ikenberry has also contributed solidly to the same publication where his name has figured on the editorial board. Both also have a long association with FA where they are in the small pool of book reviewers, each with his own marked territory. And Ikenberry, at least, is affiliated with several other specialized IR journals in addition. To put it in business terminology, you might say that Ikenberry and Mead are members of the interlocking directorate that controls their industry and keeps nonmembers out of print.

The FA editors matched Mead and Ikenberry to get separate takes on what problems the current crisis over Ukraine, the confrontation between Russia and the West, have or have not posed for theorists invested in The End of History ideas. First word was given to Walter Russell Mead, who represents the pur et dur positions of Fukuyama and Co. I will deal with his thesis first before examining Ikenberry’s antithesis.

* * *

Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers”

Mead’s basic case is that Russia’s recent actions and confrontation with the West over Ukraine mark the revival of the geopolitical dimension in international relations, meaning creation of spheres of influence, that was thought to have been vanquished when the Cold War ended and the world entered an ideologically free, post-historical phase. This idea is what Ikenberry spends most of his capital disputing.

Instead I will deal here with something I consider more important, Mead’s contention that Russia is a revisionist power, a term which shares top billing with ‘geopolitics’ in the title of his essay. Ikenberry also contests this but for different, and, I believe, wrong reasons as I will demonstrate in due course.

In approaching the issue of ‘revisionist powers.’ let’s take a page out of Hans Morgenthau, the Ur-source on Realpolitik, as we try to understand who is the revisionist and who is the status quo power. Morgenthau said in Politics Among Nations that revanchist or revisionist countries need ideology to conceal their aggressive ambitions, whereas status quo nations do not, since there is no change that needs justification.

For anyone with even a modicum of fair-mindedness, it is clear that United States since 1992 has pursued an ideologically driven foreign policy which Meade ticks off for us quite accurately.

This was and is a modified Wilsonian idealist policy that is ‘values based’ as opposed to ‘interests based’ - promoting democracy, human rights across borders. Under this smokescreen, the US incidentally fomented the color revolutions and installed regimes deemed favorable to the West in a series of countries. The same ideology provided cover for a patently revisionist security policy – bringing into NATO a string of countries from the former Warsaw Pact, in direct violation of the understandings with the Russians that ended the Cold War in 1989. This reached its high water mark in 2004 with the inclusion of the former Soviet republics of the Baltics in NATO. The efforts to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine as well crossed red lines set by the Russians for their existential security interests and were effectively frustrated, setting up the present confrontation and New Cold War.

We have here two smoking guns: American revisionism as expressed by the never-ending expansion of its military alliance and bases to the Russian borders and American revisionism as seen in the roll-out of a suitable ideological cover for its expanding worldwide hegemony.

What do we have on the other side? From the 1990s until the last year or two, Russia abandoned its Soviet ideology and indulged in a policy of enrichissezvous, preoccupied with enjoying the consumer life style that Communism had denied three generations of Russians. It has only been in the last year, and only in response to the shrill information war that the United States and Western Europe unleashed against Russia following the scandal over Snowden’s acceptance in Moscow as a political refugee and in the run-up to the Sochi Olympic Games which otherwise promised to accord great PR benefits to Russia that Vladimir Putin has moved to assemble a proto-ideology for Russia as guarantor of conservative values in a newly bi-polar world.

On the security side, Russia was on the ropes in the 1990s, retreating before every Western advance in territories that historically been allied with Russia for 150 years or more, including and particularly Serbia and other Balkan states. Even as Vladimir Putin restored the economy and military potential of his country in the first decade of the new millennium, this retreat continued, initially as part of a calculated gamble to trade geopolitical concessions in its own back yard of Central Asia following 9/11 for the redrawing of European security architecture so as to include Russia.

The first incarnation of this, in 2001, was the idea of Russia in NATO. That failed when President Bush responded to the Russian charm offensive with slaps in the face: the abrogation of the ABM treaty and the accelerated initiative to place missile defense installations in Europe. Russia’s second attempt, the new European security treaty floated by Dmitry Medvedev which would give Russia a protection against military action directed against itself by its European neighbors, also failed miserably to get US and Western attention.

Russia stopped its security retreat when it counterattacked in response to Georgian aggression in 2008. And it has continued its counterattack this year when it responded to the American led putsch in Kiev by fomenting the separatist insurgency in Crimea that led to annexation of the peninsula shortly thereafter. But even here, to speak of Russian action as revisionist is a gross misrepresentation. The annexation of Crimea was no more than a proactive defensive move to prevent the cancellation of its extended lease on the home port of its Black Sea fleet that would amount to a crushing blow to its naval military capabilities.

Thus, both in terms of ideology ( till recently totally absent) and in terms of the dynamic in its geopolitical relationship with the West (to halt an ongoing and adverse change), Russia has been sinned against rather than sinner over the past 20 plus years and Professor Meade’s type-casting Russia as revisionist is a gross violation of the truth.

What is hard to fathom is why the world’s most powerful nation and only surviving superpower at the end of the first Cold War in 1989 could not be content with its level of control in the status quo of the day and has instead become the world’s leading revisionist state. This hubristic overplaying of the hand has run counter to any definition of common sense. The detachment of American foreign policy elites including Professor Meade from the realities of global economic and military trends is the most alarming feature of our present confrontation with Russia. The simultaneous baiting of China as seen in Obama’s just-ended tour of Asia provides further high drama to the unfolding doomsday scenario.

* * *

G. John Ikenberry, “The Illusion of Geopolitics. The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order”

At the very start of his essay, Ikenberry pooh-poohs the notion that Russia (and China) is (are) revisionist powers threatening the post-Cold War world order that is U.S. dominated. Of course, his argumentation is radically different from what I set out above. They are, he says, just ‘part-time spoilers at best,’ opportunists who resist the United States’ global leadership in their own neighborhoods. This, Ikenberry goes on to say, shows more their weakness than their strength. Moreover, they ‘have no appealing brand.’

The other side of the coin in the essay under review is pure Ikenberry, i.e. an extension and reconfirmation of his decades-long celebration of the American Empire (global hegemony) for the public goods it delivers to the world through the web of international institutions it dominates. This is a worldwide architecture to which the problematic outlyers like Russia and China have no alternative to offer.

Ikenberry tells us that the global architecture of financial, defense and other liberal institutions which America put in place at the outset of the first Cold War and built out ever since was precisely designed to manage geopolitics. That is to say, geopolitics never lost the attention of American policy makers. It was the End of History camp that went astray with their illusions of full victory over the ongoing realities of power He takes the more ideologically invested Professor Mead to task for not seeing that world governance is well in hand and that the barbarians at the gates in the dispute over Ukraine do not threaten our rule.

Taking the constellation of his ideas in the first two paragraphs of his essay together, one wonders whether Ikenberry was in the pool of ghostwriters who prepared Barack Obama’s keynote speech of his European tour last month delivered at the Bozar auditorium in Brussels. There the President rolled out a New Cold War containment policy against Russia which is premised on Russia’s weakness and its being nothing more than a regional bully, not a global power. The underlying ridicule, lack of respect for and underestimation of Russia is a tragic failure of comprehension that riddles our foreign policy establishment right through the editorial board of Foreign Affairs magazine headed by Gideon Rose, making them complicit in the unnecessary risks and volatility of international relations at this moment.

AN OPEN LETTER TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT LEE C. BOLLINGER

17/05/2014

Now, when precisely gravitas and depth of analysis is needed on campus as an antidote to the war hysteria that is sweeping the mass media and pressing upon the President, Columbia is just another weak reed, contributing its pitiful bit to the hysteria. And that is intolerable. It makes a mockery of higher education as a pillar of pluralism in our society.

Mr. President,

I have just looked over the latest issue of Columbia Magazine. Both from the article entitled “Going Places” and from your interview in “The Evolving University.” I am greatly impressed by your vision and by the enormous success of your fund-raising and development team in realizing a grand renewal of the institution. I say ‘bravo’ to you and the staff.

I also mention that where I live, in Brussels, I have felt the new dynamism of the Alumni Association both at our national Club and in the greater European region. This is all to the good.

However, in my own parochial corner of Columbia, Russian studies, I am deeply disappointed and at times shocked by the primitive state of affairs today. I also see no reason to expect better days ahead.

Columbia is where I took my doctorate in 1975. And it is where I came back in the academic year 2010-2011 as a Visiting Scholar of the Harriman Institute. That year gave me a rather complete and depressing picture of how the administrators and instructors in my field have abandoned the notion of diversity in favor of advocacy and conformism as ‘freedom fighters’ on the Russian front. Even casual perusal of the list of events hosted by The Harriman Institute over the course of an academic year proves that the program has been hijacked by one side in the debate over the nature of the Russian state and the prospects for relations with it.

Subsequent visits to Columbia to participate in the annual conventions of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held in the SIA Building under the aegis of the Harriman Institute left me in no doubt that a kind of McCarthyism, of absolute intolerance for unconventional thinking about Russia had become the order of the day.

I think in particular of the 2013 convention where perhaps the most egregious case was a presentation entitled “Implications of the Pussy Riot Affair.” The panel clearly consisted of friends of friends, all sharing one political agenda. In several other panel presentations as well, I saw that the presenters assumed that they and the audience were all one happy family of Putin/Kremlin/Russia bashers, that we all believe that the ‘regime’ in Moscow is illegitimate and ripe for overthrow, and that any and all charges against it issued from the dais require no back-up because they are common knowledge. Anyone daring to raise an awkward question was dismissed from the dais as a ‘stooge of Putin.’ Given the host status of The Harriman Institute and its titular interest in Russian affairs, the institution cannot escape responsibility for these abuses.

Until the Ukrainian crisis shocked the American establishment out of its complacency over the imagined permanence of the post-Cold War order, one could understand why my field had done little more than tread water over the past two decades at Columbia just as was the case at other major centers across the country. The Harriman is now led by staff who simply cannot fill the shoes of the institution’s long-time director Marshall Shulman. They do not have the gravitas to bring reason to bear on popular mood swings such as once justified the institution’s endowment by Governor Harriman.

The shortcomings of the Harriman Institute and of the broader Columbia community of scholars in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian studies did not matter much till now. But NOW, when precisely gravitas and depth of analysis is needed on campus as an antidote to the war hysteria that is sweeping the mass media and pressing upon the President, Columbia is just another weak reed, contributing its pitiful bit to the hysteria that has us as a nation lurching to the precipice with each twist of events in and around Ukraine. And that is intolerable. It makes a mockery of higher education as a pillar of pluralism in our society.

As an example of what bothers me and should bother you, I cite below an events announcement from the Harriman which I received at the start of this week. Is it reasonable in a community of the enlightened to talk about Putin as a madman? as a Hitler? Yes, I can imagine that this was raised to draw the attention of a prospective audience. But it is giving legitimacy to views that have no place on campus.

I understand, even if I intensely dislike, when the mass media engages in ad hominem argumentation. But why is this going on at Columbia, one of the two founders of area studies in 1949 alongside Harvard? Why is the same faculty member appearing on programs produced by Comedy Central to pitch jokes to the television audience about the current crisis which is evolving along a doomsday scenario? See

http://barnard.edu/news/comedy-centrals-daily-show-welcomes-prof-kimberly-marten-featured-guest

I mention this one faculty member because the example is ready to hand. But it is not an issue of one or two faculty members, it is an institutionalized turn away from civil discourse and towards stultifying conformism that leaves the research of all faculty much the poorer and less helpful in guiding our federal government and the broader public to see its way through devilishly complex issues in these trying times.

I wish to emphasize that the point is NOT to replace the prevailing bias of Harriman-sponsored events with another bias: rather it is to remove all tendentiousness insofar as humanly possible and position the university as a neutral platform for debate of vital issues.

In closing, I urge that you convene a committee of inquiry consisting of outside experts and non-experts from civil society to look into these allegations and, if they are justified, to recommend remedial actions.

I am prepared to submit to such a committee a list detailing the failure of The Harriman Institute to live up to its important calling and expectations of its benefactor. The issues include skewed programming, unprofessional management of conferences on University property, preoccupations which may be related to funds taken from Russian sources. These weak points at the Harriman have no doubt been aggravated by SIPA’s decision a couple of years ago to de-link the master’s in international and public affairs from the area studies programs of the Harriman and other institutes. The pool at the Harriman has become especially stagnant.

Respectfully yours,

Gilbert Doctorow

Brussels

Exhibit A:

Russia: An Enigma Once More?

Monday, May 12, 2014, 6:30-7:30 pm

Columbia Alumni Center, 622 W. 113th Street (between Broadway and Riverside)

A talk by Kimberly Marten, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Political Science, Barnard College;

Deputy Director for Development, Harriman Institute.

What is motivating Vladimir Putin? The puzzles seem to be multiplying, even as the Russian economy stagnates. First was the enormous, bank-breaking expenditure on the Sochi Olympics, amid accusations of massive corruption and a human rights crackdown. Then came the brazen military seizure of Ukrainian Crimea, and a new move toward greater-Russia ethnic nationalism by Kremlin leaders. Has Putin gone mad? Is he a new Hitler? Or is Russia now winning a well-plotted chess game against the West? Kimberly Marten will provide her take on the issues

Space is limited, pre-registration is preferred.

ANGELA MERKEL’S ULTIMATUM

30/06/2014

It is both remarkable and terribly disappointing that the 28 heads of state and government of the EU have adopted the same approach to crisis resolution through ultimatums that launched the greatest cataclysm of European civilization of the 20th century.

If one thing is clear from the official conclusions of the June 26-27th EU Summit, it is that the heads of state and government of the Union’s 28 Member States have neither a sense of irony, nor an understanding of the history of the Old Continent. I have in mind the Summit’s message for Russia over the Ukrainian crisis: either render material assistance in the pacification of the Donbas within 72 hours, before the expiration of the cease-fire extension set by Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, or face imposition of harsh economic sanctions directed against key sectors of the Russian economy including energy, banking and defense.

Specifically the Russians were called upon to ensure effective control of their border with Ukraine so that reinforcements and materiel no longer reach the separatists; to ensure the release of hostages including OSCE observers; to ensure the return to Ukrainian authorities of three border checkpoints now controlled by the separatists; and to ensure the launch of substantial negotiations on the implementation of Poroshenko’s peace – which itself calls for the insurgents to lay down their arms.

According to informal sources cited by leading Western media, the formulation of this ultimatum was pushed by Angela Merkel, who these days exercises preponderant influence within the EU councils and who otherwise celebrated on the same day her 26-2 victory over David Cameron on the issue of nominating Jean-Claude Juncker to be the next EU Commission President. In her own statement to the press about Russia following the summit, Merkel said: “If no visible progress is made on these points, then we are prepared to take further decisions including drastic measures…We expect progress to come really in the hours ahead.”

The irony in this development is that it came one day before the 100th anniversary of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that set in train diplomatic and military preparations culminating in the issuance of an ultimatum by Austria-Hungary to Serbia over investigation of the perpetrators of the murder. And it was the failure to satisfy the terms of that ultimatum which triggered the declaration of war on Serbia, leading to a cascade of further declarations of war between parties of the Continent’s hostile alliances and the march to the killing fields.

The demands of Austria-Hungary on Serbia were politically unrealizable. Similarly, the demands of the June 2014 ultimatum directed at the Kremlin promoted by Chancellor Merkel are politically unrealizable within the time frame set.

Merkel’s mention of the need for visible action “in the hours ahead” is, of course, a repetition of the phrasing of the same demands the day before by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. And the authors of this approach to international diplomacy in Washington have a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ approach to their craft.

The EU-US ultimatum to Russia is unrealizable for two reasons. First, Vladimir Putin has no more control over the rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk than Petro Poroshenko has over the anti-secessionist irregulars from Pravy Sektor, the Natsgvardiya or the battalion of the oligarch, Dnepetrovsk regional governor Igor Kolomoisky, all of whom are fighting outside the ranks of the Ukrainian army and are pursuing their own interests. Second, for Putin to knuckle under to Kiev’s demands under Western threat of sanctions would cost him his support both in the broad population and among the Russian elites; it is a formula for ‘regime change’ as prescribed by the Neoconservative authors of US foreign policy.

It is both remarkable and terribly disappointing that the 28 heads of state and government of the EU have adopted the same approach to crisis resolution through ultimatums that launched the greatest cataclysm of European civilization of the 20th century. It is also exposes the fundamental fallacy of Wilsonian idealism that underlies current US foreign policy, namely the notion that crowned heads are warlike and democratically elected heads are peaceable.

THE WORM TURNS: RUSSIAN PUNDITS ON THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS AND WESTERN SANCTIONS

03/08/2014

Russian journalism is emerging from pro-Western wishful thinking to something resembling consciousness of the national interest. For these salutary changes in Russian informational space, one can only thank President Obama and his Neocon-dominated administration.

US and Western mass media coverage of the Ukrainian crisis has remained fairly uniform in its condemnation of Russia’s role through the spring and summer of 2014, with the latest developments surrounding the crash of the Malaysian airliner over separatist held territory in Eastern Ukraine tending to further lock out any hint of controversy over Russian intentions and culpability. The reporting perspective tends to be day-to-day, with the accent on human interest aspects of the day’s haul of news, such as the disposition of the corpses and body parts of the unfortunate passengers. Background information is largely missing. We are not told about the state of war in the zone where the crash occurred, about the other horrors going on amidst the Ukrainian army’s assault on cities in the Donbas

Sadly, US professional journals are not much more diligent in searching for and communicating what might constitute a view coming from the other side of the present confrontation with Russia. One exception remains The Nation, which continues to publish important articles by Professor Stephen Cohen. His most recent contribution, “The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities” details the machinations of official Washington and subservient American journalism that have kept the public ignorant of the domestic forces driving escalation of the civil war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile alternative media have picked up some important voices, none more estimable than that of the Great American Dissident, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky took a while to weigh in, holding his silence until his distaste for American bullying of Russia and its aggressive hypocrisy outweighed his distaste for what he construed as Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime. When he did emerge, however, Chomsky was eloquent: see his “Red Lines in Ukraine and Elsewhere” published on 2 May in the online resource www.truth-out.org.

In Russia the confrontation with the West over Ukraine has prompted much soul-searching and realignment of political positions among press journalists and political commentators, who, paradoxically were in the past much more critically disposed to the powers-that-be than their counterparts in the West. The reason for the change surely comes from the dramatic patriotic upsurge that followed the ‘homecoming’ of Crimea and the onset of Western sanctions. The tide that has brought Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings to more than 80%, the highest in his 14 years in federal office, also swamped the boats of opposition politicians and pundits. Moreover, the sheer stupidity of the authors of the sanctions in Washington, their ignorant assumption that they might split the Russian elites and achieve the ouster of Putin and his circle from power by waging economic warfare at no cost to themselves, has penetrated to even the most die-hard opponents of the Kremlin among Russian political commentators.

A case in point is the 28 July essay in The Moscow Times entitled “On how Western supporters of sanctions have not figured out Russian reality” by Georgiy Bovt, a regular columnist whose views have till now been in line with the paper’s editorial position of bashing Putin, the Kremlin and Russia in general.

It may come as a surprise to those who have heard of The Moscow Times only from news stories it has fed to their partners in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but the political line of a paper originally created to serve the expatriate community in Moscow has been directed against its host country for more than a decade under the watchful eye of its Finnish owners, Sanoma. The publishing group is in daily contradiction with its registered name of Independent Media.

Another straw in the wind to illustrate my point that Russian journalism is emerging from pro-Western wishful thinking to something resembling consciousness of the national interest is an article published on 31 July in the non-mainstream outlet Transitions Online (www.tol.org) by Galina Stolyarova, a journalist with the Independent Media’s St Petersburg Times. Stolyarova was for many years the main writer on cultural events in the Northern Capital, then moved to business reporting. Now she has made the jump to political commentary with an essay whose title tells the whole story: “Outrage and Double Standards. The flood of anti-Russian rhetoric in the West will lead us nowhere good.”

However, my most important exhibit of how the worm turns is Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a political analyst with a background in security issues, who has been widely published in the West as well as in Russia. Over the years, Trenin has blown hot and cold with respect to Putin and the Kremlin leadership. Pandering to the expectations of his paymasters in Washington, he has written some pretty foolish essays from time to time. Five years ago, I took him to task for just this weakness: see http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2009/10/30/a-rebuttal-to-russia-reborn-by-dmitri-trenin-foreign-affairs.html I also have been obliged to call out the seditious behavior of leading members of his staff at the Carnegie Center; see http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2013/03/04/the-carnegie-center-moscow-a-nest-of-sedition.html

Judging from his latest writings over the past couple of months, Dr. Trenin has had an epiphany. His latent superior skills of broad-stroke strategic analysis have come to the fore as seen most convincingly in an article published on 29 July in Russia in Global Affairs (globalaffairs.ru), a partner publication of Foreign Affairs: “Europe’s Nightmare Coming True: America vs. Russsia… Again. And the stakes could not be any higher.” In this piece, we get all the connections between the bits and pieces of US-Russian confrontation over Ukraine and the big picture of a struggle over American global hegemony. Here Putin and personalities generally count for little or nothing, national interests for everything.

Meanwhile Trenin is these days accurately describing the challenge and the opportunity which Western sanctions have presented to the Kremlin. As he notes, if Putin can rise to the challenge and, on the strength of his overwhelming popularity, rein in the oligarchs further, curb corruption more and successfully launch the reindustrialization that import substitution invites, he will greatly broaden the economy away from mineral extraction and Russia may genuinely prosper. That in turn will take the country along its way on the path to full-fledged democracy. This is a vision which no Russian pundit would have ventured to put forward 18 months ago.

For these salutary changes in Russian informational space, we can only thank President Obama and his Neocon-dominated administration.

HOUSE OF CARDS AND THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S POLICY ON RUSSIA

06/08/2014

How may we understand Obama’s insulting assertions about Russia in his latest interview with ‘The Economist’ newspaper and what do they tell us about his Russian policy?

Over the past half year some international affairs commentators have opined with an air of superiority that the Obama administration lacks a policy on Russia, that its personal attacks on President Putin reveal a superficiality that masquerades as policy whereas those plotting our foreign relations have not done the hard work of strategic analysis. The responses at press conferences by the ignorant dullards who act as spokespersons for the White House and the State Department surely encourage such a benign interpretation of the course taken with respect to Russia.

However, closer inspection of what is being said about and done to Russia these days leaves no doubt that Washington does indeed have a policy, and that it is a very misguided, tendentious and ultimately hazardous policy that courts the calamity of yet another world war by its dismissal of Russia’s military and economic capabilities and of Russia’s readiness to defend its vital interests with all resources at its disposal. This is not an incidental oversight; it is the fundamental blind spot which drives everything else.

Excerpts released to the media this past Sunday from President Obama’s interview with The Economist newspaper illustrate perfectly where we stand and why. The most piquant sound bites were carried at once by many media outlets as teasers. I found them at the online edition of The Moscow Times in the feature article “Obama Dismisses Russia as Nation that ‘Doesn’t Make Anything.” That remark was well crafted to attract attention, being similar in kind to the off hand comment by Russian nemesis Senator McCain some months ago that Russia was not a country but a gas station.

The headline remark formed part of a dense string of provocative assertions about Russia and its President. Already on the next day, Forbes.com journalist Mark Adomanis came out with an article entitled “Three things Barack Obama got wrong about Russia” exposing the falsehoods which the American President was disseminating.

The three factually wrong assertions which Adomanis chose to explore were:

1. that Russia does not attract immigrants

2. that male life expectancy in Russia is just 60 years

3. that the population of the country is declining

As I will demonstrate in a moment, among the assorted insulting statements about Russia which Obama chose to let drop during his interview these were among the more anodyne. They were chosen by Adomanis to debunk because they matched his personal knowledge base and comfort zone.

For those unfamiliar with the opus of Mark Adomanis, it bears mention that this hard working and widely published journalist has focused in the past several years on Russia’s demography. He has contributed greatly to drawing a realistic picture of Russian society simply by doing what others in the profession disdained to do: he reads and analyzes the data releases of Ros-stat, the Ministry of Health and other relevant Russian institutions. His writings show that the population decline which Russia experienced as from the 1990s has been effectively reversed beginning in 2009, with a gradual shift in contributing factors from immigration to natural rise in live births over deaths. It is also worth noting that in his writings Adomanis has done some comparative analysis of demographic trends in all the former Soviet bloc, showing that Russia’s experience from the fall of Communism and the industrial chaos that followed was largely similar to the experience of all its peers, only that Russia generally has been much more successful in reversing the decline.

In addition to reiterating in his latest article his findings on Russia’s rising as opposed to declining population, Adomanis noted that the true figure for male life expectancy in Russia today is 65 rather than 60, and he proceeded to drive home to his readers the importance of an 8% margin of error in statistics issued over the President’s name.

As for the third factual error in Obama’s allegation that “immigrants are not rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity,” Adomanis did not produce hard numbers but otherwise adduced persuasive arguments to show the opposite is true, including anecdotal evidence on the vast presence of foreign workers in Russian cities. Thus, he concluded that “Russia is widely acknowledged to be the world’s second most popular destination for immigrants after the United States.”

What is at issue in those 3 negative assertions by Obama and their overturning by Adomanis is the negative or positive characterization of Russian society and its leadership. Ultimately the population collapse of Russia in the 1990s was a direct result of the economic collapse and the hopelessness that pervaded society. Similarly the rise in natural births over the past five years, while supported by the generous maternity capital extended by Putin’s government to families with two or more children, accurately reflects the generalized prosperity that has touched the whole of Russian society in the past decade, and with it greater self-confidence and financial security of prospective parents.

At the same time, Adomanis is always careful not to upset his editors and the readership of an information resource to which American business subscribes. His positive take on Russian demographics and occasional upbeat remarks on the Russian economy are tempered by regular reminders of the authoritarian nature of the Putin regime. Therefore it is not surprising that the journalist chose not to explore some other assertions of Obama and, more importantly, not to dwell on why all these assertions were made in the first place.

Apart from a lighthearted comment at the outset of his article that ‘’he [Obama] was pretty clearly doing his best to give Vladimir Putin an aneurism,” Adomanis ended his article with the suggestion that the blame for the falsehoods in Obama’s remarks was due to sloppiness, unprofessionalism among his staff who never took the time to do some google research.

In fact, apart from the one-liner that ‘Russia as a nation doesn’t make anything,’ all of the other denigrating remarks were nothing new from official Washington. The talk about Russia’s declining population was rolled out five years ago by Vice President Joe Biden at the conclusion of his trip to Ukraine and Georgia to counteract fears that Washington’s policy of reset with Moscow meant détente at the expense of the former Soviet republics and East Bloc countries.

The suggestion that Russia poses just “regional challenges” that can cause only local and short-term inconvenience to America and its allies is something that Obama let loose during his visit to The Netherlands and Belgium this past March. This is by far the most dangerous belief in the President’s intellectual arsenal, because it directly (mis)informs all American decisions about how far it can push Russia into a corner. I have explained precisely why this assumption is dead wrong in an essay dedicated to his March 2014 speech at Bozar included in this volume.

This leaves us with the “Russia doesn’t make anything” allegation, which is arguably a new low in malicious propaganda about Russia disseminated from the Oval Office. The notion that the world’s fifth largest economy doesn’t make anything is patently absurd and requires no detailed counter proof. Anyone at all familiar with Russian reality knows about the creation of new industrial clusters all around the country, knows about resurgent Russian agriculture that has retaken for the country its position as a leading global grain exporter using state of the art farm machinery that is being produced in ever greater numbers by local affiliates of the world’s major brands. Reindustrialization of Russia is proceeding apace. Import substitution that Obama’s sanctions are forcing on the Russian economy will likely accelerate the trend.

What is true is that much of the technology underlying the reindustrialization is coming from abroad and that Russia is not yet a significant contributor to global innovation. However, its phoenix-like rise from economic chaos since the millennium suggests the dynamism is there. And compared to its peers in Central Europe, Russian reindustrialization is not doing badly. Poland, which is often cited as the head of class in terms of industrial recovery has no self-standing world-class industrial companies of its own and mostly gets by as subcontractor and spare parts manufacturer to German industry. Arguably Russia has made greater progress in mastering full industrial cycles.

So how may we understand Obama’s assertions about Russia and what do they tell us about his Russia policy?

As noted above, one interpretation was set up by Mark Adomanis without his developing it: that Obama’s intent is to taunt and bait Putin in the hope that he will do something rash to justify the idea that he is deranged and must be removed for the sake of international security. After all, going back to the autumn of 2014 and the information war over Russia’s laws on homosexuality, high officials in the Obama administration have repeatedly likened Putin to Hitler.

In parallel, Obama’s talking points from the interview fit in well with his administration’s objective of marginalizing Russia. This is what was behind the efforts to boycott the Sochi Olympic Games, which then morphed into disparaging news coverage of corruption, vast overspending and likely terrorist dangers in the run-up to the Games. This is what underlies Russia’s eviction from the G-8. And now it has seamlessly moved on to sanctions, which, whatever harm they may do to the Russian economy and whatever degree of popular discontent and political instability may ensue, have the sure objective of casting Russia as a pariah state and diminishing its possible global influence.

All of these essential policy objectives – marginalizing Russia, demonizing Putin and the Kremlin leadership, and striving for regime change in Moscow– have a common source in Neocon political thinking. Their Russophobe beliefs jumped the Republican-Democratic divide in the second half of the 1990s. They were the common property of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, together with the recruits to the State Department during their watch. They were fostered during the political cleansing at State during the watch of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They have gathered force ever since 2003, when Russia emerged as one of the three leading nations publicly opposing the US invasion of Iraq, and the only opposing nation able to deny to the United States the legitimacy of United Nations approval it sought for its action.

These are the political forces which took in hand Barack Obama from the moment he locked up the nomination and received Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate in the summer of 2008. Continuity of the ideology of American hegemony guiding foreign policy from the Bush administration was assured immediately following the November election when Obama’s State, Defense and other cabinet secretaries were named. These men and women and the mindset they brought to their government service have led us in a straight line to where we stand today and to Obama’s casual invective directed at Mr. Putin’s Russia in his interview for The Economist. It is the product not merely of one or two outstanding and visible personalities, such as Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her husband, Neocon foreign policy thinker Robert Kagan. It owes its strength and persistence to a substantial embedded establishment.

However, American foreign policy is not merely the prerogative of the presidential administration and the Department of State. It also rests on a consensus of the Congress, where it plays out as just one more element in the trading of favors and power that constitute domestic politics.

One of the big hits in American television programming over the last two seasons was the political drama serial The House of Cards, produced and distributed by Netflix. Populated by bigger than life personalities such as the serial Dallas enjoyed in its heyday, House of Cards has shown off to Americans how raw power can be even more seductive than money, how senior politicians work in packs and count for very little as individuals.

The Machiavellian plots that drive House of Cards follow from a double cross over the nomination of a Secretary of State such as happened to John Kerry in the fall of 2008. It would be helpful if the insider knowledge and x-ray vision of the scriptwriters were applied to inform us about the Congressional horse trading over foreign policy, and over policy towards Russia in particular.

SPEECH TO THE US-RUSSIA FORUM, HOTEL ARBAT, MOSCOW, 8 SEPTEMBER 2014

09/09/2014

When businesses understand how their interests can be best defended by civil society acting through a Committee on East West Accord to roll back the sanctions, I expect they will give a sympathetic hearing to our request for funding.

In recent weeks the question of whether we have a New Cold War has ceased to generate much controversy: it is accepted as a fait accompli, a fact of life. At the same time, nearly all our journalists remind their audience that the present confrontation between Russia and the West is the worst crisis since the end of the original Cold War in 1989.

I beg to differ with that characterization: I would say it is among the worst crises since the beginning of the original Cold War. We have approached the risk level of the Cuban Missile Crisis, even if the political leadership in Washington and Brussels publicly abjure any direct military actions and Russia publicly speaks only of diplomatic recourse to ease the crisis. What remains is the very real threat of miscalculation, misinterpretation by either side of the actions and intentions of the other side and third party-client state provocations that engage the principals in a fight they say they don’t want. This takes place against a background of vituperative information war. And in the United States, the confrontation has brought out a new McCarthyism which denounces calls to reason as toadyism to the Kremlin, which enforces silence of naysayers in the media and on university campuses, which in the end defeats the pluralism which has been the foundation of democracy.

Without endeavoring to apportion blame for the ongoing information war, one alarming fact emerges from the American and European sides: the apparent loss of all sense of fear of nuclear holocaust, a totally unfounded complacency. Our senior statesmen and politicians behave as if the Star Wars mythology of the 1980s has become reality and an entirely unproven ‘iron dome’ were in place.

The false sense of security is fed by denigration of Russia as a whole, which arose in sync with the campaign of vilifying the Russian President. The country is just a gas station, to quote Senator McCain. It is nothing more than a regional bully, not a world power, to quote Barack Obama. It makes nothing that anyone would want to buy, again from the American President. Its economy is failing, its population is falling.

In this belittlement of Russia we have a cardinal difference from the days of the original Cold War, when Russia/the USSR was morally condemned but always respected or feared as posing an existential threat to the United States and Europe. Indeed, its military prowess was then systematically exaggerated for domestic political and budgeting purposes in Washington.

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction kept the peace through the original Cold War. In effect what we have today on the US-European side is a belief in survivability of nuclear attack, and a First Strike mentality has taken hold. This matches only too well the latest Russian military doctrine on the acceptability of using tactical nuclear weapons if it is outmatched by opposing conventional weapons. These are the preconditions for a doomsday scenario that the best minds of East and West labored to prevent during the original Cold War.

And unlike those days, the broad public seems to be oblivious to the lurking dangers. We have no SANE. Until recently, we have had but pale vestiges of the grass roots movements that back then mobilized against the threat of nuclear war. We are in the new 21st century, safe from the primitive behavioral and thinking patterns of our forebears. Or are we?

In this audience, it is likely we hold similar positions on who is responsible for the current confrontation over Ukraine. We likely have similar positions over who started the information war. In my own polemical writings, I have identified the thinkers and implementers of the War Party in Washington.

But outside this hall, and particularly in the US and Europe, the blame game is rancorous and in the end unproductive.

Therefore my proposal is that we put this search for Truth aside, change course and concentrate on what can unite people as we seek to restore correct priorities in international relations with peaceful resolution of disputes at the top, with due attention to the security concerns of all sides such as underpinned the move for a new security architecture in Europe which was the main project of the Medvedev presidency but which gained no traction at the time.

It is in this spirit that I come to you today with the proposal to re-create a platform for a common sense approach to relations with Russia that was founded in Washington in 1974 and closed its doors in 1992 when the Cold War had ceased to exist and a golden age of friendly and constructive international relationships with Russia seemed to have arrived.

What I would like to do in my remaining time at the microphone is to explain why we have chosen precisely the Committee on East West Accord for resurrection, what are lessons of that organizations’ successes and ultimate failure, what are the different challenges and opportunities we face today which must define the structure and modus operandi of the new Committee.

I do not deny that there was a nostalgia factor operative when both Professor Stephen Cohen and I initially discussed recreation of the Committee. It was not over loss of our youth. Indeed, we both were active members during the 1970s and he became quite visible there during the 1980s. It was over the absence today of the civil discourse about Russia prevailing back then.

The Committee is precisely a marker. It gives us orientation as we seek a new, more effective way forward.

The American Committee on East-West relations was set up in 1974 after the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment in Congress marked a turning point against the policy of détente which had been rolled out by President Richard Nixon. The challenge to détente came from the founders of what would later be known as the Neoconservatives.

It is essential to remember that at that time, in the 1970s, a substantial part of American elites was in favor of normalizing relations with Russia/USSR. The policy had the backing of the Oval Office. The President actively encouraged American business to go to Moscow and enter the Russian market.

When this policy met a major defeat in Congress, leaders of big business, big banking came forward to sponsor a Committee to lobby Capitol Hill on their behalf and to educate the broad public on the benefits of trade with the USSR in terms of jobs and national interest. They joined some leading academics and retired statesmen and diplomats, the most notable of whom was George Kennan, the author of the Containment Policy that guided American conduct towards the USSR from the start of the Cold War.

The Board of the American Committee was upper crust and its mission was to engage with fellow members of the Establishment to negotiate a better policy on Russia. In the person of George Kennan, there was an explicit indifference to The People, whose interference in the conduct of foreign policy was considered highly undesirable. Thus, the American Committee had shallow roots in American political life and operated only in rarified levels at the top.

When the Reagan administration came to power and university professors flocked to the Committee to find an outlet for their opposition to Star Wars, the governing Board overruled the proposals of Steve Cohen and rejected the idea of making common cause with the grass roots movements opposing nuclear war, opposing the American build-up of rockets in Western Europe. In any case, its business sponsors like Donald Kendall, Chairman of Pepsico, were Reagan Republicans and opposed any partisanship that criticized the President.

For those of you who would like to see the details behind the broad picture I have just painted, I suggest you read a 2013 study of the American Committee by a master’s degree candidate of Ohio University which is downloadable from the internet.(Benjamin Wallace, Ohio University, MA thesis, May 2013)

Today the American political landscape has changed dramatically from the 1970s and 1980s. The elites are 99% behind a bipartisan policy that is entirely Russophobe and which taps into a strong current of American political beliefs, Wilsonian Idealism or Liberalism.

The cheerleaders of the anti-Russian movement feeding the press daily are the American administration itself, its press officers in the White House, the State Department. The only challenge to this prevailing wisdom is coming from the fringes on the Right and on the Left, with greater determination and appeal on the Right – among the populists of the Tea Party. Almost the same can also be said of the political landscape of the EU, though there the proportion in disagreement with official policy is greater.

As a practical matter this means that it will be much more difficult to find sponsorship money to establish a platform for détente today. Business is wary of appearing disloyal and unpatriotic. However, acting through its associations, business is not muzzled. I think of the full page advertisement against sanctions on Russia in the New York Times this past spring paid for by the American Chamber of Commerce and of the recent public statements of the Association of European Businesses condemning the sanctions policy. Therefore, when businesses understand how their interests can be best defended by civil society itself in the person of a Committee on East West Accord, I expect they will give a sympathetic hearing to our request for funding.

Another lesson of our times is that our Committee will have to reach out to existing grass roots movements to form a popular coalition that brings pressure to bear on our political classes from below, without the hope for armchair discussions over a whiskey behind closed doors. The recent demonstrations against EU policy on Russia in Germany give hope that young people in particular are ready to hear a different narrative from what they get in the mass media and are sympathetic to the call for peace, not war.

Another change in the political realities of today is the existence of the EU. Back in the 1970s and 80s, there was great truth in Henry Kissinger’s remark that he did not know where to turn to find an interlocutor for Europe in foreign policy discussions. Today the locus of foreign policy power in Europe is in Brussels.

This has been understood perfectly by our friends on the other side of the political barricade. I think of the very effective campaign in the halls of the European Parliament led by Bill Browder in 2013 on behalf of a European ‘Magnitsky Act.’ The result has been the docile acquiescence of the European heads of state and Parliamentarians in the imposition of senseless and ultimately dangerous economic sanctions on Russia. We must take a page from the playbook of our opponents and give equal time to lobbying and educational work in Europe.

Finally, the Russia of today presents a starkly different political landscape from the USSR of the 1970s and 80s, with a newly emerged and vibrant civil society that constitutes our natural counterpart-interlocutor in any effort to build bridges and establish reasonable and just state-to-state relations.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2014 ISSUE: “WHY THE UKRAINE CRISIS IS THE WEST’S FAULT,” JOHN MEARSHEIMER

18/09/2014

John Mearsheimer’s essay deals a devastating blow to the War Party in Washington. And yet the authors of our misbegotten policy towards Russia are let off easy by this contrarian political scientist who made his name exposing the Israel Lobby.

I cannot say what gnashing of teeth may have been occasioned in the halls of Foggy Bottom by the appearance in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine of an article by John Mearsheimer, professor in the political sciences department at the University of Chicago. However, I bear witness to the rubbing of hands in glee within the small American community of Russia-friendly online media resources. Portals which normally feature short and punchy op-ed pieces have republished Mearsheimer in full on their ‘front pages’, notwithstanding the thousands of words the author used to set out his thesis on the blindness of the West which provoked our present confrontation with Russia.

It is customary for virtually all readers of political science tracts, whether lay or professional readers, to look first and often only at where the author’s feet are pointed. In this case, it is not merely Mearsheimer’s shoes, but his whole body which is pointed in a direction 180 degrees at variance with US foreign policy on Russia and Ukraine.

The appearance of Mearsheimer’s article in Foreign Affairs was quite remarkable and damaging to the prevailing wisdom in academe, as in the mass media, that anyone trying to understand the Kremlin’s point of view must be a ‘dupe of Putin’ if not on the payroll of the FSB altogether. No such charge can possibly be made against Mearsheimer, who has no particular interest in US-Russian relations. Moreover, in the article Mearsheimer makes it clear that he is not a believer in Russia’s future. He came to his conclusions about the present crisis for one reason only: he is an exponent of the Realist School in International Relations, an heir to the traditions of Hans Morgenthau, and the policy line from Washington which got us into the imbroglio with Russia comes from the opposite camp, the Wilsonian Idealist, or Liberal camp, which he would oppose wherever it is applied.

In what follows I propose to move up from the bottom line to consider the content of Mearsheimer’s reasoning so as to better evaluate its limitations as well as where it marks a serious break in the ranks of the American elites.

But before doing that, I will put his FA article into the context of what appears to be a sharply delineated evolution in the thinking of the magazine’s editorial board on the Ukraine-Russia crisis from February to present. I do this in the belief that FA, as by far the largest circulation professional journal in its field, is a good marker for Establishment thinking.

Let us recall that the very first response to the overthrow of the Yanukovich government and onset of the direct crisis with Russia this past February was shocking flippancy by none other than the magazine’s editor Gideon Rose, in an appearance on the political satire television show The Colbert Report; a link to the show was featured in the magazine’s 28 February online edition. Tongue in cheek, Rose told the television audience that the task ahead was to get the Russians to accept their gold medal count at the recently ended Sochi Olympics as full consolation while the USA bagged Ukraine and raised its country count.

As the months rolled on and the confrontation with Russia assumed menacing proportions, the editorial team at Foreign Affairs adopted a more thoughtful tone. Two members of the journal’s inner circle who are rather closely positioned in the spectrum of Idealism, G. John Ikenbery and Walter Russell Mead, were invited to deliver an erudite discussion of the philosophical implications of the conflict in Ukraine on the End of History narrative and possible reemergence of geopolitics as a factor to be reckoned with in International Relations theory. The essays in question offered no practical advice on how to deal with the crisis that had now landed on the front page of everyone’s daily newspaper.

It has taken till now, when we have reached what pundits are uniformly agreeing is a New Cold War, for Foreign Affairs magazine to make its precious real estate available to other schools of thought, publishing Mearsheimer’s essay. The good professor has used the opportunity well. He not only goes after the philosophical underpinnings of a policy that has led to a cul-de-sac but gives us a new reading of the factual narrative (i.e., new for mainstream media) of who did what to whom from the early ‘90s to get us where we are today with Russia. In the end, following his free thinking to where the facts led him, Mearsheimer gives his readers a narrative that is very close to the one Vladimir Putin first set out in his February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference and has been repeating with ever greater explicitness since.

The essay by John Mearsheimer is the main international relations story of the September-October issue, which otherwise is dedicated, very unusually for FA, to domestic US issues. Indeed, the leitmotiv of the issue might be summed up as ‘doctor, heal thyself’ since the issue explored is the decay of US institutions, the critical dysfunctions of American democratic institutions. Of course, the two themes are not explicitly linked by the editors, who are calling for America to cure its ills so as to better go out and conquer new worlds. Perversely, the featured author for the major content of the issue is Francis Fukuyama, the author of the seminal work End of History. Fukuyama was the brilliant popularizer of Neoconservative ideology that otherwise is the butt of Mearsheimer’s essay. And so this issue is rich in ironic flourishes.

Mearsheimer’s argument is essentially mind over matter. Led by idealistic principles and deeming national interests a relic of the last century, our leaders cannot fathom Putin, cannot fathom the enigma that is Russia, and lead us into confrontations which could be avoided if they appreciated the logic of Realpolitik instead. A couple of short quotes set out his point with great clarity.

“Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence and democracy.” Or

“In essence, the two sides have been operating with different play-books. Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.”

This stress on misperceptions and blinders sounds rather disingenuous given Mearsheimer’s mention of the carefully structured U.S. actions in Ukraine along the way to the crisis which surely had ample vetting among officials of various mindsets. Here we find the 5 billion dollars disbursed on ‘democracy promotion’ in the country by CIA-controlled organizations including the National Endowment for Democracy. Here, too, are the actions on the Maidan by America’s senior State Department official for Europe, Victoria Nuland, who publicly encouraged the mass demonstrations against the sitting President, and soon afterwards conspired with U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt on that President’s replacement, as revealed in leaked telephone conversations.

To his credit, John Mearsheimer goes beyond the particulars of the coup d’etat of 22 February 2014 to explain the present confrontation in the broader context of East-West relations as they turned sour over the preceding twenty years. He lists US policies which were pursued over the vociferous objections of the Russians that their national security being put at risk. These include the whole issue of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders in Ukraine and Georgia, American designs on the Sevastopol port, American deployment of a missile shield in Eastern Europe. What we have here are actions bristling with hard power, which usually goes hand in hand with realism. Yet, Professor Mearsheimer declines to connect the dots.

This is all the more a pity given that John Mearsheimer made his name precisely as an iconoclast who broke taboos and told us clearly what many saw but refused to say aloud. I am alluding to his work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, written jointly with Stephan Walt. I believe a still more powerful lobby is behind U.S. foreign policy towards Russia since the mid-1990s. And unlike the privately funded Israel lobby, this one feeds off of the U.S. treasury under the flag of democracy promotion.

In his essay, Mearsheimer deals not only with political philosophy but also gives us a road map to exit the present confrontation. Curiously, his recommendation is precisely what Henry Kissinger was urging at the start of the year. And it is one that even Russia-detractor Zbigniew Brzezinski had favored back then: to give Ukraine the status of a neutral buffer state enjoying good commercial and political relations with both the European Community and Russia, with the NATO card taken off the table once and for all.

Professor Mearsheimer advocates a neutral Ukraine in the belief that the alternative outcomes will be much worse for the West, knowing that no one is going to go to war to keep Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. And he reserves the hope that by accommodating Russia’s security interests the way will remain open for cooperation on the several global hotspots including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and….controlling the rise of China.

In sum, the publication of John Mearsheimer’s article by FA magazine may mark a turning point in coverage of the crisis by the intellectual leaders of the American foreign policy establishment. Better late than never.

KHODORKOVSKY FOR PRESIDENT!

22/09/2014

Mikhail Khodorkovsky isn’t a modern day Alexander Herzen. His openrussia. org isn’t The Bell. And Russian society is not asleep; on the contrary it is a beehive of activity and of free debate.

For those of us monitoring developments in and around Russia, the breaking news over the weekend was Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s interview in Le Monde in which he spoke openly about his political ambitions for the first time since leaving Russia and declared his readiness to serve as President if opportunity knocked. That one-liner was immediately picked up by the news agencies and mainstream media outlets who delivered it to the general public, for the most part without commentary on its immediate context, more commonly with allusions to Khodorkovky’s original vying for power a decade ago leading to his prosecution for tax fraud and imprisonment.

A few mainstream papers, in particular The Guardian and The Moscow Times have been more responsible and placed the comment in the context of Khodorkovsky’s re-launch of his Open Russia political foundation in Berlin on Saturday, together with the website openrussia.org. There he framed his talk as the start of a campaign to reshape Russian politics by putting together a coalition of Opposition movements to campaign in the 2016 Duma elections.

For his part, the day after the news broke, Khodorkovsky made a public clarification of his widely quoted statement, namely that under the terms of his release from prison and under Russian law with respect to the civil rights of persons sentenced for serious crimes he is unable to stand for president. He went on to say that he was ready to take power only in a crisis situation, which he fears (!) could arise soon under the present conditions of confrontation with the West.

Here we come to the crux of the matter. Khodorkovsky’s announced candidacy fits hand in glove with the scenario of regime change in Russia being promoted from Washington. The authors of the sanctions policy firmly believe that if enough pressure is applied to the Russian economy and if the Putin administration can be cast as being solely responsible for this punishment due to its reckless interference in Ukraine, then the Russian elites will split, the people will take to the streets and there will be a vacuum of power that can be seized by a well-organized minority, which is how Khodorkovsky himself characterizes his following in Russia.

As if on cue, Opposition leaders headed by the maverick former Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov yesterday led a demonstration through the streets of Moscow that was promoted in advance as a march for peace but was, yet again, a bait and switch exercise. Banners were unfurled calling for Russia without Putin, calling for a European course for Russia. Between five and twenty-five thousand mostly unsuspecting and well-meaning Muscovites were thus used as extras in a play scripted by Khodorkovsky’s new allies in the ever bickering yet opportunistic Opposition.

I conclude that Washington has taken up Khodorkovsky as the new Great White Hope for Russia. In this position he replaces a succession of pitiful losers starting with Gary Kasparov, passing through Boris Nemtsov and lastly leader of the 2011-12 disturbances, non-systemic opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The color revolution program authored in Washington is irresponsible as regards international stability given the economic, political and military might of Russia and it is ignorant of Russian conditions, where all signs are that the US-led pressure has so far resulted in the exact opposite of what was predicted. To quote Dmitry Rogozin from yesterday’s edition of Sunday Night with Vladimir Soloviev on Russian state television, Western sanctions have become a test of the national fiber and are bringing out its best qualities. Opinion polls uniformly show a greater than 80% approval rating of President Putin following the onset of the confrontation with the EU-US over the Donbass. Meanwhile the bite of sanctions has made the country’s suffering oligarchs both less offensive to the broad public and personally dependent on government largesse to avoid falling into loss. The country is riding a wave of patriotic fervor which shows up the plans of Khodorkovsky and his Washington handlers as delusional.

I have heard Khodorkovsky’s appeal to his compatriots on live streaming from his website, and I call out the key falsehood on which his outreach stands: the notion of a European Choice for Russia. This is poisoned bait.

In the fine print, Khodorkovsky explains that this means rule of law, presidents who can be voted out of office instead of serving for life, etc. But no one will read the fine print. And the public expectation of a European Choice is a EuroMaidan for Russia. This illusion is supported by his repeated assertion that Russia is part of Europe. Looking at the map, that is re-statement of the obvious. However, the assertion is meant in political terms and willfully ignores the fact that Europe has no interest whatsoever in Russia joining it, however democratic Russia might be. Russia in Europe would totally change the balance of power within the EU. This is exactly the same situation as within NATO, where for a brief moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the democratic Russian Federation, the US entertained the idea of bringing Russia into the Alliance. Finally Washington decided against Russia in NATO in 1994 because it had no desire to share decision making power in NATO with any other member of the Alliance, least of all with what it considered its defeated Cold War foe.

Another falsehood that came out in the very first words of Khodorkovsky’s address was the assertion that life in Russia is now worse than at any time in its history. This would be a howler if it were not so cynical and malicious. The genuine facts are totally at variance with this wishful thinking of the Russian Opposition. Plainly Russians have never had it so good.

In closing, and in the interests of full disclosure, I inform the reader that I have had personal and bitter experience with Mikhail Khodorkovsky which makes me view very skeptically his advocacy of democracy and rule of law. In 2002, in my last year as Chairman of the Russian Booker literary prize, I assisted in the transition of sponsorship from my past employer, a British based multinational company, to the incoming sponsor, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, which then still had a substantial organization supervising its various charitable endeavors.

In picking up the Booker, Khodorkovsky was merely taking a page out of the playbook of fellow oligarch and fighter against the Putin regime, Boris Berezovsky, at the time still a major sponsor of Russian cultural life. Berezovsky had the crème de la crème of stage directors, producers, playwrights and other creative persons eating out of his hand thanks to the modest prizes of the Golden Mask awards which he sponsored. Though I left the Booker that year ahead of the awards ceremony, my former colleagues later told me how Khodorkovsky, now in a prison cell, had dictated to the Booker jury who must be chosen the winner in 2002 in direct violation of everything that was sacred within the traditions of the prize. In a word, he spat on civil society.

In conclusion, I submit that Mikhail Khodorkovsky is not a modern day Alexander Herzen. His openrussia.org isn’t The Bell. And Russian society today is not asleep, awaiting the White Prince. On the contrary, Russia is a beehive of activity and of free debate.

AMERICAN CIVIL SOCIETY - HOSTAGE TO THE SANCTIONS POLICY

24/09/2014

Nothing has happened since 1989 to justify the complacency of our leaders that Mutually Assured Destruction is just an empty notion from a century on which we turned the page fourteen years ago.

Media coverage of the U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia as punishment for its annexation of Crimea and alleged designs on the Southeastern Ukraine focuses on the impact on business. What started out as pin pricks directed at Kremlin insiders has evolved into prohibitions affecting key economic sectors that promise to do serious damage. The initial retaliation from Russia dealt a heavy blow to European farmers, for whom Russia represents 10% of their exports. Meanwhile American companies operating in Russia have been selectively exposed to the wrath of the Kremlin. And Moscow has announced possible further responses such as overflight bans that will deal tangible pain to American and other Western companies. Years of investment in people and plant are now at jeopardy on all sides, justifying the media attention.

However, there has also been serious fall-out of the worsening state to state relations at the level of civil society outside business and this goes largely unnoticed. Let us recall that the punish Russia movement preceded the Ukrainian crisis by more than two years. The passage of America’s Magnitsky Act in December 2012 drew an asymmetrical response from the Russians. It did not come at once. It was reached as state to state relations dipped to new lows in the summer of 2013 over the granting of asylum status to Snowden. And it came in the form of the Dima Yakovlev Law of September 2013 which ended more than two decades of large scale adoptions of Russian children by Americans. The arrival of more than 60,000 Russian orphans in the USA was an activity that occurred in hundreds of communities across the country and affected the consciousness of many times the numbers of actual adoptive parents.

The recent World US-Russia Forum held in Moscow on September 8-9 had lead speakers from among American and Russian universities; journalists; politicians, with Sergei Mironov, president of the Just Russia party, being the most notable; and business leaders, including president of AmCham Russia, Alexis Rodzianko. But it also had a substantial admixture of representatives of American civil society who came to lick their wounds, commiserate and deliberate on the way forward.

Not surprisingly, the cause of US adoptions was represented at the highest level, by Jan Wondra, National Chair of a key American NGO which has long facilitated the adoption process through its support to future and existing adoptive parents, counselling them on such delicate issues as maintaining the children’s Russian identity even as they integrate into American society. But then there were also a goodly number of salt of the earth Americans who have tirelessly worked to build bridges with Russia for decades. Here was Sharon Tennison, director of a citizens’ initiative that brought more than 6,000 Russian students to internships across Middle America living with private entrepreneurs; and several alumni of the program also came to delivery thankful testimonials.

Still other key officers from American NGOs attending the Forum have been involved in people-to-people exchanges that brought many thousands of ordinary Russians to America and ordinary Americans to Russia to meet with their counterparts in the same walks of life.

All of these dedicated and idealistic people have their eyes open and know the weaknesses of Russian society; none is a dupe of Putin. What they now have in common is a very adverse climate back home for their activities. Not only has administrative support from US agencies been withdrawn but the information war has poisoned the atmosphere in which they operate.

And lastly there were a few representatives of what remains of the US peace movement. This is the only contingent likely to experience real growth in the New Cold War as it slowly dawns on folks that the original Cold War meant permanent existential fear of nuclear war. Nothing has happened since 1989 to justify the complacency of our leaders that Mutually Assured Destruction is just an empty notion from a century on which we turned the page fourteen years ago.

ALPHABET SOUP IS GOOD FOR YOU: UNITED LEFT IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

16/10/2014

The largest contingent of Russia-neutral to Russia-friendly MEPs in the European Parliament belongs to the Left, in an alphabet soup of progressive politics mini-blocs.

Voting on resolutions calling for sanctions against Russia in the European Parliament this past summer produced a decisive victory for the ‘yes’ votes. The centrist parties cast 500 of the 751 votes in favor. However, 126 European parliamentarians voted against, and about 100 abstained or were not present.

By comparison if a similar vote were held in the US Congress, it is unlikely more than 5 Representatives would stand up against the resolution and there would be no abstentions.

Who are these MEPs opposed to the Russia-bashing policies of the majority?

As we know from their sound bites picked up by mainstream media which give them the microphone because of the whiff of scandal that surrounds them, some are the European soul-mates of the American Tea Party. These are Euroskeptics, populist parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Front National and her allies in the continent-wide European Alliance for Freedom. Others are in Nigel Farage’s UKIP and its tiny partners at the European level.

However, the larger contingent of Russia-neutral to Russia-friendly MEPs in the European Parliament belongs to the Left, in an alphabet soup of progressive politics mini-blocs. The single largest, the European United Left/Nordic Green Left bloc (better known by its acronym GUE/NGL) was founded 20 years ago and currently has 52 MEPs. Its chairwoman, Gabriele Zimmer of Die Linke on Tuesday, 14 October presided over a conference dedicated to Ukraine that was unlike any other in the European capital this past year. The difference was the neutral, fact-finding purpose of the organizers as opposed to the usually vicious partisanship and accusative fingers that characterized all the other press conferences and specialized events over Ukraine in this town.

The Tea Party vote against Russia-bashing to spite the Europe-the-Superpower ambitions of Parliament President Martin Schulz and the centrists, since they want to retain foreign policy decision-making at the national level and deconstruct the Union. The Left votes the same way, because they envision the EU in terms of social solidarity and economic progress, not militarized foreign policy and creation of spheres of influence at the Union’s borders. Moreover, they defend freedom of speech and opinion within the Parliament where the leadership would enforce its political correctness about Russia and much else on the whole membership.

As Gabi Zimmer and other United Left speakers remarked, the bloc does not accept the mainstream narrative on Russian culpability in fomenting the Ukrainian civil war, which they rather lay at the door of both external suitors for Ukraine’s affection, the EU and Russia, and particularly on EU intransigence a year ago over possible 3-way talks. Moreover, with its accent on living standards of peoples and not national or supranational geopolitical games, the United Left called out then and reiterates today that the Association Agreement with the EU can only destroy Ukrainian industry, create joblessness and promote massive emigration from Ukraine to the EU countries.

The leitmotiv of the conference was the internal contradictions in the Ukraine rooted in history and geography, and exacerbated by the rule of the oligarchs ever since independence in 1991. Without due attention to these mutually exclusive claims to political rule within Ukraine, national reconciliation is impossible. Accordingly, guest speakers from Kiev were invited to testify about the internal power struggles.

The guests included former deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Vilkul and first secretary of the now banned Communist Party of Ukraine Piotr Symenenko. They commented on videos documenting the intimidation and open violence being perpetrated on candidates to the forthcoming Ukrainian elections of 26 October.

As Kostas Chrysogonos, Greek MEP, member of the Radical Left party (Syriza) explained, the imposition on Russia of sector sanctions by the EU was done by the Council in violation of the EU’s foundation documents which require advance review of such trade measures by the Parliament. Not that the Parliament would have rejected such request, but it would have been obliged to openly debate the matter, something which the leadership of EU Institutions today dares not risk. Thus, those who denounce Putin’s Russia for alleged authoritarian decision-making, would do better to look in the mirror at the democratic deficit in the capital of Europe.

As part of its program of independent fact-finding, from 30 October to 1 November a delegation from the GUE/NGL will be in Ukraine to monitor the calculation of election results.

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS: GEORGE SOROS IN BRUSSELS

25/10/2014

“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”

George Soros’s press conference in Brussels on Thursday, 23 October, had one unifying theme, his loathing of Russia. Nominally it was to publicize his latest essay, “Wake Up, Europe” released several days ago on the online edition of The New York Review of Books and already republished in various world newspapers of record in local languages. But both in his introductory remarks and in answers to questions from the floor Soros also went into a variety of side issues, making at times some genuinely newsworthy statements. In this short essay we will examine first what Soros said and second what was written for him.

The setting for the event was a two-day Global Briefing seminar of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group which otherwise was taking place behind closed doors for the benefit of participants sponsored by their companies, embassies and NGO employers. But when you put up more than $50,000 a year in sponsorship contributions, as Soros does for the ICG, you get perks like the 45 minutes of on-record prime time just after lunch with journalists invited in as Soros did on Thursday. The moderator was of appropriate stature, ICG co-chair Lord Malloch-Brown.

The anti-Russia sound bites came at the very beginning of Soros’s chat. The wake-up call he is making concerns an ‘existential threat’ to Europe’s values and way of life coming from the big neighbor to the East. Russia is a ‘sham democracy.’ It is a ‘Mafia State.’ Russia represents the use of force. Russia is expansionist abroad and repressive at home. And Europe is unprepared to deal with this alternative and till now successful model of governance.

Europe is disunited, passive and unhappy with itself and with the measures put in place to deal with the 2008 global financial melt-down from which it never recovered. Instead of solidarity and equality of Member States, the crisis has pitted the strong states against the weak and too many of Europe’s citizens have turned against the ideals of a united Europe that works against their material interests.

So far, so good. But when Soros moved on to explain how the New Ukraine has a better grasp of European democracy than the EU itself and is fighting Europe’s fight against the Russian threat, he went off the rails and landed in the surreal. This New Ukraine, in Soros’ view, is the embodiment of Maidan principles of rule of law, fighting corruption, structural reform. It is on the front line against an imperialist minded, aggressive Russia. Therefore, it is in Europe’s interest to provide this New Ukraine with military assistance and financial aid, which immediately equates to 19-20 billion dollars.

Soros insisted that he knows Ukraine well from the time in the 1990s when he set up his pro-democracy NGO there. And while his recent visits there came after an absence of ten years, he has no doubt of his grasp of the situation in Kiev nor does he question the sincerity of its new government.

Some in the audience were unconvinced. One representative of the Mafia State, a Russian political scientist who was a presenter in the morning session on Ukraine, courteously questioned Soros on the reality of a New Ukraine when so many oligarchs from the Old Ukraine continue to wield power and command militias around the country and when officials at the top including President Poroshenko himself served in previous governments. Soros was unmoved and did not deign to respond.

When asked about the just released Human Rights Watch condemnation of use of cluster bombs by the supposedly idealistic minded and cuddly New Ukraine government, Soros agreed this was very regrettable and said he himself flagged the issue in a tiny box that is part of his essay. Of course, neither he nor anyone else in the room bothered to mention one nasty detail: the alleged use of cluster bombs by Government forces was directed against residential districts and schools, aimed almost exclusively at the civilian population, just as its artillery has been directed from the beginning of the conflict.

Soros has never been bashful about leveraging his philanthropic/cultural activities to serve his speculative ventures as financier. And so he used the press conference to appeal to Europe to supervise a debt exchange program that would effectively bail out bond holders of Ukrainian sovereign debt, to the tune of the $19 billion falling due in the coming year, and not to accede to a Cyprus or Greek type ‘bail-in’ or ‘haircut’ for the investors that would amount to default and cut off Ukraine from international financing of its private industrial recovery. This sounds reasonable, but as of the start of 2014, $7 billion face value of that sovereign debt was held by one U.S. company, Franklin Templeton. Turning those short term bonds into a modern day equivalent of Brady bonds with EU and US guarantees would clearly serve the interests of Soros’s friends in the investment community; and who knows, since Soros did not volunteer full disclosure and was asked by no one for transparency, how much of that debt he and companies he controls hold.

Soros was effusive in his praise for Angela Merkel whose background in the GDR had enlightened her to the real nature of Russia. He noted how Merkel has rallied Member States to face down Russia over Crimea and over the insurgency in the Donbas. However, without missing a beat, Soros informed the audience that Merkel is leading the troops in the wrong direction. Her sanctions policy prompts tit for tat responses from Russia that are harming the still fragile European economy by pushing it into recession. Her austerity medicine to cure Europe’s indebtedness is leading to deflation, where what the EU needs right now is reflation. It is with reflation that Europe can afford to advance the $20 billion that Ukraine needs immediately to avoid default.

One journalist in the audience asked how as one of the world’s preeminent financiers George Soros could limit his discussion of Ukraine’s financial woes to the $20 billion it needs immediately to cover sovereign debt repayment and ignore the $200 billion that now is widely talked about as the cost of Ukraine’s implementation of the Association Agreement with the EU that it has signed and ratified, a number which matches, by the way, what some of Yanukovich’s staff put forward in November 2013 to explain their decision to postpone conclusion of that Agreement pending its revision.

Soros responded with a rambling allusion to how the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukrainian entrepreneurs released from the legacy of mismanagement and theft that despoiled this rich country in the 20 years since its independence would easily find this money, of course if they were not hindered by a default on sovereign debt held by his friends.

Soros’s introductory remarks picked many of the raisins from the cake of his article ‘Rise Up, Europe.’ It has many allegations against Vladimir Putin and his actions in and around Ukraine that are disputed and unproven, such as that Russia ‘established separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine,’ ‘invaded Ukraine with regular armed forces’ in August, ‘is offering but failing to sign a deal for gas supplies,’ and otherwise is engaged in machinations aimed at forcing Poroshenko to appoint a premier who abandons the Maidan program. Soros predicts that the Russians will next ‘open by force a land route from Russia to Crimea and Transnistria’ or, alternatively, they will ‘sit back and await the economic and financial collapse of Ukraine,’ anticipating ‘a grand bargain’ with the United States whereby Russia would be granted its hegemony over its Near Abroad. Victorious Russia could then become ‘still more influential within the EU and pose a potent threat to the Baltic states with their large ethnic Russian populations.’

These emotive scenarios might be dismissed as intentionally alarmist and unrealistic if they did not bear the signature of the great philanthropist and financier. Who writes this tripe for Mr. Soros? He has no shortage of ghostwriters from the various publishing and think tank projects he finances. And this past week we saw in the scandal surrounding Ben Judah’s interview in Politico with former Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski what comes of Soros giving free rein to his minions who believe they can defame Vladimir Putin and Russia with impunity.

Journalists and pundits receive grants and research appointments from institutions where George Soros is present at the creation and remains trustee or board member and significant financial contributor. Such is the case of Ben Judah, who is not merely a widely published author and journalist but a Policy Fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, London-based, headed by a journalist-administrator whom Soros has moved from one of his projects to another. Its policy interests reflect Mr. Soros’s core beliefs, first and foremost his Russophobia. Put in simpler terms, the ECRF is a new face for his now passé Open Society offices.

Press coverage of Soros’s appearance in Brussels has followed the master script of his handouts. Bloomberg.com was typically obsequious to the billionaire. However, not everyone was taken in. “Soros has gone mad.” Such was the remark of a worldly wise New York attorney who was in Paris on the 23rd and found the “Wake Up, Europe” in Le Monde. He e-mailed his shock to some friends in Manhattan. The remark was passed along in typical digital age daisy chain. As Longfellow wrote some time ago, “Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”

* * *

I first took on George Soros’ anti-Russian rants just under six years ago when he was also giving instructions to Europe on how to tame the bear to the East. And at that time as well, Ukraine was central to his thinking. See http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2009/02/12/george-soros-on-the-russian-problem-when-sour-grapes-turn-ra.html

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2014: THE MEARSHEIMER DEBATE

28/10/2014

The Establishment boys are long out of practice at debates. In their contemptuous dismissal of any opponents who present another vision of events, they have gone flabby.

As I foresaw, John Mearsheimer’s essay on ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault’ in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine stirred up the hornet’s nest of those in and around the magazine’s editorial board who were responsible for the policy disaster on Russia/Ukraine that Mearsheimer took apart analytically in his essay. The hullaballoo in the Friends of State camp was so considerable that the ‘response’ essays in the following November-December issue of FA were not the usual five or six pages which usually follow controversial pieces. Instead readers were treated to 12 pages of critique under the heading “Faulty Powers. Who Started the Ukraine Crisis?”

John Mearsheimer is a scholar’s scholar, a theorist who has not taken appointments in the federal government. He is also a proven patriot who did his service as an enlisted man during the Vietnam War, went on to graduate from West Point and served five years as an officer in the US Air Force.

Mearsheimer is not a Russianist. His area of expertise is in the realm of IR theory where he has carved out a niche in neo-Realism. FA in its wisdom set against him two professors who have followed a more widely practiced route of outstanding political scientists, having worked within U.S. diplomacy in the home office as planners and in the field as implementers. They both are heavily invested in the policies at issue: Michael McFaul, who in 2012-14 was U.S. Ambassador to Russia and for 3 years before that was a close adviser to President Obama on Russian affairs; and Stephen Sestanovich, who was Ambassador-at-Large to the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union in the period 1997-2001.

And yet, in this seemingly unequal combat, Professor Mearsheimer held his own very nicely. He parried the intended blows of his heavier class opponents and landed a Technical Knock-Out by remaining on his feet in the ring when the final bell sounded.

Let me say straightaway that this was generally a high minded and decent fight such as, sadly, has become a rarity in our day of the information war, when brawlers on behalf of the Establishment are all too ready to denounce naysayers as stooges of Putin. McFaul’s labeling the Realpolitik analysis of Mearsheimer as potentially ‘irrational and dangerous’ was suggestive but little more than a wild swing. And there was a hint of ad hominem argumentation brought in by Sestanovich via his allegation that Mearsheimer has done flip-flops in his views on the Cold War and relations with Russia, citing works from Mearsheimer going back to 1990 and 1993. Reversals there may well be, but that proves nothing, least of all in the sphere of analysis of current events, where political scientists are regularly asked to project future scenarios based on facts that are constantly changing. In this context, consistency of positions taken is no virtue and inconsistency is no vice.

Mearsheimer in his response to his critics effectively turns back the misrepresentations of his arguments. Sestanovich did it explicitly, McFaul did it implicitly: both took for a given that Mearsheimer’s case rested on the argument that NATO expansion alone was what drove the resentment and rising assertiveness that led Russia to ‘annex’ Crimea and set up the present East-West confrontation in a Ukrainian civil war.

McFaul stresses that in his five years in government he never heard NATO expansion come up as an issue from the Russian side. It became so only after the December 2011 mass demonstrations against the Putin regime following the egregious irregularities of Duma elections. According to McFaul, at that point Putin needed to invent a meddling enemy in the person of the USA to justify his repression at home, and NATO expansion was a leading point in the anti-American campaign that goes on till this day. As McFaul puts his argument succinctly: “Russian foreign policy did not grow more aggressive in response to U.S. policies; it changed as a result of Russian internal political dynamics.” Moreover, in claiming that Putin’s actions were driven by his own’ ideology,’ McFaul tries to turn the tables on Mearsheimer over who, the United States or Russian leadership, is blinded by ideology.

After repeating verbatim the Washington Consensus narrative of the events leading up to the overthrow of the Yanukovich government in February 2014 and the heating up of confrontation with Russia, Sestanovich focuses his attention on the NATO issue, asserting that this could not have been the real driver of events either in the period prior to the overthrow of Yanukovich or in the time since. He tells us that:

‘Yanukovich’s fall was a historic event, but it did not, despite Russian claims, revive Ukraine’s candidacy for NATO membership. Ukrainian politicians and officials said again and again that this issue was not on the agenda.”

Central as this question may be to his critique of Mearsheimer, in setting out as his own the official Washington history of events Sestanovich makes many parallel criticisms of the Realist approach that Mearsheimer embodies. Whereas in his original article Mearsheimer would have us believe that Putin is a master strategist and Realpolitik player, Sestanovich endeavors to prove that the Russian president is impulsive, irrational and ultimately a loser.

His additional line of attack is that neither party to the confrontation, that is, neither the United States nor Russia, has been consistent in following a Liberal policy line or a Realpolitik policy line respectively. America has preached universal values (Liberalism) but practiced Realism (old-fashioned power politics) in pursuit of national interests.

In what is, finally, a much more dense and complex analysis than McFaul’s, Sestanovich leaves us with the vision of a Russian President bent on conquest who is kept in check only by the expansion and reinvigoration of NATO which dates from the time of his own service in the State Department.

Mearsheimer uses his time in the ring to overturn what he considers misrepresentation of his argumentation in the September-October issue. He insists that NATO expansion was only one of his three ‘critical elements’ but that on this one Sestanovich and McFaul are dead wrong: contrary to their assurances, the United States both before the Georgian War in August 2008 and afterwards pushed actively for Ukraine in NATO while knowing full well Russia’s determined opposition to such an outcome. The second element that directly caused the crisis as stated in Mearsheimer’s September essay was the February 22, 2014 coup that ‘ignited the fire.’ Here Mearsheimer challenges directly and persuasively the narrative from Sestanovich alleging that Yanukovich inexplicably fled and was subsequently impeached. Finally, he disputes the notion of both his opponents that Russian foreign policy has been determined by the personality of Putin rather than by clearly defined national interest.

John Mearsheimer concludes with a prediction that Vladimir Putin will emerge from the present confrontation having achieved his primary aim: “preventing Ukraine from becoming a Western bulwark.”

Given the difference in weight categories of the contestants on Russian affairs, the fact that Mearsheimer remained on his feet at the end of the match may be explained as much by the sheer flabbiness of his opponents as by the strength of his argumentation. So many points introduced by Sestanovich and McFaul were simply unbelievable. McFaul’s repeated insistence that Russia never objected to NATO expansion during his time in government service suggests either mendacity or amnesia. The entire thrust of Russian foreign policy during the Medvedev presidency was precisely to rein in NATO and prevent its waging war on Russia as it had done on Serbia through the drafting of a new security architecture for Europe. Sestanovich’s suggestion that Yanukovich abandoned his presidential office of his own free will is not worthy of serious discussion even if Mearsheimer deigned to respond.

What I am saying is not incidental, it is fundamental to the entire boxing match. The Establishment boys are long out of practice at debates. In their contemptuous dismissal of any opponents who present another vision of events, one which in any way seems to defend the Russian narrative, they have unlearned the art of one-on-one combat. They appear in auditoriums, they appear in print only before their own kind. They do not take their thoughts to conclusion, because they know they will be understood and approved at mid-sentence.

Considering the experiential strength of his opponents, it would surely have helped his cause, and made him seem less of an outlier if Mearsheimer had reminded his readers that there are some very serious Russianists and practitioners of diplomacy in the Russian area who fully share his understanding of causality and of how events unfolded in the US-Russian confrontation over NATO and over Ukraine. Authority does not win arguments by itself, but it also does not hurt to have authority on one’s side.

I propose to conclude this critique of the response and counter-response by looking at the tantalizing issue which Sestanovich and McFaul raise, but which neither they nor Mearsheimer deal with exhaustively or profoundly. This is why since Putin’s accession to power up until the present deep crisis Russian policy towards the United States in particular and the West in general has alternated between gestures of rapprochement and ever more serious confrontation.

Taken in full context, they are not gestures but something more substantial that might be better understood as a Plan A (alliance with the US) and a Plan B (proceeding the Russian way and building partnerships against the USA). I maintain that Plan A has always been the preferred policy of the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin’s stewardship, but a full-blown Plan B has been at the ready and has been advanced and implemented when and where Plan A has come up against insuperable obstacles not of Russia’s making.

If we go back to the days immediately after 9/11, we find that Vladimir Putin was the first head of state not merely to reach out to George Bush with words of consolation but to follow that with amazing concessions to US security interests, especially in Russia’s own back yard, Central Asia, enabling America to organize its riposte to the Taliban in Afghanistan. This was understood at the time and has since been seen by many specialists as a direct bid to enter into a close security partnership with the United States. Put in other terms, it was a bid to enter NATO.

However, Russian membership in NATO in 2001, just as in 1994, the last time it was seriously put on the table, would mean a reinvention of NATO whereby genuine consensus and not an American diktat would manage the alliance. This was unacceptable to the American leadership and Putin got as reward for his efforts the abrogation of the ABM treaty, which marked the resumption of the quest for strategic nuclear superiority over Russia first announced by President Reagan but supposedly abandoned once the Cold War ended.

This, in turn, led to a switch over in Moscow to Plan B, and in 2003 Russia joined Belgium, France and Germany in refuting the arguments for war over Saddam Hussein’s arms of mass destruction, withholding approval of the pending US invasion by the UN Security Council. This blow to the international legitimacy of America’s Iraqi adventure in turn set the US course of denigration of Putin and of Russia as a whole which has brought us to the New Cold War.

In the course of the ten plus years since America’s ‘shock and awe’ roll out of its unilateral policies, there have been re-sets on both sides, but only Russia has held to a Plan A envisioning strategic partnership whereas the United States, at best, was prepared to engage in joint efforts at resolving specific problems like cutting nuclear strategic offensive systems or preventing nuclear proliferation in the Iran case.

As I wrote even a year after the fateful Russian-Georgian War, I had no doubts that a significant party within the Kremlin leadership still hoped for a Russia in NATO.

See http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2009/8/article/saving-the-world-over-a-goblet-of-bordeaux/380922.html

At the same time, the official Russian policy had become to restrain NATO through a new Europe-wide security treaty and corresponding mechanisms of state-to-state relations giving Russia genuinely secure borders.

That was all before the venomous information war that we have seen over the past two years and before the risk of a hot war between NATO and Russian forces in Ukraine that developed this past summer and has not entirely receded given the shakiness of the truce that has suspended a proxy war.

All of these issues merit far more attention than they have received from international affairs specialists in the United States, least of all on the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine.

THE AMERICAN PEACE MOVEMENT AND THE NEW COLD WAR

14/11/2014

Peace movement members are no more immune to media manipulation than the general population whatever they may think of their own perspicacity.

In this brief essay I present my observations as an attendee of plenary sessions and co-chair of a Workshop in the Massachusetts Peace Action at the MIT campus on Saturday, 8 November. My ‘sample of one’ method to characterize the American peace and anti-nuclear movements might be dismissed as anecdotal evidence were it not for the high visibility and high quality of the event in question.

The keynote speaker for a day dedicated to the principle of ‘A Foreign Policy for All’ was the great American dissident, MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky. His well-constructed speech, delivered in a calm and reflective tone, covered the waterfront of wrongs in Americans’ conceptualization of their place in the world, beginning with ‘exceptionalism’ and extending to the bizarre notion that they own the world and any ‘loss’ of some piece of it is a direct challenge to their national security.

Other featured speakers included veteran NY Times journalist and academic Stephen Kinzer, noted journalist and activist on the Israeli occupation Phyllis Bennis and Black affairs – labor activist and writer Bill Fletcher, Jr., all of whom delivered informative presentations with great passion.

The national reputations of these speakers assured the event’s relative popularity. The 300-seat auditorium was filled with a cross section of ages and occupations. To be sure, gray heads predominated, veterans of the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 60’s and ‘70’s, of the SANE and nuclear freeze movements of the ‘80’s. They ran the show, unlike the days of their own training in protest when youth called the shots in the post-1968 world.

However, though they were observers rather than leaders, students from the many universities of the Greater Boston area constituted close to 50% and one workshop was dedicated to recruitment of sympathizers on campus.

The organizers and participants clearly shared an identity as the Progressive Left, with strong anti-corporate, anti-Washington biases. For all that, it was unmistakable how very strongly their priorities have been shaped by the narrative coming from the nation’s capital and from the mass media. Put simply, this community of peaceniks is concerned about what CNN and Fox News tells it to be concerned about – whether Ebola or the ISIS threat in Syria and Iraq. In a misguided approach to risk appraisal, it allows itself to panic over Jaws while pooh-poohing the risks inherent in driving automobiles.

These problems show up in the unstructured menu of Workshops, which head off in all directions from Food and Foreign Policy to Drones, Space Weapons and Cyber Wars; from the Struggle Against Inequality and for Social and Economic Justice to Manufacturing Consent. They show up in the list of Priority Regional issues calling for “New approaches to China, Korea, Middle East and Persian Gulf, Israel/Palestine, Africa, Cuba, Venezuela, Marshall Islands, NATO and more.” The failure to mention new approaches to Russia at the very moment when the onset of a New Cold War is recognized by all political commentators is emblematic of how the leadership of the peace movement is behind the curve, oblivious to changes in the international arena which have bypassed the favorite topics of special cause groups in which so many of the presenters are heavily invested.

This obtuseness is all the more striking in the vital area of nuclear disarmament: the Workshop on this subject was dedicated wholly to issues of nonproliferation, working in line with Washington’s post-9/11 concerns about terrorists laying their hands on dirty bombs provided to them by rogue states. Armageddon from a nuclear exchange between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, a notion which spawned SANE and the other organizations represented at the MIT event decades ago and which is today back with full vigor has not yet penetrated the consciousness of the leadership.

The net result of this blindness to the new realities and subservience to old concerns of injustices around the world and to a phony agenda manufactured by their opponents in Washington, like cyber warfare and Ebola threats, is that the Workshop on Eastern Europe, Ukraine & Russia with its 3 presenters attracted just 9 visitors from among the 300 plus persons in the plenary sessions.

The single greatest draw was the Workshop on ‘A Foreign Policy for All in the Middle East & North Africa: Foreign Intervention, Jihadism & Alternatives.’ Beheadings clearly have captured the popular imagination; the murder of the civilian population in the Donbas by heavy artillery, the threat of a hot war between NATO and Russia as their respective proxies in Ukraine suck the principals into conflict on Ukrainian territory is still off the radar screens of peaceniks. For now.

Of course, there are other reasons why they are clueless that merit a word or two. First, Russia and its President Vladimir Putin are not likable after years of denigration and information warfare coming from Washington. Peace movement members are no more immune to media manipulation than the general population whatever they may think of their own perspicacity.

The values-based Progressive Left easily gets taken in by propaganda about an authoritarian regime that allegedly jails dissent, about homophobia and about conservative family values of Russia’s silent majority, not to mention about greedy, raw capitalism. They ignore the obvious fact that most of the movement’s values on peace and international cooperation, justice and indeed human rights, as well as most of their policy bullet points, have been promoted by Putin in deed and in word, most recently in his Valdai Discussion Club speech in Sochi. They ignore the obvious fact that only one world leader, Vladimir Putin, directly challenges American global hegemony, that he does so in a principled and disciplined way. China is silent. The EU is cowed. Shame on the peaceniks for failing to get it.

In keeping with the age and sentiments of the leaders of the 8 November event, the morning and afternoon plenary sessions were opened by a banjo-strumming singer-composer of protest songs in the Pete Seeger tradition who cleverly appealed to the conceit of the audience that they are subversive, subject to the watchful eye of the Feds who photograph and tape record their every move. In this spirit, he warned the audience to be vigilant and to point out any of their neighbors who were not singing along. As one of only two in attendance wearing a jacket and tie, I sang lustily.

RICHARD HAASS: THE ABSENT VOICE AT VALDAI – SOCHI

24/11/2014

Richard Haass arrives at a neutral position in his tour d’horizon of global order and forces for disorder. But he does so in a manner that will please no one.

The November-December 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine is a true collector’s item.

I have already written about the fascinating debate (‘Faulty Powers’) sparked by John Mearsheimer’s claim in the preceding issue that the West is to blame for the crisis surrounding Ukraine.

Another major essay, entitled ‘Pick Your Battles,’ by Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University explains how the US military can move beyond its losing engagements with counterinsurgency and nation-building over the past dozen years and return to what it knows best: big wars against great powers. Russia specialists may take comfort in Betts’ finding that Russia is too weak for the US to bother with and can be left safely to its NATO allies in Europe to dispatch. China hands must shiver alone: China is the big game that the Pentagon can stalk in war scenarios intended to preserve U.S. global hegemony.

Yet it is the contribution of Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, parent organization of Foreign Affairs magazine which probably trumps all others in the issue. This magisterial essay, entitled “The Unraveling. How to Respond to a Disordered World’ should be mandatory reading for the editorial board of Foreign Affairs. Their studying it closely could lead to very beneficial changes in the publication policy with respect to ‘’dissident voices’’ in the American international relations community.

Considering where he stands on Putin and Russia generally, it is more than ironic that Haass chose to address the very same theme as guided the Valdai Discussion Group’s meeting in Sochi the week before FA’s November-December magazine was released to its subscribers: “The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules.” And where Vladimir Putin’s keynote speech in Sochi was a model of consistency, the doyen of his field in the USA delivered an analysis and prescription for policy that is a jumble of contradictions.

At the start of his essay, Haass sets out the challenges to global governance and describes the causes, many of which, by his own determination relate to US actions in the Middle East and the way it has conducted its relations with Russia. He touches upon a number of more general buttons with which we in the ‘other camp’ on directions for US policy will agree fully: including the lax regulation of financial institutions that led to the 2008 crisis, which is the biggest determinant in European politics today, plus the ‘overly aggressive national security policies that trampled international norms.’ Moreover, it is not just American political scientists in the shadows who would agree with his very frank listing of causal factors to the unraveling of the world order. Vladimir Putin’s narrative tracks very closely to the points laid out by Haass.

As regards his big picture appraisal of pluses and minuses around the globe, Haass speaks of Russia as an unappealing outlier capable of causing troubles only on Europe’s periphery. The language is so close to passages in President Obama’s speeches about Russia in the late spring and summer that the question naturally arises: who scripted whom?

Russia is not a major threat in part because it is constrained by interdependency, in Haass’ view. As a consequence, he concludes that America can direct its attention elsewhere: Europe is “no longer a security problem.” Thus, Haass is entirely on the same page as Richard Betts as noted above. But this is an odd formulation at the very moment when a hot war between Russia and NATO can break out at any moment on the territory of Ukraine and when Russia’s declared military doctrine states that it will use nuclear arms if it faces superior conventional forces.

The risks of nuclear exchange by misjudgment in the context of the ongoing information war and hyper-active military maneuvers of both sides must not be played down. This is not Ebola. It is not ISIS. It is a potential Armageddon. How can Haass and Betts be oblivious to it all?

Given Haass’ spot-on statements about Russia being constrained by interdependence, I find it contradictory that in the last third of his essay, among his recommendations for a way forward he persists in recommending that we ‘shore up Ukraine economically and militarily, strengthen NATO and sanction Russia.”

Then one inch down the page he calls upon Europe to cut its dependence on Russian energy. Surely this is not out of solicitude for Europe’s economic welfare, since Russian gas, especially if the South Stream project is eventually built, is and will be the most secure and by far the cheapest source of energy available to the Old Continent. The real intent is to destroy the foundations of the Russian economy and downsize the Russian-European strategic partnership. That policy of cutting interdependence is a concise formula for ending Russian restraint and ushering in WWIII.

Sandwiched between those two economic prescriptions is the recommendation that Ukraine ‘not become a member of NATO any time soon.” This formulation will shock the Neocons, for whom Ukraine’s joining NATO will prove its sovereignty and provide a cudgel against Russia. At the same time, the intentionally vague ‘any time soon’ will not satisfy Russia for whom Ukraine must be excluded from consideration for NATO, full stop.

At the beginning of his essay, Haass casts aside the objections to Russia itself being admitted to NATO going back to the 1990s, before the water went over the dam. He says that in effect NATO is no longer a classic alliance, just a pool of talent for ‘coalitions of the willing.’ Why then does he not re-examine the implications of his own words as they bear on current policy?

We are now beyond Russia in NATO, though from the Russian standpoint it was a viable proposition as recently as in 2009, a year after the Georgian war. But we have before us the possibility to return to Dmitry Medvedev’s initiative of finally ending the Cold War in a manner that was overlooked by the Clinton presidency, by bringing Russia into a newly designed pan-European security architecture. Medvedev’s 2008 proposal was half-baked, but the West made no counter-offer.

In conclusion, I find that Richard Haass arrives at a neutral position in his tour d’horizon of global order and forces for disorder. But he does so in a manner that will please no one. He takes the understanding of causality from the dissident analysts who are almost never published in Foreign Affairs. And he provides the policy recommendations that come from the hawks who populate the administration and who otherwise fill the pages of the magazine. Is it any wonder that with advisers like this the United States has such a wrong-headed policy on Russia, and on many other hot spots globally?

THE FRAGILE TRIANGLE: THE WEST, UKRAINE AND RUSSIA

09/12/2014

Explanatory remarks to a video recording of a discussion in the European Parliament building on the Ukrainian crisis, 2 December 2014.

The following video recording posted on youtube presents excerpts (50 minutes) of a discussion in the European Parliament building on 2 December 2014 co-organized by the GUE/NGL group of parties and the Committee on East-West Accord, European Office.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMx1D4w3ZcQ&feature=y...

For those unfamiliar with acronyms of the political blocs in the European Parliament, GUE/NGL translates roughly into Progressive Left, with major constituent elements from Germany’s Die Linke and the Nordic Greens. Die Linke have recently appeared in the news monitored by students of Russian affairs thanks to the forceful statement by their deputy party leader S. Wagenknecht last week in the Bundestag denouncing Chancellor Merkel’s policies of sanctions against Russia for subservience to U.S. rather than German interests. MEP Gabriele Zimmer, who makes the keynote speech in this video, is respectively Die Linke’s lead representative in the European Parliament, where she chairs the GUE/NGL bloc of parties.

Other featured speakers on this video are MEP Miloslav Ransdorf, Czech Republic, and Gilbert Doctorow. Ransdorf is deputy chair of the Parliament’s committee on energy and is a frequent visitor to Ukraine, where he has had a particular interest in its nuclear power generating facilities. He was one of 15 MEPs in a delegation that monitored the 26 October elections in Ukraine, where he was an observer in the Dnepropetrovsk region.

The video presentation has been excerpted from full proceedings lasting one hour twenty-three minutes. For purposes of accessibility to the widest possible audience it offers the speeches of the three pre-announced panelists delivered in English.

The full proceedings include speeches and debates in Russian and French delivered by deputies from other parties who were among the 126 MEPs who voted against anti-Russian resolutions put to a vote in the Parliament in July and September 2014. These are deputies from Right, Left and Center.

AMERICAN WAR PLANS WOULD FAIL IF EUROPE STUMBLES

8 DECEMBER 2014

http://sputniknews.com/radio_burning_point/20141208/1015629285.html

Burning Point

Ekaterina Kudashkina, moderator

Is Europe reconsidering its stance on Ukrainian crisis? Has it grown uneasy over the US’ war plans looming bigger? Radio Sputnik is discussing it with Gilbert Doctorow (US) and Dr. John Laughland (UK).

This week Minsk hosts another four-party meeting on Ukraine, bringing together representatives from Kiev, south-east regions, Russia and OSCE – organization for security and cooperation in Europe.

Days before the meeting the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of an anti-Russia resolution “strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.” A number of western analysts described the document as a US declaration of war on Russia.

On the other hand, French President Francois Hollande made a sudden stop in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Hollande said his meeting with Putin “came at the right time, in good circumstances, and will undoubtedly lead to some results in the coming days” – a peacemaker statement, in a stark contrast with the US rhetoric…

Says Gilbert Doctorow, research fellow with the American University in Moscow:

I think that these two separate events on the two continents have a commonality. They illustrate the divergence in directions of Europe and the US at this moment. The fact that President Hollande went to see Vladimir Putin on his way back from Kazakhstan, the remarks that were made thereafter and which have followed up in his talks with Angela Merkel are what he would like to believe. And why he would like to believe that is the essence of our analysis.

The French and the Germans have made progress in the ceasefire and implementation of the Minsk accords – a precondition for reviewing and, possibly, turning back the sanctions. If they decide, irrespective of the reality on the ground, that the reality is a better one and that there is progress in satisfying the Minsk accords, that frees their hands to do the necessary and to stay and turn back the sanctions.

Now, in the US the vote of the House of Representatives is not binding on the President, but it is an informal declaration of a war on Russia. It frees the President’s hands to do whatever he thinks is necessary, to deal with what is termed as the Russian aggression and the Russian threat to the post-Cold War order in Europe.

That is one important straw in the wind, but it is not the only one. The past week or two have seen other developments where Washington, not the legislature but the executive arm, was moving more aggressively against Russia. And I think of the attempts to isolate and to punish Orban in Hungary. I think of the spontaneous demonstrations against the Czech President, which, no doubt, have the backing of the National Endowment for Freedom, which is Washington financed.

That is to say that Washington is moving with a heavy fist against those eastern and central European countries, that it fears are headed for the Russian orbit, or, to put it more generally, are weak on the sanctions against Russia. So, the old continent and America are divergent right now in how they are approaching Russia.

How far could the Old World go in its disagreement with the US?

Gilbert Doctorow: In front of me I have an English translation of the heading of a speech, made yesterday by the Deputy Chair of Die Linke – the left in the Bundestag – in which she denounced Angela Merkel, saying – “you do not have the courage to resist the US Government”. In the past two weeks there have been several very high-profile statements by the leading politicians and public figures in Germany against Merkel’s position on the sanctions, and on degrading the Russian economy.

I have in mind an open letter that was signed by a substantial number of people in different walks of life in Germany, that was published in the magazine Tagesspiegel. And it goes under the heading “Nicht in unserem Namen” – not in our name. And it has the former President of the German Republic, it has the leading politicians, as well as actors and playwrights, and other well-known personalities in Germany, who are highly critical of Merkel’s policy.

In France it is not surprising that Hollande would look for a way to back away, to move off the sanctions that France has been supporting till now. You have the very principled position of Marine Le Pen’s organization – the Front National. And they are saying that they are not pro-Putin, they are not anti-Ukraine, but they would like the US to remove its heavy hand from Europe and let the Europeans solve the problems on their own.

Now, this is the kind of very subtle message which is finding its way into the French mainstream. I don’t think it was accidental that one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s first acts in his final contest for the control of his party – the UMP – was exactly to say – “let the Mistral go to Russia”. So, in the public space the influence of Marine Le Pen’s party is increasing. And that is a position that is national, defending the nation against what they see as subservience to the American interests.

Where will it end? I think it is entirely possible that the US-led policy of punishing and sanctioning Russia will fall down in Europe; that the sanctions will not be reinstituted in March 2015 and may well be curtailed even before then. And if that happens, then you have a general situation in the States that is not too dissimilar from what happened when David Cameron was refused his bill authorizing force in Syria. The US Congress then turned on Obama and he understood he couldn’t pass a similar resolution in the US Congress.

So, strategically speaking, I think Europe is what counts, and these two different paths that we mentioned at the start, this divergence that came out so clearly in the last week is worth a close study.

It seems that NATO intelligence is suggesting the West has been misreading Putin’s signals.

Gilbert Doctorow: Yes, let’s go back a little bit further. November 11, the online edition of Foreign Affairs magazine published a poll of this 29-men brain trust of experts on Russia. This is a follow-up to the essay originally published in the September-October issue by John Mearsheimer, asking the question – who is to blame? – and answering that the West is to blame for the present confrontation crisis over Ukraine.

That’s stirred up a lot of discussion in the States, because until now the public space has been 99% anti-Russian, and anyone even thinking of saying something other than that was denounced as a stooge of Putin. Now you have the Foreign Affairs magazine publishing in their September issue this critique fundamentally overturning all the premises of the US foreign policy in Russia, but not only in Russia.

And it created a storm. The result of that storm was a poll taken, as I say, of the 29-member brain trust, which concluded with the following – fully one third of the brain trust agreed or agreed strongly that the West is to blame for the present confrontation with Russia. When you consider that that brain trust is packed with people like Masha Gessen or Alexander Motyl, who are viscerally anti-Russian, and there are quite a few of them in that group, then the fact that one third would speak out (and they are identified one by one, their position statements are shown on the online Foreign Affairs and you can view them by downloading it), and they came out in principle against the US foreign policy. So, after that I think other people become braver.

I think what we are seeing is that a certain kind of civil bravery has emerged, that people, who months ago didn’t believe that the US foreign policy was being properly conducted, have come out into the open. I think that’s the big change. And for that the Foreign Affairs article, and the controversy which followed, had a very salutary effect on the public space in the US.

And is it going to make a difference?

Gilbert Doctorow: It will make a difference if Europe stumbles. If Europe holds the line and remains subservient to the instructions from Joe Biden, then the attitudes of this 33% will have no bearing on the future course of the US policy.

However, if — as I believe it is entirely possible — because when you speak of crisis, you want to look at Europe, not the US. You have caught me today in Brussels in the midst of the evolving general strike. The city is more or less shut down. And that is because of the austerity programs. And over the weekend you’ve seen similar mass demonstrations in other capitals of Europe. The policies that are identified with Angela Merkel, of Europe-wide austerity and Russia bashing are both coming under a very strong criticism from those who are suffering. And that is the men in the street. That is the domestic economies.

Dr. John Laughland, Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, UK:

…I think if they are referring to progress, they are perhaps referring to the fact that Ukraine and the separatists in the eastern Ukraine – the Kiev Government and the separatists – have agreed to continue and to pursue their discussions. In other words, the Minsk process is on track. And in spite of all the aggressive rhetoric Kiev is actually talking to its rebels. And of course, Russia and also the Western powers have always said that the negotiations are the way forward. So, I suspect that that is what they are referring to.

Hollande’s visit to Moscow may have helped. It was certainly symbolically very important. It marked a radical change from the harsh words that have been used by many European politicians, including particularly by Angela Merkel, who’s been one of the most aggressive. Despite what people say, she is far more anti-Russian than many other European leaders, and certainly more so than François Hollande. So, I think that also possibly represents some kind of progress, or at least some kind of change in the atmosphere.

So, do I get it right that the perceptions in Europe of what is really going on in Ukraine are changing?

Dr. John Laughland: It depends on what you mean by perceptions. The media reports continue to be very misleading. There aren’t very many media reports at the moment about the eastern Ukraine. We don’t have a great deal of information as to what, if any, fighting is going on, or what territory is or is not controlled. It’s rather disappeared actually from the headlines. So, I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s been a change in terms of the general public’s perception.

Is there a change taking place among the leaders – that is the question to which I would possibly give a positive answer. Again, it is difficult to know exactly what they think, but if François Hollande decided to visit Moscow, as he did yesterday, that suggests that there is at least some kind of political will to obviously keep the contacts with Moscow open, and not to adopt the policy of confrontation. And in that sense we might be able, therefore, to talk about a change of perception among the Western leaders, at least.

Well, the signals coming from Washington are totally different…

Dr. John Laughland: Well, perhaps you are referring to the resolution voted by the US Congress last week, which was extremely aggressive. Ron Paul called it one of the worst pieces of legislation he’d ever seen the Congress voted on in his entire career. And goodness knows, he himself has opposed many other pieces of the legislation in the past. So, yes, that resolution was a nasty piece of work. But of course, the foreign policy of the US is not made by the US Congress, as in every country it is made by the Government. And while such resolutions definitely can contribute to a bad atmosphere in Washington, nonetheless the final decisions will rest with Obama and with the State Department.

There is a difference, yes, as you suggest in your question, between the language coming out of Washington generally and the language, some of it, coming from some European capitals. The Europeans have basically followed America up to date. Certainly, Angela Merkel has closely met the America foreign policy and has made a number of very aggressive declarations recently, including last week. But who knows? As I say, the visit of François Hollande to Moscow does make me wonder whether in fact the Europeans, perhaps, have not after all decided to at least put out a few feelers to Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and therefore, perhaps, to deescalate the increasing confrontation between Russia and the West.

PUTIN, THE PUBLIC SPEAKER

08/01/2015

Putin’s most important speech in terms of conceptualizing Russian foreign policy was his appearance at Sochi. The speech was on the level of his talk to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, pushing out the frontiers of openness and explicitness in identifying forces at work in the New World Order. Read on…

Regular readers of my periodic essays, and more especially those who have read Stepping Out of Line will have noticed that I stopped commenting on Vladimir Putin’s speeches early in 2014, whereas in the past his appearances on the world stage almost inevitably drew my close analysis.

In good part, this is due to my overarching interest in writing about what others ignore. Until very recently, the content of Putin’s speeches got scant attention in the media, both mainstream and alternative media. However, as relations between Russia and the West became very tense, as commentators of all political persuasions agreed that a new Cold War is settling in, Putin’s public speeches have been combed over for signs of what comes next. Finally, some commentators on the anti-Washington Consensus side of the aisle began analyzing his unique style of delivery as well. I think in particular of a couple of very fine essays published by Alexander Mercouris in recent weeks.

For these reasons, both finally to get out of my desk drawer my views on three major public events at which Vladimir Putin held forth since October and to enter the discussion on his inimitable style, I offer the following remarks.

The three events in question are his speech to the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on 24 October, his annual Address to the Federal Assembly on 4 December and his annual Press Conference held two weeks later, on 18 December. The content and setting of the three varied, and so did the way the President handled himself.

The most important speech in terms of conceptualizing Russian foreign policy was his appearance at Sochi. The speech was on the level of his talk to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, pushing out the frontiers of openness and explicitness in identifying forces at work in the New World Order dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union and describing how Russia intends to stand its ground and defend its interests.

The audience included a large contingent of foreign experts on Russia who are highly critical of the Kremlin, as has become traditional for the Valdai Discussion Club events. However, the real audience was not in the room. In effect, the speech was directed at Washington and at the world, if I may paraphrase the terminology of papal addresses. Catching it on the fly was not important. The written text would be parsed by think tank analysts in the following days.

Thus, it is no accident that in Sochi Putin read his speech from start to finish, barely raising his head from the pages. Those who remark how he does not use a teleprompter fail to say that when Putin reads, he reads and makes no effort to conceal that; it is a political statement in its own right.

Putin had no desire to add any last minute thoughts, to depart from what had been polished and to risk being misunderstood. Indeed, he crammed so much into the speech that if read at a normal pace he would have exceeded by far the planned time. He read perhaps 10% too fast, missing rhetorical points, stumbling from time to time in most uncharacteristic manner.

Putin also read his speech to the Federal Assembly, shuffling papers as he went along. But he spoke at a leisurely pace, taking his time to collect applause and showing no stress. His address dealt with a mixture of foreign and domestic subjects. The event was conducted like a meeting among friends.

The Press Conference stands apart precisely because after his brief introductory remarks the President responded to questions extemporaneously, without prepared notes, armed only with pad and pencil. And the context could not have been more daunting: the conference, which took place in a vast auditorium with more than 1200 foreign and domestic journalists in attendance, came the day after one of the sharpest falls in the ruble exchange rate and in the Moscow stock market since the onset of the economic crisis of 1998.

The Russian journalists in the hall were a very mixed group, ranging from the Kremlin press pool, a body of loyalists who were given the first word, to regional boosters who flock to this annual event to get in a good word for their home towns and speak about the President’s past or hoped-for future visits. It extended to determined foes of the ‘regime’ like Ksenia Sobchak, who used the microphone to denounce the Kremlin leadership at every turn. The foreign press was heavily skewed to those known for their anti-Kremlin position. Thus, journalists for the BBC and The Financial Times were able to pose hostile, at times nearly insulting questions implying the President’s culpability for the unfolding economic crisis or directly accusing Russia of military aggressiveness. Each and every question was answered with civility, clarity and, at times, humor, which was either self-deprecatory or ironic depending on the questioner.

Alexander Mercouris and other pundits have wondered aloud, who else among world leaders would dare do the same? The obvious answer is no one. To drive home the point, one need only consider the year-end press conference of Barack Obama the next day, which was allotted a fraction of the time and took place in a room with just 60 or so handpicked journalists.

The end result is that Putin came across not merely as a statesman who has mastered the issues before his nation but as a natural as opposed to synthetic politician who is manipulated by polls and by his entourage.

Let us now turn from method of delivery to content.

As I mentioned, the Valdai Discussion group speech in Sochi was one of the most important foreign policy addresses of Putin’s fifteen years at the apex of the Russian political system. It expanded directly on themes he first set out in his February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference. But whereas the Munich speech was a recitation of stored up resentments and focused on how U.S. and Western behavior after the collapse of the Soviet Union was unfair, unreasonable in its treatment of Russia, failing to take into account its national interests, the speech at Sochi examines in detail the consequences of American unilateralism and global hegemony for the world at large.

Putin raises the question whether his and other countries should not merely sit back and let America take the lead in global management, let America bear the cost of maintaining the New World Order and enjoy the fruits of the Pax Americana. His answer is a resounding ‘no,’ as he points to the broad swathe of chaos that has resulted from American-led interventions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and to the succession of unforeseen critical challenges wherever the USA has fomented or encouraged color revolutions, most recently culminating in the Ukrainian civil war.

The speech expresses disappointment that his warnings of seven years ago went unheeded by the United States and its nominal allies, in reality vassals, who have systematically undermined international law and international organizations that stood in the way of their plans for regime change and transformation of whole regions in their own image. The result is a world convulsed by artificially induced changes, a proliferation of contradictions in the international arena which can no longer be controlled by the institutions set up after the Second World War or by the Helsinki process of the 1970s. The risk is regional hot wars if not a new global conflagration in a world without rules.

In this depressing context, the current impasse between the West and Russia over Ukraine is part of a much bigger problem, and the importance of any given elements in the crisis must not be exaggerated. The message here is one that Vladimir Putin would carry into his later appearances on 4 and 18 December: that were there no annexation of Crimea, were there no dispute over Russian support for insurgents in the Donbas, Western sanctions against Russia and the new containment policy would arise nonetheless over some other issues, real or manufactured, given Russia’s open rejection of US global hegemony as opposed to global governance under universally agreed international law with full respect for the interests and security concerns of all nation-states.

Though the speech was immediately denounced in The New York Times as yet another diatribe by the Kremlin leader, Putin in fact pointedly restated his readiness to re-engage with the West at any time if his country would be treated with respect and equality. He explicitly rejected any desire to resurrect the Soviet empire, to close Russia to the world and set out on a course of autarky, to close off options in cooperation with Western Europe while undertaking the same ‘pivot to Asia’ that other world powers were concurrently implementing in recognition of Asia’s dynamism and growing importance in the world. In short, Vladimir Putin countered every charge brought to his door by the very same New York Times and other mainstream media in the West which are his detractors.

Re-reading his well-crafted Valdai speech, I believe it is the tragedy of our times that so far no leader has emerged in the West with the intelligence and the courage to take on in public space the very serious issues raised by Vladimir Putin. Official Washington in the person of State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, or indeed in the person of President Obama himself, is off handedly dismissive; official Europe is silent.

Annual Address to the Federal Assembly, 4 December 2014

The annual address to the Federal Assembly was delivered in the festive and historically important St George’s Hall of the Kremlin to an audience that went well beyond the two houses of the legislature which comprise the Assembly. The 1,000 in attendance include members of the federal Government, leaders of the Constitutional and Supreme Courts, the governors of the constituent territorial entities of the Federation, chairmen of their legislative assemblies, heads of the official religions and spokesmen for civil society serving in advisory bodies to the local governments. In a word, the bulk of Russia’s political class was represented in the hall.

For this reason, it is not surprising that the foreign policy portion of the speech was limited to just 4 out of the 14 pages of text even if it was presented at the outset, as the context for the domestic policy which is the central matter of such an audience’s concerns. As observers as far removed from one another as Martin Sieff and Dmitri Trenin have pointed out, that domestic content was substantial. President Putin set out bold plans for the reindustrialization of the country based on unleashing the entrepreneurial talents of small and medium sized businesses while stepping up state intervention in priority sectors of the economy and in support of technology. He also proposed an unqualified amnesty on repatriated assets to reverse capital outflows and curtail the off shore economy.

As for the foreign policy portion of his speech, the points presented roughly correspond to what was said in Sochi to the Valdai Discussion Club, but they were organized in different order and emphasis on the component elements differed.

To be specific, Putin opened his speech with stirring patriotic remarks and nationalist overtones. The “Crimean Spring” and the peninsula’s reunification with Russia were presented as fulfillment of a sacred mission given the civilizational importance of Crimea to the Church as the place of baptism of the 9th century founder of the Russian state, St. Vladimir.

From there, the President moved on to the origins of the confrontation with the West over the fate of Ukraine. He condemned for the n-th time the coup d’etat that overthrew in February the constitutional head of state and he ridiculed the entire posture of the European powers in the run-up to those fatal events, when they spurned Russia’s offers to negotiate over the interests at risk from the Association Agreement with the EU.

Seeing that it was playing a fool’s game, Russia then acted unilaterally to defend itself and for this it was then slapped with sanctions. Here Putin made his point that sanctions would have been its fate in any case, because the real issue was the West’s intent to contain the now resurgent Russia. This was just the latest iteration of a centuries old pattern which had always failed in the past. Russia would have to stay the course.

And from this point, Putin went on to mention how from the 1990s Russia’s detractors in the West had been supporting terrorists, dubbed freedom fighters, in the hope that Russia would fragment, self-destruct following the Yugoslav scenario.

If any recent speech by Vladimir Putin might be said to be hostile to the West, it was clearly this Address to the Federal Assembly. The focus is on the malice of Russia’s opponents and on the nation’s strength and courage to stand tall and resist the worst sent its way. International law and openness to cooperation with all figure in the speech, but as minor motifs.

He surely knows his political elites, knows what they want to hear. And this provides us with proof, as if any were needed, that if Vladimir Putin were somehow removed from his leadership position, as so many in the US establishment hope, international relations would scarcely improve.

The patriotism and nationalism to which Putin appealed in this speech are not ends in themselves. They are the forces of attraction of the nation-state, the sole unit of measurement in the Westphalian system of global governance otherwise known as Realpolitik, of which Vladimir Putin is the consummate practitioner. In this speech, Putin managed to set out nearly all the working principles of Realism: competing nation-states combining and re-combining to find equilibrium in a balance of power that protects the interests of all, protects each from outside interference in their internal affairs and appraises each by its foreign policy orientation not its domestic constitutional order. In every way, this worldview is at odds with the prevailing Idealism in the USA and the European Union, where only democracies can have genuinely peaceful relations with one another, where universal values dictate foreign policy and where meddling, interference in the internal affairs of other countries is the norm. Putin used the occasion to express his contempt for those in the EU who have lost their sense of national pride. In Russia’s case, there was no such option since failure to honor its distinctiveness and centralized structure would spell dissolution and destruction.

For those who say that the present confrontation between Russia and the West cannot be a new Cold War because there are no ideological differences, this evidence to the contrary is compelling. To those who insist that we live in unprecedented times, that lessons from the past have no relevance to our modern age, the only response is: read more history and less science fiction.

Are we living in 2015 or in 1618? One may be allowed to wonder. The United States and Western Europe are filling the role of the Holy Roman Empire very nicely in their pursuit of universal values, read Catholicism. The Russians are playing the part of the Protestant states in their defense of diversity and particularism. Either we come to an agreement in which the latter principles prevail or we face thermonuclear war.

Press Conference

In the nature of things, the Press Conference of 18 December was more an exercise in form than in setting out new content. After all, only the brief opening remarks were wholly under the control of the President. However, in the circumstances of impending economic crisis, form became content.

Foreign commentators expressed surprise that Vladimir Putin did not outline specific measures to combat the ongoing meltdown, while stressing his confidence in his government team. Putin did not ‘talk up’ the national currency the way an American President would at a similar juncture. Instead, his exuding confidence served to calm the nerves of his compatriots, or at least of his constituency in Middle Russia. From the very start, the broad Russian public was given explicit promises on what matters to them most: that their wages and pensions were sacrosanct and would be honored in full, together with all the social obligations written into the state budget before the crisis.

Beyond that, Putin acknowledged that economic hardship was arriving, though he put a limit of two years on its likely duration. The Western press picked up at once his mention that the economic troubles came from outside, as if this were a cover story to deflect responsibility from himself and his team for mismanagement of foreign and domestic challenges. However, the President’s weighting of the decline of the ruble as being linked predominantly to the plunge in the global price of crude oil is accurate and irreproachable. Moreover, he explicitly rejected the notion that there was some conspiracy between the US and Saudi Arabia to bring down the price of oil so as to harm Russia. In a country which loves conspiracy theories, this was a highly responsible position to take and runs directly counter to the innuendo in Western reports of the conference.

What commentators have also missed is Putin’s unusual frankness with his people on why the crisis presents an opportunity to achieve fundamental reorientation of the economy, namely a diversification that has eluded the leadership notwithstanding many fine words and plans in that direction over the past 15 years. The answer is very simple and may be succinctly put in American business folk wisdom as follows: if the watch tells time, don’t fix it. That is to say, given the high returns on investments in hydrocarbons and other primary resources since the new millennium, it was impossible to bring Russian business along on plans to invest in manufacturing industry. Putin, the free-market liberal, now was assuring his countrymen that business would respond to the new stimuli of cheap oil and gas and meet the opportunities for import replacement arising from foreign imposed sanctions and from an adverse exchange rate for importers.

The most impassioned part of his appearance at the Press Conference was precisely on foreign affairs, when he responded to a question about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the erection of new virtual Walls by the West, something which could be traced straight back to the early 1990s in his view. Here Putin built on his narrative dating from the Munich speech of 2007. His tone was resolute, matter of fact and confident that Russia would finally be understood.

Putin used another question as a trampoline for mention of how Russia’s openness has been spurned and elicited instead a campaign of vilification, as for example in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics. Then he raised the image of the Russian bear, which the West wants to tie up so as to remove its claws and teeth. This colorful allusion of course attracted US media attention. However, few bothered to follow Putin’s further explanation of how the underlying issue was Western jealousy over Russia’s immense natural wealth and expanses.

Such comments are not coming from nowhere. They are delayed responses to real statements about Russia circulating in the West. The notion that Russia is simply too big may be found in remarks attributed to Hilary Clinton a year or two ago. Putin’s mention of ‘vassals’ to describe America’s European allies is no doubt an allusion to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s typologies at the end of his 1997 work The Grand Chessboard. Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s explicit offer in his Address to the Federal Assembly to cooperate with world powers in combatting Islamic terror and overcoming infectious diseases was no doubt a delayed response to Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he insultingly listed Russia as the third major challenge facing the international community after the Islamic State and Ebola.

Just as Putin’s Russia has pledged to respond to US military threats of Star Wars technology by unconventional means of its own choosing, so the verbal assaults on Russia by US and European leaders are neither missed nor forgotten but are factored into Russian policy. Considering this, it is high time that Western leaders, and Barack Obama in the vanguard, watch their words and start behaving like statesmen rather than firebrands.

CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL AND MITTELEUROPA, OR WHY GERMANY IS AS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GROWING DISASTER IN UKRAINE AS THE USA

25/01/2015

Contrary to the widely held view among political commentators, Angela Merkel is not doing Obama’s bidding on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. She has her own policy which just happens to overlap with US policy in the region in some respects. This new German foreign policy is loaded with potential problems not only for Russia but for the EU and for the United States. Read on…

For at least six months, I have been trying to fathom Angela Merkel’s policy on Russia. Finally, the Eureka moment has arrived.

Let us recall for a moment that in the spring of 2014, following the coup d’etat in Kiev that brought to power the radical nationalists of the Maidan movement, and soon after the Russian response became clear and the fate of Crimea hung in the balance, the consensus of political commentators was that Angela Merkel would be the honest broker reconciling Russia and the United States. As an Ossie, as a Russian speaker, she was said to have a special relationship with Vladimir Putin and could find solutions to patch things up like no one else.

However, with the passage of time, Frau Merkel emerged as the leading force on the Continent working against Putin and Russia. She was the one who declared early on that Putin was living in another reality, hinting at his being delusional. And her most recent statements keep up the unrelenting personal attacks on the Russian president: a week ago she explained to the press that Putin would not be invited to the G-7 on her watch, because the Russian ‘does not share our values.’

In between these pokes in the eye of her Russian colleague, Merkel has insisted on tough sanctions.

By December 2014, dissent in the German ranks found coverage in the press. We read the Open Letter of Germany’s great and good who denounced Merkel’s Ostpolitik. We read the harsh critique of the sanctions by Matthias Platzeck, head of the business lobby German-Russian Forum, and former party chief of the SPD (Social Democrats), Merkel’s coalition partners.

Other observers may be equally puzzled over how and why Chancellor Merkel persists in Russia-bashing but they have not let on, instead declaring with certitude that Merkel was and remains ‘clueless.’ Indeed, for a time I was persuaded that only American blackmail could explain the behavior of the Chancellor, which seemed to so flagrantly contradict the interests of her party and her nation, Russia’s biggest trading partner in Europe, where 300,000 jobs depend on doing business with Russia. Why other than under duress would she be doing Obama’s bidding and promoting sanctions that harm German business interests in Russia which took decades to develop? Had the American espionage of her phones uncovered some extremely damaging kompromat about her sexual orientation or about family ties to the Stasi? Speculation fed speculation.

But in the end, I am satisfied that the conundrum of Merkel’s position has been clarified and that there are no dirty little secrets here, only a definition of the German national interest that is not reflected in any way in public statements by the Chancellor or by other leading politicians.

I believe that Merkel is not doing Obama’s bidding on sanctions. She has her own policy which just happens to overlap with US policy in the region in some respects. She is indeed working against the interests of part of the German business community, including some major firms. But at the same time she is serving the interests of another part of German business which may be politically more important to her.

And who might Merkel’s allies on her Russian policy among German businessmen be? I freely acknowledge that my guess is based on anecdotal evidence; but it is firsthand, rather than hearsay, and I am persuaded of its qualitative value.

One of the most concrete cases that comes to mind dates from the summer of 2013. I happened to attend a high society engagement party in downtown Brussels which was multi-cultural, indeed multi-civilizational since the prospective groom was an EU Commission legal officer of German nationality, a long- time resident of Belgium, and the bride was Chinese from an outlying province of the PRC. At the banquet, I was seated next to a friend of the groom, a German industrialist in the metalworking sector who has long owned his primary factory near Antwerp and then several years ago opened another works in Poland just across the border from Germany.

Over appetizers, he was boasting about this Polish operation, about how the unusually well trained workers are so grateful for salaries that German peers consider a pittance and about how there is no organized labor to deal with, no labor disputes in Poland. I asked whether he had any thoughts of looking for production facilities still further to the East, namely in Russia, where costs could be still more attractive. He dismissed the idea of investing in Russia with disdain. Russians were crooks, in his opinion, with whom you could not do business.

A bit further into the meal, the conversation at our table turned to the then ongoing banking crisis in Cyprus and the very novel decision to perform a haircut not on bond holders but on depositors, the so-called ‘bail-in.’ My German industrialist expressed his delight with this solution, since he fully expected those most adversely affected to be Russians, whose capital in Cyprus had to be illegal proceeds of money laundering. Others at the table chimed in with their hearty agreement.

That constellation of opinions was striking, but seemed peculiar and irrelevant at the time. However, in the perspective of current German foreign policy, it appears highly illuminating.

In the past few years, there has been a great deal of talk in Western business media about the Polish economic success story, how Poland was virtually the only EU country not to suffer recession in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. The relative high Polish per capita GDP is widely cited and has been held out to Ukraine as an example of what awaited it upon signing the Association Agreement with the EU. However, no one stops to mention the structure of the Polish economy, which is heavily dependent on foreign owned plant from which it supplies bits and pieces of industrial products. Meanwhile purely Polish enterprises are just subcontractors for similar bits and pieces exported to Germany. Complete cycle production is rare. No one bothers to ask why there is not a single international Polish brand you can name.

The situation is not dissimilar in the Czech Republic, Central Europe’s other great industrial nation, where the economy has also been colonized, chiefly by German manufacturers, though companies like Volkswagen have established full cycle production there.

These are the success stories. Bulgaria, Romania and the other losers among the new EU members have seen their Soviet period industry swept away without any replacement.

While the fact of large-scale and unceasing Polish emigration has emerged in recent investigative reporting by The Financial Times, the situation is even worse in the weaker economies of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. With its strong drawing power as a vibrant economy, Germany is a major beneficiary of the cheap labor of these new Gastarbeiters, who, unlike the Turkish immigrants of the more distant past, pose no religious or ethnic challenges whatsoever to the German majority.

By its economic policy among its Eastern neighbors, Germany is fulfilling the pre-WWI dream of Mitteleuropa - a German dominated Central and Eastern Europe. In the domain of diplomacy, commentators have for some time spoken of Germany finding its voice and taking a more active role in international affairs. However, there has very little discussion of what that means.

It is common knowledge that the European Economic Community, and after that the European Union, was built on a Franco-German tandem. The difference in economic might of the partners was apparent from the very beginning. What France brought to the partnership was international acceptability which Germany, with its dark past of Nazism, sorely lacked. Now Germany has outgrown these constraints and has stepped out from behind the French screen. The policy it is pursuing would do Bismarck proud, indeed might win plaudits from Wilhelm II.

The keystone of this policy is profound accommodation with Germany’s largest and most ambitious neighbor, Poland. Whereas under the resentful Kaczynski brothers at the start of the new millennium relations with Poland were fraught, Frau Merkel has flattered and cajoled their successors into joining the German bandwagon. Hence her backing for the appointment of Polish President Donald Tusk to the post of Council president notwithstanding his provocative positions on Russia and his exceedingly modest qualifications for the job, beginning with his poor linguistic skills in a position that is all about communication.

From the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, indeed in the couple of years prior to the November 2013 showdown with Yanukovich over the Association Agreement, Merkel let the Poles and Lithuanians run with Ukraine as fast and far as they could, even as they committed one terrible blunder after another. The net result is that she has the Poles eating out of her hand, the Lithuanians eating out of her hand, and the Baltics lining up at her side.

In this configuration, the ever-vain Polish political class is finally realizing its dream of replacing France as the number 2 power in Europe. Russia is no longer a strategic partner for Germany. Meanwhile the PIGS of southern Europe are Untermenschen if ever there were any.

The content of the EU is being changed right under our noses, but everyone’s eyes are looking elsewhere, to the familiar landscape - to the European Central Bank and Quantitative Easing, to the job creating 315 billion euros of Commission President Juncker.

I think we have all underestimated Merkel, who mumbles through undistinguished speeches when she appears on the international stage. We have overestimated her peers.

We have also overestimated the extent of US villainy in the Ukraine affair. It takes more than one superpower to create a mess of the dimensions of Ukraine today. Berlin is crucially important in the sanctions policy against Russia and in the confrontation over Ukraine generally.

As for France, they have earned the contempt of the Germans by their own consistent efforts over the past twenty years. When Germany went into austerity at the start of the millennium, Socialist France enacted its 35 hour work week and other self-destructive policies that set its economy ever farther back from the Germans. France allowed itself to be lured by the US into an imperial role and white man’s burden sharing in Africa and the Middle East. Germany kept its own counsel and focused on concentrating its power in Europe. Now we see the consequences of this divergence. France is completely marginalized even if President Hollande thinks that the Charlie Hebdo march put Paris back at the center of the universe.

The UK continues to contemplate it belly button, or to be more precise, nurses its ideological pique over the overregulated, over-spending European Union, focusing instead on its mythical special relationship with the USA to give it global clout. Should there be a British exit from the Union, then that special relationship will be in tatters as the UK will have outlived its usefulness to Washington in managing the Old World. Still more tragically, with Britain withdrawing from Continental governance and France pursuing imperial dreams in the greater world, every element of the German foreign policy objectives from Bismarck through Wilhelm II will have been achieved. This is surely a terrific way to mark the centenary of WWI.

Meanwhile, in the US foreign policy establishment, there are no doubt many who are rubbing their hands in glee over Frau Merkel’s leadership of an anti-Russian coalition in the EU that has so far succeeded in putting in place cruel sanctions that match the US intentions. What they have not asked themselves is why she is so accommodating and what the new Germany means for American control of the Continent, which becomes very problematic the more Germany consolidates its neocolonial rule. After all, American foreign policy over the last 50 years or more has been built on preventing any power from challenging its own hegemony on the Eurasian continent.

STRATFOR’S GEORGE FRIEDMAN AND REALISM IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

29/01/2015

It would be very reassuring if the President, John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice spoke like George Friedman. However, they do not and this is one of the reasons we are heading into uncharted territory with unforeseeable consequences. Read on...

George Friedman’s December 2014 interview with the Kommersant newspaper in Moscow, republished in English on Russia-Insider and other alternative media, has attracted considerable attention among pundits. The founder and CEO of Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, an information and analysis service, made a number of remarkable assertions on the origins of the present confrontation with Russia over Ukraine which the chatting classes simply could not ignore.

Among the gems, we find Friedman’s matter-of-fact statement that the United States was behind the coup d’etat of February 22, 2014 which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich and brought to power the extreme nationalists and pro-Western forces of the Maidan. He tells us that in doing so the United States was merely looking after its national interests and serving its hundred-year-old policy of preventing any nation from becoming a hegemonic power on the European continent, which Russia was showing a potential and an intention to achieve.

The origin of U.S. misgivings over Russia, the determination that Russia had to be contained or disrupted or distracted by new security threats Friedman identifies with the Syrian conflict a couple of years ago, when Russia demonstrated it was capable of exerting significant influence and acting contrary to American plans in the Middle East, an area of strategic importance.

His reputation for heading a “Shadow CIA” (Barron’s description of Stratfor) made Friedman’s stress on Realpolitik drivers for U.S. foreign policy appear to be the voice of Washington, telling us the real story of what is going on.

In Friedman’s analysis, there is no personal dimension. Obama is bound hand and foot; he is doing what any American president would have to do in the face of rising Russia. There is no “Tsar Putin,” no “mafia state.” Instead Friedman says simply: “It’s a matter of the fundamental divergence of the national interests of two great powers.”

Friedman’s statements are all the more intriguing to commentators on Russian-American relations, because they run roughly in parallel with the explanations of the conflict which that consummate practitioner of Realpolitik, Vladimir Putin, gave repeatedly in his major public appearances from October to December last year.

The problem with taking Friedman as the ultimate insider is that what he is saying runs smack into the conventional wisdom of the chief actors in Washington responsible for formulating and approving our foreign policy, as well as for explaining it to the nation: the President, the presidential administration, the Secretary of State and his assistants, the U.S. Senate. That wisdom states flatly that Realpolitik, balance of power thinking are shop-worn remnants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this view, we have moved on to values-based foreign policy, otherwise known as Idealism or Liberalism.

This dogma was so entrenched that when the Russians made their move in the spring of 2014 to change European borders ‘by force’ (if we believe the Washington narrative) and take back Crimea, it sparked a debate among the court philosophers of our foreign policy establishment. Was Realpolitik making a comeback and putting in question the End of History beliefs of the Neoconservatives, the key promoters of Idealism?

In his contribution to the debate set out by Foreign Affairs magazine in its May-June issue - “The Return of Geopolitics” – Princeton professor G. John Ikenberry reminded us that the global architecture of financial, defense and other liberal institutions that the U.S. put in place at the start of the Cold War had continued to build out after the Cold War ended. They managed geopolitics as designed, maintained the American empire even if this was not understood by Francis Fukuyama’s followers, who saw a conflict-free future now that ideology-based conflicts had been resolved once and for all.

However, the September-October issue of FA carried an article by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer (“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”) in which Liberalism/Idealism is described as ideological blinkers of our political leadership that led us to misjudge the Russians on NATO and cross their red lines, leading to the present confrontation.

In the rebuttal to Mearsheimer in the November-December issue of FA, Michael McFaul denounces Realpolitik generally, while Stephen Sestanovich claims that the US, like Russia, is not a pure play in its foreign policy, and that it follows national interest, meaning old-fashioned power politics, even if it talks a Liberal policy line.

What are we to make of this?

It raises the question of who really is in control of U.S. foreign policy. Is it the silent minority who believe in an interest-based policy, or is it the voluble majority who insist that democratic, free market values must drive policy, that peaceful relations are only possible between states that the U.S. qualifies as democratic and that other regimes must be overthrown.

And why does this matter? It is important because the Realist school, by its nature, looks for compromises in a context of ever changing alignments between states, whereas Idealism, with its emphasis on universal values, leaves no room for compromise and flux.

It would be very reassuring if the President, John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice spoke like George Friedman. However, they do not, and this is one of the reasons why serious observers of the present confrontation like Mikhail Gorbachev are expressing alarm over the possibility of the present Cold War moving into new directions, namely a hot war between the U.S. and Russia, with unforeseeable and possibly catastrophic consequences.

WHY THE MINSK-2 SETTLEMENT OF THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS WILL HOLD

16/02/2015

A deep rift opened between the United States and Europe over how to proceed in relations with Russia once the conflict in Ukraine appeared to be spinning out of control.

Over the past few days, the media commentators have had their say about the cease-fire accords reached in Minsk last week. The consensus is not merely skeptical, but almost certain that this deal will fail, just as the September arrangements failed.

Most commonly in Western media the negative prognosis rests on negative appraisals of Vladimir Putin, who is cast as the aggressor, who will take an arm when he is offered a finger, who cannot be long appeased, and whose steady objective is the recreation of a Russian or Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, for which the Ukrainian gambit is but the first step. In the week leading up to Minsk, the War Party on Capitol Hill, well ensconced in power under the nominal Democrat Barack Obama as they were under the nominal Republican George W. Bush, demanded in the form of a think tank report chaired by Brookings Institute chief Strobe Talbot that lethal weapons be shipped to the Kiev regime as the next step in ratcheting up pressure on Putin and getting him to change course on Ukraine.

Paradoxically the beating of drums achieved results diametrically opposed to what was intended. This is true first of all in the United States, where debate over the causes and prospects for resolving the Ukraine crisis flared up and opposing sides took to the air waves with greater intensity than at any time since the coup d’etat in Kiev a year ago. Two of Talbot’s subordinates at Brookings publicly repudiated the report at the risk of their own jobs. Meanwhile, leading rejectionists of the Washington Narrative, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen, Cohen appeared on numerous national television and radio programs either individually or paired with their ideological opponents.

Indeed, the otherwise moribund Realist School of International Relations led the charge in a bid to reclaim their place at the foreign policy Establishment table. They correctly identified NATO expansion as the underlying causal factor, with Russia occupying a defensive as opposed to offensive position in the fray over Ukraine. These same realists, in particular Professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy magazine, perhaps overdid the case, arguing that Russia’s almost irrational posture in Donbas as it defends its waning influence in its region is the behavior of a country in steep decline, a country with an imploding demography and economy in shambles. Though this misunderstanding of Russian reality today, this reliance on outdated facts can and should be disputed at another time and place, we in the anti-war movement open our arms to others who challenge the War Party as welcome Fellow Travelers.

In Europe the overplayed hand of America’s War Party has brought us to a juncture resembling the situation over Syria 18 months ago, when the issue of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in their civil war was used to prepare the grounds for an all-out Western assault on the country. Europe, specifically the British Parliament, revolted against the use of armed force proposed by David Cameron, and the US President had to back down from his planned military intervention.

Now it is Germany and France that have revolted against the American hawks and sued for peace in Minsk.

The revolt was facilitated by the public expression of scorn for Europe’s would-be peace-makers, Angela Merkel in the lead, branded as “stupid” by none other than Senator McCain at the Security Conference in Munich. As if to spite the Americans, Merkel and Holland have been celebrated in the European press these past few days as a “diplomatic dream team” and their nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize are pouring in.

More generally a deep rift opened between the United States and Europe over how to proceed in relations with Russia once the conflict in Ukraine appeared to be spinning out of control. In recent weeks the Donbas rebels clearly were taking the upper hand, expanding their territory and raising the daily body count of Ukraine military regulars to the hundred plus level of last July, when defeat on the ground persuaded Poroshenko and his backers in the US to call for a cease fire.

It is no accident that the shuttle diplomacy to reinstate a truce came just as it was announced that the Donbas rebels had encircled what are estimated to be 6,000-8,000 Ukrainian Army troops at Debaltseve – marking, if true, a devastating defeat of the Kiev military machine that could have domestic political consequences.

At the same time, after dire predictions for its economy going back almost half a year, the Ukraine is finally on the ropes. It has not paid pensions and salaries for more than three months. It has hard currency reserves measured in a few weeks. It is utterly dependent on massive new loans from the IMF, the EU, the World Bank and donor nations to stay solvent in 2015. And the IMF is the cornerstone; its approval or refusal to implement aid packages to Ukraine on its table is the decider for all other interested parties. Yet, its chief Christine Lagarde made plain two weeks ago, that aid will not be forthcoming if Ukraine continues to pursue the war in the Donbas, hemorrhaging as it is more than $8 million per day.

The desperate situation of the European protégé in Kiev has been papered over by the Public Relations experts and spin doctors in Brussels. Poroshenko was rushed to the European capital immediately following Minsk to be accorded all public honors of a victor who has forced the villain Putin to the peace table and is awaiting finishing touches on what is now called a $40 billion package of assistance. But all that is just eye wash.

In the background, with the prospect of Washington exercising its military option and pushing Russia to react in ways that only can spell open, as opposed to stealthy Russian military intervention in Ukraine with, as consequence, a Europe-wide war, the EU’s leaders have been shaken to their toes by the determination and by the winning hand of Moscow. They whined at Munich about near misses in European air space between Russian jets on an unannounced military exercises and civilian aircraft. And images of nuclear mushroom clouds have finally come back to haunt their dreams. As Spiegel On Line noted in an article datelined 13 February, “Nuclear Specter Returns. ‘Threat of War is Higher than in the Cold War.’”

For all of these reasons, I believe that the Minsk-2 accords will be successful, will bring long term peace and quiet to the war-torn southeast of Ukraine and will put the nail in the coffin of NATO expansion, even if that does not figure in the signed agreements.

MERKEL, THE PEACEMAKER

21/02/2015

Merkel’s name is being publicly nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for her role in the Minsk accords. Certainly her claims for such distinction are vastly greater than Barack Obama’s were in 2009.

In the time since the signing of the Minsk-2 cease-fire accords, Europe and the U.S. have gone their divergent ways in their views of the causes of and solutions to the Ukraine crisis. And the most prominent figure in the Minsk deals, if we judge by the international media, Chancellor Angela Merkel, has herself been characterized on the two sides of the Atlantic in opposite castings.

In the U.S., where the War Party still holds sway over policy made in Washington, Merkel and her position vis-à-vis Russian aggression in Ukraine are altogether described as “stupid,” to quote Senator John McCain. Equally undiplomatic utterances about Merkel have been ascribed to America’s senior diplomat responsible for relations with Europe, Victoria Nuland, in the past couple of days.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Merkel and her junior partner on behalf of the EU in the Minsk negotiations, President Francois Hollande, are being called “the dream team” of European diplomacy, and Merkel’s name is being publicly nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly her claims for such distinction are vastly greater than Barack Obama’s were in 2009.

The gnashing of teeth over Merkel by my ideological opponents and the bouquets in her address by those who should be my ideological friends, would seem to put me in an awkward position given that as recently as 25 January I was writing that Merkel’s Germany was as responsible for the outbreak and escalation of the Ukraine conflict as the United States.

I righted this seeming error in my appreciation of Frau Merkel, if there was an error, by another article published on 16 February that, in passing, catalogued Merkel’s crucial role in bringing about the Minsk-2 accords. Both essays appear above in this collection and I have not retouched either to give greater consistency to my powers of analysis

Are these views indeed in contradiction? Or is there a higher truth?

In this brief essay I argue for the latter point: namely that both sides of Merkel’s behavior over the past six to nine months are in perfect harmony, and this is no small matter because it brings us to a more substantial understanding of what prospects there are for peace today that go beyond the layman’s psychological dissection of world leaders that we see every day in the media as substitutes for the hard work of investigative and analytical reporting.

Lest I myself fall into the trap of overstressing personalities of leaders as the drivers of international politics rather than as contingency factors, I stress that Merkel is not the formulator of German foreign policy. That she has prejudices, particularly as regards Russia, there can be no doubt. But the policies come from her entourage, the party stalwarts of the CDU. Merkel, the Ossie, is to Germany as Obama is to the USA: both are lightweights who were installed in power by leveraging their electoral attractiveness as outsiders to be coopted, read manipulated.

I called attention back in January to the total misreading of Merkel’s policies on Russia in the United States and also in the EU from the beginning of the Ukraine crisis last spring. She was seen as the potential broker in relations with Russia because she was an Ossie, a Russian speaker, who had an alleged special relationship with Vladimir Putin. Instead, we saw successive waves of economic sanctions against Russia over Crimea and the Donbas passed by the EU with Merkel riding herd over her colleagues and acting in close coordination with the US. Hence, the vision of her fanning the flames of conflict.

I pointed out that this was not an arbitrary course she was taking: it reflected a conscious choice to favor relations with Germany’s eastern and southeastern neighbors within the EU who together constitute Mitteleuropa over the previous strategic partnership with Russia. And I pointed both to anti-Russian and pro-Polish, pro-Czech etc. prejudices of part of the class of German industrial leaders, particularly in the Mittelstand as opposed to its multinational corporations, who form the backbone of CDU supporters.

In this context Merkel’s pursuit of sanctions was NOT an expression of subservience to the United States. It was in pursuit of German national interests that have a life of their own. There was merely convergence with Washington’s policy.

At the same time, there was an operative force which I did not go into in my narrowly focused essay of January: Merkel and her advisers bought into the Sanctions policy, because it was the peaceful alternative to the other, military option which Washington, D.C. placed on the table from the very beginning of the Ukraine crisis. By pursuing sanctions at obvious cost to her own people, Merkel could keep the Americans from dominating policies on the Continent towards Russia, and could prevent a general military conflagration on European soil.

What happened beginning in late January that changed the equation for Merkel, for Germany and for Europe more broadly was the new aggressiveness of the War Party in Washington that began publicly bearing down on President Obama to do something now that sanctions had clearly not caused Vladimir Putin to change course, now that the rebels of the Donbas once again were taking the military upper hand and expanding the territory under their control. The plans in the U.S. to authorize shipments of lethal weapons to Kiev threatened an escalation of the conflict into full-blown U.S. – Russian proxy war on European soil, with the risk of things going out of control leading to nuclear holocaust.

In the world of politics, for Frau Merkel and her advisers the military option now being discussed in Washington was an intolerable double-cross, and this is where the shuttle diplomacy leading to the Minsk-2 accords got its start.

It is curious that even in the Opposition camp in Germany, criticism of Merkel’s anti-Russian policies has not gone beyond cries to save the 300,000 German jobs that depend on good relations with Russia or denunciations of alleged subservience to the Americans in her pursuit of Sanctions. I think in particular of the dramatic speech directed against Merkel’s Ostpolitik delivered last December by deputy leader of Die Linke in the Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht. Similar remarks were made in the last two weeks by the iconic past leader of the SPD, Oskar LaFontaine.

Surely politicians as trenchant in their analytic skills as Wagenknecht and LaFontaine do not ignore the economic drivers of politics and policies, where we find that the cheap component parts and products made by affiliates and subcontractors in Mitteleuropa fuel the German export miracle supporting millions of jobs at home, whereas good relations with Russia account for just 300,000. But would it be politically wise to call this out and alienate the Mittelstand?

BORIS NEMTSOV, R.I.P., 27 FEBRUARY 2015

28/02/2015

The slaying of Boris Nemtsov yesterday was a contract killing of great political moment carried out by professionals who had done their research of the location very thoroughly to ensure their own invisibility to surveillance cameras and a magnificent background of the Kremlin for suggestive journalism. And so the notion of a provocation remains uppermost.

Unlike a great many commentators appearing in alternative media, I generally avoid writing ‘on the fly’ about the day’s number one news item, However, today I will break with that practice and comment on the sensational murder yesterday of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in the center of Moscow.

I do this firstly to share with readers my personal impressions of a bigger than life figure whom I saw up close, once at an Economic Forum in London in the 1990’s when he still held the office of Vice Premier of the Russian Federation, and a second time in New York in 2010 when he acknowledged to his audience in a Columbia University lecture hall that all of the titles attributed to him by the moderator of his talk had to be preceded by “former.” And yet, even then, he was still a newsmaker, a man on whom the Obama administration placed its bets for overturning Vladimir Putin. The man who was gunned down yesterday was “former” in the full sense of the word, a spent force at age 55. And this fact must be borne in mind so long as the search for his murderers goes on and speculation on the motives of the murder is rife.

That he was a spent force became patently clear in the stormy period of street protests culminating in the Bolotnaya Square demonstration against alleged electoral fraud in the Duma elections of December 2011. A new “non-systemic” opposition came into being denying those who had served the central power for the sake of ramming through their Liberal reform agenda, as Nemtsov had done. A new generation under the leadership of blogger Alexei Navalny used the new force of social networking and achieved mass audiences of activists that put to shame the discredited Liberals like Nemtsov with their paltry public support.

In the spring of 2012, the attempts of old and new opposition leaders to run a steering committee and coordinate a ‘big tent’ approach to overturning the ‘Putin regime’ failed just as all previous attempts to coordinate of the strands of opposition had failed. These movements all foundered on the overweening personal ambition of the leaders compounded by traditional Russian quarrelsomeness. Nemtsov and his erstwhile partners in the systemic opposition like Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vladimir Milov could not hold together for very long; their alliances with the non-systemic opposition of men twenty years their juniors were still more transient.

The heading on the print-ready obituary article put up on the front page of The New York Times this morning made it clear where the editors, if not the journalist who wrote the article, want to point the reader’s attention: “Critic of Putin Is Fatally Shot in Central Moscow.” The Financial Times was more cautious in allocating a title to its slide show featured on page one: “Russian reformer dies murdered” and just below, in a cascade of supporting articles, we read “Russian opposition leader Nemtsov shot dead.” We may be sure that in the Western media at large, the man who was killed is identified first not as a reformer, not as an opposition leader but precisely as a “critic of Putin.”

Boris Nemtsov was indeed a critic of Putin and a vicious critic at that. But the logic of this fact entering the first lines of the news coverage of a murder without identified perpetrators or motives is that it points us in the very direction that the Kremlin fears most: to lay the death at the door of Vladimir Putin as if his interests were served by the removal of an opponent. In Russian parlance, this is a provokatsiya intended to build on the long-established denigration of Putin in the West and serve the cause of the War Party in Washington, London and several other capitals. Putin, the Thug is the epithet assigned to the leader of the Russian Federation by America’s political elite including John Boehner, Speaker of the House. But Putin, the Murderer was the allegation that came out of the deaths of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB operative, Berezovsky house-boy Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom were also spent forces at the time of their demise.

Now the death of Nemtsov comes at a time of potentially rising social tension in Russia over the ruble’s sharp exchange rate losses, the onset of rampant inflation and rising unemployment, all triggered at the start of this year by the collapse of oil prices and Western sanctions. And, paradoxically, it also comes at a time of fervent national pride, anger at the West and unparalleled approval ratings of Vladimir Putin put at 86% of the population by the latest Levada Center poll. One logic of such a political provocation as the contract murder of Boris Nemtsov is to knock out the props of the President’s personal standing and direct the population, or at least the Moscow urban population, towards expression of anger against the regime for the social pain.

The murder of Nemtsov also comes at a moment when the Minsk-2 ceasefire shows signs of sticking. This is most inconvenient to the War Party in Washington and its protégés in Kiev who favor shipment of lethal arms to Ukraine and escalation in the fighting there. The heavy artillery on both sides was being moved back from the line of demarcation as confirmed by OSCE observers. Putin, the guarantor of peace in Ukraine risks being overshadowed by images of the man behind the murder of his critic, the man who cannot be trusted to honor international accords.

The investigator’s logic of cui bono takes us in a great many directions as we consider who might have ordered the slaying of Boris Nemtsov and why. Given that Nemtsov’s latest cudgel against the Kremlin was its policy on Crimea and Ukraine, given that he was in the company of a young female companion just arrived from Kiev, there are those who see the provocation as coming from the Maidan. Given that he was expendable but could serve as an excellent saint of the opposition at a low point in its existence, others point to his erstwhile comrades in arms. But there are a host of other explanations to be pursued.

One direction can be excluded, however: it was not in the interest of Vladimir Putin or his entourage to create this tragedy with its attendant public scandal.

Boris Nemtsov was a giant of a man with an unmistakable presence. That as a very young man he was one of the first true reforming governors in Russia in the 90’s earned him his rise to power in Moscow. Even his most ferocious detractors never pinned charges of corruption on Nemtsov from his service in the Yeltsin administration, but he did serve a corrupt regime and paid lip service to the oligarchs of the time.

When I heard him speak at Columbia in 2010, he was a man with a different mission: to overthrow what he denounced as “Putinism” which he defined as a regime built on corruption. That and allegations of human rights abuses by Putin and his entourage including the death in detention of Sergey Magnitsky and the incarceration of former Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky on what were said to be trumped up charges to silence this exponent of Western values and political opponent of the sitting President.

However, Nemtsov was at the time pursuing these possibly sincere goals in a totally unscrupulous manner following the maxim that the end justifies the means. By any ordinary description of civic behavior, he was actively courting the enemy in what may easily be described before the dock as treason. In this he was not conducting himself very differently from other leading Russian opposition figures, but he was doing it more successfully and so was more reprehensible.

I refer the reader to my lengthy description of Nemtsov’s Harriman Institute lecture in November 2010 in an essay published at the time:

http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2010/11/22/to-meddle-or-not-to-meddle-boris-nemtsov-s-visit-to-the-u-s.html

Here I will highlight only one issue: how Boris Nemtsov cultivated relations with Michael McFaul, then still advisor on Russia to Barack Obama and with Senator Benjamin Cardin, co-author of the Sergey Magnitsky Act, calling for the application of still greater sanctions against his homeland in order to punish all those involved in human rights violations, all those involved in electoral fraud with a view to regime change in Russia. This definition of sanctions was so broad and so subjective that it could easily take in vast swathes of Russian officialdom up to the President himself. And I remind readers, that this potentially devastating sanctions policy advocated by Nemtsov came 4 years before any geopolitical conflict between Russia and the EU, between Russia and the US over Ukraine.

A broadcast earlier today on Russian state television dedicated to the Nemtsov murder and moderated by the widely respected presenter Vladimir Soloviev featured a number of his former comrades-in-arms and others who underlined the positive contributions of Nemtsov from his career in and out of government. They were perplexed at his slaying and did not agree on anything other than that it was clearly a contract killing of great political moment carried out by professionals who had done their research of the location very thoroughly to ensure their own invisibility to surveillance cameras and a magnificent background of the Kremlin for suggestive journalism. And so the notion of a provocation remains uppermost.

A YOUTUBE.COM DOCUMENTARY WORTH VIEWING: ROUND TABLE IN BRUSSELS 2 MARCH 2015

12/03/2015

On 2 March, a Round Table discussion of unusual importance dealing with European security and the ongoing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine was held in the Press Club Brussels Europe, where the proceedings were fully recorded.

On 2 March, a Round Table discussion of unusual importance dealing with European security and the ongoing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine was held in the Press Club Brussels Europe, where the proceedings were fully recorded. These videos are now available for general viewing via the following links on the youtube website:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6loGinpUtU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q194qgVC0CU

The event was remarkable for the rare quality of the three presenters, guests from the USA bringing a ‘dissident’ perspective on the unfolding clash with Russia: its causes and how it might lead to thermonuclear war if world leaders do not come to their senses. And it was remarkable for the quality of the 25 VIP panelists from among European parliamentarians, diplomats and think tank officers whose comments and questions set out in the second of the two-part video series demonstrated the breadth of the concerns over possible scenarios for the clash of wills over Ukraine.

The key speakers were John Mearsheimer, Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is America’s leading exponent of the Realpolitik school in International Relations studies. He established his reputation for dealing with taboo subjects in 2007 when he co-authored a scholarly work on the Israeli Lobby and U.S. policies towards the Middle East. In September 2014 his article on “Why the West is to Blame” for the current Ukraine crisis was published in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine, touching off a fierce debate in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Professor emeritus of Princeton and New York Universities Stephen Cohen is one of America’s leading historians of modern Russia. He is the author of the classic biography of Nikolai Bukharin and has published widely read works on the returnees from Stalin’s Gulag, as well as critical historiographical books on the blind spots of American studies of Russia. In the past year, his activities as public intellectual writing and speaking out about the Ukraine crisis, attempting to understand what drives the Kremlin, have made him a key target for supporters of the Washington narrative who have portrayed him as an ‘apologist for Putin’ in attacks of a McCarthy-ite nature.

For more than 20 years, Katrina Vanden Heuvel has been editor-publisher of the New York-based magazine of commentary The Nation, which is this year celebrating its 150th anniversary. In the 1950s, The Nation was already an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventures abroad in the then gathering storm over Viet Nam. The magazine also fought against McCarthyism in U.S. society. Under Vanden Heuvel’s stewardship, it is today fighting the same fight. Vanden Heuvel is a close watcher of the Progressive Left political movement in the USA and her speech focuses on how it has lost its way, becoming intermeshed with Liberal Interventionism.

The VIP panelists in the Round Table discussion who appear in the video Part Two include 5 Members of the European Parliament representing groups of parties from the Left, Center and Right. The Brussels diplomatic corps sent two ambassadors and several high officers from the missions of the Philippines, Russia, Israel and others, who also took the floor. A senior member from the Strategy Group within the EU External Action Service took the microphone, as did the director of a Russia-related think tank based in Brussels. And from among the several senior professors in attendance, Richard Sakwa of the University of Kent also spoke out.

The 2 March Round Table was organized by the American Committee for East West Accord Ltd, a non-profit educational corporation founded in late February in the State of New York with European Coordinator in Brussels.

A PUSH-BACK TO THE CEPS TASK FORCE REPORT ON “MORE UNION IN EUROPEAN DEFENCE”

15/03/2015

Solutions to the perceived Russian threat to European security must not be left to military experts alone, as this report demonstrates. Europe must tap into the relevant multi-disciplinary expertise coming from area studies if it is to do better.

Earlier this year the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), one of the most authoritative think tanks in Brussels, issued a 25 page brochure entitled “More Union in European Defence,” making the case for concrete steps to be taken by the European Member States in the direction of forming a European Army.

The timeliness of this tightly argued report cannot be overstated. Within weeks of its appearance, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker issued a call for the creation of just such an Army.

In what follows I will critique this report, which might appear to be an unreasonably ambitious challenge for someone who is not a security professional were it not for two factors. First, the report itself is a model of transparency and integrity. It incorporates counter-arguments to its recommendations which, to a neutral reader, outweigh by far the recommended course of action. Second, there is an inexplicable flaw in the composition of the panel of experts responsible for the report.

To be sure, chair of this CEPS Task Force is Javier Solana, one of Europe’s best names in the field. Solana was NATO Secretary General from 1995-1999, followed directly by 10 years of service as the EU High Representative for Common Foreign Policy and Security Policy. Two of his close assistants from the past, Nick Witney and Helmar Linnenkamp, join him on the Task Force. Then there is also a second former NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

With all due respect, the aforementioned were all deeply involved in creating the circumstances that today find Europe in an extremely dangerous confrontation with Russia over Ukraine specifically and, more broadly, over the security architecture governing the Continent. Javier Solana helped formulate and implement NATO expansion to the former Warsaw Bloc countries and former Soviet Republics of the Baltics; he helped formulate and implement the EU’s Eastern Partnership policy. Both programs ultimately crossed Russia’s red lines.

The Task Force also includes a former President of one Member State, Latvia, a Baltic country that is at the forefront of those that have provoked and fueled the present crisis. The remainder of the panel includes several politicians from centrist parties; and a good number of experts from various European think tanks and universities in various spheres of international affairs including security and defense policy, financial regulation, EU international law. There even appears to be one expert in Middle Eastern studies with a knowledge of Arabic.

What is missing is precisely any expertise on Russia out of the 19 members of the Task Force. This is not merely an anomaly, it is a fatal flaw given that the entire logic for more integrated European armed forces and a better common defense is precisely the Russian challenge that has arisen ever since the onset of the Ukraine crisis and Russian annexation of (or ‘reunification with’) Crimea one year ago.

I will return to this point later. For now let us move on to the question of internal contradictions in the Report between the exposition of the defense and security problem Europe currently faces, the proposed way forward and the potent obstacles to any moves down the road recommended.

The Report sets out a remarkably frank analysis of the status quo, meaning the failings of common defense today, the wastefulness of the 190 billion euro aggregate spending by European Member States and the lack of coordination in R&D, the lack of timely information sharing about budgeting for national armed forces. It is also very explicit about the forces, economic and political, working against any change. These begin with the ongoing economic travails of Europe which began in 2008 and have led to belt-tightening budgets which resist calls to higher defense spending, namely to reach the hoped-for 2% of GDP. Add to this the problems facing those who would enhance Brussels’ competences in the face of the wave of Euroskepticism that has swept across European populations thanks to pain from the austerity and the Euro crisis, which violate the EU’s founding principle of solidarity. But current financial strains aside, the Report recognizes the sovereignty issues of the Member States that work against their pooling force capabilities. And the sovereignty is not just a matter of stubbornness or jealousy by each state of its assets; it is differing perceptions of security threats and resources required. It is not by chance that France has traditionally looked South at threats and Germany has looked East.

The Report nonetheless bravely formulates what it considers to be realizable objectives to make things better, if not to move directly to the stated objective of a European Defense Union.

That being said, it is up to the reader to decide whether objective obstacles to a common defense outweigh the subjective wishes of the authors of the report, however reasonable and modest they may seem taken in the abstract.

At this point I must invoke the anecdote of the Grand Vizier giving his Sultan the roll call list of reasons why there could be no 21 gun salute that day, finally coming to the single reason trumping all others: that there was no gunpowder available.

The ‘no gunpowder’ in the present case is the immediate reaction of the UK government to Commission President Juncker’s call for an EU Army: Britain absolutely refuses to sign up; Britain has its own defense interests, in Gibraltar, in the Falklands and elsewhere which it will not make subject to the very different interests of European Commissioners. And without British participation, no European Defense Union, no European Army is thinkable.

We must remember that the populists in UKIP are holding David Cameron’s feet to the fire on this. No sooner did Jean-Claude Juncker make his address on the European Army than Nigel Farage came out and said “I told you so,” meaning that this kind aggrandizement of power by Brussels at the expense of the Member States was precisely why the UK should leave the Union.

Meanwhile, there is another wholly separate line of reasoning that one can apply against the argumentation for a European Defense Union and European Army. This is to peel away the well-defined and agreed upon military threat or potential for threat posed by the Russian armed forces today and look back a bit at the political dimension which brought us to the present state of affairs. For there can be no doubt that had the European Union pursued a more politically astute foreign policy and taken proper cognizance of Russian national interests upon which it impinged by snatching up Ukraine between November 2013 and February 2014 as it did, we would not be in a New Cold War today. There was no talk whatsoever of an aggressive Russian foreign policy, of threats of hybrid warfare, or of the Baltics being overrun prior to 22 February 2014. None.

Similarly, if I may clean out the stables, the other security threat identified in the CEPS Report as justifying a European Defense Union and European Army, the one in North Africa, is the direct result of the EU’s wrongheaded foreign policy and military choices during the Arab Spring, and particularly the EU’s military intervention in Libya leading to the murder of Colonel Gaddafiand the subsequent state of chaos spreading out to the East and West along the Mediterranean and south through the Sahel into Mali.

There are those who interpret the notion of creating a European Army as a sign of the growing rift between the Old Continent and the United States. In effect, from the very beginning of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine there have been voices in the United States Congress calling for armed assistance to the Ukrainian side. This was not greeted with any enthusiasm in Europe, which went along with the alternative response to “Russian aggression” by imposing ever more punishing sanctions on Russian leaders and on key economic sectors in Russia. This hidden divergence in policy came into the open in early February 2015, when in view of the pending disastrous defeat of the Ukrainian army at Debaltseve, Washington hawks publicly placed great pressure on President Obama to kick aside restraint and send lethal weapons to Kiev. This real threat and the escalation of violence it would provoke in Eastern Ukraine led to a remarkable demarche by Chancellor Merkel that was denounced by the American hawks and put in the public arena the widening chasm in diplomatic and military policies between Europe and the United States.

In this context, talk of a European Army which would support NATO but have a separate identity not subject to control by Washington may have seemed to be reasonable and timely to its proponents. Regrettably or not, as I say, a European Defense Union or European Army is simply not feasible.

That leaves Europe with the unpalatable choice of submitting to a US diktat on arming Ukraine and facing a hot war on its borders that might suck the EU into an unpredictable, likely unwinnable open war with Russia.

What is to be done, then, about this cul de sac into which European military strategy is headed?

I would suggest that when you cannot move forward, think of backing up. To be specific, threats which have emerged due to poorly conceived and under-informed foreign policy can be put back in their box only by revising that foreign policy in such manner as to remove the sources of conflict. In this case, the solution is recognition of Ukraine as a neutral power that belongs neither to the EU sphere of influence nor is a candidate for NATO membership. It also means revisiting the nationalities policies of Estonia and Latvia, which were known to violate European principles of human rights with respect to their Russian speaking populations when they had been largely stripped of citizenship by the post-Soviet governments. The solution of convenience and back room deals among European officials that led to their blind eye to this festering abuse in 2004 when the new Member States joined the Union must be reversed. That alone is the sustainable solution to alleged fifth columns of Moscow in the Baltics alluded to obliquely in the CEPS report.

These solutions to the perceived Russian threat are possible only when Europe taps into the relevant expertise coming from area studies and does not rely on fatuous notions such as Angela Merkel’s supposedly deft hand with Russia because she commands the language. Europe can and must do better.

CRIMEA. A WAY HOME: IMPORTANT PUBLIC DIPLOMACY MESSAGES FROM RUSSIA ON THE UKRAINE CRISIS

17/03/2015

Now that UK and US trainers are being dispatched to Ukraine, now that joint military exercises with NATO are being prepared, there are in place all the preconditions for yet another ‘false flag’ provocation such as have marked turning points in the Russia-West relationship over the past year.

To mark the first anniversary of the referendum in Crimea that paved the way to reunification with Russia (or annexation by Russia, depending on your point of view) on 15 March, Russia’s state Channel One released a remarkable documentary film entitled Crimea. A Way Home. A version of this film with English subtitles may be seen on the internet via the link

https://vimeo.com/123194285

Although Russian presenters on the international channel RT feared that the film would be dismissed in the West as a propaganda piece, in fact there was keen interest among mainstream Western media in the week leading up to the film’s release thanks to a promotional trailer with a snippet, lasting several minutes, from the interview which host of the film Andrei Kondrashov took with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the complete film, Putin’s interview segments have been deftly interwoven with reconstructions of scenes from the Crimean Spring and with interviews of people from all walks of life in Crimea who comment on their experiences before, during and after reunification with Russia. The trailer focused on the decision Vladimir Putin took to intervene in Crimea. His words set off a feeding frenzy in Kiev and among pro-Ukrainian media around the world, who immediately said: “we told you so! The Crimean Spring was engineered from outside by the Russian government.”

In fact, as we see from the full film, the argument presented from Moscow is quite different: Putin explains the dramatic circumstances of the night of 22/23 February, in the hours immediately following the coup d’etat in Kiev, when President Yanukovich, fearing for his life, abandoned the capital and went by automobile cortege to Kharkiv, then to Donetsk where his security detachment made contact with the Kremlin and called in assistance to save his life. The professionally led hunt by Maidan forces for Yanukovich, the weapons they deployed to assure his physical elimination, were followed in real time by Putin and his close advisers using radio geo-positioning equipment, and left no doubt in their minds that the putsch in Kiev had been orchestrated by a very capable state, namely by the USA. It was at this point that Vladimir Putin says he decided to intervene and save what could be saved in the situation, the population of the Crimean peninsula who were clearly in the path of destruction from the radical Ukrainian nationalists and their overseas backers, given that detachments of Pravy Sektor were already on the ground in the southeast.

Western reporting of the film has focused almost exclusively on the segments of interviews with Vladimir Putin, ignoring the historical reconstructions and testimony of lesser people. One nugget was picked up in yesterday morning’s issue of The Guardian and has been repeated today by other media with greater attention to the implication. This was Putin’s mention of his determination to put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on active alert depending on how the game in Crimea played out. This is a very clear public diplomacy message which we ignore at our peril: Russia is ready to go to nuclear war over Ukraine.

Another message of public diplomacy was Putin’s explanation of where the ‘little green men’ (as Russian military in Crimea were dubbed at the time by Western media) came from, what skills were demanded of them and what orders they were given to carry out. The point is to show how the bloodless takeover of all Ukrainian army and navy installations worked, involving as it did the peaceful surrender of more than 20,000 Ukrainian troops on the peninsula and the decision of 18,000 of them to go over and join the Russian side. This was the result of a very well developed plan that was executed to near perfection. The Russians cut off the Ukrainian garrisons from all communication with Kiev, thereby sparing them the painful test of loyalty to their higher authority as orders rained down from Maidan. The second operative tactic was psychological warfare, to prepare the troops to disarm rather than fire on their compatriots. Here we see exactly how formidable the new Russia can be when put to the test, when Russia’s red lines are crossed, as happened in Ukraine from the day of the coup d’etat in Kiev.

I tried to direct attention to one more key message of Putin’s public diplomacy in this film in the brief appearance I made yesterday evening on Russia Today’s broadcast marking the Crimean referendum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd-dK-fY9GU&feature=youtu.be

Here I brought up the segment on Feodosia, which is the sole military installation on the peninsula where Putin says they faced the threat of a shoot-out with the garrison. The reason for this exceptional problem was the presence on the Ukrainian side of troops speaking English and carrying NATO IDs. To my knowledge, this is the first mention of a possible direct armed clash with NATO forces in Crimea during the transition of power. And it is the most relevant to where we are today.

Now that UK and US trainers are being dispatched to Ukraine, now that joint military exercises with NATO are being prepared, there are in place all the preconditions for yet another ‘false flag’ provocation such as have marked turning points in the Russia-West relationship over the past year. First there was the sniper fire on Maidan that ‘justified’ the coup d’etat. Next came the downing of the Malaysian airline, which was instantly placed at Russia’s door and justified severe sanctions. Should snipers successfully kill NATO soldiers on Ukrainian soil, we may easily expect the next lurch towards war with Russia which may be unstoppable.

SPEECH TO THE WORLD RUSSIA FORUM

02/04/2015

I rather doubt that an ideology has been developed in Germany to drive its actions in the East. But these actions incrementally have put it on a collision course with Russian geopolitical interests that rival NATO expansion as a causal factor in the Ukraine crisis.

“The Ukraine Crisis: the European Perspective”

Speech delivered in the Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 26 March 2015

I propose to offer a European perspective on the Ukraine Crisis and what obstacles or facilitators are found on the path of its resolution that are outside the control of hawks on Capitol Hill.

While I am based in Brussels, which is officially the Washington, D.C. of Europe, I will focus attention on Berlin, which has become the unofficial capital of Europe ever since Angela Merkel came to power in 2005.

I had my first meetings in Berlin with several actors in German politics from Left and Centrist parties several weeks ago, and will be doing a lot more exploratory work there in the weeks and months ahead in recognition of Germany’s preponderant weight in Europe-wide policy making.

The notion of Germany’s new assertiveness has been disseminated in US media but based on just one factor – Germany’s pocketbook. We hear a lot in the financial news about the role of German Finance Minister Schauble in negotiations over Greek sovereign debt. Schauble is upholding the virtues of the austerity program that Germany forced upon Europe more than 5 years ago. We know that Germany is the EU’s biggest economy and its banker with deepest pockets.

However, Germany has more than just the final word on bailouts. Germany has taken control of the levers of power in the European Union institutions.

The new President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, formerly Prime Minister of tiny Luxembourg for many years, was installed in office by the efforts of Chancellor Merkel in what was a first-time implementation of the seemingly democratic principle that the office should go to a member of the largest party in the European Parliament following the spring 2014 elections. That party, the right of center European People’s Party, to which Juncker belongs, has as its largest component, Merkel’s Christian Democrats. The fact that Juncker is damaged goods, tainted by scandals over Luxembourg’s tax treatment of business make him still more dependent on doing the will of his patron in Berlin.

The EU’s second executive body, the European Council, where the 28 heads of state and government hold summits regularly to set the policy guidelines for both Commission and Parliament, also has a new President who owes his office to strong support from Angela Merkel. Before taking this job, Donald Tusk was a nondescript prime minister of Poland with almost no visibility on the broader European stage. It was said when he was named, that he lacked the most important qualities for the job, communications skills. His command of English was poor, the journalists told us. They failed to mention that he was fluent in German, a rather useful language in Brussels these days.

In the European Parliament, the position of President is held by the German Martin Schulz, who, though from the center left SPD, lines up perfectly with Merkel’s party on Russia, as a member of the ruling coalition should. And, what is especially relevant to today’s discussion topic of Ukraine, the chairman of the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee is yet another German from Merkel’s party, Elmar Brok.

That’s how parliamentary democracies function, you might say. However, EU institutions are hardly democratic in action. Europeans have complained for decades about Brussels with its bureaucratic culture, its unelected mandarins in the Commission. The solution, many have argued, is for more power to be moved from the executive to the legislature.

Yet, the sad fact is that the European Parliament is itself a top down body, a kind of voting machine with the party bosses from the centrist parties who form the majority pulling the levers. Out of the approximately 750 seats in the Parliament, about 500 in the Center Right and Center Left form a consensus on most issues, with the other, smaller parties marginalized. And Angela Merkel, with her CDU dominating the EPP, thus calls the shots.

As regards foreign policy, the centrist parties in Europe have their own bipartisanship which roughly parallels the bipartisanship in the US Congress. Debates on the floor of the Parliament are rare.

So what has been the policy on Russia and Ukraine within Angela Merkel’s Germany which presently holds the EU in its thrall? If we go back to the very start of the Ukraine crisis one year ago when reunification with ( or annexation by) Russia set in motion what has become our New Cold War, Angela Merkel was named by the US and West European mainstream media as the best possible mediator between East and West. An Ossie, a fluent Russian speaker, she would, everyone agreed, find common understanding with Vladimir Putin and calm things down. Moreover, she had at her side in the German coalition government as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a presumed continuator of his Social Democratic party’s Ostpolitik going back to Willy Brandt and running through Gerhard Schroeder, meaning a long record of accommodation with Russia that, if anything, had long raised suspicions in France and more particularly in America, of being disloyal to the West. All of this spoke in favor of Germany, the honest broker.

However, as the months wore on and spring turned into summer, then autumn within the EU Angela Merkel emerged as the most determined advocate of sanctions, riding herd over all the Member States and introducing ever tougher sanctions to bring Russia to heel and force a reversal of its policy in Ukraine.

This appeared to run counter to domestic German political calculus, given that, as everyone knew, the German economy had never recovered fully from the 2008 crisis and might well double-dip into recession as the sanctions brought counter measures from Russia, and as the slip in the Russian economy from sanctions hurt German sales in that country. Three hundred thousand German jobs were said to be dependent on the Russian market. By December 2014 German business associations issued public statements denouncing the sanctions policy. And Merkel was the butt of a fiery speech in the Bundestag in early December by a deputy leader of the Left opposition, Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht, who accused her of selling out German interests through subservience to policies on Russia made in Washington.

Meanwhile it turned out that Steinmeier is an unusually weak member of the coalition. As they now joke in the Bundestag, he is ‘also informed’ about the latest policy on Russia and Ukraine. His position might be compared to John Kerry’s at State. Policy on Russia and Ukraine is being made in the immediate entourage of the Chancellor, and her party, the CDU, traditionally had no particular solutions for dealing with Russia. Its orientation, going back to Konrad Adenauer, was always directed to Washington.

The ‘’Putin-’Versteher’’ wing of Steinmeier’s party, those who tried to “understand” the Russians’ position were so caught out, so wrong-footed by the muscle-flexing of Russia after the Crimean Spring that they were easily silenced by stridently anti-Russian media in Germany. The media created a kind of Russophobe conformism that people I have spoken with in the SPD claim Germany had never seen before, even in the worst days of the original Cold War.

These inconsistencies remained unexplored by commentators in the United States, in Europe and…even in the most interested party in the whole question, Russia itself. Indeed in Russia, there was a residual conviction among most observers that Germany was their advocate within the EU.

Ignoring where Germany really stood lasted until early February 2015, when the Chancellor set off in yet another direction, which seemed to contradict completely the notion of subservience to Washington. At that time, in the midst of what was now all-out civil war in the Donbas, with insurgent forces freeing the Donetsk airport and extending the territory under their command, the question of the Debaltsevo Cauldron, the entrapment of 6,000-8,000 Ukrainian forces, raised a hue and cry in the United States over the need to rush lethal military supplies to Kiev.

Angela Merkel took alarm, not over the fate of Poroshenko’s government but over the possibility of further escalation of the conflict as a direct consequence of U.S. arms to Kiev: further Russian involvement and the possibility of a hot war with Russia that could have unpredictable consequences.

She then began her spectacular shuttle diplomacy with French President Francois Hollande in tow, visiting Kiev, Moscow and Minsk and seeing the Minsk-2 ceasefire negotiations11-12 February through to conclusion. The Chancellor followed this up with a visit to Washington during which she flatly disagreed with the Americans, rejecting military assistance to Kiev in favor of diplomacy. For this she was roundly condemned by American hawks. A public breach between the United States and Germany opened as great as in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.

While American media met the Minsk-2 accords with great skepticism, within Europe a very different note was sounded: Merkel and Hollande were dubbed the Continent’s ‘diplomatic dream team’ and there was talk of nominating Merkel for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I met with the top leadership of Die Linke in the Bundestag in March and, off the record, they spoke very warm words about Merkel’s actions.

Finally I bring to your attention the very latest development in Merkel’s foreign and security policies which many will find puzzling. Several weeks ago European Commission President Juncker issued a call for the creation of a European Army, calling it the best way to stand up to Russia. There can be no doubt that Angela Merkel was behind this initiative. After all, Juncker’s only past claim to attention was his skillful defense of the Euro against its structural weaknesses.

Why now the push for a European Defense Union? Surely it is a signal not to Moscow but to Washington that Germany will not be bullied over its independent Ukraine policy, will not snap to attention and join an anti-Russian military crusade.

So what is going on?

One thing is clear: that whatever is driving German and through Germany European policy on Ukraine and Russia today has a life of its own and is not subservient to Washington.

My tentative conclusion is that the German entrepreneurial class, which supports Merkel’s party, the Mittelstand, is split on the Russian question.

This brought me to look at the benefit that Germany enjoys from its nearly colonial relationship with Poland, the Czech Republic and other former Warsaw Pact states that are now in the EU and that supply Germany through its own manufacturing subsidiaries or subcontractors in these countries with very cheap parts and subassemblies, all of which power the German export economy on world markets. Surely this secures millions of German jobs and far outweighs the economic importance of Russia.

In this setting, the former strategic alliance with Russia has been jettisoned. It antagonized Germany’s neighbors and suppliers among the new Member States to the East. Now they are eating out of Angela’s hands, while she has let them pursue their childish pranks at Russia’s border and in Ukraine.

On 15 March, one Russian commentator, deputy director of the Institute of CIS Countries Igor Shishkin published a 20-page essay entitled “Merkel and the Fourth Reich.” He develops a thesis that posits Frau Merkel with a still broader and more ambitious policy of putting Russia down in the service of German economic and political interests than I had considered.

Per Shishkin, Germany integrated the GDR immediately after 1989, spent another 15 years digesting the former Warsaw Pact countries from which it extracted enormous wealth as colonial overlord, and now in Ukraine is poised to realize Germany’s centuries long ambition of Drang Nach Osten – to obtain control of the enormously productive farmland of Ukraine and its mineral wealth. Here Germany’s national aspirations coincided with Washington’s geopolitical strategy dating from 1997 when Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in The Grand Chessboard that Ukraine must be excised from the Russian sphere of influence to prevent Russia’s return to great power status.

Judging by Shishkin’s employers, we may assume he represents a faction in the Kremlin elites. The least one can say is that Moscow is also now scrambling to make sense of Germany’s policies so as to better respond to them.

In my view, Shishkin is laying it on a bit thick. I rather doubt that an ideology has been developed in Germany to drive its actions in the East. But these actions incrementally have put it on a collision course with Russian geopolitical interests. The Russians did not see this coming, just as the Germans for the most part were surprised at how they had triggered a violent Russian reaction. And yet it was a major causal factor in the current conflict over Ukraine, no less than NATO expansion engineered by the United States.

We may earnestly hope that the crisis in Donbas will become nothing more than a frozen conflict. But the bigger issues of American, Russian and German/EU ambitions in Eastern and Southeastern Europe demand resolution if there is not to be another acute East-West conflict in the medium term.

A FRESH LOOK AT STROBE TALBOTT’S THE RUSSIA HAND: A MEMOIR OF PRESIDENTIAL DIPLOMACY

16/04/2015

“I made the mistake of trying to insert my own view into Clinton’s stream of consciousness…The president gave me a look that combined amusement and impatience. I’d just reminded him, he said, of why I was a journalist and not a politician.”

Given that Strobe Talbott’s memoir was published back in 2002, one might reasonably ask why do a “review article” now, in 2015? To that I have several justifications for what follows.

First, re-examination of this memoir of Strobe Talbott’s years in government is timely because the author is reportedly the first choice of Hilary Clinton to be her Secretary of State if she wins the presidency. Hilary has just announced her candidacy for the 2016 election and by general agreement of the pundits she is the front runner. The book provides invaluable information about Talbott, the respected friend and adviser to the Clintons.

The blurbs on the dust jacket rightly highlight the author’s journalistic eye for detail and felicitous command of language. What we do not see praised are the author’s analytical skills, capacity for intellectual leadership or ability to take the long view. Nor do we find inside the covers that his professional training in Russian literature endowed him with any profound understanding or appreciation of Russia.

Secondly, quite apart from any future possible return to power, Talbott has recently been in the news with respect to one of the most important issues of our day. In his capacity as director of the Brookings Institute, the leading think tank of the Democratic Party, Talbott was the spokesman for a team of experts which in early February 2015 issued a report entitled “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do.” That report urged that President Obama send lethal arms to Ukraine. It touched off the biggest controversy in the United States over its Russia policy since the onset of the great power confrontation over Ukraine in February 2014. The Russia Hand shows that Talbott has had consistently hard-line views on dealing with Russia going back 25 years, when that country was flat on its back and hard-liners were in the minority.

Thirdly, the book provides invaluable information about how we got ourselves into the New Cold War. Historians and political scientists are actively sifting clues and re-examining the decisions taken in the 1990s on the shape of the new security architecture of Europe, in particular the fateful decisions to expand NATO to the East, ultimately right up to Russia’s borders. Talbott was both participant and fly on the wall when all these decisions were taken.

Now that I have explained how and why Talbott’s book could be valuable if it were truthful and unbiased, qualities which are fairly rare in memoirs generally and in political memoirs in particular, I can confirm that The Russia Hand passes the test of veracity comfortably. The tell-tale sign of doctored memory is absent. This book was patently not self-serving when issued. Talbott gives us too much material putting himself in a poor light in relation to his boss, Bill Clinton, and he puts his entire milieu in poor light in relation to the phenomenal opportunities to change the world for the better that lay before them if they had possessed more imagination and more guts.

Curiously, from among them all, only the boss, Clinton, comes across as having dared to envision what a ‘blue sky’ future might look like and hoped not to build obstacles to its realization even if he could not find the political strength to facilitate a positive outcome materially. Indeed, part of Clinton’s blue sky was precisely an eventual Russia in NATO scenario. As he told Talbott in his first term: “We’ve got to put this NATO thing in tomorrow terms. The Russians’ getting in someday may or may not happen, but keeping it out there as something we’re not against is a no-brainer.”

Published less than two years after the author left office, this book displays none of the amnesia that typically damages memoirs of elder statesmen. What lacuna there are in the narrative are due to Talbott’s staying close to what he saw on the job and not trying to present a comprehensive account of the age.

The final reason for going back to Talbott’s memoir today is that with the passage of time wholly new and previously unnoticed causal lines emerge in classics like this. He recorded some remarkably telling observations by the prominent statesmen he met, whether socially or in his official duties, and many of their words have taken on new meaning and profundity.

Now let’s turn to the light which this book sheds on how the present crisis came about. It is common currency on the side of the argument where I stand to put a lot of the blame for bad decisions in the 1990s to the euphoria in the West that followed the end of the Soviet Union and collapse of Communism. ‘We won the Cold War’ was on everyone’s mind. There was now no power on earth to thwart the United States in its mission of making the world safe for democracy. And it would do so to create public goods from which everyone would benefit. This was reflected in Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, which brought Neoconservative and Neoliberal values and ideological points of faith into the mainstream of American political life.

However, in Strobe Talbott’s narrative there is no sign of triumphalism at work informing decisions of the Clinton administration. What we do see is a number of other serious conceptual problems that to greater or lesser extent carry over into our own day. This begins with condescension towards what was then the Sick Man of Europe. There was the hubristic assumption that we knew best how to cure the ills of Russia and were there to give them the ‘spinach’ they needed for their transformation from command to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy, from superpower to regional power at peace with its neighbors.

In a way, the physical ills of President Boris Yeltsin were a metaphor for the condition of Russian society and economy in the 1990s. Much of the time, Yeltsin suffered from bouts of drunkenness that made his behavior in public at summits, at joint press conferences, not to mention behind the scenes during state negotiations volatile and unpredictable. At other times, his heart disease took him out of action for lengthy periods during which speculation was rife over his very survival. Strobe Talbott and other key members of the Clinton staff were permanently in damage control mode when dealing with Yeltsin. This was just a short step away from the desire to stage manage the Russian President to be sure he did the right thing while they cornered him to gain concessions to American interests on all the policy issues under joint review.

Talbott notes several times how the administration’s opponents criticized it for excessively personalizing the relationship with Russia, just as the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations had placed excessive reliance on a special relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. This criticism is justified by everything Talbott tells us about his work.

Of course, it is hard to see how things could have been otherwise because of the second dimension of Yeltsin’s ills – his political weakness. He was under constant attack from a parliament that was controlled by his enemies, whether the Communist majority or the significant nationalist “brown” minority. Yeltsin’s constant refrain, his main point of leverage in negotiations with Americans, was that he alone could deliver the goods, and that they must not undermine his delicate situation by excessive or untimely demands. This was particularly true in all issues relating to NATO, especially before and during 1996 when both Russia and the United States had presidential elections. The corollary to the foregoing is that the other political forces in Russia were much less attractive to the Americans and could not be cultivated. Indeed, meetings with the Communist Party leader Zyuganov were kept in the open and tightly circumscribed, while the LDPR leader Zhirinovsky was excluded altogether from Clinton’s occasional meetings with the Russian political establishment.

It is rather ironic that in the last couple of years of Clinton’s second term, when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, when the scandal over the President’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky and impeachment proceedings against him undermined his authority both in Washington and in the nation at large, Clinton and his team found themselves using the very same logic of ‘we’re your best and last option’ when negotiating with the Russians. This is what it trotted out when it tried to secure Russian agreement to modifications of the ABM treaty. But by this time an assertive Putin had come to power and was able to muster a patronizing tone in dealing with the lame duck American president.

During the greater part of the Clinton years, the inequality of power between the Russian and American negotiators was such that Talbott and his colleagues were knowingly offering trinkets in exchange for real assets. Hence, the Partnership for Peace and its sequel in the Russia-NATO Council instead of a full treaty bringing Russia into the security architecture of Europe. Hence, the expansion of the G-7 into a G-8 as a sop to cover Russia’s humiliation when its former allies were being welcomed into the North American defense alliance.

The politics were personalized and concessions were wrung out of Boris Yeltsin in the knowledge that the political elites in his country were determinedly opposed to the decisions he took jointly with the Americans. What is curious in all this was the expectation that these decisions could be made to stick.

This happened despite the clear warnings of none other than Yeltsin himself, as we learn from Talbott in an extensive quotation from the Russian president that bears repeating because of what it says about his lucidity then and also about the source of our conflict with his country today:

“I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority. Russia’s difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons, but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again!...And when we do, even then I don’t intend to try to compete with the U.S. but to pursue an equal partnership. We’ve got to maintain this basis for our relations. We need to be close to the U.S., but not on the basis of your monopoly in the world – rather, on the basis of equality.”

It emerges from Talbott’s memoir that the very notion of equal treatment for Russia was absurd to him and to those in his circle, just as the idea of Russia rising again seemed to them to be a chimera. They could not see beyond the here and now of their day, when all the statistics spoke against Russia.

We should not be too tough on them for this lack of understanding of the country and its reserves of steely determination to be a great power once again. Even today, in the face of a Russia that has come a long way back from its nadir, some of our most eminent exponents of the Realpolitik school see Russia as an expiring force and concentrate their attention on rising China.

From the evidence Talbott presents, President Clinton seems to have had greater intuitive understanding of Russia than his ‘Russia Hand.’ Here is another very revealing quote that Talbott has served up, this time from Bill Clinton:

“We haven’t played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven’t figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol’ Boris, ‘Okay, now here’s what you’ve got to do next – here’s some more shit for your face.’

And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with…We’ve got to remember that Yeltsin can’t do more with us than his own traffic will bear.”

Indeed, unlike Talbott and the rest of his staff, Clinton, the politician, knew the dangers of overplaying your hand. In a citation relating to American treatment of Jacques Chirac, we find Clinton remarking what was equally applicable to his Russia policy:

“I’m just saying that you shouldn’t kick a wounded dog because it will get well and bite you.”

There was no issue in American-Russian relations during the Clinton years in which this principle was more relevant than in NATO’s air war on Serbia over Kosovo and the eventual implementation of the KFOR peacekeeping mission in the breakaway republic. Russia was kicking and screaming all the way before accepting the “Bosnian reporting lines” in its relations to the US commander of the mission. And the impotent fury of the Russians in 1998 arguably set the stage for their decisions on the fate of the Crimea in 2014.

Let us return now to the critical years 1996-97 when plans for the expansion of NATO were finalized and made public. Talbott gives us some readings on NATO from his own circle of officials in the State Department, from major political personalities of his time including Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, as well as from academic institutions representing the foreign policy establishment at the time.

In connection with her famously quoted telephone conversation with American Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt when they conspired as puppet masters directing the forthcoming coup d’etat of 22 February 2014, Victoria Nuland has been very much in the news over the past year. Back in the Clinton administration she was a key assistant to Strobe Talbott on his missions to Moscow and it is interesting to see how she, Richard Holbrooke and, of course, his immediate superior Secretary of State Madeleine Albright all formed a core force behind what was still a minority position among senior officials in favor of a bold and rapid expansion of NATO. For his part, Talbott himself recruited Alexander Vershbow and Ron Asmus to his immediate team. Asmus in particular later exerted a nefarious influence on evolving U.S. policies by pleading the case of a policy that finally crossed Russia’s red lines: inclusion of the Baltic states in NATO. It was not for nothing that these countries later awarded Asmus their sashes of knighthood.

To put it charitably, Talbott and his fellow crusaders saw NATO as a guarantor of democratic government and security throughout Central and Eastern Europe in case of either scenario for evolving Russia: either collapse from its internal weaknesses and contradictions or a return of its imperialist ambitions and might. In this position, they were much closer to prevailing political thinking on Capitol Hill than to the ambivalent President to whom they reported.

Talbott illustrates the correlation of expert opinion at the time when he describes a gathering of Harriman Institute faculty he attended in the fateful year 1996, when determination of the administration’s policy still hung in the balance. He tells us that every faculty member opposed the NATO expansion except for a non-Russian specialist, the historian of Germany and Western Europe, Fritz Stern. Talbott chose to ignore this expert consensus, claiming that public opinion polls showed that NATO expansion had the vote of the American public. This is a curious stance on the value of expertise for the man who today heads a major think tank.

As regards George Kennan, Talbott’s words are even more damning for the memoirist’s personal standing as would-be statesman. Talbott makes a point of telling us that he systematically invited Kennan to State each year for a private meeting, intimating that he valued the insights of the former chief strategist of America’s Cold War diplomacy. However, after Kennan came out publicly against NATO expansion in 1997, denouncing it as a deeply flawed and nearsighted policy which would lead to no good, Talbott had to explain this criticism away to his boss, the ever watchful Bill Clinton. Talbott now reminded Clinton that Kennan had been against the concept of NATO from the time of its creation, thereby disparaging the value of his counsel.

Henry Kissinger, at 92, is today the iconic exponent of Realpolitik and dispenser of masterly wisdom in op-ed articles and occasional television interviews in which he calls upon the Obama administration to temper its vilification of Vladimir Putin and find a compromise solution to the Ukraine crisis that takes into account Russian interests.

On the basis of Kissinger’s several ‘guest appearances’ on the pages of Talbott’s memoir, we have an instructive reminder that Kissinger himself voted with both hands and feet for policies that have led to the present confrontation that he proposes now to alleviate. In Clinton’s first term, he opposed the Partnership for Peace, because he believed even that fig leaf program gave too much mouth honor to Russia. In 1997 and 1998, he publicly condemned the Clinton administration for making a commitment to the Russians not to move nuclear weapons or troops into the newly admitted Eastern European members of NATO. This is the very issue that the Obama administration is trying to subvert by the tactic of troop rotations and its rapid deployment force. Said Kissinger back then: ‘Whoever heard of a military alliance begging with a weakened adversary? NATO should not be turned into an instrument to conciliate Russia or Russia will undermine it.’”

Finally, it is worth mentioning the curious comments of Helmut Kohl justifying his strong support for eastward expansion of NATO with America forcing the pace:

“In Kohl’s view, in addition to its internal demons, Germany had been cursed in the twentieth century by political geography. Immediately to the east were the Slavic lands, historically regarded more as Eurasian than truly or entirely European. As long as Germany’s border with Poland marked the dividing line between East and West, Germany would be vulnerable to the pathologies of racism and the temptations of militarism that can come with living on an embattled frontier. That frontier would disappear, he said, only if Poland entered the European Union. His country’s future depended not just on deepening its ties within the EU but on expanding the EU eastward so that Germany would be in the middle of a safe, prosperous, integrated and democratic Europe rather than on its edge. ‘That is why Germany is the strongest proponent of enlargement of the EU,’ he said, ‘and it’s why European integration is of existential importance to us.’ Kohl believed that the EU was unlikely to expand unless NATO, nudged by the U.S., led the way. ‘This is not just a moral issue,’ he said, ‘it’s in our self-interest to have this development now and not in the future.’”

It would be hard to imagine without the help of Strobe Talbott’s memoir that such mumbo jumbo explanations for the pathologies of his nation, such musings about the Eurasian civilizations could come from one of the larger-than-life leaders of European politics in the 1990s, from a leader with a rare interest in history. This citation obliges us now to study the thinking behind Angela Merkel and her present advisors, the successors to the CDU leadership and authors of Germany’s new Ostpolitik, a and to accept nothing on faith in what our media report.

For all of these reasons, I heartily recommend The Russia Hand as an essential guide to today’s political landscape.

MOSCOW’S 70TH ANNIVERSARY VICTORY DAY CELEBRATIONS: AS REPORTED BY A FLY ON THE WALL

10/05/2015

The impact of the ‘regiment of immortals’ procession was such that even the normally dry-eyed UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon congratulated Vladimir Putin for earning the high regard of his people. No wonder the Obama administration took such pains to keep its allies from coming to the ceremony

One of the benefits of the live and continuous broadcasting of the 70th Anniversary Victory Day Celebrations in Moscow via Vesti 24 and Pervy Kanal/RTR was that we would-be commentators seated at home in Brussels, New York or wherever could follow the events without intermediation of professional reporters advising on what we should make of it all, without cuts and selective editing from central studios. Given the wealth of material for those of us with Kremlinology backgrounds from a day that began at 10.00 am Moscow time and continued well into the night, our cup runneth over. Not only can we draw our own conclusions, but we can see with perfect clarity what was picked up by our mainstream media from a cornucopia of messages to suit their preconceived ideas. And it would be naïve to deny that the Kremlin surely intended to present a variety of images of Russia, even mutually contradictory images, to draw the greatest possible attention to itself.

The complexity also arose from the two very different audiences being addressed: Russians and the world at large. For the Russian population, this was a day of bread and circus. To put it in Vladimir Putin’s language, it was the biggest, most lavish block party since the opening day ceremony of the Sochi Olympics. For the world at large, it was a reminder of Russia’s decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and also a demonstration of its growing military might now that the Bear is Back. Moreover, by the central role accorded throughout the day to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was ever at Vladimir Putin’s side, and by the announcement of various major Russian-Chinese commercial agreements, the fruits of Russia’s pivot to the East and its new independence from the Atlantic Community were underscored for all to see.

Vladimir Putin’s short speech opening the parade was itself rich in nuances. Notwithstanding the celebratory mood, he saw fit to castigate US foreign policy for its pursuit of a unipolar world and military block mentality that denies equal security for all. This was the raisin taken from the cake by the Financial Times coverage: “Putin takes swipe at US in parade speech.” By contrast both the BBC and Euronews reports on the parade highlighted the Russian President’s bouquet in the speech to the wartime Allies who were not present at the parade - the U.K., France and the USA – expressing gratitude for their contribution to the common cause of defeating Nazism.

And then there was the United States print media reporting of Moscow’s celebrations. The New York Times led the way with zero coverage. As I write these lines on the day after, the NYT has not posted a single article on its online edition. Even The Washington Post saw fit to put up an article, to be sure, on how the West was absent from the Moscow events, a continuation of the black PR that we have seen for at least the last 18 months.

The parade itself was declared by the Kremlin to be the largest military show in history. That may place it in the Guinness Book of Records, but it tells only part of the story. For a layman, the parade was not just about who was present on the reviewing stand and who was not, which honor guard troops from which countries were present and which were not. Yes, the Western leaders were absent while BRICS and other nations we would previously call ‘nonaligned’ were present. But you had the pageant of Azerbaijan troops being followed directly by Armenian troops; this made Moscow the city where lions and lambs exercised mutual respect and restraint, at least for the day. The rollout of Russia’s latest military hardware was important for foreign military attaches in attendance and to prove the words of Russia’s leadership to its people about the vast improvements in national defense achieved in the past several years. Otherwise this part of the day did not break new ground.

What came next in the celebrations was entirely different and marks the age of Putin. I have in mind the so-called “Regiment of Immortals,” the march of perhaps 500,000 ordinary Russians through Red Square, each carrying photographs of their “family heroes,” their parents, grandparents, great grandparents who fought in the Great Patriotic War and died in battle or who otherwise did not live to see this 70th anniversary celebration. This march was repeated all across Russia with reports that as many as 4 million people took part.

Successful politicians are by nature or training photogenic kissers of small babies. In joining this “regiment of immortals” and carrying a photo of his own father who fought in the war as a simple soldier, not a decorated general, Vladimir Putin took politics to the heights of statesmanship. He drove home the point that this is a day for every Russian family and not just a pompous show of military capability for the high and mighty to strut on the stage. He invited a sea of emotion to sweep the land. Here you had the bread.

A BBC reporter in Moscow shared with viewers some very relevant information to appreciate what Vladimir Putin was tapping into. She cited a recent poll of Russians asking them to name the most important day in the calendar to them. Twenty-six percent said it is their birthday. Forty-two percent said it is 9 May.

The impact of the ‘regiment of immortals’ procession was such that even the normally dry-eyed UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who took part in the Moscow proceedings, commented to reporters that what he first supposed was a mass demonstration against the government was to his surprise, a vast wave of support for the Kremlin leadership. He congratulated Vladimir Putin for earning this high regard of his people. No wonder the Obama administration took such pains to keep the Allies from coming to the ceremony.

The day did not end there. In the evening, there was a gala performance staged on Red Square that combined all the talents of song, mass choreography and other entertainment forms that had first been put on display in the Sochi Olympics opening event. In Sochi, the message was that Russia has its own traditions of both popular and high culture but is open to the world and hospitable to all. Here was the circus, and as almost always in such efforts by the Russians, it was at a supremely professional level of execution, showing very great respect for the spectators, both those on the Square and the others watching it on their television as I did. And it all ended on the traditional note of a fireworks display.

During the day, press releases on the Russian-Chinese commercial deals that were being concluded ever since the arrival of President Xi Jinping in Moscow the day before gave substance to the featured position accorded to the Chinese leader in the constant company of Putin all day long. The most important of the announcements concerns the New Silk Road, which Beijing now will run in a Northern route passing through Russia as opposed to the expected Southern route bypassing Russia. This is a change of thinking and of politics that puts Europe on notice. Germany especially has been looking to the Silk Road as a boon to the enormous goods traffic between the world’s two largest export nations, Germany and China. Now that route, with all the opportunities for investment and participation, passes through Moscow, not Teheran.

No doubt, Richard Nixon is turning over in his grave. It took the hard work of two US administrations, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to undo the geopolitical achievements of one of America’s greatest president-Realpolitik strategists. But now Nixon’s work is undone, and a very different new World Order is emerging from the rubble of the post-Cold War period.

2015 SCHLANGENBAD DIALOGUE: THE EAST-WEST CONFRONTATION IN MICROCOSM

12/05/2015

After listening patiently to the inevitable snide remarks about Kremlin positions, I followed the American folk wisdom for getting the attention of a mule: you first whack him with a 2 by 4 beam. The beam at my disposal was the remark: “Gentlemen if we continue in this tone with the Russians, we will all be dead.”

One of the key annual events in bilateral German-Russian strategic brainstorming is the traditional Schlangenbader Gespräch, best translated as “the Schlangenbad Dialogue,” held over the course of three intensely filled days of panel discussions, free-seating shared meals and ending in a half day’s cultural excursion. The venue is a Taunus hills resort town 40 km from Frankfurt. The organizer is the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the think tank of Germany’s second largest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), which has an international footprint via its offices abroad, including Moscow, Washington and Brussels.

The theme for this year was inescapable and thought provoking: “The End of the European Home: What Comes Next?” There was every reason to expect big things. The punctuation emphasized the passing of an era, the abandonment of the dream of the days immediately following the end of the original Cold War in 1989. The placement of the question mark over the future put the participants on notice that they should think outside the box. Der Spiegel sent a correspondent. Reporters from two other mainstream German dailies also sent reporters, at least to day one.

The conference came at the end of April and was the 18th edition since the founding of the Dialogue. Some 15 Russians and 65 Germans were in attendance. A majority of them have participated year after year. Some have been in it from the very beginning. A small number, perhaps 10%, myself included, were newcomers.

The continuity of invitations is an important contributing factor to the atmosphere of the event. The same attendees from both German and Russian sides have met together both in good times and in bad times and they come to the conference with a store of good will. In addition, the warm hospitality of the organizers and the delightful surroundings in the midst of prime German wine country create an atmosphere of relaxation that is propitious to reflection. The proof in this instance was that the highest ranking Russian government official, a deputy minister of foreign affairs, came with his wife and stayed for the entire duration. Moreover, there were no walk-outs, no shows of discourtesy or personal rancor even when two of the “dissidents” in the Russian delegation made programmatic statements from the floor which were meant to deal body blows to the ‘Putin regime.’

As I have just said, journalists were admitted. In that sense my essay today is in line with the policies of the organizers that the Dialogue is not a closed shop. But it is held under Chatham House rules, meaning that no direct attribution of remarks made is allowed, rules which I intend to honor in full.

That said, the sad reality of the 2015 Schlangenbad Dialogue is that the prepared speeches and even the spontaneous remarks of participants in Q&A hardly strayed from what the same speakers say to the general public and to journalists for attribution. This is not a reproach to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. It is merely a frank acknowledgement that in present circumstances of the New Cold War and diametrically contradictory narratives of the Ukraine crisis in the mainstream media on both sides, we have an ideational if not ideological divide between Russia and the West so great that a gathering like the Schlangenbad Dialogue becomes a microcosm of the world outside its doors whatever its hosts may have hoped for.

Of course, private side discussions always leave more room to step back from hardened positions. As I discovered in the corridors, at the dinner table, in shared taxi rides with other participants, there are ways to break the ice, to go beyond frozen conflict and grandstanding rhetoric and to begin more constructive discussions. Uncovering that secret will be the main point of this essay.

During the first plenary session, one of the participants asked why the two delegations are so unbalanced in numbers if the objective is full and equal dialogue. The answer to that one was easy enough: the consideration of distance to travel and expense. However, a deeper question was not asked: why there was much more diversity of positions in the small Russian contingent than in the large German group? As regards the Russians, the reason surely lies with the invitation policy of our hosts. As regards the Germans, it may be a sign of the times, as I explain further on.

Apart from the deputy minister and one or two officials, the Russians were mostly academics, think tank administrators representing ‘civil society.’ As such, they were positioned along a continuum from Kremlin loyalists to Opposition. At the far end there were two certified “dissidents,” both of whom were carrying visiting cards with self-descriptions as “publicists,” by which is meant “political observers” or “commentators.” One was a professor who attracted media attention a year ago when he was fired from his post at the prestigious Moscow university specializing in international relations that has trained generations of Russian diplomats. He was let go for publishing an article likening his country’s ‘annexation’ of Crimea (officially considered a “reunification’’ with Russia) to Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland. He demonstrated in the plenary sessions that his views of the regime have not mellowed in his forced retirement. The other “dissident” was a former Duma deputy and leader of the systemic Liberal Opposition alongside Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov. Though silent for most of the conference, in the last day he weighed in against the regime in no uncertain terms.

The academics on the Russian side performed well in Schlangenbad. They were entertaining, at times sparkling in the panel devoted to conceptualizing the coming post-Cold War period architecture of international relations in terms of the 19th century Concert of Powers. The middle level Russian functionaries were informative and constructive in their presentations to a panel devoted to the present and future role of the OSCE in peacekeeping in Donbas and facilitating the implementation of the Minsk-2 accords. The problem was with the highest ranking members of the delegation, who should have been the main beneficiaries of exposure to diverse opinions from their compatriots and German interlocutors.

There is no need, nor would it be in keeping with the ground rules, for me to go into the specifics of what the Russian deputy foreign minister said in the keynote speech which opened the conference or in his remarks during Q&A in plenary sessions. But the specific words do not count. Generally his arguments and approach to defending his country’s foreign policy with respect to Ukraine did not differ from what I have heard from another Russian deputy foreign minister speaking to an EU-Russian conference in Brussels in December or from the Russian ambassador to NATO during a debate with Elmar Brok, chair of the European Parliament committee on foreign relations, held in Brussels in April under the aegis of another German think tank, this one serving the Bavarian wing of Merkel’s party.

As individuals, the top Russian diplomats I have encountered are well educated, sophisticated in dress and demeanor and have good communication skills, meaning fluency in one or more foreign languages. But the script they are being given from headquarters on Smolenskaya Square in Moscow exposes them and their government to derision, as also occurred in Schlangenbad. The blame lies in the chain of command rising through Sergei Lavrov to President Putin, who clearly does not trust his diplomats to argue the Russian case with their own innate skills and in keeping with the circumstances before them. It is symptomatic of this problem that Moscow sent to Schlangenbad a deputy minister of foreign affairs whose background in the ministry meant that he knows virtually nothing about Germany by his own admission. This was not a mistake; it ensured he could only deliver the message he had been given at a very high level event in German-Russian relations.

The official Kremlin script denies there is a Cold War going on, since there is, we are told, no ideological divide. No divide, the officials say, because Russia adopted Western values back in the early 1990s. Similarly the concept of a European Home stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok remains valid; we must just fix the plumbing, repair the tears in the roof, do some redecorating, and everything will be fine. Russia has a very different interpretation from the West on what happened in Kiev on 22 February. The secession of Crimea through a referendum and its decision to join the Russian Federation came about as a result of the refusal of the local population of Russian speakers to accept the authority of the illegitimate regime installed in Kiev by the Maidan and its Western backers. The process of reunification with Russia conformed to international law and to the guiding principles of the United Nations which stress the right of all peoples to self-determination. The civil war which broke out in Donetsk and Lugansk similarly was a Ukrainian matter reflecting the demand of the Donbas population for autonomy in a federalized constitution as their response to the nationalists now in control of the capital. Russia did not send troops or materiel into the Donbas. There is no reason for us not to be friends.

This policy line evoked in Schlangenbad the same derision as it did at the Munich Security Conference in February and as I have seen arise elsewhere. The Russian official line takes the dishonest legalistic arguments over Russia’s alleged violations of international norms put forward by its detractors in the West and responds in kind with dishonest bluster.

The problem is not that the Russian position over Ukraine is indefensible. It is that the defenses being invoked are the wrong ones.

I firmly believe the truth is always or nearly always the best line of argumentation. America incited a coup d’etat in Kiev to take effective control of the country in pursuit of its geopolitical interest to compromise Russian national security and diminish its threat to American hegemony. Russia intervened in Ukraine firstly and foremost to ensure that its key naval installations in Sevastopol would not fall victim to the regime change in Ukraine and come under NATO control. Secondly, Russia was concerned at the possibility of Ukraine being put on a path to NATO accession, thereby giving an increasingly hostile state on its border with potentially strong military chapter 5 protection. In these issues, Ukraine and its Western backers were crossing red lines of existential security concerns which Russia had declared repeatedly going back a decade or more.

Instead of pussy-footing about its own interpretation of international law and kindly intentions, Moscow’s diplomats would do much better stating that the country will take all measures necessary to safeguard its national security. Full stop. That kind of forceful statement of intent would wipe the smiles off the faces of Western interlocutors and focus minds on what can be done to find compromises and move on.

By insisting too heatedly there is no proof behind Western accusations it has troops in Donbas, Russian diplomacy is willfully ignoring the greater truth that rankles. It is undeniable that from the beginning it has inspired and given moral encouragement to the separatist movement in Donbas.

In fact, Moscow has acted in this matter as a mirror image of the policy made in Kiev, whereby war is a calculated instrument of identity politics. From the first days when the Maidan regime came to power, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was spoiling for a war with Russia for the sake of building a Ukrainian nation. The concept is very simple: nationhood through battle and shared hardship.

Putin understood this perfectly and did not oblige. Indeed Russia had the capability of sweeping across Ukraine if it had so desired. The time to strike would have been just after securing Crimea militarily, just to move on down the coast and across into the Ukrainian heartland. But Putin made no preparations for such a campaign. He had no field hospitals ready, no supplies in place, none of the prerequisites to support such an invasion force. Indeed the whole time that the West was shouting about Russian forces concentrated on the border, Putin did not ready the logistics to support an invading army. There were no clusters of helicopters ready to direct fire.

As the Kremlin freely acknowledged at the start of the conflict, their own intelligence made plain to the Russians that Donbas, not to mention areas further to the west in Ukraine, had no majorities in favor of seceding from Ukraine and uniting with Russia. Had he made a move to take these areas, he would have occupied territories where a resistance movement could break out, all the while earning drastic punishment from the West.

Instead he paid Kiev back with in its own coin. He encouraged the separatists in Donbas to fight for their own freedom without Russian participation. They did so, Kiev responded with its vicious anti-terrorist campaign which created a real independence movement in Donbas and brought the majority of the population out against Kiev. The result was the creation of a civil war with Russian encouragement that served the purpose of building nationhood in Donbas while fracturing the identity politics of Kiev.

I was told that in past editions of the Schlangenbad Dialogue there were differences of views among the German participants. In that case, the spirit of the times, the New Cold War, has been all the more an enforcer of conformism on the German side than one might have supposed, because there did not appear to be much daylight between the positions defended in the plenary sessions by German academics, Bundestag deputies, present/retired ambassadors and foreign ministry staff. Bringing Germans from different career lines together did not broaden their horizons, at least on the subject of Russia.

A couple of times synchronous applause (rapping on the table, German style) broke out among German participants around the hall in support of harsh words about Russian policy from one or another speaker. This kind of emotional display suggests confidence there is a general consensus. What this intellectual consensus is we shall now examine in detail.

In the broad audience I identified a number of mental blocks on the German side preventing them from conceptualizing the East-West conflict in ways that can lead to resolution. They come from a Political Correctness that none of us can afford under present crisis conditions.

First there is denial among Germans that they have a foreign policy. Whereas in the last century Germany hid behind France, its partner “locomotive” of the European Economic Community, then European Union, today it hides behind Brussels and collective decisions of the 28 member states. The problem with this is that it is a carefully constructed fiction. The European Union Institutions – Parliament, Council and Commission – are all controlled from Berlin, which engineered the appointment/election of all the top officials over the past year.

Second, there is what I call the “bunny rabbit” self-image, the pretended innocence of Germany as a country that virtually disarmed after the Cold War ended and is now facing a belligerent Russia which can overrun the Baltics and possibly Poland at its choosing. There is professed amazement that Russia could see a threat in themselves or in NATO given the paltry forces and materiel at German disposal. However, this is disingenuous. Behind Germany stands the United States which has considerably more military might than Russia.

Lastly, in the spirit of virtuous innocence, my German colleagues insisted that they, unlike the Americans, never practiced regime change and so reject Russian ire over the coup d’etat of 22 February in Kiev. But Germans were undeniably active in supporting the Maidan from its first emergence in the weeks following President Yanukovich’s refusal to sign the Association Agreement with the EU. It was not just the American Victoria Nuland who was out on the square giving encouragement to protesters. German Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time Guido Westerwelle was also on the square intervening in Ukrainian internal affairs, as were some German Bundestag members, all to the detriment of the existing legally elected president of Ukraine.

Listening to my fellow participants during the plenary sessions and in quiet conversation over meals, I was left in no doubt that the great majority of the Germans present fully believe in the new secular religion that also holds sway in the European Institutions in Brussels. I call it a religion because it is based on articles of faith. None of the postulates can be proven though they are accepted as ultimate truth by all believers.

The first article of this modern day catechism is that authoritarian regimes cannot live in peace with democratic nations. This overarching principle is used to explain Kremlin behavior and the logic of the present confrontation over Ukraine. Authoritarian regimes do not enjoy the support of their people. For that reason they must divert attention to bogus foreign threats, by creating enemies and seeking to isolate their people from the outside world. Hence Vladimir Putin after the mass street demonstrations in December 2011 protesting the falsified Duma elections had to invent the American threat to hold onto power, and this policy led ultimately to the showdown over Ukraine.

Another key article of faith which I heard repeatedly from my German colleagues in Schlangenbad is that foreign policy must be built on universal values of democracy and protection of human rights plus rule of law. Russia is deemed to be failing in these fundamental areas of governance and so deserves heightened attention; it is not a country with which one can do business as usual.

The combined effect of both the foregoing postulates is democracy promotion and a moral obligation to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states for the sake of just values. A host of problems arise from this of which the believers around me seemed not to have a clue.

It is both ironic and tragic that such views should prevail precisely in Germany. Political science texts commonly make reference to the Westphalia system of nation states and to balance of power considerations guiding international politics. It is more common to ignore on what basis this system came into being, which was precisely the resolution of the terribly destructive Thirty Years War fought on German lands over the issue of furthering universal values, represented at the time by the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. In essence international relations have now been pushed back to the ways of 1618 before the lessons enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia were made to prevail for reasons of self-preservation.

Universal values allow of no compromises, they deny the art of diplomacy and work through Diktat. In our modern day, when used as a cudgel against a nuclear power like Russia, they are a formula for Armageddon.

And it was precisely this insight that guided my conversations at Schlangenbad with my otherwise stiff -necked interlocutors. After listening patiently to the inevitable snide remarks about Kremlin positions, I followed the American folk wisdom for getting the attention of a mule: you first whack him with a 2 by 4 beam. The beam at my disposal was the remark: “Gentlemen if we continue in this tone with the Russians, we will all be dead.” It was amazing and heartening how the conversation did not end at that point but actually came alive. In these side conversations, the German officials I spoke to cast off the Teflon persona associated with their rank and we began to talk in earnest about the real threats from the present nadir in communications with Russia amidst muscle flexing by the armies of all sides.

I was not surprised to hear one of the more prominent German colleagues go up to our Opposition politician and shake his hand warmly, saying: “Ah, I was hoping by now you would already be President.” All in all, the German participants were paying too much attention to the Russian ‘dissidents’ at the conference who said what Westerners like to hear about the ‘regime.’ But the power is not there and will not be there for the foreseeable future. Nor is it with the Russian academics at the conference.

Any regime change in Russia will not lead to formation of a government that is kinder to the West. On the contrary, it would likely bring to power fervent nationalists who have been impatient with the restrained Realpolitik of Putin which always makes moves within the bounds of feasible even if they fall well short of the desirable.

Our German colleagues have to be brought back down to earth before it is too late.

[1] http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2012/03/04/russia-votes-4-march-2012-the-information-war.html

*Some of the original falsified images of Sochi from before the opening of the Olympics continue to be fed to the general public even now that the Games have ended on a high note. See, for example, the Belgian daily Le Soir, which yesterday still carried on its front page an article entitled “Sochi is over! A summary of the Winter Games in 13 unusual photos’’ including the wolf that supposedly roamed the halls of one hotel reserved for the press and the fifth circle of the Olympic flag that went missing at the Opening Ceremony.