Crimea Twofer

Dishonesty had an additional comment here and one over at the March 4 roundup. Now I can’t find them. What happened?

To add to the previous comment—if one also listened intently to the Russina he used he in effect displayed arrogance and disdain towards the West and especially the US–this was a dying superpower once again trying to reassert itself onto center stage.

The serious question that the WH has to answer and they know the answer—can one go forward with Russia on the Syrian adventure or the Iranian adventure—my answer based on Putin’s own words is a no and that seriously changes the entire complexity of those two issues.

Next question would be in the face of the US/UK and their inability to ensure that a security treaty signed between them and Russia over the Ukraine is not being honored and then the inability of those two countries to enforce that treaty–brings Israel into an interesting place.

Do they trust their security to the US and the international community or for that matter do they trust Palestinians to honor the agreements who have had Russian support in the past?

Really do no think so.

This goes to not really understanding who we are dealing with—this was a translation headline carried by the WP just a few minutes ago;

“Putin says Russia won’t take more of Ukraine”

Yes that was buried in his speech —but then he did a qualifier statement about three minutes later in the speech which in fact declared that he had the moral right/ability to protect all Russians leaving it open ended as to where, when, and how many Russians he needed to defend–when news agencies report on speeches they need to inherently understand the tone, use of the foreign language, and target audiences.

What could go wrong with sending more arms or money into this, whether from the Russian side or the American/NATO/EU side:

Ukraine’s coalition collapsed after two parties quit during a months-long pro-Russian insurgency in the nation’s east that downed a Malaysian Air jet last week.

The UDAR and Svoboda parties said they’d leave the government and seek a snap parliamentary ballot, according to statements today on their websites. Under the constitution, the former Soviet republic has 30 days to form a new coalition or it must call early elections. The existing cabinet will remain in place in the meantime.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s government, took over the country in February after pro-European street protests prompted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia. Yanukovych’s successor, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, had pledged to call parliamentary elections this year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-24/ukraine-coalition-government-collapses-as-2-parties-quit.html

Good job with the billions in democracy promotion, Freedom House and USIP and Dept. State and whatever else. Everything you touch turns to gold, Ms. Nuland! Why didn’t I skip med school and get a BA from Brown and move to DC and play policy wonk for hire!

NATO is just the best, we Americans should totally and forever be subservient to Brussels when we aren’t busy trying to be a hegemony through NATO all while pissing everyone else off. Let’s keep paying for all of it even when the EU gobbles up more and more trade.

Say, it isn’t China that is our main trade competition in Africa, Africom! That would be good ole Europe.

Aw, I know there is nothing I can do and DC has got its favorite postings back, the Middle East and Asia are a drag but telling Europeans in nice European nations what to do is such a nicer way to make a living than actually doing real work.

And gee whiz, it’s nice to have the Cold War back, isn’t it American Army generals! It’s like Christmas. No more worrying about winning wars, just ceremonial money spending!

I still don’t get it. Does everything the NATO proxies within the EU touch turn into dust?

The EU Border Assistance Mission to the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine was established in response to the joint letter from the Presidents of Moldova and Ukraine dating from 2 June 2005 calling for additional EU support for capacity building for border management, including customs, on the whole Moldova-Ukraine border, including the border between Ukraine and the separatist Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova, because the Moldovan border authorities are unable to be present there.

On 7 October 2005, a Memorandum of Understanding on the Border Assistance Mission was signed between the European Commission and the governments of Moldova and Ukraine. The official opening ceremony of the EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine took place on 30 November 2005.

All this time and effort and money, and, yet….

Must I turn into a mini-intelligence agent for everything because as an American citizen I can’t rely on anything in the media or government?

http://eeas.europa.eu/csdp/missions-and-operations/moldova-and-ukraine-border-mission/index_en.htm

Yes, who wouldn’t be thrilled with this kind of activity on their border with an economic bloc that plays hardball? NATO or its proxies can’t fight their way out of a paper bag but they sure are expansive, greedy and never leave anyone alone, EVER.

Meshing ourselves with Brussels forever-and-ever is such a big strategic mistake for Americans….not making an isolationist argument, either, but simply saying there are other ways to relate to Europe. If staying in supposedly prevents conflict, how come we cause so many?

If Russia is such a dire threat that it requires the stationing of missiles and NATO to redouble its efforts, then why the desire to sell them products?

Poland has made a formal request that the EU take Russia before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to overturn its ban on EU food and vegetables.

Reuters reported on Tuesday (19 August) that Poland’s economy ministry had sent a written request for a legal challenge to EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht.

The move is expected to be confirmed by agriculture minister Marek Sawicki and economy minister Janusz Piechociński at a press conference on Wednesday (20 August).

Moscow slapped the one year ban on many food and agriculture imports from the EU, along with the US, Canada, Australia and Norway earlier this month in retaliation against EU sanctions on Russia over its role in the Ukraine crisis.

Poland is likely to be one of the countries hit hardest by the ban. Last year, it exported more than €1 billion of food to Russia, which is its fourth largest market after Germany, the UK and France, with its apple growers, who export around half of their crop to Russia, the main victims.

http://euobserver.com/news/125295

I am sorry, but the rhetoric versus the reality does not instill confidence. Germans are chided for their desire to trade, but this is okay?

War on The Rocks has the following in its weekly roundup:

Julie Ioffe and Linda Kinstler explain that the West is tired and bored with Ukraine, while Europe is reluctant to extend its embrace to a penniless, conflict-ridden country.

http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/weekend-reading-november-14-16/

I think the very rhetoric that Ioffe and others have used has contributed to this process. It’s not so much boredom as wariness and that is what happens when over-the-top rhetoric and the desire for crusades as an activist overtake quality analysis. Russian actions are a concern, there is clearly a complicated proxy conflict going on, yet in describing everything in the most simplistic and hyperbolic ways, Ioffe and others undercut their own credibility. Activists are rarely good analysts, diplomatic, planners, etc., of any kind.

Ever read a young person’s CV these days, for any job really? Our educational system and our larger culture so valorizes activism that we’ve forgotten other people are important too in maintaining a healthy society.

There is an interview in The National Interest that might be of interest:

Former Georgian foreign minister and current chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Georgian parliament Tedo Japaridze is a close observer of these events.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/tni-interview-the-legacy-mikheil-saakashvili-11678

In it, he makes the point that a sort of bait or trap was set and the Georgians under Saakashvili unfortunately took the military bait and attacked. What interests me is how we Americans likely reinforced certain Georgian attitudes that only helped further wandering into a trap, just as I am afraid we are doing the same with Ukraine today.

So the point isn’t that it is the fault of the Americans for expanding NATO or that Russia is hell-bent on domination, instead it is about good governance and the role security policy takes within good governance, it is informed by the larger whole if it is good policy and governance.

It’s so strange, often the very people in DC that would most like to help a certain region or country end up harming it, it’s as if the very emotion that causes the interest prevents a calm assessment of the situation.

A shorter comment since I seem to confuse people:

If we rush to make Eastern European states (NATO and non-NATO alike) into front-line states in a security competition with Russia, we may end up doing to them what happened to Pakistan during the early Cold War, reforms and changes in governance that need to take place may not take place because the impetus for changing how one thinks about the world just isn’t there. Someone will push you into a corner, or you will think that you can always get bailed out by the IMF or whatever.

Think hard, friends in Ukraine and elsewhere. Look at the history of developmentally weak states in the early part of the last Cold War security competition and ask yourself if this is the place you want to put yourself. Fault is not the correct word, I think, instead, what multiple factors brought us to a crisis state and how can it be reversed?

For discussion because emotional ties and habits of mind are complicated things. It’s funny, how some people are told to carefully police their emotions toward certain lands of origin when considering American interests, while others are rarely given that advice (and here I mean general categories of immigrants or religions, not any one specific person):

Secretary Pritzkers Emotional Ties to Ukraine

No country today appeals more to the American hero complex than Ukraine: David against the Russian Goliath, the object of Putin aggression for daring to see its future alongside Europe’s free markets.

BREAK

Penny Pritzker delivered that tough love message in Kiev, the city of her great grandfather’s birth, last week. “President [Petro] Poroshenko said the right things,” the Commerce Secretary, referring to his promise to adopt economic reforms, told me when she returned Friday after stops in Poland and Turkey. “But do they have the will?” That, of course, is a very different question.

Pritzker’s visit may have provided Poroshenko with useful political cover against vested interests protecting the status quo; two of three anti-corruption measures he introduced passed the Parliament. But that’s just a start.

For Pritzker, the visit packed an emotional punch. The Pritzker family fortune can be traced back to Kiev, where her great grandfather followed his brother’s escape from Tsarist Russia to the United States. The latter, Jewish and a political dissident, was about to be sent to Siberia.

http://fortune.com/2014/10/06/secretary-pritzker-kiev/

During the Cold War, the immigrant group in the West that seemed most pro-Western always had the only legitimacy in any complicated ground conflict according the the Western narrative. Not just the Cold War, obviously. Is it the territorial integrity of Ukraine and European stability that matter most, or are there other emotions involved, in that complicated way even well-meaning people can’t always understand? Emotions are one thing, analysis and the sort of analysis that can help a country like Ukraine is a different animal, it needs emotion too, but that emotion should involve something larger than picking one group, and one group only, to love.

Ukrainians of all types should be careful. A certain type of American destroys that which he or she loves the most….Not just Americans fall prey to this, obviously….

To be in an immigrant group that is on the outside of the magic circle is to be ignored, even when the information provided could have helped, really helped, for thirteen, going on fourteen, long years….

From a book review on The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain by J.H. Gleason.

I have not read the book and don’t know the author (for all I know, there might be a, uh, backstory) but am more interested in the “American diplomat’s” assessment, more accurate than anything you all had to back you up intellectually in Afghanistan during our latest campaign:

Though this oversimplifies Mr. Gleason’s complex picture; he emphasizes the fact that “during much of the period in question Great Britain’s policy was, in the main, more provocative than Russia’s” (p.3), and exposes the complete unreality of the “threat to India” by quoting an American diplomat’s report in 1835: “Among the means daily employed to popularize [Russophobia], the preferred views of Russia upon British India have been, however absurdly, held up to excite the ignorant fears of the people” (p. 186). Mr. Gleason concludes that by 1841 there was “a generally accepted stereotype “of Russian villainy whose existence could be assumed by politicians. A few evocative phrases would produce immediate hostile reactions (p. 204, 225, 275f).”

The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain by J. H. Gleason

Christopher Hill
Science & Society
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1952), pp. 281-283

Evocative phrases. Even generally sensible milbloggers and others that I have followed over the years have reacted in a way that seems very emotionally programmed, as if there is a kind of Pavlovian response. Very curious.

The point here is not to debate the nature of Russia or Russians, or the affect of British thinking on American elites, but to understand that within our own history we had judgements quite at odds with the fashionable post-war thinking that so dominates our Washington Consensus, a consensus peopled by an erratically and strangely educated yet hugely ambitious elite with almost no real understanding of why they might react to events.

Those are the more innocent. The less innocent are those who think only in terms of a certain kind of forever enemies of great power politics, and were quite willing to sacrifice anything for it. Anything.

Some of the fashionable DC crowd–“journalists”, think tankers and assorted hangers on trained like dogs to bark at the baddie of the moment–seem to be rethinking a few things as the rouble crisis continues.

Not for long, I’m sure. Careers and money are not made by thinking things through. Crisis often result from the bad decisions of many parties, not just one.

The stagnation of certain middle class incomes in America post 1990, manufacturing, feelings of middle class insecurity despite a not unreasonable current economy, the increased likelihood of conflict in the Mid East if there are no other brokers….yes, thinking things through is not the strong suit of the fashionably PhD’ed. Or, given the money making schemes for certain factions, things HAVE been thought through, just not what is best for the average American or Western European, or Eastern European even. If you need to sell, who shall you sell things to and who will get the contracts?

From Consortium News:

Anyone who dares protest the unrelentingly one-sided coverage is deemed a “Putin apologist” or a “stooge of Moscow.” So, most Americans – in a position to influence public knowledge but who want to stay employable – stay silent, just as they did during the Iraq War stampede.
.
In other words, as the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t get into line. But this conformity of thought presents a serious threat to U.S. national security and even the future of the planet.

And

It may seem clever for some New Republic blogger or a Washington Post writer to insult anyone who doesn’t accept the over-the-top propaganda on Russia and Ukraine – much as they did to people who objected to the rush to war in Iraq – but a military clash with nuclear-armed Russia is a crisis of a much greater magnitude.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/30/group-thinking-the-world-into-a-new-war/

Yes, I’ve noticed. People I’d read for years and had grown to trust now seem afraid to step out on their own. Or perhaps are so caught up in the group fever that they have convinced themselves.

I was much the same in the rush up to the Iraq War, my ignorance and fear and falling into the wrong crowd online all affected how I thought about the world. I believed many stupid things.

I’ve stopped reading old friends except to occasionally scan an article. On a personal level, I wish all well.

It is sad, though. Not everyone I’ve read is some newbie without savings looking for a job. There are quite a lot of settled people that might be kicked out of the fashionable crowd but can feed themselves and their families.

Yet….

OTOH, am I saying much about medicine online? When it comes to my profession, I’m pretty quiet, eh?

Can’t start a war from my work, though.

Whose stupid idea was it to bring two nuclear powers with a troubled history up so close to one another in a tight security perimeter?

That is the exact language used by some in the “military intellectual” field too, the action intellectuals who have never gotten anything correct.

There is no need for the dreaded appeasement either; proxy wars are countered by good governance and intelligent border work.

When was the last time you saw a really good report on the border? OSCE only puts out bits and pieces and there are many with the technology to map the whole darn thing in Ukraine, you know?

Once again, without the links:

What are we doing? Re-creating some of the same emotional dynamics of Able Archer 83, in a kind of loop?

NATO Allies Preparing to Put Four Battalions at Eastern Border With Russia
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense says buildup is response to Moscow’s military activity near the Baltics –
Wall Street Journal

Secretary Carter comes from that whole Fritz Ermarth (Casey and Gates, etc.) world of Star Wars with its proven wrong assessments of the then Soviet Union? They got everything wrong and yet the foreign party establishment bows to the conventional wisdom created by the residua of that foreign party apparatus embedded within Washington.

“The Board is deeply disturbed by the US handling of the war scare, both at the time and since. In the early stages of the war scare period, when evidence was thin, little effort was made to examine the various possible Soviet motivations behind some very anomalous events… When written, the 1984 SNIE’s [assessments][3] were overconfident.” That estimate, written by veteran Soviet analyst Fritz Ermarth, downplayed the hazards.

The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report (GWU national archives)

Heaven help us.

Psychotic:

“To deny adversaries this leverage, or at least reduce it, the Pentagon must studiously think through how the o set strategy can be shaped and imple- mented to deter, discourage and, if need be, control for and respond to adversary nuclear employment. e o set strategy, in simpler terms, must show U.S. adversaries that using nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies would be distinctly unwise and that the United States has ways and means to defeat (at least in limited terms) and deny the objectives of these opponents even if nuclear weapons have been used. …”

What of Third Offset Nuclear Weapons? Elbridge Colby, CNAS. (John Batchelor Show blurb)

Third Offset = give us more money

CNAS is a toxic influence. We are so screwed.

https://audioboom.com/boos/4597489-what-of-third-offset-nuclear-weapons-elbridge-colby-cnas