June 23, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
It is difficult to find
anything good to say about
Donald Trump,
but the reality is that he has not started any new
wars, though he has come dangerously close in the
cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be
considerable incentive in the next four months to
begin something to bolster his “strong president”
credentials and to serve as a distraction from
coronavirus and black lives matter.
Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch
up to the record set by his three predecessors
Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out
neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led,
including in his administration
Donald Rumsfeld,
Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul
Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and
Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of
having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought
he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who
believed that the United States had the right to do
whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own
security, to include invading other countries, which led
to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces
stationed nearly twenty years later.
Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal
interventionists who sought to export something called
democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them
more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan
as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his
arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by
Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the
first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning
session to review a list of American citizens who would
benefit from being killed by drone.
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The Lies And
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So the difference between
neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style
rather than substance. And, by either yardstick
all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has
nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in
his administration. The America the exceptional
mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief
that the United States is empowered by God to play
only by its own rules when dealing with other
nations. That would include following the advice
that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael
Ledeen, “Every ten
years or so, the United States needs to pick up some
small crappy little country and throw it against the
wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
One of the first families within the neocon/liberal
interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and
Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon
American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly
heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of
War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the
Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a
Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal
interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at
Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary
Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing
500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was “worth it.”
Nuland also has significant neocon connections through
her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick
Cheney.
Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind
efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of
President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an
admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime
Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs at the State Department, provided open support
to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to
Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly
appearances
passing out cookies on the square to encourage the
protesters.
Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by
brazenly supportinggovernment opponents in spite of
the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly
friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S.
administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a
foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics,
particularly if it were backed by a
$5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed
in a global double standard for evaluating its own
behavior.
Nuland is most famous for her
foul language when referring to the potential
European role in managing the unrest that she and the
National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in
Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government
in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and
escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over
Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in
Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
And make no mistake about Nuland’s broader intention at
that time to expand the conflict and directly confront
Russia. In Senate testimony
she cited how the administration was “providing
support to other frontline states like Moldova and
Georgia.” Her use of the word “frontline” is suggestive.
Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the
only nation with the military capability to destroy the
U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a
corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is
not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons
to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including
counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from
moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to
reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling
reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming
Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO).
Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for
July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine
on the proper way for the United States
manage what she sees as the Russian “threat.” It is
entitled “How a Confident America Should Deal With
Russia.” Foreign Affairs, it should be
observed, is an establishment house organ produced by
the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a
comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal
interventionists.
Nuland’s view is that the United States lost confidence
in its own “ability to change the game” against Vladimir
Putin, who has been able to play “a weak hand well
because the United States and its allies have let him,
allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties,
international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and
the integrity of elections in the United States and
Europe… Washington and its allies have forgotten the
statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield
results for many years after. That strategy required
consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level,
unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared
resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the
Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to
cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian
people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet
that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia’s
threat to the liberal world has grown.”
What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were
to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state
threatening the “liberal world.” She sees Russian
rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was
dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares
her fear that Putin might seek “…reestablishing a
Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from
vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors.
Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies
and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially
on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard
Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that
NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no
threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin’s agenda
to see Europe in zero-sum terms.”
Nuland’s view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark
that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia
would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be
a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had
provided assurances that expansion would not take place.
She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin’s
great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his
having “…always understood that a belt of increasingly
democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a
direct challenge to his leadership model and risk
re-infecting his own people with democratic
aspirations.”
Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central
theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter
Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts
as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her
analysis is ridiculous, as “Russian troops regularly
test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain
access to the country’s oil fields and smuggling routes.
If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow
and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian
oil or smuggled drugs and weapons.”
Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any
sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a
legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine
because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She
accuses the Kremlin of having “seized” Crimea, but fails
to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in
Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of
Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is
aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has
only one overseas military base while the United States
has more than a thousand.
Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House’s
threats against countries that do not toe the American
line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly
also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of
those nations threaten the United States and all the
kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a
gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington,
not from “undemocratic” leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran,
Caracas or Beijing.
Victoria Nuland recommends that “The challenge for the
United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of
the world in crafting a more effective approach to
Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts
stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among
his own citizens.” Interestingly, that might be regarded
as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign
government, reminiscent of the phony case made against
Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in
fact do in Ukraine.
Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those
who are interested in the current state of
interventionism in Washington should not ignore her.
Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is
a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and
less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an
interest in what goes on right on top of its border
while the United States five thousand miles away and
possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces
can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden
of being the world’s self-appointed policeman.
Philip M. Giraldi,
Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the
National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible
educational foundation that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle
East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and
its email is
inform@cnionline.org.
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