I
find it almost impossible to overstate the dangers of recent actions
of NATO by moving not only troops but their anti-missile defense to
“spitting distance” of Russia.
I
would recommend that every thinking person living in North America
and Europe (and indeed everywhere, since every living being is
affected) listen carefully to the following excerpt from a
discussion between Prof. Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor and read
the article below.
The usually-understated Cohen is sounding the alarm bells.
The
extract is taken from a longer item, NATO
escalates and Russia fulminates
Putin Is Being Pushed to Abandon His Conciliatory Approach to the West and Prepare for War
With
so little to show for his willingness to deal with the west many
Russians including top officials want Putin to adopt a harder line
instead
19
May, 2015
Something
significant happened in the last few days of April, but it seems the
only person who noticed was Stephen Cohen, a professor emeritus of
Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University.
In
a recorded interview,
Cohen notes that a section of the Russian leadership is showing signs
of restlessness, focused on President Vladimir Putin’s leadership.
We are not talking of street protesters. We are not talking coups
against Putin — his popularity remains above
80 percent and he is not about to be displaced. But we are talking
about serious pressure being applied to the president to come down
from the high wire along which he has warily trod until now.
Putin
carries, at one end of his balancing pole, the various elites more
oriented toward the West and the “Washington
Consensus“
and, at the pole’s other end, those concerned that Russia faces
both a real military threat from the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and a hybrid geo-financial war as well. He is being
pressed to come down on the side of the latter, and to pry the grip
of the former from the levers of economic power that they still
tightly hold.
In
short, the issue coming to a head in the Kremlin is whether Russia is
sufficiently prepared for further Western efforts to ensure it does
not impede or rival American hegemony. Can Russia sustain a
geo-financial assault, if one were to be launched? And is such a
threat real or mere Western posturing for other ends?
What
is so important is that if these events are misread in the West,
which is already primed to see any Russian defensive act as offensive
and aggressive, the ground will already have been laid for
escalation. We already had the first war to push back against NATO in
Georgia. The second pushback war is ongoing in Ukraine. What might be
the consequences to a third?
In
mid-April, General Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s
Investigative Committee (a sort of super attorney general, as Cohen
describes it), wrote that
Russia — its role in Syria notwithstanding — is militarily ill
prepared to face a new war either at home or abroad, and that the
economy is in a bad way, too. Russia, furthermore, is equally ill
prepared to withstand a geo-financial war. He goes on to say that the
West is preparing for war against Russia and that Russia’s
leadership does not appear to be aware of or alert to the danger the
country faces.
Bastrykin
does not say that Putin is to blame, though the context makes it
clear that this is what he means. But a few days later, Cohen
explains, the article sparked
further discussion from
those who both endorse Bastrykin and do precisely mention Putin by
name. Then, Cohen notes, a retired Russian general entered the fray
to confirm that the West is indeed preparing for war — he pointed
to NATO deployments in the Baltics, the Black Sea and Poland, among
other places — and underlines again the unpreparedness of the
Russian military to face this threat. “This is a heavy indictment
of Putin,” Cohen says of the revelations from this analysis. “It
is now out in the open.”
What
is this all about? For some time there have been indications that
a key faction within the Kremlin, one that very loosely might be
termed “nationalist,” has become deeply disenchanted with Putin’s
toleration of the Washington Consensus and its adherents at the
Russian central bank and in other pivotal economic posts. The
nationalists want them purged, along with Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev’s perceived Western-friendly government. Putin may be
highly popular, but Medvedev’s government is not. The government’s
economic policy is being criticized. The opposing faction wants to
see an immediate mobilization of the military and the economy for
war, conventional or hybrid. This is not about wanting Putin ousted;
it is about pushing him to wield the knife — and to cut deeply.
What
does this faction want apart from Russia preparing for war? They want
a harder line in Ukraine and for Putin to reject U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry’s snares in Syria. In short, Kerry is still trying
to force Assad’s removal and continues to push for further U.S.
support for the opposition. The American government is reluctant as
well to disentangle “moderates” from jihadis. The view is that
America is insincere in trying to cooperate with Russia on a
settlement and more intent on entrapping Putin in Syria. Perhaps this
is right, as Gareth
Porter and Elijah
Magnier have
outlined.
What
this means at a more fundamental level is that Putin is being asked
to side with the nationalists against the internationalists aligned
with the Washington Consensus, and to purge them from power. Recall,
however, that Putin came to power precisely to temper this polarity
within Russian society by rising above it — to heal and rebuild a
diverse society recovering from deep divisions and crises. He is
being asked to renounce that for which he stands because, he is being
told, Russia is being threatened by a West that is preparing for war.
The
prospect of the seeming inevitability of future conflict is hardly
new to Putin, who has spoken often on this theme. He has, however,
chosen to react by placing the emphasis on gaining time for Russia to
strengthen itself and trying to corner the West into some sort of
cooperation or partnership on a political settlement in Syria, for
example, which might have deflected the war dynamic into a more
positive course. Putin has, at the same time, skillfully steered
Europeans away from NATO escalation.
But
in both of these objectives the Obama administration is acting to
weaken Putin and Lavrov’s hand, and therefore strengthening the
hand of those in Russia calling for a full mobilization for war. It
is not coincidental that Bastrykin’s alarm-raising article came
now, as the Syria ceasefire is being deliberately infringed and
broken. Is this properly understood in the White House? If so, must
we conclude that escalation against Russia is desired? As
Cohen notes,
“the Washington Post [in its editorial pages] tells us
regularly that never, never, never ... under any circumstances, can
the criminal Putin be a strategic partner of the United States.”
Is the die then cast? Is Putin bound to fail? Is conflict inevitable? Ostensibly, it may seem so. The stage is certainly being set. I have written before on, “the pivot already under way from within the U.S. defense and intelligence arms of Obama’s own administration” toward what is often referred to as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” a set of policies developed by the U.S. in the 1990s and early 2000s. The author of one of those policies, the 1992 U.S. Defense Planning Guidance, wrote that the DPG in essence sought to:
... preclude the emergence of bipolarity, another global rivalry like the Cold War, or multipolarity, a world of many great powers, as existed before the two world wars. To do so, the key was to prevent a hostile power from dominating a ‘critical region,’ defined as having the resources, industrial capabilities and population that, if controlled by a hostile power, would pose a global challenge.
In
an interview with Vox,
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter was clear that this was
broadly the bearing by which the Pentagon was being directed to sail.
Then again, there is the rather obvious fact that, instead of the
much-touted U.S. military pivot ostensibly being to Asia, the actual
NATO pivot is being directed to Central Europe — to Russia’s
borders. And NATO is plainly pushing the envelope as hard as it
dares, up and against Russia’s borders.
Then
there is the rhetoric:
Russian aggression. Russian ambitions to recover the former Soviet
Empire. Russian attempts to divide and destroy Europe. And so on.
Why?
It may be that NATO simply presumes these envelope-pushing exercises
will never actually come to war, that Russia somehow will back off.
And that continuously poking the bear will serve America’s interest
in keeping Europe together and NATO cohesive, its sanctions in place,
divided from Russia. NATO is due to meet in Warsaw in early July.
Perhaps, then, the Western language about Russia’s “aggression”
is little more than America heading off any European revolt on
sanctions by stirring up a pseudo-threat from Russia and that the
Russians are misreading American true intentions, which do not go
beyond this. Or do they?
The
extraordinary bitterness and emotional outrage with which the
American establishment has reacted to Donald Trump’s probable
nomination as a presidential candidate suggests that the U.S.
establishment is far from having given up on the Wolfowitz doctrine.
So has Putin’s strategy of co-opting America in the Middle East
been the failure that the Bastrykin faction implies? In other words,
is it the case that the policy of gaining cooperation has failed and
that Putin must now move beyond it, because America is not about to
cooperate and is, instead, continuing the process of cornering
Russia?
As
the Texas Tribune reported on
May 4, “For the first time since his own presidency, George H.W.
Bush is planning to stay silent in the race for the Oval Office —
and the younger former president Bush plans to stay silent as well.”
To
get a sense of the war within the Republican Party (and the Democrats
are no less conflicted), read this reaction to
that story by the two-time Republican presidential candidate Pat
Buchanan. Here’s a small selection:
Trump’s triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism by the same party that nominated them [the Bush’s] four times for the presidency. Not only was son and brother, Jeb, humiliated and chased out of the race early, but Trump won his nomination by denouncing as rotten to the core the primary fruits of signature Bush policies ... That is a savage indictment of the Bush legacy. And a Republican electorate, in the largest turnout in primary history, nodded, ‘Amen to that, brother!’
Buchanan continues in
another piece: “The hubris here astonishes. A Republican
establishment that has been beaten as badly as Carthage in the Third
Punic War is now making demands on Scipio Africanus and the
victorious Romans” — a reference to Paul Ryan’s attempts to
make Trump adhere to Bush Republicanism. “This is difficult to
absorb.”
But
here, in this crisis, is an opportunity. America could
be heading into
recession, corporate profits are falling,
huge swaths of debt are looking suspect, global trade is sinking and
U.S. policy tools for controlling the global financial system have
lost their credibility. And there are no easy solutions to the global
overhang of increasingly putrid debt.
But
a President Trump — were that to happen — can lay blame for any
perfect economic storm on the establishment. America is all knotted
up at present, as the presidential nomination melee made clear. Some
knots will take time to undo, but some could be undone relatively
easily, and it seems that Trump has some sense of this. It could
start with a dramatic diplomatic initiative.
Historically,
most radical projects of reform have started in this way: overturn a
piece of conventional wisdom and unlock the entire policy gridlock —
the momentum gained will allow a reformer to steamroll even the
hardest resistance — in this case, Wall Street and the financial
oligarchy — into making reforms.
Trump
can simply say that American — and European — national security
interests pass directly through Russia — which they clearly do —
that Russia does not threaten America — which it clearly does not —
and that NATO is, in any case, “obsolete,” as he has said.
It makes perfect sense to join with Russia and its allies to surround
and destroy the so-called Islamic State.
If
one listens carefully, Trump seems halfway there. It would cut a lot
of knots, maybe even untie the policy gridlock. Perhaps that is what
he intends?
Stephen Cohen, just great! In medias res!!!
ReplyDeleteProf.Stephen Cohen is a great American Internationalist and true& Honest Geo-strategic Analyst of Russian-American Affairs.
ReplyDeletePutin is up against a nasty adversary, International Jewish Banking Cartels and Judea.
ReplyDelete