Joe Biden must think that he’s the world’s Rich Uncle. In a meeting with the
so-called Bucharest Nine today he promised these former Warsaw Pact nations
– which should never have been admitted to NATO in the first place – unlimited
economic and military support.
Nine more Ukraines if need be.
Biden conveyed reassurances that the United States is prepared to speed
to their defense if they come under offensive action by Moscow. These nations
include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Romania and Slovakia.
For want of doubt, here’s the just-in-case-you-missed-the-message amplification
from NSC spokesman John Kirby. Said the Deep State’s favorite shill, who is
apparently serving the national security complex in endless rotation:
“These are largely the group of eastern flank NATO allies who are basically
and, quite frankly, literally on the front lines of our collective defense
right now,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had previewed.
He said the president’s purpose in the meeting is to “reaffirm the
United States’ unwavering support for the security of that alliance and
trans-Atlantic unity.” It’s also meant to send a message to Putin that
his country can’t intimidate these democracies, some of them relatively new
and fragile.
Well, let’s see. Where is it documented that Putin has ever threatened Bulgaria
or Hungary or Slovakia or Lithuania or any of the others for that matter?
And what in the world could he gain by attacking these nations and occupying
what would be hostile populations and damaged economies, posing a tremendous
fiscal drain on his already beleaguered finances?
The fact is, Washington has become so crazed with anti-Putin war fever that
it doesn’t even ask, let alone answer, these foundational questions. Instead,
it has just lapsed into grade school reasoning by analogy. If Putin attacked
the government of Ukraine, why then it’s a sure bet that the nine yellow dominoes
highlighted in the map below are next on the list to fall.
No, not at all. Ukraine is sui generis. It’s a hodgepodge of variant
histories, ethnicities and religious traditions that never belonged under the
roof of a single state and which marinated during recent centuries as vassals
under the tutelage of Czarist Russia. Its historically meandering boundaries,
in fact, were only finally frozen in current form during the 20th century by
the brutal dictates of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
During the long amalgamation of these neighboring, mainly Slavic populations
the eastern and southern portions of the current Ukraine map became populated
and economically developed by Russian speaking immigrants. At length, they converted
the largely empty, herder-dominated steppes into the flourishing bread basket,
mining district and industrial work shop of old Russia.
This arrangement that was essentially continued by the communist commissars
after they consolidated control in 1922, save only for an arbitrary administrative
rearrangement which put the old “Novorossiya” (New Russia) of Catherine
the Great’s time into a wholly unnatural state re-christened as the Soviet Socialist
Republic of Ukraine.
These artificial borders and the ethnic hodgepodge within them were held together
at the gun point of Ukraine’s local communist rulers until 1991, when the scourge
of Soviet Communism perished from the earth. And almost immediately thereafter,
the elections showed that the state confected by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev
had never been built to last; and that the verdict of Ukraine’s nascent democracy
was that partition would someday be the only answer.
As it happened, the last democratically elected politician, Yanukovych, who
was driven out of the country by a Washington sponsored coup d’ etat in February
2014, had been the champion of the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas
and southern rim of the Black Sea. He ran on what was called the “Regions”
party platform in both 2004 and 2010, against vehemently pro-Ukrainian candidates,
whose bases of support were in the central and west geographies.
As shown in the two maps below, in both elections it was a case of red state
versus blue state electoral division on steroids. Except unlike the US where
a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually got a 42% showing in the deep blue state
of New York this past election, the vote split in the most hard core of the
respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.
In the 2004 election, Yanukovych narrowly lost the overall count, even as he
dominated in the east and south.
2004 Election Results in Ukraine
By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his
own Russian-speaking regions while striking out in the west. But this time with
the help of Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort)
he managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top in the
nationwide tally.
2010 Election Results in Ukraine
Needless to say, when the foolish neocons, led by the detestable Victoria Nuland,
who surrounded Vice-President Joe Biden fomented the coup against Yanukovych
in February 2014 they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were
upending.
But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of
the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed
government in Kiev made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let
the partition begin.”
The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbas
and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of pro-Russian trade
unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.
It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories
on the maps above declared their independence. And also in short order the people
of what had been the Russian province of Crimea after Catherine the Great purchased
it from the Ottoman’s in 1783 voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation.
Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply
antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking
to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics
of the Donbas – an onslaught that ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians
during the eight year run up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted
even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962.
Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers
in the Donbas after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing
campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the invasion.
In Part 2 we will amplify further on the overwhelming reasons why the Ukraine
situation is a one-off civil war situation and the unfinished and unstable residue
of a state which was never built to last.
Accordingly, it is not a case at all of legitimate sovereign borders being
violated. Nor does it involve an assault on the hypocritical notion of a “liberal
international order” that has not actually ever existed and which, instead,
has been a cover for Washington’s global hegemony all along.
But the lessons are nonetheless profound. History accumulates and eventually
leads to destructive, but wholly unnecessary outcomes.
That is the case today with the utterly foolish action of Washington during
the 1990s and 2000s to bring former Warsaw Pact Nations, and even breakaway
Soviet Republics into a NATO alliance whose mission was over and done in 1991.
It should have been dismantled then and there. When the old Soviet monster
with its 50,000 tanks and 7,000 nuclear warheads posed alongside the Bucharest
Nine pictured above disappeared into the dustbin of history, there was no longer
a threat to the east. There was no “front line” to defend.
At that point Washington should have and easily could have led the world to
disarmament and to a revival of the lasting peace that had disappeared in the
“Guns of August” in 1914.
But now the NATO section 5 mutual defense commitment to these nations is equivalent
to a stupid charity that the nearly bankrupt Federal government cannot afford
in any case.
There is absolutely nothing in it for the enhancement of America’s homeland
security, and huge incentives for the politicians of these nations to caterwaul
against Russia rather than seek peaceful accommodation.
But Sleepy Joe is a captive of the Dems “Trump Derangement Syndrome”
and cannot think rationally for a moment about the Russian President.
Still, the latter most definitely did not cause the Dems to loose the 2016
election. They brought Trump’s freakish victory upon themselves by their choice
of candidate and embrace of policies that much of Flyover America found deeply
repugnant.
PART 2
When Washington began its foolish campaign to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep
in 1997, there was one American who actually possessed more knowledge, experience
and analytical savvy about Russia and eastern Europe than the entire treaty-ratifying
US Senate combined.
We are referring, of course, to Ambassador George F. Kennan. The latter was
the intellectual father of the post-war containment policy against the Soviet
Union and had spent decades in the US embassies of Europe and the Soviet Union,
before going on to hold high rank in the State Department during the crucial
years after WWII when the Cold War was born. Thereafter he joined academia at
Princeton, where he produced a prodigious flow of scholarly work on national
security policy, including a ringing dissent on the folly of LBJ’s war on Vietnam.
So by the time he penned a New York Times op ed upon the initial expansion
of NATO in 1997, which he succinctly entitled “A Fateful Error,” the
93-year-old Kennan had decades and decades of wisdom under his belt as a policy-maker
and historian. And almost all of it was directly pertinent to the disorder left
behind in the wake of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991.
Kennan pulled no punches on the matter of NATO expansion:
The architect of the cold war policy of containment did not mince words
in arguing that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error in American
policy in the entire post-cold war era.” He predicted that “it
would inflame nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian
opinion,” “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy,”
“restore the atmosphere of cold war to east-west relations,” and “impel
Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
A fair share of the script readers and stenographers who comprise today’s mainstream
media, of course, have a faint knowledge of George Kennan and his unequivocal
stance against NATO expansion, if any at all. Their blinders are simply the
product of a quarter-century of accumulated recency bias – a process by which
the once unthinkable becomes the unchallenged status quo.
The fact is, once the Soviet Union with its 50,000 tanks, 40,000 nuclear warheads,
5 million men under arms and frightfully militarized economy disappeared into
the dustbin of history there was no purpose whatsoever for the perpetuation
of NATO.
In that sense, Kennan’s “containment” policy had achieved 100% of
its goal. The fearsome enemy on the eastern flank of Europe had literally vanished,
meaning that what had been a one-time expedient of the Cold War could and should
have been disbanded. In the rubble of the dismembered Soviet Union there was
no threat left and nothing to defend or contain.
NATO’s warranted interment didn’t happen, however, and for the immensely trivial
reason that the utterly unprincipled Bill Clinton determined to make hay one
more time in the political posturing grounds of the “Captive Nations.”
And with respect to this long forgotten matter your editor happened to have
held a front row seat.
When we went to work on Capitol Hill for a GOP congressman at the peak of the
Cold War in 1970 our first assignment was drafting a resolution during Captive
Nations Week calling for the liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania etc
from yoke of Soviet tyranny. Such resolutions had nothing to do with actual
policy, of course, which was to leave the Great Russian Bear undisturbed in
his lair called the Warsaw Pact. But as a home-front politicking matter such
resolutions were catnip to the eastern European constituencies.
After eastern Europe was peacefully liberated in 1991, however, this Captive
Nations gambit became self-evidently obsolete, but the Clinton Administration
soon had a handy PR substitute. Namely, NATO membership for the woebegone remnants
of the Warsaw Pact – a seemingly harmless gesture that had no real purpose other
than to express solidarity with back home constituencies of eastern European
descent.
NATO expansion, in effect, was a way for Washington politicians to say: We
are still with you!
Indeed, since there was no plausible reason for maintaining a war alliance
against an enemy that didn’t exist, NATO became the equivalent of a diplomatic
American Legion hall. It was a place for bureaucratic veterans of the Cold War
to swap combat stories and to pretend they still had something worthwhile to
do.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that harmless. The military-industrial complex
soon realized that it needed a tangible enemy to justify current procurement
and new weapons systems and also that the former Captive Nations comprised an
expanded market for its wares.
So the 14 new NATO nations formed a ready-made shopping mall for additional
weapons sales.
That all might have been harmless enough, save for two untoward developments.
The first was the designation of Russia and Putin as enemy #1 by the neocons
after their adventures against “terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere in the middle east came a cropper a few years after the memory of
9/11 had dimmed.
The demonization of Putin became especially urgent in late 2013 when he deftly
put the kibosh on the neocon’s plan for regime change in Syria. By convincing
Assad to give up his chemical weapons under international supervision, the case
for military removal of the Syrian president quickly evaporated.
In short order, however, these same neocons got their revenge by fomenting
a coup d’ etat on Putin’s doorstep in Ukraine. And it was led by Washington’s
hand-picked proto-fascists who detested all things Russian, including the considerable
populations and regions of Ukraine which were Russian-speaking.
As it happened, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to recognize the near-conspiracy
on the banks of the Potomac that sent the fragile politics of the artificial
state of Ukraine into a tail-spin, and which at length paved the way to the
catastrophe underway there at present.
The fact is, the detestable Kagan family comprises the high preisthood of the
neocon synod that has infiltrated the foreign policy establishment of both parties.
And it just so happens that the very high priest of that lamentable synod, Robert
Kagan, is married to Victoria Nuland, a war-mongering national security apparatchik
who has served every administration since Bush the Younger, and who was the
archetict of the Maidan coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.
From that moment on, Putin was transformed from mere a bad guy into the incarnation
of evil itself in the neocon narrative. And his rational actions after the coup
to reclaim Moscow’s centuries old naval bases in Russian Crimea and to offer
succor to the imperiled Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas only added
fuel to the fire.
But then came the deluge. In a word, the freakish election of Donald Trump
in 2016 was falsely laid at Putin’s doorstep, even as Washington’s bipartisan
ruling elites and their henchman in the mainstream media went berserk against
the Donald.
At length, it turned into a a full-fledged mania – a Trump Derangement Syndrome
(TDS) that pales into insignificance prior outbreaks of American political irrationality,
such as the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the Red Hunts of 1919.
In a word, the TDS has utterly destroyed Washington’s foreign policy compass.
The demonization of Putin has become so extreme and un-moored from reality that
Washington is literally possessed by a ghost of the old Soviet Union. That is,
it imagines a ferocious and powerful enemy on the “eastern front”
that simply does not exist.
For crying out loud, GDP is a measure of latent capacity to make war, but the
GDP of NATO is 26 times larger than that of Russia. Likewise,
defense budgets are a measure of actual current military capacity, of which
NATO’s war spending is 15 times larger. And that’s in the here
and now.
Moreover, from the point of view of Vlad Putin leaping over the Atlantic and
Pacific ocean moats to invade the American shores, the question recurs: How
many aircraft carriers does he have compared to America’s 20 aircraft and heliocraft
carriers?
One!
And it’s 38 years old!
In a word, the absurdity of Washington’s proxy war against Russia and this
week’s meeting of the so-called Bucharest Nine is the product of a foreign policy
compass that has been shattered by two decades worth of myths and lies that
served the short-term interests of Washington’s career politicians and their
Deep State masters.
But go back to the fact that George Kennan was right 26 years ago and the truth
that nothing has changed in the interim to alter his judgment. In that context,
what would a president not entombed in the false narrative of the past quarter
century actually do?
Here are a few possible starters:
Arrange exile for Zelensky in Costa Rica ( far better than he deserves);
Agree to a settlement in Ukraine that partitions the country and allows
the territories in the east and south previously known as Novorossiya (New
Russia) to go their separate way or rejoin Mother Russia;
Remove NATO’s missiles and other advanced warfare capability from the former
Warsaw Pact countries, so as to eliminate the military threat on Russia’s
doorstep;
Arrange for the early dissolution of NATO after the Ukraine proxy war has
been extinguished;
Re-open and complete an updated version of the nuclear arms treaties enacted
near the end of the Cold War, two of which were abrogated by Washington
and one this week by Moscow;
Cut the egregiously bloated $850 billion defense budget by 50% and lead
the world into a new global treaty to drastically reduce the scale and cost
of conventional arms;
Begin the nearly insuperable challenge of sharply paring back the nation’s
$2 trillion plus annual deficits, which extend as far as the eye can see.
That would be a start. It would put America back on the road toward rational
homeland security, and enable a global future not imperiled by the threat of
Nuclear Armageddon.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the
Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.
After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street.
He’s the author of three books, The
Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The
Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED!
A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently
released Great
Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also
is founder of David
Stockman’s Contra Corner and David
Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.