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George F. Kennan’s Prediction On NATO Expansion Was Right
After the U.S./EU/NATO supported coup in Kiev Russia took steps to secure its vital seaport at Sevastopol on the Crimea. With their plans to use Sevastopol for themselves and to thereby blockade Russia from influence in the Mediterranean stopped by the Russian move various reactionaries immediately demand an expansion of NATO to somehow stop further "Russian aggression":
[T]he US should work with its allies in NATO to build consensus for an immediate announcement by the alliance that NATO membership will be extended to Montenegro and Macedonia and make the commitment to a Membership Action Plan for Georgia at the NATO summit in Cardiff.
These people invert cause and effect. Russia reacted like it did because of NATO's expansion since the late 1990. Such a reaction was utterly foreseeable and was foreseen when the very first NATO expansion towards the East happened.
George Kennan was the U.S. diplomat and Russia specialist who developed the cold war strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, though he later criticized its militaristic implementation. In 1998, when the Senate voted to extend NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Kennan was asked to comment. He responded:
"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever."
…
"It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong."
NATO expansion and the putsch in Kiev are, as Kennan predicted, the reason that Russia acts as decisive as it does. A harsh Russian reaction because of NATO extension is NOT a good reason to extend NATO further. The Russian (and Chinese) reaction to that would likely be even harsher. No one serious should wish back the times when nuclear war often looked imminent. Luckily neither the public in the U.S. nor in the EU is willing to go that way.
#142:
We did not seek this confrontation. This new era crept up on us, because we did not fully win the Cold War. Communism faded, the Soviet Union disappeared and Russian power diminished. But the collapse of the Soviet order did not lead smoothly to a transition to democracy and markets inside Russia, or Russia’s integration into the West.
Translation: Russia’s surrender to the Empire was not absolute and unconditional.
A revisionist autocratic leader instigated this new confrontation. We did not.
No, of course not. The US did not break its promise to Gorbachev not to expand NATO, and Victoria Nuland didn’t discuss the overthrow of the Ukrainian government with the US ambassador to the Ukraine, the purpose of which was to get the Ukraine into NATO, to place US missiles there.
Also, similar to the last century, the ideological struggle between autocracy and democracy has returned to Europe. Because democratic institutions never fully took root in Russia, this battle never fully disappeared.
Whereas they fully took root in the Ukraine, where the elected government was overthrown by a violent fascist coup.
And, as before, the current regime must be isolated.
So, the Russian government is a regime now? I thought the US reserved that word for countries it is about to bomb.
Mr. Putin’s Russia has no real allies. We must keep it that way. Nurturing Chinese distance from a revisionist Russia is especially important
What does “revisionist” mean here? The only thing I can think of is that the US understanding, produced by Yeltsin, was that with the end of the Cold War, Russia had submitted to the US absolutely, and that that was history set in stone, so that now that Russia is standing up for its national interests, Putin is engaging in historical revisionism.
Posted by: Demian | Mar 24 2014 7:26 utc | 145
For one I’m not a complete newbie here either. More importantly though seniority isn’t everything; it helps when seeing a consistent mindset and a good track record but in the end, important is what one says now and here and how one says it.
r’giap behaves like an asshole since some days but I do not think that he *is* one; frankly, my assumption is more one pointing to the dancing yeltsin. Whatever it may be that drives him to recently behave grossly impolite and to offer little but personal attacks, it may be forgivable but it’s not acceptable nor is it in any way helpful or constructive, no matter how long he’s been here and no matter how many here dive in memories of the good old days.
So, is it the zionists? Or “global players”? Or evil forces? Or illuminati? Or the flying spaghetti monster? We do not know and we can not even really know. Certainly, a force that is powerful enough to make “big” leaders dance to their tunes, to make the media tell or not tell sth., to make bombs fall on any target, and to make billions of any currency flow around the globe, do have the power, too, to be seen or not seen or to be be seen in many suits.
So, in a sense the zionists are a symbol, too. Maybe I’m blaming this or that war these or those million deads on zionists when, in fact, party X was responsible. But then, if it was important to be just and fair to mass murderers of the worst kind, the price to pay for us would be to not name the guilty party at all if only it was capable of disguising its responsibility and guilt.
That is certainly not acceptable. And from what we can know the zionists have indeed been and are at least one of the worst evils this world has ever seen and consistently so.
Furthermore, there is nothing that should lead us to believe that there is sth. like democracy or shared responsibility on the top floor of real power, the floor where unjustified wars are decided and where agents are decided upon which then take care of the everyday management of the politician puppets.
*If* there were indeed two or three different groups in charge one would certainly notice some ripple effects as one would do in a city with two or three crime syndicates in charge, even if those usually would stick to any deals sharing the city.
We could delve deeper into this matter and, yes, we would certainly see different players and faces, players like master bankers behind the front of everyday banking, players like grey warlord emminences with just the right wires to analysts and generals, and others. But this would lead us nowhere because it’s neither the bankers nor the warlords who really call the shots; there is yet another power behind those, a power with interests in all areas and controlling the whole game. It might not be 100% correct and always correct to name that power “the zionists” but it certainly is often enough correct enough to call “the zionists” *the* evil party behind all evil things or, at least, to use that as a label.
It seems that many jews play an important role in the ugly game. But beware, it’s not as easy as calling out “the jews” as evil. First, zionism is linked to jews, maybe deeply, maybe just pragmatically, but anyway it’s not “the jews” driving and controlling zionism. Actually I tend to think that the jews are just pragmatically linked, maybe even chosen in cold calcule. After all, they are everywhere, they are a rather small group, they, due to their culture, tend to value education highly and they are not too open but rather a close knit group; in short the jews are what an evil force might consider a very useful tool. And in a very ugly way (ugly for the jews, too) they have indeed been by being blamed by pretty everyone and his dog for evil things and most of all israel which perfidiously calls itself “state of the jews”. But it gets even more perfidious. In going that way the zionist actually drive many jews to really feel that they should be linked to zionism and come to israel, a step that might seem to offer some security but actually also creates dependency.
Maybe I’m wrong but it seems very important to me to *not* blame or hate the jews and to not paint them as evil as doing so just adds injustice and more problems and also plays into the hands of the zionists.
In fact we see that ugly game at work right now in ukraine. Some israels even openly said that israel is to profit from the ukraine nazis by making the jews there understand that they can find security only in israel. And indeed israel is winning in diverse regards. One of those being that european countries will be blamed to have created a situation in which the ukraine jews were put in danger by the european instigated and payed nazis unless, of course, they blindly obey and do as told by the zionists.
More as a sidenote I’m still uncertain about zusa and particularly obama. While that guy, of course, is foremost a politician, i.e. a lousy creature and remote controlled puppet, I’m under the impression that there might be some kind of opposing force that succeeded in putting him into place with the goal of breaking zusa free from israel. Of course no zamerican president can simply declare such a step; it must be split into many small steps. kerry may be puppet but he seems to be somewhat less pro-israel than others (like clinton bitch) and obama is relatively discretely but anyway consistent in his demands for peace by/and a two state solution which, of course, is perceived as a quite direct attack by israel; in fact there are even some organisations daring to boycott israel; granted it’s not yet wide spread and it’s not yet big organisation but ones like the architects guild of some country but anyway, there is a certain kind of movement that was unthinkable five years ago.
One issue that “poked” me particularly is the many high ranking officers in the zusa military that have been sacked. It might be interesting to see what kind of officers those were. I know only one case and that was some admiral (guette or similar) who in 2007 (I think) wanted to provoke a war with Iran and almost succeeded. So it might well be that many of those officers were very friendly towards israel.
Sure enough there will again be some idiots calling me anti-semite. Oh well, …
Ceterum censeo israel americanamque vehementer delenda esse!
Posted by: Mr. Pragma | Mar 24 2014 15:59 utc | 159
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