by Oui
Fri Apr 28th, 2023 at 06:36:33 PM EST
Swedish Defense Research Agency, a report written in 2002 ... speaking of idealism 😄
The membership experiences of Denmark, Norway, Hungary, and the Czech Republic
The Influence of Small States on NATO Decision-Making
Post 9/11 the NATO alliance has changed for the worse unfortunately.
Mobilizing Against Russia?
Some Reflections on the Security Deadlock Called Ukraine | Egmont Papers - Joris Van Bladel |
ONE: THE CURRENT CRISIS IS DRIVEN BY AT LEAST FIVE RUSSIAN RIDDLES
- Why did Michael Gorbachev agree with the US-German demand to reunify Germany as part of NATO in 1990?
- What and who brought Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to the helm of Russian power in 1999?
- Why, after a period of close cooperation and dialogue, has Vladimir Putin changed his course towards the West since 2007?
- Why has Vladimir Putin significantly hardened his domestic and foreign policy, leading to a full-fledged authoritarian regime since 2012?
- What is the "end goal" of Vladimir Putin's strategy?
- What are the real intentions of the Russian president and his cronies?
Even though the answer to these riddles would provide the key to understanding Russia's current political attitude and military posture, nobody can give neat and precise answers to these questions. What is left is conjecture, if not speculation. Russia, indeed, remains an enigma.
TWO: THE PROCESS OF NATO ENLARGEMENT HAS BEEN CONFRONTED WITH ITS OWN LIMITS
One of the main driving forces fuelling the Russian-Ukraine conflict, NATO enlargement, is not necessarily an ill-advised policy. Yet it is a challenging strategy full of dilemmas and problematic considerations, the ultimate consequences of which have not always been thought through. Europe's security dilemma is the result of the following developments:
Challenged by a new security situation in Europe, NATO enlargement had to balance two incompatible realities: the historically conditioned, nationalist-inspired, anti-Russian security request from the Central and Eastern European countries, and the clearly signalled Soviet/Russian opposition to the absorption of Europe's "liminal spaces" into the Western sphere of influence. The "end of history" could indeed not erase the historical memory of the Central and Eastern European countries.
[...]
The most disappointing yet accurate answer to these questions is that we do not know. We may endlessly speculate about various scenarios and Russia's strategic end goal. Even experts who try to read Vladimir Putin's mind do not and cannot know the outcome of the current impasse. Indeed, Vladimir Putin is notorious for letting the outside world guess his real intentions. Even well-informed Russian analysts, including Dmitri Trenin and Fyodor Lukyanov, confirm this view. Trenin, for example, says, "... And here there are many questions because we cannot know what Putin is thinking. What is his plan? What is his strategy? What options does he see? It's almost impossible to judge this from the sidelines". While Lukyanov exclaims: "The expert opinion that I can authoritatively declare is: Who the heck knows?".
So damn one-sided, Western narrative ... calling oneself a global analyst? No way.
Who and what forced the change in attitude by Russia and Putin towards the West?
From the damned administration run by Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bolton/Wolfowitz/Neocons
Putting sanctions in place to replace diplomacy, building an Unipolar global power w/o interference from the United Nations, circumventing international law, treaties and the principles of the Geneva Convention. War crimes and abuse of human rights with impunity.
Pegasus Incorporated Into NATO Hybrid Warfare
In the Summer of 2021, the United States of America with Joe Biden laid the groundwork on decisions to push forward their agenda of previous decades, realizing a New World Order.
Facing the retreat from Afghanistan as the Taliban moves into one district after another with little resistance, the refusal of the White House to come to terms with Iran and agree on the Obama designed JCPOA, losing a foothold in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea Basin ... a plan was designed to confront Russia dubbed a "pariah" state by Ivo Daalder and the Atlantic Council in 2008 and the economic powerhouse, China, struggling with the pandemic.
The United States and the European Union in post-war Kosovo 1999-2012
an analysis of transatlantic peacebuilding approaches
To a unipolar great power like the US at the time, multilateral agreements and institutions were means, not ends. Still, she dismissed the distinction between power politics and policy based on values, stating that this was fine for academic debate, but made disastrous policy. The strategic interests of the Kosovo war were clear for Rice. It was located in the backyard of NATO (their most important strategic allies) and Milosevic threatened the area's fragile ethnic balance. However, she dismissed using the military for `nation building', saying the military is "certainly not designed to build a civilian society". Political liberalization, in China for example, could be achieved partly through trade and economic interaction, because of the supposed link between economic liberalization and democracy.
Two Bush administrations later in 2008, Rice wrote a Foreign Affairs piece titled 'Rethinking the National Interests: American Realism for a New World'. Because of 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and what she described as the destabilizing spill-over effects of globalization, policy shifted to "recognize that democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest". The supposed dangers to national security posed by failed, failing or collapsed states allowed for this shift. Running with the characterisation of the US as a reluctant superpower, the US was said to engage in foreign policy "because we have to, not because we want to".
This newfound affinity for democratic statebuilding involved the need to build civilian capacity and an inter-agency `whole of government approach', such as through the State Department creation of S/CRS (Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization). In meetings, S/CRS chief John Herbst used peacebuilding, stabilization and reconstruction interchangeably, pointing to Kosovo's transition to independent government as a good example of stabilization work. Again, Rice talked about the American history of trying to combine "power and principle - realism and idealism", calling it a "uniquely American realism".
Towards the end of the piece, she situates the uniqueness of this approach in the American "imagination", and their way of thinking, arguing how this accounts for American's uniquely powerful role in the world. In a 2010 Foreign Affairs article, her successor US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [name can be used interchangeably with Negroponte] also professed the importance of elevating "diplomacy and development alongside defense - a `smart power' approach". Clinton described building peace and stability by building multi-ethnic democratic states, where US diplomats and civilian experts remain after the US troops have returned home. Regardless, self-proclaimed realists such as Stephen M. Walt or John Mearsheimer have been adamant in their criticism of the process of `liberal internationalism', arguing it has had disadvantageous consequences for the US national interest.
A late 2009 "face off" between Marc A. Thiessen, a neoconservative former Bush speechwriter and the aforementioned Mark Leonard, showed some of the prevailing differences across the Atlantic in their approaches towards achieving democracy and freedom across the world. The former railed against the "globalists" seeking to restrain the self-government of freedom-loving Americans with their undemocratic supranational institutions, the latter pleading for increased international cooperation, international law and multilateralism in dealing with transnational problems. To be sure, both can be characterized as liberals in that they explicitly plead for a liberal world order, but they differ greatly in the question of how to achieve this and how it may look like.
Thiessen wants "principled power projection" by an America unrestrained by undemocratic international lawyers, while Leonard thinks this is an outdated balance-of-power mindset and urges the US to abide by a rules-based order. Thiessen is more of a laissez faire, neoconservative type liberal, while Leonard is more of a welfare liberal. When Obama came to power in 2009, and the bellicose neoconservative Bush, some Europeans thought the transatlantic alliance would be restored. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's leaked 'fuck the EU' with regards to the 2014 Ukraine crisis, however, illustrates the enduring US tendency to decide for itself when to disregard allied concerns.
Overall, the American approach to peace has been more militarized because of its outsized military capacities, although with repeated calls for more civilian capabilities since the 1990s. Post-Cold War US policy aimed at worldwide primacy, using liberal/neoconservative language and a view of American exceptionalism to blend values and interests. However, bringing in the EU and UN for `burden sharing' gives the US access to certain capacities and broader legitimacy, as well as less responsibility for the consequences of its actions. So while the US repeatedly highlighted EU weaknesses in their divisions and stovepiping of its institutions, the US still saw benefits in the using the EU for its own purposes. As a US cable stated, "we need not wait for the EU to complete its institutional restructuring and implementation to begin harnessing EU resources to support U.S. interests".
Bucharest Summit Cheney bullying and overruling NATO allies to extend invitation to Georgia and Ukraine.
Former SG NATO Jaap De Hoop Scheffer: The West should respect the red lines of Russia
Looking for a specific topic written by Jerome a Paris ... I came a ross this dKos bullshit about the "unprovoked" invasion of Georgia by Russia in August 2008.
Nothing, nothing has truly changed in Karl Rove's playbook for actors and suckers in the US ...
Georgia: oil, neocons, cold war and our credibility | Jérôme à Paris - Aug. 10, 2008 |
This is another diary critical of the West's position on Georgia. (Update: See also my new story: The warmongers lose another war
Just as a bit of background, let me state here for the record that I wrote my PhD on the independence of Ukraine, and have thus studied how Russia behaves with its neighbors rather intensively. Following that, I worked for several years financing oil&gas projects in Russia and the Caspian; in particular, I worked on te financing of the BTC pipeline that goes from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia (I wrote about it on DailyKos 3 years ago).
War between Russia and Georgia | dKos by Michiganliberal on Aug 08, 2008 |
Jerome a Paris ▶️ Michiganliberal
I blame Georgia
Saakashvili is a regular in the WSJ Op-Ed pages, calling for NATO membership and calling Europeans wimps and cowards for not standing up to bully Russia while provoking it in every possible way - your standard neocon.
He's been playing martyr to distract from his domestic failures, and he's been trying really hard to drag the West in his petty conflicts with Russia.
Russia has a history of playing hardball in the region, so deep wariness is justified, but he's gone far beyond that.
And I worry about his seeming ability to pain himself as the poor oppressed democrat fighting the big bad bully.
I'd also point out that the West, in pushing Kosovo to declare independence, largely caused this crisis because the situation of South Ossetia and other similar territories in Georgia is very much similar to that of Kosovo. Discourse about the territorial sovereignty of Georgia rings hollow when we ignored it for Serbia (despite Russia's repeated warnings).
We've been playing with fire - again - and have been encouraging a neocon to go provoke the Russians and to drag Europe (via NATO) into the conflict. Swell.
JPhurst ▶️ Jerome a Paris
Of course you blame Georgia...
...because you represent the holdovers from the discredited parts of the European Left that tried to justify any Soviet atrocity because it stood up to those evil Americans.
Russia just invaded an ally and escalated the internal conflict. The reprehensibility of this does not change just because Bush is in the White House.
Jerome a Paris ▶️ JPhurst
How is that not an ad hominem attack?
Pager ▶️ Jerome a Paris
The truth isn't trollish.
You're out of line. Waaaaaaaaay fucking out of line for throwing that bullshit argument into the mix.
Then again, your whole apologist attitude for Russia is pure bullshit so at least you're maintaining a common theme.
Jerome a Paris ▶️ Pager
What bullshit?
I have made a number of points of substance in my top comment (about saakashvili using a war for domestic purposes, about his habit to provoke Russia in aconflict, about his repeated calls that not supporting him is equivalent to Muncih in 1938, about the support he gets from the neocons in Washington).
Where did you reply to them, on the substance?
And calling me a typical apologist of Soviet atrocities is not an insult?
Similar to the Georgia, the hostilities were started by the independent state with aspiration for NATO membership w/o consultation 🤥 with Boris and Joe ... of course.
Globalization and Its Reverse
In Defense of Globalization | by Harold James - March 1, 2023 |
