Peter Beinart on walking and talking at the same time in the Trump-Russia scandal

I was prepared to dislike this piece by Peter Beinart, especially given its title, Donald Trump's Defenders on the Left The Atlantic 07/23/2017. And there are echoes of his old even-the-liberal-New-Republic persona. He even puts the term "neoconservatives" in quotes at one point (see below), supposedly suggesting its not really a valid term, though it was the self-designation of the hawkish foreign policy advocates who developed it.

But mostly he makes a good analysis of left critics of the New Cold War rhetoric that many Democrats are using in connection with the Trump-Russia scandal. He focuses in particular on Max Blumenthal, who doesn't pull any punches in his criticisms of professional warmongers.

Beinart's point is that the intelligence agencies' reports on Russian meddling in the 2016 election have to be taken very seriously. And he addresses the difference between the current set of claims and the highly dubious - and false - claims of the Cheney-Bush Administration about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

And he acknowledges what many Democrats and the mainstream press are reluctant to do, that the 2016 cyber-meddling takes place in a larger, dynamic political and military environment that the US government under Obama and Trump have incentive to be less than transparent about. "[I]n recent years the United States has waged proxy battles against Russia in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan," he writes. And he sensibly observes that people who recognize the seriousness of the election meddling "need not respond to Russia’s meddling by supporting NATO expansion or greater military intervention in Syria."

And while acknowledging the legitimacy of the concerns of left critics like Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald about the misuse of the election meddling for illegitimate or ill-advised, Beinart argues, "But last year, Russia unexpectedly attacked the United States itself in ways that genuinely harmed ordinary Americans. Trying to prevent Russia from doing so again doesn’t make you an imperialist or a hawk. No matter how anti-interventionist you are, you need to protect your own country."

I try to be cautious about using words like "attack," to describe what we know about Russia election meddling. Particularly since the Pentagon and the Obama Administration were publicly saying years ago that a cyber attack could be considered an "act of war." (Reuven Cohen, The White House and Pentagon Deem Cyber-Attacks "An Act of War" Forbes 06/05/2012) Are we going to declare war on nuclear-armed Russia over some propaganda bots?

[Max Blumenthal argues] that the anti-Moscow line Democrats are now pushing will come back to haunt them. It “will be repurposed by the political establishment” so that “anyone on the left … who steps out of line on the issues of permanent war or of corporate free trade will be painted as Russia puppets.” [Glenn] Greenwald has made a similar argument. On Monday he savaged a new foreign policy group, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which brings Clinton campaign veterans together with “neoconservatives” like Bill Kristol. “The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin,” wrote Greenwald, “is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics—accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc.—are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.”

There’s a basis to this fear. Democrats have unleashed dangerous forces by getting to the GOP’s right on foreign policy before. In 1992, for instance, Bill Clinton criticized George H.W. Bush for not deposing Saddam Hussein. In so doing, he helped lay the foundation for the push for regime change that culminated a decade later in the Iraq War. (A war I mistakenly supported.)

But the problem with downplaying Russian election meddling because you’re afraid it will fuel militarism is that it evades the central question: How worrisome is the meddling itself? [my emphasis]

During Obama's last month in office, his administration decline to call the election hacking an act of war. (John Bennett, White House Won’t Call Russia Hacking an Act of War Roll Call 01/05/2017) The Revered Statesman and Maverick John McCain, however, had something to say about it: "'When you attack a country, it’s an act of war,' the Arizona Republican said recently on Ukrainian television. 'And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay so that we can perhaps persuade Russians to stop this kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.'"

I'm going to make a wild guess that Bundespräsident Von Trump will also decline to call it an act of war.

Gleen Greenwald's caution about the Alliance for Securing Democracy is well-founded (With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons The Intercept 07/17/2017):

Democrats often justify this union [with Republican neocoonns]as a mere marriage of convenience: a pragmatic, temporary alliance necessitated by the narrow goal of stopping Trump. But for many reasons, that is an obvious pretext, unpersuasive in the extreme. This Democrat/neocon reunion had been developing long before anyone believed Donald Trump could ascend to power, and this alliance extends to common perspectives, goals, and policies that have little to do with the current president.

It is true that neocons were among the earliest and most vocal GOP opponents of Trump. That was because they viewed him as an ideological threat to their orthodoxies (such as when he advocated for U.S. “neutrality” on the Israel/Palestine conflict and railed against the wisdom of the wars in Iraq and Libya), but they were also worried that his uncouth, offensive personality would embarrass the U.S. and thus weaken the “soft power” needed for imperial hegemony. Even if Trump could be brought into line on neocon orthodoxy — as has largely happened — his ineptitude and instability posed a threat to their agenda.

But Democrats and neocons share far more than revulsion toward Trump; particularly once Hillary Clinton became the party’s standard-bearer, they share the same fundamental beliefs about the U.S. role in the world and how to assert U.S. power. In other words, this alliance is explained by far more than antipathy to Trump.

Indeed, the likelihood of a neocon/Democrat reunion long predates Trump. Back in the summer of 2014 — almost a year before Trump announced his intent to run for president — longtime neocon-watcher Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the New York Times, predicted that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” [my emphasis]

And it's worth noting here that a more pro-Russian turn in foreign policy by the Trump Family Business Administration will not necessarily result in a more peaceful state of affairs. Managing a shift from antagonism and toward co-existence and partnership between the US and Russia is a complicated diplomatic and political task. The current Administration has so far not shown the aptitude for anything more complicated than haranguing the Boy Scouts with partisan rhetoric.

Trump, ISIS and Israel

Aljazeera's Inside Story takes a look at How will President Trump deal with ISIL, Syria & Iran? 11/12/2016:

The Real News interviews Gareth Porter on the neocons in Trump's entourage and those angling for influence on the Trump Administration, Discredited Neocons From The Bush Era Floated as US Foreign Policy Advisors to Trump 11/12/2016:

Gareth expects that the neoconservatives will dominate foreign policy in Trump's Administration, even more so than in the Cheney-Bush government.

Hillary Clinton and the fusion of neocon and liberal-interventionist foreign policy

Paul Pillar has a very good, brief analysis of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, The Safety and Sameness of Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy The National Interest 06/02/2016. He begins by endorsing Clinton's main line of criticism against Donald Trump's foreign policy:

Clinton is correct that what has passed for Trump's ideas on foreign policy “are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” Trump's efforts to sound coherent have been laden with contradictions and declarations that resemble bumper stickers more than carefully thought-out policy proposals. Some of his most specific and distinctive pronouncements belong in the realm of the fantastic, such as excluding all Muslims from the country, building a huge wall and somehow getting a neighbor to pay for it, and encouraging Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea to get nuclear weapons. Just when he has seemed to have made a suggestion that sounds fresh and constructive, such as referring to neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he suddenly veers in a much different direction.

Pillar's critique of Clinton's policy comes from his outlook that US foreign policy "has, through several administrations, been suffering from some fundamental misdirections." And he notes of her recent major foreign policy address:

... she repeatedly fell back into aspects of a Washington conventional wisdom that have made for the persistence of problems rather than the solution of them. This was true, for example, in portions of her discussion of relationships with allies and adversaries. She showed a good understanding of what diplomacy with adversaries consists of when she remarked that these are “countries that share some common interests with us amid many disagreements” and that “Donald doesn’t see the complexity” involved. But she gave no acknowledgment that there also are mixtures of common interests and disagreements—indeed, not just disagreements but conflicting interests—in relations with countries commonly considered allies. This arose, for instance, when amid her appropriate defense of the diplomacy leading to the nuclear agreement with Iran she started talking about the security of Israel—without mentioning that the Israeli government has done all it can to subvert and kill the very agreement she was defending.

He also argues that it is actually hard to tell the difference between the policy of military escalation against ISIS that Trump advocates and that which Hillary proposes. And he expresses reasonable concern over Clinton's American Exceptionalism:

Clinton's overall approach is grounded in that central tenet of Washington conventional wisdom that, as she put it in the speech, “America is an exceptional country,” that “we lead with purpose, and we prevail,” and that “if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum – and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void.” The awful metaphor of a vacuum, with the misleading notion that in any troubled place in the world if the United States does not occupy it then bad vapors will whoosh in, has underlain thinking that has repeatedly meant costly trouble for the United States, including in some of the places where U.S. troops are found today.

And he calls attention to an important report that seems to reflect Hillary's hawkish foreign policy positions:

The longstanding, despite being damaging, conventional wisdom central to Hillary Clinton's thinking on foreign policy mirrors what was laid out at greater length in the recently released report from the Center for New American Security titled “Extending American Power”. As critical readers of that report have noted, it represents a mashing of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism and a recipe for repeating many of the failures that have contributed to the very unease and wishing for change that have helped to build support for Donald Trump, notwithstanding how little he has to contribute in the way of solutions.

The CNAS report could turn out to be an important as a guide to the foreign policy of a Clinton II Administration. (Extending American Power May 2016) And it has justifiably received some serious attention, including:

Jim Lobe, Hillary’s Foreign Policy: a Liberal-Neoconservative Convergence? LobeLog Foreign Policy 04/29/2016

Jim Lobe, The Neocon-Liberal Hawk Convergence is Worse Than I Thought LobeLog Foreign Policy 05/25/2016

Alastair Crooke, Neocons and Liberal Interventionists — Like Hillary — Are Converging on Foreign Policy World Post 06/08/2016

The title itself is a cue to how common its become to assume that "extending American power" is in and of itself a worthwhile goal. Extending American power is a good thing only if it benefits the American people and the world. If the goal is focused on narrow ends, such as enabling American vulture funds to plunder developing countries, extending American power for that purpose is more destructive and harmful than beneficial.

And if the US attempts to shape events according to arrogant and unrealistic assumptions about what US military power can accomplish in political terms, even policies pursued for good and just ends can be horribly destructive.

This report promises to be an important source during this campaign and beyond. For now, I'll just note that the section on the Middle East specifically advocates the no-fly zone escalation in Syria that Hillary Clinton advocates. It also treats Iran effectively as an enemy of the United States has to actively oppose. Remarkably, the paper emphatically rejects the notion that the historic nuclear agreement with Iran should even be allowed to help produce better US relationships with Iran: "Tehran should understand that Washington is not expecting the nuclear agreement to lead to a changed relationship with the government of Iran. The nuclear agreement should not be linked to Tehran’s expectation of some kind of détente or broader opening to the United States."

This is standard neocon militarism and imperialism for the Middle East. And of course the report takes it as a given that the military budget needs to be increased. At some point, the democratic movement in the United States will have to once again making a major reduction of the military budget and a re-ordering of priorities in foreign policy a major issue and get it accomplished.

This is also striking, "there is no doubt that the management of the U.S.-China relationship is the single most consequential challenge for U.S. foreign policy." Not nuclear arms control. Not managing climate change.

I'm also struck by the frankness with which the CNAS report describes Britain as a Trojan Horse for the United States in the European Union:

Add the danger of British departure from the European Union (EU) and the migration crisis and one can imagine significant ruptures in Europe that would have a very severe effect on the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the transatlantic community. ...

Europe has always functioned best when the three or four leading European powers worked together cooperatively, in partnership with the United States. In recent years, the traditional “troika” of Great Britain, Germany, and France has weakened considerably. British foreign and defense policies have weakened its leadership role in Europe and the world more generally. Germany has been left in the uncomfortable position of providing not only economic but also political and strategic leadership in Europe. The United States should work to pull this “troika” back together, with the addition of Poland (assuming of course that its government demonstrates respect for the highest standards of democratic governance), to provide strategic leadership within the European Union. For all that institution’s shortcomings, the United States has an interest in the preservation and health of the EU. ...

The United States has a particular interest in Britain remaining a strong and active player within the EU. A British departure would weaken Britain, Europe, and the transatlantic community. Among Britain’s strengths, and one aspect of its value as an ally, has been its ability to play a leadership role in Europe, providing a transatlantic perspective that can sometimes be absent from European councils. A strong Britain in a strong Europe is a key American interest. American diplomacy must strive to do the hard work of maintaining not only an alliance but a vibrant, cohesive, and powerful transatlantic community. That means increasing the level and frequency of U.S. participation in high-level meetings even when a crisis does not exist.

Such increased transatlantic dialogue should encompass the whole range of global strategic challenges. Whether or not Europe has a critical role to play or is threatened by every global crisis, it will help all of us if Europe and the United States share perspectives, knowledge, and consideration of the moral and strategic challenges they face around the world. If the two sides of the Atlantic hope to share responsibility for defending the liberal world order, they ought to have, as much as possible, a common understanding of what that entails. [my emphasis]

In other words, the United States wants an obedient EU, strong enough to be useful to American policy, but not strong enough to challenge American geopolitical priorities in the world, and Britain is the main US proxy within the EU.

The report also expresses considerable urgency in rejecting the adoption of "offshore balancing" as a strategic approach, a concept advocated by representatives of the Realist school of foreign policy like Stephen Walt: "The next administration must make abundantly clear that it has no interest in pursuing an off-shore balancing strategy [in the Middle East], such as the “new equilibrium” some have suggested, which envisages a significant U.S. military drawdown from the region." (See Stephen Walt, Offshore balancing: An idea whose time has come Foreign Policy 11/02/2011; scroll down)

Strange Paths of Trotskyism (2 of 2): Argentine Trotskyists

In this second of two posts, I'll discuss a contemoporary Argentine variant of Trotskyism. My attention was caught by an essay from the kirchnerista (left-Peronist/supportive of President Cristina Fernández) site La Batalla Cultural smacking down of Trotskyism, El hombre más odiado por la “izquierda” (accessed 08/14/2015). It's not exactly an esasy, though, more a throwaway polemic against unidentified Trotskyists.

The main target is presumably the electoral formation called the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores (FIT). It is composed of three Troskyist parties, the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), the Partido Obrero (PO) and the Izquierda Socialista IS).

The FIT formation has a small number of seats in the Argentine Congress. It's main role in the national election this year is heckle the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ) and its electoral alliance Frente para la Victoria (FpV) from the left. So they actually do get a few delegates elected.

Adriana Meyer reports on the FIT's national candidates Nicolás del Caño for President and Myriam Bregman in La sorpresa en el Frente de Izquierda Página/12 11.08.2015 discussing the national election in October.

Meyer quotes Del Caño:

“El desafío para octubre no es sólo convocar a todas las fuerzas de izquierda y progresistas, sino también desentrañar esa maniobra del kirchnerismo que busca la polarización para difundir que el mal menor es Scioli contra la supuesta derecha de Macri. Ya lo vimos, en los ’90 convocaban a votar a De la Rúa como el sapo a tragarse frente a Duhalde y a Menem, y así terminó” ...

[The challenge for October is not only to bring together all the left and progressive forces, but also to unravel this manuevere of kirchnerismo that seeks polarization in order to promote the idea that the lesser evil is {FpV Presidential candidate Daniel} Scioli against the supposed right of {PRO Presidential candidate Mauricio} Macri. But we see that in the 90's voters came together to vote for De la Rúa as the toad to swallow in front of Duhalde and Menem, and look how it turned out.]

The reference is to the election of Fernando de la Rúa as President in 1999, which ended with De la Rúa resigning and leaving the Presidential Palace, the Casa Rosada, in a helicopter during massive public protests after the financial crisis of 2001 hit. Eduardo Duhalde is a Peronist (PJ) who served as President in 2002-3 who did a lot to stabilize the country and the economy but wasn't popular.

Carlos Menem was also President 1989-1999 for the PJ. A Muslim who converted to Catholicism - the President of Argentina is required to be Catholic - Menem campaigned as a fairly traditional Peronist defending the interests of the people against the oligarchy. But once elected, he undertook an aggressive neoliberal economic program of deregulation and privatization. And he established a peg between the Argentine currency and the US dollar, which set Argentina up for the financial crisis of 2001. Menem is currently on trial for obstruction of justice in the case of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in 1994. (Algunas acusaciones fueron selectivas Página/12 14.08.2015)

Meyer quotes Myriam Bregman: "El FIT mantiene la coherencia de ser independiente de los gobiernos y de todas las variantes patronales, y por eso creció." ("The FIT maintains the consistency to be independent of the governments and of all the varieties of management, and because of that we have grown.")

How much they can actually accomplish for their constituents in that state is another question. Doctrinaire Trotskyism can be very self-limiting.

But it can pull some left-leaning voters from PJ candidates. And the FIT does to some extent amplify the complaints of the more conservatives candidates ("oligarchical parties" in the Peronist vocabulary) against the PJ and the current government. So it's easy to see how a kirchnerista website would acuse them of being actually rightwingers. Or, as a Trot might put it, "objectively" supporting the Right:

No son pocos los compañeros peronistas (que hace mucho debieron haber superado ese sentido común) los que hablan de “izquierda” de manera despectiva. Y así es como el trotskismo logra su objetivo, que es precisamente generar confusión y partir al campo popular.

[There are more than a few Peronist compañeros (who should long ago have gotten over this common attitude) who talk about the "left" in a depreciating way. And that is how Trotskyism achieves it objective, which is precisely to generate confusion and divide the popular camp.]

Strange Paths of Trotskyism (1 of 2): Trotskyism and American neocons

I came across a current article on an Argentine website about Troskyism in relation to present-day electoral politics there, which I will discuss in the second post.

I recently referenced a brief and unsympathetic definition of Trotskyists as the people who support revolution everywhere except where there's one going on.

They're purists, in other words. No popular movement, no militant union, no reform, no actual revolution is ever pure enough for them. Trotskyism often finds itself in agreement with rightwingers in attacking left-leaning movements and governments.

I wrote here about Trotskyism and one of its many offshoots, American neoconservatism, in Transformations of Trotskyism: Irving Kristol (1920-2009) and the neoconservtives 09/19/2009. (My description of Trotskyism here is partially adapted from that post.)

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) lost out in the internal power struggles inside the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and Trotsky himself emigrated from the USSR. Josef Stalin, the main winner of the power struggle, had first met Trotsky in Vienna in 1913 in a residence at Kolschitzkygasse 30. They disliked each other from the start. Trotsky was an on-again, off-again ally of Lenin for years. When the October Revolution came, Trotsky was the most visible Bolshevik leader next to Lenin. He became head of the Red Army. Stalin was a longtime Bolshevik activist and leader. Exactly how important his role was in 1917 was a matter hotly disputed in the later glorification of Stalin and the polemcis with Trotsky and his followers.

Trotsky had supporters in many countries including the United States, which he had visited before the October Revolution. Although Trotskyists were radical left critics of capitalism and considered themselves to be the true custodians of Lenin-style Communism, they were also known for their bitter polemics against "Stalinism" and anything they associated with it. Trotskyists set up leftwing parties to compete for support on the left with the Soviet-line Communist parties.

In what may have been originally a case of Freud's "narcissism of small differences", the Trotskyists tended to be more upset by what they saw as the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and the Communist parties than they were about the capitalists in their own countries. Trotskyist intellectuals were exceptionally fond of ideological arguments. Part of guarding their purity was to be sure to denounce ideological deviations in any revolutionary process in any part of the world as early as possible. Political principles that are too pure to be realized in practice are conveniently free from being discredited by actually being put into effect.

This kind of criticism is also useful for conservative or liberal critics of left governments and movements. When the Soviet Union was still around, Trotskyist criticisms of the Soviets had the value for the USSR's opponents of being a way of accusing the Soviet leadership of being big old hypocrites. Not that politicians of any kind are ever lacking when it comes to accusing opponents of hypocrisy. But the Trotskyist narrative played a particularly useful role in that regard when it came to the Soviet Union.

Sidney Blumenthal in The Rise of The Counter-Establishment (1986), Sidney Blumenthal talks about the Trotskyist background of American neoconservatives. He talked about a dinner in 1985 honoring the memory of Whittaker Chambers, whose "pumpking papers" decisively helped Richard Nixon become a national figure:

At the 1985 dinner the featured speaker was Richard Nixon, who was presented with a scroll making him an honorary member. By these rituals the Irregulars commune with the spirit of Whittaker Chambers, who progressed from Bolshevik to conservative, from true believer to true believer, and whose act of hiding stolen government documents in a pumpkin patch inspired the group's name. The neoconservatives, too, are witnesses, and the conversion from left to right is the central political experience in their lives. These are people for whom card-carrying membership still has meaning. [my emphasis](p. 122)

The neoconservatives he discusses there were the "first generation" of that particular trend, including people like Irving Kristol, who actually had been Trotskyists in their younger days. Blumenthal frames their ideological positioning this way:

Neoconservatism is the final stage of the Old Left, the only element in American politics whose identity is principally derived from its view of Communism. Like the conservatives, the neoconservatives depend upon their enemy for their own definition. ... The conservatives believe that the Liberal Establishment has been running the country. Neoconservatives add to this general notion the belief that liberals are either a species of Stalinist fellow traveler or operate "objectively," whether they know it or not, in the broad interest of the Soviet Union. Conservatives would like to believe this, too. But the neoconservatives, many with the benefit of the Trotskyist background, offer an unmatchable authenticity and intensity on the subject. (p. 130) [my emphasis]

And he describes Irving Kristol (the father of William "Butcher's Bill" Kristol) this way:

In his attempted unification of the higher and lower realms of politics, it was apparent that Kristol still believed that while philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it. "We studied radicalism in the 1930s," he said. "It was great training in polemics and sustained political analysis. Being a Trotskyist was highly intellectual. I learned a lot. The neoconservatives are the political intellectuals, and that's what the Trotskyists were. Not the Communists. The Trotskyist movement produced political intellectuals, which is why so many went into sociology and achieved distinction. It was much more rigorous intellectual training than you could get in college. If someone came up with some matter on which you were not well read, my God, you were humiliated. It was jesuitical. The Republican Party, meanwhile, produced antipolitical intellectuals. Those people are not in my tradition."

The neoconservatives are the Trotskyists of Reaganism, and Kristol is a Trotskyist transmuted into a man of the right. He remains a free-floating, intense political intellectual in the vanguard. (p. 154) [my emphasis]

The "paleo-conservatives" who draw their inspiration more from the isolationist Old Right of the immediate post-Second World War period, still like to insult neocons by calling them Trotskyists.

Emir Sader made this useful summary of an essay by a well-known Troskyist named Isaac Deutscher (From Ex-Leftists to Anti-Leftists Monthly Review 13.06.2012:

Isaac Deutscher has an article entitled "Heretics and Renegades," delineating the path of people who begin by breaking with left-wing theories and positions and end up becoming fanatical anti-leftists. They are characters who have, over time, populated the Right all over the world.

Some of them took advantage of Stalinism in order to condemn Lenin and, eventually, Marx and Marxism. It's no accident that a non-negligible proportion of them have Trotskyist origin. Proceeding to equate Stalinism with Nazism in order to absolutize "Stalinist totalitarianism" was already a step toward liberalism and anti-communism.

Here's a standard type: those who are on the Left, even militantly so, suddenly "repent," drop everything, deny and denounce their pasts and their comrades, the idols whom they worshipped blindly, in order to surrender themselves -- together with their arms, history, and, frequently, work -- to the Right.

Some of them remain on the Left, in its most moderate corner, denouncing, in a strongly anti-left tone, what's not "democratic" in the currents of the Left itself. They are loud advocates of alliances with centrist and even right-wing currents, and they tend to dilute the distinction between Left and Right. [my emphasis]

Robert Kaplan promotes war and the alleged virtues of imperialism

Leading neoconservative Robert Kaplan has come up with a new rhetorical twist to justify the constant theme of neocon foreign policy: war, war and more war.

He gives one high-profile version of it in The Ruins of Empire in the Middle East Foreign Policy 05/25/2015. The original title Foreign Policy put on the article was, "It's Time to Bring Imperialism Back to the Middle East." In an addendum to the piece, Kaplan claims the earlier title "misrepresented what I wrote."

But Kaplan is pitching the same kind of frank imperialism that was so popular among neocons leading up to the Iraq War, 2003 edition: "The challenge now [in the Middle East] is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone."

Ari Heistein discusses Kaplan's analysis in Kaplan’s Fantasies of Empire and the Myth of the Arab Strongman Informed Comment 05/30/2015. He points to problems in Kaplan's mini-sketch of history. Like this from Kaplan:

And it is not just imperial forces that have declined and left chaos in their wake. The fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and the reduction of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria to that of an embattled statelet has ended the era of post-colonial strongmen, whose rule was organically connected to the legacy of imperialism. After all, those dictators ruled according to the borders erected by the Europeans. And because those imperial borders did not often configure with ethnic or sectarian ones, those dictatorial regimes required secular identities in order to span communal divides. All this has been brutally swept away.

Hestein replies:

While one of Kaplan’s key arguments was that “Totalitarianism was the only answer to the end of Western imperialism” in reality totalitarianism was the answer to imperialism. When looking at Egypt, a country ruled by Arab strongmen for nearly six decades and one of the most influential powers in the Arab Middle East, Kaplan’s claim immediately collapses. The Free Officers deposed King Farouk in 1952, which signaled the end of Egypt’s thirty year parliamentary era and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. A short time after taking office, Nasser destroyed much of Egypt’s civil society and consolidated power through political violence and repression — he was the quintessential Arab strongman. Egypt’s history seems to corroborate Kaplan’s claim with only one problem: the British had up to 80,000 troops in Egypt until 1956.

I recently wrote about Kaplan's latest warmongering themes in Neocon bigwig Robert Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos 01/13/2015,

See also my post of nearly eight years ago on Kaplan's war fantasies, Over the cliff with the neocons one more time? 09/03/2007.

Kaplan has been providing more of the same in places like this article in The Atlantic, In Defense of Empire April 2014 issue.

Neocons differed even in the 1990s and 2000s over their ideological cover. Some preferred the rhetoric of democratic imperialism while others talked more in the terms of allegedly benign order on which Kaplan relies here. Digby Parton writes in Restoring the awe Hullabaloo 06/02/82015:

[Zach Beauchamp] goes on to say that Bush administration believed after 9/11 that the middle east needed to be remade in order to stop jihadism and Iraq was the most logical place to start. But that's not the way it was. The policymakers in the Bush administration had been lobbying to go into Iraq long before there was any fear of jihadism. In fact, they barely acknowledged jihadism existed. Now it's true that they wanted to remake the middle east but it was for a host of reasons that had to do with maintaining American hegemony, oil, Israel etc. Jihadism wasn't even on their radar, hence the August 6th [2001] memorandum ["Bin Laden determined to strike in US"] to which Bush replied, "ok you've covered your ass..."

Beauchamp quotes a number of Bush officials from their various books and interviews saying they were motivated by 9/11. But if it was, it was only because it gave them the excuse to do what they had wanted to do for a decade [in particular, invading Iraq]. ...

Bush's freedom agenda held no answers to these problems because it wasn't a real agenda. It was a PR campaign designed to make Americans feel good about themselves for invading a country that hadn't attacked us. And, to be fair, there were neoconservatives who actually wanted to believe this drivel about the "birthing of democracy." I'm fairly sure that Bush was one of them. (I used to always refer to them as "starry-eyed neocons.") But you can bet Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't believe a bit of it --- they were part of a hardocre [sic], imperial clacque that went all the way back to the 70s. To the extent they signed on to the "lighter side" of neoconservatism it was purely for propaganda purposes. Their motives were about showcasing American power, period.

It's dreary having to talk about this again. But the results in Iraq are what they are. Many people predicted it would come to something like this and maybe it was inevitable at some point. But regardless of their "true motivations" Bush' neoconservative cronies had been pushing for this thing since the first gulf war and knew they'd never have a better opportunity.

9/11 was a gift not a motive.

Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and the AMIA/Nisman/vulture-funds tangle

Raúl Kollmann in “Ellos dicen culpables sí, juicio no” Página/12 29.04.2015 reports on the resignation of Argentine Héctor Timerman from the Jewish organization AMIA and explains the immediate background of his decision:

La renuncia de Timerman es a la AMIA, la mutual a la que están afiliados una parte de los integrantes de la comunidad judía. La AMIA administra los cementerios, la red educativa, algunos comedores, la asistencia social, el respaldo a personas de la tercera edad y muchas actividades culturales. Los socios de la AMIA votan su comisión directiva, hoy en día en manos de los sectores más religiosos y ortodoxos. Al mismo tiempo, para las cuestiones políticas se supone que la representación está en la DAIA, donde convergen las instituciones (entre ellas la AMIA), los templos, las escuelas, los clubes. Cuando se elige la conducción de la DAIA, las instituciones y clubes con más socios tienen varios votos: la AMIA, por ejemplo, tiene cuatro de los 120 totales. Con la carta de renuncia dirigida a Leonardo Jmelnitzky, actual presidente de la AMIA, Timerman quiso dejar en claro que no quiere ser representado por la conducción de la AMIA y tampoco por la DAIA.

En las últimas semanas surgió un grupo importante de integrantes de la comunidad judía que concretaron la primera convocatoria de judíos progresistas que no se sienten representados por la AMIA y la DAIA. El ex director ejecutivo de la DAIA Jorge Elbaum produjo una enorme repercusión con dos notas publicadas por Página/12 en las que mostraba y testificaba sobre las presiones que recibió la DAIA para bloquear el memorándum con Irán. Se alinearon voceros del PRO, de las embajadas de Estados Unidos e Israel y, enseguida, las fundaciones financiadas por los fondos buitre, en especial por Paul Singer. El propio fiscal Nisman se movió activamente como “amigo” de la Fundación para la Defensa de la Democracia, también financiada por Singer. Todas estas movidas fueron rechazadas en el plenario de argentinos de origen judío, que tuvo la conducción de la periodista Miriam Lewin ....

[Timerman's resignation is directed to the AMIA, the mutual society to which a part of the members of the Jewish community are affiliated. The AMIA administers the cemeteries, the educational network, some dining facilties, social assistance, support for the elderly and many cultural activities. The members of AMIA vote for their board of directors, these days in the hands of the most religious and orthodox sectors. At the same time, for political questions the representations is assumed to be in the DAIA, where the institutions converge (among them AMIA), the temples, the schools, the clubs. When the leadership of the DAIA is decided, the institutions and clubs with the most members have various votes: AMIA, for instance, has four of the 120 total. With the letter of resignation directed to Leonardo Jmelnitzky, current President of the AMIA, Timerman wants to make it clear that he doesn't wish to be represented by the leadership of the AMIA nor by the DAIA.

In recent weeks, an important group of progressive members of the Jewish community has emerged that constituted the first announcement by progressive Jews who do not feel themselves represented by the AMIA and the DAIA. The ex-Executive Director of the DAIA Jorge Elbaum produced an enormous repercussion with two notes published by Página/12 in which he demonstrates and testifies about the pressure the DAIA received to block the memorandum on Iran. Spokespeople aligned from the PRO, the embassies of the United States and Israel and, promptly, the foundations financed by the vulture funds, particularly by Paul Singer. Prosecutor Nisman himself actively behaved as "a friend" of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, also financed by Singer. All of these moves were rejected by the plenary session of [the progressive group] of Argentines of Jewish origin, which was lead by the journalist Miriam Lewin. ...]

A sidebar article reports on the left-leaning group of dissenters from the AMIA/DAIA positions, Un foro “colectivo y democrático” Página/12 29.04.2015.

Kollmann further reports:

En su diálogo con este diario, Timerman contó los intercambios con los dirigentes comunitarios sobre el memorándum. “Nosotros les dijimos que era un paso adelante, como lo sostuvieron Interpol o Amnesty International. Era intentar destrabar la situación y juzgar a los sospechosos, que Irán no iba a extraditar. Ellos dijeron que sí al principio y después que no. La Presidenta les ofreció que traigan una idea alternativa. Y no trajeron nada, salvo la posibilidad de reformar la Constitución para juzgar en ausencia, algo que en la Argentina nunca se hizo. Por eso insisto en el texto que ellos, los dirigentes de la comunidad judía, no quieren avanzar en buscar formas de juzgar a los sospechosos. Ellos dicen culpables sí, juicio no.”

[In his conversation with this paper, Timerman recounted the exchanges with the community leaders about the memorandum {the agreement with Iran}. "We told them that it was a step forward, as Interpol or Amnesty International maintained. It was intended to unfetter the situation and try the suspects that Iran had not extradicted. They said yes at first and later no. The President {Cristina Fernández} invited them to bring an alternative idea. And they didn't come up with anything, except the possibility of reforming the Constitution to allow a trial in absentia, something that has never been done in Argentina. For that reason, I insisted in the text {of the resignation letter} that they, the leaders of the Jewish community, did not want to have progress in looking for forms of trying the suspects. They are saying guilty yes, trial no."]]

As I've commented on here numerous times, the AMIA case has become deeply involved in efforts by American neoconservatives, the Government of Israel and the Republican Party to get up a war with Iran. Paul Singer is one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party, whose enthusiasm for the Likud Party of Israel's warlike policies he apparently shares. He's also a supporter of neocon policies and is engaged in a landmark legal dispute with Argentina over "vulture fund" investments in defaulted Argentine bonds. And all of this has become embedded into differences of priorities and outlook within Argentina's Jewish community and with the partisan opposition to Cristina's government and her Peronist Justicialista Party.

The Washington Post, whose editorial stance has been staunchly neoconservative for years, in a recent editorial accused Cristina and her government of promoting anti-Semitism in defending itself over the Nisman/AMIA case, Argentina’s president resorts to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories 04/23/2015. From everything I can see, this is a ludicrous accusation.

Jim Lobe and Charles Davis respond specifically to the WaPo editorial in Following the Money: The New Anti-Semitism? LobeLog Foreign Policy 05/01/2015.

Obviously, Foreign Minister Timerman is Jewish, as is Cristina's Economics Minister Axel Kicillof. Those are the two most prominent ministers of her Cabinet on the international scene.

On these themes, see also:

Charles Davis, U.S. Hedge Funds Paint Argentina as Ally of Iranian ‘Devil’ – Part One Inter Press Service 07/29/2013

Charles Davis, U.S. Hedge Funds Paint Argentina as Ally of Iranian ‘Devil’ – Part Two Inter Press Service 07/31/2013

Graciela Mochkofsky, Why Alberto Nisman Is No Hero for Argentina — or the Jews The Forward 03/10/2015, who gives this summary of Nisman's background:

In 1997, when he first became involved in the case — known in Argentina by the JCC’s acronym, AMIA — Nisman was a young and ambitious prosecutor making a career in the newly inaugurated system of open trials.

His task was to make presentable the fabrication concocted by Judge Juan José Galeano. With forged evidence, Galeano and other authorities had accused a ring of corrupt police officers of being the “local connection” in the bombing.

The open trial began in 2001 and ended in disaster in 2004. The forgery was so apparent that it didn’t survive scrutiny. The policemen were exonerated. The judge, the prosecutors, the head of the intelligence service, a high-ranking police officer, former president Carlos Menem and the leader of the main political Jewish organization were eventually indicted for the cover-up (and are going to trial in a few months). Nisman somehow survived, and President Néstor Kirchner (Cristina Kirchner’s now late husband, who took office in 2007) appointed him as special prosecutor for the AMIA case. He had to rebuild it from scratch. In 2006, based mostly on foreign intelligence reports, Nisman accused the Iranians of sponsoring the attack, allegedly carried out by Hezbollah militants.

Neocons, Ukraine and neoliberalism

Patrick Smith has quite an interesting piece in Salon considering the issues of Ukraine and the Greek depression together in the context of neoliberalism, Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy 02/12/2015.

One of the striking things about current Western policy is that while NATO countries are supposedly backing Ukraine in a military confrontation with Russia and Russian proxies, the IMF is also requiring neoliberal austerity policies in Ukraine, the same sort that have proven so effective in wrecking Greece and other eurozone periphery countries.

The neocons are hot for escalation in Ukraine. Neocon publicist James Kirchick advocates for just that in What Germany Owes Ukraine Foreign Policy 02/05/2015.

Kirchick is a staunch neoconservative and that viewpoint (and sneering style) comes across in this article. The neocons have a well-established record of accomplishment: pretty much 100% of what they've accomplished when their policies were enacted has been disastrous. And with Victoria "F**k the EU!" Nuland heading the US diplomacy on Ukraine as Asst Secy of State for Europe, Obama has at least nominally put the neocons in charge of US policy there. Of course Kirchick sneers at the Germans for being suckers for "Russian propaganda" - or as Nuland has taken to calling it in her signature diplomatic manner "Moscow b******t" - because they're dubious about going to war over Ukraine. In the neocon world, it's always 1938, Chamberlain is always on the verge of making a deal with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, and anyone who opposes rushing to war is a coward or fool.

This from Kirchick is priceless: "Simply put, most Germans, already averse to violence in the first place [those pussies!!], cannot countenance the idea of German weapons being used to kill Russians." Because nobody in Germany remembers a time when Russia looked like an enemy, right? This kind of make-it-up-on-the-fly history is at least a contributing factor to the outcomes neocon foreign policy produces. And his sneering attitude toward authoritarianism in Hungary is icing on the cake. Neocons love to talk about the moral value of democracy - when they're trying to gin up a war. Wwhich is 24/7. But actual democracy, they don't give a flying flip about that.

Russia financing anti-EU rightwingers?

Tomas Mayer has a report in Der Standard (Vienna) claiming that far-right, anti-EU parties like Marie Le Pen's National Front (NF) in France are getting substantial funding from Russia, apparently much of it with official approval from Putin' regime: Russen sollen rechte EU-Skeptiker finanziert haben 27.11.2014.

I'm cautious about any such reports given the neocon drive in the US to elevate Russia as a major threat. This one doesn't sound improbable on its face. But it also cites the not-entirely-respectable German tabloid Bild-Zeitung on one its claims, based on what it received from "secret services." Who would never lie about such things, of course. But Standard doesn't cite or link the specific Bild articles making the claim.

Robert Parry's Consortium News keeps track of neocon activity and propaganda targets. Maidhc Ó Cathail in Neocons Claim to Fight Russian ‘Unreality’ 11/26/2014 discusses some of their latest propaganda themes against Russia.

Ukraine, neocons, liberal interventionists, the Obama Administration and Henry Kissinger

Unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger gave an interview to Der Spiegel, the English verison of which appears here, Interview with Henry Kissinger: 'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?' Spiegel International, interview Conducted By Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Erich Follath 11/13/2014.

Although his bad acts as a government official during the Nixon and Ford Administrations will continue to define his personal and historical reputation, he does have some coherent "realist" ideas on foreign policy that are still worth noting. Like the President Richard Nixon he served, Kissinger combined some bad acts and bad ideas with some constructive policies, particular on relations with China and the Soviet Union and on nuclear arms control.

So his comments on Vladimir Putin's Russia are notable.

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about a concrete example: How should the West react to the Russian annexation of Crimea? Do you fear this might mean that borders in the future are no longer incontrovertible?

Kissinger: Crimea is a symptom, not a cause. Furthermore, Crimea is a special case. Ukraine was part of Russia for a long time. You can't accept the principle that any country can just change the borders and take a province of another country. But if the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.

Something I'm not seeing discussed is the effect that Russia's official annexation of the Crimea would have on any attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO. NATO is a military collective defense alliance. And part of nations obligating each other to defend their borders is defining what borders they are defending.

So, if we bring Ukraine into NATO, it seems we would have two choices: officially recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea and agree only to defend the current borders controlled by the Ukrainian government; or, declare war on Russia over Crimea.

Recognizing the annexation of Crimea as an accomplished fact is probably a sensible thing to do. But the US has gone a long time never officially recognizing the government of Cuba that has been in effective control of that country since 1959. But as a practical matter, unless the US and its NATO partners really are willing to go to war with Russia to "liberate" the Crimea that voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to join Russia and which Russia regards as strategically vital its national security, they are going to have to accept it as a reality in practice. But even assuming Russia would allow Ukraine to join NATO without Russia taking further actions to prevent that, the US and NATO would presumably be hesitant any time soon to make a treaty with Ukraine that involved formal recognition of Russia's annexation of the Crimea.

A referendum by a portion of a country to secede or join another is not a sufficient reason in international law and practice for recognition of that choice, by either the original nation or anyone else. With neo-Confederate sentiment in the US Republican Party seemingly becoming stronger by the day, that's something worth emphasizing in this context.

Kissinger's position on this issue seems pragmatic; it may come off as amoral, as well. But that goes without saying: this is Henry Kissinger we're quoting here:

SPIEGEL: What was it then?

Kissinger: One has to ask one's self this question: Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask one's self why did it happen?

SPIEGEL: What you're saying is that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?

Kissinger: Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine's economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with Russia. This does not mean the Russian response was appropriate. [my emphasis]

The advantage of Kissinger's amoral perspective is that he's not inclined to express self-righteous outrage at the amoral behavior of leaders like Putin, unlike the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who endlessly moralize about liberty and human rights and international law while they gleefully trample them into the dust in the real world:

SPIEGEL: It seems you have a lot of understanding for Putin. But isn't he doing exactly what you are warning of -- creating chaos in eastern Ukraine and threatening sovereignty?

Kissinger: Certainly. But Ukraine has always had a special significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.

SPIEGEL: Relations between the West and Russia are tenser now than they have been in decades. Should we be concerned about the prospects of a new Cold War?

Kissinger: There clearly is this danger, and we must not ignore it. I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it. [my emphasis]

It's sad when Henry Kissinger makes more practical good sense on an issue than most of mainstream opinion.

Here he affirms the unlikelihood of NATO actually going to war over the Crimea and the practical risks of economic sanctions against Russia:

SPIEGEL: But didn't the annexation of Crimea by Russia force the EU and US to react by imposing sanctions?

Kissinger: One, the West could not accept the annexation; some countermeasures were necessary. But nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over eastern Ukraine. That's a fact of life. So one could say we don't have to accept it, and we do not treat Crimea as a Russian territory under international law -- just as we continued to treat the Baltic states as independent throughout Soviet rule.

SPIEGEL: Would it be better to stop sanctions even without any concessions from the Russians?

Kissinger: No. But I do have a number of problems with the sanctions. When we talk about a global economy and then use sanctions within the global economy, then the temptation will be that big countries thinking of their future will try to protect themselves against potential dangers, and as they do, they will create a mercantilist global economy. And I have a particular problem with this idea of personal sanctions. And I'll tell you why. We publish a list of people who are sanctioned. So then, when the time comes to lift the sanctions, what are we going to say? "The following four people are now free of sanctions, and the other four are not." Why those four? I think one should always, when one starts something, think what one wants to achieve and how it should end. How does it end?

SPIEGEL: Doesn't that also apply to Putin, who has maneuvered himself into a corner? Does he act out of weakness or out of strength?

Kissinger: I think out of strategic weakness masked as tactical strength. [my emphasis]

Robert Parry cites Kissinger's interview in his article, Letting the Neocons Lead Consortium News 11/17/2014.

I would say that Parry's articles on Ukraine have been a little one-sided for my taste, though I feel weird writing that. I basically agree with his analysis of the West's bad policies over Ukraine and on expanding NATO generally. But in reading his columns, I find myself wishing for a bit more context on the ambitions of the Russian side and the internal dynamics driving Putin's regime. The West, the US in particular, has been reckless in much of its post-1989 policies toward Russia. But that doesn't mean that Russia's actions, even in pursuit of legitimate security concerns, have always been free of reckless impulses, either. But neither do I want to see people aping bad Cold War habits of crouching every criticism of US policy with a Both-Sides-Do-It or Russia-Is-Evil qualifiers in a useless gesture to try to avoid being accused of being pro-Russian by the Dick Cheneys and Ted Cruzes of the world.

But Parry is spot on with this:

In a rational political system, the American neocons would be the most discredited group in modern U.S. history. If not in the dock for complicity in war crimes – from Central America in the 1980s to Iraq last decade – they would surely not be well-regarded scholars at prominent think tanks and welcomed as op-ed columnists at major publications.

But the United States doesn’t currently have a rational political system. Instead of being prosecuted or ostracized, the neocons continue to dominate Official Washington’s foreign policy thinking. They and their “liberal interventionist” sidekicks continue to demonize disfavored “enemy” leaders – just as they did in Central America and Iraq – and bait doubters for “weakness” if they don’t climb onboard. [my emphasis]

He's doing well to calling attention to how little practical difference there is in cases like the new non-war war in Syria and Iraq between the neocons and the so-called liberal hawks or liberal interventionists.

In The Neocons — Masters of Chaos Consortium News 10/17/2014, Parry writes:

The neocons and their “liberal interventionist” junior partners have kept the “regime change” pot boiling with the Western-orchestrated overthrow and killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the proxy civil war in Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad, the costly economic embargoes against Iran, and the U.S.-backed coup that ousted Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.

All these targeted governments were first ostracized by the neocons and the major U.S. news organizations, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, which have become what amounts to neocon mouthpieces. Whenever the neocons decide that it’s time for another “regime change,” the mainstream U.S. media enlists in the propaganda wars.

This is also a context in which news from Latin America needs to be evaluated, especially in Venezuela and Argentina. The Obama Administration has been way too enthusiastic about "regime change" plays and overconfident in their ability to achieve constructive results.

Mearsheimer on the Obama Administration's policy on Ukraine

Über-Realist John Mearsheimer writes about US policy toward Russia in Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin Foreign Affairs Sept-Oct 2014. This article has a feature I haven't noticed or used before. The article is behind subscription, but you can send the full article to your Kindle for free.

"Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin's determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO," Mearsheimer writes.

I'm cautious about the theoretical framework that "realist" foreign-policy theorists like Mearsheimer use, because in the minds and hands of people like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, it can produce some beneficial, pragmatic policies (normalizing relations with China, detente with the USSR) alongside cynical, foolish and destructive ones (prolonging and expanding the war in Indochina, getting up a coup in Chile). But the best of the Realists, like Mearsheimer, his sometime collaborator Stephen Walt, and the late George Kennan, provide valuable and unsentimental analysis that takes into account capabilities and intentions, aspirations and delusions.

In the United States, even the most critical foreign policy issues are publicly discussed by policymakers and elected officials in highly ideological terms, heavily influenced by an unreflective Cold War triumphalism. The latter of which was un-Realist and unrealistic to begin with, and now is fast approaching the clinically delusional. Mearsheimer and Walt also take into account a few years of history in looking at current foreign policy problems, something that our major media in the US, including CNN, have effectively lost the ability to do.

Intelligence analysts and foreign policy professionals and the occasional news junkie were aware of the background that Mearsheimer relates on Russia's resistance to NATO expansion. The Clinton and Bush II Administrations were always taking on a bigger risk with NATO expansion than the American public realized. We don't have to assume any benign motives on the part of Russian leaders for policymakers to have known that Russia was highly likely to eventually push back against it, as they have done in Georgia and Ukraine. Taking the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into NATO was an especially questionable move. As Mearsheimer reminds us, NATO made Albania and Croatia full members in 2009.

As Stephen Walt has pointed out that NATO hasn't bothered to put in place the kind of forward military capabilities to effectively defend the Baltic countries against an actual Russian invasion, as Kennan predicted in 1998 in an earlier stage of NATO expansion (see below). So, in the world of war-gaming, what does NATO do if we want to go to war with Russia in non-NATO member Georgia but Russia simultaneously threatens the actual NATO allies in the Baltics?

Actually, such scenarios are a little far-fetched in Mearsheimer's view: "Russia's mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions." He judges that Vladimir Putin's "response to events there has been defensive, not offensive."

So whatever larger questions of virtue may be at stake, the US and NATO really seem to have underestimated the risks and real costs of the NATO expansion policy. And now the reliance on economic sanctions against Russia coincides with the continuing depression in the eurozone for which there is no end in sight under Angela Merkel's deflationary "ordoliberal" economic policies. The whole set of US-NATO policies on Russia needs more of a dose of realism, on both the theoretical and policy levels.

Mearsheimer notes that in addition to NATO expansion, the West established an Eastern Partnership initiative, "a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy." He says Russia viewed "the plan as hostile to their country's interests." He writes, "In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion."

Then there's Victoria Nuland and the dubious "democracy-promotion" efforts that have targeted Ukraine, Venezuela and other countries that, perhaps coincidentally, don't have the best relations with the United States.

The West's final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve "the future it deserves." As part of that effort, the U.S government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED's president, Carl Gershman, has called that country "the biggest prize." After [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych won Ukraine's presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country's democratic institutions. [my emphasis]

The State Department website has the Congressional testimony of Nuland from last year before a Senate subcommittee, A Pivotal Moment for the Eastern Partnership: Outlook for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan 11/14/2013:

The United States supports the sovereign right of these countries to choose their own future, and we welcome their closer relationship with the EU. We have been working in lock-step with our European Allies and partners to help Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia meet the tough conditions for a “yes” vote at Vilnius. We’ve also been aligning future U.S. assistance with that of the EU to ensure that these countries can continue on the politically difficult, but necessary, path of reform and economic adjustment, including after Vilnius. At the same time, we have been working with the EU and each candidate country to anticipate and prepare them for any negative reaction to their choice, whether it comes from inside or outside their countries. I would note in this regard that any form of pressure to prevent sovereign states from pursuing greater integration with the EU, or any organization of their choosing, would contravene obligations under the OSCE Helsinki Principles and the Charter of Paris. The message we are sending in the neighborhood is that all countries benefit when their neighbors open their markets and become more stable and prosperous.

Nuland presented US assistance in a very benign light:

Ukraine still needs to take three important reform steps to meet the EU’s conditions for signature at Vilnius including: passage of legislation reforming its Prosecutor General’s Office; passage of legislation reforming its parliamentary election code; and the release of jailed former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko for medical treatment. Since its independence in 1991, the American people have supported Ukraine’s transition to democracy and a free market economy with over $5 billion in assistance. In FY2013, our assistance topped $100 million, and much of it went to help Ukraine meet European standards in law enforcement, electoral reform, business climate and the judicial sector, including key support for Ukraine’s newly adopted Criminal Procedure Code. If Ukraine meets the EU’s conditions and signs in Vilnius, it will be able to export its goods to the largest single market in the world, tariff-free, by early 2014. This should provide a great stimulus to an economy which has been in a difficult recession for over a year. In the past few months, Ukraine has come under pressure from Russia, including bans on chocolate, stoppage of refrigerated goods at the border, and reductions in other key imports. We are working with the EU on options to help Ukraine make difficult trade adjustments and weather the EU implementation period if Ukraine makes the political decisions necessary to sign its AA at Vilnius.

When regime change from the elected if authoritarian-minded, pro-Russian Yanukovych government fell to an anti-Russian one. Mearsheimer even uses one of those f-words, saying that the new government "contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists."

And Mearsheimer explains why it's difficult to assume there was not a US-directed regime-change operation in play:

Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych's toppling that it was "a day for the history books." As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych's ouster.

Russia's leaders, and apparently much of the public, see a Western alliance by Georgia or Ukraine to be very much against Russia's national interest. "Washington may not like Moscow's position," writes Mearsheimer, "but it should understand the logic behind it." Because, as it puts in a classic Realist tone, "it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them."

That other famous realist, George Kennan, warned in strong terms in 1998 when the Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion negotiated by the Clinton Administration, that it was a bad idea (Thomas Friedman, Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X New York Times 05/02/1998; yes, Little Tommy Friedman once did some decent reporting):

"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. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs."

"What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was," added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed "X," defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. "I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

... "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." [my emphasis]

Mearsheimer sees a theoretical/ideological aspect to the Clinton Administration view on NATO expansion, a badly flawed view in Mearsheimer's opinion:

Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the "indispensable nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe. ...

... Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.

... NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees.

Robert Parry has been providing a lot of critical coverage on the Ukrainian events since February at his Consortium News site, including:

Robert Parry, Neocons and the Ukraine Coup 02/23/2014:

Over the past several weeks, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was undercut by a destabilization campaign encouraged by Nuland and Pyatt and then deposed in a coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias. Even after Yanukovych and the political opposition agreed to an orderly transition toward early elections, right-wing armed patrols shattered the agreement and took strategic positions around Kiev.

Despite these ominous signs, Ambassador Pyatt hailed the coup as “a day for the history books.” Most of the mainstream U.S. news media also sided with the coup, with commentators praising the overthrow of an elected government as “reform.” But a few dissonant reports have pierced the happy talk by noting that the armed militias are part of the Pravy Sektor, a right-wing nationalist group which is often compared to the Nazis.

Thus, the Ukrainian coup could become the latest neocon-initiated “regime change” that ousted a target government but failed to take into account who would fill the void.

Robert Parry, Cheering a ‘Democratic’ Coup in Ukraine 02/26/2014:

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the EU was driving too hard a bargain or whether Ukraine should undertake such painful economic “reforms” – or how Yanukovych should have balanced the interests of his divided country, with the east dominated by ethnic Russians and the west leaning toward Europe.

But protesters from western Ukraine, including far-right nationalists, sought to turn this policy dispute into a means for overthrowing the elected government. Police efforts to quell the disturbances turned violent, with the police not the only culprits. Police faced armed neo-Nazi storm troopers who attacked with firebombs and other weapons.

Though the U.S. news media did show scenes of these violent melees, the U.S. press almost universally blamed Yanukovych – and took almost gleeful pleasure as his elected government collapsed and was replaced by thuggish right-wing militias “guarding” government buildings.

Robert Parry, A Shadow US Foreign Policy 02/27/2014:

The National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan’s propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration’s policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections.

• Ray McGovern, Ukraine: One Regime Change too Many 03/01/2014
• Robert Parry, What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis 03/02/2014
• Robert Parry, America’s Staggering Hypocrisy 03/04/2014
• Robert Parry, Putin or Kerry: Who’s Delusional 03/05/2014
• Robert Parry, The ‘We-Hate-Putin’ Group Think 03/07/2014
• Robert Parry, Crimea’s Case for Leaving Ukraine 03/09/2014
• Melvin Goodman, The Flaw in ‘Cornering’ Russia 03/10/2014
• Annie Machon, The West’s War on Democracy 03/11/2014
• Robert Parry, How Reagan Enforced US Hypocrisy 03/11/2014
• Robert Parry, How Looking Forward Tripped Up Obama 03/12/2014
• Robert Parry, Neocons Have Weathered the Storm 03/14/2014
• JP Sottile, Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch 03/16/2014
• Robert Parry, Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine 03/16/2014
• Robert Parry, Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit 03/19/2014
• Robert Parry, WPost’s Anti-Putin ‘Group Think’ 03/20/2014
• Lorraine Barlett, Crimea and Punishment 03/21/2014
• Andres Cala, Why Europe Shies from Ukraine Showdown 03/26/2014
• Robert Parry, The Danger of False Narrative 03/27/2014:

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Ukraine joining with the EU or staying with Russia (or a combination of the two) – depending on the will of the people and their elected representatives – this latest U.S./EU plan was motivated, at least in part, by hostility toward Russia.

That attitude was expressed in a Sept. 26, 2013, op-ed in the Washington Post by Carl Gershman, the neoconservative president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which doles out more than $100 million in U.S. funds a year to help organize “activists,” support “journalists” and finance programs that can be used to destabilize targeted governments.

Gershman, whose job amounts to being a neocon paymaster, expressed antagonism toward Russia in the op-ed and identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

The NED, which was founded in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, listed 65 projects that it was financing in Ukraine, using U.S. taxpayers’ money. In other words, Gershman’s op-ed reflected U.S. policy – at least inside the State Department’s still-neocon-dominated bureaucracy – which viewed the EU’s snatching of Ukraine from Russia’s embrace as a way to weaken Russia and hurt Putin.

• Robert Parry, Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis 03/30/2014
• Todd Pierce, ‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’ 04/01/2014 (Unfortunately, it's not an April Fool's joke!)
• Robert Parry, Ukrainians Get IMF’s Bitter Medicine 04/02/2014
• Robert Parry, When Is a Putsch a Putsch? 04/08/2014:
• Robert Parry, What’s the Matter with John Kerry? 04/14/2014:

In late September, as the neocon drive for bombing Syria was petering out, neocon Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), penned a Washington Post op-ed that called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and expressed hope that “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

NED was founded in 1983 essentially to carry out the sorts of activities that traditionally were done by the CIA, i.e., supporting activists, “journalists” and other operatives who would be useful in destabilization campaigns against troublesome governments, all in the name of “democracy promotion.” NED’s annual report listed a staggering 65 projects in Ukraine.

By fall 2013, Kerry’s State Department was committed to prying Ukraine loose from Russia’s orbit, all the better to weaken Putin (and drive a wedge between him and Obama). At the forefront of this effort was Victoria Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century which famously pushed the case for invading Iraq.

• Robert Parry, Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass 04/16/2014
• Robert Parry, The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance 04/18/2014
• Robert Parry, Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Imperative 04/20/2014
• Robert Parry, Another NYT-Michael Gordon Special? 04/21/2014
• Robert Parry, Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre 04/22/2014
• Robert Parry, NYT Retracts Russian-Photo Scoop 04/23/2014
• Nat Parry, Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas 04/24/2014
• Robert Parry, John Kerry’s Sad Circle to Deceit 04/25/2014
• Robert Parry, Why Neocons Seek to Destabilize Russia 04/27/2014
• VIPS, Obama Urged to Show Restraint on Ukraine 04/28/2014
• Ray McGovern, Killing the Putin-Obama ‘Trust’ 04/28/2014
• Ray McGovern, Kerry’s Propaganda War on Russia’s RT 04/30/2014: about an appearance on RT television by Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen
• Robert Parry, Who’s the Propagandist: US or RT? 05/01/2014
• Robert Parry, Twisting Putin’s Words on Ukraine 05/02/2014
• Daniel Patrick Welch, A People’s War in East Ukraine 05/03/2014
• Robert Parry, Will Ukraine Be NYT’s Waterloo? 05/03/2014
• VIPS, Needed: Obama-Putin Summit on Ukraine 05/04/2014
• Robert Parry, Another NYT ‘Sort of’ Retraction on Ukraine 05/04/2014
• Robert Parry, Ukraine’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Reality 05/05/2014
• Robert Parry, What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine 05/06/2014
• Robert Parry, Putin’s Subtle Message to Obama 05/08/2014
• Robert Parry, Burning Ukraine’s Protesters Alive 05/10/2014
• Robert Parry, Ukraine’s Dueling Elections 05/12/2014
• Robert Parry, Ethnic Russians Are People Too 05/13/2014
• Robert Parry, How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine 05/15/2014
• Robert Parry, The State Department’s Ukraine Fiasco 05/24/2014
• Robert Parry, NYT’s One-Sided Ukraine Narrative 05/26/2014
• Ray McGovern, Premature US Victory-Dancing on Ukraine 05/28/2014
• Robert Parry, How Neocons Constrain Obama’s Message 05/28/2014
• Robert Parry, The Only Standards Are Double Standards 06/04/2014
• JP Sottile, Hillary Clinton’s Hawkish Legacy 06/05/2014
• Robert Parry, Why Take the Neocons Seriously? 06/15/2014
• Ray McGovern, Facts Needed on Malaysian Plane Shoot-Down 06/28/2014
• Robert Parry, Obama at a Crossroad of War or Peace 06/18/2014
• Robert Parry, NYT Revamps Its False Ukraine Narrative 06/26/2014
• Ray McGovern, Who Violated Ukraine’s Sovereignty? 06/28/2014
• Ray McGovern, The Risk of a Ukraine Bloodbath 07/02/2014
• Robert Parry, Itching for a Genocide 07/03/2014
• Robert Parry, NYT Dishes More Ukraine Propaganda 07/06/2014
• Robert Parry, No Lessons Learned at the NYT 07/07/2014
• Robert Parry, The Human Price of Neocon Havoc 07/17/2014
• Robert Parry, Airline Horror Spurs New Rush to Judgment 07/19/2014
• Robert Parry, What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine? 07/20/2014
• Robert Parry, Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment 07/21/2014
• Ray McGovern, Kerry’s Poor Record for Veracity 07/22/2014
• Robert Parry, The Mystery of a Ukrainian Army ‘Defector’ 07/22/2014
• Robert Parry, Blaming Russia as ‘Flat Fact’ 07/27/2014
• VIPS, Obama Should Release Ukraine Evidence 07/29/2014
• Robert Parry, Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts 08/03/2014
• Robert Parry, Was Putin Targeted for Mid-Air Assassination? 08/08/2014
• Robert Parry, NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War 08/10/2014
• Robert Parry, Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers 08/13/2014
• Dovid Katz, The Hushed-Up Hitler Factor in Ukraine 08/16/2014
• Robert Parry, The Powerful ‘Group Think’ on Ukraine 08/18/2014
• Robert Parry, Behind Obama’s ‘Chaotic’ Foreign Policy 08/21/2014
• Ray McGovern, Russia’s Humanitarian ‘Invasion’ 08/23/2014
• Ray McGovern, Selective Outrage over Ukraine POWs 08/25/2014
• Robert Parry, Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine? 09/02/2014
• Robert Parry, The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis 09/03/2014
• Robert Parry, Sidestepping Ukraine’s ‘N-Word’ for Nazi 09/06/2014
• Robert Parry, Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine 09/08/2014
• Robert Parry, Malaysia Airlines Whodunnit Still a Mystery 09/08/2014
• Robert Parry, Neocons Revive Syria ‘Regime Change’ Plan 09/11/2014
• Ted Snider, Perfecting ‘Regime Change’ in Ukraine 09/15/2014
• Robert Parry, Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Nazi Storm Troopers 09/15/2014
• Robert Parry, High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine 09/22/2014
• Robert Parry, Obama’s Propagandistic UN Address 09/25/2014