If
you were a powerful elite and you sought to have EuroMan prune his
house, what would you do? This was just sent to me. It’s an interesting
read.
NATO Ups the Ante in the Ukraine Crisis
June 26, 2015
Armed NATO allies in Estonia, March 22, 2015 (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)
NATO
defense ministers, meeting in Brussels this week, rushed headlong into a
new and potentially more dangerous cold war with Russia by taking the
unprecedented decision to station men and matériel directly on Russia’s
western border. NATO’s decision, which has no precedent in the history
of the last cold war, will only serve to heighten tensions with Russia
and may well be the catalyst for ever more violence in the breakaway
regions of eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile,
transatlantic efforts to undermine last February’s Minsk II cease-fire
accords continue without surcease. On Monday, June 22, the European
Union extended sanctions against Russia in the financial, energy,
technological, and defense sectors until January 2016. The decision was
made at the EU’s foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg. Russia quickly
retaliated, banning food imports from the EU, the United States,
Canada, Norway, and Australia for the next 12 months.
The
controversy surrounding the tit-for-tat sanctions was followed in short
order by US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s weeklong trip to Europe. A
senior defense department official claimed that Carter would spend his
time urging NATO allies to “dispose of the Cold War playbook.”
Yet
ditching the “playbook” obviously didn’t entail jettisoning Cold
War–style rhetoric, since Carter went on to denounce Russian President
Vladimir Putin as a “malign influence” in Eastern Europe.
Senator
John McCain, as usual, went even further. Delivering comments redolent
of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famously hawkish Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles’s “rollback” rhetoric last weekend in Kiev, McCain said it
was in the interests of the West to “reverse” Russian aggression.
According to McCain, only the deluded “still cling to the Minsk
cease-fire.” He declared that he and the Ukrainians he met with “know
this cease-fire is a fiction.”
Later
in the week Secretary Carter participated in the NATO defense
ministers’ meeting in Brussels. And the summit’s—please forgive the
bureaucratese—“deliverables” indicate that the alliance has taken
Carter’s directive to heart, with plans to triple the number of troops
in its Response Force to 40,000 troops. Troops, armored vehicles and up
to 250 tanks will be stationed across Europe’s eastern frontier, with
plans to station them in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
and Romania.
Taking this perhaps fateful step is, in fact, going far beyond the “Cold War playbook” and has no parallel in Cold War history.
These
maneuvers precede what will be NATO’s largest joint exercise of the
post–Cold War era, Trident Juncture 2015, which is planned to take place
September 28 to November 6.
More
worrying still is the fact that the NATO meeting took place amidst a
rash of nuclear posturing from both sides. On June 16, President Putin
made headlines throughout the West when he announced that Russia would
add 40 additional intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear
deterrent. His announcement was, in turn, denounced in short order by
Secretaries Kerry and Carter as well as by NATO Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg.
Such
was the import of Putin’s comments that the House Armed Services
Committee held a hearing on Thursday on nuclear deterrence. The
ostensible focus of the hearing was the increasingly aged state of the
US nuclear arsenal, but the hearing also served, not surprisingly, as
occasion for hard-line Republicans to sound the alarm over Russia’s
nuclear “provocations.”
Questions
over just how to shore up the US nuclear deterrent in the face of a
resurgent Russia have also been a priority of Washington’s think tanks.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies just released a
report, Project Atom, which urges the Pentagon to add, among other
things, a carrier-based nuclear deterrent to the arsenal. The defense
journalist Tyler Rogoway explains that
the “strategy emanates from the idea that a deterrent is more effective
when it’s forward deployed to positions in and around an ally’s
geographical area.”
Yet, according to Council on Foreign Relations expert Adam Mount,
for all the hand-wringing over Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Putin’s recent
announcement was “entirely in line with previous expectations and did
not add major new capabilities to his nuclear arsenal.” Russia,
according to Mount, continues to be in full compliance “with the New
START treaty, which limits strategic launchers like ICBMs.”
Nevertheless, all the Sturm und Drang over
the sanctions, NATO troop buildups, and nuclear saber rattling masks
the uncomfortable fact that it is our clients in Kiev who are acting as
the primary—though, of course, not only—obstacles to implementing Minsk
II.
In
Brussels, NATO signally failed to address Kiev’s ongoing economic and
financial blockade of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, its firing
of GRAD rockets into crowded residential blocks in eastern Ukrainian
cities, and its refusal to negotiate with the rebel leaders as
stipulated by the Minsk accords. Meanwhile, President Obama is said to continue to insistthat it is the Russian-separatist side alone that is refusing to implement the accords.
And
so the events of this week have extinguished any glimmer of hope that
may have been sparked by John Kerry’s diplomatic parley with the
Russians in Sochi this past May. All the while, the administration,
aided and abetted by a compliant Congress and a complacent media, stands
idly by as the war parties on both sides of the Atlantic march on,
unencumbered and virtually unopposed.
For more about an organization dedicated to opposing this rush toward a new Cold War please visit EastWestAccord.com
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