NATOs formand Jens Stoltenberg blabrer det ud, krigen i Ukraine er tabt
“Wars develop in phases,” Stoltenberg said in an interview Saturday with German broadcaster ARD. “We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times,” he said.
“We should also be prepared for bad news,” Stoltenberg added, without being more specific.
Tidligere har han sagt at krigen er udløst af Vestens insisteren på at udvide NATO. Vores egen udenrigsminister Lars Løkke Rasmussen fortalte et par russiske spøgefugle, der udgav sig for afrikanske diplomater, at skønt Vesten stod last og brast med Ukraine, så ville den ukrainske præsident på et tidspunkt skulle tage bestik af situationen og komme til forhandlingsbordet. Polens Duda betegnede Ukraine som en druknende mand, som man skal holde sig fra, hvis ikke man vil trækkes med i dybet.
Mellem Stoltenberg, Duda og Løkke og alle andre, der indrømmer denne totale fadæse, kan man tolke, at det er Vestens måde at fortælle russerne, at man har accepteret nederlaget og at man ikke ønsker at blive trukket længere ned i dybet, som man langsomt forsøger at omprogrammere hjemmefrontens proxy-patriotiske masser. Marie Krarup skrev fra Krigens start, at dette ville blive resultatet, ødelæggelsen af Ukraine. Hun vidste noget, og det var der andre der gjorde: Realisterne havde ret, skriver Lily Lynch i The New Statesman
Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities.
At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive”, which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. “We’re about to see what a decentralised, horizontal, innovative high-tech force can do,” Jessica Berlin, a German and American political analyst, wrote in May. “Ukraine may be underfunded, undermanned and underequipped compared to Russia. But those tactical, adaptive Ukrainian strengths deliver what money can’t buy and training can’t teach. Get ready for some stunners.” In the Daily Telegraph, the soldier-turned-civilian-military-expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was effusive as recently as June: “As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.”
(…) Early on, reporters framed the war as one of David vs Goliath, in which Ukrainian grandmothers downed Russian drones with jars of pickles. Ukraine’s astonishing performance in Kharkiv fuelled expectations. Early mythmaking has made recent disappointments all the more bitter. “There were wishful expectations that Russia would collapse, fold early on, especially after Ukraine heroically survived the first round, and people got carried away,” Patrick Porter, the realist scholar of international relations, said.
Gordon Hahn skriver i Russian And Eurasian Politics
The shocking scale of the political overreach and historical blunder of this NATO strategy, particularly as it became increasingly strident and self-interested, was visible to all of the West’s most accomplished strategic thinkers: George Kennan, John Mearsheimer, Michael Mandelbaum, among others (including myself). (Some, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the light on their death beds.) These seasoned and reasonable men noticed and warned from the start that such a policy would chase Moscow into Beijing’s arms, creating a bulwark of anti-Western strategic power. It is with this historically grave miscalculation that today’s Ukrainian conflict found its genesis, for NATO’s ‘open door policy’ raised the issue of Russia’s border being fully covered with members of the alliance. By attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO – officially since the alliance’s 2007 Budapest summit, unofficially probably since 1991 – the alliance deprived itself of a buffer state between Russia and the West that would have largely precluded conflict with Russia, particularly if a strategy of buffer-building instead of alliance-building were applied to the Baltic, Belarus, and Moldova as well. From the beginning, NATO expansion discredited democracy and Russia’s Westernizers and resuscitated Russia’s traditional security vigilance norm in relation to the West. NATO’s new members had powerful historical grudges and cultural and religious animosities in relation to Russia, and Russia had historically rooted sensitivities about its western neighbors because of a centuries-long pattern political interference, subversion, and interventions, cultural and religious animosities, and military interventions and invasions emanating from the West, by the West, and for the West.
Ukraine was an especially troublesome matter given the common historical, cultural, religious, and ethno-national elements between Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainian and Russian national identities are inextricably intertwined by common historical experiences and political ties, some of comity, some not so much. By insisting on its right to expand to Ukraine, NATO turned the neutral sign under which post-Soviet Ukraine existed into a negative sign as far as Moscow was concerned. From being a potential buffer state for the West (and Russia), Ukraine became an object of desire between the West and a Moscow already in a state of heightened vigilance as a result of several waves of NATO expansion, including to its borders with the Baltic states. In short, the West replaced a security buffer with security dilemma and high likelihood of conflict with Russia.
Perhaps more importantly, because of the two country’s often common history, Ukraine was a divided state, split along ethic, linguistic, identitarian, geographic, political-historiographical, and socioeconomic lines. NATO’s efforts to expand to Ukraine aggravated tensions between western and southeastern Ukraine where these divisions lay ready to explode like a soldier stepping on a land mine. The Western-backed Maidan revolt was the violent spark that detonated this powder keg.
Billedet herover er fra The New York Times.
Bill Clintons forsvarsminister William Perry var en stor kritiker af at flytte NATO østpå så hastigt. For fem år siden kunne man i Guardian læse
In his memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, Perry writes that he argued for a slower expansion of Nato so as not to alienate Russia during the initial period of post-Soviet courtship and cooperation. Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat, led the opposing argument at the time, and was ultimately supported by the vice-president, Al Gore, who argued “we could manage the problems this would create with Russia”.
Perry said the decision reflected a contemptuous attitude among US officials towards the troubled former superpower.
“It wasn’t that we listened to their argument and said he don’t agree with that argument,” he said. “Basically the people I was arguing with when I tried to put the Russian point … the response that I got was really: ‘Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.’ And of course that point of view got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding down that path.”
Perry considered resigning over the issue “but I concluded that my resignation would be misinterpreted as opposition to Nato membership that I greatly favoured – just not right away”.
He sees the second major misstep by Washington DC as the Bush administration’s decision to deploy a ballistic missile defence system in eastern Europe in the face of determined opposition from Moscow. Perry said: “We rationalised [the system] as being to defend against an Iranian nuclear missile – they don’t have any but that’s another issue. But the Russians said ‘Wait a bit, this weakens our deterrence.’ The issue again wasn’t discussed on the basis of its merits – it was just ‘who cares about what Russia thinks.’ We dismissed it again.”
The Obama administration has since modified the missile defence system in eastern Europe, replacing long-range with medium-range interceptor missiles but that has not mollified Russian objections.
The west’s assurances to Soviet ministers on eastward expansion of Nato | Letters
Perry said he was opposed to such systems on technical grounds. “I think they’re a waste of money. I don’t think they work,” he said. “In fact, when I talked to the Russians I tried to convince them not to worry, they don’t work anyway but they didn’t buy that.”
The third factor that Perry pointed to in the poisoning of US-Russian relations was Washington DC’s support for pro-democracy demonstrators in the “colour revolutions” in former Soviet republics including Georgia and Ukraine. Perry agreed with the ethical reasons for backing such revolutions but noted their severely damaging effect on east-west ties.
“After he came to office, Putin came to believe that the United States had an active and robust programme to overthrow his regime,” the former defence secretary said.
“And from that point on a switch went on in Putin’s mind that said: I’m no longer going to work with the west … I don’t know the facts behind Putin’s belief that we actually had a programme to foment revolution in Russia but what counts is he believed it.”
Tidligere Europaparlamentariker for De Grønne Jakob von Uexkull husker det således
“Ikke en tomme østpå”, som Blake Fleetwood kaldte sin artikel fra sidste år og beskrev hvorledes krigen kunne have været forhindret for årtier siden (Hvis det var det man ville)
Thirty years ago the current conflict with Russia was foretold and feared. George Kennan, James Baker, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Sam Nunn, and Thomas Friedman, among others, all warned in the 1990s of a new Cold War if NATO was expanded without including Russia.
In order to understand what’s going on in Ukraine from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, you have to go back to 1990 when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Talks were proceeding about the pending unification of Germany, which the Soviets could have vetoed.
There is no question that the U.S. and NATO — President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker — made a deal in early February 1990 with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
According to documents declassified in 2017, the deal essentially was that the Soviets would allow German unification with the written “ironclad guarantees”, that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward”, in the words of James Baker.
A week later Gorbachev began German reunification talks. So what happened next?
At this point with Russia in chaos and its nascent democracy and free market was just emerging. They needed help. The U.S. could have entered into a real Marshall Plan arrangement, as we did after World War II with our enemies, Germany and Italy. This plan could have included Russia and all of the Eastern Bloc and offered an opportunity for a long standing partnership to nurture the roots of democracy and capitalism in the region.
But this opportunity was lost because Cold War hardliners, within President George H. Bush’s foreign policy circle could not see the enormous differences between an emerging Russian democracy/capitalism and the Soviet Communist Empire.
These hardliners proclaimed the Wolfowitz/Bush doctrine in 1992 which held that the US was the only remaining superpower and should thus project its dominance over any region in the world.
Senator Edward Kennedy described the doctrine as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.”
The Bush/Baker promises regarding NATO expansion into eastern Europe were kept through the Republican administration.
But in 1998 after the Democrats took over, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy team said “we’re going to cram NATO expansion down the Russian’s throats because Moscow is weak…, The cold war is over for you but not for us.” according to an article in The New York Times.
The Democratic administration essentially took the position that the cascade of promises to halt NATO expansion were made to the Soviet Union not Russia, and anyway didn’t apply to the new administration.
To the great humiliation of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian people, Clinton would not allow Russia to join NATO, but it started a process which would lead to 14 other former Warsaw Pact members joining what was an anti-Soviet military alliance.
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, joined first and were eventually followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia.
Russian journalists felt that America had taken advantage of a weakened Russia to impose a new world order that did not include them or their historical need for a buffer zone.
While the Senate was first debating NATO expansion, excluding Russia, New York Times Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Thomas Friedman, reached out to the dean of American scholars of Russia, George Kennan. He said “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war.”
“I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”
Kennan believed that expanding NATO would forever damage America’s efforts to transform Russia from an enemy to a friend.
Kennan was right. From that point on Russian leaders felt that America had taken advantage of a weakened Russia to impose a new world order, that did not include them or their historical need for a geographic buffer zone.
Kennan havde ret, skrev Thomas Hodgson også
Many Russians view NATO as a vestige of the cold war, inherently antagonistic to their country; they ask why their military alliance was disbanded and why the West ought to not do the same.
As of 1995, a mere 13% of US armed forces were serving abroad. By 2017, this had soared to 22%. In the same year, NATO had amassed 800 battalion troops in Estonia, 1200 in Latvia and Lithuania respectively, and 4000 in Poland; this was atop 250 tanks, Bradley Fighting vehicles and Paladin howitzers – the largest build-up since the Second World War. This accumulation came as defence budgets in the Baltic states began to rise exponentially, with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania spending over 2 billion dollars combined in 2019. There is, therefore, ample evidence to suggest a positive correlation between heightened NATO presence within a region and intensified militarisation.
The critical question here is evident: could this have been avoided?
NATO conduct in the former Soviet Union flagrantly defies every basic principle and platitude of good foreign policy: ‘treat former enemies magnanimously’, ‘do not take on unnecessary new ones’, ‘avoid emotion in making decisions’, ‘be willing to acknowledge error’. I am of the opinion that NATO manages to defy and violate every one of the aforementioned in its stance on Russia. With 1991 came the opportunity to welcome the nascent Russian Federation and the surrounding eastern bloc into the international community; to roll out a Marshall Plan style arrangement to foster the roots of fledgling democracy and market capitalism in the region. Instead came the Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine, described by Ted Kennedy as a call for “21st century American imperialism”, squandering any chance of Russian integration, therefore rendering backlash inevitable.
America had taken advantage of a weakened Russia to impose a new world order that excluded them and disregarded their historical need for a buffer zone. Russia, thereafter, was forever condemned to enemy status.
Og nu er den tabt, Ukraine ødelagt og NATO står tilbage som en forbryderorganisation i Verdens øjne.
MONOKULTUR 
Skriv en kommentar