Guest Post by Patrick L. Smith
We are making mayhem in Russia, and reality is almost the opposite of what is being described in the press
Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)
I cannot be the only one to note the remarkable sequence of events in the Obama White House last week. It tells us all we need to know—for now, anyway—about what Washington is up to as it puts Russia in an illegal police chokehold. This will end neither soon nor well.
On Wednesday the president announced his out-of-nowhere move to lift sanctions against Cuba and reestablish diplomatic ties. I cannot be the only one to do this, either: I wept. Half a century of suffering pointlessly inflicted on a humane and very brave people will now come to an end.
On Thursday Obama signed HR 5859, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, into law. One is always suspicious of bills with Boy Scouty names like this, and one is always justified: Obama just gave himself permission to inflict pointless suffering on the humane and very brave Russian people more or less arbitrarily and indefinitely. And in all our names, the Pentagon will now arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Funny, the $350 million committed as an opener just about matches what Truman gave the Greek monarchists in 1947, so commencing the Cold War.
Let us end the Cold War 90 miles off our coast and far too late. Let us prosecute it full bore against Russia and along its borders, far too irrationally and nostalgically. I find one key to Washington’s reasoning, if this is the word, on Russia in this contradiction, because it is apparent, not real.
“It is clear that decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous and stable Cuba,” Obama said Wednesday. “We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse.”
With this statement a president who has consistently betrayed principle and common decency in deploying American power abroad went some way to redeeming himself in my household. Egypt, Syria, endless indulgence of Israel, the fight with China over the Pacific sphere of influence, those aggressively corporate trade deals Washington wants to impose across both oceans—and now the opening to Cuba: This guy has the lumpiest foreign policy record of any president I can recall, but he bested 10 predecessors when he reached his hand across the water to Havana.
So went our 44th president’s 24 hours in the sun.
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The Ukraine bill, a straight-ahead cave to unreconstructed cold warriors on Capitol Hill, ranks among Obama’s most craven and cowardly foreign policy decisions. Sanctions are pointless on Wednesday, but let us provide for more of them on Thursday because the Russophobes, blunt instruments all, require them.
The Russian press wants to think Obama signed the Ukraine bill reluctantly. I want to think the Cuba move was an expression of who the man buried in America’s version of the deep state truly is. Maybe we are both right. But the Russian press and I have to get off the question of obscured intent. In the end this is a distraction.
Obama’s State Department and Treasury are not stocked with end-of-history neoliberals by coincidence or some kind of carryover from the Bush II years. They are staffed as they are because Obama subscribes as avidly as any of them to the neoliberal agenda.
Obama last week on normalizing with Cuba and “our enduring objective”: “The Cuban regime still represses its people. This chips away at this hermetically sealed society, and I believe offers the best prospect, then, of leading to greater freedom, greater self-determination on the part of the Cuban people.”
Obama last week on more sanctions against Russia: “As I have said many times, our goal is to promote a diplomatic solution that provides a lasting resolution to the conflict and helps to promote growth and stability in Ukraine and regionally, including in Russia.”
I celebrate the Cuba opening: Triumphantly right for the wrong reason. I join a swelling number of Europeans in condemning Obama’s new provision for extending sanctions against Russia: It is abjectly wrong for the same wrong reason. Tactics are all that is at issue. Strategy remains constant.
There is no reason whatever to expect the Cuban leadership to change in consequence of normalization. I stand with Sen. Marco Rubio and the rest of the Castrophobes on this point.
I depart on a dime from conservatives beyond this. In the Cuban case, the Russian case and all others, the ambition to inspire “regime change”—the single most self-deluding of all our euphemisms, in my view—is an intrusion without justification.
Fidel Castro must have taken up “Take Me as I Am or Let Me Go” as soon as the great Ray Price wrote it in 1967. Castro stayed the course and built one of the world’s most socially just societies—this by the U.N.’s reckoning, not merely mine. One hopes Raúl and his successors keep singing, for Rubio and the conservatives are right on this point, too: In a half-century war of attrition with inappropriate American objectives, Cuba has just won. We are all better off.
And so we will be if the same outcome emerges in Washington’s confrontation with Russia. Conveniently, the Cuban opening gives us just the lens through which to view the Russian question as a very destructive year draws to a close. No, Russian society is not remotely comparable to Cuba’s. This is for Russians to think about, as I have argued previously, and changes nothing for the rest of us.
Read the transcript of Vladimir Putin’s press conference last week, an annual affair with none of the phony staging and screened questions American leaders require. It is here. “We are protecting our independence, our sovereignty and our right to exist,” the Russian leader said among much else. Think about this. It is not the remark of a man who plans to go anywhere soon.
Think about it again while looking back on the year now ending. Then ask: How did it come to this? Why would a Russian leader be moved to say this?
The American press did all it could to caricature Putin’s exchange with journalists. My favorite among the strivers was BusinessWeek, for which … magazine, I suppose we have to call it, Putin’s press conference was “surreal,” “extremely long and very weird.” Read the piece here. The juvenile vocabulary is for a purpose. Surreal, weird press conferences do not have to be considered, to say nothing of understood. The above questions do not have to be asked. Asking them would be a very bad thing. So would understanding.
It is a long way down the hill from last December, when the Independence Square protests in Kiev were gaining momentum. Washington was meddling, as was soon exposed, but Putin continued simply to watch as his ally in the presidential palace, Viktor Yanukovych, got deeper and deeper into trouble.
Then the crypto-Nazis and devotees of violence turned popular, vital, justified demonstrations into an unjustified coup. That changed everything, of course, and the rest is our very recent history. Americans do not like history because it is too revealing of events as they are, and it is hence left out of American coverage of Ukraine from the moment I describe onward until now. But it is there, as paying-attention people know.
As it happens, a growing number of Europeans now count among what Germans call Putin Versteher, “Putin understanders.” A Financial Times columnist explains the phenomenon here, though about as well as BusinessWeek explained Putin’s presser last week. Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor from 1998 to 2005, is a noted understander. So are a lot of left parliamentarians, a lot of German business executives, and a lot of Europeans other than Germans. Very mixed bag.
The simplest way to explain the understanders’ view is to say these are people with a grasp of history—recent history, Cold War history, and, the best of them, history going back to the West’s response to the 1917 revolution. When Putin asserts that Russia’s sovereignty and “right to exist” are at stake, they are capable of acknowledging what he means.
A grasp of history and, in the case of the business people, a queasy-making grasp of just how destructive sanctions—as they are, never mind new ones—are already beginning to prove outside of Russia as well as in it. Europe today has little of the stamina it had in 2008 to withstand financial and economic contagion. And here comes the contagion, like a westward wind off the Russian steppes.
Currency markets in Russia’s neighbors are already in chaos. Every day you read—not in the American press, of course—of devaluations against the euro, new foreign exchange controls, forex markets closing altogether. Here is a telling detail: Last week the Swiss cut interest rates to less than zero—you pay to deposit funds—so as to head off a rush of weak-currency holders into the franc.
Mayhem in the making, and eerily like the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, as mentioned in this space a couple of weeks back.
Among European leaders, something like a revolt against the American sanctions regime appears to be coalescing. At gatherings in Brussels last week, Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, French President François Hollande and the Danish foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, all said in different ways, “Enough with the sanctions already.” Renzi said it best: “Absolutely no to more sanctions.”
In view of the damage already being wrought, and with more on the way in the year to come, there is a “why” question attaching to the Ukraine crisis and the West’s American-led policy toward Russia. What is all this for, exactly? Answer this and we will answer a lot for ourselves.
My answer begins here. It is time we Americans understand exactly what is meant when our leaders use the word “freedom.” It is supposed to designate one of those values none of us would think of assailing. Let us assail it.
Freedom for most English-speakers may bear its obvious meaning, but in truth it bears many. Freedom to do what? The limits of which are what? Whose freedom?
Amartya Sen, the Harvard Nobelist in economics, wrote a great book some years ago called “Development as Freedom.” For him, freedom means a society wherein one is safe from poverty, where education, health care, sewage and what we call “public goods” are available, where there is authentic opportunity to realize oneself and where one can work with the expectation of earning a decent living. Absent these, there is—one of Sen’s great coinages—“unfreedom.”
Freedom in the American dialect, at least as almost all our leaders use the term, means something rather different. This is freedom for private enterprise and it is more or less full stop there. My coinage would be this: In the official American meaning, we mean neoliberal freedom, which is to say, freedom for corporations. Look out the window if you are at all confused or doubtful.
As a useful aside, we ought to think about this when we hear American leaders talk about repression and the absence of freedom in Cuba. Who is repressed and unfree—teenagers of African descent, as in America, or spooks, adventurers, saboteurs and Batista nostalgists, as America has urged these on for 50 years? Which sort of repression is justified and which to be condemned?
It is the banner of neoliberal freedom Vicky Nuland, Vice President Biden, CIA Director John Brennan and all others bear when they travel to Ukraine. Arsenyi Yatsenyuk, the prime minister in Kiev, bears it. That is why he is popular in Washington. So does Petro Poroshenko, the candy-bar billionaire turned president. Ditto his popularity on these shores.
N. B.: None of these people has anything to say about democracy or the attributes of Sen’s notion of freedom, do they? They speak incessantly of “reforms.” Reform is part of the neoliberal lexicon, another code word, like freedom. We will see this banner unfurl in the course of the year to come.
As a curtain-raiser, consider Yatsenyuk’s recent presentation in parliament, as outlined and analyzed here. Were I an ordinary Ukrainian, I would find the robotic inhumanity of Yatsenyuk’s list if reforms absolutely frightening. No wonder so many seek refuge in Russia.
As noted in earlier columns, I have been engaged in a lively exchange lately on the topics of Ukraine and Russia with good sources in the global energy and commodities markets. In specific answer to the why question, I can do no better than reproduce part of a long note that arrived a couple of days ago from Europe. The South Stream this source mentions is the gas pipeline Russia just canceled in response to deteriorating relations with Europe:
…. Also, what is at stake is the W. European gas market. In the daily froth of the media, Asia is seen as the big prize of America’s natural gas producers…. But in the industry, fewer and fewer people are seeing it that way. The terminal market for America’s shale gas will not be Asia, but Europe…. And to grab that market, the South Stream has to be stopped, and a big wedge driven between Russia and W. Europe…. That is where the strategy in support of the regime which has grabbed power in Kleptokrainia fits in….
More and more evidently, it is to American energy interests that we have to look to find the specifics of the why question. If the object is to disrupt ties between Russia and its westward neighbors—a forlorn project, in my view—it explains why Washington pops up with more sanctions or the threat of them, as with Obama’s new bill, so often when there seems to be a break in the clouds. I have found this weird over the months but do not any longer.
To me the question of Russia and the West comes down to one thing: It is bound to become messier in the year to come because a mess, in effect, appears to be exactly what Washington wants. One of two relationships will suffer a critical breach: Europe’s with Russia or Washington’s with Europe. I dearly hope it is the latter and think there is a good chance it will be.
Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.” He was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.
I just hope Russia manages to survives this incest by Wahington and comes out on top. Economic warfare caused Pearl Harbor, and who knows what the end game will be by sticking our finger in Russia’s eye.
“On Thursday Obama signed HR 5859, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, into law. ….. the $350 million committed as an opener ….” ————- from the article
And with the stroke of a pen ….. (de facto) war is declared on Russia. Imagine if Russia passed a Mexican Beaner Freedom Act … supplying that country with hundreds of millions of dollars in heavy weapons to be used against the USA!USA!USA! Shitstain McCain would sponsor a Let’s-Bomb-The-Fuck-Outta-Moscow Act. Legalizing terror with the stroke of a pen. What kind of shit-hole do Americans support? We are all guilty by association.
Look for more stroke-of-the-pen laws. The You-Can’t-Own-Gold law. The Preppers-Are-Terrorists law. The No-More-Criticizing-The-President-On-The-Internet law.
“No, no, no, Stucky!! You’re fuckin’ nuts!!”
Oh, yeah? Really? Wake the fuck up.
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“Among European leaders, something like a revolt against the American sanctions regime appears to be coalescing ….. ” ———- from the article
Hungary just told America to fuck off. Turkey is moving towards Russian influence. Despite Obama-nutsack-licking leadership, the German people are waking the fuck up to American bullshit. France and Italy are seeing through the bullshit. First a trickle … then a roaring waterfall.
Europeans need to take their continent back. They need to realize Amerika doesn’t give a flying fuck if the Continent is destroyed in a world war, again. THAT would be GOOD business for the USA!USA!USA! … just like the last time two times. And if Europe does grow some balls and tells Amerika to fuck off, well, what allies will we have left? I guess, Afghanistan … whereby the Head Nigger In Charge a few days ago declared an official end to the war and, he said, the Taliban will never again threaten American interests. Deluded Nigger In Charge!
We need Europe more than they need us. God help Amerika once they wake up to that FACT.
Europe Beware! – WWIII could destroy Europe for the third time in a Century
by Peter Koenig
Monday, December 29, 2014
Washington is hell-bent on a war with Russia. It is part of the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) to take over the world. After Russia, China would follow. That’s the plan. China is being encircled as we speak. Never mind that Russia and China have recently concluded a pact, a close financial and military alliance – which to defeat will be next to impossible.
Unless – and here is the crux of the matter – unless Washington initiates an all-out nuclear war, destroying the planet, including itself – but foremost Europe.
Of NATO’s 28 member countries, 26 are in Europe, of which 12 in Eastern Europe, countries that used to be part of or ‘dependencies’ of the former Soviet Union. And this happened despite Washington’s promise at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, not to expand NATO eastward. A lie and sheer affront to Russia.
This provocation is exacerbated today by the US’s further arming the NATO bases of Poland and Latvia, and by NATO’s considering Ukraine’s urgent call – or rather, the call of the Washington installed Kiev Nazi thugs – for NATO protection and to become a NATO member as soon as possible.
Imagine, NATO at Moscow’s doorstep. Would the Kremlin just bow and accept it? – Hardly. With NATO bases in 26 European countries – Guess – who would be the logical center of the next war theatre?
Do the Obama stooges not realize this? – Do the vassals have no brains? Or would the coward leaders (sic) escape to Florida, while their people smolder to dust? – Wake up, Europe! Wake up! – People of Europe, take back your countries from the neoliberal puppets, from your spine and brainless coward leaders.
In fact, the West led by the naked emperor is currently waging war against Russia on several fronts: relentless anti-Russia, anti-Putin propaganda, by the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon controlled MSM; arming and equipping the Kiev war criminals that has led to at least 5,000 savagely killed Donbass inhabitants most of whom civilians, women and children, and more than a million homeless refugees into Russia; CIA inspired false flag operations, like the downing by Kiev’s air force of Malaysian Air MH17, killing 298 people; a salvo of countless economic sanctions which, albeit, hurt Europe more than Russia; and a currency war with an engineered fall of the ruble, combined with an ‘engineered’ drop of oil prices by conspiring with the Saudi clowns for overproduction, a stab not only at Russia, but also at the economies of others who refuse to bend to Washington’s dictum, like Iran and Venezuela.
Russia is taking all of it with calm. Vladimir Putin is a chess player par excellence, out-maneuvering the west at every move. In addition to Russia’s large foreign exchange reserves – estimated at close to half a trillion dollars equivalent – Ms. Elvira Nabiullina, President of Russia’s Central Bank, entered into a currency swap agreement with China, pitting their combined economies, constituting about 27% of the world’s GDP (2014 est. US$85 trillion) against the western economic aggressions.
A few days ago Russia’s Central Bank started buying back cheap, down-graded rubles with its excess foreign reserves. The Russian currency gained 10% alone on 17 December, last day of trading before the weekend. With the fall of the ruble, foreign shareholders of Russian corporations, especially in Europe and the US, were afraid of losing out under a ruble collapse. They shed their shares – which Russia quickly repatriated, thereby not only returning foreign holdings of Russian stock into Russian coffers, but also cashing in on the dividends of these stocks. According to some accounts (Spiegel Online), with this move alone Russia earned some 20 billion dollars.
It looks like the economic and propaganda war is being won by Russia. On the political western front things are crumbling too. Hungary’s government, a member of the EU and of NATO, has just declared an alliance with Russia against Washington. Turkey, once a contender to enter the EU, is disgusted with Europe and in instead aiming at membership in the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Turkey is a strategic key NATO member. Will others follow suit, as more and more are seeing the emperor’s nakedness and malignancy?
The veils are falling. Gradually. So-called allies of the empire are wary since long. Afraid of ‘sanctions’ or worse, of a possible take-over by the merciless killing machine, they have nodded and played along. But, as they see the implosion of the beast, they increasingly dare jumping ship.
Europe – be aware! The center of the next war might again be Europe. A dying beast knows no mercy. It rather destroys the universe and itself than leaving survivors behind. – Unless it’s poisonous and killing tentacles can be paralyzed – terminally, by economic isolation; by abandoning the dollar; by making this worthless currency irrelevant and obsolete. For good.
Europe – it’s not too late! Your economic future is in your autonomy; in an alliance of you, Europe, a coalition of sovereign nations, with the east – an alliance with the promising new Silk Road. Mr. Xi Jinping’s offer to Madame Merkel this past spring is still open. Neoliberal thinking is short-term thinking. Instant profit for instant debt.
Europe, take the lead. Break loose from the corrupt debt-ridden dollar casino scheme. A new ruble-yuan based monetary system is in the making. The basket may soon expand by other BRICS currencies – and, who knows, maybe the Euro? – Our children, grandchildren and their children deserve a future of peace and harmony and wellbeing.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, the Voice of Russia, now Ria Novosti, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
Posted by VINEYARDSAKER: at 13:19 9 comments:
Labels: Peter Koenig, WWIII
Why America Can’t Stop
by Mikhail Khazin
Translated by Roobit
Or an attempt to describe how US problems correlate with international security.
On several past occasions I have written that the United States is deliberately destroying the entire system of international security, the same system that they had built together with the USSR. Why did they start dismantling the international security system is also understandable, in the 1990s the generation of “victors” came to power in that country, these people are convinced that they had “defeated” the USSR (as our theory explains it is obviously not so, please refer to http://worldcrisis.ru/crisis/188291 ) and because they are “victors” they may do anything they please. They decided that collective security arrangements are onerous, and that they need their own security system, the one that only they will have control over.
If we were to evaluate rhetoric of individuals who were in charge of the states that were admitted as new NATO members in the last 20 years, then we can figure out the logic that stands behind the expansion (and perhaps a bit even farther still). “We are being threatened and the USA is our only possible protection, therefore we must all be integrated within a US-centered security structure.” This was all going on while Russia, as a matter of principle, was not participating in affairs of those countries (not even in those of the Ukraine, which was abandoned to its own devices, something that has to a great extent caused the recent events in that country), Russia was not a threat to anyone (and of course it is not a threat to anyone now), the point of this all was deliberate destruction of the old global security system, in which Russia used to play a key role.
Obviously constructing a new security system from scratch is an endeavor that is both expensive and slow, and that is the prime reason why on some issues (such as nuclear disarmament) the United States continued to talk with Russia although the background of those communications can be best expressed through a formula: we only talk about questions which we consider to be of interest to us, and the rest is not really your business. The trouble is that all those plans, which were developed in the 90s and which they began to implement during 2000s (quite possibly, the events of September 11, 2001 http://worldcrisis.ru/crisis/86502 were organized to launch the execution of those plans, same way as the Pearl Harbor was staged to extract the United States from its “embrace of isolationism”), so those plans had been based on the premise of continuous economic growth, itself founded upon the primacy of America’s resources. Instead they ended up with a crisis, which has significantly reduced those available “resources.”
I must note that the period of capture of former Socialist Commonwealth’s markets has indeed become “the golden age” of American economy, even their budget scored a surplus. But our work in 2001 in which we evaluated the balance between different branches of American economy in the 1998 showed that ( http://worldcrisis.ru/crisis/73174 ) already then the US economy was standing on the brink of abyss comparable to where it found itself in the early 1930s. Today’s picture is far more frightening and what can be done about it unclear as well. The old security model has been destroyed. Trust cannot be restored, a new model does not exist, there are some elements of it here and there, but they function only if the US directly intervenes into the process. Intervention factually consists of allocating large sums of money to all participants in the process, and it is faulty: Palestine, ISIS, etc.
This is happening while the situation inside the US worsens. The problem is that for a long time they have a barrier in place that has separated the elite from the rest of the society, the barrier of the kind that’s only being built here (in Russia). American educational system, and I mean educational system that prepares societal leaders, has been destroyed already back in the 1960s, an average citizen (the sheep in the parlance of the elite) has actually no chances of advancement to an upper “elite” level, the one from which the society is being governed. A successful marriage could serve as a theoretical exception, but this social advancement mechanism cannot be employed in a systemic fashion. However for those few who are born active, unless the punitive psychiatry destroys them at a tender age or they fall victim to juvenile justice, something that now gets written a lot about, for them there are still mechanisms for upward social mobility which could bring them up to the level of technocratic elite.
The trouble is that in the course of this half of a century they’ve had accumulated lots of people who are absolutely unprepared to tolerate a sharp decline in their standards of living. But along with the worsening of the economic crisis, in order to maintain their grip on power and their status the “actual” elites must most definitely reduce the living standard of these population strata of the American society. And that can push the system up onto the critical level of mutual contradictions. Because internal resources necessary for maintenance of the quality of life of this so called upper middle class are depleted, they need to find some substitute external resources. To phrase it differently: the United States can only preserve domestic social stability at the expense of someone else.
Here we stumble upon remnants of the old security system. The Bretton Woods system was based upon a premise that all assets of participating member states will be dollar denominated. So fresh dollars were printed along with introduction of new assets into the system, and the US elites could then work out how those dollars are to be shared with the elites of those new countries (or regions) that were about to be incorporated within this dollar zone. How those regional elites were going to split those dollars with their own population was their own concern. But there are no more assets to be brought into the system, consequently no new dollars are being printed, and worse than that, existing dollars are being redistributed for America’s benefit through US controlled world dollar system. This makes internal conflicts in many of the world’s countries all but unavoidable.
Some of those conflicts are at their beginning stage while others are already burning hot, but their essence is all he same, counter-elites, the ones who were not let into the proverbial dollar cookie jar now make claims upon existing elites demanding either to restore the scale of support they get (that means that the old elites must commence financing of the economy from their own pockets) or yield power and get out of the way. Most obvious that because those existing elites are all pro-American, the scenario is developing under accompaniment of increasingly anti-American rhetoric.
We would like to remind you that similar processes already took place in Latin America after the investment flows from the United States changed their direction in aftermath of the Second World War. There the finale was either a breakdown of the economy or emergence of new forces at the helm of the state, frequently personified by brutal dictators, and sometimes, like in Chile, both a combination of both developments. What is going to happen to the world’s regions is an open question, but the choice of means to control the situation which remains at America’s disposal is shrinking dramatically.
The United States are obviously witnessing these processes and are impotent to do anything about them. From that standpoints, Obama’s officials are no different from Putin, he might not like Nabiullina’s policies but he cannot just fire her because giving her the boot would destroy the consensus of the elites (and he’s too hesitant as doesn’t venture to reign in the elites), likewise the administration team in the US is unable to go against their elites, which adamantly refuse considering anything that might somehow threaten their status. And that in turn means that rocking the boat is forbidden!
That can be defined as: sudden moves that can be interpreted as a game changer which in turn might alter the very rules that the United States has introduced in the decade of 2000 and such moves are not allowed. For example, you cannot just change borders. Possibly, if the United States could turn the clock back, then they might have left the Pandora’s box safely closed and would not have amputated Kosovo from Serbia, but what’s done is done, besides that all happened during prosperous 90s. But to permit the phenomenon of Crimea (or anything similar) is just impermissible. Because if we allow to change borders on a regional level, then entire Eastern Europe, the Middle East and many other areas will turn into serious war theaters.
Essentially we are the ones who understand that this is unavoidable, but American elites will never come to grips with that (and that’s why our economic theory is something they would never agree with), this why they will do whatever it takes to postpone their own end, they’ll drag it until the whole structure collapses upon them on its own. In that sense, it is implausible to expect that they would remove sanctions or that they will somehow agree to us acting independently. Perhaps they would be happy to but they are prisoners of their own system.
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/
Patrick Smith is typical of European leftists (I suspect he is a Brit, not a true European). While I am totally opposed to our provocative stance towards Putin, who is in many ways an admirable national leader, and while I oppose without reservation the Neo-Con treason that has virtually wrecked our country, his attempt to tie the Cuba situation into this equation is ridiculous.
Smith’s paean to the “humane and brave” Cuban people is true, but not in the way Smith thinks. 90 percent of the Cuban people loathe the Castro regime and with the exception of a handful of psychotics, the other ten percent are just pure opportunists. Living for conditions in Cuba for non-Communist Party members are atrocious. UN claims to the contrary are concocted by leftists gasbags like Smith.
The brave and humane Cubans are those who have fought or fled the regime, or the thousands who lie rotting in filthy prisons for such crimes as teaching the Bible to their children or for the crime of “dangerousness” (I am not making this up) or pissing on a picture of Fidel.
Putin and the U.S. are playing a cynical game with respect to Cuba. You can make a good argument for normalizing relations and you can make a good one for turning the screws on these tropical Red bastards. Tweedledee, Tweedledum. That said, let’s not confuse the real Cuban people with a nasty, murdering, bankrupt regime run by a homicidal maniac.
“Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.
Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Tacitus
The script for WWIII was laid out in Albert Pike’s letter to Mazzini, I believe it was written in 1877. Upon reading the letter you will find that WWI and WWII followed exactly as written. We are on coarse for events laid out for the third and final world war. These things do not just happen, BO is simply an actor. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think.
It’s not “neo-liberals” behind this, it’s the neo-cons implementing their PNAC playbook.