Comment: The following screed was penned by one 'Kirk Bennett', which is probably a nom de plume for one of the US elite's top reality-creators. It was published in The American Interest, a bi-monthly, 'elite' US foreign policy magazine begun by US 'geostrategists' Francis Fukuyama, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Adam Garfinkle 10 years ago to "define the American interest." It includes among its regular contributors the British 'gentleman historian' Niall Ferguson, and NeoCons Dov Zakheim, Robert Kaplan, and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Their focus in this article is 'Russian containment', which is rejected as 'a myth'...
'The Motherland Calls', WW2 memorial outside Volgograd (formerly known as Stalingrad), the tallest statue of a woman on Earth
"There can be no alliance between Russia and the West, either for the sake of interests or for the sake of principles. There is not a single interest, not a single trend in the West which does not conspire against Russia, especially her future, and does not try to harm her. Therefore Russia's only natural policy towards the West must be to seek not an alliance with the Western powers but their disunion and division. Only then will they not be hostile to us, not of course out of conviction, but out of impotence."These words, which sound like something Russia's President Vladimir Putin might have said recently, were actually penned in 1864 by the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev. The notion of perpetual Western antipathy runs in strong currents throughout Russian thought over the past two centuries. Indeed this is a well from which Putin has drawn deeply in recent speeches to mobilize the Russian populace and to justify the Kremlin's policies in Ukraine and elsewhere. The West, according to this account, is both envious of Russia's dynamism and moral superiority and eager to profit territorially at Russia's expense. Putin has repeatedly alleged that the West has maintained a containment policy toward Russia since the 18th century; the Western reaction to events in Ukraine is merely the present manifestation of this policy. Indeed, so deep and consistent is the animosity toward the mighty Eurasian colossus that, even without Ukraine, Westerners would have seized on some other pretext, however flimsy, to try to keep Russia on its knees.
It's a tidy little narrative that seemingly explains everything, with a bit of historical perspective no less. It has the added advantage of absolving Russia from any responsibility for the current tense relations with the West. But how accurate is it?
The 18th and 19th centuries were the golden age of Russian expansion. It was during this period that the Russian Empire absorbed vast areas in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia's western borderlands that would later comprise most of the territory of the 14 non-Russian Soviet republics, of which Russia was supposedly deprived after the breakup of the USSR.
Comment: No, of which it was deprived after the breakup of the USSR.
If the Western powers had a policy of containment with respect to Russia during these centuries, then one could only call this policy a monumental failure. A Finn, a Latvian, or a Pole might well ask where containment was when they needed it.
Comment: Two British wars in Afghanistan in the 19th century, the Crimean War in the 19th century, the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century, then regime change via color revolution in Russia in 1917 and the subsequent 'emancipation' of the 'Finns, Latvians and Poles'. Was this not a resounding success for the containment of Russia?
In the 18th century Russia dealt knockout blows to two Western powers, Sweden and Poland, and began the lengthy process of dismantling the Ottoman Empire.
Comment: Actually, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire was a British-French affair. Of course the Russians wanted to control the Bosporus Straits; otherwise they'd have the situation they're in today: the entrance to the Black Sea controlled by a Western vassal.
The year 1700 saw Peter the Great's invasion of Sweden and the onset of the Great Northern War. Although the war dragged on until 1721, the outcome was decided at the celebrated 1709 Battle of Poltava, where the Russians annihilated a Swedish army led personally by King Charles XII. It has bequeathed to the Russian language the saying, "погиб, как швед под Полтавой" ("perished like a Swede at Poltava"), and it effectively eliminated Sweden as a major European power. Solzhenitsyn poignantly assessed the historical significance of the battle: Russia moved from one war of conquest to the next, while Sweden abandoned its imperial pretensions and resigned itself to neutrality, prosperity, and a dignified life for its citizens. Who indeed, wondered Solzhenitsyn, were the winners and losers at Poltava?
Comment: Yes, early imperial Russia neutered Swedish imperial ambitions, winning access to the Baltic Sea and becoming a sea power in the process, but the author 'forgot' to mention that Sweden invaded Russia first. It's like saying 'Russia neutered Nazi German imperial ambitions because it had its own greedy imperial ambitions'. Sure, Russia sorted out Nazi Germany, but do we forget that Hitler assembled the largest invading force the world has ever seen and slaughtered over 30 million Russians?
Russia remained largely disengaged from the major 18th-century European wars, with the notable exception of the Seven Years' War (1756 - 63), in which Russian forces defeated the armies of Frederick the Great, occupied East Prussia, and even briefly seized Frederick's capital, Berlin, in 1760. Frederick was saved by the timely death in 1762 of Russian Empress Elizabeth and the accession to the throne of her son, Peter III, who idolized Frederick and pulled Russia out of the anti-Prussian coalition.
Comment: This was a bizarre - and we do mean BIZARRE - episode. Russia could have strangled German imperialism in its cradle, but somehow, owing to some diabolical miracle, the healthy Empress Elizabeth had the most untimely death just as her troops seized Berlin. In the meantime, in the background, British agents had been working on the people around her young successor, who they convinced to 'do a Brest-Litovsk/Belavezha Accords' (interesting how it's a recurring theme in Russian history, no?) and surrender an otherwise unassailable military-strategic advantage.
A decade later Peter's wife and successor, Catherine the Great—herself a German princess—teamed up with the German powers, Prussia and Austria, to begin the dismemberment of Poland, a process completed with the Third Partition in 1795. Their mutual concern to prevent any resurrection of Polish statehood created a certain commonality of interest among the partitioning states, ensuring that the 19th century would be a time of almost unbroken Russian-German comity.
Comment: Indeed, here we approach the 'event horizon' for Western (British, French and, today, American) imperialists: Russian-German managed integration of the Eurasian continent.
The 19th century saw Russia much more engaged in European diplomacy and conflicts, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon's ill-fated 1812 campaign is often cited as a prime example of Western aggression against Russia, but the really significant point about the period of 1812 - 15 is the fact that all the other major European powers were aligned with Russia against Napoleon, insofar as all of them were determined to prevent France from dominating Europe.
Comment: Oh really? Why then did a multinational European Napoleonic army, the largest force ever assembled to that point, find itself fighting against only Russian defenders?
Russia availed itself of the general state of European upheaval during the Napoleonic era to administer an additional drubbing to its old rivals Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, annexing Finland and Bessarabia in 1812. The awarding of further Polish lands to Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 rounded out Russia's western borders, which were to remain virtually unchanged—and unchallenged by any Western power—throughout the subsequent century.
Comment: As before, Russia expanded only because it was invaded by those countries, justly seeking a greater buffer zone between its civilization and the barbaric nations to its west. Same as what happened post-1945.
The policy of containment was not invented yesterday. It has been carried out against our country for many years, always, for decades if not centuries. In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools were quickly put into use.While it is difficult to discern in the 18th century even a single event that could be credibly construed as "Western containment" of Russia, there are clear instances in the 19th century of efforts by Western powers, with varying degrees of success, to check Russian expansion. The following are perhaps the most salient examples:
— Putin's address to the Federal Assembly 4 December 2014
- Notwithstanding Russia's crucial contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, its effort to obtain the former Polish lands in their entirety was rebuffed at the Congress of Vienna. The other major powers were united in their desire to limit Russian penetration into central Europe, and Russia had to settle for Prussia's and Austria's booty from the Third Partition—a territory that was, moreover, organized as a quasi-buffer "Kingdom of Poland" with its own constitution and army.
- Alarmed at the possible consequences of a Russian death blow to the tottering Ottoman Empire, Britain and France initiated the 1853 - 55 Crimean War—another highlight in the litany of Russian historical grievances with respect to the West.
- Concerned by the prospect of a Russian client state dominating the Balkans, the major European powers acted in concert at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to dismember the "big Bulgaria" Russia had secured at Ottoman expense with the Treaty of San Stefano.
- In the latter half of the 19th century Britain and Russia engaged in the "Great Game," in which the former, concerned about the security of its Indian possessions and the communication routes thereto, used diplomacy and material support to local forces to check Russia's advance into the Caucasus and Central Asia—with only very modest results.
Comment: BRITAIN engaged in 'the Great Game', and insanely named it such. It was never a 'game' for Russians. They were using their influence and reach to transform the Eurasian landmass, while the Brits and European fellow-travellers were brutalizing far away lands - lands with zero cultural or historical connections to them - in order to plunder and enslave them.
Monument to the ships scuttled during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War
Comment: Indeed, the Western oligarchs HATED Russia for that, which is why the reign of Tsars had to end. Russia and Russian influence was vast and peaceful at this point, effectively encompassing most of the 'World Island', and constituting an alternative world order to the Anglo-American vision (nightmare) we see before us today.
In addition, during the Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1863, there was considerable public sympathy for the Polish cause in Western countries such as Britain and France—though certainly not in Prussia or Austria.
Comment: The recurring theme of 'sympathy for Poles' in certain Western capitals is as nauseating as it is duplicitous. The poor Poles, used time and time again by the West, and still they come back for more.
However, none of this even remotely amounted to "Western containment" of Russia. Western efforts to check Russian expansion in the 19th century were situational, episodic and largely inconsequential. Western powers did not seek to limit the Russian Empire's territorial enlargement out of some intrinsic animus toward Russia, but because at least some Russian conquests, actual or mooted, threatened specific interests of other powers.
Comment: Russophobia was so intense in the 19th century that Western propagandists even then were routinely portraying Russians as backwards 'Asiatic' barbarians. 'Russia studies' in Western universities were dedicated to this project full-time, and a term was even coined - Russification - which has no corresponding equivalent for any other country or empire. Here are typical mass media caricatures of Russia from the 19th century:
© La Caricature'Europe threatened with Russian barbarity and an ensuing cholera epidemic', a sketch from a French political magazine in 1831. Note that this captured the 'fear' in certain circles in Europe that Russia would follow up its defence against the Napoleonic invasion by 'barbarically invading Europe'. The following century, the same 'fear' - really a psychopathic projection - would justify the 'containment of Russia' - and the suppression of independence movements globally - after Russia's successful repulsion of the Nazi invasion.
How Russia is portrayed to European schoolchildren today
Moreover, St. Petersburg enjoyed good relations with one or more Western powers at practically all times; the only brief periods of relative isolation were during the Crimean War, when traditionally friendly Prussia and Austria maintained neutrality, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, as Russia's entente with the Germanic powers withered, but before the alliance with France had been concluded.
Comment: Key to their dream of global hegemony was the British elite's 'balance-of-power' strategy: they would play one country or people against another to prevent any from threatening its global hegemony. Overnight, Russia or Germany could go from 'foe' to 'friend' and back again. This is where Britain earned the title of 'perfidious Albion'.
No Western country laid claim to any Russian territory; even Napoleon's invasion was not intended to "detach juicy morsels" from Russia, but to force Russian adherence to his Continental System. Russia continued to conquer vast territories in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East, and only sporadic efforts were made by Western powers even to moderate Russia's appetite, not to speak of attempting to hem the country in.
Comment: The prize was not "morsels of Russian territory"; the prize was its subjugation under the Western order. The Western oligarchy, now concentrated in the banking houses of Paris, London, Switzerland and New York, understood that 'Russia' was not another nation-state to be defeated by conventional means. It was a federation of peoples, a separate civilization, a mini UN or alternate world order. Russia was the most powerful, advanced and socio-economically healthy conglomeration of countries on Earth at the turn of the 20th century.
The Anglo-American elite was plotting a war that would change all that. Notice that 'the Great War' quickly ended after Russia was taken over by barbarians and set on a path that would retard its industrial, economic, demographic, and cultural growth for decades. It's difficult to say that this was the explicit rationale for the Great War - there were plots within plots, and the left hand often didn't know what the right was doing - but history is measured in terms of results.
The events in Ukraine are the concentrated expression of the policy of containing Russia. The roots of this policy go deep into history, [and] it is clear that this policy, unfortunately, did not end with the Cold War.In this historical context, the Kremlin's "Western hostility" story begs a question: of which specific territories was Russia unjustly deprived by 19th-century "Western containment?" Should Russia rightfully have expanded deep into the Balkans? Should it have legitimately annexed the Turkish straits, large portions of eastern Anatolia, or perhaps southern Azerbaijan and the southern Caspian littoral? Was it Russia's due, cruelly denied by malign Westerners, to expand into Afghanistan, India, Xinjiang, or Manchuria?
—Putin's speech to Russian diplomats 1 July 2014
Comment: Yes to all of the above, but with a crucial qualification. Imperialism as practised by the West - then and now - and imperialism as practised by Russia then are two different things. Unlike the European empires, imperial Russia didn't suck the life out of its 'colonies'. All of the above were not so much "Russia's due" as they were naturally integrating - via trade and cultural exchange - into and with the largest land-based 'empire' on Earth, in stark contrast to the Western empires, which took over other lands under the pretense that they were 'civilizing and pacifying those lands', but actually pillaging and plundering them. Meanwhile the Brits and others had 'overt' colonies in every corner of the globe, along with vast 'covert' holdings via economic means, all of which they very much considered "our due". Fast-forward to today, and while nobody says they have 'colonies', everyone understands that the Anglo-American elite rules most of the planet through primarily covert means.
The 20th century saw major new developments in Russia's relations with Western powers. The long period in which Prussia acted as Russia's partner (and usually a junior one at that) drew to a close once Prussia morphed into Germany. The German invasion in the second year of World War I was the first attempt by a Western power to seize Russian territory in at least two centuries.
Comment: Whether or not they were fought to 'seize Russian territory', the author is omitting the Swedish invasion of Russia in 1708, the French-led invasion of Russia in 1812, the French-British-Turkish invasion of Russia in 1853, and the Japanese invasion of 1905. In fact, if those wars were not done with territorial gains in mind, what purpose could they have served other than to 'contain' Russia?
However, the German success embodied in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk proved fleeting, and was reversed with the collapse of the German monarchy, the November 11 armistice, and the Treaty of Versailles.
Comment: Yes, it was fleeting because there was subsequently a counter-coup within the Bolshevik coup that brought the independent, nationalist Stalin to power in the mid-1920s, which severed the color revolution from its Wall Street/Western banking chains.
The fitful, half-hearted Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-21 was certainly anti-Bolshevik but hardly anti-Russian. The Western interventionist powers did not lay claim to any Russian territory and were even loath to recognize or support independence-minded groups like the Balts, Ukrainians or Georgians; indeed, the Allies were fighting with the White armies for a Russia "one and indivisible."
Comment: "Loath to recognize" or not, results are all that matter: chunks of Russia were sliced off to invent new countries called Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, while further "morsels of territory" were gifted to Germany and Turkey. Russia lost over 25% of its land and 33% of its population in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
The 1941 Nazi invasion was a still more ambitious land-grab at Russia's expense, but ended even more catastrophically for Germany than its eastern campaign in World War I.
Comment: Sure, but its outcome was by no means certain. We'd all be speaking German today if the Russians hadn't won the most almighty battles in all human history.
Once again, the seizure of Russian territory by a Western power was extremely brief, and on this occasion was followed by an unprecedented extension of Russian control deep into Central Europe - and, for the first time in history, a genuine Western policy of containment.
Comment: No, the only thing that changed was that the policy began to be explicitly formulated as such. The "unprecedented extension of Russian control deep into Central Europe" was welcomed by Europeans liberated from Nazi Germany. Those who found themselves in US-occupied Europe all 'went left' and 'pro-Russia' too, but decades of subsequent subversion and lies from the US and fascists in Europe kept them out of power.
Purveyors of the Russian victimization narrative portray the French and German invasions of Russia and the Cold War policy of containment as different facets of the same relentless, age-old Western antagonism toward Russia. All of these events do, in fact, reflect a pronounced tendency in European history, but it is not the anti-Russian monomania that some observers imagine.
Comment: Oh? What is it then?
The most remarkable point is the fact that, when Russia was invaded in 1915-18 and 1941-44, exactly as in 1812, the other major Western powers were on Russia's side.
Comment: Not so fast! In all cases, the Western oligarchy bankrolled the wars against Russia.
Whenever Russia defeated Western invaders, it was in broad alliance with other Western countries.
Comment: ...on the surface.
Indeed, in the centuries prior to the Cold War, Western powers never once ganged up to wage war against Russia, but rather against whichever power was threatening to dominate Europe—France in the early 19th century, and Germany in the first half of the 20th.
Comment: This is semantics. What they sought to prevent, via 'balance-of-power diplomacy', was Russian alliance with the dominant forces in Europe, so that they could dominate.
"Sebastopol", by V. Nesterenko. Russian marines are desperately trying to defend the principal Russian port and fortress on the Crimean peninsula. A century later, they would do the same again.
Comment: Come on! Britain was then the global hegemon, and they also had the Ottoman Empire on their side.
The Cold War, which was the only authentic period of Western containment of Russia, fits the historical pattern exactly—not as a manifestation of animosity toward Russia, but as yet another example of European states uniting against any power attempting to control the continent.
Comment: 'But we did it for freedom and democracy!' No, you did it for absolute power - YOU have always sought to "control the continent."
Western solidarity in the face of a real Soviet threat simply followed the familiar model of European balance-of-power politics...
Comment: There was no "real Soviet threat": this was the paranoid projection on the basis of which the Western US-led empire went rampant all over the world. Stalin didn't flinch when the Anglo-Americans installed a fascist regime in Greece before WW2 even formally came to a close.
Note the admission of duplicitous "balance-of-power politics".
...but people of a certain mindset discern instead an anti-Russian conspiracy—and even project it centuries back in time.
Comment: Indeed, people of a truth-based mindset, anathema to reality-creators. Wethinks the lady doth protesteth too much. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
But even if Putin has badly mischaracterized the historical context...
Comment: He hasn't.
...surely Russians have legitimate grievances about collective Western behavior since the end of the Cold War, do they not? The dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO, the serial humiliation of Russia, and Western disregard of its interests: Are these phenomena not sufficient evidence of the West's perfidy and fixation on keeping Russia down?
Comment: You said it!
There is not enough space in an essay to treat all of these themes in detail...
Comment: Oh, don't chicken out on us now!
...but a couple of points should provide some salutary perspective.
The Soviets used to refer to the agencies of state power in the USSR as "organs." Accordingly, one might say that the Soviet Union died of multiple organ failure. Its demise was the result of internal breakdown, not the hammer blows of Western military or even economic policy toward its Cold War adversary.
Comment: There were "hammer blows", though these were multi-faceted, including "giving the USSR its Vietnam" (Brzezinski creating Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan), a contrived oil price collapse in 1986, feeding the east European Soviet states with massive debt, constant 'dirty tricks' involving sabotage and subversion inside the USSR, and an incessant disinformation campaign about life in the West being awesome and life in the USSR being hellish.
Yes, the Soviet Union had run its course as 'an entity apart' based on ideological differences. The 'Capitalist vs Communist' distinction was absurd because the West was not exclusively 'capitalistic', and the East was not exclusively 'communistic'. They in fact represented, as they have for the duration of this titanic struggle, two competing 'modes of civilization', one that is generally cruel and individualistic, and one that is generally benevolent and community-based.
People in the USSR in the 1980s wanted change, a new 'blend of life' that provided them with some of the benefits they perceived in Western culture. Alas, the change they sought was not what Western agents of empire gave them, and it wasn't until Putin came to power that they achieved a balance of material benefits, personal freedoms, and national security.
Indeed, the collapse came precisely in the context of receding East-West tensions, when the Cold War had essentially ended and Soviet citizens were no longer mobilized by fear of foreign aggression—a fact perhaps not lost on the current Russian leadership.
Comment: Not quite. East-West tensions receded in the 1970s. They were significantly reinvigorated in the 1980s by the NeoCons in the Reagan administrations, who cast the USSR as 'the evil empire' - classic psychopathic projection at work again.
As for the post-Soviet borders that Russian nationalists find so grossly unjust, they were drawn not in Washington or Brussels, but in Moscow, and the West had no input into them whatsoever. There was no diktat like Versailles or Trianon. Victoria Nuland was not serving up sandwiches at Belovezha.
Comment: 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave: When first we practise to deceive!' The author no doubt experienced duper's delight when he penned that reference to the Kiev coup...
No, Nuland was not serving up sandwiches at Belovezha, but there were guns to a lot of heads. Even before the Belovezha Accords were signed, the CIA and friends had agents inside the USSR setting the union up for subsequent 'economic shock therapy', the rise of rabid oligarchs, and the carving up of state resources to foreign corporations. By that point, the George Soros 'freedom NGOs' had been active in Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere for almost a decade. The union was besieged on all sides by unseen forces, who very nearly brought Russia itself to civil war, as happened during the last interregnum between the coup of 1917 and Stalin coming to power 8 years later.
Moreover, the great bogeyman of Western imperialism proved to be the dog that didn't bark following the Soviet collapse. How is it possible that the covetous West, lusting for centuries after Russian land, failed to rush in for the kill at the obvious moment of Russia's maximum historical weakness?
Comment: It did! And it would have completely done so if not for some of the old guard - and later Putin - stopping the rot.
Beyond the USSR, its collapse immediately 'gave the US the green light' to 'go massive' in the Middle East and the Balkans. There would have been no invasion of Iraq in 1991 if the USSR were still on its feet. This was the beginning of the 'Wolfowitz Doctrine':
The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower."Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
"There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
Yet there were no Western vultures circling the Soviet carcass.
Comment: There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Western vultures circling the Soviet carcass...
Let's Do Business! The Soviet Union is open for deals as never before
A top executive warns, 'If U.S. companies wait until all the problems are solved, somebody else will get the business'
By Paul Hofheinz, Fortune Magazine, September 23, 1991Boris Yeltsin never actually said the words across the top of this page, at least not within earshot of this writer. But he might as well have. Everything the Russian President and his new partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, declared and did in the past few tumultuous weeks, and will do in the next few, adds up to that simple message. The Soviet Union, or whatever we ultimately call the collection of diverse, bumptious entities on Europe's eastern flank, is wide open to Westerners with checkbooks...
Not one Western country annexed, or so much as laid claim to, a single square centimeter of Russian territory after 1991—not even regions like Kaliningrad or Karelia, wrested from Western countries a mere half-century before.
Comment: The initial gains weren't territorial - they were primarily economic - but then came NATO expansion. To be in NATO is to be firmly in the Western empire. The author's rather narrow definition of 'annexation' excludes the fact that the West took about a quarter of Russian/Soviet territory, and a third of its population - again.
Notwithstanding all the overwrought Russian angst about supposed U.S. designs on Siberia, Americans curiously failed to advance any scheme to reunify the Alaskan Eskimos with their Siberian kinfolk, or even so much as contrive a narrative about fraternal peoples cruelly separated by an artificial boundary capriciously drawn down the middle of the Bering Strait.
Comment: It's disputed whether or not former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the following, in 2007:
"Siberia is too large and rich to belong to one country."Anyway, said or unsaid, Albright, the NeoCons, and US foreign policy mandarins in general, have clearly had their fangs set on opening up Russia to Western private interests. One year before Putin was made PM of Russia, Washington sensed something was afoot:
Economy Shift In Russia Worries U.S., Albright SaysThe technocratic jargon she uses needs to be deciphered a bit: When Albright said, "We can only wonder if some members of Primakov's team understand the basic arithmetic of the global economy," she wasn't just being a typically arrogant American. She was making pointed reference to the specific Chicago-school neo-liberal economic formulae Western oligarchs rely on to maintain the status quo of 'ever more for the rich and ever less for the masses'.
New York Times
October 3, 1998
The United States is disappointed by the economic confusion within the new Russian Government of Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said today, and she warned Russia about the dangers of an anti-Western policy.
In her first comprehensive review of United States-Russian relations since Mr. Primakov was confirmed as Prime Minister last month, Ms. Albright said Washington was ''deeply concerned'' about Russia's direction and did not think the crisis there would soon abate.
''We have heard a lot of talk in recent days about printing new money, indexing wages, imposing price and capital controls and restoring state management of parts of the economy,'' she told the U.S.-Russia Business Council in Chicago. ''We can only wonder if some members of Primakov's team understand the basic arithmetic of the global economy.''
''Our initial reaction to some of the direction he's going in has not been particularly positive,'' she said.
''More big bailouts are not by themselves going to restore investor confidence in Russia,'' she said. ''In the long run, the gap between Russia's needs and its resources must be met not by foreign bailouts but by foreign investment.''
Ms. Albright sharply criticized as self-defeating the ''many voices in Russia who want to shift the emphasis in Russia's interaction with America and our allies from one of partnership to one of assertiveness, opposition and defiance for its own stake.''
Chastizing Russian state bailouts is - in retrospect - richly ironic given the scale of US bailouts of US corporations just 10 years later. More to the point, however, is Albright's subsequent statement:
"...the gap between Russia's needs and its resources must be met not by foreign bailouts but by foreign investment."Right there we find the same line of thought as the first comment about Siberia being "too big for one country", just formulated slightly differently: Russia should be allowing Western corporations to exploit its resources for private profit, instead of the national state doing so for the benefit of Russia.
What also comes through is the same sentiment regarding the scale of Russia's natural resources: it's 'unfair' that this country has more than it needs, therefore they should allow us - humanitarians of the benevolent and blessed Western oligarchy - to come in and redistribute it 'on behalf of all humanity'.
Like Putin said back in 2006, "Comrade Wolf knows who to eat."
This Western restraint is inexplicable from the perspective of the Russian victimization narrative, but is entirely comprehensible in light of actual historical reality. Russia did not become the largest country in the world by being the object of constant Western depredations or containment.
Comment: Indeed, it became so in spite of Western containment.
In fact, the only Russian territory that has been permanently ceded to a Western power in the last three centuries is Alaska, which was voluntarily sold to the United States.
Comment: ...along with portions of western Canada and what became known as California! If only the Russians had civilized North America before the 'industrious ones' got to it...
The only existing claim on Russia territory is the Japanese pretension to a few miserable little islands. Frankly, the fear—verging on paranoia—that Western powers will jointly plunder and partition Russia if it shows the slightest weakness would seem to be based on Russia's own historical practice toward Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire rather than on any actual experience at the receiving end of concerted Western aggression.
Comment: This is a complete twist of historical reality. As outlined above, the West has routinely placed Russia on the "receiving end of concerted Western aggression." When Putin came to power in 1999/2000, 'Russia', as such, was hanging in the balance. The Tartars in central Russia were considering following the Chechens in making a break for independence.
The charge that the West reneged on a pledge not to enlarge NATO at the end of the Cold War has been authoritatively rebutted by a 2009 study that examined declassified Soviet and Western written accounts of key meetings in 1990 rather than relying solely on the memory of participants.
Comment: Another insidious lie.
Statements about NATO not moving "one inch to the east" were referring to the alliance's military infrastructure in the context of a reunified Germany as a NATO member. Neither side at the time understood these statements as precluding Central European membership in NATO, for the simple reason that neither the Soviets nor the West could imagine such a prospect in early 1990.
Comment: Perfidy!
There is another vitally important aspect of NATO enlargement that its detractors gloss over: Central European countries have not been dragged or lured into NATO by the West; they've been pushed by Moscow. Russian revisionism and great-power chauvinism constitute the finest NATO recruitment tool ever devised.
Comment: Nice theory. One flaw: they joined before "Russian revisionism and great-power chauvinism" made a comeback.
Just one interview by the likes of Aleksandr Dugin, or one conference by Konstantin Zatulin's CIS Institute, does the trick better than the cumulative work of all the NATO information centers over the past 25 years.
Comment: They absolutely HATE Dugin, who they pejoratively labeled "Putin's brain", and whose Eurasian Movement is bearing fruit.
If Moscow doesn't like NATO enlargement, it might usefully stop creating the conditions that make NATO membership such an attractive proposition for so many of Russia's neighbors.
Comment: NATO membership isn't "an attractive proposition for Russia's neighbors": it's an attractive proposition for the psychopathic elites in those countries seeking to lord it over people with US backing.
An exaggerated fear of hostile encirclement drives Russian policies that antagonize other states, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; by definition, Russia can never have secure borders as long as it keeps making enemies of its neighbors.
Comment: Say those who have encircled Russia with hostile regimes, terrorists and drug barons:
Stripped of its massive overlay of mythology, pathos, and historical misinterpretation, the Russian victimization narrative nevertheless does contain a kernel of truth. Western powers have indeed pursued their own interests, choosing to advance them even when they clash with Russia's, and have failed to consult or even inform Russia at key junctures.
Comment: Stripped of its massive overlay of mythology, pathos, and historical misinterpretation, the Western empire's belief in its 'exceptional' right to rule the world masks pure psychopathic nihilism. They believe in the freedom of individuals alright; the freedom of certain individuals to satisfy their unlimited greed and attain absolute power.
But to be honest, this is exactly what Russia has done with respect to the West. Western blindsiding of Russia on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya finds its counterpart in unilateral Russian moves such as the 1999 seizure of the Priština Airport in Kosovo and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
Comment: The 1999 "seizure" of Priština Airport in Kosovo?? What exactly are you holding that up as? It was a "unilateral" move to stymie the rampant bloodlust YOU were instigating in the entire region. As for the "invasions" of Georgia and Ukraine after YOU carried out coups there that brought psychopaths to power, normal people everywhere welcomed them as someone finally standing up to the bully: YOU.
Supposedly generous, unrequited Russian gestures toward the West were either unavoidable, such as the withdrawal of Russian troops from the former Soviet satellite states, or clearly in Russia's own interest, like support for the U.S./NATO campaign against the Taliban.
Comment: YOU have never, and will never, perform such gestures. The only way you can be brought to the table, as with the current talks about Syria's future, is after Russia beats you over the head with a very big stick.
An honest look at post-Cold War Western and Russian interests prompts us to ask two sets of questions. First, what specifically would it have meant for the West to accommodate Russian interests over the past 25 years? Acquiescing in ethnic cleansing in the Balkans?
Watching Qaddafi's forces drown Benghazi in blood?
Cheering from the sidelines as Russia absorbed neighboring regions, or even entire countries, under the guise of supposedly indigenous, "popular" movements for Eurasian integration or reunification of the Russian World?
Comment: Precisely, along with watching oligarchs everywhere squirm and foam at the mouth.
Eschewing NATO enlargement and leaving Central Europe in a security vacuum, where the smoldering embers of old conflicts could burst once more into flames?
Comment: Old conflicts, like the ones your predecessors routinely provoked in order to create an 'intermarium' between western Europe and Russia?
Second, if the goals and interests of the West and Russia differ radically, as they clearly do in so many areas, then how, as a practical matter, are the two of them supposed to partner? How can they cooperate when they're pulling in different directions?
Comment: Only if - and it's a big if - the 'rule of normal man' returns to the West. For that you'd need another JFK in the White House, which probably isn't going to happen again so soon - the US blew that chance.
So the next best thing is for Russia to convince Europe that the US is doomed, and that they'll sink with it if they don't get out from under Washington's boot. This might force a palace coup in the US that would end the pathocracy.
Both scenarios remain highly unlikely. And so, practically, the US and Russia will cooperate as they have been doing: with Russia maneuvering the US into a corner. The hope is that, once held in that corner, the US backlash won't take the whole world down with it.
In the end, these questions aren't important. What is important is to observe that Russia's actions have the effect of holding up a mirror to the West's beastly nature, in the process 'teaching' the world what it really means to be civilized.
Unfortunately, when it comes to European security, Russian and Western interests are largely at odds. The post-Cold War Western effort to "export security" to the east runs directly counter to Moscow's predilection for weak, divided neighbors that it can dominate.
Comment: That's rich coming from people with a "predilection for weak, divided neighbors that it can dominate" EVERYWHERE.
Russian great-power chauvinists persist in seeing 1991 as a historical aberration, tragic but reversible, while the rest of the world—and above all, Russia's post-Soviet neighbors—perceive it as the new normal.
Comment: Tell that to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the first and only president of 'Kazakhstan' since 1990, and founder of the Eurasian Union. And all the other countries that have joined or are queueing up to join the Union.
'Bennett' is right, but for the wrong reason. 1991 was no historical aberration; it was 1917 all over again.
Actually, for all the vilification of the West, Moscow's effort to upend the post-Cold War order is not being thwarted by Western resolve (if only!), so much as by Russia's own inability to re-gather the post-Soviet lands by either attraction or compulsion.
Comment: Like we said; Eurasian Union. Plus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, new BRICS bank, new AIIB bank, countless other Eurasian fora, mega trade and military deals... Eurasian integration is an unstoppable force of nature, which no amount of divide-and-conquer, balance-of-power, 'great game' scheming could hold back forever. The West was always going to lose in the long-run because its hegemony is based on lies, not objective reality.
The major division among Western observers of Russia is not between those who understand Russia's perspective and those who do not. It is between those who accept the Russian narrative more or less uncritically, and those who find that narrative distorted, self-serving, and riddled with errors of fact and interpretation.
Smelz like somebody behind this starz n`stripes curtain is quite skittish...