Ukraine is Paying the Price for US Recklessly Pushing NATO

Those old enough to remember when President Clinton's penis was a big news item will also remember the "Peace Dividend," that the world was going to be able to cash now that that nasty cold war was over. But guess what? Those spies didn't want to come in from the Cold, so while the planet is heating up, the political environment is dropping to sub-zero temperatures. It's deja vu all over again.

Ukraine is Paying the Price for US Recklessly Pushing NATO

Postby admin » Sat Mar 12, 2022 2:07 am

Andrew Bacevich: Ukraine is Paying the Price for the U.S. “Recklessly” Pushing NATO Expansion
by Amy Goodman
MARCH 11, 2022
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/3/11/ ... n_invasion

GUESTS: Andrew Bacevich: president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
LINKS
"The ‘end of history’ … again?"
"The Ukraine invasion is nothing compared to Iraq"
“After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed”

What role did the United States play in creating conditions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and what will it take to end the war? The U.S. invasion of Iraq, which saw no repercussions for the Bush administration despite breaching international humanitarian law, coupled with Cold War-era policies and NATO’s eastward expansion, incited Putin’s aggressions towards Ukraine, says retired colonel Andrew Bacevich, president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “American decision makers acted impetuously, and indeed recklessly, and now we’re facing the consequences,” says Bacevich.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. Senate has passed a $1.5 trillion spending bill that includes $13.6 billion for military and economic aid for Ukraine. That is twice the original amount requested by the Biden administration. This comes as the U.S. and NATO are pouring weapons into Ukraine to help counter the Russian invasion. The New York Times recently reported the U.S. and its allies sent 17,000 antitank weapons to Ukraine over a recent six-day period. The Washington Post reported the U.S. is quietly preparing plans to back an Ukrainian insurgency and a government in exile if Russia succeeds in seizing Ukraine.

We are joined now by Andrew Bacevich, President and Co-founder of the antiwar think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is a retired Colonel, Vietnam War veteran, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and author of a number of books including his most recent just out called After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.
His most recent pieces include one headlined U.S. Can’t Absolve Itself of Responsibility for Putin’s Ukraine Invasion. Professor Bacevich, let’s begin there. Talk about the U.S.-Putin connection and why you feel the U.S. is partially responsible for what is taking place.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think I would describe it as a U.S.-Russia connection because it is not necessarily limited to Mr. Putin. The key issue here I think is when the Cold War ended, of course, Russia was in a position of great weakness and vulnerability and the United States and its allies chose to exploit that weakness. The most vivid expression of that was the eastward expansion of NATO. Let’s remind ourselves, NATO was an anti-Soviet alliance when it was created in 1949. The expansion of NATO basically moved it up to the borders of post-Soviet Russia. At that time, there were many Americans—George Kennan, the diplomat, would be perhaps the most prominent—that warned against NATO expansion as likely to cause us troubles down the road. We ignored those warnings, and I think that we’re kind of in a chickens coming home to roost situation right here.

I am not a Putin apologist and he is the principal cause of this catastrophe that we are experiencing, but Putin had been quite candid in warning that the eastward movement of NATO, and in particular the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, constituted from his perspective a vital threat, a threat to vital Russian security interests. We ignored that, and I think to some degree, this terrible, unnecessary war is a result of that.

AMY GOODMAN: You are not the only one who says this. One person who warned years ago about NATO expansion in Eastern Europe is William Burns, the current director of the CIA.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008. In his memoir, The Back Channel, Burns wrote “sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.” And then in 1995, Burns wrote a memo saying, “Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” He’s talking about Russia. In another memo Burns wrote, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Again, those the words of the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns. Andrew Bacevich?

ANDREW BACEVICH: One would say that given that kind of warning from a very senior official, highly respected senior official, why did we go ahead and do it anyway? I think are two answers to that question. One is because Europeans so desperately wanted to join NATO and to join the EU, seizing their chance to have democracy, to have liberalism, to have the possibility of prosperity. My paternal grandparents came from Lithuania. Lithuania was in the vanguard of countries that wanted to join the EU and NATO. I don’t blame the Lithuanian people for that aspiration, and in many respects, joining NATO and the EU has paid dividends for Lithuania. That said, it was done in the face of objections by the Russians and now we’re paying the consequences of those objections.

The other reason we did it, of course, apart from what I think is really kind of a deep-seated Russophobia that pervades many members of the American elite, was the belief at that time, that is to say back in the 1990s, the belief that Russia couldn’t do anything about it. Russia was weak, Russia was disorganized, and therefore it seemed to be a low-risk proposition to exploit Russian weakness to advance our objectives and also to advance the objectives of other European countries, most of which had either been part of the Soviet Union or had been Soviet satellites and saw the end of the Cold War as their chance to achieve freedom and prosperity. I don’t blame the Lithuanians, I don’t blame the Poles but I do think that American decision-makers acted impetuously and indeed recklessly and now we’re facing the consequences.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about this brutal invasion by Putin of Ukraine and also what Putin is demanding. It hasn’t gotten as much attention in the United States as in other places, but the demands written in documents submitted to the U.S.—Ukraine cease military action, Ukraine change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, acknowledge Crimea—if you can talk about these demands and also the brutality of what Putin is doing right now?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Let’s start with the brutality. I must admit that to me, the most striking thing about the war as it has evolved has been the crudeness of the Russian war machine. They had portrayed themselves as a modern army. Modern armies know how to use force, to use violence in a controlled and purposeful way. Yeah, people get killed, buildings get destroyed but it is not random violence. That I think summarizes the conception of modern war. We believed, and I think the Russians themselves believed, that they had embraced the methods of modern war. It turns out that they did not. So everything that has happened thus far over the first couple of weeks has demonstrated that they are incapable of using violence in a controlled and politically purposeful way, which brings us to the present moment where it appears that what we are moving into is some form of siege warfare, where violence is used in a random way to punish, to terrorize, I guess, among the Russian commanders, with some vague hope that violence used in this way is going to lead to the Ukrainians giving up, collapsing.

It remains to be seen if that is going to happen, but that seems to be the current conception among the Russians of how they think they’re going to achieve their goals. Whether or not they succeed, what we see, I think, is levels of violence far greater than anybody expected, the probability of civilian deaths and destruction on an enormous scale, and not insignificantly, at least from a Russian point of view, very high Russian casualties. The press reports that say the Russians have already lost somewhere in the order of 3,000 to 4,000 Russian soldiers killed in action is actually, in my view, astonishing and is a powerful statement of how the Russians misread their own military capabilities and therefore plunged into this morass where I don’t think anybody on the Russian side, whether Putin or his generals, has a clear picture of how they’re going to get out of the mess that they created.

AMY GOODMAN: They are calling for Ukraine—talk about what it means to remain neutral, also recognition of Crimea and the independent states, the Donbas region. But I also wanted to quote Zelensky here for a minute, if we can see any movement in both of these parties when it will come to a ceasefire. He made this very important statement on ABC. He said, “Regarding NATO, I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago after we understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” Talk about what this means.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It’s too bad people couldn’t say that out loud before the war started.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Zelensky himself, the president of Ukraine.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah, but had Zelensky said, had the Americans said, had NATO said out loud, prior to the beginning of the war that, “We all collectively recognize that Ukraine is not going to be joining NATO anytime soon,” if we were willing to put that in writing, then I would argue that it would at least have been possible, not certain, it might have been possible to dissuade Putin from taking the course that he chose. Again, he chose the course. He is the perpetrator. He is the criminal. But nonetheless, I think a wiser handling of the NATO issue might have given Putin a way to avoid taking the terrible steps that he ended up taking.

AMY GOODMAN: Zelensky also said—”I am talking about security guarantees,” he said. He went on to say, “I think that items regarding temporary occupied territories and unrecognized republics that have not been recognized by anyone but Russia, these pseudo republics, but we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.” This was followed by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba saying, “If we could reach an agreement where a similar system of guarantees as envisaged by the North Atlantic Charter could be granted to Ukraine by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, including Russia, as well as by Ukraine’s neighbors, this is something we are ready to discuss.” We are seeing the broad outline of a possible agreement or ceasefire here.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It seems to me that what you just quoted is courageous, enlightened, especially given the fact that Ukraine has been the victim of this entire thing. I guess the question is on the Russian side, are there any signs of that willingness to compromise? And that is where—not that I know anything about discussions going on behind the scenes, but it appears that Russia is not willing to seek a compromise. Quite frankly, if Putin listens to any advisors whatsoever, those advisors should be urging him to find a way to cut a deal, because the longer this war goes, the greater harm this war will inflict on Russia and the Russian people. Again, it is not my job to worry about Russia, but it seems to me if Putin cares at all about the well-being of his nation, then he needs to be working real hard to find a way to back away from the cliff that he has wandered onto.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Andrew Bacevich, if you could explain the argument you make in your piece, headlined The Ukraine invasion is nothing compared to Iraq. You are a retired colonel. You’re a Vietnam War veteran. You lost your son in Iraq. Explain your argument.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Not for an instant would I want to minimize the horrors that are unfolding in Ukraine today and the deaths and the injuries inflicted on noncombatants. But let’s face it, the numbers are minuscule compared to the number of people that died, were displaced, were injured as a consequence of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Brown University Costs of War Project, the total number is somewhere in the vicinity of 900,000 deaths resulted from our invasion of Afghanistan and our invasion of Iraq. Now I understand that Americans don’t want to talk about that, don’t want to remember that, the political establishment wants to move on from that. But there is I think a moral dimension to the present war, to the Ukraine war, that should cause us to be a little bit humble, reticent about pointing our fingers at other people.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we only have 30 seconds, but the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been staggering. You’ve got not only the government response. Of course, Putin has strengthened NATO beyond any NATO activist’s wildest imaginings. The corporate response, all of these companies pulling out. The effect of all of this?

ANDREW BACEVICH: It remains to be seen, but I think your point is basically correct. The negative response that Putin has elicited around the world, not everywhere but most places around the world, has been astonishing and heartening. But let’s see, I think it remains to be seen what the policy effects are going to be.

AMY GOODMAN: We thank you so much for being with us, Andrew Bacevich, retired Colonel, Vietnam War veteran, President and Co-founder of the antiwar think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is After the Apocalypse.
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Re: Ukraine is Paying the Price for US Recklessly Pushing NA

Postby admin » Sat Mar 12, 2022 2:09 am

The ‘end of history’ … again? Beware of those declaring the world order has shifted or disappeared, pushing us toward another costly ‘generational’ conflict.
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Responsible Statecraft
MARCH 7, 2022

Does the Ukraine War of 2022 mark a decisive turning point in contemporary history? To wade through the storm of media commentary unleashed by the Russian military action is to conclude that it does. All the most famous pundits and foreign policy mandarins agree.

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan wasted no time. As of February 21 he was already declaring that “the end of the present order and the beginning of an era of global disorder” was now at hand. The signature of this new era would be conflict in “every region in the world” as nations struggled to adjust “to a new configuration of power.

Also in the Post, Robert Gates, revered senior statesman, wrote that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.” Strangely unmentioned in Gates’s op-ed were the several U.S. wars that had marred that supposed holiday.

In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger offered his own definitive judgment. “Ukraine Changes Everything,” read the headline of his column, which warned Europe not to ignore its “this changes everything” lesson.

“Do nothing, and disorder descends,” he wrote. Americans would now harvest the fruits of doing nothing, and President Biden “leading from behind.”

To which the weary skeptic, battered by prior waves of ostensibly transformative events, might respond: Again? So soon? Are you certain?

In just the last few decades, historical turning points have accumulated with such frequency that an observer is hard-pressed to keep up. First came 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism. Together, these signified “the End of History” itself. Our side had won, the other side had lost. The resulting triumph of American-style liberal democratic capitalism was irreversible.

Serious, well-informed, and influential people said such things and were well-compensated for doing so. Their analysis turned out to be at the very least premature. Some might even say wildly wrong. The passing of the Cold War turned out to be other than transformative.

Indeed, barely a decade later, the horrific events of 9/11 showed that History had either not ended or had resumed with a vengeance. From a post-Cold War perspective, the deadly attack that targeted Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did. So the same pundits who had with assurance and conviction declared that history had run its course now outdid one another in describing how History had charged off in a new direction. The events of September 2001 had “changed everything.”

In short order, the United States retaliated by embarking upon a vastly ambitious global war. The overall aim of this undertaking, according to the U.S. commander-in-chief, was to “rid the world of evil.” This time for sure History would do America’s bidding.

Here again, things didn’t work out as planned. The war itself — more accurately, several wars — did not achieve decisive results. Evil evaded the snares laid by successive administrations in Washington. The deaths of thousands of U.S. troops, the harm sustained by tens of thousands of others, and the expenditure of trillions of dollars produced few benefits. Among American elites, however, the evil consequences of a war fought to end evil elicited little by way of serious reflection.

In some respects, the present war arrives as an exquisitely timed excuse for forgetting the recent past. Why rehash previous failures to forecast the future when a new one, stamped “Made in the Kremlin,” is staring us in the face? Why dwell on losses and disappointments incurred in places like Iraq and Afghanistan when there is fresh work to be done in and around Ukraine? Why second guess when forgetting is so easy and convenient?

Well, as a former First Lady/U.S. Senator/secretary of state/presidential candidate famously put it, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”

To my fellow citizens: Let’s not be fooled a third time.


I do not mean to minimize the thuggishness of Russia’s president or the barbarism of the Russian forces that have invaded Ukraine. Both deserve our condemnation. Nor do I mean to trivialize the suffering of the Ukrainian people, which demands sympathetic attention. Yet however appalling, such events are not without precedent, even in recent times.

Observers like Kagan, Gates, and Henninger have an aversion to context, especially when it complicates their own analysis.

In international politics, crimes are not easily measured with precision. Guilt and innocence tend to be in the eye of the beholder. Yet however distressing to admit, crimes committed by the United States in recent years, usually justified under the guise of liberating the oppressed and spreading democracy, have inflicted more damage on the international order than anything done by Russia. Moscow never promulgated a patently illegal doctrine of preventive war. We did. And the death toll resulting from U.S. campaigns undertaken subsequent to 9/11 — more than 900,000 killed according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project — exceeds by several orders of magnitude the number of Ukrainians killed (or likely to be killed) in the present conflict.

The point is not to justify Russian aggression, which cannot be justified. Rather, the point is simply to assert that the invasion of Ukraine does not mark some astonishing, unprecedented departure from an “order” that existed mostly in the minds of Western observers rather than the real world.

In fact, the events in Ukraine affirm the continuing relevance of that famous dictum of Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” The United States has no intention of declaring that axiom inoperative. Indeed, Washington has every intention of exploiting it to the fullest — even as senior U.S. officials express their devotion to the rule of law and the wellbeing of humankind.

So whatever Joe Biden and his various counterparts may say or do regarding Ukraine, History will continue on its anointed path. I make no pretense of knowing how the war there will end. I can only hope and pray that the fighting will stop soon, with far fewer casualties than resulted from our own “war on terrorism.”

What I do know is that when the war does end, Ukrainians and Russians will still be neighbors, with the latter bigger and stronger than the former. Facilitating their efforts to coexist — permanent hostilities being the only possible alternative — actually figures as a pressing priority to which the Gates, Kagans, and Henningers of our media universe should give their attention. Would that they would do so.
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Re: Ukraine is Paying the Price for US Recklessly Pushing NA

Postby admin » Sat Mar 12, 2022 2:11 am

The Ukraine invasion is nothing compared to Iraq. Or Iran or Afghanistan or…
by Andrew Bacevich
Spectator World
March 2, 2022 | 10:06 pm

Of the war in Ukraine, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel.”

In the very next sentence, he describes the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a raw, eighteenth-century-style land grab by a superpower,” thereby acknowledging that the episode actually has innumerable historical parallels — just not ones that Friedman cares to acknowledge as legitimate.

Friedman figures prominently among those claiming to have divined the essential character of the present age. His key finding: tech-driven globalization has rendered old-fashioned power politics obsolete. The rules of the game have changed irrevocably. Practically speaking, nations have no choice but to submit.


In best-selling books, he describes our collective future. The subtitle of one such tome claims to offer “A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” then still in its first decade.

In Friedman’s “hot, flat and crowded” world governed by tech-driven globalization, superpower land-grabs should have no place. The United States would enjoy unchallenged preeminence.

That Vladimir Putin has somehow not received the memo or has chosen to ignore its dictates is beyond flabbergasting.
When it comes to audacity, Putin has demonstrated the sort of chutzpah that has long been a Friedman signature. But the sense of dismay akin to betrayal expressed by Friedman and other commentators is entirely manufactured.

In fact, Putin has acted in accordance with geopolitical imperatives that predate the modern era. Nation-states compete against one another to advance their own interests. Pursuant to that competition, they employ various means, with suasion typically the preferred option. Given the uncertainty inherent in war, along with the likelihood of unintended consequences and higher than expected costs, violence tends to be a last resort. But last resort does not mean never. In international politics, these are the enduring facts of life.

The frequently heard charge that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violates ostensibly sacred international “norms” holds no water. No such norms exist — at least none that a great power will recognize as inhibiting its own freedom of action. For proof, we need look no further than the recent behavior of the United States which has routinely demonstrated a willingness to write its own norms while employing violence on a scale far exceeding anything that Russia has done or is likely to do.

Nothing that Putin has done in Ukraine pursuant to securing what he defines as vital Russian interests should be cause for surprise. Implicit in the shock expressed by observers such as Friedman is a belief that Europe has become an eternal “zone of peace” in which the triumph of liberal democracy had made the “end of history” a reality.

Preserving this illusion requires imagination. It means classifying the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s as an anomaly — forgotten as soon as the shooting stopped. But it also requires sustaining the pretense that Europe matters more than the rest of the world — that developments there possess greater significance than developments in, say, the Middle East or Africa.

This intellectual framing according to which events occurring in proximity to the Rhine and the Danube possess greater inherent importance than events near the Tigris or the Nile dates from the age of Western imperialism. It underwrites the inclination of observers such as Friedman to treat Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as utterly beyond the pale while events such as the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 and America’s various post-9/11 military interventions are either forgotten or written off as unfortunate lapses in judgment.


Russian actions in Ukraine deserve universal condemnation. But as crimes go, Putin’s aggression pales in comparison with the human toll exacted by Saddam Hussein’s US-supported war of choice against Iran. As for the calamitous results of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the impact of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine rates as trivial by comparison. The point is not to measure relative iniquity in a balance, but simply to note that while the ongoing events in Ukraine may be tragic, they are not all that unusual. The professed surprise of pundits and politicians stems either from wishful thinking or willful ignorance.

History hasn’t ended. The global triumph of democratic liberalism is a mirage. As the old radio serial had it, “Evil lurks in the hearts of men,” even in an era of Google, Apple, 5G, Uber and Grubhub. What may be most difficult for the beneficiaries of global US hegemony is this: the American Century has ended. The world conjured up by Thomas Friedman has not taken its place.

What Friedman ought have written is this: “By invading Ukraine, Russia has demolished what little remained of the lucrative line of bullshit that I have been peddling for the past twenty or so years.” But don’t count on any such admission to be forthcoming.
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