2023-05-26 01:27:08
Dto Common Dream, an article by prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University, exposes the contradictions of this war they force us to believe:
Recognizing that the issue of NATO enlargement is at the heart of this war, we understand why US weapons will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.
George Orwell wrote in 1984 That “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past“. Governments work tirelessly to distort public perception of the past. Regarding the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the war in Ukraine began with a Russia-provoked attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the United States in ways top US diplomats predicted decades earlier, meaning war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.
Recognizing that war has been provoked helps us understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify invading Russia. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and the non-Western world to explain and counter US militarism and unilateralism. Indeed, the relentless US drive to expand NATO is widely opposed around the world, thus Russian diplomacy rather than invasion would likely have been effective.
Biden’s team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly: in the important speech by Biden on the first anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most current G7 statement . The mainstream media, friendly to Biden, simply parrots what the White House says. Il New York Times he’s the main culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five op-eds, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!
Two main US provocations. The first was the US intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region, like other NATO countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey). The second was the role of the United States in establishing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine with the violent overthrow of the pro-Russian President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The war in Ukraine started with the overthrow of Yanukovych nine years ago, not in February 2022 as The government of the United States, NATO and the G7 leaders would have us believe.
The key to peace in Ukraine lies in negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and non-enlargement of NATO.
Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. Recognizing them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, saving Ukraine from its current devastation and the United States more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch supporter of the military-industrial complex and a very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.
The archives irrefutably show that the US and German governments repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “an inch eastward” when the Soviet Union dissolved the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, US planning for NATO expansion began in the early 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski he precised the timeline of NATO’s expansion with remarkable accuracy.
US diplomats and Ukrainian leaders themselves knew full well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great American scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fatal mistake,” writing in the New York Times That, “Such a decision can be expected to inflame nationalist, anti-Western and militarist tendencies in Russian public opinion; have a negative effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations and to push Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry has considered resigning in protest of NATO enlargement. In recalling this pivotal moment in the mid-1990s, Perry stated the following in 2016: “Our first action that really put us in a bad direction was when NATO started expanding, involving Eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At the time, we were working closely with Russia and they were starting to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy… strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that”.
In 2008, then US ambassador to Russia, and now director of the CIA, William Burns sent a cable to Washington warning at length of the grave risks of NATO enlargement: “The NATO aspirations of Ukraine and Georgia not only strike a raw nerve in Russia, but raise serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Russia not only perceives the encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences that could seriously undermine Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly concerned that strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community opposed to membership, could lead to a major rift, involving violence or, at worst of cases, the civil war. In that case, Russia should decide whether to intervene; a decision that Russia does not want to have to face”.
Ukrainian leaders clearly knew that pushing for NATO enlargement to include Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych stated in a 2019 interview “that our price for NATO membership is a big war with Russia”.
In 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed for neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The United States has been secretly working to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape by then US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before his violent overthrow. Nuland makes clear on the call that he was coordinating closely with then-Vice President Biden and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of US policy toward Ukraine.
After Yanukovych was overthrown, war broke out in the Donbass, as Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the United States armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian military to be interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO e administration Biden they are strongly committed to Ukraine’s future in NATO.
In the immediate run-up to the invasion of Russia, NATO enlargement was in focus. The draft US-Russia treaty of Putin (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russian leaders have pointed to NATO enlargement as the cause of the war in the meeting of the National Security Council of Russia on February 21, 2022 . In his speech to the nation that day, Putin stated that NATO enlargement is a central reason for the invasion.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts he recently wrote : Could the war have been prevented by a Russo-Western agreement that stopped NATO expansion and neutralized Ukraine in exchange for solid guarantees of independence and sovereignty? Most likely. In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a speedy negotiated conclusion to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett former prime minister of Israel who was a mediator, a deal was close to being reached before the US, UK and France blocked it.
While the Biden administration claims Russia’s invasion was unprovoked, Russia has been pursuing diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war; Biden preferred to reject diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say in the issue of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while Biden’s team again stalled a diplomatic end to the war.
Recognizing that the issue of NATO enlargement is at the heart of this war, we understand why US weapons will not end this war. Russia will escalate the conflict if necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to include Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine lies in negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and non-enlargement of NATO. The Biden administration’s insistence on such enlargement to include Ukraine has made the latter a victim of ill-conceived and unfeasible US military aspirations. It is time for the provocations to stop and for the negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.
*****
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the date of William’s warning cable Burns del 2008 on NATO enlargement. The error has been corrected. Jeffrey D. Sachs
#war #Ukraine #provoked #important #achieving #peace #News #talk