President Obama’s Initiation of a New Cold War — Paradoxically Aggravates Problems for the Russian Periphery Nations

05 May 2014

We Americans cannot seem to abandon our idea that aggressive meddling abroad is a good thing

President Obama effectively announced the New Cold War:

Mr. Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state.

Mr. Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin, aides said.

As a result, Mr. Obama will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.

American policy merely encourages Russia to foment discord in its border nations, so as to give the Federation an excuse to invade and take over more territory

By continuing to adhere to the NATO-enlarging actions that understandably made Russia worry about its security in the first place, President Obama cynically guarantees that Russia will even more aggressively.

This works to the disadvantage of the Eastern European and Near Asian nations that the United States pretends that it is trying to keep free.

The question is why such geopolitical stupidity continues.

Why has the President announced the geopolitically unproductive equivalent of a new Cold War?

Our politically astute President is protecting himself from Republican Party attacks at home. Unfortunately, his policy stance rejects the kind of courageous leadership that would benefit core American national interests, as well as those of people in the Ukraine and other Russia-bordering states.

We know that militarily countering Russian interventions in its border states is a no go. That means that the Administration is betting that it can bring Russia’s interventionist military and special operations units to a halt by economic means.

However, isolating Russia economically appears likely to provoke the Federation into committing even more flagrant border interventions. That will not work to our advantage:

An alert China will almost certainly see Russia’s plight as an opportunity for it to assist the Federation just enough to keep it alive as a thorn in the West’s side.

Why give our potentially most powerful global competitor (China) an already irritated stick (Russia) with which to flagellate America on a second front? Especially during a time in which the United States has more or less abandoned its economic willingness to fight two-front wars.

That this informal Russia-China hookup appears to have escaped Washington strategists indicates that:

(a) the Administration’s geopolitical strategists are not top quality,

(b) President Obama cares more about preserving his reputation as a warmongering leader than he does in actually acting in the national interest,

or that

Imperialism as a camouflaged agenda

Geopolitical analyst Mike Whitney recently wrote that:

The United States is in the opening phase of a war on Russia.

Policymakers in Washington have shifted their attention from the Middle East to Eurasia where they hope to achieve the most ambitious part of the imperial project; to establish forward-operating bases along Russia’s western flank, to stop further economic integration between Asia and Europe, and to begin the long-sought goal of dismembering the Russian Federation.

The US intends to spread its military bases across Central Asia, seize vital resources and pipeline corridors, and encircle China in order to control its future growth.

As we know from past experience, Washington will pursue its strategy relentlessly while shrugging off public opinion, international law or the condemnation of adversaries and allies alike.

The world’s only superpower does not have to listen to anyone. It is a law unto itself.

The pattern, of course, is unmistakable. It begins with sanctimonious finger-wagging, economic sanctions and incendiary rhetoric, and quickly escalates into stealth bombings, drone attacks, massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, millions of fleeing refugees, decimated towns and cities, death squads, wholesale human carnage, vast environmental devastation, and the steady slide into failed state anarchy; all of which is accompanied by the stale repetition of state propaganda spewed from every corporate bullhorn in the western media.

Isn’t that how things played out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria?

Is Mr. Whitney right?

From a strategic perspective, whether Whitney is right does not matter because his view is almost certainly how Russian (and probably Chinese) leaders evaluate the situation.

This means that Russia is going to react to American containment policy as if its core national security interests are at stake. A wise China will consider reacting similarly. Thus, the United States is unnecessarily poking two tigers with one stick.

Rather than deterring conflict by letting regional hegemons act as hegemons have always acted within their zones of influence — American policy is now further escalating a potentially explosive situation by announcing that it plans to stomp all over the Russian Federation.

Such a provocative policy constitutes a surprisingly high level of hubris, even for the increasingly conceited United States. Especially so, considering that the former Soviet Union, virtually by itself, defeated Hitler on World War II’s Eastern Front at a cost of twenty to thirty million lives.

Note

I recently heard a retired Army leader say that NATO would today crush the Russian Federation. Apparently this airhead had forgotten (a) what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan against much less powerful foes and (b) that the Russian Federation is a nuclear power of sizeable proportion.

We are probably not going to succeed (in the long run) with such an unrealistic policy

One of the basic rules of personal and geopolitical survival is that one cannot metaphorically “piss off” one’s entire ecological habitat and get away with it.

No empire has ever included anywhere close to the whole planet. That America is now contemplating such a move, especially during the very visible decline of our comparative global power, reveals the insanity of our thinking.

American geopolitical insanity arouses fear in the geopolitically rational people around us

Russia and China, being reasonably sensible hegemons — despite our aversion to their autocratic ways — have got to feel threatened by American machinations.

Neither of these potential adversaries has been trotting around the world starting large wars. Neither has been attempting to impose its way of life on the totality of the rest of the globe. Yet that is exactly, from their perspectives, what the United States has been doing for decades.

In this context, is “we will isolate you” containment a formula for peace?

Is forcing a stalwart competitor into thinking that it has to forcefully defend itself wise geopolitical strategy?

Arguably not.

So, why are we going down this repeatedly discredited route?

Who benefits from the Administration’s anti-Russian hostility?

The Military Industrial Complex.

The broad American economy that benefits from war and conflict does not care about lives, American or foreign. Nor does it care about advancing the cause of a peaceful humanity. As long as empire and stirred conflict breed lots of bucks, the Military Industrial Complex is happy.

The moral? — A new Cold War is profitable for the elite who run America

It saddens me to see my country become such a self-destructively influential manifestation of what Americans historically have professed to hate.

President Obama’s aggressive containment policy is the reverse of a comprehensively sensible one. A more thoughtful plan would have considered legitimate Russian interests and quietly accommodated them in ways that would have preserved the free neutrality of Russia’s border nations.

Instead, American policy has been poking Russia in ways that the United States would not itself tolerate in our own hemisphere. The hypocritical stupidity of our openly anti-Russian policy may eventually come home to weaken us.

Were I Chinese, I would be smiling.

PeteFree.com

President Obama’s Initiation of a New Cold War — Paradoxically Aggravates Problems for the Russian Periphery Nations