Yanking President Putin’s Chain while Standing on Hypocrisy’s Ice — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Laughable Chastisement

© 2014 Peter Free

 

19 November 2014

 

 

It looks as if the United States, the European Union and NATO are determined to provoke more Russian expansionism

 

America’s entrenched militarism — making war for profit’s sake — and the West’s generally arrogant sense of moral superiority seem about to tumble us all into an escalation over Ukraine that historians will probably agree afterward was unnecessary.

 

 

At a meeting Monday in Brussels, European Union foreign ministers mulled the possibility of further sanctions against Moscow for its actions regarding Ukraine.

 

Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign affairs chief, said more sanctions against Russia would not be effective and the EU should focus instead on encouraging meaningful reforms in Kiev.

 

But [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, speaking in Sydney after the G-20 summit in Australia, struck a more defiant note, saying sanctions would remain in place "as far and long as they are needed."

 

Merkel said Russia's annexation of Crimea "calls into question the horror of two World Wars and, after the end of the Cold War, Europe's framework of peace."

 

"Who would have thought that, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the end of the Cold War and the end of the world's separation into two blocks, something like this could have happened in the middle of Europe?" Merkel said.

 

"Old ways of thinking in spheres of influence, which spurn international law, must not become accepted."

 

The German leader warned that regional conflicts like the one raging in eastern Ukraine "can very quickly broaden to major fires."

 

© 2014 Laura Mills, Putin Says Sides Not Abiding Peace Deal In Ukraine, World Post (18 November 2014) (extracts, underline added)

 

 

How do you imagine the Russian Federation will react to Germany’s astonishing level of hypocrisy?

 

Chancellor Merkel (probably inadvertently) rubbed salt into wounds.

 

Germany’s catastrophic World War II invasion of the Soviet Union is the Russian Federation’s most recent reminder that Realpolitik — not spurious “let’s all get along” moral wishes — should underlie its wish to reestablish a geographic buffer along its border.

 

You do not have to be a psychological genius to see that the West’s tactless diplomacy is probably going to further provoke the Federation into engaging in more unpleasant behavior:

 

 

[T]he United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.

 

Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion.

 

For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

 

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.

 

Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

 

© 2014 John J. Mearsheimer, Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault, Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014) (extracts)

 

 

This is not difficult stuff

 

The United States would not tolerate a Great Power attempting to recruit our geographic neighbors into its sphere of influence. Nor would we, as individual people, allow one of our neighbors to incorporate part of our back yard into his or her use.

 

The fact that no one in the West appears to see the two-way nature of this street says more about our true motives than our lack of intelligence. It is all about keeping the geopolitical pot simmering and making money.

 

The global Military Industrial Complex profits from our displays of apparently self-destructive diplomatic stupidity.

 

 

The moral? — War is good for militarism’s business, peace and stability are not

 

It is a pity that people without a say are always the ones who get blown up.