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I suspect the US foreign policy establishment must be really pissed off at the way the EU (and Merkel) has handled Ukraine. Total fantasist rookies, if you ask me.
Look, the entire European establishment bought into the idea we had a post-realist world order in Europe. They didn't even have the phrase "sphere of influence" enter their heads during the trade negotiations with Ukraine last fall, because they don't think in those terms any longer. I've kept telling people for years this is totally wrong, but they needed this kind of brutal wake-up call to get it. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Putinism and the Anti-WEIRD Coalition [...] Americans of all stripes have a well-honed ability to ignore inconvenient facts, and our better educated citizens seem particularly prone to this (as I noted with our "expert" inability to see what North Korea believes, even though they aren't shy about it). At root, I suspect Obama and many Americans refuse to accept the in-our-face reality of Putin and his regime because they represent a past version of ourselves, caught up in retrograde views that are entirely unacceptable to our elites, therefore they pretend they do not exist, because they don't actually exist in their world. Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he's what they thought they'd gotten past. He's a traditional male with "outmoded" views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons - and he hates us. Of course, this also happens to explain why some Westerners who loathe post-modernism positively love Putin, at least from a safe distance. Some far-right Westerners - the accurate term is paleoconservatives - have been saying for years that the West, led very much by America, has become hopelessly decadent and they've been looking for a leader to counter all this, and - lo and behold - here he is, the new "leader of global conservatism." Some paleocons have stated that, with the end of the Cold War, America has become the global revolutionary power, seeking to foist its post-modern views on the whole planet, by force if necessary, and now Putin's Russia has emerged as the counterrevolutionary element. Cold War 2.0, in this telling, has the sides reversed. [...] We are entering a New Cold War with Russia, whether we want to or not, thanks to Putin's acts in Ukraine, which are far from the endpoint of where the Kremlin is headed in foreign policy. As long as the West continues to pretend there is no ideological component to this struggle, it will not understand what is actually going on. Simply put, Putin believes that his country has been victimized by the West for two decades, and he is pushing back, while he is seeking partners. We will have many allies in resisting Russian aggression if we focus on issues of freedom and sovereignty, standing up for the rights of smaller countries to choose their own destiny. However, too much emphasis on social and sexual matters - that is, telling countries how they must organize their societies and families - will be strategically counterproductive.
[...]
Americans of all stripes have a well-honed ability to ignore inconvenient facts, and our better educated citizens seem particularly prone to this (as I noted with our "expert" inability to see what North Korea believes, even though they aren't shy about it). At root, I suspect Obama and many Americans refuse to accept the in-our-face reality of Putin and his regime because they represent a past version of ourselves, caught up in retrograde views that are entirely unacceptable to our elites, therefore they pretend they do not exist, because they don't actually exist in their world.
Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he's what they thought they'd gotten past. He's a traditional male with "outmoded" views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons - and he hates us.
Of course, this also happens to explain why some Westerners who loathe post-modernism positively love Putin, at least from a safe distance. Some far-right Westerners - the accurate term is paleoconservatives - have been saying for years that the West, led very much by America, has become hopelessly decadent and they've been looking for a leader to counter all this, and - lo and behold - here he is, the new "leader of global conservatism." Some paleocons have stated that, with the end of the Cold War, America has become the global revolutionary power, seeking to foist its post-modern views on the whole planet, by force if necessary, and now Putin's Russia has emerged as the counterrevolutionary element. Cold War 2.0, in this telling, has the sides reversed.
We are entering a New Cold War with Russia, whether we want to or not, thanks to Putin's acts in Ukraine, which are far from the endpoint of where the Kremlin is headed in foreign policy. As long as the West continues to pretend there is no ideological component to this struggle, it will not understand what is actually going on. Simply put, Putin believes that his country has been victimized by the West for two decades, and he is pushing back, while he is seeking partners. We will have many allies in resisting Russian aggression if we focus on issues of freedom and sovereignty, standing up for the rights of smaller countries to choose their own destiny.
However, too much emphasis on social and sexual matters - that is, telling countries how they must organize their societies and families - will be strategically counterproductive.
On matters of political strategy and military affairs at least, Russians and Americans are so uncannily alike in their thought processes and ways of looking at the world that "mirror image" is really the best way of characterizing them. After all, these are the two peoples who have been studying each other, for billions of man-hours, over a nuclear chess board for almost 70 years now. That's why so many Americans have man-crushes on Putin, after all. We really do understand and appreciate the guy. And contrary to what many in the commentariat have been writing in the past few weeks, Putin, and Russians in general, have displayed an amazingly accurate understanding of how Americans think strategically as well.
All of Putin's actions, and those of the US, are completely explained the the realist theory of international relations -- that the interests of power always take precedence, and that "the strong will do what they must while the weak can only do what they can." No ideological explanation is necessary, and it appears doubtful that Putin is really interested at all in anti-neoliberal or any other post-modernist inspired discourse. He has never indicated, in his entire, well publicized life, any interest in such thinking.
Realism, on the other hand, is the same principal of foreign policy (and all policy really) that has dominated thinking in the affairs of statecraft since Thucydides first made the observation, and later re-popularized by Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, and now still be taught and argued by people like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, as well as having comprised the core pedagogy of both US and Russian military staff colleges for over a century, at least.
Realism is how US and Russians think and how their soldiers and diplomats have been educated, and it is how they expect the other to interpret events and actions, and nothing that has actually transpired in events in Europe, right down to the infamous "fuck the EU" phone call and exposure by Russia, contradicts a purely realist interpretation of what is going on in both Russian and American policymakers' minds. Only the blogosphere, and perhaps various EU heads of state, appear to be consistently duped by US and Russian press releases.
-------- As the unelected Kiev junta sends armed balaclava-clad paramilitaries to quell protests in Ukraine's eastern cities it declares the operation «anti-terrorism». The acting (sic) president in Kiev Oleksandr Turchynov has labeled all those seeking political autonomy in Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk and other pro-Russian cities in the east of the country as «terrorists and criminals»; a new set of laws cobbled together by the junta - two months before scheduled official elections have taken place and therefore of dubious legality - gives the self-appointed politicians in Kiev the power to prosecute any one that does not recognize their self-imposed authority... Meanwhile, NATO has warned Moscow to «step back» from alleged military aggression (from within its own borders!) towards Ukraine - even though the US-led alliance has escalated the presence of its fighter jets and troops in Russia's neighboring countries. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary general of the 28-member NATO organization, has also led calls for speeding up the incorporation of Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina into the nuclear-armed pact. This is in addition to a deal hastily worked out by NATO and the NATO-backed junta in Kiev for joint military exercises to be carried out on Ukrainian territory. This constitutes a new genre of politics, which one might dub «surrealpolitik». The former realpolitik of the bygone Cold War decades may have been cynical and callous, but at least such thinking was based on an objective reality that vying sides could commonly recognize and therefore negotiate. In the new genre of surrealpolitik, one side's version of reality seems more in the realm of fantasy, which makes any dialogue between political contentions nearly, if not totally, impossible.
Meanwhile, NATO has warned Moscow to «step back» from alleged military aggression (from within its own borders!) towards Ukraine - even though the US-led alliance has escalated the presence of its fighter jets and troops in Russia's neighboring countries. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary general of the 28-member NATO organization, has also led calls for speeding up the incorporation of Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina into the nuclear-armed pact. This is in addition to a deal hastily worked out by NATO and the NATO-backed junta in Kiev for joint military exercises to be carried out on Ukrainian territory.
This constitutes a new genre of politics, which one might dub «surrealpolitik». The former realpolitik of the bygone Cold War decades may have been cynical and callous, but at least such thinking was based on an objective reality that vying sides could commonly recognize and therefore negotiate. In the new genre of surrealpolitik, one side's version of reality seems more in the realm of fantasy, which makes any dialogue between political contentions nearly, if not totally, impossible.
NATO installs an unelected regime in Kiev through a coup d'état against a legally elected government. That is a fact. Yet in the surreal world of Washington and its NATO allies, this fact is inverted into a fictional notion that what happened in Kiev during February was the culmination of «a democratic revolution». Airbrushed from the objective narrative are details such as the new regime arrogating administrative power through a campaign of Western-backed street violence and terrorism, including the fatal shooting of police officers by covert snipers. Without supporting evidence, the sniper-assisted regime in Kiev, which was promptly accorded the authority of «government» by Western capitals and their media, has since counter-charged Russian secret services and the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych of orchestrating the shootings. Of course, the incriminating leaked telephone conversation, dated February 26, between EU ministers Catherine Ashton and Estonia's Urmas Paet on Western-backed covert snipers is conveniently deleted from the official Western record.
Without supporting evidence, the sniper-assisted regime in Kiev, which was promptly accorded the authority of «government» by Western capitals and their media, has since counter-charged Russian secret services and the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych of orchestrating the shootings. Of course, the incriminating leaked telephone conversation, dated February 26, between EU ministers Catherine Ashton and Estonia's Urmas Paet on Western-backed covert snipers is conveniently deleted from the official Western record.
The wrong interpretation is to imagine that anything new, like a new surrealpolitik paradigm, has infected the thinking of the non-aggressive side, which is what I see all over the blogosphere, like in your blockquote here.
The right interpretation is that the NATO side has already determined that use of force in Ukraine is not worth the effort, so it is writing the Ukraine off but cannot tell that to their allies in the Ukraine and elsewhere because it sounds too ruthless and unsupportive of justice, democracy, and the rule of law, the shared values for which any use of force must be consistent in the first place. In Realpolitik, when someone uses words and official statements rather than actions, it is code for: you're not that important to us right now. No one should infer from this that policymakers on the NATO side have a different view of reality at all.
As a young community organizer in Chicago, President Barrack Obama used to lead intense organizer trainings, called "week-longs" where trainees learned to abandon the "justice junkie" mindset and adopt Saul Alinsky's unique style of Machiavellian street politics. The week's training begins by reading Thucydides' "Milean Dialogue," the core text for the Realist school of international relations. The exercise that Obama, like all trainers then, like now, taught was to divide the trainees into the Melians and Athenians, and let them try to negotiate an outcome. One of the key lessons was to not think like the stupid, self-righteous, but sympathetic Melians, but to think instead as ruthlessly and strategic as the Athenians. Don't waste your resources on something where you can't build power as an outcome.
I really doubt Obama has forgotten this formational part of his entry into politics. Nothing else he has done indicates that he has. I'm pretty sure the US and NATO just aren't seeing where it helps them build power to get involved militarily in Ukraine at the present time, or they would have already done so.
So, strategically, it was a pretty ruthless and low-risk (for the West) move that would have impressed Saul Alinsky, if not Henry Kissinger.
Earlier this week, Russia laid out its vision for eastern Ukraine and how Ukraine can move toward reestablishing its stability and territorial integrity - or what's left of it. Ukrainian officials called the Russian road map, published on the foreign ministry's website, an "ultimatum" and a "completely unacceptable" demand. But, as Yatsenyuk's speech showed, the two sides share common themes with regard to Ukraine's east. The prospect of a federalized Ukraine. Yatsenyuk promised government reforms that would transfer to Ukraine's regions "the broadest scope of authority and financial resources." The Russian memorandum also calls for decentralization in Ukraine - it called the process "federalization" - and said it should be written into the Ukrainian Constitution. Yatsenyuk's statement confirmed that this was being done.
The prospect of a federalized Ukraine. Yatsenyuk promised government reforms that would transfer to Ukraine's regions "the broadest scope of authority and financial resources." The Russian memorandum also calls for decentralization in Ukraine - it called the process "federalization" - and said it should be written into the Ukrainian Constitution. Yatsenyuk's statement confirmed that this was being done.
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