We Don’t Need More Brinkmanship With Russia BY BRANKO MARCETIC
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/united-states-russia-war-ukraine
NATO is a Cold War artifact originally designed to counteract the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact on the international stage, and stop the Soviets from expanding westward across Europe. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved, there was, ostensibly, no more use for NATO, and both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations told Russian leadership the alliance wouldn’t expand eastward.
But privately, Bush’s Pentagon urged Washington “to leave the door ajar” for Eastern European membership down the line — which is exactly what they did, under criticism from no less than Robert Gates, defense secretary for both Bush’s son and Barack Obama, and George Kennan, the father of the US anti-communist policy of containment. Between 1999 and 2020, fourteen countries joined the alliance, all of them from Eastern Europe and two of them scraping right up against Russian border. Kennan had warned this would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “impel Russian foreign policy in a direction decidedly not to our liking.” Which, looking back in hindsight, is pretty spot on.
Russian “Provocations” Are Part of a Tit-for-Tat Exchange
This current stand-off is going on in the context of roughly five years worth of news about Russia’s supreme villainy, so it’s natural to assume this latest move of Putin’s is just more of that. He’s a bad man doing bad things to test, needle, and undermine the United States. It’s not surprising, given that Putin is a neoliberal authoritarian who represses his opposition and has almost certainly had his domestic enemies killed.
But influential segments of the US press often fail to give their audiences the full context for what’s going on in the world, ending up with a two-dimensional narrative of an evil mastermind attacking a put-upon United States for no good reason. In fact, Putin’s highly publicized “provocations” against Washington are responses to far less publicized US actions, and vice versa — part of a tit-for-tat exchange between two adversarial powers.
The United States Is Close to Over-Stretching Itself
US officials have long been plagued by an overestimation in their country’s ability to wage war, bordering on the delusional. It’s ratcheting up another level right now.
Consider the following: At the same time that hawks are urging Biden to take up arms against Russia should it invade Ukraine, the United States also seems to be positioning itself to fight Russia’s ally, China, should it attack Taiwan. One high-ranking US official declared the island nation “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital US interests in the Indo-Pacific,” and militarists in Congress have debated giving Biden a Gulf of Tonkin–like blank check to respond in case Taiwan’s invaded.
On top of all this, Israeli and former US officials are also urging Biden to threaten (and, if it comes to it, carry out) an attack on Iran, which his administration has explored doing.