Beginning with Bill Clinton’s NATO expansion, Clinton, Bush, and Obama used US military power to topple dictators, spread democracy, sanction so-called rogue states, and set up the globe as a “security” operation run by the US. By 2016, the US was formally committed to defending more foreign countries than at any time in its history.
12/10/18, “The Death of Global Order Was Caused by Clinton, Bush, and Obama,” Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt
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12/27/18, “NATO Partisans Started a New Cold War With Russia," The American Conservative, Ted Galen Carpenter
“Putin is responding to the West’s aggressive actions, not the other way around."
“When historians examine the first few decades of the so-called post-Cold War era, they are likely to marvel at the clumsy and provocative policies that the United States and its NATO allies pursued toward Russia. Perceptive historians will conclude that a multitude of insensitive actions by those governments poisoned relations with Moscow, and by the latter years of the Obama administration, led to the onset of a new cold war. During the Trump administration, matters grew even worse, and that cold war threatened to turn hot.
Since the history of our era is still being written, we have an opportunity to avoid such a cataclysmic outcome. However, the behavior of America’s political, policy, and media elites in response to the latest parochial quarrel between Russia and Ukraine regarding the Kerch Strait suggests that they learned nothing from their previous blunders. Worse, they seem determined to intensify an already counterproductive, hardline policy toward Moscow.
U.S. leaders managed to get relations with Russia wrong just a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. One of the few officials to capture the nature of the West’s bungling and how it fomented tensions was Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense during the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s. In his surprisingly candid memoirs, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates recalls his report to Bush following the 2007 Munich Security Council, at which Russian President Vladimir Putin vented about Western security transgressions, including the planned deployment of a missile defense system in Central Europe.
[Gates]: “When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of the Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War . . . .” Yet even that blunt assessment given to Bush did not fully capture Gates’s views on the issue. [Unfortunately globalist George HW Bush, who said: “To hell with that!…We prevailed, they didn’t.”…was a big promoter of this ugly US view]. “What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George H. W.] Bush left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake.” [Gates was in a position to right these wrongs for decades but instead just collected a paycheck.]
Specific U.S. actions were ill-considered as well, in Gates’s view. “U.S. agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation.”
His list of foolish or arrogant Western actions went on. Citing NATO’s military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during Bill Clinton’s administration, Gates noted that “the Russians had long historical ties with Serbia, which we largely ignored.” And in an implicit rebuke to his current boss, Gates asserted that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching.” [US won Ukraine, “the biggest prize,” only after spending $5 billion US taxpayer dollars over 20 years].
That move was a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.” Indeed, events regarding Ukraine after Gates completed his memoirs illustrated that U.S. arrogance and meddling knew few bounds. U.S. officials openly sided with demonstrators who overthrew Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian government, and then reacted with shock and anger when Russia retaliated by seizing and annexing Crimea.
Gates’s overall assessment of Western, especially U.S., policy toward Russia during the post-Cold War era was unsparingly harsh—and devastatingly accurate: “When Russia was weak in the 1990s and beyond, we did not take Russian interests seriously. We did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view and managing the relationship for the long term.”
Unfortunately, Gates was one of the rare anomalies in the American foreign policy community regarding policy toward Russia. His criticism, trenchant as it is, still understates the folly of the policies that the United States and its NATO allies have pursued toward Moscow. The treatment that three successive U.S. administrations meted out to a newly capitalist, democratic Russia was appalling myopic. Even before Vladimir Putin came to power—and long before Russia descended into being an illiberal democracy and then an outright authoritarian state—the Western powers treated the country as a de facto enemy. The NATO nations engaged in a series of provocations even though Moscow had engaged in no aggressive conduct that even arguably justified such actions. [No wars=No free US taxpayer cash]
The determination to confront Russia has only grown over the years, as the current tensions involving the Kerch Strait illustrate. When Russian security forces fired on three Ukrainian naval vessels that attempted to force a transit of the Kerch Strait (a narrow waterway between Russia’s Taman Peninsula and Russian-annexed Crimea that connects the Black Sea and Sea of Azov), the United States and its NATO allies reacted furiously. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley branded Russia’s conduct “outlaw actions.”
An array of U.S. lawmakers and pundits advocate highly provocative steps in response. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urged an increase in U.S. arms sales to Ukraine [conquered by the US in 2014 after twenty years, $5 billion US tax dollars, and bloodshed], asserting, “If Putin starts seeing Russian soldier fatalities, that changes his equation.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-OK) threatened new sanctions on Russia and called for a coordinated response between the United States and its European allies. “If Putin continues his Black Sea bullying,” Inhofe stated, “the United States and Europe must consider imposing additional sanctions on Russia, inserting a greater U.S. and NATO presence in the Black Sea region and increasing military assistance for [US client state] Ukraine.”
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) echoed those views. Menendez called for tougher sanctions, additional NATO exercises on the Black Sea and more U.S. security aid to Ukraine, “including lethal maritime equipment and weapons.” Some hawks even seem receptive to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s call on NATO to station warships in the Sea of Azov, even though such a step would likely lead to a shooting war between the West and Russia.
Far too many Western (especially American) analyses explicitly or implicitly act as though the United States and its NATO allies worked assiduously to establish cordial relations with Russia but were compelled to adopt hardline policies solely because of Russia’s perversely aggressive conduct. That is a distorted, self-serving portrayal on the part of {US taxpayer funded) NATO partisans. It falsely portrays the West as purely a reactive player—that NATO initiatives were never insensitive, provocative, or aggressive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the opposite is closer to the mark; Russia’s actions, both in terms of timing and virulence, tended to be responses to aggressive Western initiatives. Unfortunately, avid NATO supporters seem determined to double down, insisting that the Trump administration adopt even more uncompromising policies.
Contending that Moscow is to blame for the deterioration of East-West relations because of its military actions in Georgia and Ukraine, as U.S. opinion leaders tend to do, is especially inaccurate. The problems began much earlier than the events in 2008 and 2014. The West humiliated a defeated adversary that showed every sign of wanting to become part of a broader Western community. Expanding NATO and trampling on Russian interests in the Balkans were momentous early measures that torpedoed friendly relations.
Such policy myopia was reminiscent of how the victorious Allies inflicted harsh treatment on a defeated, newly democratic Weimar Germany after World War I. The NATO powers are treating Russia as an enemy, and there is now a serious danger that the country is turning into one. That development would be an especially tragic case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 750 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support for Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements (forthcoming, February 2019).“
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Among comments
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“Clyde Schechter says: December 26, 2018 at 10:57 pm
The reason “we did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view and managing the relationship for the long term” is because we are arrogant and prone to meddling. It’s called American Exceptionalism, also known as American Imperialism. The future looks grim, and, in my view, the current Cold War with Russia feels a lot more dangerous than the original one because our leaders have upped the belligerence by orders of magnitude. At least in the original Cold War the objective was merely containment of Communism. Our current leaders want nothing short of global domination.”
Added
12/20/2017, “When Washington Assured Russia NATO Would Not Expand,” “How America’s failure to honor a 1990 commitment led to many of today’s global crises.” The American Conservative, Andrew J. Bacevich.
As George HW Bush said: “To hell with that!…We prevailed, they didn’t.”… In the 1990s US elites believed Russia was “ours to lose.” Newly independent fledgling Russia and its millions of citizens were about to be plundered and driven into poverty and starvation by lawless US elites. Multiple events contributed to the end of the Soviet Union. US hadn’t “won” vs the Soviet Union but this was and remains the mentality of the criminal US political class. “«According to records from Kohl’s office, the chancellor chose to echo Baker, not Bush, since Baker’s softer line was more likely to produce the results that Kohl wanted: permission from Moscow to start reunifying Germany. Kohl thus assured Gorbachev that ‘naturally NATO could not expand its territory to the current territory of [East Germany].’ In parallel talks, Genscher delivered the same message to his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, saying, ‘for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.’… But Kohl’s phrasing would quickly become heresy among the key Western decision-makers. Once Baker got back to Washington, in mid-February 1990, he fell in line with the National Security Council’s view and adopted its position. From then on, members of Bush’s foreign policy team exercised strict message discipline, making no further remarks about NATO holding at the 1989 line. Kohl, too, brought his rhetoric in line with Bush’s, as both U.S. and West German transcripts from the two leaders’ February 24–25 summit at Camp David show. Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: ‘To hell with that!’ he said. ‘We prevailed, they didn’t.’… In April, Bush spelled out this thinking in a confidential telegram to French President François Mitterrand… Bush was making it clear to Mitterrand that the dominant security organization in a post–Cold War Europe had to remain NATO — not any kind of pan-European alliance. As it happened, the next month, Gorbachev proposed just such a pan-European arrangement, one in which a united Germany would join both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, thus creating one massive security institution. Gorbachev even raised the idea of having the Soviet Union join NATO. ‘You say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is simply a security structure that is adapting to new realities,’ Gorbachev told Baker in May, according to Soviet records. ‘Therefore, we propose to join NATO.’ Baker refused to consider such a notion, replying dismissively, Pan-European security is a dream.’”…9/10/2015, “How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed West,” Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse
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“Yanks to the Rescue,” 7/15/1996 Time cover. US freely interfered in Russia’s 1996 presidential election to re-elect drunken pal Yeltsin: “The Americans were “vital,” says Mikhail Margolev, who coordinated the Yeltsin account at Video International…. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign.”Re-published 6/24/2001, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, Michael Kramer…“Americans generally have no idea what life was like for Russians during the 1990s. They naively assume that because Russia swiftly adopted capitalism, the result was great economic prosperity. The reality was quite different….According to Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine” between 1991 and 1998 “more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed creating an epidemic of unemployment.” As a result, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line. Klein goes on to say that “25 percent of Russians – almost 37 million people – lived in poverty described as ‘desperate.’…During the 1990s, when Yeltsin was dramatically changing the country under the direction of the Clinton administration, the rate of drug addiction in Russia increased by 900 percent. The suicide rate almost doubled. HIV, which had previously only infected no more than fifty thousand Russians, became a nationwide epidemic with millions contracting AIDs. An entire population of people who had lived with guaranteed employment, guaranteed healthcare, old age pensions, and a planned economy saw the social safety net swept from underneath them, as widely unpopular policies, backed by Washington, were imposed on the country. US Senator Bill Bradley describes the tone of US diplomats in their interactions with Russia, saying Clinton administration officials spoke of “stuffing shit down Boris throat,” gleefully taking pleasure in ordering him to wreck his country’s economy.…“One reason why Yeltsin was the West’s darling—while Mr. Putin is the target of virulent attacks–was that his policies perfectly suited the Western agenda for Russia, a superpower-turned economic and military weakling, a subservient client state and a source of cheap energy and minerals. By contrast, Russia’s resurgence under Mr. Putin is seen as upsetting the global balance of power and threatening the U.S. unipolar model.”….”At its meeting in Madrid, July 1997, NATO formally invited three former Soviet satellites—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—to join the [NATO] alliance; and in March 1999, less than two weeks after their membership became effective, NATO began to bomb Serbia, Russia’s ally, in an effort to end its military operations in Kosovo. Yeltsin denounced but could not deflect either development. Likewise, Clinton could do little but protest five months later as Russia began a massive bombing campaign in the Second Chechen War. When Yeltsin suddenly resigned from office in December [1999], however, Clinton praised his counterpart for helping to achieve “genuine progress” in U.S.-Russian relations.”…“The West outrageously ignores the opinion of the Russian people….The rise of new Russia has undermined America’s self-arrogated right to decide what is good and what is evil…and to impose “democratic transformation”on other nations, either by war as in Iraq, or through “colour revolutions” as in Georgia and Ukraine. If Mr. Putin’s Russia is accepted as an emerging democracy, rather than as a successor to the “evil empire,” it will be difficult to justify the new containment policy the U.S. has set in train, surrounding Russia with a ring of military bases and missile interceptors. Nor would one be able to easily dismiss Moscow’s criticism of the aggressive and arrogant U.S. behaviour across the world. As Mr. Putin asked in his famous Munich speech, if Russia could carry out a peaceful transition from the Soviet regime to democracy, why should other countries be bombed at every opportunity for want of democracy? Hence the Herculean effort of Western opinion-makers to paint everything Mr. Putin does in evil colours.” Yeltsin dissolved parliament on 9/21/1993. Of Yeltsin’s televised appearance announcing dissolution of parliament, English speaking announcer says @:02, “Yeltsin reached for a cup of tea to show Russians he was not drunk."…In Oct. 1993 Yeltsin sent tanks to attack Parliament. Scores were killed, hundreds wounded, US still didn’t say Yeltsin is Hitler. Bill Clinton said, “President Yeltsin had no other alternative but to try to restore order.”
Above photos, AFP and Tass, Oct. 1993 via Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Liberty
Dec. 1993: “U.S. backing remained constant after the disastrous election results in which Yeltsin’s party received only 15 percent of the vote and the Constitution barely passed the referendum.”….This after US gave Yeltsin $12 million US tax dollars to help his Nov. 1993 election and provided election experts on the ground in Russia.…..
In 2018, Russian people haven’t complained to the US or asked them to bomb Russia. Putin has favorable ratings among the Russian people per Pew Polls as chart shows.
Putin’s popularity among Russian people was solidified when he created the opportunity for Crimea’s return to Russia, Washington Post and Pew Poll.…“Analysts said that after the Crimean annexation, Putin became untouchable to a large slice of the population.”…(Crimea voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia).………………………………..
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Added: Clinton, Bush, and Obama advanced murderous US global war machine:
“They set about using [US taxpayer funded] American power to topple dictators, spread democracy, sanction so-called rogue states, and bring as many countries as possible into security institutions led by the United States. By 2016, in fact, America was formally committed to defending more foreign countries than at any time in the nation’s history.”
12/10/18, “The Death of Global Order Was Caused by Clinton, Bush, and Obama,” Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt
Image: “President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, former first lady Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listen during a state funeral for former President George H. W. Bush at the Washington National Cathedral on Dec. 5, 2018 in Washington, D.C.,” getty
“America’s post-Cold War presidents could have taken a road that didn’t end at Donald Trump.”
“A recurring theme of foreign-policy commentary since 2016 has been the prior status and uncertain future of the so-called liberal order. Some writers question whether a liberal order ever existed or challenge its alleged virtues, while others are quick to defend its past achievements and bemoan its potential demise.
If there is a consensus among these various commentators, however, it is that U.S. President Donald Trump poses a particular threat to the U.S.-led, rules-based order that has supposedly been in place since 1945. If only Hillary Clinton had become president, some believe, the United States would have remained the “indispensable nation” guiding the world toward a more benign future, and the familiar elements of a rules-based order would be thriving (or at least intact).
There is no question that Trump places little value in democracy, human rights, the rule of law, or other classic liberal values, and he seems to have a particular disregard for America’s democratic partners and a soft spot for autocrats. But it is a mistake to see him as the sole—or even the most important—cause of the travails now convulsing the U.S.-led order.
Indeed, the seeds of our present troubles were sown long before Trump entered the political arena, and are in good part due to foreign-policy decisions made by the administrations of former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
Think back a quarter century, to the beginning of the “unipolar moment.” Having [allegedly] triumphed over the Soviet Union, the United States could have given itself a high-five, taken a victory lap, and adopted a grand strategy better suited to a world without a superpower rival. Rejecting isolationism, Washington could nonetheless have gradually disengaged from those areas that no longer needed significant American protection and reduced its global military footprint, while remaining ready to act in a few key areas should it become absolutely necessary. These moves would have forced our wealthiest allies to take on greater responsibility for local problems while the United States addressed pressing domestic needs. Making the “American dream” more real here at home would also have shown other nations why the values of liberty, democracy, open markets, and the rule of law were worth emulating.
This sensible alternative was barely discussed in official circles, however. Instead, both Democrats and Republicans quickly united behind an ambitious strategy of “liberal hegemony,” which sought to spread liberal values far and wide. Convinced that the winds of progress were at their back and enamored of an image of America as the world’s “indispensable nation,” they set about using American power to topple dictators, spread democracy, sanction so-called rogue states, and bring as many countries as possible into security institutions led by the United States. By 2016, in fact, America was formally committed to defending more foreign countries than at any time in the nation’s history.
America’s leaders may have had the best of intentions, but the strategy they pursued was mostly a failure. Relations with Russia and China today are worse than at any time since the Cold War, and the two Asian giants are once again colluding against us. Hopes for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians have been dashed, and the rest of the Middle East is as divided as it has ever been. North Korea, India, and Pakistan have all tested nuclear weapons and expanded their nuclear stockpiles, while Iran has gone from zero enrichment capacity in 1993 to being nearly a nuclear weapons state today. Democracy is in retreat worldwide, violent extremists are active in more places, the European Union is wobbling, and the uneven benefits of globalization have produced a powerful backlash against the liberal economic order that the United States had actively promoted.
All of these trends were well underway long before Trump became president. But many of them would have been less likely or less pronounced had the United States chosen a different path.
In Europe, the United States could have resisted the siren song of NATO expansion and stuck with the original “Partnership for Peace,” a set of security arrangements that included Russia. Over time, it could have gradually drawn down its military presence and turned European security back over to the Europeans.
Russia’s leaders would not have felt as threatened, would not have fought Georgia or seized Crimea, and would have had little or no reason to interfere in the U.S. election in 2016. As the European Union took on a greater security role, states like Poland and Hungary might have been less inclined to flirt with authoritarianism under the safety blanket of U.S. security guarantees.
A wiser United States would have let Iraq and Iran check each other instead of attempting “dual containment” in the Persian Gulf, eliminating the need to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. Had Washington also made its support for Israel and the Palestinian Authority conditional on both sides making steady progress toward “two states for two peoples,” the two principal sources of Osama bin Laden’s murderous antipathy toward America would have been removed, making the 9/11 attacks much less likely. And with no 9/11, we almost surely would not have had invaded and occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, thereby saving several trillion dollars and thousands of U.S. and foreign lives. The Islamic State would never have emerged, and the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks that have fueled right-wing xenophobia in Europe would have been far less significant.
A United States less distracted by wars in the Middle East could have moved more swiftly to counter China’s growing ambitions, and it would have had more resources available to accomplish this essential task. Instead of naively assuming that a rising China would eventually become democratic and willingly abide by existing international norms, the United States could also have made Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization contingent on it first abandoning its predatory trade practices and establishing more effective legal institutions at home, including protections for intellectual property.
Moreover, greater attention to how the benefits of globalization were distributed would also have reduced inequality in the United States and tempered the polarization that is ripping the country apart today. And as Rosella Zielinski argues in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, financing foreign wars by borrowing money (instead of by raising taxes) lets the wealthiest Americans off easy and even allows them to earn interest lending to the federal government, exacerbating existing economic disparities. In this way, an overly ambitious grand strategy helped make economic inequality worse.
Finally, a more restrained grand strategy would not have tempted U.S. leaders to use torture, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, unwarranted electronic surveillance, and other betrayals of core U.S. values. It would also have freed up trillions of dollars that could have been spent strengthening our armed forces, providing better health care for U.S. citizens, rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, investing in early childhood education, or reducing persistent deficits.
To be clear: to say that our strategy has been mostly a failure is not to say that the United States failed at everything, or to suggest that the world would be perfect today had U.S. leaders chosen differently. But when one looks back on what the pursuit of “liberal hegemony” has wrought, there can be little doubt that a different approach would have left the United States (and many other countries) in much better shape today. And the liberal order that many are now desperate to save would be in much better shape.
Nor is it implausible to imagine one additional benefit: Trump would not be president. Back in 2016, when he called U.S. foreign policy a “complete and total disaster,” a lot of Americans nodded in agreement and cast their votes for him. Unfortunately, his erratic, incompetent, and needlessly combative handling of foreign affairs has succeeded only in making America less popular and influential, without reducing any of its global burdens. The United States is still “nation building,” still waging wars in far-flung locales, still spending more on defense than the eight next largest militaries combined, and still subsidizing numerous wealthy allies.
Defenders of our past follies now bemoan Americans’ reluctance to support the same overweening global strategy that produced so many disappointments. But the public has every reason to reject an approach to the world that has repeatedly failed, and to demand a better alternative. Some voters mistakenly believed they would get it from Trump, but he hasn’t delivered and almost certainly won’t. The question remains: what—and whom—will it take before the American people get the more restrained foreign policy they want and deserve?”
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Comment: As someone said, if the US hadn’t meddled in Russia to engineer their pal Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election, Yeltsin would not have been around to help select Vladimir Putin as his successor.
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Comment: As someone said, if the US hadn’t meddled in Russia to engineer their pal Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election, Yeltsin would not have been around to help select Vladimir Putin as his successor.
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“Mark Thomason says: December 27, 2018 at 9:31 am
Americans know so little about these events that they take mention of it to be anti-American, Putin-bot talk. The ignorance is insurmountable.
The only way to deal with this is proactive — suggest better policy without looking back at past mistakes. That is a serious handicap to understanding and discussion, but it is all Americans are capable of doing.”
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