NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.<\/p>\n
With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified \u201cRussian aggression\u201d. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.<\/p>\n
They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO.\u00a0 This was not a mere matter of a \u201csphere of influence\u201d in Russia\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia\u2019s border.<\/p>\n
A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn\u2019t. \u00a0He could underreact, and betray Russia\u2019s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.<\/p>\n
Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine.\u00a0 The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was \u201cthe new Hitler\u201d, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.<\/p>\n
In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course.\u00a0 Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found.\u00a0 Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country\u2019s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias.\u00a0 The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright \u2013 which they may have expected him to do.<\/p>\n
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. \u201cYou just don\u2019t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext\u201d, Kerry pontificated. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century\u201d. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin\u2019s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.<\/p>\n
It Was All Planned at Yalta<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>In September 2013, one of Ukraine\u2019s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine\u2019s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945.\u00a0 The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a \u201cdisplay of fierce diplomacy\u201d, stated that: \u201cThe future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.\u201d The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schr\u00f6der, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland\u2019s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski.\u00a0 Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia\u2019s natural gas reserves.\u00a0 The center of discussion was the \u201cDeep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement\u201d (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine\u2019s integration with the West.\u00a0 The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine\u2019s ties with Russia in favor of the West.<\/p>\n Conspiracy against Russia?\u00a0 Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia\u2019s position perfectly clear.<\/p>\n Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference.\u00a0 \u00a0Forbes<\/a> reported at the time \u00a0on the \u201cstark difference\u201d between the Russian and Western views \u201cnot over the advisability of Ukraine\u2019s integration with the EU but over its likely impact<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on \u201cvery specific and pointed economic criticisms\u201d about the Trade Agreement\u2019s impact on Ukraine\u2019s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports ccould only swell the deficit.\u00a0 Ukraine \u201cwill either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout\u201d.<\/p>\n The Forbes reporter concluded that \u201cthe Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times<\/em> of London.<\/p>\n In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself.\u00a0 Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong.\u00a0 What went wrong first was that Yanukovych \u00a0got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union. \u00a0He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States\u2026 against Russia.<\/p>\n Ukraine as Bridge\u2026Or Achilles Heel<\/strong><\/p>\n Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West.\u00a0 The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.<\/p>\n It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics.\u00a0 So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn\u2019t matter too much.<\/p>\n It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine\u2019s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow,\u00a0 Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Habsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.<\/p>\n The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: \u201cFor most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.\u201d\u00a0 Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder.\u00a0 In any case, he was never \u201cMoscow\u2019s man\u201d, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.<\/p>\n It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia.\u00a0 In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West \u2013 and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position.\u00a0 The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country\u2019s role as bridge.\u00a0 This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev.\u00a0 A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.<\/p>\n But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia \u201cthe enemy\u201d.<\/p>\n Plan A and Plan B<\/strong><\/p>\n U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue.\u00a0 Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.<\/p>\n As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called \u201cpromoting democracy\u201d).\u00a0 This investment is not \u201cfor oil\u201d, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia\u2019s Achilles\u2019 heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.<\/p>\n What called public attention to Victoria Nuland\u2019s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, \u201cFuck the EU\u201d.\u00a0 But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions.\u00a0 The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych. \u00a0German Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate.\u00a0 Nuland\u2019s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but \u201cYats\u201d.\u00a0 And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.<\/p>\n Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia\u2019s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea.\u00a0 Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin\u2019s necessary defensive move to prevent this.<\/p>\n But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy.\u00a0 If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet \u2013 a total national disaster.\u00a0 On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective.\u00a0 Putin\u2019s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked \u201cRussian expansionism\u201d, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.<\/p>\n Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media.\u00a0 Suddenly, we are told that the \u201cfreedom-loving West\u201d is faced with the threat of \u201caggressive Russian expansionism\u201d.\u00a0 Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States.\u00a0 But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge.\u00a0 Never mind \u201ccommunism\u201d; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia\u2019s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that.\u00a0 The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.<\/p>\n The Protection Racket Returns<\/strong><\/p>\n But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to \u201csave Europe\u201d,\u00a0 which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe.\u00a0 Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama\u2019s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies.\u00a0 The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union.\u00a0 This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.<\/p>\n Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended.\u00a0 So has the EU.\u00a0 With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes.\u00a0 The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states.\u00a0 Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America \u2013 where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained.\u00a0 Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of \u201cthe Russians are coming!\u201d in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.<\/p>\n Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat.\u00a0 Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new \u201ciron curtain\u201d meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard<\/em>: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony.\u00a0 The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.<\/p>\n Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to \u201cprotect\u201d Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine.\u00a0 This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.<\/p>\n To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on \u201cdefense\u201d, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe\u2019s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia\u2019s natural gas sales\u00a0 \u2013 stigmatized as a \u201cway of exercising political pressure\u201d, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent.\u00a0 Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.<\/p>\n From D-Day to Dooms Day<\/strong><\/p>\n Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade.\u00a0 French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future. \u00a0In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue.\u00a0 The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they \u2013 and historians \u2013 know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army.\u00a0 If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.<\/p>\n Putin is widely credited as being \u201cthe best chess player\u201d, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis.\u00a0 He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him.\u00a0 But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid\u2026 as long as possible.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the \u201cold\u201d Europeans.\u00a0 Apparently abandoning all Europe\u2019s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today\u2019s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day \u2026 D for Doom.<\/p>\n Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference?\u00a0 All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n Diana Johnstone<\/em>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Fools\u2019 Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions<\/a>. She\u00a0can be reached at\u00a0diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n