Monthly Archives: February 2022

PARIS The standoff with Russia over Ukraine enters a critical phase this week. The United States has snapped NATO to attention and moved forces east. Moscow has readied still more forces on the Ukraine border. But beneath those tensions, diplomatic avenues are being feverishly explored and the outlines of potential solutions, still amorphous, may be taking form.

President Biden meets Monday with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and President Emmanuel Macron of France, at the same time, will visit his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow before traveling to Kyiv.

With the Biden administration staking out a hard line, Germany lying low and Mr. Putin seemingly determined to force a solution to Russias security grievances, it is Mr. Macron who has positioned himself at the center of the diplomacy in Europe. To Moscow, he is a quality interlocutor, as Mr. Putin called Mr. Macron, according to a senior official in the French presidency, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with French government practice.

For Mr. Macron the chance to lead the effort to create a new European security architecture has placed him front and center on perhaps the biggest stage of his presidency, just two months before elections. It has given him an opportunity to step into a larger leadership role for all of Europe and to put some flesh on his sometimes grandiose visions for a Europe allied with, but more independent of, the United States.

Do we want a Russia that is totally aligned with China or one that is somewhere between China and Europe? Bruno Le Maire, the French economy minister, who is very close to Mr. Macron, said on Friday as Russia and China declared no limits to their friendship and called on NATO to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.

For France, the choreographed embrace of Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics was a demonstration of the ominous wider ramifications of the Ukraine crisis, as Mr. Macron embarks on several days of intense diplomacy.

The risks are as great as the potential payoffs for Mr. Macron. Solutions to the crisis seem fiendishly elusive for now, even if Mr. Putin has appeared less directly threatening toward Ukraine over the past week.

The French president has a double purpose: to stop the war that a massive Russian troop concentration at the Ukrainian border threatens; and to allay the festering Russian grievances that NATOs expansion eastward in 1999 and 2004 provoked, with the eventual aim of integrating Russia in a new European security system that offsets its lurch toward China.

Its a tall order, but Mr. Macron has never lacked for audacity. He will need to tread carefully. Theres frustration in European countries, including Germany, with Mr. Macrons tendency to forge ahead and then yell at them for not doing anything, said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is now the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. That weakens him.

French officials described in broad outline the twin approaches Mr. Macron would adopt in his meetings with Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

The first is to use the Normandy Format a grouping of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia to bolster the 2015 Minsk 2 agreement, a deeply ambiguous document that secured a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine but that has proved largely inoperable, not least because nobody agrees on its meaning.

Could some interpretation of the accord, involving the eventual powers of the breakaway Donbas region over national policy, go some way toward satisfying Mr. Putins insistence that Ukraine never join NATO, a demand the United States and its allies, including France, are adamant in rejecting?

The second, in close consultation with Mr. Biden, is to secure a concrete signal of de-escalation that reverses the Russian military buildup and, as a means to achieving that, explores what Mr. Putins ultimate red line is in the confrontation.

The senior official at the French presidency said the nucleus of the Western conflict with Mr. Putin lay in the extension of NATO and the inclusion in it of countries from the former Soviet space, which created an area of volatility that has to be reduced. He added that Mr. Putin had told Mr. Macron that he wanted a conversation of substance that goes to the heart of the matter.

In effect, France appears to be saying that Mr. Putins demands, which include pushing NATO back out of formerly Soviet-controlled countries, cannot ever be satisfied but that getting to the heart of the matter involves acknowledgment that NATO expansion created permanent grievances with Russia even as it secured freedom for 100 million central Europeans.

No one believes that Romania, Lithuania and other states that joined an expanded NATO are ever going to leave it, or that NATO is ever going to abrogate its 2008 Bucharest statement that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance. But, as Turkeys almost 60-year flirtation with the European Union illustrates, there are ways of turning a candidacy for membership of an organization into an indefinite holding pattern.

We can take a step toward Putin, recognize he is not completely wrong, said Justin Vasse, the former head of policy planning at the French foreign ministry who now heads the Paris Peace Forum.

The senior official at the French presidency said, Ukraine is not a member of NATO and, to my knowledge, will not be for a while.

Mr. Macron wants to explore whether American offers last month could be complemented by further confidence-building measures that permit a way out of the crisis.

The American proposal involved more transparency about missile deployment in Eastern Europe and a call for reciprocal commitments by both the United States and Russia to refrain from deploying missiles or troops in Ukraine. Mr. Putin has rejected the American response to his demands as inadequate.

Conceivably the arms control offers of the other day could be combined with some sort of consultative mechanism for changes in NATO status, or some sort of moratorium on NATO expansion, or some creative interpretation of the Minsk agreement that gives a Donbas constituent assembly veto powers over what the government will do, Mr. Shapiro, the former State Department official, suggested.

None of this appears likely, however, given Mr. Putins unprovoked direct threat to Ukraine, his annexation of Crimea, his invasion of Georgia in the short war of 2008 and his history of tearing up treaties when it suits him. The Biden administration, with muscular proactive diplomacy, has signaled it is in no mood for compromise.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlins position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATOs eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscows military buildupwas a response to Ukraines deepening partnership with the alliance.

Mr. Putin, it often seems, is only the latest exponent of what Joseph Conrad called Russian officialdoms almost sublime disdain for the truth.

Despite this, Mr. Macron, who knows that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would send gas costs spiraling higher at a time when the French electorate is angry about lost purchasing power, sees some potential in the Normandy Format. A first meeting last month ended with limited progress, a second meeting is scheduled soon, and a summit of French, German, Russian and Ukrainian leaders has been suggested.

The Minsk 2 agreement calls for a decentralization of Ukraine that confers special status on areas of the east now controlled by separatists, with the specificities to be agreed on with representatives of these areas.

Russia, in a creative interpretation of these specificities, has argued that they should include granting the elected representatives in these areas a veto on Ukrainian foreign policy decisions, including membership in NATO. In this way, Ukraine would effectively become part of Russias sphere of influence.

This is not going to happen, Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said last week. Never.

Mr. Zelensky, the president, has sounded more ambivalent. If it is not NATO, then point to some other security guarantees, he said last month. It was unclear what he had in mind.

The security guarantees offered by the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Russia vowed to respect Ukraines existing borders and sovereignty, proved worthless.

Absent other avenues, the Normandy Format at least brings the parties together. Mr. Shapiro argued that it could help forge stability.

Instability is the Russian strength. Stability is our strength, he said. NATO and the European Union expansion were a very powerful way to secure democracy in Eastern European countries. But we got out of it what we could. If you believe in the superiority of the Western economic and political model, as I do, stability makes that evident, and spheres of influence are a pretty good way to establish that.

Mr. Putin, the French official said, wants long-term visibility on Ukraine and Europe. That appears to leave Mr. Macron playing a potentially dangerous game, trying to balance the new European security order he has said he seeks with his commitment to the United States and the NATO alliance.

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

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Macron Tries to Avert a European War and Reshape European Security - The New York Times

Vladimir Putin doesnt need to send troops into Ukraine. He has already achieved his strategic goals for now.

The leading European Union powers, France and Germany, are competing against each other for Putins ear, while Britain is competing against them by shipping arms to Ukraine. The United States is exposed as an unreliable protector, unable to defend its overextended position on Russias doorstep in Ukraine. Nato is divided and powerless, a shadow of imperial overreach.

A decrepit caste of corrupt leaders is incapable of managing a controlled retreat from imperial overreach. America today, or Russia the day before yesterday? Putin witnessed the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent expansion of Nato up to Russias borders. He is now returning the favour. He is pushing American and European influence out of Ukraine, and unpicking the already frayed bonds of Nato and the EU.

Geopolitics is not about morality. It is about the effective use of power. For thirty years, the smart opinion in Washington was that post-Soviet Russia was no threat to anyone because it had an economy the size of Portugal and its economy ran on carbon fuel exports. That these statistics were true shows how well Putin has played his limited hand and how arrogantly the US has mishandled relations with Russia while its experts tell each other flattering fictions.

When George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, reviewed the American diplomacy of the 1890s, he noted an 'overestimation of economics, of trade, as factors in human events and the corresponding underestimation of psychological and political reactions of such things as fear, ambition, insecurity, jealousy and perhaps even boredom as prime movers of events.'

Kennan habitually decried the crusading idealism of Wilsonian foreign policy. Here, he detects idealisms shadow, the tendency to overemphasise material interest, as an obstacle to understanding what we are dealing with.

This applies to allies as it does to rivals. It is not hard to see why Putin might want to redraw the map of eastern Europe, rebalance the power dynamics of the European continent and push the United States out of Europe by breaking up Nato. Kennan saw the Clinton administrations triumphalist expansion of Nato and the EU up to Russias doorstep as containment continued past its sell-by date. He called it 'a tragic mistake' and saw where it would lead:

'I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. There is no reason for this whatsoever.'

It is, though, harder to see why Germany might want to go along with Putins big play, or why France might, as it usually does, do everything it can to hamper the United States when the chips are down. The motivations for the behaviour of France and Germany are harder to understand because they go against both the bottom line of material interest and the higher aspirations of the American ethos. Understanding them requires modesty before the basic facts of history and culture.

Why did the Germans allow Angela Merkel to turn off their nuclear power stations and make them dependent on Russian gas? Because the Germans have a primitive worship of Nature, because they think it makes them better than other people, and because, geography being what it is, they always have to choose between Russia and France. Theyre not doing it out of guilt over World War II. They're doing it because they lost the war and still think theyre special which, looking at it this way, they are, one way or another.

Why did Emmanuel Macron scramble to organise a summit with Russia in Paris rather than allow the US, the senior partner in Nato, to set the table? Because the French despise the US even more than the Germans do, and they too think this might be a chance to slough off the boorish Americans. Because French foreign policy since 1945 has been a long campaign against the true enemies of civilisation, les Anglo-Saxons, because the Germans no longer need the French to rehabilitate them, and because the French genuinely believe the United States is little more than England on steroids and hence, culturally speaking, a worse influence than Russia, which at least has a soul where the Anglo-Saxons have a wallet.

It is the task of professional diplomats to understand their material, regardless of whether they approve of it. But the United States was in many respects founded to repudiate local variations of fact and history, and to install a better and universal way of doing things. This is why Americans do not make good diplomats and why Kennan, one of the greatest diplomatic analysts of Americas imperial century, left no school of followers in the think tanks.

Russia is not the only empire that the US humbled in the twentieth century. When FDR committed the US to smashing the German empire, he also committed the US to unmaking the British and French empires. Long after the last American had left the last base in Europe, the British, French and Germans will still be there, and so will the Russians. Now, as American credibility and coherence fall away, theyre responding by being more British, French, German and Russian than ever, just as the US is accelerating its strategic decline by falling ever further back on the American creed.

What the US needs now is Kennans subtle and cynical policy toward Russia: respect and understand your antagonist, remember that the Russian people are not the same as their leaders, build your foreign policy on your domestic strengths, avoid extremes in policy and action. If you think Joe Biden is capable of any of that, I have a dacha in Crimea to sell you.

This article originally appeared on Spectator World

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Putin is unpicking the frayed bonds of Nato and the EU - Spectator.co.uk

The club of economic analysts of the Thai Bankers Association said Thailands economy could be affected in either of two scenarios.

In the first scenario, Russia invades Ukraine and retaliates against Nato member states by cutting off its gas supply to Europe 46 per cent of European gas needs are imported from Russia.

Such a situation would lead to a spike in the prices of natural gas, coal and oil both in Europe and globally. Many businesses in Europe would have to close because of lack of energy.

The club also sees the prices of precious minerals, such as palladium, platinum, aluminium, copper, nickel and iron rising sharply in that scenario.

The club said the Thai economy would be affected by rising oil prices, that would add financial burden to the fund to control diesel oil price. Thai businesses that have to import goods which require precious minerals would see costs shoot up.

Thailand imports Bt152 billion worth of goods that use precious minerals as raw materials each year, and Bt7.7 billion worth of such goods are imported from Russia.

In the second scenario, Nato and the US retaliate against Russia by suspending all kinds of transactions with it. They would stop providing credits and loans to Russian banks as well as remove Russian banks from the international transaction alliance or SWIFT code.

This would cause very high inflation in Russia and the Russian rouble would be greatly depreciated. The situation would affect stock and bond markets and global gross domestic product would contract by 5 per cent.

Thai-Russian bilateral trade totalling Bt88 billion Bt56 billion of imports from Russia and Bt32 billion exports would be affected, they said.

The club added that the export and import of vehicles, rubber products, machines, vegetables and fruit, and electric appliances would be affected. Fewer tourists from Russia would visit Thailand because of the economic slump in their country, the club added.

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Aggravation of Russian-Nato conflict will hit Thai economy hard - Nation Thailand

Matt Lehman| Opinion contributor

Americans, for good reason, have become wary of international military intervention, engaging in state building exercises that have shown little success. But it is too easy for us to think of Ukraine as another Iraq or Afghanistan to avoid.The current Ukrainian situation is not the same.

The United States has a duty to help Ukraine.We promised to guarantee the security of Ukraine in 1994 when its leaders gave up the worlds third-largest nuclear arsenal.Imagine for a moment how much risk they took in the name of a safer world. Americans should be proud of our military when it upholds our promises.

Ukraine is a democracy and Ukrainians are a free people.While the country is still a developing post-communist state with its own challenges, we are not imposing a foreign value system in a culture we dont understand.Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has threatened no one. Ukraine does not harbor terrorists, nor does it cause security issues for its neighbors.Ukraines success, and its increasingly Western orientation, are exactly why Vladimir Putin sees it as a threat.

Putins regime is nothing more than a mafia gang pretending to be a legitimate government. He cynically deploys xenophobic tropes against "Ukrainians, Tatarsand Jews" to prop up his regime. He has destroyed any semblance of what we would understand as a free press or free practice of religion. His thugs poison and kill his enemies anywhere in the world. He will shoot down passenger airlines full of civilians if it serves his needs. He dabbles in anti-feminism and homophobia to distract his people from his own crimes. The truth is that Putin rules over a declining and aging population with limited economic opportunities as he and his cronieshoard billions of dollars. Destabilizing Ukraine is a useful prop in advancing his antidemocratic USSR delusion.

If our moral obligation to honor our promise to support free people is not enough, let us not forget that Putin controls the worlds second-largest nuclear arsenal. One day, Putin will die without having established any plan for a peaceful transfer of power.For our own safety, the U.S., with its NATO allies, must prepare for the near certain bloody struggle for power that will engulf Russia.

Ukrainians are not asking for U.S. boots on the ground. They are asking for our moral support and weapons to help them protect their homes and communities from unjust invasion. A recent poll has confirmed that only 3.7% of Ukrainians would flee in the event of war.They will stand and fight for their own independence.

There are moments in history when fundamental human values embodied by the United States and other Western democracies must take precedence over narrow and short-term economic issues. We have a clear choice: arm the Ukrainians and prepare severe sanctions on Russian oligarchs; or just give into Putins reality distorting propaganda and watch thousands lose their life fighting for the freedom we take for granted in the U.S.

Tragically, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie seems to be siding with the Russian tyrant against our ally in tweets and statements that point toward the economic costs of supporting our ally and make false equivalencies between free Ukraine and the Russian dictatorship.

I support the Biden administration and the sensible Republican coalition working with him to ensure Americas leadership position in this crisis.I call on my fellow Americans to do the same.

Matt Lehman and his family live in Newport, Ky. They lived in Kyiv, Ukraine for five years. He is a candidate for Congress to represent Kentuckys 4th District.

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Opinion: US and NATO must stand with Ukraine - The Cincinnati Enquirer

During the Arab Spring in 2011,protests eruptedin Libya as people demanded dictator Muammar Gaddafis removal. When he came to power in 1969, Ghaddafi was a charismatic yet eccentric and unpredictable leader who controlled Libya for 42 years. The West viewed his death in October 2011 as another victory for democracy in the Arab Spring, alongside the removal of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. In reality, Gaddafis death was largely a result of foreign intervention rather than an indigenous uprising. NATO and its regional allies had astrong interestin Gaddafis removal, leading to a highly effective military campaign to end his regime.

On February 15, 2011, protests against repression and food shortages began in Benghazi. Two days later, Libya had its day of rage; a wave of protests erupted in cities around the country. Gaddafi responded by instructing the military to attack protestors. The protests continued, escalating into a full-scale insurgency, now known as the First Libyan Civil War.

Though fighting against Gaddafis regime, the rebel groups were often extremely violent and unpredictable. According to Amnesty International, Libyan rebel groups were responsible for numerous human rights violations, including ethnic cleansing and the systematic kidnapping and murdering of dark-skinned Libyan residents they claimed were pro-Gaddafi mercenaries from West Africa.Many Libyans interviewed during the time said they preferred living under Gaddafi than under the constant threat of rebel groups, as Gaddafis regime was at least predictable.

As the Civil War escalated, Al-Jazeera was responsible for the majority of international reporting on the conflict. Al-Jazeera, owned in part by the Qatari government, portrayed the conflict to the international community in a way that vilified Gaddafi while letting violent rebel forces off the hook. They published several articles that pushed accusations against Gaddafis forces, corroborated by little to no evidence. Italso reportedthat Gaddafi was using air power to attack protestors, a claim that both the US State Department and International Crisis Group later contradicted. Furthermore, Al-Jazeera reported that Gaddafis soldiers weregiven Viagraand ordered to systematically rape civilian and rebel women. An investigation by Amnesty Internationalcontradictedthis claim, concluding they found insufficient evidence to support it.

On March 17, the UNauthorizedNATO and its regional allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The resolution clearly stipulated that the operation should prioritize protecting civilian lives. It also authorized anarms embargoon belligerent forces and the freezing of all Libyan authoritys assets. The ensuing intervention campaign consisted of primarily French, American, British, and Qatari forces.

Despite the UNs clear parameters regarding foreign intervention in Libya, it was clear that NATO and the GCC weremore concernedwith removing Gaddafi than with protecting civilian lives. The strikes carried out by the US, Britain, and France all seemed to disregard the directive of keeping civilians safe, as they carried out attacks that often intentionally harmed Gaddafi loyalists. Furthermore, Britain, Italy, France, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE lateradmittedto sending special forces into the region, even though it was not allowed under theUN resolution. Qatari special forces, many of which received secret training from the French, lateradmittedto having led much of the rebellion, advising and planning key battles in the fight against Gaddafi. Despite NATO and GCCs blatant disregard of the UN resolution, the international community still generally supported the intervention. They maintained that the intervention was a purely humanitarian mission, preventing any backlash or opposition from their own citizens.

After evading attack for many months, Gaddafi was eventually found in a drainpipe by a rebel group, captured,killed, and buriedin the desert in October 2011.

The West was far keener to assist in the Libyan uprising than any other country during the Arab Spring. While the NATO intervention claimed a humanitarian purpose, NATO failed to intervene in other countries, such as Syria, where protests were also met with brutal crackdowns. To understand the Wests involvement in the 2011 Libyan civil war, it is necessary to look at Gaddafis relationship with foreign powers throughout his time in power.

After coming to power, Gaddafi was extremely unfriendly and distrustful of the West. The West wanted access to Libyas vast oil reserves, but Gaddafis nationalist and protectionist stance made contracts unaccessible. As a result, Western powers were interested in removing the dictator from power. Throughout the1980s, the Reagan administration fabricated stories about Gaddafi to turn the American public and international actors against him, hoping to justify a coup or attack. Britain went so far as to cooperate and work with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a terrorist organization connected with Al-Qaeda, to weaken Gaddafis rule.

In the early 2000s, however, Gaddafi began to open Libyan oil markets to the West, striking deals with the US and various European Nations. As he thawed economic relations, the Wests relationship with Gaddafi shifted considerably. Gaddafi was seen in Paris and New York shaking hands with prime ministers and celebrities as he was given a warm welcome into their countries. The West now considered Libya a key ally in protecting its interests in both the Middle East and Africa. Libya became a priority market for European arms producers. In 2009 alone, these producers sold an estimated $500 million USD of German, French, British, and Italian arms to Libya. A raid of the regimes offices in 2011 uncovered a letter written in 2007 by Tony Blairthe Prime Minister of a country that had recently partnered with an Al-Qaeda cell to weaken Gaddafi to Gaddafi himself, fondly signed Best Wishes Yours Ever, Tony. The same year, Gaddafi allegedly financed Nicholas Sarkozys presidential campaign, dumping 50 million EUR to assist his victory in France.

The cooperative relationship was short-lived, as Gaddafis regime began to turn its back on its deals with the West. After signing concessions with Libya, ExxonMobil and Total both entered into agreements with unfavourable terms, in which they were forced to front billions of dollars to Gaddafis regime. In 2009, Gaddafi threatened to renationalize Libyan oil while giving a video conference lecture at Georgetown University. The regime extorted Italy, threatening to send mass numbers of migrants across the Mediterranean if they did not agree to invest $5 billion USD in Libya. They made oil concessions and deals with NATO adversaries Russia and China. Finally, in early February 2011, weeks before the uprising, the regime announced it would officially divest from British and American deals.

As the Libyan Civil War began, the West saw an opportunity to remove an erratic leader and finally secure access to Libyan oil. In an attempt to re-assert French presence in Africa, as well as his own political position, Sarkozy was caught using planes meant for humanitarian aid to transport executives from large oil firms like Total to meet with rebel groups and make deals. Britain similarlyadmitted to forming a Libyan Oil Cell to strategize obtaining access to Libyan oil. Italy and Qatar also tried to secure favourable standing with Libyas potential leaders, funding a Libyan interim government, the National Transition Committee (NTC).

The Arab Spring and following rebellion came at an opportune time for the West to dethrone Gaddafi, who, in addition to being an erratic, nationalist dictator, had now also betrayed the West and cost them millions of dollars. NATO, along with its regional allies, contributed to his removal using its military, political, and economic influence. NATO maintained that its intervention was purely humanitarian. In reality, NATO wanted to remove Gaddafi and finally access Libyan oil. Their mission was widely successful, as Gaddafis death is still seen as a victory of the Arab Spring rather than an example of illegal foreign intervention.

Featured Image: Muammar al-Gaddafi, 12th AU Summit by U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jesse B. Awalt, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal. No changes were made.

Edited by Ewan Halliday

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NATO, Gaddafi, and the Arab Spring MIR - The McGill International Review