@UrbanMysticDee
>Kennedy was the one who originally proposed the joint Moon mission and Khrushchev rejected it at first but his son convinced him to accept the proposal a few months later.
Didn’t know that. May or may not have ended the Cold War but a massive amount of good will and peaceful precedent would have been established.
>I think Khrushchev was a true believer, and I think Kennedy was too. Not necessarily in the same things, but they really wanted to end the war and work toward the mutual benefit of both nations. That’s why Kennedy had to be murdered and Khrushchev replaced by a military pupped. There was too much money and power riding on keeping the war going to allow two starry eyed idealists to ruin the world with peace.
Interesting. I will certainly look into more of Khrushchev. I am a bit critical on and have a less idealistic view of Kennedy than some but I certainly agree: Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a lone wolf. Clearly Kennedy had contemplated such himself with his interest in
Seven Days in May
>NATO’s implicit purpose was the anti-Russia club. The re-unification of Germany (something France protested) was a blatantly anti-Russian move. The expansion of NATO, after the Cold War ended and its purpose had ostensibly evaporated, was blatantly anti-Russian.
NATO’s purpose in the Cold War as a anti-Russian club I don’t see much of a problem so much as the natural way such a military alliance would be, even if I could agree that there was opportunities to cool down the Cold War. The expansion of NATO I think was done just as much, if not more, “the End of History” mentality. We had won the Cold War and we were going to spread the wonders of capitalism and junk food to every country and it was thought that Russia would be eventually just another one of those newly liberalizing states even if it took a little longer. Ignorance that even the most pacified liberal Russia would not fit neatly in that world.
>In the past century there has been untoward Russian aggression, particularly against the Poles, but most of the horrible things Russia has done has been a self-fulfilling prophecy of a West that has never even considered peace for centuries except for very very briefly in the early 60s.
Not sure I would agree 100% with this but certainly I think you can make that case with some parts of Western policy,
like our current war!
There are two ways to prevent conflict: strength and diplomacy. Consider the American Eagle depicted on the Great Seal of the United States that’s also on our dollar bill. In one talon, the eagle clutches 13 arrows, and in the other it clutches an olive branch. This reflects our nation’s understanding of how to make and maintain peace since our founding: strength and diplomacy. This administration failed on both fronts.
First, President Biden failed to project American strength when he gutted our energy independence, canceling the Keystone pipeline on his very first day in office and restricting domestic energy production. Meanwhile, other NATO countries like Germany made themselves even more dependent on Russian gas by shuttering their nuclear power plants. Putin must have concluded that the West needed his gas too much to sanction him effectively. Next, the Biden administration botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Afghan army that we had spent many years and countless billions of dollars to “stand up” was exposed as a fraud in a matter of days. Then our troops and their local allies beat a chaotic retreat from the country that revealed tactical incompetence in the general corps, with zero accountability to follow. Lastly, in the crucial days and weeks leading up to the war, Biden appeared to give the green light to a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by Putin’s forces, suggesting that wouldn’t necessarily trigger the sanctions and other penalties.
But of course in Washington there is never a shortage of those who will chide an administration for failing some test of strength in foreign policy. What is rarer and therefore more vital is to point out failures of diplomacy, which can just as easily lead to unnecessary war. And I believe our State Department failed in its diplomatic mission in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion.
Ever since the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, when NATO opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, the Russians have indicated that membership for these two border nations was an unacceptable “red line” for them. They quickly proved their seriousness later that year by invading Georgia and securing territory where predominantly-Russian populations were located. (Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar?) For the last 14 years, Putin and the entire Russian elite have spoken with one voice: NATO membership for Ukraine was an intolerable security threat. We ignored this red line, continuing to push for NATO expansion and transitioning Ukraine’s military onto a NATO platform even before official membership.
In response, a Russian troop buildup began on Ukraine’s border around the beginning of last year. This had the intended effect of getting the new president’s attention. Biden called for a summit and met with Putin in Geneva in June last year. We don’t know exactly what was said in the room but we do know that Biden said publicly at that time that corruption in Ukraine prevented its entry into NATO. Putin seemed mollified, and tensions seemed to abate. According to recent reporting by The Intercept based on U.S. intelligence sources, the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border started to subside after the Biden-Putin Summit and did not increase again until October/November. So what happened in between to upset the apple cart?
On September 1, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky visited the White House. This was the first such visit by a Ukrainian head of state, fulfilling one of Kiev’s long-standing diplomatic objectives. On that day, the U.S. and Ukraine issued a “Joint Statement” affirming deep economic and military ties between the two nations, including support for Ukraine’s NATO membership. This likely reflected weeks of back-channel negotiations that preceded Zelensky’s visit, suggesting Biden’s reassurances to Putin were dead-letter virtually from the day he made them. On November 10, Secretary of State Blinken and the Ukrainian foreign minister signed a massive 10-year Charter Agreement, which was the long-form version of the Joint Statement issued earlier.
Predictably, the Russians hit the roof. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said they had reached “the boiling point.” They delivered a virtual ultimatum to the U.S. in December demanding written assurance that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. A month of furious negotiations began in January between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lavrov, during which Blinken gave no ground on NATO membership. In fact, he seemed proud of western intransigence, making statements like “There has been no change; there will be no change.” And: “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”
Yet that’s not what Blinken was saying privately. We now know, thanks to a stunning recent interview by Fareed Zakaria, that Zelensky was privately told that Ukraine wasn’t going to be admitted into NATO but that the door had to remain publicly open.
What could possibly be the rationale for this diplomatic approach? We refused to accede to the Russians’ most long-standing and important demand even though we privately admitted to Ukraine that we had no intention of following through. In other words, we refused to give the Russians “the sleeves off our vest,” a concession that was largely meaningless to us but of paramount importance for them.
Was it really so hard for us to imagine that the Russians might have a genuine concern about being encircled on a 1200-mile border by what they regard as a hostile military alliance? Aren’t diplomats supposed to be able to put themselves in the other guy’s shoes? Even if we see NATO purely as a defensive alliance, is it really inconceivable that Russia could see that vast military power as having offensive potential? After all, they watched NATO take offensive action to topple Moammar Ghaddafi in Libya and to bomb their Serbian allies during the Kosovo War. Is it really so hard to understand Russian paranoia about having American troops, weapons, and bases on their Ukrainian border, from which they’ve been attacked throughout history? The United States itself was willing to risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets over offensive weapons placed ninety miles off our shores in 1962, yet we treat the same concern by the Russians as crazy or a bluff.
Now, I disagree with some parts of this, but I am too tired to go into right now. The words “self fulling prophecy” certainly could fit with the United States dealings with Ukraine.
