Ukraine - The Brzezinski Factor

Kerry and Lavrov are still hurling threats.  Which is better than shooting, unless it were at each other.  Lavrov's face affects me much like W's. Nausea.  You can tell when Putin and Lavrov lie about Russian involvement in Ukraine; their lips move.

Ukraine's security apparatus is in an unenviable position.  Thoroughly infiltrated by Russia, after 20 odd years of full cooperation, they find it hard to know whom to trust.  Compounding the difficulty is that the Russian backed terrorist activities in eastern Ukraine have more of a partisan aspect as locals actively participate. Shooting unarmed locals is bad press so they are really trying hard not to do that but it makes it difficult to shoot the armed ones who hide behind them.

Apparently using the military on your own people is OK as long as it is Chechens, Syrians or Ukrainians by a pro-Russian government, but not against imported Russian terrorists and their local accomplices.

All well and good, until I ran into an article a few days back that made me realize just how nasty and cruel realpolitik is. Forget the Spin, Putin Is Holding a Losing Hand compares the current situation in Ukraine with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan(1). The Soviet Union was in the process of turning Afghanistan into a secular nation with a strong central government which raised the ire of the War Lords and Imams who saw their authority diminishing.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (2), President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, saw this as an opportunity to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam.  Consequently America began covertly supporting the Mujaheddin against the Afghan government, hoping to draw the Soviet Union into armed support of its protégé.  If they didn't fall for it, at least America would be rid of a government aligned with the USSR and if they did fall for it, they were doomed.  Win-win.

When the Red Army invaded, the Soviet leadership claimed that they were entering Afghanistan to defend the existing Afghan government against a covert war initiated by the United States. The Carter administration adamantly denied the Soviet claims, and the Soviet complaints were ridiculed in the national media -- like Medvedev's words this week -- as nothing more than self-serving propaganda...  Except, as it turns out, it would appear that the Soviet claims were true.

The people of Afghanistan were simply pawns in the game  as was obvious when America abandoned Afghanistan immediately after the Soviets left in 1989. Something similar happened in Iraq after Desert Storm.  Iraqis were encouraged to revolt against Saddam Hussein but the Shias and Kurds who believed they would get American support were left to their fate as the desired revolt was within Saddam's Party to replace him with another dictator but more amenable to American policy. 

So the author argues that America put relentless pressure on Russia, forcing her to react which brought us to today's crisis: 

The post-Cold War strategy of encirclement was more aggressive in design than simple containment. America's goal, in Brzezinski's words, was to "shape a political context that is congenial to Russia's assimilation into a larger framework of European cooperation." That is to say, Russia would be pushed toward the right choice -- democratization and decentralization -- and pay a price if it chose poorly...  On the one hand, steadily tightening a military noose around Russia -- ultimately to include Ukraine and Georgia -- would constrain its imperial ambitions, the integration of democracies along the Russian periphery into the European community would push Russia toward political and economic reform. 

On the other hand, should Russia ultimately push back against the West's broken commitments and military encirclement...it would demonstrate to the world that Russia continued to harbor imperial ambitions and remained a threat to the rest of the world, justifying punitive measures to further isolate Russia economically and politically. It was a win-win strategy: Either outcome would serve America's interests in the region...

 ...Despite the talk of partnership, the fact is that the United States has consistently pursued aggressive and hostile policies designed to contain Russia, and -- if Brzezinski has his way -- ultimately see Russia broken up into a confederation of smaller states. Yet, by and large, the American media has bought into the dominant narrative, and ignored the deeper strategy at play. America's core strategy remains intact, and from the Brzezinski perspective everything is on track. Vladimir Putin has not been the master strategist of the media's imagination, the puppetmaster who has outfoxed American at every turn. Instead, he has long been caught in a trap, his actions manipulated in a game of power and strategy that goes back decades and in which he is playing a role, not writing the script.

Ukraine and the people of Ukraine are merely pawns in the Great Game according to this theory. Perhaps but there are major flaws in the comparison. According to Foreign Policy "NATO Expansion Didn't Set Off the Ukrainian Crisis". Russia hasn't been "encircled" by the West -- Vladimir Putin simply wants to be able to invade his neighbors at will.

First off, it took no pressure at all to draw the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO.  They had been under Moscow's heel in times past and wanted no more of it.  NATO was their guarantee.  And Russia made it even easier by continuing to bully her former colonies even after the breakup of the USSR before the first round of NATO expansion occurred when the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined in 1999.

In 1992 and 1993 -- after Russia formally recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- Moscow cut off energy supplies to these small, reborn democracies in an attempt to pressure them into keeping Russian military forces and intelligence officers on their sovereign territory. From 1997 to 2000, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania Keith C. Smith, Russia cut off oil shipments to the country no less than nine times after it refused to sell refineries to a Russian state company. To this day, the Russian Foreign Ministry maintains that the Baltic republics -- which Russia militarily conquered, occupied, and subjugated for nearly five decades -- "voluntarily joined the Soviet Union in 1940 (3)." The Balts didn't become part of NATO until 2004. Given this history, is it any wonder why these countries -- or any other country victimized by Soviet-imposed tyranny -- would want to join the alliance? Is it NATO's fault for saying OK?

As Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt aptly pointed out on Twitter recently, it was the "historic failure of Russia that a quarter of a century after fall of Soviet Union the new generations in its neighbors see it as an enemy," while, "A generation or two after 1945 Germany is surrounded by countries that, after all the horrible pain and suffering, see it as a friend."

(1) For those interested in the history of the CIA in Afghanistan, read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars
(2) For those interested in Russia and Ukraine in the "roaring 90s", read Casino Moscow by Zbigniew's nephew Matthew Brzezinski. 
(3) In the same kind of referendum in which Crimea "volunteered" to rejoin Russia.