Henry Kissinger: To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end By Henry A. Kissinger March 5, 2014
Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.
Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.
Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.
Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.
The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.
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The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities.
The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 , when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian , became part of Ukraine only in 1954 , when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other — as has been the pattern — would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West — especially Russia and Europe — into a cooperative international system.
Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other. That is the essence of the conflict between Viktor Yanukovych and his principal political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. They represent the two wings of Ukraine and have not been willing to share power. A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.
Russia and the West, and least of all the various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself at a time when many of its borders are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.
Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist — on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.
Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome compatible with the values and security interests of all sides:
1. Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.
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2. Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.
3. Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.
4. It is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections held in the presence of international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.
These are principles, not prescriptions. People familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.
The Russia-Ukraine crisis continues unabated as the United States ignores all of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s security demands and spreads a frenzy of fear by claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.
In a new exclusive interview for Truthout on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky outlines the deadly dangers of U.S. intransigence over Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even when key Western allies have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts in that direction. He also seeks to shed some light on the reasons why Republicans today seem to be divided on Russia.
Chomsky — whose intellectual contributions have been compared to those of Galileo, Newton and Descartes — has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), as well as dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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C.J. Polychroniou: Tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, and there is little room for optimism since the U.S. offer for de-escalation fails to meet any of Russia’s security demands. As such, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the Russia-Ukraine border crisis stems in reality from the U.S.’s intransigent position over Ukrainian membership in NATO? In the same context, is it hard to imagine what might have been Washington’s response to the hypothetical event that Mexico wanted to join a Moscow-driven military alliance?
Noam Chomsky: We hardly need to linger on the latter question. No country would dare to make such a move in what former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson called “Our little region over here,” when he was condemning all spheres of influence (except for our own — which in reality, is hardly limited to the Western hemisphere). Secretary of State Antony Blinken is no less adamant today in condemning Russia’s claim to a “sphere of influence,” a concept we firmly reject (with the same reservation).
There was of course one famous case when a country in our little region came close to a military alliance with Russia, the 1962 missile crisis. The circumstances, however, were quite unlike Ukraine. President John F. Kennedy was escalating his terrorist war against Cuba to a threat of invasion; Ukraine, in sharp contrast, faces threats as a result of its potentially joining a hostile military alliance. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless decision to provide Cuba with missiles was also an effort to slightly rectify the enormous U.S. preponderance of military force after JFK had responded to Khrushchev’s offer of mutual reduction of offensive weapons with the largest military buildup in peacetime history, though the U.S. was already far ahead. We know what that led to.
The tensions over Ukraine are extremely severe, with Russia’s concentration of military forces at Ukraine’s borders. The Russian position has been quite explicit for some time. It was stated clearly by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his press conference at the United Nations: “The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Much the same was reiterated shortly after by Putin, as he had often said before.
Historian Richard Sakwa … observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.
There is a simple way to deal with deployment of weapons: Don’t deploy them. There is no justification for doing so. The U.S. may claim that they are defensive, but Russia surely doesn’t see it that way, and with reason.
The question of further expansion is more complex. The issue goes back over 30 years, to when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was collapsing. There were extensive negotiations among Russia, the U.S. and Germany. (The core issue was German unification.) Two visions were presented. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. The U.S. rejected it: NATO stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.
For obvious reasons, German reunification within a hostile military alliance is no small matter for Russia. Nevertheless, Gorbachev agreed to it, with a quid pro quo: No expansion to the East. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed. In their words to Gorbachev: “Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
“East” meant East Germany. No one had a thought about anything beyond, at least in public. That’s agreed on all sides. German leaders were even more explicit about it. They were overjoyed just to have Russian agreement to unification, and the last thing they wanted was new problems.
There is extensive scholarship on the matter — Mary Sarotte, Joshua Shifrinson, and others, debating exactly who said what, what they meant, what’s its status, and so on. It is interesting and illuminating work, but what it comes down to, when the dust settles, is what I quoted from the declassified record.
President H.W. Bush pretty much lived up to these commitments. So did President Bill Clinton at first, until 1999, the 50th anniversary of NATO; with an eye on the Polish vote in the upcoming election, some have speculated. He admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. President George W. Bush — the lovable goofy grandpa who was celebrated in the press on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan — let down all the bars. He brought in the Baltic states and others. In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join NATO, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population. Germany and France vetoed Bush’s reckless invitation, but it’s still on the table. No Russian leader would accept that, surely not Gorbachev, as he made clear.
As in the case of deployment of offensive weapons on the Russian border, there is a straightforward answer. Ukraine can have the same status as Austria and two Nordic countries throughout the whole Cold War: neutral, but tightly linked to the West and quite secure, part of the European Union to the extent they chose to be.
The U.S. adamantly rejects this outcome, loftily proclaiming its passionate dedication to the sovereignty of nations, which cannot be infringed: Ukraine’s right to join NATO must be honored. This principled stand may be lauded in the U.S., but it surely is eliciting loud guffaws in much of the world, including the Kremlin. The world is hardly unaware of our inspiring dedication to sovereignty, notably in the three cases that particularly enraged Russia: Iraq, Libya and Kosovo-Serbia.
Iraq need not be discussed: U.S. aggression enraged almost everyone. The NATO assaults on Libya and Serbia, both a slap in Russia’s face during its sharp decline in the ‘90s, is clothed in righteous humanitarian terms in U.S. propaganda. It all quickly dissolves under scrutiny, as amply documented elsewhere. And the richer record of U.S. reverence for the sovereignty of nations needs no review.
It is sometimes claimed that NATO membership increases security for Poland and others. A much stronger case can be made that NATO membership threatens their security by heightening tensions. Historian Richard Sakwa, a specialist on East Europe, observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.
The U.S. is vigorously fanning the flames while Ukraine is asking it to tone down the rhetoric.
There is much more to say about Ukraine and how to deal with the very dangerous and mounting crisis there, but perhaps this is enough to suggest that there is no need to inflame the situation and to move on to what might well turn out to be a catastrophic war.
There is, in fact, a surreal quality to the U.S. rejection of Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine. U.S. policy makers know perfectly well that admission of Ukraine to NATO is not an option for the foreseeable future. We can, of course, put aside the ridiculous posturing about the sanctity of sovereignty. So, for the sake of a principle in which they do not believe for a moment, and in pursuit of an objective that they know is out of reach, the U.S. is risking what may turn into a shocking catastrophe. On the surface, it seems incomprehensible, but there are plausible imperial calculations.
We might ask why Putin has taken such a belligerent stance on the ground. There is a cottage industry seeking to solve this mystery: Is he a madman? Is he planning to force Europe to become a Russian satellite? What is he up to?
One way to find out is to listen to what he says: For years, Putin has tried to induce the U.S. to pay some attention to the requests that he and Foreign Minister Lavrov repeated, in vain. One possibility is that the show of force is a way to achieve this objective. That has been suggested by well-informed analysts. If so, it seems to have succeeded, at least in a limited way.
Germany and France have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts to offer membership to Ukraine. So why is the U.S. so keen on NATO expansion eastward to the point of treating a Russian invasion of Ukraine as imminent, even when Ukrainian leaders themselves don’t seem to think so? And since when did Ukraine come to represent a beacon of democracy?
It is indeed curious to watch what is unfolding. The U.S. is vigorously fanning the flames while Ukraine is asking it to tone down the rhetoric. While there is much turmoil about why the demon Putin is acting as he is, U.S. motives are rarely subject to scrutiny. The reason is familiar: By definition, U.S. motives are noble, even if its efforts to implement them are perhaps misguided.
Nevertheless, the question might merit some thought, at least by “the wild men in the wings,” to borrow former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s phrase, referring to those incorrigible figures who dare to subject Washington to the standards applied elsewhere.
A possible answer is suggested by a famous slogan about the purpose of NATO: to keep Russia out, to keep Germany down and to keep the U.S. in. Russia is out, far out. Germany is down. What remains is the question whether the U.S. will be in Europe — more accurately, should be in charge. Not all have quietly accepted this principle of world affairs, among them: Charles de Gaulle, who advanced his concept of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural’s; former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik; and French President Emmanuel Macron, with his current diplomatic initiatives that are causing much displeasure in Washington.
If the Ukraine crisis is resolved peacefully, it will be a European affair, breaking from the post-World War II “Atlanticist” conception that places the U.S. firmly in the driver’s seat. It might even be a precedent for further moves toward European independence, maybe even moving toward Gorbachev’s vision. With China’s Belt-and-Road initiative encroaching from the East, much larger issues of global order arise.
As virtually always in the past when it comes to foreign affairs, we see a bipartisan frenzy over Ukraine. However, while Republicans in Congress are urging President Joe Biden to adopt a more aggressive stance toward Russia, the proto-fascist base is questioning the party line. Why, and what does the split among Republicans over Ukraine tell us about what is happening to the Republicans?
One cannot easily speak of today’s Republican Party as if it were a genuine political party participating in a functioning democracy. More apt is the description of the organization as “a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” This characterization by political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise is from a decade ago, pre-Donald Trump. By now it’s far out of date. In the acronym “GOP,” what remains is “O.”
I don’t know whether the popular base that Trump has whipped up into a worshipful cult is questioning the aggressive stance of Republican leaders, or if they even care. Evidence is skimpy. Leading right-wing figures closely associated with the GOP are moving well to the right of European opinion, and of the stance of those who hope to retain some semblance of democracy in the U.S. They are going even beyond Trump in their enthusiastic support for Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” extolling it for saving Western civilization, no less.
This effusive welcome for Orban’s dismantling of democracy might bring to mind the praise for Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini for having “saved European civilization [so that] the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history”; the thoughts of the revered founder of the neoliberal movement that has reigned for the past 40 years, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 classic Liberalism.
Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has been the most outspoken of the enthusiasts. Many Republican senators either go along with him or claim ignorance of what Orban is doing, a remarkable confession of illiteracy at the peak of global power. The highly regarded senior Sen. Charles Grassley reports that he knows about Hungary only from Carlson’s TV expositions, and approves. Such performances tell us a good deal about the radical insurgency. On Ukraine, breaking with the GOP leadership, Carlson asks why we should take any position on a quarrel between “foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States.”
Whatever one’s views on international affairs, it’s clear that we’ve left the domain of rational discourse far behind, and are moving into territory with an unattractive history, to put it mildly.
U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more forces to the Ukrainian border just days after Moscow announced it was pulling some troops back. This comes as Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. For more on the history behind the present crisis in Ukraine, we speak with one of the last U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR, Ambassador Jack Matlock, who says the U.S.-led expansion of NATO following the end of the Cold War helped lay the groundwork for the current standoff over Ukraine. He argues continued escalation could stoke another nuclear arms race, and lays out some of the parallels with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Tension over Ukraine remains high between Russia, the U.S. and NATO. U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more troops to the Ukrainian border, just days after Moscow claimed it’s pulling some troops back. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
We begin today’s show looking at the roots of the crisis with a former American diplomat who served as the last [sic] U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR. Ambassador Jack Matlock held the post from 1987 to 1991. He was first stationed in Moscow in the early 1960s and was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Matlock has written extensively about U.S.-Russian relations. His books include Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray. His latest article is headlined “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.”
In the article, Ambassador Matlock writes about testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a quarter of a century ago and about the possible expansion of NATO. He told the Senate, quote, “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Ambassador Matlock’s words. And Ambassador Jack Matlock joins us now.
Ambassador, that was you speaking a quarter of a century ago. Why is this so important and relevant today?
JACK MATLOCK: Well, thanks for the question. And first of all, I should make one correction: I was not the last ambassador to the Soviet Union; Robert Strauss was. Now, he lasted only about three months of the last in the Soviet Union, and some people have forgotten that, but I should correct that, to start with.
But the reason that I testified, along with a number of other people — many of them had been influential in bringing the Cold War to the end. The reason I testified against expanding NATO expansion — against expanding NATO, in the beginning, in the late ’90s, was because we had — at the end of the Cold War, we had removed the Iron Curtain. We had created what we had aimed for: a Europe whole and free. And it was obvious, if you start piecemeal expanding NATO, you are going to — without including Russia — you are going to once again precipitate a buildup of arms and a competition, an armed competition, then. But there was no reason to do it at that time. Russia was not threatening any East European country. Actually, the Soviet Union in its last years was not, because Gorbachev had accepted the democratization of the East European countries. And actually, one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to recognize the freedom and independence of the three Baltic countries, so that we had a Europe whole and free. The task was to build a security architecture that would include them all. And the reason I testified against it was that I saw that a process that we started then, if continued, and if continued up to the borders of the Soviet Union — I mean, to the borders of Russia and included former parts of the Soviet Union that were recognized as part of the Soviet Union at that time, such as, most importantly, Ukraine and Georgia, that this would bring about a confrontation.
And I would say my experience and the experience of others during the Cuban Missile Crisis brought home to us the dangers of a military confrontation between countries that have nuclear weapons. At the time, those of us involved — I was in Moscow at the American Embassy — that was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, did not understand how close we came to a nuclear exchange. We learned that only later. But it would have been a disaster for both sides. And so, I had hoped, and I advised, that we not start this process of expanding NATO for that reason.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ambassador Matlock, could you explain what at the time, following the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union — what was the justification at all for the continuation of NATO, especially following the end of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of that defense agreement?
JACK MATLOCK: Well, to put it bluntly, there were three purposes of NATO to begin with. As the first secretary general, British Lord Ismay, stated, NATO was to keep the Russians out, to keep the Germans down, to keep the Americans in. So, when it was no longer necessary to keep the Russians out, many of us thought that it was important to keep the German military integrated, and so that in the future you wouldn’t risk some breakout, as had happened earlier. And we thought it important to keep the United States as a part of European security to ensure the stability. So, I certainly approved at the time the continuation of the NATO that existed at the end of the Cold War; however, I thought it should be integrated into an overall European security organization that included Russia, the East Europeans and the other states that had been in the Soviet Union. And we actually had plans for that at the time through a proposal called the Partnership for Peace, which could include them all. And we also had an organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which included all the European countries, and it could have been beefed up in many respects. And in that case, we could have kept the old NATO but built other security arrangements.
You know, I thought that when we ended the Cold War, one of the most profound, I would say, principles was one that President Gorbachev, then the president of the Soviet Union, expounded. He said, you know, security must be security for all. And that was precisely how he justified reduction in the Soviet military. And even before the Soviet Union broke up, we were living in peace, and we had a united Europe. Many people seem to feel that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the end of the Cold War. That’s wrong. It had ended two years before that. And the breakup of the Soviet Union did not occur because of Western pressure; it occurred because of internal pressures within the Soviet Union. And it was something that President Bush did not wish. As a matter of fact, one of his last speeches, when there was a Soviet Union, was in Kyiv, when he advised Ukrainians to join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation, that he was proposing, and actually warned against suicidal nationalism. Those words, you know, are not remembered much now. People seem to think that Ukraine is free because of the end of the Cold War and the pressure of the West as one of the fruits of victory in the Cold War. This is simply incorrect. It turns history upside down.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ambassador Matlock, could you elaborate on some of the initial agreements that were reached between NATO and Russia? In the same year in which you testified against NATO expansion to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1997, the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed, in which NATO and Russia — which said explicitly NATO and Russia do not consider each other adversaries. Was that agreement significant? And explain why so many Eastern European states, including former Soviet republics, have wanted over the decades to join NATO.
JACK MATLOCK: I think that the — it is true that those, the countries, beginning with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, they wanted to join NATO because they feared that there would be another attempt to — you might say, to bring pressure to bear on them or to occupy them. There’s no question that some of them wanted that, but the — seems to me what was important is we should have tried to convince them that that was not likely and that if there was to be a division of Europe again, arming part of it would bring about a rearmament of the other. That is just, I think, almost common sense. But, however, the — yes, the incentive came from there, and, I must say, domestically, the pressure came domestically, because there were many voters in key states, often, you know, children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, who were pressing for this. But at the time, we thought that that was unnecessary.
I would add, however, that the problems with Russia are not just NATO expansion. There were also a process that began with the second Bush administration of withdrawing from all of the arms control — almost all of the arms control agreements that we had concluded with the Soviet Union, the very agreements that had brought the first Cold War to an end. There was a step-by-step withdrawal of those. And there was a decided direct intrusion into the domestic politics of these newly independent countries, attempts to — directly to change the government. This gets, I would say, very complicated in a way, for one who hasn’t been able to follow it step by step. But, you know, in effect, what the United States did after the end of the Cold War was they reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the “new world order,” but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the U.N. Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any U.N. approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported. So —
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Matlock, I wanted to go back in time. It’s very interesting, as you take us forward. But 30 years before you testified, you write in your recent piece about how, quote, “in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis — something I remember vividly since I was at the American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to Kennedy.” You continue, quote, “At the end of the week of messages back and forth — I translated Khrushchev’s longest — it was agreed that Khrushchev would remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba. What was not announced was that Kennedy also agreed that he would remove the U.S. missiles from Turkey but that this commitment must not be made public,” unquote. This is President Kennedy’s address November 2nd, 1962, announcing the dismantling of Soviet missile bases in Cuba.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: My fellow citizens, I want to take this opportunity to report on the conclusions which this government has reached on the basis of yesterday’s aerial photographs, which will be made available tomorrow, as well as other indications, namely that the Soviet missile bases in Cuba are being dismantled. Their missiles and related equipment are being crated, and the fixed installations at these sites are being destroyed.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President John F. Kennedy in 1962. How relevant that is today. I’m looking at the front page of The New York Times, and one of the headlines is “Ukraine? Putin’s Bigger Fear May Lie in Poland,” with a sub-headline, “New U.S. Military Base Is a Mere 100 Miles From Russia.” That’s about how far Cuba is from the coast of Florida, right? About 90 miles. If you could address this? And I also just want to comment. I mean, you are 93 years old. Your experience through — you’re 92. Your experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis, being the ambassador to the Soviet Union under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, we would think you would be plastering the airwaves, and everyone would be inviting you on. But I dare say I wonder if it’s your antiwar point of view, even with this wealth of experience, they are simply not inviting you. But I want to ask that question about the comparison of the weapons that are being poured in right now, encircling Russia, and this point about Poland, with what happened with Cuba and why the U.S. felt it was critical for those missiles of Russia to be removed, even though Cuba was an independent nation, could do what it wanted.
JACK MATLOCK: Well, obviously, we saw it as a threat to put nuclear weapons close to the United States. At the time, we didn’t admit publicly that we had placed nuclear weapons that could reach the Soviet Union. And that’s one of the reasons Kennedy kept it secret that he had agreed to remove the weapons in Turkey. Yes, and at the time, most of us who were involved were not only pleased at the outcome; we Americans felt that, well, it really made no difference how we took them out, it was necessary to remove them.
But we learned later, with conferences we had with people involved on their side, that, actually, if we had bombed the missile sites in Cuba, as the joint chiefs had advised Kennedy, but he refused, those officers in charge could have launched the missiles if they were under attack. So we could have lost Miami and maybe other cities right at the start. And if that had happened, how would the U.S. react? How could we politically do anything except strike the Soviet Union in some fashion? And when that sort of thing starts, there was no theoretical way — we ran a number of war games — that you could be sure that this process would stop. Now, we also learned later that when a U.S. destroyer was keeping a submarine, a Soviet submarine, submerged, that the commander of the submarine actually at one point ordered an attack on the destroyer with a nuclear torpedo. He was overruled by a superior officer. We came very close, though we did not know it at the time, to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That’s one of the reasons now — now I’m not saying that we have a precisely comparable situation. You know, moving the 82nd Airborne to Poland is not like moving nuclear weapons. I think it is totally unnecessary, and I don’t know how we’re going to use them. But what the Russians have objected to was deployment of anti-ballistic missiles sites. And they say that — in Eastern Europe, they say that, although these are anti-ballistic missiles, the same sites can be used actually for short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles, just by a change of the software. Now, again, I am not technically competent, but I think there is an issue here that we have refused to address, and that is, obviously, since we pulled out of the ABM Treaty and a number of other arms control treaties that had brought the end of the Cold War, I think that it is maybe understandable that the Russians would have fears here. I would also add that it’s not just a matter that one side or the other might suddenly launch a nuclear attack. I don’t see that happening. But the thing is, as the Cuban Missile Crisis explained to us, accidents can happen when you put yourself in this position. And when they happen, how do you keep it from escalating?
A second thing is that maybe the greatest threat that nuclear weapons possess today is that though it may be irrational for any government actually to use them because it could bring about a suicidal effect, if they get into the hands of terrorists, of nonstate actors, they can be used with perhaps impunity. And at the end of the Cold War, we had cooperative agreements with the Russians to secure their nuclear weapons, in what we call the Nunn — Sam Nunn and other senators sponsored this. These have all broken down now.
And what worries me is there could be a creeping up of another nuclear arms race, because if the Russian government, if President Putin feels he is being pressed and his security threatened — rightly or wrongly, because it’s perceptions that count — then what’s to keep him, since we have walked out of most of the other agreements, from putting, say, intermediate-range missiles in Kaliningrad or bringing them close to the border? Then what are we going to do? So, to get into another insane arms race, when we have so many other common problems we need to deal with, I think, is extraordinarily unwise.
AMY GOODMAN: Jack Matlock, we want to thank you so much for being with us, served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 under Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His latest piece, that we’ll link to, “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.” His books include Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray.
Next up, we speak to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atlantic reporter Ed Yong about the millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo. What does society owe immunocompromised people? Stay with us.
Henry Kissinger: To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end By Henry A. Kissinger March 5, 2014Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.
Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.
Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.
Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.
The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.
Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small Caps Default X-Small Small Medium Large X-Large XX-Large Default Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light Bold Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% Tom Toles goes globalThe European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities.
The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 , when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian , became part of Ukraine only in 1954 , when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other — as has been the pattern — would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West — especially Russia and Europe — into a cooperative international system.
Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other. That is the essence of the conflict between Viktor Yanukovych and his principal political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. They represent the two wings of Ukraine and have not been willing to share power. A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.
Russia and the West, and least of all the various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself at a time when many of its borders are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.
Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist — on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.
Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome compatible with the values and security interests of all sides:
1. Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.
Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small Caps Default X-Small Small Medium Large X-Large XX-Large Default Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light Bold Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% The best editorial cartoons of 2014 (so far)2. Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.
3. Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.
4. It is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections held in the presence of international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.
These are principles, not prescriptions. People familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.
更多我的博客文章>>> Ex-U.S. Ambassador to USSR: Ukraine Crisis Stems Directly .. 近代的几乎每个美国总统身上都带着一个或更多的战争 这是谁的腿? 说说俄军到底是不是人道 一个幸福的乳房的一生
他的更像一个較開明而務實的西方政治人物的看法。
當然按他的提議或能免戰於一時，但回避不了我說的那些更深遠的问題。
而二戰使殖民地紛紛獨立。或许這次再製造普京的俄羅斯使西方由殖民主義形成的世界架构正式全面崩塌 - 這正是我預見的。
Chomsky: US Approach to Ukraine and Russia Has “Left the Domain of Rational Discourse”
The Russia-Ukraine crisis continues unabated as the United States ignores all of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s security demands and spreads a frenzy of fear by claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.
In a new exclusive interview for Truthout on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky outlines the deadly dangers of U.S. intransigence over Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even when key Western allies have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts in that direction. He also seeks to shed some light on the reasons why Republicans today seem to be divided on Russia.
Chomsky — whose intellectual contributions have been compared to those of Galileo, Newton and Descartes — has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), as well as dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Get our free emails EmailC.J. Polychroniou: Tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, and there is little room for optimism since the U.S. offer for de-escalation fails to meet any of Russia’s security demands. As such, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the Russia-Ukraine border crisis stems in reality from the U.S.’s intransigent position over Ukrainian membership in NATO? In the same context, is it hard to imagine what might have been Washington’s response to the hypothetical event that Mexico wanted to join a Moscow-driven military alliance?
Noam Chomsky: We hardly need to linger on the latter question. No country would dare to make such a move in what former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson called “Our little region over here,” when he was condemning all spheres of influence (except for our own — which in reality, is hardly limited to the Western hemisphere). Secretary of State Antony Blinken is no less adamant today in condemning Russia’s claim to a “sphere of influence,” a concept we firmly reject (with the same reservation).
There was of course one famous case when a country in our little region came close to a military alliance with Russia, the 1962 missile crisis. The circumstances, however, were quite unlike Ukraine. President John F. Kennedy was escalating his terrorist war against Cuba to a threat of invasion; Ukraine, in sharp contrast, faces threats as a result of its potentially joining a hostile military alliance. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless decision to provide Cuba with missiles was also an effort to slightly rectify the enormous U.S. preponderance of military force after JFK had responded to Khrushchev’s offer of mutual reduction of offensive weapons with the largest military buildup in peacetime history, though the U.S. was already far ahead. We know what that led to.
The tensions over Ukraine are extremely severe, with Russia’s concentration of military forces at Ukraine’s borders. The Russian position has been quite explicit for some time. It was stated clearly by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his press conference at the United Nations: “The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Much the same was reiterated shortly after by Putin, as he had often said before.
Historian Richard Sakwa … observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.There is a simple way to deal with deployment of weapons: Don’t deploy them. There is no justification for doing so. The U.S. may claim that they are defensive, but Russia surely doesn’t see it that way, and with reason.
The question of further expansion is more complex. The issue goes back over 30 years, to when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was collapsing. There were extensive negotiations among Russia, the U.S. and Germany. (The core issue was German unification.) Two visions were presented. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. The U.S. rejected it: NATO stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.
For obvious reasons, German reunification within a hostile military alliance is no small matter for Russia. Nevertheless, Gorbachev agreed to it, with a quid pro quo: No expansion to the East. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed. In their words to Gorbachev: “Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
“East” meant East Germany. No one had a thought about anything beyond, at least in public. That’s agreed on all sides. German leaders were even more explicit about it. They were overjoyed just to have Russian agreement to unification, and the last thing they wanted was new problems.
There is extensive scholarship on the matter — Mary Sarotte, Joshua Shifrinson, and others, debating exactly who said what, what they meant, what’s its status, and so on. It is interesting and illuminating work, but what it comes down to, when the dust settles, is what I quoted from the declassified record.
President H.W. Bush pretty much lived up to these commitments. So did President Bill Clinton at first, until 1999, the 50th anniversary of NATO; with an eye on the Polish vote in the upcoming election, some have speculated. He admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. President George W. Bush — the lovable goofy grandpa who was celebrated in the press on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan — let down all the bars. He brought in the Baltic states and others. In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join NATO, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population. Germany and France vetoed Bush’s reckless invitation, but it’s still on the table. No Russian leader would accept that, surely not Gorbachev, as he made clear.
As in the case of deployment of offensive weapons on the Russian border, there is a straightforward answer. Ukraine can have the same status as Austria and two Nordic countries throughout the whole Cold War: neutral, but tightly linked to the West and quite secure, part of the European Union to the extent they chose to be.
The U.S. adamantly rejects this outcome, loftily proclaiming its passionate dedication to the sovereignty of nations, which cannot be infringed: Ukraine’s right to join NATO must be honored. This principled stand may be lauded in the U.S., but it surely is eliciting loud guffaws in much of the world, including the Kremlin. The world is hardly unaware of our inspiring dedication to sovereignty, notably in the three cases that particularly enraged Russia: Iraq, Libya and Kosovo-Serbia.
Iraq need not be discussed: U.S. aggression enraged almost everyone. The NATO assaults on Libya and Serbia, both a slap in Russia’s face during its sharp decline in the ‘90s, is clothed in righteous humanitarian terms in U.S. propaganda. It all quickly dissolves under scrutiny, as amply documented elsewhere. And the richer record of U.S. reverence for the sovereignty of nations needs no review.
It is sometimes claimed that NATO membership increases security for Poland and others. A much stronger case can be made that NATO membership threatens their security by heightening tensions. Historian Richard Sakwa, a specialist on East Europe, observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.
The U.S. is vigorously fanning the flames while Ukraine is asking it to tone down the rhetoric.There is much more to say about Ukraine and how to deal with the very dangerous and mounting crisis there, but perhaps this is enough to suggest that there is no need to inflame the situation and to move on to what might well turn out to be a catastrophic war.
There is, in fact, a surreal quality to the U.S. rejection of Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine. U.S. policy makers know perfectly well that admission of Ukraine to NATO is not an option for the foreseeable future. We can, of course, put aside the ridiculous posturing about the sanctity of sovereignty. So, for the sake of a principle in which they do not believe for a moment, and in pursuit of an objective that they know is out of reach, the U.S. is risking what may turn into a shocking catastrophe. On the surface, it seems incomprehensible, but there are plausible imperial calculations.
We might ask why Putin has taken such a belligerent stance on the ground. There is a cottage industry seeking to solve this mystery: Is he a madman? Is he planning to force Europe to become a Russian satellite? What is he up to?
One way to find out is to listen to what he says: For years, Putin has tried to induce the U.S. to pay some attention to the requests that he and Foreign Minister Lavrov repeated, in vain. One possibility is that the show of force is a way to achieve this objective. That has been suggested by well-informed analysts. If so, it seems to have succeeded, at least in a limited way.
Germany and France have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts to offer membership to Ukraine. So why is the U.S. so keen on NATO expansion eastward to the point of treating a Russian invasion of Ukraine as imminent, even when Ukrainian leaders themselves don’t seem to think so? And since when did Ukraine come to represent a beacon of democracy?
It is indeed curious to watch what is unfolding. The U.S. is vigorously fanning the flames while Ukraine is asking it to tone down the rhetoric. While there is much turmoil about why the demon Putin is acting as he is, U.S. motives are rarely subject to scrutiny. The reason is familiar: By definition, U.S. motives are noble, even if its efforts to implement them are perhaps misguided.
Nevertheless, the question might merit some thought, at least by “the wild men in the wings,” to borrow former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s phrase, referring to those incorrigible figures who dare to subject Washington to the standards applied elsewhere.
A possible answer is suggested by a famous slogan about the purpose of NATO: to keep Russia out, to keep Germany down and to keep the U.S. in. Russia is out, far out. Germany is down. What remains is the question whether the U.S. will be in Europe — more accurately, should be in charge. Not all have quietly accepted this principle of world affairs, among them: Charles de Gaulle, who advanced his concept of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural’s; former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik; and French President Emmanuel Macron, with his current diplomatic initiatives that are causing much displeasure in Washington.
If the Ukraine crisis is resolved peacefully, it will be a European affair, breaking from the post-World War II “Atlanticist” conception that places the U.S. firmly in the driver’s seat. It might even be a precedent for further moves toward European independence, maybe even moving toward Gorbachev’s vision. With China’s Belt-and-Road initiative encroaching from the East, much larger issues of global order arise.
As virtually always in the past when it comes to foreign affairs, we see a bipartisan frenzy over Ukraine. However, while Republicans in Congress are urging President Joe Biden to adopt a more aggressive stance toward Russia, the proto-fascist base is questioning the party line. Why, and what does the split among Republicans over Ukraine tell us about what is happening to the Republicans?
One cannot easily speak of today’s Republican Party as if it were a genuine political party participating in a functioning democracy. More apt is the description of the organization as “a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” This characterization by political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise is from a decade ago, pre-Donald Trump. By now it’s far out of date. In the acronym “GOP,” what remains is “O.”
I don’t know whether the popular base that Trump has whipped up into a worshipful cult is questioning the aggressive stance of Republican leaders, or if they even care. Evidence is skimpy. Leading right-wing figures closely associated with the GOP are moving well to the right of European opinion, and of the stance of those who hope to retain some semblance of democracy in the U.S. They are going even beyond Trump in their enthusiastic support for Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” extolling it for saving Western civilization, no less.
This effusive welcome for Orban’s dismantling of democracy might bring to mind the praise for Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini for having “saved European civilization [so that] the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history”; the thoughts of the revered founder of the neoliberal movement that has reigned for the past 40 years, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 classic Liberalism.
Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has been the most outspoken of the enthusiasts. Many Republican senators either go along with him or claim ignorance of what Orban is doing, a remarkable confession of illiteracy at the peak of global power. The highly regarded senior Sen. Charles Grassley reports that he knows about Hungary only from Carlson’s TV expositions, and approves. Such performances tell us a good deal about the radical insurgency. On Ukraine, breaking with the GOP leadership, Carlson asks why we should take any position on a quarrel between “foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States.”
Whatever one’s views on international affairs, it’s clear that we’ve left the domain of rational discourse far behind, and are moving into territory with an unattractive history, to put it mildly.
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/17/jack_matlock_ukraine_russia_nato_us
Ex-U.S. Ambassador to USSR: Ukraine Crisis Stems Directly from Post-Cold War Push to Expand NATO STORYFEBRUARY 17, 2022U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more forces to the Ukrainian border just days after Moscow announced it was pulling some troops back. This comes as Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. For more on the history behind the present crisis in Ukraine, we speak with one of the last U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR, Ambassador Jack Matlock, who says the U.S.-led expansion of NATO following the end of the Cold War helped lay the groundwork for the current standoff over Ukraine. He argues continued escalation could stoke another nuclear arms race, and lays out some of the parallels with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: Tension over Ukraine remains high between Russia, the U.S. and NATO. U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more troops to the Ukrainian border, just days after Moscow claimed it’s pulling some troops back. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
We begin today’s show looking at the roots of the crisis with a former American diplomat who served as the last [sic] U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR. Ambassador Jack Matlock held the post from 1987 to 1991. He was first stationed in Moscow in the early 1960s and was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Matlock has written extensively about U.S.-Russian relations. His books include Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray. His latest article is headlined “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.”
In the article, Ambassador Matlock writes about testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a quarter of a century ago and about the possible expansion of NATO. He told the Senate, quote, “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Ambassador Matlock’s words. And Ambassador Jack Matlock joins us now.
Ambassador, that was you speaking a quarter of a century ago. Why is this so important and relevant today?
JACK MATLOCK: Well, thanks for the question. And first of all, I should make one correction: I was not the last ambassador to the Soviet Union; Robert Strauss was. Now, he lasted only about three months of the last in the Soviet Union, and some people have forgotten that, but I should correct that, to start with.
But the reason that I testified, along with a number of other people — many of them had been influential in bringing the Cold War to the end. The reason I testified against expanding NATO expansion — against expanding NATO, in the beginning, in the late ’90s, was because we had — at the end of the Cold War, we had removed the Iron Curtain. We had created what we had aimed for: a Europe whole and free. And it was obvious, if you start piecemeal expanding NATO, you are going to — without including Russia — you are going to once again precipitate a buildup of arms and a competition, an armed competition, then. But there was no reason to do it at that time. Russia was not threatening any East European country. Actually, the Soviet Union in its last years was not, because Gorbachev had accepted the democratization of the East European countries. And actually, one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to recognize the freedom and independence of the three Baltic countries, so that we had a Europe whole and free. The task was to build a security architecture that would include them all. And the reason I testified against it was that I saw that a process that we started then, if continued, and if continued up to the borders of the Soviet Union — I mean, to the borders of Russia and included former parts of the Soviet Union that were recognized as part of the Soviet Union at that time, such as, most importantly, Ukraine and Georgia, that this would bring about a confrontation.
And I would say my experience and the experience of others during the Cuban Missile Crisis brought home to us the dangers of a military confrontation between countries that have nuclear weapons. At the time, those of us involved — I was in Moscow at the American Embassy — that was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, did not understand how close we came to a nuclear exchange. We learned that only later. But it would have been a disaster for both sides. And so, I had hoped, and I advised, that we not start this process of expanding NATO for that reason.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ambassador Matlock, could you explain what at the time, following the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union — what was the justification at all for the continuation of NATO, especially following the end of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of that defense agreement?
JACK MATLOCK: Well, to put it bluntly, there were three purposes of NATO to begin with. As the first secretary general, British Lord Ismay, stated, NATO was to keep the Russians out, to keep the Germans down, to keep the Americans in. So, when it was no longer necessary to keep the Russians out, many of us thought that it was important to keep the German military integrated, and so that in the future you wouldn’t risk some breakout, as had happened earlier. And we thought it important to keep the United States as a part of European security to ensure the stability. So, I certainly approved at the time the continuation of the NATO that existed at the end of the Cold War; however, I thought it should be integrated into an overall European security organization that included Russia, the East Europeans and the other states that had been in the Soviet Union. And we actually had plans for that at the time through a proposal called the Partnership for Peace, which could include them all. And we also had an organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which included all the European countries, and it could have been beefed up in many respects. And in that case, we could have kept the old NATO but built other security arrangements.
You know, I thought that when we ended the Cold War, one of the most profound, I would say, principles was one that President Gorbachev, then the president of the Soviet Union, expounded. He said, you know, security must be security for all. And that was precisely how he justified reduction in the Soviet military. And even before the Soviet Union broke up, we were living in peace, and we had a united Europe. Many people seem to feel that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the end of the Cold War. That’s wrong. It had ended two years before that. And the breakup of the Soviet Union did not occur because of Western pressure; it occurred because of internal pressures within the Soviet Union. And it was something that President Bush did not wish. As a matter of fact, one of his last speeches, when there was a Soviet Union, was in Kyiv, when he advised Ukrainians to join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation, that he was proposing, and actually warned against suicidal nationalism. Those words, you know, are not remembered much now. People seem to think that Ukraine is free because of the end of the Cold War and the pressure of the West as one of the fruits of victory in the Cold War. This is simply incorrect. It turns history upside down.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ambassador Matlock, could you elaborate on some of the initial agreements that were reached between NATO and Russia? In the same year in which you testified against NATO expansion to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1997, the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed, in which NATO and Russia — which said explicitly NATO and Russia do not consider each other adversaries. Was that agreement significant? And explain why so many Eastern European states, including former Soviet republics, have wanted over the decades to join NATO.
JACK MATLOCK: I think that the — it is true that those, the countries, beginning with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, they wanted to join NATO because they feared that there would be another attempt to — you might say, to bring pressure to bear on them or to occupy them. There’s no question that some of them wanted that, but the — seems to me what was important is we should have tried to convince them that that was not likely and that if there was to be a division of Europe again, arming part of it would bring about a rearmament of the other. That is just, I think, almost common sense. But, however, the — yes, the incentive came from there, and, I must say, domestically, the pressure came domestically, because there were many voters in key states, often, you know, children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, who were pressing for this. But at the time, we thought that that was unnecessary.
I would add, however, that the problems with Russia are not just NATO expansion. There were also a process that began with the second Bush administration of withdrawing from all of the arms control — almost all of the arms control agreements that we had concluded with the Soviet Union, the very agreements that had brought the first Cold War to an end. There was a step-by-step withdrawal of those. And there was a decided direct intrusion into the domestic politics of these newly independent countries, attempts to — directly to change the government. This gets, I would say, very complicated in a way, for one who hasn’t been able to follow it step by step. But, you know, in effect, what the United States did after the end of the Cold War was they reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the “new world order,” but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the U.N. Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any U.N. approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported. So —
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Matlock, I wanted to go back in time. It’s very interesting, as you take us forward. But 30 years before you testified, you write in your recent piece about how, quote, “in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis — something I remember vividly since I was at the American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to Kennedy.” You continue, quote, “At the end of the week of messages back and forth — I translated Khrushchev’s longest — it was agreed that Khrushchev would remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba. What was not announced was that Kennedy also agreed that he would remove the U.S. missiles from Turkey but that this commitment must not be made public,” unquote. This is President Kennedy’s address November 2nd, 1962, announcing the dismantling of Soviet missile bases in Cuba.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President John F. Kennedy in 1962. How relevant that is today. I’m looking at the front page of The New York Times, and one of the headlines is “Ukraine? Putin’s Bigger Fear May Lie in Poland,” with a sub-headline, “New U.S. Military Base Is a Mere 100 Miles From Russia.” That’s about how far Cuba is from the coast of Florida, right? About 90 miles. If you could address this? And I also just want to comment. I mean, you are 93 years old. Your experience through — you’re 92. Your experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis, being the ambassador to the Soviet Union under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, we would think you would be plastering the airwaves, and everyone would be inviting you on. But I dare say I wonder if it’s your antiwar point of view, even with this wealth of experience, they are simply not inviting you. But I want to ask that question about the comparison of the weapons that are being poured in right now, encircling Russia, and this point about Poland, with what happened with Cuba and why the U.S. felt it was critical for those missiles of Russia to be removed, even though Cuba was an independent nation, could do what it wanted.
JACK MATLOCK: Well, obviously, we saw it as a threat to put nuclear weapons close to the United States. At the time, we didn’t admit publicly that we had placed nuclear weapons that could reach the Soviet Union. And that’s one of the reasons Kennedy kept it secret that he had agreed to remove the weapons in Turkey. Yes, and at the time, most of us who were involved were not only pleased at the outcome; we Americans felt that, well, it really made no difference how we took them out, it was necessary to remove them.
But we learned later, with conferences we had with people involved on their side, that, actually, if we had bombed the missile sites in Cuba, as the joint chiefs had advised Kennedy, but he refused, those officers in charge could have launched the missiles if they were under attack. So we could have lost Miami and maybe other cities right at the start. And if that had happened, how would the U.S. react? How could we politically do anything except strike the Soviet Union in some fashion? And when that sort of thing starts, there was no theoretical way — we ran a number of war games — that you could be sure that this process would stop. Now, we also learned later that when a U.S. destroyer was keeping a submarine, a Soviet submarine, submerged, that the commander of the submarine actually at one point ordered an attack on the destroyer with a nuclear torpedo. He was overruled by a superior officer. We came very close, though we did not know it at the time, to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That’s one of the reasons now — now I’m not saying that we have a precisely comparable situation. You know, moving the 82nd Airborne to Poland is not like moving nuclear weapons. I think it is totally unnecessary, and I don’t know how we’re going to use them. But what the Russians have objected to was deployment of anti-ballistic missiles sites. And they say that — in Eastern Europe, they say that, although these are anti-ballistic missiles, the same sites can be used actually for short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles, just by a change of the software. Now, again, I am not technically competent, but I think there is an issue here that we have refused to address, and that is, obviously, since we pulled out of the ABM Treaty and a number of other arms control treaties that had brought the end of the Cold War, I think that it is maybe understandable that the Russians would have fears here. I would also add that it’s not just a matter that one side or the other might suddenly launch a nuclear attack. I don’t see that happening. But the thing is, as the Cuban Missile Crisis explained to us, accidents can happen when you put yourself in this position. And when they happen, how do you keep it from escalating?
A second thing is that maybe the greatest threat that nuclear weapons possess today is that though it may be irrational for any government actually to use them because it could bring about a suicidal effect, if they get into the hands of terrorists, of nonstate actors, they can be used with perhaps impunity. And at the end of the Cold War, we had cooperative agreements with the Russians to secure their nuclear weapons, in what we call the Nunn — Sam Nunn and other senators sponsored this. These have all broken down now.
And what worries me is there could be a creeping up of another nuclear arms race, because if the Russian government, if President Putin feels he is being pressed and his security threatened — rightly or wrongly, because it’s perceptions that count — then what’s to keep him, since we have walked out of most of the other agreements, from putting, say, intermediate-range missiles in Kaliningrad or bringing them close to the border? Then what are we going to do? So, to get into another insane arms race, when we have so many other common problems we need to deal with, I think, is extraordinarily unwise.
AMY GOODMAN: Jack Matlock, we want to thank you so much for being with us, served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 under Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His latest piece, that we’ll link to, “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.” His books include Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray.
Next up, we speak to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atlantic reporter Ed Yong about the millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo. What does society owe immunocompromised people? Stay with us.