Ex-Pentagon Chief: US President Must Swallow Pride, Work it Out With Putin
Putin has the Immortal Regiments behind him, and the West has the mortal kind
…from Sputnik News, Moscow
Chuck Hagel as a young man in Vietnam. Little could he see what was in store for him
[ Editor’s Note: What
a surprise from Mr. Hagel, whom we have not heard much from, but he
makes up for it below. A man who can describe current US foreign policy
toward Russia as, “I am not sure there’s some strategic thinking here,”
could pull up a chair here at the VT halfway house for ex-administrators
who have seen the light.
We will see what the
response to his remarks is over the next few days. Rest assured, it was
not a slip of the tongue. This came out in a talk to the Atlantic
Council. Maybe brother Hagel would like to give fellow Vietnam vet
Gordon Duff an interview for VT, where I could promise a room with a
view.
All kidding aside, it
is always nice to have former high level people who are past all the
strings and pressures of their careers step forward to contribute some
adult supervision, especially when it is badly needed… Jim W. Dean ]
____________
Putin is famous for his public Q&A grillings, which Western leaders never expose themselves to
– First published … May 11, 2016 –
Hagel has always had a reputation for a cool head
Tensions between Moscow and Washington have been at an all-time post-Cold War high. The US is currently engaged in joint military drills with Georgia, mere miles from Russia’s border, while the US Navy has sailed aggressively close to Russian waters in the Baltic Sea.
To avoid future conflict, former secretary of defense Hagel stated that the next US President must swallow their pride and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss de-escalation.
“Now that might be distasteful,
but we know enough about President Putin to know he deals leader
to leader,” Hagel said at the Atlantic Council.
“…There is a lot of damage that
can be done [around the world], and until that leader-to-leader dialogue
begins, ‘what you need, what we need, and let’s start sorting this
out,’ then you will consider a proxy war.”
On NATO’s plans to boost its presence in the Baltic, Hagel warned that this could lead to unintended consequences.
“I’d be very careful with this.
Because the centrifugal force of this is so subtle it takes you right
down into the middle of a situation that you didn’t want to be in,” he
said.
With NATO deploying additional troops to Baltic states, Russia will respond in kind, Hagel opined, and both sides could then find themselves “very quickly in another Cold War buildup here that makes sense for neither side.”
The former secretary suggested that officials in Washington are failing to consider the long-term implications of its unnecessarily aggressive policies.
“We continue to build up the
eastern flank of NATO with more battalions, more exercises, and more
ships and more platforms, and the Russians will respond,” Hagel said.
“Not sure where that takes you, either. I’m not sure there’s some real
strategic thinking here. It’s a reaction. It’s a tactical kind
of ricocheting from crisis to crisis.”
While opposed to a permanent stationing of NATO forces in the Baltic,
Hagel does, however, support the use of rotational armored brigade
teams.
“Those forces are far more agile
and ready. When you have stationary troops you have overhead, you have a
lot of different dynamics. I just think it’s smarter today, for the
kind of world we live in.”
But even rotational deployments could lead to unintended hostilities.
Last month, Russia’s Permanent Envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko stressed
the need for the alliance to stop its buildup near Russia’s borders.
“If NATO really wants to resume
the dialogue on arms control, on strengthening Europe’s stability and
security on the basis of those developments, which for a long enough
period served as the basis for maintaining stability in Europe, they
should stop the process of strengthening its military presence along our
borders,” he told the Rossiya-24 television channel.
“All [forces] that were sent to and have been rotating along our borders must be returned to the place of permanent deployment.”