Thursday, March 8th., 2018
"...the US moved from a stance of mutual trust
and respect in its relations with Russia to one of disregard and
disrespect, exploiting Russia's internal problems during this period
to assert its dominance as a unipolar power..."
"......"The most fundamental [error by Washington upon the demise of the Soviet Union] was to treat post-communist Russia not as a strategic partner but as a defeated nation, analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II."
"...What has been made abundantly clear
by its actions since the early 1990s is that economic and military might
is for Washington the first and final arbiter of international affairs...."
"...That
we have arrived at such a parlous juncture in relations between East
and West is, per Talleyrand, worse than a crime it's a blunder — an
indictment of the conclusions drawn in Washington in response to the end
of the Soviet Union. Here we are obliged to cite the sage lament
of former US President Dwight D Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made,
every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and
are not clothed..."
No More Mr. Nice Guy: Putin Unveils Next Gen Russian Nukes
©
Sputnik/ Michael Klimentyev
In
one short, simple sentence written some years ago, US scholar and
Russia expert Stephen F Cohen got to the heart of the matter: “The Cold
War ended in Moscow, but not in Washington.”
This indispensable context is how the section of Russian President Vladimir Putin's March 1, 2018, address
to the Russian Federal Assembly, dealing with foreign policy and
security, has to be understood. In what arguably stands as the most
significant public address of the Russian president's tenure in the
Kremlin, the world, particularly Washington, was left in no doubt that
Moscow possesses the ability and willingness to meet any threat to its security that the US and its allies may seek to impose.
Putin identified the decision of the Bush administration to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
in 2002 as the point when the US moved from a stance of mutual trust
and respect in its relations with Russia to one of disregard and
disrespect, exploiting Russia's internal problems during this period
to assert its dominance as a unipolar power. "We did our best
to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty," the Russian
leader announced. "All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty
in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue
with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease
concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought
that a compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our
proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected."
In
a dramatic video presentation, the Russian president went on to unveil
the next generation of the country's nuclear missiles, developed
with the objective of circumventing and overcoming Washington's missile
defenses and existing nuclear capability.
The defiance with which Putin revealed the country's new
and enhanced missile technology was unmistakable. It was perhaps
illustrative of the years of broken promises, bad faith, duplicity and
encroaching and enveloping military pressure exerted by the US and its
allies against the Russian Federation. Returning to Cohen: "The most
fundamental [error by Washington upon the demise of the Soviet Union]
was to treat post-communist Russia not as a strategic partner but as a
defeated nation, analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II."
In contradistinction, in the parallel universe that Western
hawks and neocons inhabit, responsibility for the breakdown
in relations between Moscow and Washington is ascribed to "Russian
aggression." It's a charge that throws up the question of what kind
of aggression is it that sees US troops on Russia's border but no
Russian troops Washington's border, US warships patrolling the Black Sea
on Russia's shore but no Russian warships patrolling the Gulf of Mexico
on theirs? And this is before we come to the missile defense shield
deployed in Romania in 2016, or the attempt by Washington to use Georgia
as its cat's paw in 2008 with the aim of NATO expansion, followed
by Ukraine in 2014.
What has been made abundantly clear
by its actions since the early 1990s is that economic and military might
is for Washington the first and final arbiter of international affairs.
©
Sputnik/ Александар Милачић
Yet guns, warships and rockets, more than diplomacy, have
underlain US foreign policy since the day the hammer and sickle was
lowered over the Kremlin. As for those 800 military bases established
by Washington in 70 countries, are we really meant to believe they did
so with the objective of making the world safe for democracy? Credulity,
as they say, only stretches so far.
Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter once
described the Roman Empire thus: "There was no corner of the known world
where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual
attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's
allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented. When it
was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was
the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested
with an aura of legality."
Substitute Washington for Rome
in that passage and you have yourself the nuts and bolts of America's
relations with the world throughout the era of unipolarity.
Putin's
address and unveiling of Russia's advanced nuclear missile capability
provides empirical evidence of the failure of US and Western foreign
policy since the Soviet Union was consigned to history. Rather
than embrace this world-historical event as an opportunity for peaceful
coexistence, for stability and cohesion, the US sought to impose on its
former Cold War adversary a Carthaginian peace.
And lest anyone forget what this Carthaginian peace
entailed for Russia's people, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein's "Shock
Doctrine" is required reading: "By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian
farms had gone bankrupt and roughly 70,000 state factories had closed
creating an epidemic of unemployment… By the time the shock therapists
[of the West] had administered their ‘bitter medicine in the
mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line,
according to the World Bank."
When we consider that in 1989 the
number of people living in poverty in Russia was 4 million, we are left
with the monstrous fact that the free market economic reforms imposed
on Russia in the 1990s led to the impoverishment of 72 million people
in less than a decade.
Given this history and given Moscow's repeated attempts to reach a modus vivendi with the West,
Putin's address to the Russian Federal Assembly was that of a leader
left with no choice other than to adapt to the verities of a US hegemon,
for whom peaceful co-existence is anathema.
Thus, for Russia, it is now a case of meeting might with might.
The views and opinions expressed by John Wight do not necessarily reflect Sputnik's position.