Dear CCI Followers,
Mid-Year 2020 we are witnessing an all-out, flagrant demonization of Russia and China in all of America’s mainstream media! Why? Whom do they hope to influence???
Answer:
Mainstream Democrats and Republicans who have been busy with their own lives … and have paid no attention to international relations in the past. They get their news from NYT affiliates, The Washington Post and CNN. All of whom promote each other’s safe narratives.
Here we are four months away from the 2020 Presidential election and both parties just voted to allot $738,000,000,000 to fight more wars! But in truth, we in the U.S. don’t have any real enemies.
Congressional members pose Russia and China as “ENEMIES” writ large. WHY? — to feed America’s military industrial complex’s (MIC) insistence that we need more weapons production. The MIC then provides congress members’ states with weapons manufacturing companies which feeds their states’ economies in addition to providing them with campaign contributions. It’s a quid pro quo.
But friends, we don’t have $738 billion USD to spend on more weapons!!! We are broke and are trillions of real dollars in debt! So where will this money come from? It will be printed. How long can this go on without a huge crash across America? Not long it seems. How will we afford “real needs” such as medical care, education for our youth, environmental challenges, social security and infrastructure needs in the immediate future?
WAKE UP Mainstream Americans!!!
And realize that the only way to change the situation is if we Americans “in the know” begin to educate the Americans among us who are still asleep to what is happening! They still think their Democrat or Republican parties will fix everything for them. THEY WON’T! THEY CAN’T! They are the problem!
WE MUST BECOME THE TRUTH TELLERS — TRUTH SHARERS! Otherwise Mike McFaul (mentioned below) and others, will seal our fates. He and others think we Americans can bluff our way and push other nations to maintain the NATO war machine, so we can remain the sole hegemon on planet earth.
There exists a “doctrine” that substantiates all of this — the Wolfowitz Doctrine devised in 1992, which in essence says — “We Americans have the right to take down any country that threatens our #1 status in the world.” Google the Wolfowitz Doctrine … read for yourself. This along with another doctrine, that of “Full Spectrum Dominance” says it all.
Do these Doctrines explain the numerous wars and rumors of wars we have waged since 1992? Without a doubt, they do.
However, they don’t explain the military interventions of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers’ generations that were initiated before 1992. Those interventions need a bright LIGHT shined on them posthumously.
Lest I sound like I have “an ax to grind,” let me say that I don’t. I look at history as evolutionary, our species has been evolving slowly from lesser forms to better forms of life. It’s been a slow process since our Neanderthal relatives. The stage of evolution we are now in is the only one we can change for the better. We MUST do so for the good of our children and grandchildren … and yes, for ALL children. This is our responsibility. We cannot remake the past but we can make change now for the future.
LET’S BRING THIS DISCUSSION UP TO TODAY:
The NYT and The Washington Post fully support Black Lives Matter (BLM). I do as well! We must learn to respect all races, cultures, lifestyles and national backgrounds. We need to be inclusive … treat blacks, browns, Asians, all nationalities with respect … yet our politicians and leading newspapers denigrate Russians and Chinese, their histories and cultures on a daily basis. Isn’t this totally incongruent in 2020???
PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE BELOW. Melvin Goodman is a Professor at Johns Hopkins University, a former CIA analyst and an author. He is confronting us with the abject truth.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The Washington Post and Its Cold War Drums
July 10, 2020
By Melvin Goodman
The Washington Post has taken its Cold War campaign against China, Russia, and Iran to a new level. In the Sunday edition of its Outlook section, the Post gave front-page coverage to long articles by former ambassador Michael McFaul and former New York Times’ writer Tim Weiner to trumpet Russia’s “constant aggression” and its “brutal Cold War rules.” There was no hint whatsoever of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to improve Russian-American relations over the past two decades, and no suggestion that the actions of the United States over the past 25 years have significantly contributed to the poor state of relations between Moscow and Washington.
The companion pieces have supportive titles, which suggests an editorial decision to express an authoritative point of view. McFaul’s article is titled “Trump always finds a way to let Putin win….”, and Weiner’s screed follows with “….even when Russia plays by brutal Cold War rules.” Their joint thesis is a simple one: Donald Trump’s complacency has enabled President Putin’s “litany of belligerent acts.” Neither writer notes U.S. actions over the past quarter-century that have worsened the international environment and helped to create a revival of the Cold War. Indeed, they absolve the last four American presidents of any responsibility for the current state of affairs, ignoring their actions that have been consistent with Cold War policymaking. Is anyone going to address the importance of restoring a Russian-American dialogue revolving around arms control and disarmament as well as Third World conflict resolution?
McFaul’s article is particularly interesting in view of his role as the architect of President Barack Obama’s “reset” policy toward Russia, his standing as one of the leading scholars on post-communist Russia, and his appointment as the first non-career diplomat to be U.S. ambassador to the Kremlin. His two-year tour was hardly a success as McFaul, only several days after his arrival in Moscow, chose to invite a number of organizers and prominent participants in the anti-Putin protest movement to the U.S. embassy. McFaul immediately became an Internet celebrity in the tight-knit world of Russian opposition, which demonstrated a lack of awareness of Russian political sensitivities, particularly if the Obama administration was genuinely trying to “reset” relations.
McFaul’s article is totally one-sided. He argues that “Trump has received nothing” from Moscow despite his concessions to the Russian president, citing “no new arms-control treaty, no help in deal with worsening relations with Iran.” But it was Trump who backed away from arms control and disarmament with Russia, abrogating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and walking away from the Outer Space Treaty. Conversely, it is Putin who is trying to get back to arms control negotiations, particularly to extend the New START Treaty, which expires in January 2021. Moreover, it is Putin who supports the Iran nuclear accord, and nowhere does McFaul explain what Russian leaders could possibly do to reverse the damage that the Trump administration has done to relations with Iran as well as to political stability in the Persian Gulf.
Weiner is welcome to his opinion that the CIA’s covert action in Afghanistan was the “last great battle of the Cold War,” but the Russians have dealt with genuine facts for the past 25 years that point to U.S. responsibility for the current disarray in Russian-American relations. In the 1990s, it was the United States and President Bill Clinton who decided to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, bringing former Soviet republics into NATO, a betrayal of commitments that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze not to “leap frog” over Germany in order to go into East Europe.
President George W. Bush went one terrible step further by bringing former Soviet republics into NATO; it took German Chancellor Angela Merkel to get him to stop flirting with membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Merkel convinced Bush that introducing Ukraine and Georgia to NATO would violate Putin’s red line regarding NATO membership. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland used her cell phone to discuss specific individuals who would be in the government or out. When the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine told Nuland that the European Union would have problems with her intervention, she replied “Fuck the EU.” The Kremlin intercepted the call and had a field day spreading the news. The Russian actions toward Ukraine and Georgia that McFaul and Weiner cite were, in fact, a response to U.S. manipulation of the politics and policies of both nations, which followed Putin’s red-line warnings to the United States.
One of the most severe moves reminiscent of the Cold War was President George W. Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. It was noteworthy that John Bolton served in influential administration positions in 2002 and 2019, when the ABM Treaty and the INF Treaty, respectively, were abrogated. Bush followed up the abrogation with another offensive maneuver, the deployment of a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania, claiming the defense was designed to counter a possible attack from Iran. This made no sense at the time, and even less sense during the Obama administration when the Iran nuclear accord was completed. Not only has Donald Trump demonstrated no interest in the importuning from Putin regarding the need to return to disarmament negotiations, he has created a Cold War-like Space Force and suggested that U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Germany might end up in Poland. McFaul needs to reconcile the fact that additional U.S. forces will be sent to Poland with his notion that “Trump always finds a way to let Putin win.”
It is customary for the political rhetoric to get heated during a presidential campaign, which will find Donald Trump and Joe Biden vying for honors in the field of national security and militancy, but there should be some balance and context from the mainstream media. The increasingly hard line of the Washington Post on the competition with China, Russia, and Iran suggests that the political contenders will be goaded—and not ameliorated—by the nation’s key newspapers.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent book is “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing), and he is the author of the forthcoming “The Dangerous National Security State” (2020).” Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.