State Department Failed to Prevent the War. Will It Now Prevent the Peace?

anonymoose said:
Then you have no desire to be well informed on both sides of the argument.
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I have 'limited time' to devote to Chat Rooms.

Notice how quickly "Anatta' disappeared when I asked him about a 'Surveillance State'? He was cheering Xi of China, then when confronted, immediately headed for the Exit.
 
anonymoose said:
Understood. Just before the invasion I had zero understanding of the impending war.
Now I soak up information on it like a sponge.
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Czar Putin the Stupid wants to re-create The Russian Empire. The Russian-Speakers from Other Lands will throw Flowers at the Feet of their Liberators. (somehow, Ukraine didn't get the memo)
 
Jack said:
Czar Putin the Stupid wants to re-create The Russian Empire. The Russian-Speakers from Other Lands will throw Flowers at the Feet of their Liberators. (somehow, Ukraine didn't get the memo)
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It’s a little more complicated than that but good effort.
 
anonymoose said:
It’s a little more complicated than that but good effort.
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Probably, but if you want it in a Nutshell, there it is.
Putin DID belong to the G-8 and was part of the Family of Nations.
Now, he's looked at as 'going Rogue'. A Real Dumbass.

I view it in a similar vein as the US invading Canada. In order to 'liberate' British Columbia, we bomb Ottawa.
 
anatta said:
Ever since the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, when NATO opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, the Russians have indicated that membership for these two border nations was an unacceptable “red line” for them. They quickly proved their seriousness later that year by invading Georgia and securing territory where predominantly-Russian populations were located. (Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar?) For the last 14 years, Putin and the entire Russian elite have spoken with one voice: NATO membership for Ukraine was an intolerable security threat. We ignored this red line, continuing to push for NATO expansion and transitioning Ukraine’s military onto a NATO platform even before official membership.

In response, a Russian troop buildup began on Ukraine’s border around the beginning of last year. This had the intended effect of getting the new president’s attention.
Biden called for a summit and met with Putin in Geneva in June last year. We don’t know exactly what was said in the room but we do know that Biden said publicly at that time that corruption in Ukraine prevented its entry into NATO. Putin seemed mollified, and tensions seemed to abate. According to recent reporting by The Intercept based on U.S. intelligence sources, the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border started to subside after the Biden-Putin Summit and did not increase again until October/November. So what happened in between to upset the apple cart?

On September 1, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky visited the White House. This was the first such visit by a Ukrainian head of state, fulfilling one of Kiev’s long-standing diplomatic objectives. On that day, the U.S. and Ukraine issued a “Joint Statement” affirming deep economic and military ties between the two nations, including support for Ukraine’s NATO membership. This likely reflected weeks of back-channel negotiations that preceded Zelensky’s visit, suggesting Biden’s reassurances to Putin were dead-letter virtually from the day he made them. On November 10, Secretary of State Blinken and the Ukrainian foreign minister signed a massive 10-year Charter Agreement, which was the long-form version of the Joint Statement issued earlier.

Predictably, the Russians hit the roof. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said they had reached “the boiling point.” They delivered a virtual ultimatum to the U.S. in December demanding written assurance that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. A month of furious negotiations began in January between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lavrov, during which Blinken gave no ground on NATO membership. In fact, he seemed proud of western intransigence, making statements like “There has been no change; there will be no change.” And: “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”

Yet that’s not what Blinken was saying privately. We now know, thanks to a stunning recent interview by Fareed Zakaria, that Zelensky was privately told that Ukraine wasn’t going to be admitted into NATO but that the door had to remain publicly open.

What could possibly be the rationale for this diplomatic approach? We refused to accede to the Russians’ most long-standing and important demand even though we privately admitted to Ukraine that we had no intention of following through. In other words, we refused to give the Russians “the sleeves off our vest,” a concession that was largely meaningless to us but of paramount importance for them.

Was it really so hard for us to imagine that the Russians might have a genuine concern about being encircled on a 1200-mile border by what they regard as a hostile military alliance? Aren’t diplomats supposed to be able to put themselves in the other guy’s shoes? Even if we see NATO purely as a defensive alliance, is it really inconceivable that Russia could see that vast military power as having offensive potential?

After all, they watched NATO take offensive action to topple Moammar Ghaddafi in Libya and to bomb their Serbian allies during the Kosovo War. Is it really so hard to understand Russian paranoia about having American troops, weapons, and bases on their Ukrainian border, from which they’ve been attacked throughout history? The United States itself was willing to risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets over offensive weapons placed ninety miles off our shores in 1962, yet we treat the same concern by the Russians as crazy or a bluff.

But let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say you believe that NATO expansion was not a real concern of the Russians but rather just a pretext for Putin’s invasion. We should still have been willing to give that guarantee to take it off the table as a casus belli. Polling of the Russian people showed that they favored an invasion to prevent Ukraine joining NATO by 2 to 1, but a majority did not favor attacking Ukraine for reunification. Even if it was just a pretext, we should have robbed Putin of that pretext in order to drive up his negatives among the Russian people. Just today, a new poll by Levada Centre showed that 80 percent of the Russian people support Putin so obviously we failed at that.

Nobody can claim that American negotiators didn’t know the Russians’ key demand. The Associated Press headline on January 19 practically screamed it: “Russia says it will take nothing less but NATO expansion ban.” Yet we never relented on the public assertion that Ukraine would join NATO while privately saying that it wouldn’t. It’s as if Blinken trained at some Bizarro World school of diplomacy where you say publicly what you should say privately, and privately what you should say publicly.
https://www.theamericanconservative...revent-the-war-will-it-now-prevent-the-peace/
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No use at blaming the State Department to which tRump's lawlessly hacked in atrocity waged war on Democracy including the State Department. Instead of projecting, consider placing the blame where it really belongs as in tRump, his un-American conspiring GOPer mob of the sewer and their chumped off supporters who they count on at voting against their own interests and the interests of humanity. To be a sucker for tRump and a repuke apparently is a sucker that is ok with the idea of making it to hell:

How Trump Sabotaged Ukraine

Even as he promoted a fiction of Kyiv’s interference in US politics, the president was busy meddling himself. What his own adviser called a “drug deal” paved Putin’s way.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, now a rogue leader and a singular menace to international security, sees Ukraine as having fallen under malign sway of the West and the CIA. To the extent that he had a credible pretext for invading and occupying Ukraine, it was that NATO has encroached on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. But in fact, Washington’s most consequential involvement in Kyiv’s affairs to date has been Donald Trump’s intervention in them, and it was pro-Russian.

Republicans have criticized President Joe Biden for not doing more to arm the Ukrainians, yet fail to recognize that crucial US support was withheld years ago: they voted not to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial in the Senate, proceedings that the House of Representatives had precipitated over Trump’s making US assistance to Ukraine conditional on political favors. That observation barely scratches the surface of Republican hypocrisy on this front, but recounting the Trump administration’s corrosive relationship with Ukraine is not the vindictive resurrection of old talking points. Rather, it is essential to reckoning with his domestically and strategically calamitous presidency. Trump must be held accountable for weakening the US-led international, rules-based order, undermining US deterrence of a hostile and predatory Russia, and setting up Ukraine for Putin’s brutal and geopolitically ominous invasion."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/03/11/how-trump-sabotaged-ukraine/
 
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