Russians Remember Their WWII Vets
The West’s propaganda war against Russia filters events there through a prism of
cynicism and contempt, but that misses the human component of a country still
remembering the deep personal scars of World War II, as Gilbert Doctorow
reflects.
By Gilbert Doctorow
I will open with full disclosure: I am generally not enthusiastic about crowds
or going with the flow. That is simply a question of temperament. So it took a
bit of coaxing from my Russian wife to prepare me for the Immortal Regiment
parade in St. Petersburg, where we otherwise were staying within the context of
our bimonthly visits to the city.
She was intent on honoring her father and grandmother, both of whom were on
active duty during the Great Patriotic War: he, a naval officer detached for
much of the time to working with the Allies on matters of Lend Lease; she on the
front lines as a radiologist in the medical service.
Like thousands and thousands of other residents of St. Petersburg and the
outlying suburbs, we did what was necessary to be full-blooded participants of
the May 9 march. Several days in advance, we visited our neighborhood photo shop
and handed over our less-than-perfect photos of her relatives to be enlarged,
placed within a standard Immortal Regiment format, laminated, and affixed to a
white plastic pole.
The format contained the obligatory St. George’s ribbon, symbol of the Victory,
to one side, plus the last name, first name and patronymic of each family
member, their military service, rank and dates of birth and death at the bottom.
As I later saw on the parade, some people inserted details of the battles and
awards, if any, that their family heroes had earned. Others gave no more than
the names.
Accounts of the march that have appeared in Russia media are sparing on details.
See the fragment of live RT coverage
at https://russian.rt.com/article/301808-bessmertnyi-polk-v-sankt-peterburge–pry
amaya. I have not heard a more precise number of participants than “several
hundred thousand.” What I intend to share here is a sense of the mood and
composition of the crowd, as well as of the efforts of the city to provide the
safety infrastructure that made it what it was: a family event.
Given the manifestly patriotic nature of Victory in Europe Day celebrations,
which open in Moscow and cities across Russia with military parades, precise
marching columns, displays of military hardware on the ground and in the air, I
was uncertain how possibly strident the Immortal Regiment component might be.
As it turned out, the crowd was uniformly good-humored and focused on its
private obligations to be met: the celebration of parents, grandparents, even
great grandparents’ role in the war and reconfirmation of their status as family
heroes whatever their military or civil defense rank, whether they survived or
were among the countless fatalities.
Among the marchers, there were a great many family groups consisting of two and
three generations. The latest demographic trends were on full display – young
families with two or three children in tow. There were also young courting
couples. Very few single elderly or lone marchers in general.
From the very outset, at the marshalling point, you could see friends and
acquaintances waiting to meet up and march together. From conversations en
route, it was plain that the parade was an occasion for people who thought they
knew one another to talk about what otherwise had been kept under wraps in this
country, where so much had was secret during the decades of Communism: details
of their family history and innermost thoughts.
Faces on Placards
The faces on placards were unretouched. Simple, honest photos, many of them
photos of peasants or laborers. Other placards showed off their more successful
relatives in officers’ uniforms bedecked with medals. The whole gamut of service
ranks was on display.
One curious but inescapable fact: the marchers were only white folks. Though
there is a substantial population of Central Asians or Caucasus nationalities in
St. Petersburg, both legal and illegal, and though many of them surely had
fathers and grandfathers in the War, they did not show up. Perhaps they were
uncertain about the welcome that might await them. If so, they were excessively
cautious.
The starting point of the march was the Alexander Nevsky Square overlooking the
Neva River and just next to the city’s most famous cemetery, where many of its
great literary and artistic lions are buried. From there we proceeded two
kilometers down what is called the Old Nevsky Prospekt, today a luxury shopping
district for fashion clothing, until we reached the intermediate open space next
to the Moscow Railway Station known as Uprising Square.
Then we thinned out a bit as we proceeded down Nevsky Prospekt proper, which is
a still wider boulevard that runs a further 2.5 kilometers to meet the Neva at
another point is its winding course around the city, at Palace Square. Here, in
a large public space framed by the Hermitage Museum and its annexes, there would
be entertainment from bandstands in the evening and the closing fireworks
display close to midnight.
Along the route, there were several stands for musicians singing WWII and
Victory songs to amplified music. Our march was at a slow gait with paused every
minute or two to tighten ranks.
The spirit of the crowd was enlivened by shouts
of “Ura” that traveled in successive waves from front to rear. Here and there,
some marchers spontaneously broke into song, Katyusha being the most popular
number.
The local city fathers also did their work very well to ensure both a feeling –
and reality – of security for an event in the open that could otherwise pose
hazards of keeping out trouble makers, not to mention terrorists for whom this
great mass of humanity could be a splendid target.
Every three or four meters along the route of Nevsky Prospekt there were
uniformed police, both male and female officers. Many of them trained
experienced eyes either on the marchers or on those passing by on the sidewalks.
A very few were busy chatting on mobile phones, while a few male and female cops
flirted. In brief, it was a very human scene such as you might expect in New
York or Paris.
All roads crossing Nevsky were blocked by police lines and/or vehicles. The
metro stations where many entered the system on their way to the rallying point
of the Alexander Nevsky Square received empty trains in order to very quickly
whisk away those traveling to the Square.
In closing, I wish to point out that Russian opposition personalities and
cynical intellectuals in Russia and abroad have insinuated that the Immortal
Regiment marches around the country are phony, some kind of Kremlin-promoted
gimmick to close ranks around President Vladimir Putin. But the efforts invested
by the thousands of people I saw and the very private, family celebration that
they were conducting within the anonymity of a collective action left me with no
doubt this is an initiative fully owned by its participants.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East
West Accord Ltd. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published
in August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
A Gift of Culture to Battered Palmyra
In an extraordinary act of culture and courage, a Russian orchestra performed in
the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra recently liberated from the Islamic State,
but Western media mocked the event, notes Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
Even those with a limited knowledge of Russia may be credited with having heard
of St. Petersburg being called the Venice of the North. This is a title it must
share with a variety of other claimants famed for their canals, such as Bruges
in Belgium, although St. Petersburg has more justification than competing cities
given its common architectural roots with the Venice of the South, namely the
leading Eighteenth Century Italian architects who contributed greatly to forming
its appearance.
To cognoscenti there is also another twin city association of St. Petersburg,
that of Northern Palmyra. That notion goes back to the age of Catherine the
Great, who was likened to the Third Century Queen Zenobia, powerful ruler of the
Palmyran Empire, who conquered Egypt and a large swathe of Anatolia. In the time
of Pushkin, Russian writers further developed the allusion, drawing more
generally upon the reputed beauty and cultural richness of Roman Palmyra.
The links of consciousness did not end there. Later in the Nineteenth Century,
St. Petersburg based archeologists were among the Europeans taking part in digs
in Palmyra and writing about their adventures.
With this twin city awareness borne by the Russian intelligentsia to this day,
it is not so surprising that precisely a St. Petersburg conductor, Valeri
Gergiev, thought up the grand gesture, an act of great imagination that was
realized on May 5. He brought the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater to
Palmyra, recently liberated from the Islamic State by a Russian-backed offensive
mounted by the Syrian government.
The orchestrated performed a concert of Bach, Shchedrin and Prokofiev in the
Roman Amphitheater to celebrate the return of culture to a UNESCO site
desecrated by its Islamic State occupiers who over the preceding year held their
brutal public executions here. The concert audience consisted of Russian and
Syrian troops, Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, noted Arabist and
Director of the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky, local dignitaries, and a
contingent of UNESCO representatives.
The event opened with a short speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin carried
over a live satellite link from his residence in Sochi. Putin underscored the
courage of those participating in the concert and the will of civilized society
to triumph over terror. The entire event was broadcast live on Russian state
television and was made available on the web by RT.
As the recording makes clear, this was a world-class performance that featured
eminent soloists. The unaccompanied Bach piece for violin was played by a
laureate of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, Pavel
Miliukov. Quadrille, a work by the Mariinsky’s house composer Rodion Shchedrin,
widower of ballet prima donna Maya Plisetskaya, was performed by cellist Sergei
Roldugin. And the choice of a Prokofiev symphony was in line with Gergiev’s
longstanding efforts to make that great Soviet composer widely known and
appreciated at home and abroad.
A Frontline Performance
The concert took place little more than a month after Palmyra was liberated from
its Islamic State occupiers and just days after the archeological sites were
cleared of mines by Russian military specialists, many of whom were in the
audience. Meanwhile, the forces of the Islamic State continue to send missions
against Palmyra and its surrounding countryside in attempts to recapture lost
ground.
In these circumstances, the action of maestro Gergiev, his orchestra and
soloists, the logistics team that moved the orchestra and some 100 tons of
telecommunications gear into the war zone, and the broadcasting team who set up
the live coverage must be characterized as brave, even daring.
It was also in character for Gergiev. He performed at the front before, as he
famously did in 2008 when he brought the orchestra to the capital of South
Ossetia, Tskhinvali, just after its liberation from Georgian attackers. But he
and his orchestra also perform at home in ways that show similar disregard for
their own comfort and incur heightened risks: they regularly bring their music
to hard to reach parts of the Russian Federation on grueling tours of the far
north and the far east, often taking with them internationally known soloists.
Those concerts do not receive the admiring attention of the outside world.
It bears mention that the concert by maestro Gergiev and the Mariinsky orchestra
was not a one-off event. It was meant to be the first step in the return of
culture and decency to Palmyra. On the next day a follow-on concert featuring a
Syrian orchestra and chorus was held in the Roman amphitheater.
Moreover, the Russians did not rush to evacuate their broadcasters and gear,
because state television carried a live transmission of this evening concert to
Russian viewers late last night.
With all due respect to maestro Gergiev’s intention to present a gift of culture
to the residents of Palmyra and to convey the promise of return to normal
civilian life in a country devastated by civil war and the intervention of
foreign fighters, it would be disingenuous to ignore the way the Kremlin and its
state television framed the event for consumption in Russia and the wider world.
Call it an exercise in Soft Power, of which it was surely Russia’s most
successful in many, many years; call it what you will, the concert in Palmyra
had a clearly stated political dimension. This “Pray for Palmyra” concert was
dedicated to the memory of two heroes, one Syrian, the other Russian. Large
photos of both were on either side of the stage.
The Syrian being honored was Dr. Khaled Asaad, director of the Palmyra museum
complex who in August 2015, at age 81, was brutally executed, beheaded by the
Islamic State militants. The presence at the concert of Hermitage director
Mikhail Piotrovsky was a direct counterpoint to the missing Syrian scholar and
administrator. Piotrovsky symbolized the ongoing and future participation of
Russian art restorers in bringing Palmyra back to its pre-war status as a center
of research for orientalists and a major tourist attraction.
A Russian Hero
The Russian being honored was Lieutenant Alexander Prokhorenko, Russia’s
national hero of the Syrian campaign, the special forces officer working behind
enemy lines on the Palmyra front who, when surrounded by jihadists, called in
Russian jet strikes on his own position and knowingly paid with his life while
taking out an enemy detachment.
Prokhorenko’s body was eventually recovered and returned to Russia where it was
given the highest state honors. His funeral in his native Orenburg region was
held on May 6. Russian television news coverage of the Palmyra concert was backto-back with video reportage of the honor guard receiving Prokhorenko’s coffin.
Though some British newspapers had described Prokhorenko as a Russian “Rambo”
and some Western military experts saluted the selfless heroism of this fellow
professional soldier, Russian state television chose to feature a more personal
response. We were shown an elderly French couple who had sent their family
medals for World War II resistance heroism to the parents of Prokhorenko via the
Russian diplomatic service as their expression of solidarity. The couple was
invited to Russia by President Putin and met with the grieving parents of
Russia’s hero, as we saw on television.
More broadly, the date for the Mariinsky concert in Palmyra was surely chosen
with an eye to the May 9 Victory in Europe celebrations across Russia. The
concert was a gift to the Russian nation for its popular if skeptical support of
the military intervention in Syria. The people saw on their screens the fruits
of Russian-Syrian military cooperation, and in particular images of the secular
and friendly Syria that Russian diplomacy has backed with blood and national
wealth.
They saw the first step in what will be a long process of reconstruction,
preparing the way for the return of refugees and displaced persons. All of this
is a direct reproach to the European Union’s handling of the migrant
crisis. Europe, like the United States, has at best stood by and at worst aided
and abetted the Gulf States and Turkey in their interventions in the Syrian
civil war, greatly strengthening the terrorist forces and prolonged the fighting
awaiting the collapse of the Assad regime, notwithstanding all the havoc that
resulted for the Syrian population.
Western mainstream media coverage of the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra’s concert
in Palmyra runs the full range from merely tendentious and sour grapes to
overtly hostile and malicious commentary.
U.S. media coverage was meager. The online edition of Time magazine was short,
concentrated on the facts and avoided politically colored adjectives. To its
credit, we were told that the concert was led “by renowned Russian conductor
Valery Gergiev.” The presence in the audience of UNESCO dignitaries was noted.
The New York Times was less cautious, more inflammatory. Its editors chose a
headline that sought to deprive the event of any serious merit: “Russian
Orchestra Plays in Palmyra Ruins as Strikes Kill 28.” This linkage of two
separate news items may be described as the “Washington narrative” because it
shows up in many other derogatory press accounts of the concert.
What shred of journalistic integrity the Times managed to produce appears at the
very end of the article, when the author admits that: “it was not immediately
clear who carried out the attack on the camp in Idlib province where some 2,000
internally displaced people had taken shelter from the fighting in nearby Aleppo
and Hama provinces over the past year.”
And the closing words are that it is “too early to say if Assad’s forces carried
out the attack.”
But the intended damage to the credibility of the Russian
cultural mission to Palmyra was already done up front.
The New Cold War
Probably the most toxic U.S. reporting on the concert was from Radio Svoboda,
the old Cold War bullhorn directed against Russia with U.S. government funding.
Here at the outset we are told about the cellist Roldugin, the “close friend of
Russian President Vladimir Putin” who was revealed in the Panama Papers scandal
as the owner of an offshore company engaged in “shady transactions.”
But then the article switches over entirely to a story broadcast by Sky News two
days earlier alleging that Palmyra was handed over to Syrian government troops
by the Islamic State in accordance with agreements reached between the Islamic
State and the Assad regime. The propaganda point was that Assad was supposedly
in cahoots with the jihadists. The notion of Russian participation in the city’s
liberation is off the radar screen.
British media were more attentive to the concert in Palmyra but, with one or two
exceptions, no friendlier than their American confrères. The Guardian was
entirely aligned with the Washington narrative. Valery Gergiev is portrayed as
the “Kremlin favourite.” Moreover, we read that “Gergiev, the former principal
conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, is a controversial and outspoken
supporter of Putin.”
In this light, we are reminded about Gergiev’s 2008 concert in Ossetia. I note
parenthetically what The Guardian omitted in their rush to marginalize the
maestro: that Gergiev is now the principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic
as well as artistic director of the Mariinsky.
The Guardian also reminds us that featured cellist Sergei Roldugin is “Vladimir
Putin’s best friend” and that
“the Panama Papers revealed that Roldugin was the
beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore deals.”
Finally, The Guardian tells its readers that among the foreigners present at the
concert were representatives from Zimbabwe, China and Serbia. They pointedly
omitted that they were present in a UNESCO delegation which also included
Europeans.
The BBC online coverage carries many of the anti-Putin, anti-Russian tendentious
adjectives, reminders and omissions that we have seen above. But it goes the
extra mile by quoting UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond’s extraordinary
comment that the concert was “a tasteless attempt to distract attention from the
continued suffering of millions of Syrians. It shows that there are no depths to
which the regime will not sink.”
From the BBC quote, it is not clear whether the Minister had in mind Putin’s or
Assad’s regime’s plumbing the depths, but his intention to slander the Russians
is obvious.
The BBC also carried a more balanced separate report from their bureau chief in
Moscow, Steve Rosenberg. He saw that the message from Moscow was that Russia is
a force for good, whereas Western officials “remain suspicious of Russia’s
intentions.” Otherwise Rosenberg just repeats the same hurtful innuendos that we
have seen above: the connection between Rodulgin and the Panama Papers, the
Gergiev concert in Tskhinvali in 2008.
To every generalization there is always an exception, and as happens from time
to time it is the British tabloids that show more common sense and decency than
the high-style outlets of the political class.
The heading given to the article on the concert in the online edition of The
Daily Mail says it all:
“Culture and civilization return to Palmyra: Russian
orchestra performs concert in the ancient Roman amphitheatre for the first time
since ISIS used it to carry out public executions in Syria.” The editors wisely
included a click-on video recording of the concert, allowing their readers to
judge for themselves.
In summary, the Information War that the West has been waging against Russia is
going full tilt. It is an unpardonable error of judgment to speak of a new Cold
War as something that lies ahead, just around the corner. We are in the midst of
it, and it will take enormous luck or a change of leaders for the better if we
are to avoid a hot war.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East
West Accord Ltd. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published
in August 2015.
© Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
New Risks from Brussels’ ‘Security’
After a terror attack, Western governments react – or overreact – to show
they’re doing something, but often make matters worse, as Belgium’s new layer of
security outside Zaventem airport shows, writes Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
In the days following the March 22 terrorist attack at Zaventem, Brussels’
international airport, the Belgian government was confronted with a walkout by
airport security employees who resisted plans to restart services without any
far-reaching changes to procedures. The employees demanded, in particular,
provision for screening all passengers before they entered the airport building,
which would require substantial increase in their own numbers.
It is a sad commentary that it was not the federal authorities but these public
workers who stood up for the safety interests of the traveling public, while at
the same time feathering their own nests.
Eventually, the government caved in and measures were agreed to. Temporary tentlike pavilions were erected out on the street in front of the airport buildings
for the verification of passenger documentation and x-raying of their baggage
before admittance to the terminal buildings for check-in. However, as is now
apparent, the new infrastructure was poorly conceived and could only result in
stupendous back-up of passengers in the open when put to the test of large
flows.
Week by week in April, the percentage of flights restored to Zaventem from their
diversion to Liege and Charleroi and other regional airports mounted. There was
some reason to be optimistic. This past weekend, the airport administration
announced a step-up to 80 percent of pre-attack passenger flows – and then the
whole operation turned into chaos.
This week when I arrived at Zaventem at 6.30 am, two-and-a-half hours before my
flight’s departure, I joined a crowd of some 1,000 hopeful passengers packed
tightly together. We advanced at a snail’s pace along a 250-meter walk in the
open air to reach the pavilion serving one set of airlines or to reach elevators
to ascend three floors and wait for entry into the second pavilion serving other
airlines.
The inconvenience and physical discomfort for all those in the line speaks for
itself. And this was a morning of clear skies, unlike the rain and even hail
that have descended on the mass of passengers exposed to the elements every day
for the past week or more.
There were too few staff to explain who goes where. Moreover, such airport staff
as circulated was clearly untrained, unable to answer the simplest questions.
There was no one to assist the elderly, the infirm or passengers with babies and
small children. The huddled mass might as well have been from a scene of Syrian
refugees at the Macedonian-Greek border.
But that disgraceful discourtesy to the paying public is the least of what was
offensive. What was utterly shocking was the inattention to our security. After
all, that is supposedly what these new procedures were intended to provide.
By gathering us all together in the open, without chaperones, with armed
military patrols only passing by occasionally as if on show, we were so many
herring in a barrel. Any chap or gal wearing a suicide vest could easily have
taken 500 lives with him or her, as opposed to the 16 lives that were lost in
the attack of March 22, when passengers were spread out in the departure hall.
Not Up to It
Let us not mince words: the Belgian authorities are not up to their jobs, from
the minister on down to the airport supervisors. They were incapable of doing
the proper engineering. Even a fool would have known that putting in place four
baggage X-ray machines in two pavilions to do the work that 20 highly automated
inspection lines otherwise do inside the building after check-in was a formula
for total breakdown at peak hours.
Lest anyone think these observations are unique to me, they were validated this
evening by a front-page report on one of the country’s leading dailies, Le
Soir.
The president of Brussels Airlines is quoted as saying that by these new
pre-screening procedures the authorities had shot themselves in the foot and
made themselves the laughingstock of Europe. But his complaint was with the
labor unions of the security staff, not with the airport administration and
Ministry of Interior who should have known better than to implement such
shortsighted measures.
Belgium’s complacent ruling elites must now be overruled by the international
community protecting its own. Until then, foreigners should be put on notice: it
is madness to fly into and out of Brussels National Airport-Zaventem.
In my analysis of root causes, I pointed to failures of Belgian political
institutions as bearing prime responsibility for the attacks.
The nation’s two major language communities – French and Dutch – are forever
trying to pull the blanket over to their respective side. To moderate these
rivalries and keep the country together, certain structures were put in place
step by step over the past 60 years. To outsiders, these measures appeared to be
enlightened and, for many years, Belgium was a poster child of making democracy
work in an ethnically diverse society, a model for countries in Central Africa
and other complex societies in the Third World. However, behind this façade of
progressivism, there were the dirty little secrets of unfortunate consequences.
Foremost among the innovative but offending institutions are proportional
representation and power sharing through allocation of seats between
representatives of the two communities. The excessive protection of minorities
leads to government by coalition. The spoils of power are distributed between an
unchanging cast of characters who are installed in office for their party
loyalty and not for competence and who almost never face removal for their
failures. The flip side of incompetence is institutionalized corruption.
Meanwhile, there is little coherence to government policies, which are instead a
patchwork, with bits thrown off here and there as sops to the smaller factions.
Media Criticism
Immediately after the March 22 attacks, Belgian media were full of reports about
the tragic failures of policing and of the court system that led to the
existence of a flourishing nest of terrorists in the very center of Brussels.
These jihadists had been masterminding attacks going back to the Madrid train
bombing a decade ago and were behind the November 2015 rampage of murder in
Paris before they planned the assaults in Brussels in the name of the Islamic
State.
Logically, the key ministers of Justice and Interior should have paid a price
for the dereliction of their departments and personally for not heeding warnings
coming from abroad well ahead of the terror attacks.
Indeed, they offered to
resign, but they were retained at the behest of Prime Minister Charles Michel,
who insisted that the team should stick together to face the challenge before
the nation resulting from their and their departments’ incompetence.
For those not in the know, suffice it to say that logic was never Charles
Michel’s strong point; he was designated PM as a reward for his bilingualism and
for being the son and heir to decades-long Reform Party leadership.
Ultimately another minister was forced out of office, Jacqueline Galant, who had
the portfolio of Mobility (transport). No one could save her from her own
impudent lies that the public and the press exposed. Galant had denied ever
reading a European report from 2015 heavily critical of security arrangements at
Belgian airports.
But her ouster came against the will of the “team” in power, which was reluctant
to part with her for reasons of gender politics, Galant being the only female in
the cabinet. Then there was also the little matter of finding a replacement that
would not alter the balance between right and left, between French and Dutch.
And so it goes in the Kingdom of Belgium. But inevitably there are issues
affecting the greater world where the game playing and incompetence must stop. A
major international airport is one such case.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East
West Accord.
His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in
August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
Russia Rises From the Mat
The U.S. government doesn’t want to admit that its heady “unipolar” days are
over with Russia no longer the doormat of the 1990s, but Washington’s arrogance
risks war, even nuclear annihilation, explains Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
th
In Moscow, the preparations for the May 9
Victory Day parade began in the
middle of the final week of April. Heavy equipment including mobile ICBM
carriers and the latest battle tanks, together with troop formations passing
through Red Square, carry on the long tradition established in Soviet times of
demonstrating the nation’s military might on this day for televised
dissemination across the entire expanse of Eurasia.
Meanwhile, preparations have also been made for this year’s edition of another
Victory Day parade that began just one year ago but is likely to become a still
more enduring tradition, the so-called March of the Immortal Regiment in which
ordinary citizens carry photographs of their own family heroes from WWII:
fathers, grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers who fought on the front or
worked at defense positions behind the lines.
These processions, which are held in towns across Russia, tap into a nationwide
wellspring of emotion and pay tribute to the fact that every family in the
country lost members to the WWII war effort. Every one.
This extraordinary sense of loss from war is something that sets Russian
consciousness apart from American consciousness and at times makes it difficult
to recall that we were allies in that epochal war. The 40 years of Cold War
alienation between us is another factor that dims what we once achieved
together. For these reasons, President Vladimir Putin’s evocation of our WWII
alliance when he spoke before the United Nations General Assembly meeting in
September 2015 and called upon the United States to link arms with Russia and
head up a multinational effort to defeat the Islamic State and vanquish
terrorism fell on deaf ears in the U.S.
Tense Relations
The past several years have not been easy for relations between our countries.
And yet, if looked at with some detachment, the apple of contention between us
can and should become the very source of our future mutual understanding and
cooperation in addressing constructively the world’s many problems. Both nations
in their own way take pride in their independent spirit and creative
contributions to peace and generalized prosperity. Both nations are great powers
that determine the world’s destiny. Both are “hammers,” not “nails.” For that
very reason we are often at odds.
On the U.S. side, triumphalism over its self-declared “victory” in the Cold War
in 1989, gloating over the economic and social collapse of the Russian
Federation in the 1990s, and ambition to secure Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a
world safe for democracy through interventions abroad intended to hasten the
seemingly inevitable course of history all heightened the tensions in RussianAmerican relations way beyond where they would naturally have been from the
inherent competitiveness of two great powers.
Until the eye-opening display of Russian military gear and capability beginning
with the bloodless reunification with Crimea of spring 2014 and running through
the resoundingly successful five-month Russian air campaign in Syria starting in
October 2015,
American behavior towards Russia in the new millennium had been conditioned by a
now seriously outdated view of its potential adversary as a failing state
lacking in economic might and in social coherence to withstand serious pressure
from outside, enjoying unjustified international rights inherited from its
Soviet past and having as its only military props an aging strategic nuclear
force that would be practically unusable if push came to shove because that
would spell national suicide.
The reality today is what President Boris Yeltsin foretold to Bill Clinton when
Russia was in a supine position, protesting lamely against American intervention
in Russia’s old client state, Serbia: “think again, because Russia will be
back.”
Indeed, under Vladimir Putin Russia has come back as great powers usually do. It
may be smaller than the USSR, but it is vastly more fit, with a mixed
market/directed economy that is far more agile and better managed, with
conventional forces that approach and in certain domains exceed Western
standards. Russia’s living standards are higher and it possesses strong reserves
of patriotism to support a shared sense of its place in the world. Russia is now
a formidable and arguably unbeatable foe if confrontation is where some U.S.
policymakers want relations to go.
There are those Americans who look back with nostalgia to what they perceive as
Ronald Reagan’s negotiations with Moscow “from a position of strength.” U.S.
Ambassador to Russia at the time, Jack Matlock, has made it clear that the U.S.
carefully avoided any appearance of abusing its relative advantage when dealing
with Mikhail Gorbachev to reach a dramatic relaxation of tensions through
dismantling the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire on mutually agreed terms.
But even if we assume that the “position of strength” was an invisible driver of
those talks, in conditions of today’s revitalized Russia such an approach is
only bringing us tit-for-tat escalation of military and political posturing.
Nuclear War Risks
In such a climate of heightening tensions, the law of averages tells us that if
something can go amiss it will, and there is presently too little shared trust
to ensure that faulty launch warnings or some similar technical or human errors
will not lead to irrevocable counter-responses, ending civilization on Earth as
we know it.
Statesmanship and common sense dictate that the United States and Russia seek
ways to engage with one another in permanent rather than episodic manner, and
that we deal with each other in a spirit of equality and mutual respect.
That is the essence of foreign policy “realism” – the judicious use of American
power – which has been injected into the ongoing presidential campaign as a
guiding principle by Republican candidate Donald Trump. He has no proprietary
rights over it, and it would be a good thing if congressional candidates gave it
a test drive as well because it is the only approach to international affairs
that can save us from needless confrontation and risk of nuclear war, which is
where we find ourselves today.
Only when this critical threat has been resolved can we move on to the
unquestionable benefits of constructive programs of cooperation between Russia
and the United States in peace-keeping and support for political processes in
the world’s hot spots, in investment and trade, in culture and education, in
sports, in science and technology, and in the many other forms of interaction at
the level of ordinary citizens which characterized these relations in happier
times.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East
West Accord Ltd. His most recent book Does Russia Have a Future? was published
in August 2015.
© Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
No Dissent from Anti-Russian Propaganda
The European Union prides itself on its commitment to free expression, except
apparently when a documentarian diverges from the official line bashing Russia.
Then silencing dissent becomes the “responsible” response, as Gilbert Doctorow
explains.
By Gilbert Doctorow
The West’s propaganda campaign against Russia took an unusual turn this week as
a new documentary challenging the Western narrative of how Kremlin critic Sergei
Magnitsky died in 2009 was blocked from being shown at the European Parliament
in Brussels, Belgium.
The last-minute shutting down of the documentary, “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the
Scenes,” was engineered by lawyers for William Browder, the influential chairman
of the investment fund Hermitage Capital and an associate of Magnitsky.
Based in London, Browder has been an unrelenting crusader for imposing sanctions
on Russian officials allegedly connected to Magnitsky’s death in prison. Browder
successfully pushed for the U.S. Congress to approve the 2012 Magnitsky Act and
has lobbied the European Parliament to pass a similarly punitive measure.
On Wednesday, Browder pulled off a stunning show of force by arranging the
cancellation of “The Magnitsky Act” documentary just minutes before invitees
entered the auditorium at the parliament building for the showing.
Instead of watching and then discussing the film, the few of us who
attended were drawn precisely to the power of the absent puppet master, Bill
Browder, as Andrei Nekrasov, the film’s director, explained the reasons for his
rare dissent against the Magnitsky narrative that Browder has peddled for years.
St. Petersburg-based film director Nekrasov said he had originally intended to
produce a documentary largely supportive of Browder’s narrative but a eureka
moment led him to change the message of his film midway through production into
what ultimately became a scathing critique of Browder and a serious critique of
the entire concept of applying personal sanctions against alleged human rights
abusers without due process, as was the case in the compilation of the so-called
“Magnitsky List” of Russians blamed for Magnitsky’s death.
A Praised Filmmaker
Nekrasov is an internationally recognized artist who has won prizes for dramas,
documentaries and arts programs in Germany and France with his work presented at
festivals around the world. Fluent in German, French and English in addition to
his native Russian, Nekrasov took parts of his professional education in France
and the U.K.
In his home country, Nekrasov has a reputation as a nonconformist and his
reporting has taken on Russian authorities in the past, including a film arguing
that the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were organized by the KGB successor
organization (FSB) to justify the second war in Chechnya that brought Vladimir
Putin to power.
In other words, Nekrasov has not been a friend of the Kremlin, let alone a
“stooge” of the Putin regime. Indeed, he said that before taking the assignment
to do a film about Magnitsky for the ARTE television channel, he had friendly
relations with Browder, whom he had met a number of times in different settings.
Nekrasov said he fully believed in Browder’s narrative of the murder of
Magnitsky as a way to silence his investigation into the theft of Hermitage
Capital’s assets by crooked Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs officials.
Nekrasov said his change of heart came in the middle of shooting the film when
Browder’s people handed him a copy of the affidavit signed by Magnitsky that was
said to have led to his murder in detention. The introduction to the document
laid out precisely that argument of Russian wrongdoing, but the content, the
actual text signed by Magnitsky, said nothing whatever about his investigating
the theft of $230 million and made no charges whatsoever against Ministry of
Internal Affairs officers.
That glaring discrepancy prompted Nekrasov to gather more and more evidence,
leading ultimately to his conclusion that the Magnitsky case was a sham
fabricated by Browder, that there was no murder, that Magnitsky’s death was a
case of negligence and nothing more sinister, the sort of thing that happens
quite routinely in U.S. and other prisons around the world, however sad that may
be.
Moreover, this discovery set Nekrasov’s mind to thinking about how and why what
was now obvious to him was hidden to all others through whose hands the facts,
factoids and allegations of the Magnitsky affair had passed over the past seven
years. His inescapable conclusion was the explanation was to be found only in
blind anti-Russian prejudice, the denigration not only of the country’s leader
but of its entire political establishment if not the nation as a whole.
Nekrasov began to wonder how anyone could accept as reasonable the assumption
that in that country of 146 million people there was not a single honest or
professionally competent judge, not a single policeman who was not a crook.
Dangerous Thought
Nekrasov expressed concern for his own future welfare after the negative
publicity arising from his discovery of unpleasant truths about the Magnitsky
affair, especially in Russia where he fears that pro-Browder people will
consider his documentary a betrayal.
Regarding why the film’s screening was canceled on Wednesday night, Finnish
parliamentarian Heidi Hautala, the sponsor of the event (and reportedly
Nekrasov’s girlfriend), said it was not an action imposed by the President of
the European Parliament, though he surely took a dim view of allowing this
dissenting viewpoint to be shown in an auditorium at the parliament.
Nekrasov cited two last-minute objections. One was from a German politician whom
he interviewed for the film, MEP Marieluise Beck, a leading member of the Greens
in the Bundestag, the party allied to the European Parliament bloc from which
Hautala, the organizer of the screening, comes.
In the interview segment which Beck now demanded be excised, she demonstrated,
in Nekrasov’s view, exactly what was wrong with the position held by Browder’s
defenders in Europe.
When he confronted her with the discrepancies, with the reasons he had changed
his view of the Magnitsky affair, Beck insouciantly replied that “this is just
details” about which she did not care and that the overriding fact remained the
same: that Magnitsky died in prison.
However, Nekrasov said the decisive objection that led to the cancellation was
from the director of the German national public broadcaster ZDF, a major sponsor
of the film who claimed that Browder’s lawyers threatened to sue for libel if
the film were shown and would “ruin the broadcaster financially.” Given the
public standing of ZDF, that threat appears to have been no more than bluster,
however it sufficed for the ZDF management to cave in.
Nekrasov expressed his surprise and alarm that Browder had the money and the
contacts to so intimidate the backers of the film. But Nekrasov’s own position
vis-à-vis Browder is now inescapably one of self-defense rather than slinking
away. Browder has publicly claimed that the film is flawed by inadmissible
fabrications and falsifications. It is Nekrasov’s stated intent to take Browder
to court for defamation.
But it’s now unclear whether “The Magnitsky Case: Behind the Scenes” will be
aired on ARTE, the European cultural channel, as scheduled on May 3 given the
vast resources Browder has mobilized to prevent its showing.
Political Courage
Faced with objections from the Green bloc, Hautala showed political courage in
sponsoring the documentary. She is known for her strong interest in defending
human rights globally, including in Russia, and mentioned in her opening remarks
that she was the first MEP to call for sanctions against Russia over the death
in detention of Sergei Magnitsky and to this day she favors targeted sanctions
against human rights violators.
But she has set four operating principles for sanctions to be workable, all of
which come down to adhering to the rule of law: the charges must be verifiable,
proving the connection of the persons to the violation; they must be
transparent, so that everyone can judge the grounds; they must provide access to
remedy for the targeted persons; and they must contain a sunset clause or
duration period for possible reevaluation of the grounds.
Hautala also mentioned that she is one of 17 MEPs on Russia’s retaliatory “black
list” of 89 European politicians and influential persons, though she complains
that she has never received from Russian authorities the individual
justifications on why she is on the list and has no access to a remedy to appeal
that arbitrary decision.
Hautala displayed even more courage by admitting to the auditorium several
prominent critics of the Browder/Magnitsky story, including Pavel Karpov, one of
the two Ministry of Interior officers who were accused by Browder of overseeing
the torture and murder of Magnitsky and of doing so to cover up their theft of
$230 million in assets from his Hermitage Capital operation in Moscow which
Magnitsky was said to have been investigating.
Karpov used the opportunity to explain his challenge to these allegations as
unsubstantiated and how his bringing of defamation charges against Browder in
London courts never was heard.
Also, Natalya Veselnitskaya, a Moscow lawyer, was given the floor to issue a
lengthy denunciation of Browder for his crimes of egregious tax evasion that
were the apparent motive for his creating the Magnitsky controversy.
Veselnitskaya is the attorney of Denis Katsyv, the son of a Vice President of
Russian Railways whose assets in the U.S. were frozen under the Magnitsky Act
because of allegations that he had somehow enjoyed a share of the purloined
Hermitage Capital money.
Hautala also allowed in Russian electronic and print media journalists,
including, most significantly, Yevgeni Popov, the Vesti television presenter and
director of a hard-hitting and controversial documentary entitled The Browder
Effect, which was aired on the flagship Pervy kanal state channel on April 13.
Popov flew in for the European Parliament event and later his interview with
Nekrasov on the streets of Brussels was part of a featured news item on the
cancellation of the film’s screening.
Still, the lengths to which Browder seems prepared to go suggests that the
dominant Western narrative of the Magnitsky affair is coming under pressure and
that there is growing skepticism even in the West over whether the case is as
simple as evil Russian agents murdering a noble investigator.
There finally is some suspicion that perhaps the controversy was manufactured,
in part, to cover up possible criminal activity by Browder and to fend off
Russian demands for his extradition to face pending prosecution.
Another open question is whether a second allegation against Browder in Popov’s
documentary can be made to stick: namely that William Browder was a contractor
working with/for British intelligence (MI6) and the CIA from 1996 and that since
2006 has been controlling Russia’s non-systemic opposition leader Alexei Navalny
on a mission to destabilize the Russian government and prepare the way for
regime change.
Serious questions, however, have been raised about the authenticity of some of
Popov’s documents and whether the accusations against Navalny have any merit.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East
West Accord.
His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in
August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
Putin Deftly Answers Russia’s Questions
Russian President Putin appeared on top of his game as he fielded questions from
across Russia in his annual Q&A event which focused on concerns about the
economy, as Gilbert Doctorow describes.
By Gilbert Doctorow
Anyone watching Russian state television in the past weeks would have been
keenly aware that Thursday was D-day, the day of the annual marathon Q&A session
of President Vladimir Putin with the nation. Russians were advised not only how
to dial in on the usual land lines, but how to direct their video calls, send
SMS or MMS, write in by email.
The only instructions missing were for acquiring seats in the auditorium which
were evidently allocated by the presidential administration following its own
notion of distribution by profession and industrial sector. Millions of
questions and opinions were sent in ahead of the show. The operators during the
show indicated that there were tens of thousands of live attempts to get a word
to the President as he spoke.
Thursday’s show was clocked at something more than three hours. A year ago it
was well over four hours. But the difference then and now went well outside any
question of volumes of questions or time spent with Vladimir Putin on air. The
whole exercise was far better choreographed and more impressive technically.
Just as Putin has recently taken to using teleprompters from time to time to
achieve a more polished effect, so the Q&A today was more corporate in format
and finish than in preceding years. Corporate means firstly no surprises.
The audience in the auditorium was better dressed and better behaved than in
years past. We had no loudmouths like Ksenia Sobchak a couple of years ago using
their invitations to sound off against the Putin regime.
The one easily identifiable critic from a Moscow radio station who was given the
microphone was restrained and posed his question in rather oblique language: in
plain text he was asking about the branding of the opposition as traitors by
Chechnya boss Ramzan Kadyrov. And he nodded assent, when Vladimir Putin
diplomatically reminded him of where Kadyrov came from, what his life path had
been, and urged that his verbal outbursts not be given undue weight.
The well-behaved and well-turned out audience this time held no banners and wore
no funny hats to draw the President’s attention to the outlying regions from
which they had come for this event. Instead, television crews were prepositioned
in Tomsk, on the Kerch bridge construction site of the Crimea, on Sakhalin, and
one or two other remote sites. The provincials were well-vetted and stuck to
business-like questions, instead of the traditional appeals to the President to
visit them and share some dumplings over lunch.
Putin was visibly relaxed, though as always he was exceedingly well prepared
with statistics on the tip of his tongue, able to answer questions about every
imaginable aspect of government policy, economic forecasts, the international
political situation. At the same time, his sense of humor and amusing use of
Russian folk terms livened up what could otherwise be a dull session.
One outstanding example was his answer to a query from a nine-year-old as to
whether he had been forced to eat hot cereal (kasha) as a child and whether his
view of kasha had changed over time. He explained that “no” he had never been
forced to do anything against his wishes as a child, that he always had liked
kasha and had eaten it for breakfast today. Then he closed this out with the
remark that, yes, his view of kasha had changed with the years, for the better:
“As you get older and have fewer teeth, you enjoy kasha all the more.”
With similar aplomb Putin responded to a question about the cellist Sergei
Roldugin, a friend whose name came up in Western media coverage of Russians
having offshore accounts per the Panama Papers. In the past week, Putin directly
defended Roldugin against harsh innuendo from foreign critics of Russia.
Then Russian state television in its weekly wrap-up broadcast on Sunday
evening, Vesti nedeli, broadcast a feature interview with Roldugin to show what
Roldugin’s “business activities” on- and off-shore have been all about: funding
the purchase of rare Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century violins, cellos
and other instruments abroad and making them available to young Russian
virtuosos.
In his Q&A remarks, Putin on Thursday took a lighter tone and retold how a
journalist’s account of a recent concert appearance of Roldugin mentioned that
the maestro was playing some “second-hand” instrument, his slang term generally
identified with flea markets.
Domestic Concerns
The questions for the most part were about domestic issues like the cost of
living generally and inflation in food products in particular ever since the
imposition of the Russian embargo in response to Western sanctions. Other
typical subjects were the scarcity of cheap generic Russian drugs in pharmacies
and the problem of monthly housing unit management costs that have far outpaced
family income.
On the economic front Putin was cautiously optimistic, predicting a small 0.3
percent contraction this year and resumed growth from early 2017. This was the
one nugget that The Financial Times has just seized upon to headline its
coverage of the Q&A, thin pickings though it may be. (Western economic estimates
predict a greater drop in Russia’s GNP in 2016 and are less bullish about 2017.)
One could just as easily have featured Putin’s assurances to a Russian dairy
farmer concerned over how he could repay the loans he has taken to expand
production if the sanctions end and the Russian counter-sanctions are dropped,
as WTO rules require. Said Putin, I don’t think the sanctions are likely to be
lifted any time soon, so don’t worry.
International affairs occupied a very small part of the Q&A session, and the
very few controversial questions posed were deftly and diplomatically dispatched
by the President. Thus, he dodged completely the request to identify which
American presidential candidate, Clinton or Trump, was less threatening to
Russia.
Instead, Putin chose to highlight the positive and to reiterate that Russia is
ready to cooperate with all who treat it with respect and equality. And he
stressed that in some areas even today Russia and the United States cooperate
constructively, in particular on non-proliferation and the Iran nuclear issue.
Though the Q&A session this year was more corporate in style, the distinctive
nature of the event that dominated past editions and which always made it hard
for Westerners to comprehend, was not entirely absent. That essence is the
traditional petition of the people to the Tsar for redress of abuses by local
potentates, whether corrupt regional officials or thieving company bosses.
Thus, we heard from one auto industry worker in the Urals that he and his
comrades receive their salaries three months in arrears and only
partially. Another petitioner asked whether the governor in his Siberian region
now under criminal investigation would be given the prison term he deserves for
his thievery. And the lady on the video line from Omsk who opened the Q&A spoke
for a vast number of write-and call-ins who complained about the deplorable
state of the roads now that the snow has melted and the potholes were simply
shocking to see. If any subject has come down through the ages in Russia, it is
surely roads.
Vladimir Putin has often been called a modern-day Tsar in Western media in what
is meant to be a pejorative label for an authoritarian ruler. To the extent the
Q&A raises the image of traditional Russian petitions and denunciations to the
sovereign, we have to ask how Vladimir Putin, the elected President of Russia
and head of state,
measures up.
In a remarkable book entitled The End of
Tsarist Russia, the widely respected
British historian Dominic Lieven remarks that it was almost impossible for any
man to live up to the expectations that the Russian people had of their Tsar. He
said this to exculpate Nicholas II, whom history has judged very harshly.
In this context, I would note that if Putin is to be seen as a Tsar, his
performance in the Q&A, just as his daily performance of his duties, day-in-andday out, deserves the highest grades for intelligence, diligence, reserve,
management skills and the rest. If he is a Tsar, a Tsar of this quality comes
along once in 300 years.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West
Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to
[email protected]. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
Behind Ukraine’s Leadership Shake-up
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s stepping down is a mostly cosmetic move in
response to the Dutch rejecting the E.U.’s association agreement with Ukraine, a
country still locked in political dysfunction, says Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
The significance of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s resignation
speech has been given more weight by Western media than it merits. After all, he
and President Petro Poroshenko were on the same side of the political equation
even as they arm-wrestled for much of the last two years for greater influence
and power. On the other side of the equation are the Pravy Sektor and fellow
radical nationalist forces of the war party.
To those who may argue that notwithstanding his technocratic image as an
economic reformer Yatsenyuk himself has been a fervent nationalist backing the
extreme policies directed against Russia, I respond with another viewpoint that
strips things back to essentials: Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko are two stiffs in
knit suits, politicians both.
On the other side are the guys carrying guns who were the force behind the
Maidan uprising and who are effectively controlling the front lines in Donbas
and the border with Crimea. They represent the violence and threat of violence
that remains unchanged by the departure of Yatsenyuk. And standing behind
Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko are the untamable oligarchs.
It is these forces behind the throne that have made it impossible for Poroshenko
to put through the various legal and constitutional changes necessary to
implement the political side of the Minsk-2 accords. Therefore, after
Yatsenyuk’s departure, Ukraine will remain at war with no reforms of substance
possible nor any real crackdown on corruption thinkable.
This means the likely continued withholding of desperately needed International
Monetary Fund money — and the leaders of Western Europe, at least those not
ideologically committed to Russia-bashing, distancing themselves further from
Ukraine. The question becomes how long Ukraine can defy the economic laws of
gravity before descending into chaos.
As for the timing of Yatsenyuk’s departure, which has been hanging in the air
since Poroshenko provoked a vote of confidence to oust him in February, the
answer lies in to the April 6 Dutch referendum, which made it essential to offer
up a scapegoat and show that Ukrainians intend to get their house in order.
The Dutch referendum was important not only because the majority of those going
to the polls voted no to ratification of the European Union’s Association
Agreement with Ukraine but also because the rejection came in the face of
European leaders urging approval or at least hoping to tamp down the turnout so
it would fall below the 30 percent quorum requirement.
Though much ink has been spilled by pundits since April 6 playing down the
significance of the Dutch referendum – given that 80 percent of the Association
Agreement has already been implemented on a provisional basis – a thorough legal
analysis presented by the Centre for European Policy Studies, a leading Brussels
think tank, made it clear that the referendum nonetheless does have significant
consequences.
The economic part of the Agreement was within the power of the European
Commission and the European Parliament. That has indeed been implemented and is
not immediately affected by the Dutch referendum. However, in practice it has
been a one-way agreement so far, only facilitating European exports to Ukraine
while the counter flow, which fell by one-third in 2015, is subject to
negotiations to avoid what would, in effect, be dumping of Ukrainian
agricultural commodities on the European market at low prices with very
destructive results if unchecked.
Meanwhile, the political and military chapters of the Association Agreement,
which require ratification by all 28 Member States of the E.U., are effectively
now a dead letter. And it was precisely these little known texts calling for
close coordination of defense and foreign policies between the E.U. and Ukraine
that sent up red flags for Russia watchers. This would have been the first step
toward full NATO membership.
Moreover, while spokesmen for the European Commission and Parliament say they
intend to proceed with implementation of a visa-free regime for Ukraine, which
is technically within their rights, it is hard to see how this can be done
without pouring oil on the flames of discord within the E.U. at a time when the
Union is under great stress and may be coming undone.
It was precisely the nightmare of Ukrainian economic refugees making their way
to the streets of Amsterdam that fed the xenophobic movement of Geerd Wilders
and his “No” campaign in the referendum. The E.U.’s defiance of the Dutch vote
now would play directly into the hands of the Brexit movement in the U.K. by
proving the undemocratic, out-of-control nature of the E.U. institutions.
At the same time, the Ukrainian leadership must have been even more unnerved by
what its “friends” were saying to counter the possible “No” vote in
Holland. Just days before the referendum, European Commission President Jean-
Claude Juncker told reporters that Ukraine was not a candidate for E.U.
membership and would likely not be ready for membership in the coming 20 to 30
years. In political life, that means “never.” Similar words of contempt for
Ukraine came from the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
In this sense, the Dutch referendum was surely the trigger for the removal of
Yatsenyuk to show Europe and the world that Ukrainian leaders were trying to
consolidate their power in order to proceed with deep reforms. But
Kiev’s political leadership is not where the real power in the country lies.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West
Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to
[email protected]. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
Dutch Voters Reject Ukraine Deal
Dutch voters struck a blow against the E.U.’s Ukrainian association agreement –
and the incessant Russia-bashing that has surrounded it – creating hope for less
belligerence in Europe, writes Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
On this overcast Thursday morning in Brussels, the political capital of Europe,
rays of bright sunshine are breaking through from the east as the latest results
of vote counting in neighboring Netherlands suggest that Wednesday’s referendum
against the European Union’s Association Agreement with Ukraine won two out of
every three votes and passed the 30 percent participation requirement of all
eligible voters to be considered valid.
If those results are confirmed by the official results – to be released on April
12 – this referendum marks a resounding defeat for the Brussels-led conspiracy
to pursue Russia-bashing policies of sanctions and information warfare without
consulting public opinion at home.
To change metaphors and speak in terms of Dutch folklore, it is the first crack
in the dam that many of us have been waiting for, the opportunity for common
sense to prevail over the illogic, hubris and plain pigheadedness of those who
control the E.U. institutions in Brussels, and afar from Berlin and Washington.
While the referendum was formally just “advisory,” both the public statements of
parliamentarians and the acknowledgements of the Dutch government ahead of the
voting indicated that it will force a new vote in parliament on ratification and
likely send Prime Minister Mark Rutte to Brussels. hat in hand, requesting a
renegotiation of the Association Agreement.
As such, it may bring the E.U. foreign policy machinery to a shuddering halt and
open the illogic of all its policies towards its eastern borderlands over the
past several years to public scrutiny and, possibly, to revision.
However, whether this was the decisive moment when the E.U. is brought to its
senses or just the first of a series of knock-out blows directed at the
political correctness and group think that have been driving policy ever since
the coup d’etat in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, its importance cannot be
overstated.
We have been hearing for more than a year that the Russia-bashing policies – the
sanctions in particular – were opposed by a growing minority of E.U. member
states. Among the dissenters named at one point or other have been Italy,
Hungary and Slovakia. Then came Bavaria, within Germany, whose ministerpresident Horst Seehofer just months ago flouted the policies of Chancellor
Merkel and paid court to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. On
Wednesday, the president of Austria did the same.
And yet, despite all the fine words to reporters about how the sanctions violate
the basic economic interests of their countries and of Europe as a whole, none
of these statesmen broke ranks when the sanctions repeatedly came up for
renewal. The significance of Wednesday’s vote in The Netherlands was that this
time the people spoke, not their elected or appointed officials. This was a
consultation to remember.
In effect, the referendum played out at two levels. At the domestic level, it
was a power struggle between the mainstream centrist parties in The Netherlands
who stand for a “go with the flow” approach on E.U. decisions and decisionmaking, versus the Euroskeptic extremes on the left and especially on the right.
On the right, Geerd Wilders and his Freedom Party want to put a stick in the
gears of the E.U. machinery and halt the slow-motion, seemingly unstoppable move
towards greater union, indeed towards federalism that have gained momentum ever
since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. In that sense, the vote
foreshadows the campaign fight of the parliamentary elections that will take
place in The Netherlands in 2017.
At the same time, the referendum had a geopolitical dimension going way beyond
the spoils of office, as a proxy battle in The Netherlands between those who
favor a pro-U.S./pro-NATO approach versus those seeking improved relations with
Moscow.
In both dimensions, the particulars of the E.U.’s Association Agreement with
Ukraine that runs several hundred pages were not the real issue on the ballot.
All of which begs the question of what exactly Prime Minister Rutte will
eventually be asking the E.U. Commission to renegotiate.
The signs are multiplying that the E.U. consensus on foreign policy driven by
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is nearing collapse. Within Germany itself, her
detractors are becoming ever bolder. Earlier this week, the German newspapers
were carrying on their front pages news of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s
invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to visit him at his home
next week.
This move is seen as a direct rebuke to Merkel and her policy of open-arms to
refugees from Syria and the Middle East, a policy that Orban led a number of new
Member States in opposing.
The next big test for the European Union, and the next opportunity to deal a
severe blow to its complacent leadership in Brussels will be the Brexit
referendum in the U.K. at the end of June.
NB: the issues in the referendum were the featured topic in RT’s Cross Talk show
released on 6 April during which I expanded on these points and on the criminal
folly of EU policy on Ukraine:
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West
Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to
[email protected]. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016 [For a video discussion about
the Dutch referendum, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCAsC_dw8wY]
Explaining Belgium’s Vulnerabilities
Brussels is called the capital of Europe but it also the capital of an
ethnically and politically divided Belgium that has made it an easy target for
Islamic extremists, writes Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
In the immediate aftermath of the March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels, the
most watched television news stations in Europe, the BBC and Euronews, broadcast
extensive live coverage of the scenes of horror at the airport in Zaventem and
outside the Metro station near the European Institutions in central Brussels.
Then we were shown senior politicians, in particular the Belgian Prime Minister
and French President, delivering pious words on European solidarity in times of
crisis and their shared revulsion at the cowardly deadly acts just perpetrated
by jihadists for which responsibility was claimed by the Islamic State.
Next came coverage of the popular reaction to the terror acts, the lighting of
candles, leaving flowers and sharing messages of condolences at the Place de la
Bourse in downtown Brussels, all so reminiscent of the popular reaction that
followed terror attacks at a concert hall and on the streets of Paris on Nov.
13, 2015, and still earlier following the attack on the editorial offices of
Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. These maudlin exercises brought out the “human
interest”nature of events which the media could feed on hungrily.
Phase Two of media coverage stayed within the category of “human interest”but
moved on to the flow of information about the identities of the jihadists. We
learned about their personalities, their past whereabouts, and their
interconnections. The overriding approach was at the psychological level: trying
to explain to a confused and shocked public how someone unexceptional in their
midst, cleaning staff at the airport or a tram driver, as it turned out, could
fall under the influence of radical Islam and carry out kamizake attacks on
fellow civilians.
At this point, what some observers found to be a profound insight passed from
the pages of The New York Times to talking heads in Europe:
the fact that in
Brussels, as with other infamous recent acts of terrorism on two continents, the
actors were mostly brothers, bound we are told, by unbreakable familial bonds
that made it so hard for police agents to enter their conspiracies and thwart
their plans.
The psychological approach to terror suspects clearly sells newspapers and
magazines. Of course, it can be done by journalists of greater or lesser
professionalism. One highly professional essay of this kind appeared in The New
Yorker magazine back in June 2015. It is relevant to mention here because it was
devoted precisely to the story of Belgian jihadists: “Journey to Jihad” by Ben
Taub.
I do not deny that this delving into personal motivation of the perpetrators of
evil is a valid dimension to the news, even if it smacks of voyeurism. But it is
only one dimension to the complex problem we face in these attacks, and it
carries an important flaw. Reading these personal details of criminals, society
does not hold up a mirror to itself. Without introspection and seeking faults in
ourselves, in acts committed or omitted, we cannot devise ways to thwart the
phenomenon of terror, which definitely can be controlled or rooted out by
effective police measures if other dimensions are considered.
These other dimensions are sociological, especially socio-economic and sociopolitical. In this essay, my primary focus will be on how they play out in
Belgium because this is where the latest attacks occurred within the specific
context of Belgian society and its political structures. Moreover, the whole
question of domestic security remains at the level of the sovereign states
everywhere on the Continent.
For these reasons, the tendency of many global commentators on the events this
week to speak of it as a European Union event resulting from E.U. practices is
both incorrect and unhelpful. The fact that Brussels is the capital of Europe is
only slightly relevant. The jihadists attacked here because this is where they
lived, this is where their views were shaped, and because they understood
perfectly that the kingdom of Belgium was an easy touch.
Intelligence Failure
On Day Three following the terror attacks,
the Belgian common front of lighting
candles, delivering pious speeches and preaching national solidarity in the face
of the terrorist threat finally cracked.
This was touched off by harsh criticisms of the Belgian authorities from outside
the country. Although Israelis and others weighed in, the most destructive salvo
was launched by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said one of the
suicide bombers had been deported from Turkey to Belgium (actually to The
Netherlands) a year ago for terrorist activities about which the Belgian
authorities were warned but took no action. Erdogan called the Belgians
incompetent to their faces.
This blackening of their names forced Belgian politicians to defend themselves
publicly to the press and put the blame on their domestic political opponents,
all of which cuts in a very interesting pattern in a kingdom which has a Left of
center and a Right of center that lead coalitions only in combination with the
gradations of opinion on either side thanks to proportional representation.
And the whole set of parties is multiplied by two because the political parties
do not cross the North-South language divide between Dutch speakers and French
speakers respectively. We will go into these mutual recriminations in a moment,
to see what failures in Belgian policies and personalities the actors chose to
highlight and what they either did not see or preferred not to talk about.
But first, I would like to mention one additional outside stimulus to debate in
Belgium that drew attention of the leading French daily newspaper, Le Soir: an
analytical article published in Foreign Affairs magazine on March 24 by
researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington who allege a particular
susceptibility to radical jihadism in French-speaking countries with French
political culture that also happen to have a high degree of urbanization and a
high level of youth unemployment, such as the Molenbeek district of Brussels,
the home grounds of the March 22 attackers and also of the Paris attacks. See
William McCants and Christopher Meserole, “The French Connection: Explaining
Sunni Militancy Around the World.”
This article infuriated Belgian journalists, who quoted the rebuttal offered by
the French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud. His most notable argument was
a reminder that “Belgium is 45% French speaking. Its political culture is
appreciably different from that of France.”
On the one hand, we must congratulate McCants and Meserole for approaching the
question of the March 22 terrorist attacks from a sociological viewpoint and
seeking explanations that can potentially guide political changes. On the other
hand, the complaint of the French ambassador goes to the weakness of their
analytic toolkit, which the authors themselves tell us amounts to numbercrunching to arrive at causality.
Number-crunching in this way is not a substitute for area knowledge, though
regrettably throughout
American studies of International Relations, that is
precisely what has taken the upper hand over the last decade or more. Study of
history, language, culture have gone to the wall to make way for the universally
applicable quantitative analysis that NGOs, banks and international institutions
generally expect from their recruits.
In this instance, it seems the authors are blind to the language divide in
Belgium. They also appear to ignore the national backgrounds and historical
baggage of the various Sunni minority populations in Belgium and France or how
this compares with the background of Sunni populations in neighboring Germany,
for example.
Different Backgrounds
In point of fact, the Sunni Muslim residents in France have been predominantly
Algerian, whose feelings towards their French neighbors carry collective memory
of colonization and of a long and bitter war of liberation that led to
independence. Algerians are viewed in Belgium as aggressive, potentially violent
and spongers on the French welfare state.
Sunni Muslims living in Belgium have been Moroccans in the majority. The Kingdom
of Morocco was never colonized and Moroccan immigrants here have no historical
complexes about the country of their residence and they are seen as
enterprising. But their settlement is almost exclusively in the French-speaking
regions of Wallonia and Brussels, where they share a common language, not in the
Flemish north.
Indeed, their arrival in Belgium has been resented by the Flemish for distorting
the linguistic balance in the country in favor of French speakers. To be sure,
Flanders has its own substantial Sunni Muslim minority, but they are largely
Turks, whose relations with the Flemish majority are rather like those of the
Turks in Germany. Turks had a special relationship with Germany going back to
before the fall of the Ottoman Empire and, by extension, do well in a territory
(Flanders) that is within the family of Germanic languages.
The mutual recriminations among Belgian politicians over the alleged laxness and
incompetence at the federal ministerial level that allowed the murderous March
22 bombings to take place began with the acknowledgement by the two most exposed
officials, Minister of Justice Koen Geens and Deputy Prime Minister holding the
portfolio of Internal Affairs and Security Jan Jambon, that cues may have been
missed. They offered to resign but this was refused by Prime Minister Charles
Michel, who invoked the need for his team to stick together in the midst of the
crisis.
But the rest of the political establishment was not so forgiving. Both ministers
are politically on the Right and came to office as defenders of law and order.
Thus, they were fair game for the Socialist opposition. Moreover, both are
Flemish, and one, Jambon, is a leading figure in the Flemish separatist or
independence party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA).
A somewhat odious personality in the view of the Francophone parliamentarians
due not only to his aspiration for tearing the country apart but also for his
scandalous expressions of sympathy for war-time collaboration with Nazi Germany,
Jambon happens to be a political hack with no evident experience or skills to
hold down the demanding position of Minister of the Interior and State Security.
In this respect, he was even less prepared for his responsibilities than the
Police Chief of Cologne, a German political hack, at the time of the scandalous
rampage of Muslims including refugees outside the Cologne main station on New
Year’s Eve. But then again, in fairness to Jambon, he is not the only Belgian
minister holding a portfolio for which he has no claim other than party loyalty.
Here we have the key issue that none of the politicians has so far named but
which distinguishes the Belgian political culture: power-sharing.
Power-sharing is not just the result of proportional representation whittling
away single-party majorities and forcing coalitions. Power-sharing is the glue
that holds Belgium together given the mutual antipathy of the French-speaking
and Dutch-speaking halves of the country. It results in behind-closed-door
allocations of office and in endless rotation of the same handful of people
within successive cabinets led by prime ministers of different parties.
Lack of Democracy
Finally, it is a kind of institutionalized corruption concealed by democraticsounding principles that belie a distrust of the general population’s maturity.
This is Belgium’s dirty little secret.
With his protégé Jambon squirming under the spotlight, Belgium’s real power
broker, chairman of the N-VA and mayor of Antwerp Bart De Wever, went on the
offensive against the Socialists for wrong-headed tolerance of criminality and
for naïve encouragement of social diversity and multiculturalism.
Of Philippe Moureaux, the long-time burgomaster of the Molenbeek district known
for coddling the one-third of the population who are Muslim, two of whom he
brought into his council, De Wever asked accusingly “how can he dare show
himself in public now?”
De Wever also fulminated against Brussels for allowing native-born sons to
become radicalized killers, something which could never happen in Antwerp, in
his view. Given that the Belgian radical Salafist organization Sharia4Belgium
was founded in 2010 and recruited its members precisely in Antwerp, De Wever
would be advised to reconsider his smugness.
Power-sharing means you cannot “throw the bums out.”It also means that the
changing will of the majority is always frustrated, that the political
institutions cannot easily recalibrate to new circumstances, to new challenges,
such as the current threat from radicalized Islam.
Though mixité sociale has fallen out of fashion with the general public in the
past couple of years, political correctness of the political establishment has
not yet adjusted to the new facts. Similarly the system of justice has not moved
in any significant way from extreme defense of individual rights to a greater
weighting towards public security at the expense of deviant behavior of the few.
Put in simple English, the Belgium system of justice is a revolving door through
which several of the participants in this week’s terror attacks easily passed.
Possibilities of preventive detention of suspects in terrorism are not used. And
whole communities are no-go zones for the police. While Belgium, like most other
Continental states, has draconian laws on the books regarding registration of
residence going back to the Code Napoleon, they are not enforced.
In communes like Molenbeek, whole buildings are said to be occupied by
unregistered foreigners living in hostel-like conditions without proper
papers. All of this will have to change if the city and the country is to be
made safe from a repetition of what we have seen or worse.
Police actions are useless against terrorism in the face of community support
for the radicals. And this is precisely what we saw on television during the
police siege in Molenbeek on March 18 that ended in the capture of Europe’s most
wanted man, Salah Abdeslam. The cameraman providing the feed for the Euronews
live coverage turned his camera on a row of matronly Muslim women in traditional
jilbab dress waving their fists angrily at the cameras.
I have been told by some insiders at a Brussels television production unit that
these “accidental” images of community feelings enraged Euronews directors
because it could be prejudicial to public thinking about Muslims. Political
correctness dies very slowly.
Deep Alienation
The alienation of the Molenbeek Muslim population has to be examined in-depth.
But one can safely assume that it has roots in two factors, one of which was
named by the Brookings Institution experts: high youth unemployment. The other
is blowback for Belgium’s participation in every NATO and Western military
expedition in the Middle East and North Africa (Libya) since the start of the
new millennium.
Youth unemployment in Molenbeek is over 25 percent. The more shocking fact is
that this is not the result of some post-2008 crisis but a situation going back
at least two decades.
The still more shocking fact is that the same is true of
Brussels as a whole, not just the pockets of the Muslim residence.
Regardless of the ruling coalition of the day, Belgium and the Region of
Brussels-Capital have completely failed to attract jobs for working-class
citizens. At the same time, the authorities have been very successful creating
high-paying professional jobs in pharmaceuticals, in Information Technology and
Communication, in the European Institutions and NATO for people like themselves.
The participation of Belgium in the Western military interventions has generated
ill-will among its Muslim minority and so prepared fertile ground for
propagation of radical Islam. The foreign policy has represented a mindless
commitment to a philosophy of “go along and get along.”
In this way, one of the first acts of the newly installed Minister of Foreign
Affairs Didier Reynders was to commit six Belgian fighter jets to the campaign
that brought down and murdered Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Six jets! The military
value of this contribution was negligible, but the damage done to domestic peace
in Belgium was vast.
There can be no way to find dialogue with the Muslim community if its views on
these interventions are ignored. And, in the end, Belgium’s army is being
drained of resources to maintain order on the streets of Brussels.
At a minimum, the first conclusions from the events of the past week are that
Belgium must once again consider constitutional changes and revise its political
structure and culture to meet not only the new challenges of home-grown
terrorists but long festering problems. These festering problems come from the
paradoxical democracy deficit that results from very progressive, expertdesigned power-sharing solutions that presently frustrate the will of the
majority at every turn by excessively protecting the interests of minorities.
If power-sharing is the only way to prevent a permanent Flemish takeover of the
federal institutions, then Belgium must either break up into two states along
linguistic lines or it must become a confederal state each part of which
protects the rights of minorities to speak their native language at all
government instances, as is due under European conventions but is not honored in
Belgium today, where each territory has only one official state language.
At the same time, it must abandon the automatic right of linguistic minorities
to seats in governing institutions. The first part of this proposition, break-up
or confederalism, has been a basic plank of the Flemish nationalists. It is high
time that the French speakers understand it to be in their interests as well.
Secondly, proportional representation must be eliminated, because it denies
government the possibility of quick response to new challenges, to new
priorities and to new ways of thinking. The Belgians should adopt the AngloSaxon first-past-the-post method if they want to leave behind the wishy-washy
coalitions of these past decades that only breed corruption, undeserved
complacency in the ruling elite, and apathy in the general population.
Generalized apathy is not conducive to solving tough problems of security that
Belgium faces today.
Where will this end if the country does not begin to pay attention to its own
constitutional and political deficiencies? The outlook is not bright.
Terrorist Ambitions
The latest news reveals that the ambitions of the terrorists went way beyond the
apparently limited damage they achieved by their terror attacks at the airport
in Zaventem and the Metro near the European institutions, which netted 32 deaths
and 300 seriously wounded bystanders.
The attackers’ major objective was, and likely remains, Belgium’s nuclear
installations, as we learned from the murder on Thursday evening (reported only
on Saturday) of a guard at one of Belgium’s nuclear plants, whose electronic
pass was stolen. That comes on top of the news that one of the senior nuclear
researchers here was under jihadist surveillance cameras for some time.
The governments of The Netherlands and Germany have for some time been
protesting over the risks inherent in Belgium’s aged nuclear installations. The
threat of jihadist attacks on Belgian stations has given them a lot more to
worry about.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West
Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future?(August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to
[email protected]. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016
Trump’s Troubling Choice of Sessions
Donald Trump has named Alabama Sen. Sessions to lead his foreign policy team,
disappointing some “realists” who hoped Trump would turn his back on the neocondominated establishment, explains Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
I imagine many anti-war colleagues will choke over Donald Trump’s selection of
the junior senator from Alabama Jeff Sessions to head his foreign policy team.
Sessions’s past strong support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the prosecution
of the war that followed features prominently in his Wikipedia entry.
Surely, it is not heart-warming to read about Sessions’s rally in 2005 to
protest an anti-Iraq War rally the day before. There he described the other side
as committing the sin first highlighted by President Ronald Reagan’s
neoconservative United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1984 – “to blame
America first.”
Then there are the other, non-foreign policy positions of Sessions that will be
galling to all progressives. Ranked as one of the most conservative members of
Congress, his positions on civil rights, gay marriage, race relations,
immigration and abortion rights follow conservative orthodoxy. The list of his
domestic policy red flags goes on and on.
In any case, Sessions is not widely regarded as a foreign policy expert. Despite
his membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee, national security policy
is not his strong suit. He is known more for his experience as a former state
attorney general and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
By itself, the choice of Sessions is a seemingly sad commentary on Trump’s
campaign. And yet it clearly fit within Trump’s political calculations of
getting elected to the presidency. Picking Sessions came not long after Sessions
issued his endorsement of Trump, one of the first major figures in the
Republican establishment to do so. With his solid standing within the more
conservative wing of the party, Sessions is a valuable asset to protect Trump
against charges that he is not a real Republican, nor a real conservative.
Whether Trump really intends to take counsel from this new chief adviser on
foreign policy is another matter, a question of strategy and not electoral
tactics. In this sense, Trump may have been too clever by half.
As he draws together a foreign policy and security team, Trump’s choice of
Sessions – a lockstep Republican on national security as illustrated by his
staunch support of President George W. Bush’s Iraq War – may push aside
“realist” and “anti-interventionist” military and civilian experts who have been
left on the curb these past 20 years as the American foreign policy
establishment purged its ranks of heterogeneous opinions to become dominated by
a monolithic assemblage of warmongers.
A person who regularly communicates with me summarized the challenges facing
Trump in formulating foreign policy as follows:
“The key is fleshing out for Trump what his elliptical statements, not only
about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Russia, mean, and translating his
deal-making into a new non-militarist diplomacy — making big diplomatic deals
that will end the cold war and open other prospects, e.g., on nukes, etc. I
sense he is ready for this, but the military people Sessions will recruit have
contrary instincts and no regional knowledge. Trump does best tapping into the
real conservatives who are closer to Rand Paul and worship the Reagan of
1985-88. Even the retired Gen. [Martin] Dempsey [former chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff], based on what [investigative reporter Seymour] Hersh wrote,
might advise Trump.” (Hersh described Dempsey as resisting interventionist
pressure to engage in “regime change” in Syria and instead worked behind the
scenes with Russia to thwart gains by jihadist terror groups.)
The first task for a President Trump would be to take us back from the brink of
nuclear war with Russia. In the context of needless confrontations with Moscow,
which have produced a feverish atmosphere of mutual distrust, preemptive nuclear
strikes have become all too thinkable.
A potential Trump administration in January 2017 should arrive in office with
well-defined plans for resuming arms control talks that address directly
American concerns over Russian tactical nuclear weapons and Russian concerns
over America’s global missile defense system. Trump and his team should be ready
to discuss and to act on a desperate need for a new security architecture in
Europe that brings Russia in from the cold.
Only after these debts in arrears are resolved can we proceed in positive
territory to revising the rules of global governance and replacing rancor and
discord with concerted actions by all the big global players. This is the
foreign policy which the American public has backed in opinion poll after
opinion poll over the past 30 years. It is the policy which the establishment
elites have denied us for too long.
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West
Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is
available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For
donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to
[email protected]. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016