Showing posts with label Soviet Union 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soviet Union 2014. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
(RussiaTV) Post-Cold War West Poked Russian Bear With Stick But the Bear Swipes Back
Published on Mar 24, 2014
Crimea's secession has steered up a storm in the West, with flaming speeches being heard from politicians. However, there's little real action being taken - Why? What frightens the power players?
We ask these questions to David Speedie from the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs.
Crimea's secession has steered up a storm in the West, with flaming speeches being heard from politicians. However, there's little real action being taken - Why? What frightens the power players?
We ask these questions to David Speedie from the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs.
(Bloomberg) Larry Summers: Ukraine & US Sanctions
Published on Mar 24, 2014
March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Larry Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and former U.S. Treasury secretary, comments on the Ukraine crisis and U.S. sanctions on Russia. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)
March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Larry Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and former U.S. Treasury secretary, comments on the Ukraine crisis and U.S. sanctions on Russia. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)
CrossTalk: After Crimea - Who's on Right Side of History?
Published on Mar 24, 2014
How has the world changed with the advent of the most recent Ukraine crisis? How realistic is Russia's isolation by the West? And are we experiencing a new geopolitical paradigm shift? CrossTalking with Martin McCauley, Mark Sleboda and Christoph Hoerstel.
How has the world changed with the advent of the most recent Ukraine crisis? How realistic is Russia's isolation by the West? And are we experiencing a new geopolitical paradigm shift? CrossTalking with Martin McCauley, Mark Sleboda and Christoph Hoerstel.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
(NYT) Ross Douthat: Russia Without Illusions
Russia Without Illusions
March 22, 2014
Ross Douthat
SINCE the end of the Cold War, America’s policy toward Russia has been shaped by two dangerous illusions.
The first was the conceit that with the right incentives, eyes-to-soul presidential connections and diplomatic reset buttons, Russia could become what we think of, in our cheerfully solipsistic way, as a “normal country” — at peace with the basic architecture of an American-led world order, invested in international norms and institutions, content with its borders and focused primarily on its G.D.P. Not the old Russian bear, and not an “Upper Volta with rockets” basket case, but a stable, solid-enough global citizen — Poland with an Asian hinterland, Italy with nukes.
The second illusion was the idea that with the Cold War over, we could treat Russia’s near abroad as a Western sphere of influence in the making — with NATO expanding ever eastward, traditional Russian satellites swinging into our orbit, and Moscow isolated or acquiescent. As went the Baltic States, in this theory, so eventually would go Ukraine and Georgia, until everything west and south of Russia was one military alliance, and its western neighbors were all folded into the European Union as well.
On the surface, these ideas were in tension: One was internationalist and the other neoconservative; one sought partnership with Russia and the other to effectively encircle it. But there was also a deep congruity, insofar as both assumed that limitations on Western influence had fallen away, and a post-Cold War program could advance smoothly whether the Russians decided to get with it or not.
Now both ideas should be abandoned. After Crimea, as Anne Applebaum wrote last week, it’s clear that Putin’s Russia “is not a flawed Western power,” but “an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics.” It may not be America’s No. 1 geopolitical problem, as a certain former candidate for president suggested. (Don’t sleep on the Chinese.) But it is a geopolitical threat — a revisionist, norm-violating power — to a greater extent than any recent administration has been eager to accept.
But at the same time, after Crimea there should also be fewer illusions about the West’s ability to dictate outcomes in Russia’s near abroad. Twice in this era — in Georgia in 2008 and now in Ukraine — Russian troops have crossed alleged red lines in conflicts with countries that felt they had some sort of Western protection: Ukraine through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which supposedly guaranteed its territorial integrity, and Georgia because of our support for its potential entry into NATO. And in both cases the limits of Western power have been laid bare — the disorganization and disunity of “European” foreign policy, and the fact that even the most bellicose U.S. politicians aren’t ready to say that South Ossetia or Simferopol is worth the bones of a single American Marine.
For the rest, see:
(LA Times) Shaping Response to Russia a High-stakes Test for Obama
Shaping a response to Russia will be a high-stakes test for Obama
President Obama's trip will be a plunge into American leadership in Europe after years of shifting U.S. policy away from the Old World.
President Obama, at the Andrews Air Force Base golf course in Maryland, will visit Europe this week. (Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images / March 22, 2014)
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WASHINGTON — Planned as a springtime tour with a modest itinerary — affording time to chat with the pope, admire the Rembrandts and take in the Colosseum — President Obama's weeklong trip to Europe instead has become a high-stakes test of whether he can move the continent's leaders into a tougher response to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Obama will huddle Monday in Amsterdam with other members of the G-7, seeking a strategy against what many see as the most threatening European land grab since World War II. He will have to navigate disagreements among the European nations over how far to go, and the price they are willing to pay, to sanction Russia for seizing the peninsula from Ukraine.
And he will have to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is prepared to uphold its promises to defend them.
It's a retro role for the president, as well as for Western Europe, which has been snapped back into its pivotal place in global geopolitics. And it's not one that Obama — who has spent his presidency talking about shifting U.S. policy away from the Old World — is likely to have anticipated.
Some say he has not prepared for this challenge.
"It's going to require an enormous amount of American leadership in Europe, which we have not seen for the last five years," said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "We've got a lot of making up to do."
Much of Europe welcomed the election of Obama after the go-it-alone style of President George W. Bush. But many diplomats since have come to view the U.S. administration as dismissive and disengaged. And that was before a top American official was caught on tape several weeks ago, rudely brushing off the European Union's views on the growing unrest in Ukraine.
On Obama's itinerary Wednesday will be his first visit as president to Brussels, the seat of the 28-member European Union. The EU-U.S. summit there, following a meeting on nuclear security at The Hague earlier in the week, will be the first such get-together since 2011.
The president's role in strategizing with his European counterparts also is complicated by revelations last year of U.S. spying on European heads of state and of bulk collection of phone data. The scandal has touched a nerve, particularly in Germany.
For the rest, see:
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-obama-europe-20140323,0,5743042.story#axzz2wndrNjrU
And he will have to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is prepared to uphold its promises to defend them.
It's a retro role for the president, as well as for Western Europe, which has been snapped back into its pivotal place in global geopolitics. And it's not one that Obama — who has spent his presidency talking about shifting U.S. policy away from the Old World — is likely to have anticipated.
Some say he has not prepared for this challenge.
"It's going to require an enormous amount of American leadership in Europe, which we have not seen for the last five years," said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "We've got a lot of making up to do."
Much of Europe welcomed the election of Obama after the go-it-alone style of President George W. Bush. But many diplomats since have come to view the U.S. administration as dismissive and disengaged. And that was before a top American official was caught on tape several weeks ago, rudely brushing off the European Union's views on the growing unrest in Ukraine.
On Obama's itinerary Wednesday will be his first visit as president to Brussels, the seat of the 28-member European Union. The EU-U.S. summit there, following a meeting on nuclear security at The Hague earlier in the week, will be the first such get-together since 2011.
The president's role in strategizing with his European counterparts also is complicated by revelations last year of U.S. spying on European heads of state and of bulk collection of phone data. The scandal has touched a nerve, particularly in Germany.
For the rest, see:
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-obama-europe-20140323,0,5743042.story#axzz2wndrNjrU
(WashPo) NATO general warns of further Russian aggression
NATO general warns of further Russian aggression
U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, said Russia had assembled a large force on Ukraine’s eastern border that could pose a threat to Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region.
Video
A Russian armored vehicle attempts to enter Belbek Airbase in Crimea where Ukrainian forces are resisting handing over control.
Ukraine’s east is also considered under threat; Ukrainian officials have been warning for weeks that Russia is trying to provoke a conflict there, a charge Russia denies.
But Breedlove said Russian ambitions extend beyond Ukraine.
For the rest, see:
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