NATO Abandons Diplomacy, Says No Longer ‘At Peace’
By Bas Spliet | The Libertarian Institute | August 23, 2022
At the end of its annual summit in Madrid in late June, NATO adopted a new strategic concept. The guidance document is the eighth of its kind since the founding of the alliance in 1949. It radically breaks with the three previous post-Cold War security briefs, however, which observed that “the Euro-Atlantic area is at peace” because “the threat of a conventional attack against NATO territory is low.” In the eyes of NATO, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that calculus, claiming that the military organization can no longer discount the possibility of an assault on sovereign NATO states. Continuing the same cryptic language, the new strategic concept concludes that the Euro-Atlantic area now is “not at peace,” in spite of no NATO member being in a state of war with Russia.
Behind this word play, a more dangerous policy change has been codified in the document. Since the adoption of the Harmel Report in 1967, NATO has always officially included diplomacy in one form or another (with political dialogue and strategic partnership being interchangeable labels) as one of its “core” or “fundamental” tasks. The “NATO 2030” report from November 2020, for instance, unequivocally stated that “NATO should continue the dual-track approach of deterrence and dialogue with Russia.”
In the new strategic concept, the core tasks have been purged of the need for diplomacy, except for one or two throw-away lines about “meaningful and reciprocal political dialogue” about arms control issues buried in the middle of the text. Rather, in addition to its original function of deterrence and defense, NATO now fully embraces “crisis prevention and management,” which it has spearheaded since the 1990s with its legally dubious and morally questionable interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya; and “cooperative security,” referring to NATO’s enlargement in Eastern Europe and its Partnership for Peace cooperation with countries in ever further-away regions, including the Black Sea, the Middle East, North Africa, and even the Indo-Pacific, which the British have been pushing to include in a “global NATO.”
Russia was the first country to sign up for the Partnership for Peace program back in 1994. The new NATO doctrine, however, states that Russia can no longer be considered a partner “in light of its hostile policies and actions.” The strategic concept ignores the fact that NATO’s enlargement and new core tasks, which the alliance adopted after the Cold War in an effort to justify its continued existence, have likewise long been seen as hostile in Moscow, nor does it offer any reflection on how the new policies might have contributed to the current unpeaceful “strategic environment.” Instead, it hails the “historic success” of NATO’s expansion in terms of space and substance and insists that the alliance “does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to the Russian federation.”
The logic behind this reasoning is that NATO’s enlargement, or its Partnership for Peace program for that matter, is an outflow of the West’s innocent and well-meant efforts to spread its values of liberal democracy around the world. New member states joined the alliance in a voluntary capacity, after all. In a sense, this logic holds true. It is difficult to see how extending a war guarantee to East European and Balkan nations contribute to the security of Western Europe, let alone the United States. And from Clinton to Bush and Obama, NATO’s Open Door policy has been couched in a Wilsonian rhetoric of the United States as a benign hegemon. Joe Biden, too, steered last year’s NATO conference in Brussels in the direction of proclaiming a global fight between democracy and authoritarianism.
What proponents of this Wilsonian liberalism fail to realize, however, is that their benevolent actions might antagonize other nations. Now, NATO apologists, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, argue that if the alliance had not expanded eastward, Vladimir Putin would have been even bolder in his imperial ambitions. But as John Mearsheimer pointed out back in 2014, there is virtually no evidence that Putin aimed to incorporate Crimea before the Maidan coup. Rather, his offensive foreign policy in Ukraine since 2014, culminating in the 2022 invasion, is one of reaction to NATO creeping up to Russia’s borders. Bringing Ukraine into the NATO fold has long been a big fat redline for Russia, and we crossed it.
First of all, West-European officials promised the Soviets after the fall of the Berlin Wall that NATO’s borders would not move “one inch” eastward. But then all former Warsaw Pact countries and even some former Soviet Republics were incorporated in the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to the evidence the National Security Archive assembled on this issue a few years ago, recent archival research has once again confirmed these broken promises.
Next, in 2008, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned American diplomats that further NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, would constitute a “potential military threat.” William J. Burns, who is now the CIA chief but at the time served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, translated Lavrov’s message succinctly in a diplomatic cable: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.” He further gave voice to the opinion of State Department experts, who warned that “the strong division in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.” The Bush administration ignored these warnings and pushed for the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine at a summit in Bucharest, where the alliance codified that “these countries will become members of NATO.” Ultimately, war followed in both countries, in Georgia in 2008, and in Ukraine in 2014. In the process, Russia annexed Crimea and supported a separatist war in the Donbass, which dragged on in protracted fashion until the 2022 invasion.
After 2014, Ukraine started to become a de facto member of NATO, which bolstered the Ukrainian regime to take a tough stance against Russia. In 2017, Trump decided to sell “defensive weapons” to Kyiv. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine, training its military and teaming up with it in joint air and naval exercises. In June 2021, a British destroyer sailed through the Black Sea in an effort to shore up support for Ukraine, precipitating a diplomatic stand-off with Russia. NATO was undeterred, however, because a total of 32 countries participated in a major naval exercise in the Black Sea one month later.
In response, Russia decided to engage in coercive diplomacy, much like the Obama administration had done to get Iran to sign on to the 2015 nuclear deal. Putin amassed troops on the Ukrainian border, demanding guarantees that no offensive missiles would be installed in Eastern Europe and Ukraine not to join NATO. When the crisis was not solved diplomatically, Russia invaded Ukraine. Up until recently, there was hardly any diplomatic intercourse between Washington and Moscow in order to resolve the conflict. The UK’s Boris Johnson, too, “urged against negotiations” during a trip to Kyiv in April. Other NATO members, such as France, Germany, Italy and Hungary, have warmed to negotiations. But as long as there is no bigger push to re-establish diplomacy as a core task of the military alliance, Wilsonian rhetoric is likely to continue to make the world unsafe.
Bas Spliet is a historian and PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He writes about a variety of topics from a historical angle. Find all his work on (Re)writing history, his Substack website. You can e-mail him at Bas.Spliet@UAntwerpen.be.
MEET THE EX-CIA AGENTS DECIDING FACEBOOK’S CONTENT POLICY
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | July 12, 2022
It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.
Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says.
Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.
Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.
In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.
TRUST ME, BRO
In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.
There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields. Deborah Berman, for example, spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Little is known about what she did at the agency, but her pre-agency publications indicate she was a specialist on Syria.
Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. Directly after that, he became a diplomat (underlining how close the line is between those two professions), and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.
Meanwhile, the LinkedIn profile of Cameron Harris – a CIA analyst until 2019 – notes that he is now a Meta trust and safety project manager.
Individuals from other state institutions abound as well. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and is now a director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua. Since 2020, Meta has employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager.
Others have similar pasts. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, is vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager.
Joey Chan currently holds the same trust and safety post as Kamal. Until last year, Chan was a U.S. Army officer commanding a company of over 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.
None of this is to say that any of those named are not conscientious, that they are bad people or bad at their job. Vacher, for example, helped design Facebook’s amber alert program, notifying people to missing children in their area. But hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power. Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.
Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, “woke” organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial. It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of “black sites” where prisoners are repeatedly tortured. Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.
One of these critics is Elizabeth Murray, who, in 2010, retired from a 27-year career at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations. “This is insidious,” Murray told MintPress, adding,
I see it as part of the gradual and sinister migration of ambitious young professionals originally trained (with CIA’s virtually unlimited, U.S.-taxpayer funded pot of resources) to surveil and target ‘the bad guys’ during the so-called Global War on Terror of the post-9-11 era.”
MintPress also contacted Facebook/Meta for comment but has not received a response.
ARM’S LENGTH CONTROL
Some may ask what the big fuss is. There is a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cybersecurity fields, and many of them come from government institutions. Casinos, after all, regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves. But there is little evidence that this is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario; Facebook is certainly not hiring whistleblowers. The problem is not that these individuals are incompetant. The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight.
In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability. The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s. And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.
Again, this article is not claiming that any of the named individuals are nefarious actors, or even that they are anything but model employees. This is a structural problem. Put another way, if Facebook were hiring dozens of managers from Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or GRU, everybody would recognize the inherent dangers. It should be little different when it hires individuals from the CIA, an organization responsible for some of the worst crimes of the modern era.
FROM STATE INTELLIGENCE TO PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE
Facebook has also hired a plethora of ex-national security state officers to run its intelligence and online security operations. Until 2013, Scott Stern was a targeting officer at the CIA, rising to become chief of targeting. In this role, he helped select the targets for U.S. drone strikes across South and West Asia. Today, however, as a senior manager of risk intelligence for Meta, “misinformation” and “malicious actors” are his targets. Hopefully he is more accurate at Facebook than at the CIA, where the government’s own internal assessments show that at least 90% of Afghans killed in drone strikes were innocent civilians.
Other former CIA men at Facebook include Mike Torrey, who left his job as a senior analyst at the agency to become Meta’s technical lead of detection, investigations and disruptions of complex information operations threats, and former CIA contractor Hagan Barnett, who is now head of harmful content operations at the Silicon Valley giant.
Meta’s intelligence and online security team includes individuals from virtually every government agency imaginable. In 2015, Department of Defense intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow left her post to become director of global security intelligence for Meta. The FBI is represented by threat investigations manager Ellen Nixon and head of cyber espionage investigations Mike Dvilyanski. Facebook’s influence operations policy manager Olga Belogolova had stints at the State Department and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Before Meta, David Agranovich and Nathaniel Gleicher both worked for the National Security Council. Agranovich is director of global threat disruption at Facebook while Gleicher is head of security policy. Hayley Chang, director and associate general counsel for cybersecurity and investigations, worked formerly for both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. And Meta’s global head of interaction operations, David Hansell, was once an Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency man.
One of Meta’s most outwardly-facing employees is its global threat intelligence lead for influence operations, Ben Nimmo, a character MintPress has covered before. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.
Perhaps then, it is not surprising that Facebook never seems to find U.S. government influence operations online – they are part of one!
CYBER WAR, CYBER WARRIORS
While Meta has not unmasked any nefarious U.S. government action, it regularly uncovers what it claims are foreign disinformation campaigns. According to a recent Facebook report, the top five locations of coordinated inauthentic behavior between 2017 and 2020 on its platform are Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine. However, it was at pains to note that American operations were driven by fringe far-right elements, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, and not the government.
This is despite the fact that it is now well-established that the Pentagon fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority of them doing so from their keyboards. A Newsweek exposé from last year called it “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” adding,
The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”
Newsweek warned that this army was likely breaking both U.S. and international law by doing so, explaining that,
These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”
As far back as 2011, The Guardian was reporting on this enormous cyber force, whose job it was to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” Yet the ex-military and ex-CIA officials Facebook employs do not seem to have found any trace of their former colleagues’ at work on the platform.
DIGITALLY SWINGING ELECTIONS
Since its beginnings in 2004, Facebook has grown to become a massive global empire and by far the most important news distributor the planet has ever known. The company boasts almost 3 billion active users, meaning that nearly 2 in 5 people worldwide use the platform. A recent 12-country study suggested that around 30% of the entire world gets its news via their Facebook feeds. This gives whoever is in charge of curating those feeds and controlling those algorithms inestimable power. It also represents a serious national security threat for all other countries, especially those that might wish to take a path independent from the United States. That those people are in large part former spooks makes this threat all the more perilous.
This is far from a hypothetical quandary. In November, less than a week before the country’s election, Facebook took the decision to delete hundreds of pages and accounts belonging to individuals and groups that supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista party – a longtime U.S. target for regime change. These included many of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets. Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more intrusive, and was likely designed to try to swing the election towards the pro-U.S. candidate.
Facebook claims that those accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” When those individuals migrated on to Twitter, recording videos identifying who they were to show they were not bots, Twitter immediately deleted those accounts too, in what was dubbed a coordinated attempt at suppression.
The individual behind this attempt was the aforementioned Ben Nimmo, who co-authored an unconvincing report, full of questionable assumptions and allegations. This included an insinuation that accounts following a pattern of activity whereby their Facebook usage levels peaked in the morning and afternoon and dwindled to almost nothing after midnight Nicaragua time suggested they were bots.
Facebook was also used by right-wing Cubans to attempt a U.S.-backed color revolution against the ruling Communist government last year.
Giving any individual or group that much control over the airwaves of communication raises huge questions about national security and sovereignty – doubly so when those individuals are so intimately connected to the U.S. national security state.
When asked what the public’s reaction would be to the news of such an intimate connection between Facebook her former employer, Murray stated that she was unsure whether many would be bothered:
I would like to think that the American public would strenuously object. However the CIA and other agencies have worked over many decades to cultivate a positive – indeed almost glamorous – image in the eyes of the vast majority of the public, mostly through TV series, Hollywood films, and favorable media coverage – so sadly my guess is that the vast majority of the public probably believes that these are the folks who should be in charge.”
However, she said, the news would likely land a very different way in countries that have been the target of Washington’s ire. “As you’re no doubt aware, the CIA has an atrocious public reputation in most parts of the world,” she added.
SPOOKS IN EVERY DEPARTMENT
MintPress has found former representatives of the U.S. national security state in virtually every politically sensitive department at Facebook. This includes even higher levels. Between 2020 and 2021, Kris Rose was a member of Meta’s governance oversight board – the group responsible for the overall direction of the platform. He left his job at the Director of National Intelligence as the president’s daily brief writer to take up the role. Before that, he had spent six years at the CIA as a political and counterterrorism analyst. Meanwhile, Gina Kim Sumilas, Facebook’s director and associate general counsel for the Asia Pacific region, spent nearly twelve years in the CIA before moving into the tech private sector.
There is also considerable overlap with the U.S. government in the company’s front facing staff. Kadia Koroma, for instance, was plucked from her position as an FBI spokesperson in January 2020 to become media relations manager at Facebook. Jeffrey Gelman, policy communications manager for Facebook’s oversight board, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and held influential roles in both the State Department and the National Security Council. And executive communications spokesman Kevin Lewis spent many years in the White House as President Obama’s spokesperson.
Meta’s vice president of legal strategy is Rachel Carlson Lieber, who went straight from the CIA into Facebook. Her first role at the Silicon Valley giant was as head of the North America regulatory and strategic response, a department that continues to feature a number of former state officials. This includes head of strategic programs, Robert Flaim, who spent more than twenty years as an FBI, and Erin Clancy, who left a 16-year career at the State Department to become a manager of strategic response policy.
Clancy’s official work centered around U.S. policy in the Middle East. Her own bio boasts that she worked on the U.S. sanctions regime placed on Iraq and Sudan. She also worked at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus at the time of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It is known that she also coordinated closely with the White Helmets, a controversial aid organization that some have alleged is far too close to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Even after her Facebook appointment, Clancy moonlighted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a fellow at the Atlantic Council, the hawkish body that serves as NATO’s brain trust.
Why are these national security state officials so attractive to Meta? One reason, Murray explained, is financial. “By snagging a CIA employee a company can save a considerable sum,” she said, explaining that, “The individual has likely undergone extensive professional training (at taxpayer expense) and probably has a security clearance,” something that is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain in private sector work. Therefore, companies dealing with matters of state secrecy (such as defense contractors) have historically courted both current and former officers to fill their ranks, enticing them with much higher salaries than they can receive in government service.
“What is new (or at least newly known to us!) is that now these professionals are being sought after by social media companies like Facebook, Google and others who are now heavily into monitoring, surveilling, and censoring content, and then sharing data about users with U.S. government entities,” Murray added.
Such is the need for these individuals in these fields that private companies often hire former national security agents to do the recruiting for them. For instance, John Papp, who spent 12 years at the CIA as a senior intelligence officer and 4 years as an imagery analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, went on to work as a recruiter for many of the largest defense contractors in Washington. These included Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Lockheed Martin. Today, he works as a recruiter for Meta.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta also employs former spooks for their internal security operations. The company’s vice president, chief security officer is Nick Lovrien, a former counterterrorism operations officer at the CIA, while its head of insider protection is ex-CIA operational psychologist and “undercover officer” Nicole Alford.
Meanwhile, Meta’s director of global security governance – the individual reportedly responsible for the personal safety of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg – is Jill Leavens Jones. Jones left her job as a U.S. Secret Service special agent to take the appointment. And director of global security operations Alexander Carrillo continued on as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard for several months after his appointment at Facebook. The company also hires former feds to work directly with law enforcement on legal issues. One example of this is former FBI special agent Brian Kelley.
A LONG PATTERN OF INFILTRATION
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
US taunts Russia to escalate in Ukraine
An UAV hit the roof of the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol, Crimea, August 20, 2022
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | AUGUST 21, 2022
In military terms, the crude, locally assembled drone dropping a country-made bomb or two on unguarded sites in Crimea are at best pin pricks in the big picture of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. But it can be profoundly consequential in certain other ways.
For a start, this escalation has Washington’s approval. A senior Biden administration official told NatSec Daily the US supports strikes on Crimea if Kiev deems them necessary. “We don’t select targets, of course, and everything we’ve provided is for self-defence purposes. Any target they choose to pursue on sovereign Ukrainian soil is by definition self defense,” this person said.
But Washington knows — and Moscow knows — that like any sophistry, this one too is a clever argument but inherently fallacious and deceptive. The New York Times has interpreted the drone attack on Crimea as a challenge to the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. The Times wrote that the Crimea attacks “put domestic political pressure on the Kremlin, with criticism and debate about the war increasingly being unleashed on social media and underscoring that even what the Russian government considers to be Russian territory is not safe.”
The Times claimed that “as images of antiaircraft fire streaking through the blue Crimean sky ricocheted through social media, the visceral reality of war was becoming more and more apparent to Russians — many of whom have rallied behind the Kremlin’s line, hammered home in state media, that the “special military operation” to save Ukraine from Nazi domination is going smoothly and according to plan.”
The paper quoted a prominent establishment think tanker in Moscow acknowledging that the Crimean attack is a “serious” development insofar as “People are beginning to feel that the war is coming to them.” The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in a nationwide address on Saturday, “One can literally feel in the air of Crimea that the occupation there is temporary, and Ukraine is returning.”
Once again, while Russia is steadily winning the ground war in Ukraine, the US is determined not to lose the information war. In Washington’s reckoning, in this Internet Age, the war is to be ultimately won in the Russian people’s minds. Therefore, this studied escalation by Washington puts Moscow in a dilemma, since if it is unanswered, Zelensky may target the 19-km long Crimean Bridge connecting the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar in mainland Russia with the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea.
In fact, it is a near certainty. The point is, the Kerch bridge is “Putin’s bridge” in the Russian people’s consciousness. While formally opening the bridge to car traffic in May 2018, Putin was quoted as telling the workers, “In different historical epochs, even under the tsar priests, people dreamed of building this bridge. Then they returned to this in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s. And finally, thanks to your work and your talent, the miracle has happened.”
Therefore, there is no better way to puncture the halo around Putin than by despatching at least a bit of the Kerch bridge to the bottom of the Black Sea. Meanwhile, from the US perspective, Kiev’s drone attacks on Crimea already serve three purposes.
First, this is meant to be a blow to the Russian morale. Indeed, Putin’s towering popularity within Russia has become an eyesore for the Biden Administration. Putin’s masterly navigation of the Russian economy out of crisis mode is an incredible feat that defied all logic of power in the American calculus — inflation is steadily falling (in contrast with the European countries and the US); the GDP decline is narrowing; foreign reserves are swelling; the current account is on the plus side; and lo and behold, the Biden Administration’s so-called “nuclear option” — Russia’s removal from the SWIFT messaging system — failed to cripple foreign trade.
Second, both Washington and Kiev are desperately scrambling for “success” stories to distract attention. The Times playing up the story speaks for itself. In reality, Russia’s Donbass offensive has created a new momentum and is steadily grinding the Ukrainian forces. Within the week, Russian forces will have encircled the lynchpin of the Ukrainian defence line, Bakhmut city, which is a communication hub for troop movements and supply logistics in Donbass. Russian forces have reached the city outskirts from the north, east and south. The fall of Bakhmut will be a crushing defeat for Zelensky.
On the other hand, even two months after Zelensky promised a “counteroffensive” on Kherson near Crimea, it is nowhere in sight. Even his most ardent votaries in the western media feel let down. To be sure, there is growing disenchantment in Europe.
The Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, undoubtedly the smartest European politician today (with an economy registering over 6% growth when the rest of the continent is mired in recession), told German magazine Tichys Einblick in an interview last week that this war marked the end of “western superiority.” Interestingly, he named Big Oil as “war profiteers” and singled out that Exxon doubled its profits, Chevron quadrupled, and ConocoPhillips’ profits have shot up manifold. (Of course, all three are American companies.) Orban’s message was clear: America has weakened the EU. This thought must be troubling many a European politician today.
Third, Washington has thrown down the gauntlet in a measured way. But there is no way the war can be brought into the drawing rooms of the average Americans the way Times says is happening in Russia. Twenty Americans were killed in Kharkiv two days ago in a high-precision Russian missile strike, but there aren’t going to be any body bags returning to Arlington Cemetery; nor does it make headlines in the cooperative American media.
The US plans to go further up on the escalation ladder. Escalation is the Biden Administration’s last chance to stall a Russian victory. The American strategic thinker and academic John Mearsheimer has written that the risk of a disastrous escalation is “substantially greater than the conventional wisdom holds. And given that the consequences of escalation could include a major war in Europe and possibly even nuclear annihilation, there is good reason for extra concern.”
Moscow’s preference is to avoid any escalation, since the special military operation is achieving results. Whereas, it is the US that is in some visible despair, and in immediate terms, Russia’s plans to hold referendums in Kherson and Zaporozhye in September must be stalled. Herein lies the danger.
The US’ current build-up over Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant points toward a hidden agenda to intervene in the war at some point directly. Kiev’s attempt to arrange a nuclear explosion in Zaporozhye can only be seen in this light. Moscow seems to anticipate such an eventuality.
Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu disclosed yesterday that Russia has begun mass production of Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missiles and is already deploying them. The US lacks the capability to counter Tsirkon, which is estimated to be 11 times faster than Tomahawk with far superior target-penetration characteristics. Shoigu may have given a stark warning that Russia will not be cowed down if there’s a NATO intervention in Ukraine.
NATO ready to intervene in Kosovo – Stoltenberg
Samizdat | August 17, 2022
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has reiterated his promise that the bloc will intervene if “stability” is jeopardized in Kosovo during a press conference with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Wednesday.
”Should stability be jeopardized, KFOR stands ready to intervene and will take any measures that are necessary to ensure a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement for all the people of Kosovo,” he said.
The leader of the military alliance called on “all sides” to “show restraint and avoid violence,” arguing that diplomacy was the only way forward, even while threatening military intervention under the UN mandate if the two parties did not abide by the EU-mediated dialogue.
Stoltenberg is set to hold a meeting with Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti later on Wednesday, while Vucic and Kurti will meet on Thursday in Brussels to continue the dialogue.
Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo are running high after the province passed a law requiring Serbs to exchange their passports for special Kosovo-issued documents and switch out their Serbian license plates for plates issued in Kosovo.
Stoltenberg initially told Vucic that NATO would intervene in Kosovo in the event of stability being jeopardized during a phone call on August 3, echoing a communique from the NATO mission to Kosovo issued the previous week.
The announcement of the new law was accompanied by heavily armed special police taking control of two border crossings with Serbia, leading local Serbs to erect roadblocks in protest and Vucic’s government to issue a statement condemning Pristina’s behavior. NATO peacekeepers were deployed to defuse the tensions, and Kurti’s government agreed to delay the implementation of the new legislation in return for the protesters dismantling their barricades.
Russia has accused the West of fueling tensions between Serbia and its breakaway province, claiming the eruption was aimed at weakening the one European holdout from NATO and forcing it to adopt anti-Russian sanctions embraced by the rest of the continent. Kosovo, on the other hand, has blamed Russia for the escalation, arguing that Moscow is trying to distract from the war in Ukraine.
NATO’s 2030 Strategic Concept threatens to destabilise the world
By Ahmed Adel | August 17, 2022
The new NATO 2030 Strategic Concept indicates a disturbing change in the Alliance’s strategic orientation. As a result, provocations towards Moscow, as well as Beijing, are escalating, especially after the former was labelled by NATO as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” In this context, the Atlantic Alliance urged member states to allocate more resources for military purposes, as well as to increase the rapid reaction forces on its Eastern European front from 40,000 troops to a staggering 300,000. This is in addition to escalations in the South China Sea.
NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, explained that, unlike the previous document of the same title, which was adopted in Lisbon in 2010, there are no longer any guidelines on cooperation with Moscow, not even in the areas of arms control, the fight against terrorism or drug trafficking. Relations with Russia are continuously deteriorating as the West instigates less cooperation and more conflict.
The behaviour of NATO’s main members – the US and the United Kingdom, as well as Germany and France, in Ukraine, but also in the Caucasus and Central Asia, signify that Russia is the most direct threat to Western hegemony despite China’s massive economic rise. Therefore, there is nothing epochal about the positioning on NATO’s eastern borders since it is a logical epilogue of a process that has been ongoing since at least 2014. Arguments can be made though that this process began with the Syrian War in 2011, or perhaps even as early as 2008 with the NATO-instigated Russo-Georgia War.
The change in strategic orientation, projected in the medium term, also concerns China’s relations with the West and Russia. The tightening of relations between China and Russia is contrary to the interests of the Alliance because, according to NATO, “China seeks to undermine the current world order by controlling global logistics and its economy,” hence NATO’s strengthening of relations with its Asia-Pacific partners.
It is also for this reason that the US encouraged the dismantling of the EU-China investment agreement, openly supports protesters in Hong Kong and repeats claims of a Chinese-perpetrated genocide against the Uyghurs, escalates tensions in the South China Sea, and helped dismantle the 17 + 1 format, which in practice can no longer function. This is also in addition to Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taipei and the establishment of the AUKUS alliance.
For the most part, in NATO’s new strategic orientation, China could arguably be heading towards a similar situation to that of Russia in 2014. For NATO strategists, China’s response to Pelosi’s visit, manifested by military and naval exercises in the South China Sea, is excessive. They are of this view because China exposed how easily Taiwan could be isolated from the outside world, with the US only able to watch on.
NATO is moving very explicitly and in a targeted manner against China. Perhaps such a step was induced or accelerated by Beijing’s refusal to align itself with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions and condemnation of the demilitarisation of Ukraine.
Proceeding with such provocations and escalations is also very risky for NATO though. A NATO-instigated war against China, just as the Alliance left Russia no choice but to demilitarise Ukraine to ensure its own national security, would reshape the world much faster and more fundamentally than what has already occurred due to the war in Eastern Europe. The attempted isolation of Russia not only failed, but in fact accelerated the changing of the global geopolitical and economic system away from Western hegemony.
As China is the largest industrial power in today’s world, as well as a massive market for consumer goods and a key investor and creditor in numerous regions, without a stable China, there is no global stability. If the Alliance was not able to achieve its goal in Ukraine, a region where several NATO members directly border Russia, there is little prospect that it can make any major achievement on the Asian front.
If the Alliance is not capable of coping with a direct confrontation with Russia in Europe, it raises the question on how it will be able to cope with a direct confrontation on two fronts against a potential Russian-Chinese coalition. NATO’s anti-Chinese and anti-Russian strategic commitment, which has been framed until at least 2030, is a dangerous provocation, and not only for the targeted countries. The West’s provocations are a danger to the entire world as it can dramatically affect global stability and the quality of life of everyday citizens, hence why the NATO 2030 Strategic Concept is alarming.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Western ‘superweapons’ myth dispelled – Shoigu
Samizdat – August 16, 2022
Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine has served to dispel the myth of Western ‘superweapons’, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said during an international security conference on Tuesday.
Speaking at the forum, part of the ongoing Army 2022 expo near Moscow, Shoigu claimed that the weapons provided to Kiev have not had a significant effect on the battlefield, as has been claimed by the West.
“Initially, it was about the supply of Javelin anti-tank systems and some unique drones. More recently, HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems and long-range howitzers were being promoted to the role of superweapons by Westerners. However, all of these weapons are being ground up in battle,” the minister said.
Shoigu added that Russian forces are “carefully examining” the Western weapon systems seized on the battlefield in Ukraine, and are “taking into account the features and specific qualities” of these weapons when planning combat operations.
The minister’s statement comes after US Defense Secretary LLoyd Austin announced last week that the weapons sent to Kiev by Washington have proven themselves effective on the battlefield and pledged to send more arms to Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”
The US has approved more than $54 billion of economic and military aid to Ukraine since February, while the UK has committed nearly $3 billion in military aid alone, and the EU has spent another $2.5 billion on arms for Kiev.
A large range of equipment, from rifles and grenades to anti-tank missiles and multiple launch rocket systems, has left Western armories for Ukraine, with most entering the country through Poland.
Moscow, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned the West against sending weapons to Kiev, saying it only prolongs the conflict and increases the number of casualties.
Canada, Sweden and Finland announce dispatch of military instructors to Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | August 15, 2022
The West continues to insist on indefinitely prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The policy of sending military aid seems to have no limits. In addition to financial remittances and arms shipments, Western countries are also mobilizing to give military instructions to Kiev. Considering the war crimes and human rights violations repeatedly committed by Ukrainian forces, supporting Kiev militarily means co-participating in the crimes – and the West must be judged responsible for that.
On 12 August, Canada and Sweden announced that they had sent teams of military instructors to participate in a joint program with the UK to train Ukrainian troops. Currently, London leads a project of military assistance to Ukraine by training soldiers with Western instructors. The objective is to pass on the technical and practical knowledge necessary for the Ukrainians to use the military equipment received from the West in the best possible way, thus helping Kiev to continue its “resistance” against the Russian special military operation.
Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said that 225 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officers will be sent to the UK to participate in the project. The first phase of participation would consist of a four-month period of joint military actions, in which Ukrainian combatants would be instructed in knowledge “related to frontline combat, weapons handling, first aid, field craft, patrol tactics, and include the law of armed contact”. She also made it clear that, in addition to training soldiers, Ottawa will also be contributing by sending 39 armored vehicles to Kiev.
On the same day, the Swedish government also made it clear that it intends to actively participate in this London-led international mobilization. Stockholm announced the deployment of 120 military instructors to participate in the program. The act follows a previous announcement, in which Finland also committed to act in the training, albeit in a more moderate way, sending about 20 instructors. This is just another step towards militarization, revealing the bellicose turn that both countries have taken since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, when Sweden and Finland started to react irrationally to Moscow’s measures, even asking for NATO membership.
In fact, it must be noted that countries like Canada, Sweden and Finland are historically weak nations from a military point of view, whose security has always depended on two key factors: neutrality or automatic alignment. In the case of the Scandinavian nations, neutrality has always been a central factor, which began to be reversed as local governments adopted more favorable stances towards NATO – culminating in the current application for membership. In the Canadian case, however, the pillar of defense policy has always been automatic alignment with the US, complying with all decisions taken by Wasington in exchange for a place in the security umbrella.
These countries remain militarily weak. Their participation in the program does not imply real changes. Most Canadian, Swedish and Finnish military officers do not even have real war experience, which shows the practical irrelevance of being participants in the UK-led project. More than that: the very existence of a training program is of questionable relevance. Although the UK and other NATO countries have great military expertise and undoubtedly have qualified instructors to train their allies, the short training time makes it almost impossible for soldiers to prepare properly.
British military assistance to Kiev with training of personnel is not new. Since 2014 London has been assuming projects to train Ukrainian soldiers. Some of these programs took place publicly, while others were conducted secretly – such as the clandestine “Operation Orbital”, in which more than 22,000 Ukrainian troops were trained by British agents. What the UK is doing now is simply continuing its actions of the last eight years, with the only difference that now NATO’s plans for Ukraine have already failed. The aim is no longer to arm Kiev so that it can become a local power against Russia – it is simply to prolong the conflict indefinitely in order to “postpone” Russian victory.
For the UK, continuing the instruction is an opportunity to encourage the use of Western military equipment and thus trying to extend the conflict. For Canada, Sweden and Finland, it is a mere gesture of “political goodwill”, without any relevance. But, above all, those involved in this training and in all forms of military aid to Kiev share in becoming co-responsible for the Ukrainian atrocities. Since it is proven that Western-trained Ukrainian soldiers use Western weapons against civilians in Donbass, then the West itself is a participant in these crimes and should be sanctioned for doing so.
Lucas Leiroz is aresearcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
NATO actions raise risk of nuclear conflict – Russia
Samizdat | August 9, 2022
The deployment of US atomic weapons on the territory of non-nuclear NATO members goes against the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), increases the risk of conflict, and hinders disarmament efforts. This was the message the Russian delegation delivered to the UN conference on nuclear nonproliferation in New York, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said on Tuesday.
“NATO openly declared itself a nuclear alliance. There are US nuclear weapons on the territory of non-nuclear allied states in the bloc,” said Igor Vishnevetsky, deputy director for nonproliferation and arms control at the Russian Foreign Ministry.
In contravention of Articles I and II of the NPT, non-nuclear members of NATO are taking part in “practical testing” of the use of atomic weapons, Vishnevetsky added. Such actions “not only continue to be a significant factor negatively affecting international and European security, but also increase the risk of nuclear conflict and generally act as a brake on efforts in the field of nuclear disarmament.”
Moscow’s position is that “US nuclear weapons must be withdrawn to national territory, the infrastructure for their deployment in Europe must be eliminated, and NATO’s ‘joint nuclear missions’ must be terminated,” Vishnevetsky told the UN conference, according to a transcript posted by the Foreign Ministry.
The US Air Force currently has an estimated 150 nuclear bombs at NATO bases in Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Russian delegate also touched on AUKUS, the September 2021 deal that envisioned the US and the UK providing atomic-powered submarines to Australia. This partnership “creates prerequisite for the start of a new arms race in the Asia-Pacific region,” Vishnevetsky said.
The withdrawal of US atomic weapons from non-nuclear NATO states was one of the key planks of Russia’s security proposal, presented to the US and NATO in December 2021. Neither Washington nor the military bloc addressed it in the responses they sent to Moscow in January.
At the very start of the conference, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of “reckless, dangerous nuclear saber-rattling” aimed at “those supporting Ukraine’s self-defense.” Russian diplomat Andrey Belousov responded that Moscow put its nuclear forces on alert to deter NATO aggression, and that the conflict in Ukraine does not rise to Russia’s nuclear threshold.
Belousov has also addressed statements by US officials about new negotiations on strategic arms control with Moscow, saying that Russia has so far received only “declarative statements,” but no “concrete proposals.”
The US keeps reneging on arms control agreements, so why should Russia trust Joe Biden’s latest overtures?
By Scott Ritter | Samizdat | August 6, 2022
This week, in an address to the Tenth Review Conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – which had convened at the United Nations Headquarters in New York – US President Joe Biden made a forceful appeal to Russia regarding the need to resume arms control talks. “Today,” Biden said, “my Administration is ready to expeditiously negotiate a new arms control framework to replace New START when it expires in 2026.” But, he added, “negotiation requires a willing partner operating in good faith. And Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression in Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe and constitutes an attack on the fundamental tenets of international order. In this context, Russia should demonstrate that it is ready to resume work on nuclear arms control with the United States.”
Biden has made arms control a central theme in his dealings with Russia. Indeed, one of his first major acts as president was to sign on to a five-year extension of the Obama-era New START treaty, which had been allowed to languish under the Trump administration. “Extending the New START Treaty,” Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, declared in a press release issued at the time, “ensures we have verifiable limits on Russian ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers until February 5, 2026. The New START Treaty’s verification regime,” Blinken noted, “enables us to monitor Russian compliance with the treaty and provides us with greater insight into Russia’s nuclear posture, including through data exchanges and onsite inspections that allow US inspectors to have eyes on Russian nuclear forces and facilities.”
Blinken then added a critical statement. “The United States,” he declared, “has assessed the Russian Federation to be in compliance with its New START Treaty obligations every year since the treaty entered into force in 2011.”
Unfortunately, Russia cannot say the same about the US. Since 2018, Russia has accused the United States of “converting a certain number of Trident II SLBM launchers and В-52Н heavy bombers, in the way that the Russian Federation cannot confirm that these strategic arms have been rendered incapable of employing SLBMs or nuclear armaments for heavy bombers.” The bottom line is that America accomplished its conversions in a manner which allowed them to be easily reversed, something Russia believed circumvented the intent of New START, which was the permanent reduction of each side’s nuclear arsenals.
The US rejected the Russian allegation, noting that New START does not explicitly require the conversions on either the Trident II SLBM launchers or the B-52H bombers to be irreversible. As long as the treaty was in force, the US contended, Russia could use its inspection provisions to verify that the goal of “rendering incapable” was still in place. The Russians, with reason, believe that the US position violated both the spirit and intent of treaty, a position which carried over into the extension of New START.
But Russia’s problems with America’s compliance are just one of the issues when it comes to judging whether to trust Washington’s good faith on arms control overall. The US has walked away from three foundational treaties in the past two decades – the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in 2002, the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. Likewise, America’s intransigence over fairly adapting the conventional forces in Europe (CFE) treaty to reflect post-Cold War realities led to its demise. New START is the last man standing when it comes to arms control accords between Russia and the US.
Biden tried to further strategic arms control with Russia, discussing the matter with President Vladimir Putin during their Geneva Summit in June 2021. The two leaders agreed to pursue “an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue” that would “seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.” Indeed, two such meetings were on July 28 and September 30, 2021. Following the conclusion of the second round of talks, the negotiators agreed to “form two interagency expert working groups” covering the “Principles and Objectives for Future Arms Control” and the “Capabilities and Actions with Strategic Effects.”
But then came the crisis in Ukraine, and the talks gave way to the issue of security guarantees demanded by Russia in the face of NATO expansion, which threatened to bring Ukraine into the fold of the trans-Atlantic military bloc. In direct talks with the US, NATO and the OSCE in January 2022, Russia was repeatedly rebuffed in its efforts to negotiate a new European security framework that considered its national security interests, setting in motion the conditions that resulted in Russia initiating its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, prompting President Biden to terminate the strategic stability dialogue, an action which essentially froze US-Russian relations, at least in the arms control field.
Biden’s announcement on restarting talks with Moscow took the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, by surprise. “No requests on reopening this negotiating process have been made,” Lavrov announced during a press conference in Myanmar, adding that the West “has developed a habit of making announcements on the microphone and then forgetting about them.”
Regardless of the lack of any prior notice on the part of the US, Russia announced that it was ready to engage in arms control talks at any time, the sooner the better. Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, during a conference call with the media, declared that “Moscow has repeatedly spoken about the necessity to start such talks as soon as possible as there is little time left.” If the New START treaty expired without a replacement, Peskov said, “it will negatively impact global security and stability, primarily in the area of arms control.” For this reason, Peskov noted, “We [Russia] have called for an early launch of talks, but until that moment it has been the US that has shown no interest in substantive contacts on the issue.”
Peskov further emphasized that negotiations on a new arms control pact can only be held “on the basis of mutual respect and taking into account mutual concerns.”
Washington’s push for talks with Moscow, however, appear to be little more than an effort to get Russia to negotiate away the advantage in strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems that it has accrued in recent years through the development of weapons such as the Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and the Avangard hypersonic re-entry vehicle. In this way, the US would have Russia walk away from new systems which cost billions of dollars to develop and field, while the US would only be called upon to give up a handful which have not yet been fully tested and deployed (the US is poised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years to replace the Minuteman III ICBM, B-2 bomber, and Ohio-class submarine with a new missile (the “Sentinel”), a new bomber (the B-21), and a new submarine (the “Columbia” class). The high cost of these new weapons is likely to become an issue in a tightening economic environment, which may explain Biden’s push for fresh negotiations.
The current US approach to arms control negotiations appears to be one-sided in nature, premised on sacrificing existing Russian capacity for future American systems which are currently under development. In addition to this, the US has a poor track record when it comes to either treaty compliance (the ongoing controversy over New START verification of Trident and B-52 conversions comes to mind), or treaty adherence (the US withdrawals from the ABM treaty, the INF treaty, and the Open Skies treaty serve as an historical precedent).
The US approach ignores the fundamental approach taken by Russia when it comes to arms control – that any such negotiations must take place as part of a comprehensive restructuring of existing security frameworks that fully integrate Moscow’s legitimate national security concerns. This includes issues pertaining to missile defense (including the two US facilities in Poland and Romania), intermediate nuclear forces (a ban on the deployment of such systems on European soil), and non-strategic nuclear weapons (the US stockpile of B-61 bombs currently stored in Europe, and releasable to non-nuclear NATO members during any potential conflict.)
The White House has flipped the script when it comes to advancing the cause of arms control. Former US President Ronald Reagan appropriated a Russian saying– “Trust but Verify”– when discussing his approach to implementing the groundbreaking INF treaty back in 1987. At that time, the “trust” was assumed, and the focus was on constructing appropriate verification regimes to ensure treaty compliance.
Today, there is no trust between Russia and the US, primarily because of the dismissive manner which the Biden administration has treated the issue of Moscow’s concerns over European security that has been inexorably linked to aggressive NATO expansion. But the abysmal track record of the US under existing and past arms control agreements must also be considered. Even if Biden were willing to consider Russia’s concerns, the question that must be answered for Russia is whether the Americans can be fully trusted as a partner in disarmament.
As things stand today, the answer to this question is, sadly, ‘No.’
Today, Ukraine bombed a Donetsk hotel full of journalists – here’s what it felt like to be there
Victim of recent shelling lies in the street of Donetsk, Donetsk People’s Republic. © RIA Novosti
By Eva Bartlett | Samizdat | August 4, 2022
At 10:13 am today (Thursday), Ukraine began shelling central Donetsk. There were five powerful blasts in the space of ten minutes. The last explosion blew out my hotel’s ground-floor glass, including a sitting room – where journalists often congregate before and after going out to do field reporting – and the lobby. About one minute earlier, I had passed through the latter. A cameraman’s assistant who was there at the time of that fifth explosion suffered a concussion from the force of the blast.
A woman walking outside the building was killed, as were at least four others, including a child. Donetsk Telegram channels are filled with videos locals have taken, of the dead, the injured and the damage, and of grief-stricken people. One such hard-to-watch Telegram post (warning: graphic footage) features a man in shock at the gruesome sight of the bodies of his murdered wife and grandchild on a street two blocks from the hotel.
The total number of injured is still not known, as I write. First estimates placed the number at at least ten, among them two ambulance workers: a paramedic and a doctor.
Reading the news, you have the luxury of graphic image warnings and the choice not to look at the pictures and videos of the carnage that occurred today, as well as over the past eight years of Ukraine’s war on Donbass. The people here on the ground don’t get a warning, or a choice as to whether they will see the mutilated remains of a loved-one or stranger. As uncomfortable as it is to see such footage, it does need to be shown if the world is to know the truth of what’s going on in Donbass, to give voice to the locals, killed and terrorized by Ukrainian forces as Western corporate media looks elsewhere or covers up these crimes.
Chronology of a bomb strike
When the shelling started, I was in my room editing footage from the previous day – from the aftermath of another shelling of a Donetsk district. You wouldn’t know it from most Western media coverage but explosions are so common here that I didn’t think much of the blast other than it was louder than usual and the car alarms were going off.
Seven minutes later, another explosion, much louder and much closer. From the window, smoke could be seen rising to the north, probably 200 meters away. This would have been right near the Opera House, where the funeral ceremony for Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Colonel Olga Kachura, killed yesterday, was commencing.
A minute later, another loud blast sent me running from the room, which faced the direction of incoming artillery. Luckily, the only damage ended up being a broken window.
Downstairs, journalists who had been in the hotel and others who had been outside ready to go out reporting, took shelter in the hallway for the time being, ready to run to the basement if things escalated.
One told me he had been preparing to go film and was about 10 meters away from where the last shell struck. “I believe they were trying to target the funeral. And journalists also,” he said. He also said there was a woman outside who had lost a leg, and that she was probably dead by now.
One could assume that Kiev’s forces’ only intended target was the funeral service for Colonel Kachura, aiming perhaps to send a message to the DPR military and the civilians who support it. While that would be egregious by itself, it is likely that a hotel housing journalists was not just ‘collateral damage,’ either.
Ukraine routinely persecutes, censors, imprisons, tortures, and targets media personnel, putting us on kill lists.
Kiev’s forces know a lot of journalists stay at this hotel for its central location and strong wifi. Many frequently do their live reports from outside the hotel. And those staying here, as well as in other central Donetsk neighborhoods, have been loudly reporting on Ukraine’s showering of Donetsk with the insidious, internationally-prohibited ‘butterfly’ anti-personnel mines of late – the latest, until today, in the list of Kiev’s war crimes. These explosives are designed to rip off feet and legs, and Ukraine has repeatedly fired rockets containing them, intentionally dropping them on civilian areas in Donetsk and other Donbass cities.
After the explosions rang out in central Donetsk today, Emergency Services arrived at the scene and, following a period of calm, journalists went out to document the damage and the dead. The woman I’d been told about lay in a pool of blood, covered with what appeared to be a curtain from one of the blown-out windows.
The calm didn’t last long. Ukraine soon resumed shelling, and journalists outside ran back inside as we received another four attacks. “It’s like a common thing, they shoot one place and shoot it again. So we’re in the middle of that process right now,” a Serbian guy near me said. The chief of a local Emergency Services headquarters told me Kiev also makes triple strikes, not only double.
It is said that Ukraine used NATO-standard 155mm caliber weapons in today’s attack. If that is true, this is another instance of Ukraine using Western-supplied weapons to slaughter and maim civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
If by bombing a hotel full of journalists Kiev wanted to intimidate them away from reporting on Ukraine’s war crimes, it won’t work. Most journalists reporting from on the ground here do so because, unlike the crocodile tears of the West for conflicts they create, we actually care about the lives of people here.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
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Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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