ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

[JustJohn or JJ]

Washington And The World


What Obama Should Tell Americans About Ukraine

The crisis is getting worse. It’s time for the president to rally the nation.

By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

May 02, 2014

President Obama needs to articulate clearly to the American people, and very soon, that the Ukraine crisis is the most important challenge to the international system since the end of the Cold War.

It is more than a month since the Russians annexed Crimea, and recent events have only exacerbated the crisis, with pro-Russian rebels reportedly shooting down two Ukrainian helicopters in separatist-held Slaviansk on Friday. Yet the president still hasn’t laid out a comprehensive statement of what is really at stake: why we are facing this problem; why it is in our common interest to resolve it with the Russians if possible; and why, if negotiation does not work out, we have an obligation to help Ukraine. Above all the president must clarify why we cannot tolerate an international system in which countries are invaded by thugs and destabilized from abroad. And why this is a common responsibility not just for us but for our allies and other friends like the Chinese, whose stake in stability should be as great as ours.

On the whole I support the actions the president has taken so far. Considering the kind of democratic alliance we have, I think he generally did as well as is possible under present circumstances. He has had to tread carefully. What I do fault him for is not explicitly and calmly, but in a broad perspective, addressing the American people on this issue. He hasn’t made a single major statement to them on what potentially could be a major international crisis. He needs the support of the American people. Thus he has to convince them that this is important and that his stand deserves both national understanding and support.

Obama also has to generate some degree of conviction in the West that this is a joint responsibility, and he has to convince Moscow that we are serious. If we are to deter the Russians from moving in, we have to convince them that their aggression will entail a prolonged and costly effort. But it will be such only if the Ukrainians resist. Thus, we should be making an effort to negotiate with Russia even as at the same time we should be more open to helping the Ukrainians defend themselves if they’re attacked. The Ukrainians will fight only if they think they will eventually get some help from the West, particularly in supplies of the kind of weaponry that will be necessary to wage a successful urban defense. They’re not going to beat the Russians out in the open field, where thousands of tanks move in. They can only beat them through prolonged urban resistance. Then the war’s economic costs would escalate dramatically for the Russians, and it would become futile politically. But to be able to defend a city, you have to have handheld anti-tank weaponry, handheld rockets and some organization.

At the same time we need also to explore the possibility of a negotiated solution with Russia regarding Ukraine. It still might be possible to design it along the lines of the relationship that Russia has with Finland, which is not a member of NATO but enjoys full participation in Europe as best it can, even as it enjoys also a normal relationship with Russia. Obama should convey clearly to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States is prepared to use its influence to ensure that a truly independent and territorially undivided Ukraine pursues policies toward Russia similar to those so effectively practiced by Finland: mutually respectful neighbors, wide-ranging economic relations both with Russia and the European Union, but no participation in any military alliance viewed by Moscow as directed at itself – while also expanding its European connectivity. The Finnish model may be the ideal example for Ukraine, the EU and Russia.

As far as Russian worries about Ukraine being absorbed into the EU, I would remind the Russians that to join it, a country has to pass 32 different examinations to get in. That takes time. The Turks were told they could join back in the 1960s, some 50 years ago. So the Russians need not fear a prompt integration of Ukraine into the EU.

A serious effort to explore such an outcome might be productive, although it may be difficult to bring the Ukrainians themselves on board. In any case, we are dealing with the very real threat that Russia is trying to alter the post-Cold War individual security arrangements by force. We are also facing the possibility that the net dynamic effect of such an accomplishment could be much-intensified pressure on some of the more vulnerable NATO countries. Hence I think we have to be very clear in indicating to the Russians what the stakes are, what the possible high costs for them are likely to entail and what the parameters of a constructive solution might be.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a former U.S. national security adviser and the author, most recently, of Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.

[Nictoshek]

Obama also has to generate some degree of conviction in the West that this is a joint responsibility, and he has to convince Moscow that we are serious.

[kaima]

May 4, 2014 4:34:51 GMT -7 JustJohn or JJ said:

Washington And The World


What Obama Should Tell Americans About Ukraine

The crisis is getting worse. It’s time for the president to rally the nation.

By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

May 02, 2014

Obama also has to generate some degree of conviction in the West that this is a joint responsibility, and he has to convince Moscow that we are serious. If we are to deter the Russians from moving in, we have to convince them that their aggression will entail a prolonged and costly effort. But it will be such only if the Ukrainians resist. Thus, we should be making an effort to negotiate with Russia even as at the same time we should be more open to helping the Ukrainians defend themselves if they’re attacked. The Ukrainians will fight only if they think they will eventually get some help from the West, particularly in supplies of the kind of weaponry that will be necessary to wage a successful urban defense. They’re not going to beat the Russians out in the open field, where thousands of tanks move in. They can only beat them through prolonged urban resistance. Then the war’s economic costs would escalate dramatically for the Russians, and it would become futile politically. But to be able to defend a city, you have to have handheld anti-tank weaponry, handheld rockets and some organization.

I am happy to see he offers some specific ideas on how we need to help the Ukrainians. Now we can think of the logistics and the problems we have in countries as far removed from us as Ukraine, and these countries with no powerful, angry and hostile neighbors as the Ukrainians have with the Russians. Look at the problems we have with moving into and out of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan we have no Russia opposing us, no modern weapons to shoot down our airplanes or attack our ships in the neighborhood. We do have a questionable Pakistan 'friend' much as we have an EU 'friend", a friend who is quite dependent upon Russia for heat and power.

I like his ideas, but putting them into execution is quite questionable. And once we overcome Russian opposition, to whom do we deliver these 'supplies' and weapons? Does the current government have the heart to lead the people to oppose the Russians? So far our "free" press has not reported on the actions of the existing Uki government nor its efforts and successes at rallying the Ukrainian people into firm opposition to Russia and preserving Ukraine as we know it today. What is the atmosphere in Ukraine, and the spirit? If Obama rallies the USA, and less likely the west, will he have to do a stump tour of Ukraine to rally its people?

I am not ready to bet our future on it.

Kai

[Nictoshek]

Russia’s Weimar Syndrome

Roger Cohen
MAY 1, 2014

LONDON — Sergei Karaganov, a prominent Russian foreign policy expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, recently provided a useful summation of his vast country’s sense of humiliation and encirclement. Because explosions of nationalist fervor like the one fostered by Vladimir Putin are dangerous and slow to abate, it is worth quoting this analysis at some length.

“The rupture is due to the West’s refusal to end the Cold War de facto or de jure in the quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Karaganov wrote in the daily Izvestia. “In that time, the West has consistently sought to expand its zone of military, economic and political influence through NATO and the E.U. Russian interests and objections were flatly ignored. Russia was treated like a defeated power, though we did not see ourselves as defeated. A softer version of the Treaty of Versailles was imposed on the country. There was no outright annexation of territory or formal reparations like Germany faced after World War I, but Russia was told in no uncertain terms that it would play a modest role in the world. This policy was bound to engender a form of Weimar syndrome in a great nation whose dignity and interests had been trampled.”

The country being discussed here, it should be recalled, is the world’s largest, a Eurasian power whose Communist empire extended as far west as Berlin for more than four decades after World War II, subjecting peoples to the mind-numbing, soul-poisoning oppression of totalitarian rule under regimes that coerced and confined. The Gulag-littered Soviet imperium was a crushing universe, a “conspiracy of silence,” in the poet Czeslaw Milosz’s words, where “one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

Russia is also a nation that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was ushered by the West into the group of leading industrialized countries known as the G-8 (before its recent Crimea-related exclusion). It has been the object of outreach from Washington and NATO since 1991, including initiatives that resulted in Russia joining the Partnership for Peace program and the NATO-Russia council. (NATO-Russian cooperation has been suspended since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea; yes, there was cooperation to suspend.)

What the United States and Europe were not prepared to do, however, was to eviscerate the Atlantic alliance in the name of some dreamy “Union of Europe” — Karaganov’s phrase — that would bring about “the merger of European soft power and technology with Russia’s resources, political will and hard power.” If this for Moscow was what was meant by the end of the Cold War, it was a nonstarter and still is.

Nor, rightly, was the West prepared to turn its back on the desire of former Soviet vassal states from Poland to Estonia to secure the guarantee against renewed subjugation and the prospects of new prosperity that, in their eyes, only membership in the European Union and NATO afforded. Abuse breeds caution. These nations, long blotted out, wanted their security, freedom and the rule of law underwritten in steel.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing rampage in eastern Ukraine by the Russian fifth columnists of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” demonstrate the wisdom of their choice. The expansion through NATO and the E.U. of a free Europe was the greatest American and Western diplomatic achievement since 1989.

What now? A sense of national humiliation, whether based in fact or not, is a tremendous catalyst for violence. It was in Weimar Germany, where the reparations and concessions stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 created an explosive mood. It was in Serbia at the time of the break-up in 1991 of Yugoslavia, a country Belgrade always regarded as a Serbian extension of itself. The blinding fever drummed up by Slobodan Milosevic was based in a supposed need to reassert Serbian greatness; the means then was the ravages of his fifth columnists in Bosnia.

That delirium took a decade to dim. It is unlikely that the Russian version will take less. Putin’s nationalist upsurge is the mask for all sorts of problems — demographic decline, corruption, a coopted judiciary, a cowed press, an oligarchic resource-based economy that has failed to diversify — but no less virulent for that.

In the face of this assertive Russia, nothing would be more dangerous than American weakness.

So when President Obama, in response to a recent question about whether his declaration that the United States would protect the Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea risked drawing another “red line,” gave an evasive answer including the hypothesis that America might not want to “engage militarily,” he did something profoundly dangerous. In Asia, as in the Baltic, the Article 5 commitment to a joint military response to any attack on an ally is critical.

The U.S. treaties must be words of truth that sound “like a pistol shot,” or violent mayhem could spread well beyond East Ukraine.

[Nictoshek]

Putin zaczyna rozumieć, że przeholował, że się za bardzo zaangażował, za bardzo się wkopał właściwie w całą, kompleksową sytuację Ukrainy, nie mając w tej chwili przemyślanego planu działania - powiedział w "Faktach po Faktach" profesor Zbigniew Brzeziński. Z byłym doradcą prezydenta Cartera rozmawiała Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska.

Brzezinski: Putin begins to understand that he overreached

[Eric]

I don't think so. For Putin, this is Russia's opportunity to say to the West, "We're not a poor, broken, weak country anymore. We had to obey everything you said in the 1990s, but now we have the ability to follow our own national interests. If Russia's national interests aren't the same as the West's, then the West's aren't the same as Russia's, either."

Russia doesn't want to find itself in the same position as Latin America is to the United States.

[karl]

It is easy to become confused between political and economics in the matter of energy, for then the forest has a tendency to hide the trees. In this manner, Mr. Putin has not forgot his training and experience whilst serving as a KBG officer. His enemies are not the West or the Americans, it is simply economics or best to say, how to best fulfill energy contracts not just to Western Europe, but to the increasing energy needs of his home land of: The Russian Federation.

The Ukrainians made their bed, and are learning to sleep in it as so be it. They will sort out their problems on their own as should be. It is not to our West to wade in with a big stick nor of the Americans. What we in the West need, is stability in rational thinking, not simply a knee jerk reaction to up setting news as has occurred.

It has been very well known of the richness of black gold in the Black sea for some years, but has been tied up by the former Ukrainian government that no longer exist. At present with the new Government, is at present a rather new question of direction that it {new government} will take upon what ever resolution to these various issues. For upon their land is some very expensive earth gas pipes and terminal centres they are responsible for. For in this matter, they {new government} have placed them selves between two forces that of The Russian Federation on their East side, and, Western Europe on their West side. With this are production contracts that must be fulfilled with out excuse. Withen the confines of these previous contracts, will go protection of those pipes and line terminals to the new Government as their responsibility with out fault.

So as the fog of confusion as portrayed by the various news agencies will come to an end with what ever excuse they will give. The reality of our times will become visible as to the following will display.

Note: the following was acquired information of an Americans source with academic responsibility of accurate research and documentation.



March 20, 2014

Putin Wants Crimea's Oil and Gas Rights


Russian President Vladimir Putin was all smiles as he signed the annexation treaty between Crimea and the Russian Federation on March 18th that will allow the Crimea to be absorbed by Russia. In a speech to the Russian Duma, Putin congratulated the 82% of Crimea citizens voting by a 96% majority to secede from the Ukraine. But Putin’s Cheshire-Cat smile isn’t just about welcoming two million more countrymen. The day before, Crimea’s parliament nationalized Chornomornaftohaz and Ukrtransgaz, the two energy companies that control substantial offshore oil and gas reserves. Putin intends for Russia to make a profit on acquiring and developing Crimea’s offshore oil and gas.

The Crimea is a lush region known for its palm-fringed seafront boulevards and rocky hills, but it receives subsidies for 85% of its electricity, 90% of its drinking water and most of its food. Putin has committed to continuing subsidies and lifting 560,000 Crimean pensioner payments from the Ukrainian average of $150 a month to Russia's minimum of $180. He also assured Crimean workers that average wages will rise from $270 as Ukrainians to the $660 average wages of workers in neighboring Krasnodar region.

Karen Vartapetov, an analyst at Standard & Poor's rating agency, calculated that Moscow will need to pay 38 billion rubles (just over $1 billion) a year to bring Crimea's per capita budget revenue to the same level as Russia's poorest regions, such as North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria in the restive North Caucasus. According to economist Jouko Rautava, of the Institute for Economies in Transition at the Bank of Finland, economic growth in Russia in 2014 could dip below 1 percent after the “Crimea Weekend” -- short of the Russian central bank's forecast for 1.5-1.8 % expansion.

But these subsidies are only a fraction of the $29 billion in annual subsidies and debt relief President Obama and European Union (EU) leaders seemed to be willing to pay to support Ukraine’s “people’s revolution.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recognized the rebel government on February 21st and pledged $1 billion of support; while the 28-nation EU offered to join with the International Monetary Fund aid package worth $27 billion over seven years. But when it came time for the U.S. to contribute the first billion dollars in cash last week, Congress objected and left for vacation.

Russian officials have committed to initially send 30 to 40 billion rubles in financial aid to Crimea for transition to the Russian economy. Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov told reporters: “There will be changes in tax laws, the issue of forming a customs service, an internal revenue service, and the registration of legal entities and individuals, inventories and rules to adapt to the Russian tax system.”

But by acquiring the Crimea, I believe Russia will gain control of about 70% of Ukraine’s Black Sea offshore oil and gas drilling rights. After the 2012 discovery of the Domino Field in neighboring Romania that is so large the country expects to become a natural gas exporter, ExxonMobile Corporation quickly licensed from Ukraine the rights to drill in the Skifska tract off the Crimean Peninsula. Exxon had partnered with Royal Dutch Shell Plc and planned to spend $735 million drilling two wells about 50 miles off Crimea’s southwestern coast. But according to Chris Weafer of Macro Advisory in Moscow, “Exxon and Shell are now in a legal limbo.” They pursued an “exploration deal with a government which may soon no longer have jurisdiction over the region.” ExxonMobil said the company “isn’t choosing sides in the dispute.”

The United States and the EU retaliated with sanctions against Russia on March 17th, but there is little overlap between the 11 individuals targeted by President Obama’s Executive Order and the 21 people sanctioned by the EU Legislature. Only 4 individuals have been jointly sanctioned by the U.S. and EU, and only 2 are Russian.U.S. sanctions target the highest ranks of power in Russia, including parliament leaders; while the longer EU list targets lower level individuals with 2/3 Ukrainian or Crimean.

Europe is much more vulnerable to Russian countermoves because of its strong economic ties to Moscow. Russia supplies over 50% of Central Europe oil and gas and 30% of the EU. There are also 6,000 German companies actively selling to Russia and German companies have invested heavily in Russian manufacturing according to a report today in the magazine Der Spiegel. European banks are also concerned with loss of the enormous amount of Russian capital flowing through London's financial district.

Vladimir Putin is the most popular Russian leader in the last 30 years with an approval rating of 71.6%. According to my sources, Russians see the same strengths of courage and strong moral purpose in Putin that they believe President Ronald Reagan used to lead the economic rebirth in America that overwhelmed the Soviet Union. They see Barack Obama as an updated Mikhail Gorbachev; a man who talked a good game but whose economic policies led to foreign weakness and internal collapse.They believe Putin’s addition of Crimea’s oil and gasreserves will economically strengthen Russia.

The author welcomes feedback @ [e-mail]
Chriss Street is teaching microeconomic at University of California, Irvine this spring from March 31 – June 8, 2014. Call Student Services at [phone] or visit unex.uci.edu/courses to enroll!

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Karl