Russia appears to have been involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. The deeper issues, however, go beyond partisan politics.

At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, assured the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not absorb former Warsaw Pact states. The most recent NATO summit was held in Warsaw. We plan to deploy advanced weapons in Poland.

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the United States was involved in an intense political crisis in Ukraine, which had been a republic of the now extinct Soviet Union. Ukraine’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovich, an unsavory leader by any standards, was close to Moscow. Washington supported a revolution by Yanukovich’s political opponents, Western-oriented free market advocates. They prevailed. Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern population revolted, and Russia then seized Crimea and interfered in eastern Ukraine. Five thousand Ukrainian forces — anti and pro Russian — have been killed, along with 2,000 civilians.

Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, was caught on tape designating one Ukrainian leader as “the guy”; he became Prime Minister.

To be sure, both the U.S. and Russia have interfered in many countries, but when it comes to former Warsaw Pact states and especially to former Soviet republics, the moral issues of democracy — or hypocrisy — are overshadowed by extreme risk.

As the West incorporates former Soviet republics into NATO, as it has the Baltic states, it becomes obliged to defend them with nuclear weapons. In turn, Russia is moving toward nuclear launch on warning, with greatly increased danger of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The next President will need to manage tensions with Moscow to avoid a new arms race.

For Speak Your Mind, this is David Keppel.

Yet the Pentagon has been testing a precision nuclear warhead that can be delivered by cruise missile.

Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry has warned that the cruise missile might sway a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse yet, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided to deploy heavy U.S. weapons in Eastern Europe. To do so would break a crucial pledge the United States made at the end of the Cold War that we would not expand NATO and would not place our weapons near the Russian border. Putting such weapons in nations such as Hungary – whose right wing government has fascist overtones – is morally debatable and strategically dangerous. Russia is sure to react asymmetrically, perhaps moving closer to nuclear launch-on-warning.

In the 21st century, which faces climate chaos and social and political turmoil, we must modernize our thinking, not our nuclear weapons.

Sources

https://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/FAQs#sthash.mIHjyUut.dpuf

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernizes-nuclear-weapons-smaller-leaves-some-uneasy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/opinion/breaking-the-taboo-on-the-use-of-nuclear-arms.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/world/europe/us-fortifying-europes-east-to-deter-putin.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

America’s great Cold War diplomats—George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Lwellyn Thompson—were realists. They had no love for Soviet communism, but they warned repeatedly against Americans’ capacity to see their own actions as righteous and others as evil. They knew that that diplomacy depends on recognizing all parties’ essential interests, as well as allowing them to save face.

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to the reunification of Germany, the West promised him that we would not take advantage of the change to expand NATO. Yet today, Eastern European states are part of NATO. NATO installed missile defenses in Poland and Romania and set up a military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

American diplomats and American money were involved in the ouster of Ukraine’s corrupt but democratically elected pro-Russian president. The new government, ratified by a rump parliament, includes far right-wing forces. It excluded Russian as a national language, alarming eastern Ukrainians, then reversed the decision.

I believe Kennan would have counseled President Obama not to take advantage of the conflict to threaten Russia, specifically through NATO membership, military integration, or deployments and to beware of using American money to support opposition groups, above all in Russia itself. Washington would insist on no less of Moscow if there were a socialist revolution in Mexico.