Russia – Speak Your Mind

In Search Of An Arms Race

Will Murphy — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 13:00:12 +0000

President Trump proposes a $54 billion increase in the U.S. military budget, with sharp cuts in environmental protection, diplomacy, and aid to the poor in the U.S. and globally. The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next seven nations combined. One billion people live on $1.25 a day. 20 million are on the brink of famine. The United States spends less than one percent of the Federal budget on assistance to the global poor. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in 2013: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Desperate people also become migrants.

Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

The Malaysian Airlines Tragedy

Yaël Ksander — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:45:42 +0000

In 1983, the Soviet Union apparently shot down a Korean airliner that was off-course over Sakhalin Island, a Soviet submarine port. 269 people perished. My father, John Keppel, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, questioned the U.S. government’s account and called for an independent Congressional investigation.

The apparent missile shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine also deserves independent investigation, but clearly in both cases innocent people lost their lives when civilian airliners crossed zones of intense conflict. Many civilians have been killed in recent battles in eastern Ukraine after government forces ended a truce with separatists.

If pro-Russian rebels mistook the Malaysian plane for a Ukrainian military aircraft, their mistake, though criminally reckless, was not unique. Ukraine shot down a Russian airliner in 2001, and the U.S. downed an Iranian civilian Airbus in 1988, killing 290.

The Reagan administration seized on the 1983 Korean Airlines tragedy to push Europeans to accept deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles on their soil. Senator John McCain already speaks of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy as a “game-changer.”

One hundred years ago, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo led to the cataclysm of world war. This is no time for games. NATO deployments in or near Ukraine would be especially provocative. A new Cold War on the border of a resentful, nuclear armed Russia would carry incalculable risk, to which the Malaysian Airlines tragedy is just a clue.

Sources:

Democracy Now

The Nation

MSNBC

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

Ukraine: A New Cold War

Betsy Shepherd — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 16:16:25 +0000

The current standoff with Russia over Ukraine is a good time to ask how we survived the Cold War without nuclear war.

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.