Ibne Siraj :
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev without necessarily taking sides with Russian President Vladimir Putin, told a German news magazine that NATO instigated the current Ukraine crisis because it had chosen not to adhere to the provisions of the Paris Charter of 1990, thus saying the dangling nuclear war between NATO and Russia is just a matter of time. With both sides flaunting their respective nuclear arsenal, Gorbachev told German magazine Der Spiegel that the world “will not survive the next few years” if either side lost its nerve in the current stand-off. “Moscow does not believe the West, and the West does not believe Moscow. The loss of confidence is catastrophic.”
Although critical of his successor, the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner nonetheless believed that Putin was just reacting based on NATO’s flamboyant aspirations to expand, fuelled by the United States’ “dangerous winning mentality.” He said the US-led NATO’s eastward expansion has destroyed the very essence of the European security order, which was written in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. NATO’s expansion, he claimed, was a 180-degree turn away from the Paris Charter of 1990. “We won’t survive the coming years if someone loses their nerve in this overheated situation,” Gorbachev said. “This is not something I’m saying thoughtlessly. I am extremely concerned.”
The hitherto silent Gorbachev has suddenly appeared on the scene when he saw that the crisis in Ukraine has been deepening at the instigation of the United States and its allies. The way the overall situation is aggravating, Gorbachev’s fear of an imminent nuclear war may take place centering the Ukraine crisis. The escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine has taken center stage at the 51st Munich Security Conference, with international efforts taking place to heal the rift between the United States, Russia and Europe. While Washington is discussing plans to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, European nations are strongly opposing the dangerous move, with tensions between NATO and Russia running perilously high.
What is being seen is that the crisis in Ukraine has provided NATO with the pretext for moving further forward with all sorts of military might. This is how secret western plans are well underway for an advance of that crisis in Ukraine. What the United States has succeeded in doing with NATO expansion is to set up a military Iron Curtain along Russia’s entire western border. Experts say NATO must take the responsibility for the destabilizing role it has played in Ukraine over the past two decades, and how this has led to the current crisis.
NATO plays an intrinsic, indispensable role in the ongoing war in Ukraine, with the crisis already having lasted almost 300 days in duration, It is one that is expanding in intensity and in scope every day and NATO is helping to fuel the conflict by its expansion plans. NATO’s role is in efforts made since 1994, when it initially extended an international partnership program to Ukraine called Partnership for Peace. It was extended to dozens of other countries also but immediately upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US employed NATO as the mechanism by which to militarily integrate the republics of the former Soviet Union. And this of course includes the full integration into membership of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 11 years ago.
But also efforts were made to bring countries like Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and other counties that border Russia, to integrate them into the military command structures of NATO. Even if Ukraine is far from becoming a full NATO member, it can still be useful as a so-called non-aligned member like Georgia, where Ukraine would co-operate fully with the alliance. It’s sufficient that these two countries be launching pads or operating areas in forward bases for US and NATO operations particularly aimed at Russia. Over the past 21 years, there have been efforts to integrate Ukraine into the US-controlled NATO military block.
During a well attended press conference in Moscow, Putin referred to the west’s promise not to expand the NATO eastwards after the fall of the Berlin wall and said, “Didn’t they (West) tell us after the fall of the Berlin Wall that NATO would not expand eastwards? However, the expansion started immediately. There were two waves of expansion. Is that not a wall? True, it is a virtual wall, but it was coming up. What about the anti-missile defence system next to our borders? Is that not a wall?” Putin continued to say, “This is the main issue of current international relations. Our partners never stopped. They decided they were the winners, they were an empire, while all the others were their vassals, and they needed to put the squeeze on them.
I said the same in my address in the Federal Assembly that this is the problem. They never stopped building walls, despite all our attempts to work together without any dividing lines in Europe and the world at large.” The Russian President believes that Moscow’s rough stand on certain critical situations, including that in the Ukraine, should send a message to the west that the best thing to do is to stop building walls and to start building a common humanitarian space of security and economic freedom. Basically, the US-Russian relations were ok until February 22, 2014. Since then, things have gone “down the toilet bowl. Before February 22, there was no evidence of American or European policy makers being concerned with Ukraine.
The US government and the mainstream media are swaggering towards a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine without any seriousness that has informed this sort of decision-making throughout the nuclear age. Instead, Washington seems to posses by a self-righteous goofiness that could be the prelude to the end of life on this planet. Nearly across the US political spectrum, there is a pugnacious “group thinktank”, which has transformed what should have been a manageable political dispute in Ukraine into some morality play. President Barack Obama personally recognizes how foolhardy this attitude is, he has made no significant move to head off the craziness and, indeed, has tolerated provocative actions by his underlings. Obama also has withheld from the American people intelligence information that undercuts some of the more extreme claims that his administration has made.
More broadly over last year, Obama’s behavior ranging from his initial neglect of the Ukraine issue to his own participation in the tough talk that he had helped put the Russian economy “in tatters”, ranks as one of the most irresponsible performances by a US president. Given the potential stakes of nuclear war, none of the post-World War II presidents behaved as recklessly as Obama has, which now includes allowing his officials to talk loosely about sending military support to an unstable regime in Kiev that includes neo-Nazis who have undertaken death-squad operations against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
None of the nuclear-age presidents – Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush – would have engaged in such provocative actions on Russia’s borders, though some surely behaved aggressively in overthrowing governments and starting wars farther away. Even Ronald Reagan, an aggressive Cold Warrior, kept his challenges to the Soviet Union in areas that were far less sensitive to its national security than Ukraine. He may have supported the slaughter leftists in Central America and Africa or armed fundamentalists fighting a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, but he recognized the insanity of a military showdown with Moscow in Eastern Europe.
After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, US presidents became more assertive, pushing NATO into the former Warsaw Pact nations and, under President Clinton, bombing a Russian ally in Serbia, but that came at a time when Russia was essentially flat on its back geopolitically. Perhaps the triumphalism of that period is still alive especially among neocons who reject President Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russia’s national pride.
These Washington hardliners still feel that they can treat Moscow with disdain, ignoring the fact that Russia maintains a formidable nuclear arsenal and is not willing to return to the supine position of the 1990s.
