Open Letter to President Obama

Research is hard for many of our finest foreign policy and military pundits, it seems. Julia Ioffe comes to mind but then it is The New Republic we are talking about:

This 1995 Strobe Talbott piece on NATO expansion is about as confused and contradictory as the Talbottian Brookings wallah South Asian stuff. I know the retrospectoscope is powerful, but what an intellectual and conceptual mess:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/why-nato-should-gr… has decided it should accept new members for three main reasons.

<blockquote>Collective defense remains an imperative need of European and transatlantic security, and central to American engagement in Europe. The end of Soviet communism, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the breakup of the USSR have eliminated the threat that NATO was created to counter during the cold war. But new threats may arise that would require NATO to protect its members and to deter attack. During the cold war, membership in the Alliance was limited by the artificial division of Europe into two camps. With the cold war’s end, NATO should be open to the new democracies that have regained their independence, that share common values, and that can advance the military and political goals of the Alliance.

The prospect of being admitted to NATO provides the nations of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union with additional incentives to strengthen their democratic and legal institutions, ensure civilian command of their armed forces, liberalize their economies, and respect human rights, including the rights of national minorities. In short, nations that are encouraged in their aspirations to join NATO are more likely to make a successful transition from their communist past.

The prospect of membership can also foster among the nations of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union a greater willingness to resolve disputes peacefully and contribute to peace-keeping operations. Thus the process of expansion can help to promote regional stability and peace.</blockquote>

What I've noticed many in the military do is project a sort of perfect idea of NATO as a defensive alliance onto the messy project of democratization and 90's era rooted nation-building project it has been. Add it to local politics within a background of global power politics and you have the disaster you see before you today.

And the nukes. No one ever wants to talk about how Russian nuclear doctrine or how the meddling by all sides takes us to a very dark place.

After Iraq, you'd think people could spot American Foreign Policy propaganda but I guess if it fulfills some emotional need to be at war with a forever enemy worthy of a certain type of American maleness or femaleness, then what the heck, eh?

2008 statement from then Senator Hillary Clinton (2008 Presidential Candidate)

Very similar to 90's era speech from Bill Clinton and his attempts to create a domestic constituency for NATO expansion and counteract critics who said he was too domestically focused. You can see echos in the Open Letter to President Obama in its attempts to leverage a kind of domestic American partisan space.

<blockquote>I enthusiastically welcome the January 11 letter from Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Arsenii Yatsenyuk to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, which outlines Ukraine's desire for a closer relationship with NATO, including a Membership Action Plan. Like Ukraine's leaders, I hope that important steps toward reaching these goals will be made at the NATO summit in Bucharest in early April. I applaud the fact that Ukraine aspires to anchor itself firmly in the trans-Atlantic community through membership in NATO and look forward to working with Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Americans to reach that goal.
Since the earliest days of Ukrainian independence, the strategy of the United States has always been to respect and support the Ukrainian people's democratic choices in shaping their future. Ukraine has been and remains an extremely important partner for the United States, and I take great pride in Ukraine's contributions to our common goal of building a Europe that is whole and free, peaceful and prosperous.

When I traveled to Ukraine in 1997, I visited a memorial to the victims of Communist repression in Lviv, and made a commitment to the Ukrainian people on behalf of the United States: "In your fight for freedom, your fight for democracy, the American people will stand with you." In recalling that commitment more than ten years later I applaud the immense contributions that Ukrainian-Americans have made to our country and the indispensable role they have played in broadening and deepening the bonds between the United States and Ukraine. I have been greatly impressed by the courage of the Ukrainian people as they emerged from decades of Soviet oppression and as they have experienced both victories and struggles on the path to democracy and freedom.

BREAK

The United States has always favored the closest possible ties between NATO and Ukraine, including the creation of the NATO-Ukraine Council. We have always insisted on an open door policy for European democracies that want to join the Alliance. The enlargement of NATO is not directed against any state; NATO does not see any nation as its enemy. I pledge to support Ukraine's efforts to meet the criteria for MAP and eventual membership. The United States should actively encourage our NATO Allies to deepen their own ties with Ukraine, a country that has broken with an authoritarian past and pursues good relations with all its neighbors. Ukraine deserves a chance to pursue its aspirations for a wider role in the Euro-Atlantic community. In the same spirit, I call on the Bush Administration to give Ukraine all the support it needs to complete its accession to the World Trade Organization.

As President, I will ensure that the United States does everything necessary to help Ukraine realize these important and achievable goals.</blockquote) - 2008 statement from then Senator Hillary Clinton

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=90885

But as events have shown, our system did more than promote democracy, it actively chose sides and supported candidates, interfered in European strategies and so on. It's as likely that we prevented a kind of democratic space from opening up as we supported it. Hard to know, so many outsiders were messing around in 'the system', plus the system itself has a lot of issues.

​Fascinating. Digging through 90's era op eds, newspaper articles, and congressional hearing transcripts, you find so many warnings about NATO expansion.

And it's not an either/or thing. The WAY in which it was done and its context is very important:

http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/bene.htm

<blockquote>Russia is the main opponent to this expansion, because it interprets this as an increasing military presence on its borders. There is also a concern over old territorial claims to parts of Russia's new neighbors that Moscow may try to pursue subsequently. <strong>For example, one vague scenario is of Russian intervention in the Eastern Ukraine to "protect the lives and property of Russian citizens".</strong> Despite this, there has been a detectable thaw in Moscow's opposition to NATO expansion as its leadership recognizes that the alliance no longer poses a threat to Russia, and this should be a manageable concern. For example, Russian Defense Minister Igor Rodionov recently stated the following: "I have become convinced NATO is not a threat to Russia, but I have millions to convince in Russia who are still worried that it is a threat."(2) </blockquote>

United States Marine Corps
Command and Staff College
Marine Corps University
2076 South Street
Marine Corps Combat Development Command
Quantico, Virginia 22134-5068
MASTER OF MILITARY STUDIES
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF MILITARY STUDIES
Author:
Captain Gyula Bene, Hungarian Army
<strong>AY: 1996-97</strong>

If NATO expansion had occurred in a different way, without the stripping of the Russian economy, without aggressive democracy promotion as regime change, without Iraq and Libya and a "global" NATO diluting its capabilities, and so on, what then?

Counterfactuals. Hard but always interesting.

<blockquote>Senator Durbin’s ethnic Lithuanian profile is less well-known outside of Central Illinois....Rep. Durbin also was a leader of the Congressional Baltic Caucus and wrote/sponsored several important resolutions in support of Lithuania before and after independence came in 1991. As a U.S. Senator since 1996, Dick has continued to assist Lithuania over the years, most significantly with its entry into NATO.</blockquote>

http://lithspringfield.com/business-professions/u-s-senator-richard-j-d…

While I have great admiration and sympathy for some of the communities in the US that lobbied for NATO expansion, it didn't happen in an orderly way within any kind of strategic framework. It was an ad hoc, money making, pandering, sort of thing and its come back to bite the US in the a$$. And one wonders if the expat community prevented a better way of organizing defense for certain countries because they created false expectations. A shame.

And apparently no one got the British Ukranian business reference, did they? One set of oligarchs fighting another set, with innocent Ukranians in between. Anyone wishing to join the EU should read the fine print, especially toward everyday people. Remember, the bankers always get paid first. And the big three (UK, France, Germany) have no intention of making any hard sanction calls, none whatsoever. No American President can change this reality.

Retro 90's history, young Americans:

<strong>April 29, 1998, Phyllis Schafly, Eagle Forum</strong>

<blockquote>The Senate is scheduled to vote this week on the centerpiece of Clinton's global plans, the NATO Expansion Treaty. Because this treaty would control our foreign policy for decades into the future, we are entitled to have the answers to these twenty questions before the vote.

Why are you committing America to go to war to defend the borders of faraway countries that were Communist until a few years ago? Under NATO's Article V, we must "forthwith" go to war to defend any NATO member against attack.

Why are you giving a foreign organization (NATO) the power to commit America to war? The U.S. Constitution gives the power "to declare war" to Congress, not to NATO, or to the United Nations to which NATO is tied by eight references in its charter.

Why are you trying to perpetuate a Cold War alliance that successfully finished its mission? The threat that NATO was designed to protect us from is no more; the Cold War is over.

Why are you repudiating the Reagan policy of Peace Through Strength? Ronald Reagan built up our military power so we didn't have to use it, but the Clinton-Albright policy is to involve us in every conflict in order to show "world leadership."

Why did you pass a law in 1996 to force U.S. taxpayers to guarantee payment for the weapons that the new NATO countries are obligated to buy to upgrade their military forces? Let's have full disclosure of the PAC donations every member of the Senate has received from U.S. corporations that will profit from this law.

Is NATO Expansion a mechanism to institutionalize the Bosnian model? It's now obvious that Clinton lied about dates and plans to exit Bosnia, and that Bosnia was always a plan to use American troops as global cops and social workers on a permanent basis.

What is NATO's plan for dealing with the impending conflict in Vojvodina? Which side will NATO take? Is there any reason to use NATO troops to defend one side rather than the other?

Does "collective security" mean that the U.S. does the securing and all other countries do the collecting? If Eastern Europe needs "collective security," why isn't wealthy Western Europe handling the challenge instead of bleeding Uncle Sap?

Can you assure us that the NATO Expansion Treaty is not like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that put America on the track to the Vietnam War? Or that NATO Expansion is not a slippery slope to perpetual conflicts, falsely disguised as "peacekeeping" and with a huge potential for warmaking?

Please list the additional countries that you anticipate will join NATO Expansion. Clinton has already promised Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and, in his Letter of Transmittal to the Senate, he promised that "no qualified European democracy is ruled out as a future member" of NATO.

Is there any rationale for admitting some countries and excluding others? Why not admit Kosovo, Bosnia, Ukraine, and all the former Captive Nations of the former Soviet Union?

What is the definition of "out-of-area" NATO interests that Madeleine Albright has already testified will include the Middle East and Central Africa? Isn't NATO Expansion just a new mini-United Nations to get around the fact that the only people still enthusiastic about the UN are Ted Turner and Jane Fonda?

Why are you letting our fair-weather friends in Western Europe off the hook for their refusal to admit Eastern European countries into the European Union (EU)? That's what Albright ought to be demanding that they do, instead of putting the burden on America to admit them into the NATO military alliance.

Why are we alienating Russia (with its awesome store of nuclear weapons) at a time when we should be encouraging cooperation and stability? Russia considers NATO Expansion an unfriendly act because it will put NATO troops directly on Russia's borders.

and so on....</blockquote>

http://www.eagleforum.org/column/1998/apr98/98-04-29.html

And before anyone says, yeah, but 9-11 changed things and the neocons and ought-cons got it, remember, the Atlanticists and some neocons are the biggest block-and-tacklers for the Saudi/Pakistan axis.

It's one reason you didn't get your Northern Distribution route earlier. It's one reason that China jumped ahead so quickly while the Atlanticists were obsessed with Europe.

Plenty of European centric proposals for defense were, well, proposed. They were squashed by various constituencies, and the writers of this letter are among that group. They are partly to blame for the situation today. By pushing Iraq, by preventing Europeans from focusing on their own defense, by pushing NATO expansion and regime change, sorry, democracy promotion IN RUSSIA, the geniuses helped to get us to today.

None of this takes away from domestic Russian or other factors.

There is no end to the being made fools of, is there?

This letter is very much in line with the criticism of Reagan by the neoconservatives:

<blockquote>Reagan had a genuine horror of nuclear weapons, and wanted them abolished. He called mutually assured destruction “the craziest thing I ever heard of.” His three military interventions — Grenada, Lebanon and Libya — were “limited operations of short duration,” and he carefully avoided direct confrontation with the Soviets.

This got Reagan into trouble with the neocons early on. They took to the oped pages to lament “The Muddle in Foreign Policy” (Irving Kristol) and chronicle the “Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy” (Norman Podhoretz).

Incredibly, Podhoretz accused Reagan of “following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire,” instead of “encouraging the breakdown of that empire from within.”

In Reagan’s Middle East policies, especially, there was much for hawks to rue, such as the administration’s sharp condemnation of Israel’s 1981 “preventive strike” on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and Reagan’s decision to withdraw U.S. peacekeepers from Lebanon after a truck bomb killed more than 200 Marines.

In a 2007 debate, to the chagrin of Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, invoked Reagan to argue for getting out of the Middle East: “We need the courage of a Ronald Reagan.”

<strong>Despite Reagan’s “ringing speeches,” he was “quite circumscribed in his efforts at democracy promotion,” Colin Dueck writes in Hard Line, a new history of GOP foreign policy. Reagan viewed the U.S. as a city on a hill, a “model to other countries,” not a crusader state with “an obligation to forcibly promote democracy overseas.”</strong></blockquote> - Gene Healy, CATO Institute "Reagan Was No Neocon"

I encourage younger folk lurking--aw, I know you're around, students!-- to go back to newspaper articles and primary resources of the time and read some of the criticisms by the same class of intellectuals. Don't they seem remarkably similar to this one?

Venting and emotion is not strategy.

Many in the military--despite the need to be outside politics--view themselves as conservatives. And yet, on many milblogs, few seem interested in tracing intellectual histories and disagreements and how arguments developed. Curious.

Outlaw is correct, the neoconservatives never did understand strategy. They hated Reagan for this very reason--look at their criticisms of him. This letter reads no differently. I wrote the following at War on the Rocks:

<blockquote>What American President–even during the height of the Cold War–would escalate over the Ukraine? Sometimes I think some people confuse the hot rhetoric of that time with the care with which people handled situations because of the presence of nuclear weapons.

What is optimal for Europe and its various factions–including the UK–and what is optimal for the US are not as closely aligned in this period as during the Cold War. All the bleating about “the West” fails to recognize this fact. No amount of so-called American leadership can change these facts on the ground.

The expansion of NATO now means that the US has a strategic defense perimeter in Europe that runs through some shifting, difficult, troubled regions. Given that Europe has a collective GDP that is huge, this is strategic malpractice from the American system.

<strong>From Reagan In His Own Hand, page 25:</strong>

“Reagan says that U.S. Foreign policy leaders have failed to appreciate that clearly delineated defense perimeters are central to international credibility and sound strategic doctrine, and they will help bring an end to communism. Much of Reagan’s analysis of crisis in the Third World is framed in terms of his concern for United State’s defense perimeters.”

This is not an exercise in What Would Reagan Do, but a point about the expansionary, shifting, uncertain, one day this/the next day that, attitude toward NATO by feckless leaders in the West. (And you can throw in whichever Russian leaders that you like, too).</blockquote>

No matter what you think Russia is today, from a misunderstood failing power, to a revanchist imperially minded nation, the drawing of unclear lines is strategically stupid. Especially between two nuclear powers.

This is the problem with the democracy promotion/spending millions to buy elections Gene Sharpified State Department line, Special Forces Gene Sharp alcolytes.

Don't fall in love yourselves as Masters of Chaos. Ain't no one a master of chaos. The second you think that, chaos already won.

I may not have the military background of people here but my time in Boston and Palo Alto--however brief--taught me a lot about the intellectual feeder class of Ivy league intellectuals. Them, you don't know so well.

I know them because once upon a time I wanted to be one.

<blockquote><strong>Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities -- democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. -- but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. </strong>The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.

....

Did the U.S. government fund the Yushchenko campaign directly? Not to my knowledge. Both the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute conducted training programs for Ukrainian political parties, some of which later joined the Yushchenko coalition. But in the years leading up to the 2004 votes, American ambassadors in Ukraine insisted that no U.S. government money could be provided to any candidate. Private sources of external funding and expertise aided the Yushchenko campaign. Likewise, U.S. and Russian public relations consultants worked with the Yushchenko campaign, just as U.S. and Russian public relations people were brought in to help his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych. In future elections Ukrainian officials might enforce more controls on foreign resources. But this kind of private, for-profit campaign advice occurs everywhere now, and Americans no longer control the market.

Did American money bring about the Orange Revolution? Absolutely not. The combination of a weak, divided and corrupt ancien régime and a united, mobilized and highly motivated opposition produced Ukraine's democratic breakthrough. Westerners did not create or control the Ukrainian democratic movement but rather supported its cause on the margins. Moreover, democracy promotion groups do not have a recipe for revolution. If the domestic conditions aren't ripe, there will be no democratic breakthrough, no matter how crafted the technical assistance or how strategically invested the small grants. In fact, Western democracy promoters work in most developing democracies in the world, yet democratic transitions are rare.</blockquote>

- Michael McFaul, Washington Post, <strong>2004</strong>

Given the fact that so many retired Special Forces types have fallen for the Gene Sharp/USIP line, I'm not surprised that the crowd here missed the potentially negative second, third, and so-on, order effects of dumping millions of dollars into a foreign system and essentially attempting to mediate outcomes.

Thinking three or four steps down the line is not a strong suit with certain military intellectuals. Col. Petit was right in the article printed around here sometime ago--some people need to read more widely, including digging through policy papers of the intellectual class that is a permanent feature of Washington. I know we have civilian control of the military but you are still supposed to be educated beyond what you think you already know.