Another Obummer Lapse in Foreign Policy: EU & Russia Cozy Up to Each Other Because of US Disinterest

My Death Panels Will Get Y'all Soon Enough!

BHusseinO can't seem to buy a break nowadays. A recent German/French/Russian "Summit" was held in Deauville to begin to orchestrate the EU's relaxation of its NATO ties and construction of a new "security relationship" with Russia.

...there are obvious factors explaining the French and German initiatives. A major one is President Barack Obama’s perceived lack of interest and engagement in Europe. His failure to attend a Berlin ceremony commemorating the end of the Cold War and his cancellation of a meeting involving the E.U.’s new president has had symbolic weight. At the same time, the U.S. reset with Russia and the administration’s willingness to treat President Dmitri A. Medvedev as a potential Western-oriented partner has given the Germans and French the sense they were free to act on the basis of their own interpretations of the changes in Moscow. In this European view, the United States has become significantly dependent on Russia through its maintenance of military supply routes to Afghanistan and its heightened pressure, albeit in wavering measure, on Iran. Because the reset is portrayed by the administration to be a U.S. foreign policy success, criticism from Washington of Russia is at a minimum.

And Obummer has given the Russians a whole series of passes in other areas, why get so excited about the EU? Including the fact that the EU has no strategic partnership with NATO? Obummer is nothing if not asleep at the switch as the US train barrels down a tunnel to nowhere, which is his apparent foreign policy goal.

Ten days ago, when Mr. Medvedev offered Hugo Chávez of Venezuela help to build the country’s first nuclear power station, the State Department expressed concern about technology migrating to “countries that should not have that technology” — but added (bafflingly), that the relationship between Venezuela and Russia (for years Iran’s supplier of nuclear wherewithal) “is not of concern to us.”

Last week, more of the same. When Mr. Medvedev bestowed Russia’s highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony on a group of sleeper spies who were expelled from the United States last July, a State Department spokesman turned away a reporter’s question with a “no comment.” Washington chooses not to say anything either about Mr. Medvedev’s support, repeated in Deauville, for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, as next year’s president of the G-20 consultative grouping, to focus its attention on limiting the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

In the Deauville aftermath, the Americans have preferred applauding Mr. Medvedev’s decision to come to a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon next month, following U.S. congressional elections. He is not expected to announce Russian participation in or endorsement of a U.S.-initiated antimissile shield for Europe — the United States’ notionally organic bond in strengthening the alliance’s trans-Atlantic future — yet the Russian president’s appearance as a guest on NATO’s turf could be seen as an important gesture of real cooperation.

Still, for all the Americans’ concern about Europe dealing with Russia on its own, there hardly has been a corresponding public statement from the administration that’s a call for caution about Moscow’s interest in setting up rivalries between NATO and the E.U. For David J. Kramer, a former senior State Department official with responsibility for Russia, the new circumstances show “the Russians now have far more leverage in the U.S. relationship than they should.”

But World Politics Review has a less Manichaen point of view on the zero-sum game that used to be called the Great Game which consisted in keeping Russia within its Soviet boundaries:

Finally, as Vinocur points out by citing a French source at Elysée Palace, it's premature to assess whether Russia's Western turn represents a permanent, or even a durable strategic shift. If you take the 2008 Russia-Georgia War as the highwater mark of Russian belligerence toward the U.S. and NATO, certainly the past year points in that direction.

But it bears noting that in the intervening two years, Russia has essentially accomplished all of the foreign policy objectives previously driving that belligerence. NATO's eastward expansion is off the table. The U.S. European-based missile defense system has been modified and multilateralized (although as Richard Weitz's WPR column today makes clear, it remains problematic). And Russian dominance in Central Asia is re-established.

In light of that, Russia's concerns have now begun to resemble more closely those of Europe and the U.S. -- namely, China's expanding influence, both globally and in Central Asia, as well as regional stability in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

That raises the question that poses the biggest problem to this sort of Russia fearmongering: Assuming the very unlikely emergence of an alignment between Europe and Russia that did replace the trans-Atlantic relationship, in what policy and regional areas would that threaten U.S. interests? Central Asia is a contested space mainly to assure European energy security, which such an alignment would logically moot. Interests in Afghanistan overlap entirely, with differences mainly concerning method (counternarcotics policy, in particular). On Iran, Europe is very closely aligned with the U.S. view, and would more likely exercise a moderating influence on Russia than the reverse. And in terms of balancing against China, Russia's Far East territory would provide a very useful northwestern frontier to preoccupy Chinese strategists. As for counterterrorism, counterproliferation and anti-piracy, Russia has been relatively cooperative, even at the height of its belligerent period.

A lot of the anxiety these kinds of summits provoke can be traced to a lingering distrust of European diplomacy, which is seen by most Americans as not Manichean enough. But the flipside of Europe's pragmatism is that it is driven by self-interest. And it will be quite a while before it is in Europe's interest to abandon the trans-Atlantic relationship. In the meantime, a more closely harmonized relationship with Moscow not only resembles the current U.S. policy toward Russia, but is in everyone's interest

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Let's hope that after the mid-term elections chastise Obama into a saner look at things, he can get a grip on the foreign policy levers of strategy instead of trying to punish the Brits for being imperialists back a century ago and to soothe the undying hatred that vicious radical criminals like Ortega and Chavez nurture towards the USA.

Unless he's lost all contact with the world as it is.

Robo-Dunce Putin Flexes His Muscles--Medvedev Fights Back

The trial of Mikhael Khodorkovsky is as farcical as any show trial by Vlad Putin's hero Josef Stalin. Medvedev at least bleated back at Putin:

Putin, who has remained as powerful as ever since becoming Prime Minister in 2008, repeated throughout the trial that Khodorkovsky deserves to stay behind bars. Most recently on Dec. 16, less than two weeks before the verdict, he said on national television that "a thief should sit in prison."
This blatant bit of pressure on the court seemed to irritate President Dmitri Medvedev, a former lawyer, who said on Dec. 24 that no official "has the right to state his position about this case or any other case until the sentence is read." This was the clearest rebuke against Putin that Medvedev had ever made, and for Khodorkovsky's lawyers, it seemed to highlight their core dilemma.

Unless Medvedev mans up and grants a presidential pardon, Putin will run again and brush him aside like a used Kleenex. Russia is a tyranny of dunces and will remain so until

New President Medvedev Putin-Lite?

The Economist has a good piece which basically demonstrates that Putin-2 under Medvedev may not be as peaceful as the business-oriented apparatchiki's bland resume indicates. It turns out that Putin may run for parliament, get elected, get appointed Prime Minister, and continue to run Russia from the Front Office.

The Kremlin line is that the teamwork between Mr Putin as prime minister and Mr Medvedev as president will guarantee stability, creating a good base for more liberal reforms. Mr Putin has hinted that more state companies will, sooner or later, be privatised. So far, this has sounded more like a redistribution of property, rather than liberal reform.

As for Mr Putin, he seems still to be keeping his options open. If he becomes prime minister it is hard to imagine him answering to Mr Medvedev. Whatever the form, Mr Putin will be more popular and more powerful than his protégé. Under the constitution, the president has control over the army and the security services, but this could easily be changed by a parliamentary vote. In any event Mr Putin is unlikely to part with power. More surprises could be in store, even the revival of a once-touted plan for a union with Belarus that might let Mr Putin stay president.

The Kremlin's machinations have revealed a simple truth: that the authoritarian system created by Mr Putin in the past eight years does not allow an orderly transition of power from one elite to another. Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, points out that elections, which in a democratic society act as a mechanism for rotating power, have in Russia become a mechanism for preserving it.

This reverses the biggest achievement of Boris Yeltsin's short-lived, imperfect democracy: a peaceful transfer of power. The manner in which Mr Yeltsin handed power to Mr Putin in December 1999 was not ideal, but he did step down and let somebody else take charge. Mr Putin seems unable to repeat that. Indeed, so as to hang on to power, he may be prepared to undermine the institution of a strong presidency that he helped to create.

For all the talk of stability, Russia is in some ways less stable than it was. Mr Putin has been lucky to enjoy an oil boom that filled up state coffers and fanned economic growth. But the underlying economy has not been diversified or restructured. Inflation is running in double digits, domestic gas and electricity prices need to be raised and the outlook for the world economy is suddenly gloomier. Yet the biggest danger for Russia remains political.

Parenthetically, I'm currently reading Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which is a goldmine of information on how a one-party state rapidly became a secret-police state---pushed by Stalin's purges, the NKVD was Murder Incorporated on a Hitlerian scale as the Party Elite attacked the Party itself. The problem lies in means and methods, and the KGB inherited the mentality of the NKVD, which in turn was an "Organ" created by Stalin & Beria, two Georgians strongly influenced by the "poison-poison" culture derived from the 18th century rule of Georgia by Iran, and its poison-Shahs Nadir Shah and Shah Abbas, whose Borgia-clone courts fascinated Stalin no end as he wrote the curriculum for Georgian primary & secondary education.

Beria was an experienced poisoner, a real expert, and Section 13 of the KGB inherited his expertise in murder by deniable means. Putin has evidently been seeped in this culture and Polonium 210 has succeeded Beria's potions in the political pharmaceutical arsenal wielded by Vlad, the Empoisoner. The Economist sums it up:

Russia has traditionally had only one centre of power: the Kremlin. There is but one precedent for a strong prime minister and a weak head of state. This was 100 years ago when Pyotr Stolypin was prime minister under Tsar Nicholas II. Stolypin dealt ruthlessly with political protesters to push through reforms to make Russia a leading European power. His catch-phrase was: give Russia 20 years of peace, and you will not recognise it. But it all ended badly. Stolypin was assassinated, Nicholas II murdered by the Bolsheviks—and Russia plunged into 73 years of communism.

We can only hope that Russian autocracy succeeded by oligarchy then by dictatorship and finally democracy does not revert back to its atavistic autocracy by another Tsar, this time a scion of the Secret Police culture which still afflicts Russia.

Medvedev Transition from Putin Czarism to Democracy?

Dmitri Medvedev may have been the author of a note to me concerning a nasty blog excoriating Vladimir Putin as a warmed-over Czarist/Politburo autocrat in December. It was signed in his name from his official-looking weblog and was almost certainly penned by a helper, but curiously didn't defend Putin, but advised me to give Medvedev himself a chance after he was elected. Curious, because I didn't attack Dmitri, but was very harsh on little Vlad The Empoisoner. His blog has the perfect winning line for a skeptic like myself:

"We are well aware that no non-democratic state has ever become truly prosperous for one simple reason: freedom is better than non-freedom."

I hope Dmitri continues to think along these lines and eventually gets enough political power to actually implement a return to more representative government.

Putin's Real Hero May be Stalin

Time 's Man of the Year issue has an interesting article by Simon Sebag Montefiore concerning Putin & the long-time Russian historical tradition of "autocracy tempered by assassination."

History lives in Russia. Stalin was obsessed with history and based part of his style on the brutal Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. "The Russian people need tsardom," Stalin said. When he walked around the Kremlin, he reflected, "Ivan once walked here." Now Stalin has become the best barometer of Russian leadership style. New state textbooks hail Stalin as "the most successful Russian leader ever" and a state builder along the lines of Peter the Great and Bismarck.

Putin has one unexpected connection to the past: his grandfather was a chef who cooked for Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin. Half of Stalin's huge library, with marginal notes in his red crayon, remains in Putin's office, and when he is bored, it is said, he takes down a book and discusses the notes with his visitors. Ironically, Stalin the Marxist—born a Georgian cobbler's son—has become the icon and prototype of the strong Russian Tsar, the hero of a resurgent, capitalist Russia.

Reassuring, isn't it?

The Guardian has another reassuring article on Vlad the Empoisoner [another trick he picked up from Stalin & Beria, who inherited their poisoning traditions from when the Iranian Shahs ruled Georgia and imparted their own Borgia/Medici/SunKingatVersailles court poisoning tradition to that distant satrapy in the 18th century. Now lil Vlad has Polonium 210 to work with!] who has amassed a fortune making him Europe's wealthiest man:

According to Panfilova, the "randomised" corruption of the 1990s has given way to the "systemic and institutionalised corruption" of the Putin era. Members of Putin's cabinet personally control the most important sectors of the economy - oil, gas and defence. Medvedev is chairman of Gazprom; Sechin runs Rosneft; other ministers are chairmen of Russian railways, Aeroflot, a nuclear fuel giant and an energy transport enterprise.

Putin has created a new, more streamlined oligarchy, his critics say. "The crown jewels of the country's wealth have ended up in the hands of Putin's inner circle," Vladimir Rzyhkov - a former independent MP - wrote in Monday's Moscow Times.

Before his death, Tolstoy famously predicted that Soviet Communism would generate "Genghis Khan with a telephone." Stalin certainly lived up [or down] to that prediction, killing more than 40 million Russians through ideology and incompetence.

Vladimir Putin appears to be Peter the Great with a portfolio. Oh yes, and a pharmacopeia to deal with his enemies that glows in the dark!

Axis of Weasels on Gas

The New York Times takes its usual anti-Bush stance without giving both sides of the issue on the proposed entry of Ukraine and Georgia into the MAP, or Membership Action Plan:
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Bush gave a rousing speech in which he stated his positions and declared that “the terrorist threat is real, it is deadly and defeating this enemy is the top priority of NATO,” which is not the defined goal of every member of this collective security alliance.

Referring to democratic revolutions in both Ukraine and Georgia, he said: “Welcoming them into the Membership Action Plan would send a signal to their citizens that if they continue on the path to democracy and reform they will be welcomed into the institutions of Europe. It would send a signal throughout the region” — read Russia — “that these two nations are, and will remain, sovereign and independent states.”

Some German officials described the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, as upset and even angry on Wednesday. She and Mr. Bush have talked repeatedly about the issue in the past two months. Mrs. Merkel had thought that a compromise was in the works, the officials said, with Washington supporting a warm statement welcoming the interest of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO and encouraging them to work toward entering the membership plan program.

With its usual disingenuous opacity, the NYT leaves the so-called "Friendship Pipeline" to Germany from Russia, supplying natural gas at low rates, entirely out of the article. Instead, the NYT plays its usual game of not mentioning the elephant in the living room while "earnestly" portraying major NATO allies' opposition in the best possible light:

Germany and France have said they believe that since neither Ukraine nor Georgia is stable enough to enter the program now, a membership plan would be an unnecessary offense to Russia, which firmly opposes the move. In fact, senior diplomats here said, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has threatened to cancel his planned first-ever visit to the NATO meeting on Friday if the two former Soviet states enter the program for eventual membership.

Mrs. Merkel visited Moscow on March 8 and met Mr. Putin and his successor, Dmitri A. Medvedev. She told them that Russia would not be allowed a veto over NATO membership. But a senior German diplomat, Wolfgang Ischinger, said that offering membership to a divided Ukraine could destabilize the new government there, and that not enough diplomacy had taken place beforehand with Russia.

Mr. Ischinger, Germany’s ambassador to London, noted that after the NATO summit meeting Mr. Bush and the two Russians would meet in Sochi, a Russian resort on the Black Sea. He said, “It’s the absence of this discussion that makes me wonder if NATO has done enough of its homework at this point on this front.”

Oh yeah, and Mr. Ischinger neglects to mention that the corrupt ex-Chancellor of Germany has assumed the CEO job of the "Friendship Pipeline" and Gerhard Schroeder plays the game of senior blackmailer in the German opposition based on Russian threats to raise the price of natural gas. Later, GWB gets damned by faint praise:

Derek Chollet, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said Mr. Bush’s speech was “a combination of valedictory and marker-laying.” Mr. Bush will probably lose the argument on Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Chollet said. “But he doesn’t care so much, and he believes he’s on the right side of the issue.

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Luckily, the USA itself is lavishly blessed with coal and natural gas, as the Wall Street Journal notes in an article. Were the US to allow gas and oil exploitation of the North Slope in Alaska, which could be done with a negligible environmental footprint, the execs of Chevron and Exxon-Mobil & Shell would not be reporting to Congress which is farcically trying to blame big oil for its own silly environmental blockade of the North Slope.

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal and its coal is high-quality anthracite rather than the awful brown coal which makes Beijing's skies a puce pallor. Coalbed methane and a lot of other technologies can lessen the already low impact American coal development will have on the environment.

Sadly, Europe remains a hostage to Russia and its own dishonest political elites in the NATO/natural gas tug of war which the NYT in its usual dishonesty neglects to mention.

FSB to become new KGB: Minority Report Put Into Action?

I have Deputized Tiger-Boy Putin as My Living Representative

Dmitri Medvedev has decided to INCREASE the powers of the Soviet-style secret police, the FSB, because of criticism of its anti-terrorism efforts!!! But no, not to increase the FSB's effectiveness against terrorists, but to quash and quell critics of its own incompetence!!! Back to Stalin, who may represent the true spirit of Russia after all. Except now, the FSB's chief target are the Communists, it would seem!

"Officers of law enforcement agencies have long talked about the necessity of switching from investigating crimes to their prevention," Mikhail Margelov, the Kremlin-connected head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said in a statement. "The amendments do not turn FSB into a new edition of once-almighty KGB but protect Russian citizens from outrages by men in uniform."
Some of the law's articles, including ones that toughen control over media for "extremist statements" and allow FSB to publish warnings in the press, were removed or toned down following severe criticism from opposition and even Kremlin loyalists.
However, a lawmaker with the Communist party that remains the largest opposition force in Russia's rubber-stamp parliament, said the amendments did not change the law's repressive character.
"Despite all the promises to correct the most odious articles, by the second reading nothing has been changed in the text," Viktor Ilykhin told The Associated Press.
A Kremlin loyalist from a nationalist party praised the law for its "preventative measures."
"This is not a repressive law," Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic party, told Gazeta.ru online daily. "We're only talking about preventive measures."
Kremlin critics say, however, that the new measures could be used to violate the rights of opposition, and its obscure wording would leave the legislation open to interpretation.
"It's an ugly law with obscure formulas," independent political analyst Yulia Latynina told AP. "In case a drunken FSB officer is shooting at you, and there have been many such cases, you might end up getting jailed for 15 days for merely trying to escape."
The opposition has accused the Kremlin of turning Russia into a Soviet-style police state, and many Russians say they have experienced or fear abuse at the hands of FSB officers. Government critics say corruption among the FSB and other agencies stifles business activity and stunts the economy.
Some rights activists say the law simply legalizes practices FSB officers have been using for years.
"I don't think it adds anything to what FSB has been doing without any laws," former Soviet dissident and head of the Moscow Helsinki group Lyudmila Alexeyeva told AP. "But it's very sad when a law approves the outrage of such a dangerous service as FSB."
The legislation continues a trend under former President Vladimir Putin, blamed by the opposition and the West for rolling back Russia's democratic reforms of the 1990s. The former KGB officer and FSB head allowed the security services to regain power and influence at the expense of Russia's democratic institutions.

Like the film Minority Report, which describes a gnostic government's pre-emptive arrests for crimes not yet committed, it seems that in the new Russia, the law comes from God's lips to Putin's ear!

Girly-Man Obama Afraid to Bring Up Iran Sanctions with Russia?

The four-women-out-of-five Nobel Panelists in Oslo probably gave Obama that Faint Praise Peace Prize for cowering again in the face of opposition, this time in New York after Medvedev of Russia opined that sanctions against Iran are not very "effective," spurring Obama not even to bring them up with the Russians. This according to veteran Russia-watchers Dimitri Simes and James Collins in the link above.

So taking away the missile sites from Poland and the Czech Republic [in the process insulting Poland in a stupendously stupid anniversary boo-boo on the 70th year to the day after Stalin invaded Poland from the East] has had no effect on Russia vis-a-vis Iran, against which the missile sites were to protect the EU---themselves a cowering group of libtards eager only to avoid strife even if it means ethnic takeovers from illegal immigrants.

And Hilary Clinton will not be meeting PM Putin in Moscow today, as after the "reset" button mishap, he probably thinks she's as stupid as her boss Obama is cowardly.

I hope the Israelis bomb the s**t out of Iran and throw this pipsqueak POTUS of ours into a real girly-man hissy-fit.

A major blogress [who voted for Obama] called him "pussy-whipped."

After seeing the FRONTLINE piece on Afghanistan & Pakistan tonight, I don't think this cowardly specimen of metrosexuality hs a future in foreign policy that he'll be proud of.

Dear Leader Clever or Weak in Foreign Policy[ies]?

The Economist has a two-handed economist's take on the 44th iteration of George Washington:

This goes to the heart of the debate about Mr Obama’s diplomacy. Which will he be, clever or weak? Does this president have a strategy, backed if necessary by force, to reorder the world? Or is he merely a presidential version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s idealistic, clever Quiet American who wants to change the world, but underestimates how bad the world is—and ends up causing harm?

Short-sighters v long-gamers
The doubters argue that, however decent and articulate, Mr Obama is gaining a reputation as someone who can be pushed around. This month, after the president pandered to China by refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, China pushed for more by banning questions at his Beijing press conference with Hu Jintao, its president. When Mr Obama demanded that Israel stop all work on its settlements in the occupied territories, Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, defied him and still, staggeringly, won praise from Hillary Clinton.

Each time, the doubters say, Mr Obama’s delicate overtures are met with ambiguity or contempt. Since he engaged Iran, it has continued to temporise and dissimulate over its nuclear programme. When Mr Obama abandoned a missile-defence system in Europe, he appeared to extract a pledge from Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, that his country would support sanctions if Iran is recalcitrant—only for Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, repeatedly to say he sees no need. Although America has pledged $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over five years, the army seems reluctant to take on the Taliban who drift from northern Pakistan into Afghanistan—indeed, the conditions riding on the grant were spun by the Pakistani security services into an American “insult” (see article). Yes, Mr Karzai eventually buckled in Kabul, but his readiness to thumb his nose at the world superpower was humiliating.

Now you see him, now he is a Cheshire cat disappearing behind a smile:

...as the months drag on, the “weak” case has been gaining the upper hand. Mr Obama has yet to show he has the staying power to take on a dangerous, stubborn and occasionally bad world. Even allowing for Israel’s shift this week, the president has hardly lived up to his promise to work for Middle East peace “with all the patience and dedication that the task requires”. With one big exception, he has not yet shown that he can back his oratory with a stick—and that was a tariff on Chinese tyres, a weak sop to America’s unions.

Calm and conciliatory pragmatism is welcome after George Bush’s impetuous moral certitude, but it also carries risks. Critics on the American right are wrong to carp at Mr Obama’s bowing to kings and emperors. Simple courtesy will help restore America’s image, not diminish it. The trouble is that the president often seems kinder to America’s rivals than to its friends. His guest this week, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, may well have moaned about Mr Obama’s kid-glove handling of China. Allies in eastern Europe, their soldiers dying in Afghanistan, resent being called mere “partners”, Mr Obama’s term for pretty much anyone (see article). The hapless Gordon Brown has got precious little thanks.

The Economist ends on a downbeat note:

And how exactly will Mr Obama’s quiet multilateral vision, in which each nation does its bit for the good of all, work in practice? He is right that American power is circumscribed. But the European Union is not fit to help him police the world (see article). China, India and Russia are not willing.

“God save us always from the innocent and the good”
That leaves Mr Obama with a burden to shoulder on his own. In the coming weeks he could prove the doubters wrong. He could lead the way towards a brave deal on the climate. He could press Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme before his own end-of-year deadline—or secure Russian backing for sanctions. He could agree to cut nuclear arms with Russia. He could bully the Palestinians and Mr Netanyahu to agree to talk. And he could get Mr Karzai and Pakistan to show that they mean to make Afghanistan governable. Even part of that list would set up Mr Obama as a foreign-policy president. But if there is no progress, then Mr Obama will be cast as starry-eyed and weak. He himself recognised the danger of that in one of those golden speeches: “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

Just like this clown's pledge in April to keep the missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, only to have August come along....and on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the "innocent and the good" doubletalk vaporizer reneged.

Obama Kisses Hem of Putin's Robe

The cowardly loser in the WH fulfilled his onstage promise to Medvedev last year to cut back missile defense after he was re-elected.

Russia Blames US for Gas Pipeline Eff-Ups

Gerhard Schroeder must be getting extra kneepad time in front of his Empoisoner Master Vlad Putin, as the Kremlin laughingly blames US skullduggery for the Ukraine inability to wheel its gas to needy Balkan countries [Bulgaria & Romania]. In the meantime, Belarus, which has been on kneepads in front of dwarf Putin for over a decade, pays a price roughly one-third the exorbitant fees the Dwarf is trying to impose on the Ukraine. The Dwarf wishes to bitch-slap Ukrainian nationalists into submission with gas overcharges.

The FT headline has the EU "baffled" by the natural gas contretemps. Why don't we just say "muzzled" to make the situation clear. The clown named Medvedev in charge of Gazprom notes:

Gazprom had declared “force majeure” on its gas exports to Europe and warned it would unleash its “entire legal arsenal” against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Stern, who used to hum during long IAEE conferences we both attended during the late eighties [he explained to me that he is an amateur musician] and now head of Oxford Energy's gas research, summed it up with the observation that Russian & Ukrainian statements were

“all smoke and mirrors”

Perhaps a musical metaphor like "andante" would better fit this deathmarch toward a frozen destiny befitting the Dwarf Second Napoleon now guiding Moscow's policies.
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Is Joe Biden The Next Dick Cheney?

Biden characteristically spares no verbiage in his recent interview in the WSJ about his recent trip to Ukraine and Georgia, shortly after Obama's Moscow visit:

“The reality is the Russians are where they are,” Mr. Biden told The Wall Street Journal, according to excerpts posted on the newspaper’s Web site. “They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”

Putin's [or rather his hand-puppet Medvedev's] chief foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko had his own view of Biden's straightforward assertions:

The Russian retort had [a] reference to the previous administration, albeit an oblique one. After noting the ambiguity of who was shaping policy for the administration, the president or his deputy, Mr. Prikhodko said, “We have been there already.”

Foreign Policy mag guru Daniel W. Drezner called Biden's observations "dumbass" and referred to Joe's boss B. Hussein-O thusly:

The word "stupid" has been thrown around a lot this week, but I think it applies pretty well to Biden's language.

Methinks the slavishly adorational media honeymoon for Obama and his acolytes might be finite and while the Andrea Mitchells of the MSM still follow Sarah Palin's spoor like dyke-groupies, perhaps they could soon revert to their administration-bashing of the previous eight years.

And given the lack of spontaneous prowess of BHO when he goes off-teleprompter, even the male altar boys for Heresiarch Obama, like Tweety-Bird Mathews and the CNN/MSNBC choirboy castrati might alter pitch and grow stones. Nah!! Too much to hope for....

Nationalism Trumps Globalization in New IT Era

Robert Kaplan is one of the most accomplished foreign policy and historical analysts in the USA. Kaplan correctly skewers the self-referential boobies stateside and in Europe who interview each other and like-minded liberal elites in Egypt and India and elsewhere to give a false sense of kumbayeh peace and harmony breaking out everywhere. Here's Kaplan:

Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.

Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.

Take Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.

Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.

I have been to Egypt a dozen times while doing political risk assessments for Amoco and know that the Ikhwan & Army have gigantic networks of members comprising over 50% of the population. I saw the pathetic Mohammed El Baradei on a PBS interview last night downplay the size and importance of these two controlling influences on Egypt. El Baradei said to wait for the upcoming parliamentary elections to see.

Sadly, there is little prospect of a liberal majority, unless, as in the constitutional referendum polling last week, there is a very low turnout. [The referendum failed in Cairo and other large cities, by the way, but the large rural turnout, including many of the 30% of Egyptians who are illiterate, voted for the Islamist agenda.]

But wait, there's more bad news for the Boy Wonder to "lead from behind" on:

Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.

An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.

Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.

The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria's writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.

The US and Europe are introspective and distracted. America under this second-rate president is fast losing ANY leverage in foreign policy except that wielded by its overwhelming military advantage---which Obama will be loath to ever use, given the vociferous self-referential imbecility of his left-wing Demonrats.

But wait, there's more:

Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India's navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world's largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin's nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin's nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.

Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin's party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.

Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year's award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.

Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece's Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.

Putin is no less than a new incarnation of the Czars, or more frighteningly, Stalin. Russia has a huge demographic problem in that sparsely populated Siberia looks tempting to a China burgeoning with hundreds of millions of Malthusian manpower. Siberia's natural resources would tempt any powerful neighbor and Putin is acutely aware of the necessity of keeping China in the friendship column.

India is also frightening, as the nationalist parties appear poised to make electoral gains against the Congress Party's wobbly cobbled-together scrum of squabbling factions. India with the bomb and Pakistan also with the bomb in turmoil, a situation Kaplan leaves out of his excellent analysis, could flare up as easily as a Sino-Indian contretemps.

Kaplan sums up the battle between values and interests:

We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).

The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.

Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.

The narcissist in the White House toppled Mubarak after the aged Egyptian leader, who was never the fascist ogre portrayed by the silly libtard US media, gave the arrogant Boy Wonder a short lecture on the phone about ancient societies and the hazards of rapid political or economic change [The Shah's "White Revolution" led to a massive exodus from countryside to cities and sparked the 1979 Iranian Republic and its subsequent mischief-making.].

The miffed Child Wonder threw a tantrum and promptly phoned the Egyptian military to threaten withdrawal of US security assistance if Mubarak stayed in power. Mubarak departed against the advice of seasoned senior diplomats like Frank Wisner and now women and Copts in Egypt are in the gunsights of the new Islamist ascendancy, while the idiot in the White House golfs the time away, heedless of the turmoil he caused in touting what he imagined was the "Arab Spring," now rife with Summer thunderstorms.

Syria is the best example and Obama's cowardly diffidence will again show that the US is "leading from behind," afraid to ruffle the feathers of Russia and China. Now Obama can talk to Medvedev, as he promised to when an open mike betrayed this pernicious double-talking politico's perfidious underhanded dishonesty for all the world to see. The US will pay dearly for re-electing a stooge for POTUS.