EURO-NATO: HOW THE WEST WAS RUN

Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chater 1
Poated 5/11/2007

One of the prime avenues for containing and steering the power of the EU into conformity with the Anglo-American Alliance was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Also called “the Western Alliance:” the US, UK, Belgium, France, et al, NATO was the grand World War II Alliance minus the USSR. After forming in 1949, NATO took in Greece and Turkey (1952), and then West Germany (1955), but afterwards sat steady for decades as it stared Moscow down, never used its mutual defense clause, and remained a potential military force only.

Yet despite the final crumbling of the Warsaw Pact and even the USSR itself, the objects of its vigilance, NATO remained and looked for a new mission. In a 1992 Pentagon report leaked before scrubbing, then Undersecretary of Defense for policy Paul Wolfowitz offered a role for NATO if not a mission. The report admitted “we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance’s integrated command structure.” This command structure keeps the United States in the loop so that the Europeans could not make military or security decision the US was unwilling to sign off on. Indeed, Wolfowitz noted how this arrangement would allow NATO to remain “the primary instrument of Western defense and security as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs.” [1]

CFR heavyweight and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the same role for NATO. In his 1997 strategic tome The Grand Chessboard, he took a placating line that the organization’s leadership should eventually give Europe a greater role, coequal with Washington in a 1+1 (US + EU) formulation. While he noted the existing “American primacy within the alliance,” European membership was set to grow, and thus “NATO will have to adjust.” [2] But in an accompanying article for Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the CFR, he wrote more frankly:

“With the allied European nations still highly dependent on US protection, any expansion of Europe's political scope is automatically an expansion of US influence. […] A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of US policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States...” [3]

To date, NATO remains Europe’s only credible security force, is now in fact waging wars over its member’s interests while expanding its member list (and therefore possible conflict trigger-points), and the US has consistently promoted European expansion, especially the CFR people.

Who exactly is pulling whose strings in this arrangement is a matter of contention. Some, like John Laughland, would argue that Europe has thus been made the “51st state of America,” [4] while some Americans claim their country has been “Europeanized” as the economic powerhouse to bolster the European order. More likely neither side holds the reins exclusively, and a carefully managed confluence of interests is the wellspring of this trans-Atlantic union we call the West. Either way, regarding Russia and its sphere, it can be treated as a unified and hungry whole. Upon the USSR's collapse, if not before, the West set to wooing the former Warsaw Pact states; Internal political and economic reforms, once verified, could lead to inclusion in the solidifying EU and even NATO, then taking new applications as it considered its new agenda.

It was known Russia could not react favorably to NATO expansion, as noted in a 1995 analysis by Alexei K. Pushkov, onetime adviser and speech-writer for Premier Gorbachev, an eminent Russian mind. The report was published in Strategic Forums, an offshoot of National Defense University in Washington, and warned that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe or beyond would lead to seven key problems. Pushkov listed among these: “deepening of the gap between Russian and Western civilizations,” “an unwelcome influence on internal Russian politics,” and “a rebirth of the Russian sphere of influence among the former states of the Soviet Union.” On this point, he explained “if Russia considers itself geopolitically cut off from Europe and the Euro-Atlantic community, it would have no choice but to strengthen its historical sphere of influence.” [5]

Most ironically, Pushkov predicted, the expansion of this tool of Western security could well lead to “a weakening of overall European security” by expanding the number of NATO’s mutual defense trigger points while simultaneously increasing the tensions with Russia over those, and by encouraging “a new militarism in Russia.” Expansion would surely be seen in Moscow as an unfriendly act of distrust, no matter the spin put on it, and could cause Russia “to become a more independent player, less constrained by a real or illusionary partnership with the West.” Pushkov warned “Russia might well become a loose cannon in world politics” with “very serious” effects on world stability.

Yet in March 1999 the NATO blithely accepted applications from former Warsaw Pact states Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, expanding its geographic scope greatly at the expense of Russia’s recent sway. Others got in the queue; Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the last Republics fused into the USSR and first to leave, ran away and joined this circus. A later round of NATO additions in March 2004 scored all three, its first former SSRs, along with Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the alliance’s first former Yugoslav republic, Slovenia.


left: NATO states vs. Warsaw Pact in 1988, Iron Curtain highlighted.
right: NATO vs. Russia’s sphere (CIS) in mid-2004

During the Cold War the West always maintained they propped up the Iron curtain to keep the Soviet wolf at bay – in its time that may have been true, but once the fence fell, every bit of devouring has been in an easterly direction as the Euro-Atlantic community expands deeper into Eurasia and what was being called the post-Soviet Space, with Russia’s influence receding like a melting glacier.

Next: Gene Sharp: Master of Noviloent Warfare

Sources:
[1] Tyler, Patrick E. "US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop A One-Superpower World: Pentagon’s Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America." The New York Times. March 8, 1992.
http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm
[2] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives." New York. Basic Books. 1997. First Printing. Page 76
[3] Zbigniew Brzezinski, "A Geostrategy for Eurasia," Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html
[4] Laughland, John. “Becoming the 51st State.” Antiwar.com. May 20, 2003
http://antiwar.com/laughland/?articleid=2071
[5] Pushkov, Alexei. "NATO Enlargement: A Russian Perspective." Strategic Forums. July 1995. http://www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF_34/forum34.html

POLAND AND CHINA, 1989

East-West: The Twin Pillars of Nonviolence
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 3/13/07

By 1980 the Cold War, a grinding state of indirect conflict between a developed, Capitalist “West,” and a developing, Communist “East,” had been going on for over three decades. The Capitalist nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were arrayed from North America across Western and Southern Europe to hedge in any encroachment of Soviet Communism further west, and bound by their mutual defense clause to consider an attack on one nation an attack on all. Any such attack was predicted to come from NATO’s nemesis, the Communist nations of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led alliance of Eastern European countries with its own mutual defense clause to prevent any capitalist encroachment further east. Both sides were heavily armed with vast nuclear arsenals capable of ending or seriously complicating all life on Earth, both connected to these mutual defense triggers. Since anybody attacking anything in Europe could easily lead to the mutually assured destruction of Soviet-US nuclear war, the two political bulldozers stared each other down, idling in high gear. Arms reduction talks and other détente policies had calmed the situation some, but as 1980 opened on Europe the Iron Curtain still held firm for both sides in a long-term status quo stalemate.

By decade’s end it would be torn down and the Cold War ended. It is indeed ironic that Warsaw Pact, which had been signed in and named for the Polish capital, began to fall apart most dramatically in that same nation. Solidarity, a labor union-turned political player challenged the Communist government starting in 1981 with labor strikes and other such nonviolent means. Throughout the 1980s, Solidarity was suppressed by the hard line Jaruzelsky government, but continued its disciplined nonviolent actions in the underground, pursuing reforms based on Catholic social teaching as opposed to Communist rule.
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, supported by Washington and Rome, campaigns for President of Poland in May 1989.

The group had as its rallying figure electrician-turned-dissident Lech Walesa and enjoyed robust supported from the CIA, Reagan’s Washington in general, and the Roman Catholic Church (under its first Polish pope, John Paul II). In 1988 they gathered enough steam to launch a final wave of strikes; the economy ground nearly to a halt, and the government was forced to open negotiations. Soon the Solidarity party was allowed to stand candidates in elections, and their leader Walesa was overwhelmingly elected president of Poland at the end of 1989; the Communists were driven out and a new day dawned.
Beyond Poland’s borders, Solidarity’s decade-long example had sparked imitators, whose own struggles crested that same year. Czechoslovakia saw Vaclav Havel's “Velvet revolution,” and Hungary and Bulgaria also saw revolutions in late 1989. Romania’s brutal leader Nikolai Ceausescu was given the Mussolini treatment, executed along with his wife on Christmas Day, their corpses shown on worldwide TV. But of course the most vivid and widely remembered story of the year was the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9 to an exuberantly united Germany (it wasn’t physically torn down for another year). The events of 1989 announced the sudden and final end for the Soviet-led eastern bloc. Spectators in Washington, London, and Brussels watched with a mixture of satisfaction and professed surprise as people power expressed with primarily bloodless uprisings allowed the “democratic West” to finally win the Cold War in Europe as the last decade of the 20th century began.

Further east but earlier that same year, another attempted revolution against Communist rule didn’t go so well. Chinese president Deng Xiaoping’s policies of liberal reform went too far by the standards of many citizens, and not far enough in the eyes of others. This fragmented discontent rose above the surface in Beijing, with protest activities beginning in April. By May the activists started a hunger strike centered on Tiananmen Square, and solidarity strikes spread across the country, threatening the economy. Authorities first tried to quell the protests non-violently, but the decision was finally made to concede nothing to the demonstrators, who were seen as tools of external “bourgeois” powers.

Martial law was declared on May 20, and the government ordered units of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to regain control of the city on June 4. Tanks were sent to crush through roadblocks erected by protesters, and PLA troops reportedly fired directly into the crowds without warning. Casualty estimates vary widely; Chinese authorities cite 400-800 killed, others cite deaths in excess of 2,000, besides perhaps tens of thousands injured and/or imprisoned. This was called the “June 4 incident” in China, and the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” in the west, which imposed various sanctions and other punishments over the episode. Nonetheless, the idea of a dictatorial East won the day in China and the “People’s Republic” carried on much as it had.
The lone protester, identity and fate still unknown, who famously but briefly held up a PRC tank column at Tiananmen Square, June 4 1989.

The massacre at the “gate of heavenly peace” revealed starkly the dangers of mass opposition as a tool of pressuring or toppling governments. This gloomier side, along with the more positive examples in Europe, sent a mixed message for nonviolent protesters as the 1990s opened. The Warsaw Pact, with its leadership in Moscow teetering, had been broken and Eastern Europe freed. But the PRC had not been on the brink of collapse and so remained intact in all its repressive efficiency. Many lessons can be drawn from this dichotomy, depending on one’s perspective, but clearly Solidarity and Tiananmen presented the twin pillars of civil insurgency – the peaceful and successful vs. the brutally suppressed. At the risk of over-simplification, the events of 1989 presented an East-West polarity that would leave an impression for decades and would evidence itself as the 21st Century's round of transformations played out.

Next: Iraq and the New World Order at the End of History

IRAQ AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER AT THE END OF HISTORY

Adam Larson
Caustic logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted March 7 2007
updated and edited a bit, 11/11/09

The USSR’s demise came not a minute too soon for Washington’s grandest ambitions of world power. Near the end of his tenure, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was setting himself up to assume a major continued role in the world. His domestic legacy of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring) had greatly softened the Soviet image in a world that he noted was growing more interconnected and self-aware. He apparently fancied himself a bit of a latter-day Woodrow Wilson, and publicly laid his utopian plans for an end to the Cold War and its replacement with something called a “new world order,” to be led by the USSR and the US working in harmonious tandem. He first announced this on December 7 1988 at a UN assembly: “further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order.” [1]

He wasn’t the first to use the phrase; it’s been a perennial favorite of idealist rhetoric since at least World War I and is even on our US currency. But his specific formulation was unprecedented in that it came from a Soviet leader and that it was taken serious by many worldwide, premised deftly on the concerns of the day. He offered a partial Soviet surrender as it were, an end to economic blocs and creation of one global capitalist economy if with local variations. He foresaw beyond this a gentler world of great power cooperation, wider democracy and social justice, environmental protection, nonviolent conflict resolution and of course nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev’s proposal was seen by many as a rambling pipe dream, but his idealism boosted Soviet influence in Europe, and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course there were motives other than pure high-minded Pollyannaism at work; with a mismanaged economy in decline and a military drained by the eight-year war in Afghanistan, Gorbachev’s plan seems to have been to replenish Soviet power with his bold injection of intellectual capital. When you’re short on both guns and butter, a good enough idea may help fill the gap. The premier explained that despite the disagreements that had held the past in a chokehold, mutual respect was the to be the new paradigm. “For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change,” he stressed in June 1990. “Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.” [2]

Bush and Gorbachev meet at Malta to discuss the shape of the New World Order, December 2-3, 1989

Washington and the newly elected president Bush were left on the defensive by this visionary approach, accepting the Soviet leader’s basic premise but dithering on committing to it in a definitive way. In their memoir of power A World Transformed, Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft explained their concern about losing leadership to Gorbachev if they followed his lead, and the counterbalancing fear that the Europeans might stop following Washington if it seemed to drag its feet on the yellow brick road to the future. [3] The Malta Conference of December 2-3 1990 was supposed to re-open the East-West discussion of the shape of the new world, but the results were disappointing, with Bush again criticized for a lack of commitment to Gorbachev’s ambitious divination. Famously weak on “the vision thing,” in retrospect it almost seemed Bush was waiting for something to point him in the right direction to chart his own map towards a new world - one with Washington taking the lead.

As the tougher-minded in Washington saw it, partnership with Moscow was less necessary by the end of 1989; the writing was on the wall and the hawks were preparing for a different new world order - one without the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s soft attitude and the general Soviet weakness freed their hand to pursue hot war over their own interest with less reservation than in the past. The initial test of this freedom of movement was the US conflict with Panama of December 1989, just weeks after Malta. With charges of drug dealing by president Noriega as justification, this easily-won, small-scale neighborhood war began the “reluctant sheriff” phase of America’s self-appointed post-Cold War military role.

But that “reluctant sheriff” called his next high-noon showdown within less than a year. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had just escaped a draining eight-year war with Iran, and in August 1990 responded to a string of apparently American-sponsored provocations by ordering a full invasion and annexation of his tiny, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. The Americans had first told him they had “no opinion” on such “Arab-Arab disputes” as the border disagreement with Kuwait, but once carried out, this brazen act was taken as the first real challenge to the nascent and ill–defined new world order. [4] At this point Bush finally took the linguistic offensive, tapping into Gorbachev’s vein of optimistic ideals in a speech on September 11 1990:

“Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge: a new era - freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. […] Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. […] [Gorbachev] and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.”

Bush stressed in his speech “this is the first assault on the new world that we seek, the first test of our mettle.” America rose to the occasion with its ready and eager military and an increasing momentum of international resolve. Gorbachev was reportedly torn between his desire for purely peaceful ends and the obvious (linguistic) similarity of Washington’s approach to his own vision of cooperation. [5] Working with Secretary of State James Baker, Bush pulled every trick in the book, not least flattery, to swing Soviet opinion behind the war plan in hopes of unanimity in the UN Security Council.

Permanent member China was persuaded to abstain, voting neither way, Yemen and Cuba (then two of the ten rotating members) were the only no votes (repaid with more sanctions) and the USSR followed Washington’s lead, joining 11 other yes votes on Security Council Resolution no. 678 in November 1990. Saddam was thus given a deadline of January 15 to withdraw or face UN forces, and so Bush, Baker, Shevardnadze, et al. had forged the first Security Council-approved military action since the fluke of approval for the Korean conflict at the UN’s dawn in 1950. This sudden usefulness of the UN was new, it was all about world order, and would go down as Bush’s legacy, not Gorbachev’s.

All it took was some serious follow-through, and the forces were already built up in neighboring Saudi Arabia – ostensibly neither to attack Iraq nor to liberate Kuwait, but only to defend the Saudi Kingdom from what the Americans insisted was a realistic threat of an Iraqi invasion. The military machine that assembled itself during late 1990 in sprawling bases in the Saudi desert were primarily American and British, no Soviet troops took part. Bush offered to have Soviet troops in the coalition, as noted by then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, but Gorbachev apparently declined the honor. [6] It was the largest American military buildup since the Vietnam War, and designed to finally wash that war’s bad taste from America’s maw. By the end of the year, over a half-million soldiers and a mind-boggling arsenal of advanced weaponry was announced as offensive capable and ready to enforce Security Council Resolution 678.

For whatever reason, Saddam failed to withdraw by the deadline. Air strikes began a few days after and through late January and all of February pounded targets across Iraq with a bombardment that rivaled anything since World War II. On February 22, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-sponsored cease-fire agreement calling for a withdrawal in three weeks to be overseen by the Security Council. The US rejected the proposal and kept bombing, two days later launching the final phase with coalition ground forces pushing through Kuwait and into Iraq. Saddam finally surrendered and the US shot up some of the (retreating? withdrawing?) columns. But Bush refused to push on to Baghdad. Saddam was left in power though locked in a “box” of sanctions and weapons inspectors, to be policed by the world community.

Immediately after the war was finished, President Bush lauded the cooperative spirit of world community – the US and USSR were on the same side! He declared in a speech on March 6, 1991:

“The Gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test. […] Even the new world order cannot guarantee an era of perpetual peace. But enduring peace must be our mission. Our success in the Gulf will shape […] the new world order we seek.”

In this process, Gorbachev had followed hopefully, but the war had been an American game and by now so was the Cold War. 1990 saw a weaker Moscow granting more autonomy to the constituent republics, and 1991 was mired in deeper crisis yet with Russia’s role in the USSR itself coming into question. Just six months after the end of the Gulf war, a coup by Communist hardliners had the premier sidelined for three days in August amid a nationwide “emergency.” This spurred strong international condemnation and threats, massive strikes and protests from the Russian public, and deft moves by an emerging new class of West-friendly leaders like Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

The liberal Gorbachev was thus restored but the final slide had been entered. Half the Republics took the chance provided by the coup’s chaos in Moscow to declare independence, and the USSR’s final dissolution was recognized by all parties in December. As 1992 dawned, the Pro-West Yeltsin was in power in the new Russian Federation, by far the largest of the newly independent constituent republics. Where there had been one massive, monolithic nation there now stood massive Russia (with its south Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad) and fourteen smaller republics.

Some semblance of a regional cooperation framework was maintained with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The creation of the CIS in December 1991 is what officially marked the end of the USSR. It was agreed to by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to ensure a “civilized divorce” of the republics, yet it continues on to the present time, eventually including all the former SSRs minus the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who sought to escape Russia’s sphere as totally as possible.

The Cold War was over and the West officially emerged victorious. It was a heady time in Washington and a bit of a dreamland. Influential American thinker Francis Fukuyama even wrote about the “end of history,” first in a 1989 article and later in a 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama explained “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism.” Fukuyama defines history narrowly as the development of political ideologies, and so the emergent liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and as such marked the termination of the historic process. [7] History is over because we had won, Fukuyama’s case seems to run. We put the period at the end of the sentence because all of history has leading up to the perfection we are. We the liberal Democratic New World Order, we the Last Men of the West.

Next:
Euro-NATO: How the West was Run
Sources:
[1], [2], Wikipedia. “New world order.” last modified 21 July 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_world_order
[3] George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed, ISBN 0679752595, pp. 42-43.
[4] Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time: US War Crimes in the Gulf. New York. Thunder’s Mouth Press. First edition, First Printing. 1992. Page 12-19.
[5] Aldrich-Moodie, Benjamin. “Negotiating Coalition: Winning Soviet Consent to Resolution 678 Against Iraq”
Woodrow Wilson school of Public and International Affairs. WWS Case Study 1/98
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cases/papers/negotiating.html
[6] see [3], pp. 361-364.
[7] Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History and the Last Man. (intro) Penguin. 1992.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm