What is Wrong and Dangerous about US Foreign Policy, How Washington’s Demands Risk War with Russia
Former Ambassador to Russia McFaul’s Article
By Alexander Mercouris
Global Research
July 10, 2016
In a lengthy article in the Washington Post lamenting the Brexit vote and calling it a “victory for Putin”, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul slips out a fascinating comment that is very revealing of the looking glass world of neocon thinking:
“He (Putin) stopped NATO’s expansion by invading Georgia in 2008 and slowed E.U. expansion by invading Ukraine in 2014. He has increased Russia’s economic hegemony in large parts of the former Soviet Union by building the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). As a result of his military intervention in Syria, Putin is expanding Russia’s presence in the Middle East, as Europe and the United States pull back.”
In McFaul’s world all this is taken as axiomatically bad. But what actually makes it bad? Let us take each of these propositions one by one:
Stopping NATO expansion and slowing EU expansion
Putin or rather Russia did not invade Georgia in 2008. As was conclusively established by an EU report what happened in 2008 was that Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Russia repulsed the Georgian attack.
Nor did Russia invade Ukraine in 2014. What happened in 2014 was that following a violent and unconstitutional coup in Kiev, which overthrew the country’s democratically elected President, Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia whilst Ukraine’s eastern regions – which had overwhelmingly voted for the overthrown President – protested following his overthrow and demanded more autonomy. The new coup-installed Ukrainian government in Kiev in turn responded by launching a military attack on the protesters in the eastern regions causing the war there. The fact that the conflict in Ukraine is a civil war is explicitly recognised in the Minsk II agreement – which was brokered by the Germans and the French and which sets out a road-map for a political settlement – and which is itself an international legal document approved and supported as such by the US and by a vote of the UN Security Council.
Putting aside these factual points, why is it wrong for Russia to oppose the expansion of NATO and the EU to its borders and why is it right to seek to expand them in that way? Why is it a bad thing if the expansion of the one is halted and the expansion of the other is slowed down?
The Rest…HERE
