Russian Motivation Part 3

I was reading an article by Paul Craig Roberts, who was an under-secretary of the treasury during the Reagan regime. (Note that this is a joke, I admired President Reagan. But if we are going to label other countries’ leaders with this epithet it seems only fair to use it for the United States as well.)  Roberts reminded me of another reason that Russia feels threatened by the current geopolitical situation. They feel that the policy of the United States is to encircle the Russian Federation with enemies. Surely that cannot be the policy of the United States? 

At the end of the Soviet Union the United States and Russia had an agreement:

When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership, in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war.

The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations. It was Reagan’s own vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who first violated the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings by incorporating former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire into NATO and taking Western military bases to the Russian frontier.

The process of surrounding Russia with military bases continued unabated through successor US administrations with various “color revolutions” financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy, regarded by many as a front for the CIA. Washington even attempted to install a Washington-controlled government in Ukraine and did succeed in this effort in former Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.

Put yourself in Putin's place. Putin knows that any agreement he makes with the current president could be overturned by the next. The encirclement of Russia with enemies is a prime example of this. The United States gave its word that NATO would not be expanded into the former Soviet Union or its former satellites. The United States’ word was broken. 

Serbia and Russia were promised that Serbian minorities in Kosovo would be respected and that Kosovo would not become independent. The Serbian minority was expelled by the Moslems and Kosovo is independent in every way that matters, except in name only, and that is just a matter of time. 

Our foreign policy seems to be “Let’s threaten the two countries with the most nuclear weapons and lead us into war.” Yet the stupidity of this policy is seldom mentioned in polite company—certainly not by Faux News and PMSNBC. 

What Russia is doing in the Middle East is exactly what the United States is doing, protecting their allies. Why would we expect anything else from any nation state?  

Comments

[eric anderson]

Since Obama clearly hates the US, why is he pursuing this confrontation? Purely political (not appearing as a "weak Democrat"), or some other motive?