Deena Stryker
When a senior fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution states on Prime Time television that Russia needs to get its troops out of Central Europe, most listeners will assume there are still Russian soldiers in Poland, Hungary and or the Czech Republic, twenty-six years after the former Soviet Union’s military alliance known as Comecon was dissolved.
Michael O’Hanlon knows perfectly well which countries are part of Central Europe, but he counts on the ignorance of US TV watchers. I had to go to the text of his article in Foreign Affairs (Addressing the real source of the U.S.-Russia rivalry, Jan 11, 2017) to discover that the countries he was referring to as part of ‘Central’ Europe were actually Georgia and Ukraine. (Even considering former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that definition is not credible…)
The US organized a coup in Ukraine in 2014, when its president wanted it to be both part of the EU and of the Russian-centered Eurasian Union. Since then, Ukraine has been deprived of membership in both organizations and is in even worse shape than before the coup.
The US desperately wants to get Georgia into NATO, but stretching the definition of Central Europe to include that country which is to the east of Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states, will not make Europeans consider it one of its own — not even the Baltic states that share its ‘fear’ of Russia.
After declaring that “A new security architecture for Central Europe needs to be based on several foundational concepts,” O’Hanlon proposes a revolutionary thesis of international law:
“Even if it were deemed normatively acceptable that great powers have spheres of interest, there is no natural way to define these that would or could be stable.” Tell me I’m dreaming: spheres of influence can’t be ‘stable’? Only if longitudes and latitudes could fluctuate! Yet O’Hanlon is here granting academic imprimatur to the idea that it’s ok for a country to tear other nations away from their neighbors (either by ‘regime change’ or war…).
“Once the pursuit of such spheres is condoned (!), history and logic suggest that great powers will define them in increasingly ambitious and expansive terms—ultimately producing conflict.” Here the Brookings star is rewriting basic international law to affirm that it’s OK for a country — including one geographically far away — to subjugate its enemy’s neighbors — because that country is wrong to “define its sphere of influence in ‘increasingly ambitious and expansive terms’”!
The alternative press in addition to keeping up with the MSM’s far-out version of journalism now must take on academia’s rewriting of international concepts that stretch back to time immemorial. Here, in black and white, is a foreign affairs ‘expert’ stating that taking over other nations is acceptable if they become too close to their neighbors. O’Hanlon says that what Washington calls Russia’s ‘bad behavior’ is an inevitable result of perfectly legitimate US threats against her neighbors! In a high point of sophistry, referring to Ukraine and Georgia, he writes:
“(A new security architecture) should also ensure a full range of options for their diplomatic and economic activities and other associations; they should not be part of the sphere of influence of Russia or any other country or group.”
O’Hanlon goes on to accuse Vladimir Putin of having “squelched Russian political and civil society and provoked unnecessary conflicts near his own borders.” Really? Who orchestrated a coup against the duly elected president of Ukraine? Or the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia? Who is massing troops along Russia’s entire Western border, from the Baltics to the Black Sea?
Suddenly, though ignoring these facts, O’Hanlon breaks with his entire thesis:
“But allowing Putin to claim some degree of vindication is a far less injurious outcome than running an unnecessarily heightened risk of war—or, at a minimum, perpetuating a period of poor relations between Russia and the West that impedes cooperative action against other problems of mutual concern like Iran’s or North Korea’s nuclear programs, or instability throughout much of the broader Middle East.”
What a masterful pivot toward the in-coming President, who has vowed to promote US-Russian cooperation!
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’. 
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
MAIN IMAGE: O’Hanlon (right) in casual dress.
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