Munich Redux
Dispatches from Deena Stryker
[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]esterday, the annual Munich Conference on Security wrapped up, the first occasion for the foreign ministers of Russia and the US to formally state their respective nations’ world views since the US election.
Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov (above) noted that it had been ten years since President Putin outlined his hopes for the future at the same forum, calling for a redistribution of power from one hegemon to multiple regional centers such as Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa (Not coincidentally, these countries are the members of the BRICs, an economic club representing half of the world’s population, whose first summit was held in 2009 and whose development bank was founded in 2014).
“What kind of relationship do we want with the US? One [based on] pragmatism, mutual respect, and an understanding of special responsibility for global stability,” the foreign minister stated. “We need to resume [our] military cooperation. Without it, the diplomats’ meetings make no sense.”
NATO’s head Jens Stoltenberg: happy to push Washington’s abominable war agenda. To the peril of humanity, Western Europe is crawling with puppet politicians. Stoltenberg, a Norwegian, and former PM from the Labour Party, shows how low previously peaceloving, independent Scandinavia has fallen.
As the Washington Post commented: “NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, surrounded by his deputies yesterday, couldn’t say that NATO is ready for this.”
Gathering military and security figures from about seventy countries, the first Munich Security Conference was held in 1963, at the height of the Cold War, continuing annually ever since. At the 2007 meeting, the first to which Russia was invited, Vladimir Putin spelled out clearly his concept of a multi-polar condominium. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/AR2007021200555.html. He was heard around the world, however the United States took no notice. Notwithstanding this clear statement, Obama’s ‘reset’ with Russia failed, with Russia accused of “failing to cooperate”. In reality, it was the US that failed to accept Putin’s worldview of shared influence and cooperation in solving world problems. Throughout the eight years of the Obama administration it continued its assault on the Muslim world, creating ISIS, and as a direct result, a Europe overwhelmed with Muslim immigrants, teetering on economic and political collapse.
Following the 2008 economic crisis, instead of using the power of the European Union — that issues directives of every imaginable sort from its headquarters in Brussels — to organize the peaceful resettlement of these victims of US warfare — Europe’s leaders fell prey to NATO’s fairy tale that Russia is the threat. Most recently with NATO tanks, troops and missiles lined up on Russia’s Western border, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, its propaganda machine warns Europeans that the mighty bear is set to interfere in crucial elections this year, after engineering the Trump victory in the US. It’s even using football to pile on, warning European fans that Russian hooligans are gearing up to attack them during the 2018 World Cup should they travel to Moscow.
It would be a disaster for the West should Western youth discover that Russia is a modern country, whose people live the same lives they do, bears nowhere in sight. During the 2014 Olympic Games in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, anti-Russian propaganda went into overdrive, deterring many sports fans from witnessing the games up close, and publicizing every little organizational or structural failure. We can expect to see the same ‘game’ played next year — if we’re still here.
Donald Trump has many faults, but it’s a significant plus when the US President calls a spade a spade. Trump began this policy last week by rebutting an interviewer’s claim that “Vladimir Putin killed a lot of people” with: “We’re so innocent?” to the horror of the press and patriotic Americans, who have learned to dismiss US wars as ‘necessary evils’. At his first solo press conference, described unanimously by the media as a disaster, Trump roundly rejected Russia-bashing: “I could blow that (Russian) ship off Delaware out of the water, but that would not be a good thing. I know this will not be good for me politically, but I believe the best thing would be for us to get along with Russia, China and all other countries.” Trump’s press conference was nothing like Obama’s slick, elegant performance, and as if to underscore the approval of his base, it was followed by several campaign-type rallies.
If the American public had been informed during these last eight years of Vladimir Putin’s multi-polar world view, they would know that it is now shared by their president. But they have not, and Congress is obsessed with finding out ‘what did the President know and when did he know it’, apropos a conversation between the briefly tenured National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and the Russian Ambassador to the US. Flynn was fired for fudging his answers to the Vice President when asked whether he mentioned sanctions, or promised that they would be lifted in return for cooperation in defeating ISIS.
Russia’s performance in Syria leaves no doubt that together with the US, it could remove ISIS from the map, yet Congress is more concerned with finding out whether a never-implemented 200 year old law (the Logan act) that bars civilians from interacting with foreign dignitaries was breached by a still ‘civilian’ Flynn, viewed as treason. Perhaps because US-Russia military cooperation would logically involve turning NATO troops around from the Russian border, where there is no threat, and redeploying them to the Middle East.
One of the things at stake in Washington’s internal war is the fate of Europe, where nationalists are on the rise. The defeat of ISIS would slow the flow of refugees, and eventually it would be able to choose whether to remain a neo-liberal US colony in which ‘there is no alternative’ but austerity, or join the rest of the vast Eurasian continent in which Muslims and Christians live side by side.
The chances that Donald Trump will be allowed to interact with the rest of the world on an equal footing with other power centers, as called for by the Russian President, instead of continuing to try to rule it in the Munich tradition, are slim, but progressives need to start by getting the message out.
APPENDIX
RUSSIA’S Foreign Minister, Lavrov, attends Munich Conference.
BELOW: The US VP, MIKE PENCE, with characteristic smugness, reiterates America’s determination to “back Europe against Russian aggression” (sic) via a warmongering instrument of its own creation, NATO.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
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’.
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