84% van de Nederlanders staat achter de huidige steun voor Oekraïne. 88% steunt de NAVO, zo bleek vorige week uit onderzoek van de Atlantische Commissie.
Ook in de Tweede Kamer is een breed draagvlak voor de militaire steun. ‘En waarom eigenlijk?’ vroeg Ollongren. ‘Omdat ook onze vrijheid op het spel staat. Als we hier geen grens trekken, waar ligt dan de grens? Dan zijn Moldavië en de Baltische Staten de volgende op het lijstje van het gedroomde imperialistische Groot-Russische Rijk. En reken maar dat China en andere regimes meekijken. Komt Poetin hiermee weg, dan is de wereld zoals we die kennen geen gegeven maar een kaartenhuis,’ waarschuwde ze. ‘Daarom is deze oorlog ook onze oorlog. Jullie oorlog.’
Wat Ollongren betreft mag deze oorlog niet wennen. ‘Laten we elkaar blijven uitleggen waarom dit ook onze oorlog is,’ riep ze op. ‘Waarom het belangrijk is dat we Oekraïne blijven steunen. Uitleggen wat er op het spel staat. In de strijd voor blijvende betrokkenheid zijn wij allen ambassadeur.’
Wat minister Ollongren verzweeg was dat talloze westerse academici op de krankzinnigheid hebben gewezen van een ‘uitgelokte oorlog' tussen nucleaire grootmachten. Zo waarschuwde één van de meest gerespecteerde geopolitieke deskundigen ter wereld, de Amerikaanse voormalige minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en oud Nationale Veiligheidsadviseur, dr. Henry Kissinger, in 2015 publiekelijk dat onder president Obama en vice-president Joe Biden, ‘breaking Russia has become an objective; the long-range purpose should be to integrate it.’ Het westers establishment ziet hem als een 'pragmatische staatsman in vijandige tijden.’ Maar in de huidige politiek is Ollongren exemplarisch voor beroepspolitici die het pragmatisme hebben ingewisseld voor fanatisme. Lichtgewichten willen alleen het publiek behagen en zeker niet informeren, het complexe moet gereduceerd worden tot hapklare brokken voor de massa. Obey! Gehoorzaamheid is de smeerolie van elke totalitair functionerende massamaatschappij.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-interview-henry-kissinger-13615?page=0%2C1
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’ — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century…
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant — and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slo- vakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, ‘This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders… The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.’ But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement — which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.
Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, ‘These countries will become members of NATO.’
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, ‘Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.’ Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a ‘direct threat’ to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, ‘very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.’
Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saa- kashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided — and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the al- liance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.
Voor alle duidelijkheid: Georgië begon dit gewapend conflict nadat president Bush junior president Saakashvili, die in de VS was opgeleid, had verteld dat de VS de Georgische aanval zou steunen, zo vertelde mij destijds zijn echtgenote Sandra Roelofs. De NAVO wilde juist deze aanval omdat door Zuid Ossetië een strategisch belangrijke militaire route loopt, dwars ‘through the Caucasus from Georgia to Russia.’
Mearsheimer:
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a ‘sphere of influence’ in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.
The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve ‘the future it deserves.’ As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country ‘the biggest prize.’ After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, ‘Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.’ He added: ‘Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.’
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Nogmaals enige relevante en onthullende achtergrondinformatie. Allereerst de door de Amerikaanse ‘deep state’ gefinancierde en aan de CIA gelieerde National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Bekend is dat de NED in ander landen, nooit in de VS of in bevriende dictaturen, zogeheten ‘color revolutions aanwakkert om de wettige regering omver te werpen.’ Zo initieerde de Verenigde Staten na de Tweede Wereldoorlog
a covert front against the Soviet Union through the CIA and other intelligence apparatus. By the 1960s, the United States had realized gradually that it was far from enough to ‘promote democracy' through secret means only. There was an urgent need to establish a ‘public-private mechanism’ to openly provide funding. In 1983 and with the efforts of the then U.S. president and some other people, NED was founded as a bipartisan and non-profit institution.
NED is nominally an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad, but in fact, it relies on continuous financial support from the White House and the U.S. Congress, and takes orders from the U.S. government.
As early as in 1991, the founder of NED Alan Weinstein put it bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post that a lot of what they were doing was what the CIA had done 25 years ago. NED was therefore known globally as the ‘second CIA.’
NED has a long history of instigating color revolutions against ‘hostile’ countries. Early NED documents revealed activities by NED mainly in Eastern Europe to subvert state power as early as the late 1980s.
On Aug. 27, 1989, the Washington Post published a report titled ‘How we helped Solidarity win,’ pointing out that NED provided financial support for the Polish Solidarity to help them overthrow the then Polish government, heralding drastic changes in Eastern Europe.
It was also an important enabler behind the Arab Spring. In Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Syria, Libya and other countries, NED provided financial support to pro-America individuals and groups by supporting professed feminism, freedom of the press, and human rights activities.
It exported various kinds of anti-government ideas, incited color revolutions, and plunged the Arab world into war, social unrest and economic recession.
In Bolivia, the organization instigated the ‘color revolution,’ forcing President Evo Morales (de eerste Indiaan in Zuid Amerika die na vijf eeuwen witte overheersing tot president werd gekozen. svh) to resign and go into exile. During the nearly 14-year rule of the leftist government under Morales, Bolivia enjoyed political stability and the fastest growth rate in South America. Its poverty rate continued to drop, people's livelihoods improved markedly, and tensions between the white and the indigenous eased significantly.
The Morales government won the general election, but was forced to step down by ‘street movements’ and the military and police. NED played a part in more ways than one.
one dimension of those ground rules should be the repudiation of violence as a means of political expression, so the mistake was allowing Hamas to participate in the first place.
Op de vraag: What’s the definition of democracy which you commit tens of millions of dollars to bolster every year? antwoordde deze Amerikaanse zionist: ‘Het is het systeem dat mensen in staat stelt hun eigen lot te bepalen, niet alleen via vrije verkiezingen, maar ook via de vrijheid van meningsuiting en geweten, terwijl de fundamentele mensenrechten in die samenleving worden gegarandeerd. Het is een systeem dat wordt gekenmerkt door... onafhankelijke media, decentralisatie van de macht en effectief lokaal bestuur, zodat het geen formule is die alleen maar macht aan de top biedt.’
https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2008/03/03/interview-carl-gershman/
Het zal duidelijk zijn dat de houding van de NED een aanfluiting is, afkomstig uit de koker van een staatsinstituut dat doorgaat voor een ‘Tweede CIA,’ en volgens onafhankelijke onderzoekers ‘samenspant met lokale politieke groeperingen om zich te bemoeien met de interne aangelegenheden van andere landen.’ Waar minister Ollongren eveneens over zweeg is het feit dat ‘[a]t least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.’ Bovendien waren ‘[f]ar more of the people killed civilians. More than 432,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 2001.
Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.
The U.S. could have pursued several nonmilitary alternatives to holding accountable those responsible for perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. These alternatives would have been far less costly in human lives. For example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq turned the country into a laboratory in which militant groups such as Islamic State have been able to hone their techniques of recruitment and violence. The formation of Islamist militant groups spreading throughout the region counts among the many human costs of that war. (Page updated as of August 2023).’
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human
Een andere hoog aangeschreven diplomaat die de agressieve westerse politiek ten aanzien van Rusland al jarenlang bekritiseerd is de Amerikaanse laastste ambassadeur in de Sovjet Unie, Jack Matlock, 'a historian, and a linguist. He was a specialist in Soviet affairs during some of the most tumultuous years of the Cold War, and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.' Onder de kop 'I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis' schreef hij in februari 2022:
After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today.
Today we face an avoidable crisis between the United States and Russia that was predictable, willfully precipitated, but can easily be resolved by the application of common sense.
But how did we get to this point?
Allow me, as someone who participated in the negotiations that ended the Cold War, to bring some history to bear on the current crisis.
We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members.
President Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy — an agreement with Russia, France, and Germany that the United States endorsed.
Was this crisis avoidable?
Despite the prevalent belief held by both the DC foreign policy establishment and most of the Russian public, the United States did not support, much less cause the break-up of the Soviet Union. We supported the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to legalize their claim to independence. And — despite frequently voiced fears — Vladimir Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle that the European Union is pledged to enforce.
Since Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.
Was this crisis predictable?
Absolutely. NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. In 1997, when the question of adding more NATO members arose, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement:
'I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.' Indeed, our nuclear arsenals were capable of ending the possibility of civilization on Earth.
But that was not the only reason I cited for including rather than excluding Russia from European security. As I explained to the SFRC: 'The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.'
The decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies that produced the end of the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a 'Europe whole and free.' Gorbachev had spoken of 'our common European home,' had welcomed representatives of East European governments who threw off their communist rulers and had ordered radical reductions in Soviet military forces by explaining that for one country to be secure, there must be security for all.
President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting in Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not 'take advantage' of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be 'taking advantage.') The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, 'not one inch.'
These comments were made to Gorbachev before the Soviet Union broke up. Once it did, the Russian Federation had less than half the population of the Soviet Union and a military establishment demoralized and in total disarray. While there was no reason to enlarge NATO after the Soviet Union recognized and respected the independence of the East European countries, there was even less reason to fear the Russian Federation as a threat.
Was this crisis willfully precipitated?
Alas, the policies pursued by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all contributed to bringing us to this point.
Adding countries in Eastern Europe to NATO continued during the George W. Bush administration but that was not the only thing that stimulated Russian objection. At the same time, the United States began withdrawing from the arms control treaties that had tempered, for a time, an irrational and dangerous arms race and were the foundation agreements for ending the Cold War. The most significant was the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which had been the cornerstone treaty for the series of agreements that halted for a time the nuclear arms race. After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It was clear at that time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States as the jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting Russia. Nevertheless, Washington continued its course of ignoring Russian (and also allied) interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression that not only Russia opposed, but also France and Germany.
Although President Obama initially promised improved relations through his 'reset' policy, the reality was that his government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian influence and, indeed, to encourage 'regime change' in Russia itself. American actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most Russians, as indirect attacks on them.
And so far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep, actively supporting the 2014 revolution and overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in 2014.
Relations soured further during President Obama’s second term after the Russian annexation of Crimea. Then things got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused of being a Russian dupe, Trump passed every anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattering Putin as a great leader.
Can the crisis be resolved by the application of common sense?
Yes, after all, what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence — the avowed aim of those who agitated for the 'color revolutions' — was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russo-phobic stance that it will take great political skill to navigate such treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome.
President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm?
Maybe the subsequent negotiations between Washington and the Kremlin will find a way to allay Russian concerns and defuse the crisis. And maybe then Congress will start dealing with the growing problems we have at home instead of making them worse.
Or so one can hope.
Al deze door Ollongren verzwegen feiten spelen geen enkele rol in haar politieke mens- en wereldbeeld. En niet alleen bij dit politiek lichtgewicht dat bij haar aantreden als D’66 minister van Defensie desgevraagd niet het verschil wist tussen een majoor en een sergeant, laat staan dat zij het niveau van insiders als Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, en Jack Matlock ook maar enigszins weet te benaderen. Nederland wordt vertegenwoordigd door een populistische dame met de mentaliteit van een Albert Heijn-filiaalchef, die braaf de oorlogszuchtige NAVO-doctrine uitvoert, maar zelf geen enkel idee heeft wat de consequenties ervan kunnen zijn. Een even grote dwaas is de meermaals van corruptie betichte huidige voorzitter van de Europese Commissie, Ursula von der Leyen. Ook zij is geenszins geïnteresseerd in mensenrechtenschendingen, zoals blijkt uit haar verklaring in oktober 2022 verheugd te zijn over ‘onze trilaterale energie-overeenkomst met Egypte en Israel. Het heeft een belangrijke rol gespeeld in onze strategie om van de Russische fossiele brandstof af te komen. Maar mijn bezoeken aan Cairo en Jeruzalem gingen om veel meer dan gas,’ zo verzekerde zij een zaal vol EU-diplomaten, die maar al te goed begrepen dat mensenrechten terzijde worden geschoven zodra het Brussel en Washington gaat om grondstoffen en markten, momenteel voor een aanzienlijk deel in handen van Aziatische grootmachten als Rusland en China die weigeren de westerse dictaten klakkeloos te accepteren. Maar ook daarover zwijgt Ollongren in alle talen. Zij voert alleen bevelen van Washington uit, zonder te beseffen wat de werkelijke consequenties kunnen zijn. Egypte en Israel mogen datgene wat Rusland en China niet mogen, zolang ze maar de westerse belangen blijven behartigen. De Europese bevolking betaalt een hoge prijs voor de huidige EU-politiek. Niet alleen financieel maar ook geopolitiek. Meer daarover later.
EU en Mensenrechten, 'op regels gebaseerde orde'? Bijna dagelijks worden zelfs Palestijnse kinderen vermoord of verminkt door het Joodse regime. De EU en de VS weigeren hieraan politieke consequenties te verbinden.
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