America's Hypocrisy on Ukraine
America's Hypocrisy on Ukraine
By Ivan Eland
July 28, 2014 "ICH" - "HP" - Much finger pointing has occurred on the downing of Malaysia flight MH-17 over separatist-held territory in Ukraine. The American media – still reflexively anti-Russian even though the Cold War has been over for almost a quarter century and heaping blame on Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, since even before his annexation of Crimea – has gone hog wild with recrimination after the downing of the aircraft.
And Russia and Putin are easy targets. In America, our story line goes much like this: after the Cold War ended, the United States benevolently showered Russia with assistance, acceptance into the G-8 talkshop of industrial democracies, and "experts" on creating a democracy (I was on one of those trips), but the Russian people let the dour Vladimir Putin ruin our efforts to export democracy there by re-instituting autocratic rule. Americans feel rejected, because the Russians just didn’t want to be like us. And with our usual assumed benevolence, we just don’t understand why Russia is behaving in a "20th century manner," by annexing Crimea and funneling training and weapons to Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, when the rest of the world, including America, has moved on to a new era in the next millennium. Americans – always very ahistorical, and even more so with the advent of 24-7-365 cable "news" – have amnesia about any role the United States might have had in bringing U.S.-Russian relations to their current sad state of affairs.
After the Cold War ended, the then-democratizing Russia, still inducing suspicions in the West, was excluded from the expanding NATO and European Union. After the Berlin wall fell, in a verbal promise to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to coax him to agree to the reunification of Germany, then-President George H. W. Bush pledged to Gorbachev that NATO, a military alliance hostile to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would not expand into the territory of the now defunct Soviet-led Warsaw Pact (that is, Eastern Europe). In violation of that promise, the outdated NATO alliance, instead of going the way of the Cold War, repeatedly expanded and is now on Russia’s borders. In fact, during the latest crisis over Ukraine, the United States has reinforced forces near Russia and increased their "training" activity. In addition, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been trying to win increased influence in the oil and gas-rich former Soviet Central Asian states on Russia’s borders. The Cold War ended but the U.S. containment noose around Russia just moved eastward and northward toward a weaker Russia.
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