[[link removed]]

HOW THE NEOCONS CHOSE HEGEMONY OVER PEACE  
[[link removed]]


 

Jeffery Sachs
September 4, 2024
Dropsitenews
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Yet, all along, from the very start, I believed in a mixed economy
along social democratic lines, not a free market “neoliberal”
economy. _

Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Eagleburger appear on McNeil Lehrer on PBS
in 1992.,

 

Jeffrey Sachs: A Front Row Seat to the Cold War That Never Ended

An inside story of the road not taken

Ryan Grim [[link removed]]

_About two months ago, over on Counter Points
[[link removed]], we did an
interview with Matt Taibbi on the long arc of his career, stretching
from the Soviet Union to Substack. In a throwaway moment, when we were
discussing the American economist Jeffrey Sachs, I noted what a wild
ride his own career had been, going from one of the “Harvard boys”
stripping Russia for parts in the 1990s to an outspoken critic of U.S.
hegemony. Sachs reached out after the show aired to say that his role
in post-Soviet Russia was badly misunderstood, and that in particular,
while he was indeed at Harvard, he was not among the Harvard
economists involved in the scandalous sell-off of Russian assets known
as “loans for shares.” It wasn’t a hostile message, and it
seemed like Sachs had even grown weary of the discussion. I asked if I
could share it with Taibbi, and he agreed. _

_Sachs, in his note, said a lot more about his experience as an
adviser to the nascent Russian government, and backed it up with
contemporaneous news reports, op-eds, and TV interviews. We encouraged
him to put his reflections into essay form and he agreed to do so. The
resulting product is below and is also published in Taibbi’s Racket,
which you can subscribe to here [[link removed]]. _

_Matt has written his own essay based on the new information
[[link removed]]
offered by Sachs, coupled with his own experience in Russia. He
writes:_

The more time I spent looking at U.S. economic policy toward Russia,
the more I was convinced something was terribly wrong. I corresponded
regularly with Janine Wedel, then a professor at George Washington and
Pitt Universities who wrote an influential article in The Nation
called “The Harvard Boys Do Russia.” Janine’s thesis was the
rapid liberalization of Russia’s economy was “more shock… than
therapy” and that one of the biggest by-products had been episodes
like the mass inflation of 1992 and Black Saturday: “The evaporation
of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of
Russians.” Her article was not kind to Jeffrey Sachs, and described
him as part of the corruption scandal at the Harvard Institute of
International Development (HIID) that I also wrote about.

Who’s right? By the time I started digging into HIID, Sachs was
gone. He said on Breaking Points today that privatization, certainly
the nuclear core of Yeltsin-era corruption, “wasn’t my
bailiwick” and that he never worked on those issues with colleagues
who “didn’t do the right thing.” All I can say is, as someone
who covered prikhvatizatsia fiascoes like the infamous
loans-for-shares auctions as much as any American, Sachs never crossed
my radar. I assumed that as a Harvard heavy with ties to Lawrence
Summers and the “energetic young reformers,” he was at least a
co-architect of Russia’s downfall.

Now, I’m not so sure.

_We’re crossposting Matt’s piece here
[[link removed]]
— I strongly recommend it. _

_The Sachs essay is a valuable historical document and adds new
context to one of the most significant hinge moments of our time,
during which a series of fateful decisions were made by American
policymakers—decisions that were not predetermined but were genuine
choices that could have been made differently—that set the course
toward our present conflict. It’s by no means the end of the story,
but no doubt an important part of it._

_But it’s not just history. There are lessons here to be learned if
there’s an appetite for it. _

_The history keeps going. The Biden administration today unleashed its
three most powerful ministries on Russia, accusing the country of
meddling in the 2024 U.S. election: The Department of Justice filed
charges, the Treasury Department laid down sanctions, and the
Department of State demanded Russian news outlets register as foreign
agents._

_Sachs, to be sure, is a controversial figure — I consider that a
compliment — and has his critics on both the left and the right. He
joined us again on Counter Points for an interview Wednesday
[[link removed]] about his new
essay, during which he addressed many of those critiques and took
questions from me, Taibbi, and Emily Jashinsky. _

HOW THE NEOCONS CHOSE HEGEMONY OVER PEACE BEGINNING IN THE EARLY 1990S

_By Jeffrey Sachs_

In the late 1980s, President Mikhail Gorbachev opened the chance for
world peace by unilaterally ending the Cold War. I was a high-level
participant and witness to these events, beginning in 1989 as a senior
adviser to Poland, and then in 1990 onward to the Soviet Union,
Russia, Estonia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and several other countries. We
are in a hot war today between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine in part
because the U.S. could not take “yes” for an answer in the early
1990s. Peace was not good enough for the U.S.; the U.S. government
chose to assert global dominance as well, bringing us to today’s
harrowing dangers. The failure of the U.S., and the West more
generally, to help the Soviet Union and then Russian economically in
the early 1990s marked the first steps of the U.S. misguided quest for
dominance.  

Winston Churchill famously wrote: “In War, Resolution; In Defeat,
Defiance; In Victory, Magnanimity; and in Peace, Good Will.” The
U.S. showed neither magnanimity nor good will in the waning days of
the Soviet Union and the Cold War. It showed insolence and power,
until today. In the economic sphere, it did this in the early 1990s
by neglecting the urgent short-term financial crisis facing
Gorbachev’s Soviet Union (until its demise in December 1991) and
Yeltsin’s Russia. The result was profound instability and corruption
in Russia in the early 1990s that created a deep resentment against
the West. Even this grave mistake of Western policymaking, however,
was not definitive in setting the course for the current hot
war. From the mid-1990s onward, with even more consequence, was the
relentless U.S. bid to expand its military dominance over Eurasia, in
a sequence of moves that eventually led to the explosion of
large-scale war in Ukraine.  

MY ORIENTATION AS ECONOMIC ADVISER

When I came to serve as Poland’s and later Russia’s economic
adviser, I carried with me three fundamental convictions, based on my
studies and my experience as an economic adviser.  

My first core conviction drew upon the political economy insights of
John Maynard Keynes, the greatest political economist of the 20th
century. In the early 1980s, I had read his scintillating book _The
Economic Consequences of the Peace_ (1919), which is Keynes’
devastating and prescient critique of the harsh peace of the
Versailles Treaty after World War I. Keynes railed against the
imposition of reparations burdens on Germany as an affront to economic
justice, a burden on the economies of Europe, and the seed of future
conflict in Europe. Keynes wrote of the reparations burden and the
enforcement of war debts: 

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe,
vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for
very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the
despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the
late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy,
whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our
generation. Even though the result disappoint us, must we not base our
actions on better expectations, and believe that the prosperity and
happiness of one country promotes that of others, that the solidarity
of man is not a fiction, and that nations can still afford to treat
other nations as fellow-creatures?

Keynes was of course proved right. The Carthaginian peace imposed by
the Versailles Treaty came back to haunt Europe and the world one
generation later. The lesson for me in the 1980s was Churchill’s
dictum of magnanimity and good will, or Keynes’ admonition to treat
other nations as “fellow creatures.”  Following Keynes, I believe
that rich, powerful, and victorious countries are wise, and obligated,
to help poor, weak, and defeated countries. This is the path to peace
and mutual prosperity. This is why I have long championed debt relief
for the poorest countries, and why I made debt cancellation a hallmark
of the policies to end hyperinflation in Bolivia in the mid-1980s,
instability in Poland in the late 1980s, and grave economic crisis in
the Soviet Union and Russia in the early 1990s.  

My second core conviction was as a social democrat. For a long time,
I was wrongly described by the lazy mainstream media and economically
unsophisticated pundits as a neoliberal, because I believed in the
need for Poland, Russia, and other post-communist countries of the
region to enable markets to function, and to do so quickly to overcome
black markets in the face of the collapse of central planning. Yet,
all along, from the very start, I believed in a mixed economy along
_social democratic lines_, not a free market “neoliberal”
economy. In a 1989 interview
[[link removed]]
with the New Yorker I put it this way:

Look, I’m no particular fan of Milton Friedman’s or Margaret
Thatcher’s or Ronald Reagan’s version of the free market. In
United States terms I’d be identified as a liberal Democrat, and the
country I admire the most is Sweden. But the point is whether you
were trying to create a Sweden or a Thatcherite England, starting from
where Poland is, you’d move in exactly the same direction. And that
is because Sweden and England and the United States have certain basic
attributes that have nothing to do with what Poland has right
now. They are private economies, where the vast, vast proportion of
the economy is in the private sector. There is a free financial
system: banking; independent financial organizations; strict
recognition of private property; joint-stock companies; a stock
exchange; a hard currency convertible at a unified rate. All those
attributes are the same whether you’re going to provide free day
care or private day care. Poland starts from the opposite extreme.

In practical terms, social-democratic style reforms meant the
following. First, financial stabilization (ending high inflation,
stabilizing the currency), should be done quickly, along the lines
explained in the hugely influential 1982 paper “The Ends of Four Big
Inflations
[[link removed]]” by
the future Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent. Second, the government
should remain large and active, especially in public services (health,
education), public infrastructure, and social protection. Third,
privatization should be cautious, careful, and law-based, so as to
prevent large-scale corruption. While I was often incorrectly
associated by the mainstream media with the idea rapid “mass
privatization” through giveaways and vouchers, mass privatization
and the attendant corruption was the very opposite of what I actually
recommended. In the case of Russia, as described below, I had no
advisory responsibilities whatsoever regarding Russia’s
privatization program.  

My third core conviction was practicality. Provide real help, not
theoretical help. I advocated urgent financial assistance for Poland,
the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine. My advice was heeded by the
U.S. government in the case of Poland, but firmly rejected by the U.S.
government in the case of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s
Russia. At the time I couldn’t understand why. After all, my
advice worked in Poland. Only many years later did I appreciate
better that while I was discussing the “right” kind of economics,
my interlocutors in the U.S. government were the early
neoconservatives. They were not after Russia’s economic
recovery. They were after U.S. hegemony. 

EARLY REFORMS IN POLAND

In 1989, I served as an adviser to the first post-communist government
of Poland and helped to devise a strategy of financial stabilization
and economic transformation. My recommendations in 1989 called for
large-scale Western financial support for Poland’s economy in order
to prevent runaway inflation and enable a convertible Polish currency
at a stable exchange rate and an opening of trade and investment with
the countries of the European Community, now the European
Union. These recommendations were heeded by the U.S. government, the
G7, and the International Monetary Fund.  

Based on my advice, a $1 billion zloty stabilization fund was
established that served as the backing of Poland’s newly convertible
currency. Poland was granted a standstill on debt servicing on the
Soviet-era debt, and then a partial cancellation of that debt. Poland
was granted significant development assistance in the form of grants
and loans by the official international community.  

Poland’s subsequent economic and social performance speaks for
itself. Despite Poland’s economy having experienced a decade of
collapse in the 1980s, Poland began a period of rapid economic growth
in the early 1990s. The currency remained stable and inflation
low. In 1990, Poland’s GDP per capita, measured in purchasing-power
terms, was 33 percent of neighboring Germany. By 2024, it had reached
68 percent of Germany’s GDP per capita, following decades of rapid
economic growth.  

TRYING FOR A GRAND BARGAIN FOR THE SOVIET UNION

On the basis of Poland’s economic success, I was contacted in 1990
by Grigory Yavlinsky, economic adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev,
to offer similar advice to the Soviet Union, and in particular to help
mobilize financial support for the economic stabilization and
transformation of the Soviet Union. One outcome of that work was a
1991 project undertaken at the Harvard Kennedy School with Professors
Graham Allison, Stanley Fischer, and Robert Blackwill. We jointly
proposed a “Grand Bargain” to the U.S., G7, and Soviet Union, in
which we advocated large-scale financial support by the U.S. and G7
countries for Gorbachev’s ongoing economic and political reforms.
The report was published as _Window of Opportunity: The Grand Bargain
for Democracy in the Soviet Union
[[link removed]]_
in October 1991. 

The proposal for large-scale Western support for the Soviet Union was
flatly rejected by the Cold Warriors in the White House. Gorbachev
came to the G7 Summit in London in July 1991 asking for financial
assistance, but left empty-handed. Upon his return to Moscow, he was
abducted in the coup attempt of August 1991. At that point, Boris
Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, assumed effective
leadership of the crisis-ridden Soviet Union. By December, under the
weight of decisions by Russia and other Soviet republics, the Soviet
Union was dissolved with the emergence of 15 newly independent
nations.  

THE U.S. REFUSES MY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR LARGE-SCALE AID TO RUSSIA

 
In September 1991, I was contacted by Yegor Gaidar, economic adviser
to Yeltsin and soon-to-be acting Prime Minister of the newly
independent Russian Federation as of December 1991. He requested that
I come to Moscow to discuss the economic crisis and ways to stabilize
the Russian economy. At that stage, Russia was on the verge of
hyperinflation, financial default to the West, the collapse of
international trade with the other republics and with the former
socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and intense shortages of food
in Russian cities resulting from the collapse of food deliveries from
the farmlands and the pervasive black marketing of foodstuffs and
other essential commodities.

I recommended that Russia reiterate the call for large-scale Western
financial assistance, including an immediate standstill on debt
servicing, longer-term debt relief, a currency stabilization fund for
the ruble (as for the zloty in Poland), large-scale grants of dollars
and European currencies to support urgently needed food and medical
imports and other essential commodity flows, and immediate financing
by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to protect Russia’s
social services (healthcare, education, and others). 

In November 1991, Gaidar met with the G7 Deputies (the deputy finance
ministers of the G7 countries) and requested a standstill on debt
servicing. This request was flatly denied. To the contrary, Gaidar
was told that unless Russia continued to service every last dollar as
it came due, emergency food aid on the high seas heading to Russia
would be immediately turned around and sent back to the home ports. I
met with an ashen-faced Gaidar immediately after the G7 Deputies
meeting.  

In December 1991, I met with Yeltsin in the Kremlin to brief him on
Russia’s financial crisis and on my continued hope and advocacy for
emergency Western assistance, especially as Russia was now emerging as
an independent, democratic nation after the end of the Soviet Union.
He requested that I serve as an adviser to his economic team, with a
focus on attempting to mobilize the needed large-scale financial
support. I accepted that challenge and the advisory position on a
strictly unpaid basis.    

Upon returning from Moscow, I went to Washington to reiterate my call
for a debt standstill, a currency stabilization fund, and emergency
financial support. In my meeting with Richard Erb, deputy managing
director of the IMF in charge of overall relations with Russia, I
learned that the U.S. did not support this kind of financial package.
I once again pleaded the economic and financial case and was
determined to change U.S. policy. It had been my experience in other
advisory contexts that it might require several months to sway
Washington on its policy approach.  

Indeed, from 1991 to 1994, I would advocate nonstop but without
success for large-scale Western support for Russia’s crisis-ridden
economy and support for the other 14 newly independent states of the
former Soviet Union. I made these appeals in countless speeches,
meetings, conferences, op-eds, and academic articles. Mine was a
lonely voice in the U.S. in calling for such support. I had learned
from economic history—most importantly the crucial writings of John
Maynard Keynes, especially _Economic Consequences of the Peace_—and
from my own advisory experiences in Latin America and Eastern Europe,
that external financial support for Russia could well be the make or
break of Russia’s urgently needed stabilization effort.  

It is worth quoting at length here from my article in the Washington
Post in November 1991
[[link removed]]
to present the gist of my argument at the time, explicitly drawing
upon Keynes’ logic:  

This is the third time in this century in which the West must address
the vanquished. When the German and Hapsburg Empires collapsed after
World War I, the result was financial chaos and social dislocation.
Keynes predicted in 1919 that this utter collapse in Germany and
Austria, combined with a lack of vision from the victors, would
conspire to produce a furious backlash towards military dictatorship
in Central Europe. Even as brilliant a finance minister as Joseph
Schumpeter in Austria could not stanch the torrent towards
hyperinflation and hyper-nationalism, and the United States descended
into the isolationism of the 1920s under the “leadership” of
Warren G. Harding and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

After World War II, the victors were smarter. Harry Truman called for
U.S. financial support to Germany and Japan, as well as the rest of
Western Europe. The sums involved in the Marshall Plan, equal to a few
percent of the recipient countries' GNPs, was not enough to actually
rebuild Europe. It was, though, a political lifeline to the visionary
builders of democratic capitalism in postwar Europe.

Now the Cold War and the collapse of communism have left Russia as
prostrate, frightened and unstable as was Germany after World War I
and World War II. Inside Russia, Western aid would have the
galvanizing psychological and political effect that the Marshall Plan
had for Western Europe. Russia's psyche has been tormented by 1,000
years of brutal invasions, stretching from Genghis Khan to Napoleon
and Hitler.

Churchill judged that the Marshall Plan was history's "most unsordid
act," and his view was shared by millions of Europeans for whom the
aid was the first glimpse of hope in a collapsed world. In a collapsed
Soviet Union, we have a remarkable opportunity to raise the hopes of
the Russian people through an act of international understanding. The
West can now inspire the Russian people with another unsordid act.

This advice went unheeded, but that did not deter me from continuing
my advocacy.  In early 1992, I was invited to make the case on the
PBS news show The McNeil-Lehrer Report.
[[link removed]] I was
on air with acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. After the
show, he asked me to ride with him from the PBS studio in Arlington,
Virginia, back to Washington, D.C. Our conversation was the
following: “Jeffrey, please let me explain to you that your request
for large-scale aid is not going to happen. Even assuming that I
agree with your arguments—and Poland’s finance minister [Leszek
Balcerowicz] made the same points to me just last week—it’s not
going to happen. Do you want to know why? Do you know what this year
is?” 

“1992,” I answered. 

“Do you know that this means?” 

“An election year?” I replied.

“Yes, this is an election year. It’s not going to happen.” 

Russia’s economic crisis worsened rapidly in 1992. Gaidar lifted
price controls at the start of 1992, not as some purported miracle
cure but because the Soviet-era official fixed prices were irrelevant
under the pressures of the black markets, the repressed inflation
(that is, rapid inflation in the black-market prices and therefore the
rising the gap with the official prices), the complete breakdown of
the Soviet-era planning mechanism, and the massive corruption
engendered by the few goods still being exchanged at the official
prices far below the black market prices.  

Russia urgently needed a stabilization plan of the kind that Poland
had undertaken, but such a plan was out of reach financially (because
of the lack of external support) and politically (because the lack of
external support also meant the lack of any internal consensus on what
to do). The crisis was compounded by the collapse of trade among the
newly independent post-Soviet nations and the collapse of trade
between the former Soviet Union and its former satellite nations in
Central and Eastern Europe, which were now receiving Western aid and
were reorienting trade towards Western Europe and away from the former
Soviet Union.

During 1992, I continued without any success to try to mobilize the
large-scale Western financing that I believed to be ever-more
urgent. I pinned my hopes on the newly elected presidency of Bill
Clinton. These hopes too were quickly dashed.  Clinton’s key
adviser on Russia, Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum, told me
privately in November 1992 that the incoming Clinton team had rejected
the concept of large-scale assistance for Russia. Mandelbaum soon
announced publicly that he would not serve in the new
administration. I met with Clinton’s new Russia adviser, Strobe
Talbot, but discovered that he was largely unaware of the pressing
economic realities. He asked me to send him some materials about
hyperinflations, which I duly did. 

At the end of 1992, after one year of trying to help Russia, I told
Gaidar that I would step aside as my recommendations were not heeded
in Washington or the European capitals. Yet around Christmas Day, I
received a phone call from Russia’s incoming financing minister,
Boris Fyodorov. He asked me to meet him in Washington in the very
first days of 1993. We met at the World Bank. Fyodorov, a gentleman
and highly intelligent expert who tragically died young a few years
later, implored me to remain as an adviser to him during 1993. I
agreed to do so and spent one more year attempting to help Russia
implement a stabilization plan. I resigned in December 1993 and
publicly announced my departure as adviser in the first days of 1994.
 

My continued advocacy in Washington once again fell on deaf ears in
the first year of the Clinton administration, and my own forebodings
became greater. I repeatedly invoked the warnings of history in my
public speaking and writing, as in this piece in the New Republic
[[link removed]]
in January 1994, soon after I had stepped aside from the advisory
role.      

Above all, Clinton should not console himself with the thought that
nothing too serious can happen in Russia. Many Western policymakers
have confidently predicted that if the reformers leave now, they will
be back in a year, after the Communists once again prove themselves
unable to govern. This might happen, but chances are it will not.
History has probably given the Clinton administration one chance for
bringing Russia back from the brink; and it reveals an alarmingly
simple pattern. The moderate Girondists did not follow Robespierre
back into power. With rampant inflation, social disarray and falling
living standards, revolutionary France opted for Napoleon instead. In
revolutionary Russia, Aleksandr Kerensky did not return to power after
Lenin's policies and civil war had led to hyperinflation. The disarray
of the early 1920s opened the way for Stalin's rise to power. Nor was
Bruning's government given another chance in Germany once Hitler came
to power in 1933.

THE TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA’S CORRUPT PRIVATIZATION

It is worth clarifying that my advisory role in Russia was limited to
macroeconomic stabilization and international financing. I was not
involved in Russia’s privatization program which took shape during
1993 to 1994, nor in the various measures and programs (such as the
notorious “shares-for-loans” scheme in 1996) that gave rise to the
new Russian oligarchs. On the contrary, I opposed the various kinds
of measures that Russia was undertaking, believing them to be rife
with unfairness and corruption. I said as much in both the public and
in private to Clinton officials, but they were not listening to me on
that account either. Colleagues of mine at Harvard were involved in
the privatization work, but they assiduously kept me far away from
their work. Two were later charged by the U.S. government with insider
dealing in activities in Russia which I had absolutely no
foreknowledge or involvement of any kind. My only role in that matter
was to dismiss them from the Harvard Institute for International
Development for violating the internal HIID rules against conflicts of
interest in countries that HIID advised.  

The failure of the West to provide large-scale and timely financial
support to Russia and the other newly independent nations of the
former Soviet Union definitely exacerbated the serious economic and
financial crisis that faced those countries in the early
1990s. Inflation remained very high for several years. Trade and
hence economic recovery were seriously impeded. Corruption flourished
under the policies of parceling out valuable state assets to private
hands.  

All of these dislocations gravely weakened the public trust in the new
governments of the region and the West. This collapse in social trust
brought to my mind at the time the adage of Keynes in 1919, following
the disaster Versailles settlement and the hyperinflations that
followed: “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process
engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million
is able to diagnose.” 

During the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, Russia’s social services
fell into decline. When this decline was coupled with the greatly
increased stresses on society, the result was a sharp rise in
Russia’s alcohol-related deaths. Whereas in Poland, the economic
reforms were accompanied by a rise in life expectancy and public
health, the very opposite occurred in crisis-riven Russia.  

Even with all of these economic debacles, and with Russia’s default
in 1998, the grave economic crisis and lack of Western support were
not the definitive breaking points of U.S.-Russia relations. In 1999,
when Vladimir Putin became prime minister and in 2000 when he became
president, Putin sought friendly and mutually supportive international
relations between Russia and the West. Many European leaders, for
example Italy’s Romano Prodi, have spoken extensively about
Putin’s goodwill and positive intentions towards strong Russia-EU
relations in the first years of his presidency.  

THE NEOCON MARCH TO WAR WITH RUSSIA

It was in military affairs rather than in economics that
Russian-Western relations ended up falling apart in the 2000s. As
with finance, the West was militarily dominant in the 1990s and
certainly had the means to promote strong and positive relations with
Russia. Yet the U.S. was far more interested in Russia’s
subservience to NATO than it was in stable relations with Russia.  

At the time of German reunification, both the U.S. and Germany
repeatedly promised Gorbachev
[[link removed]]
and then promised Yeltsin
[[link removed]]
that the West would not take advantage of German reunification and the
end of the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet Union’s military alliance) by
expanding the NATO military alliance eastward. Both Gorbachev and
Yeltsin reiterated the importance of this U.S.-NATO pledge. Yet within
just a few years, Clinton completely reneged on the Western commitment
and began the process of NATO enlargement. Leading U.S. diplomats,
led by the great statesman-scholar George Kennan, warned at the time
[[link removed]] that
the NATO enlargement would lead to disaster: “The view, bluntly
stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of
American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” So, it has
proved. 

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters
that have resulted from U.S. arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices
here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events. In
1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking
Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a
major NATO base in the Balkans. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally
withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s
strenuous objections. In 2003, the U.S. and NATO allies repudiated
the United Nations Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false
pretenses. In 2004, the U.S. continued with NATO enlargement, this
time to the Baltic states and countries in the Black Sea region
(Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans. In 2008, over Russia’s
urgent and strenuous objections, the U.S. pledged to expand NATO to
Georgia and Ukraine. In 2011, the U.S. tasked the Central
Intelligence Agency to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of
Russia. In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Muammar
Gaddafi. In 2014, the U.S. conspired with Ukrainian nationalist
forces to overthrow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In 2015,
the U.S. began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Romania, a
short distance from Russia. From 2016 to 2020, the U.S. supported
Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous
backing by the UN Security Council. In 2021, the new Biden
administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of
NATO enlargement to Ukraine. In April 2022, the U.S. called on
Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

U.S. NEOCONS VERSUS GLOBAL PEACE

Looking back on the events around 1991 to 1993, and to the events that
followed, it is clear that the U.S. was determined to say no to
Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful
integration of Russia and the West. The end of the Soviet period and
the beginning of the Yeltsin presidency occasioned the rise of the
neoconservatives to power in the United States. The neocons did not
and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia. They
sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic U.S.,
in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

In this U.S.-led world order, the neocons envisioned that the U.S. and
the U.S. alone will determine the utilization of the dollar-based
banking system, the placement of overseas U.S. military bases, the
extent of NATO membership, and the deployment of U.S. missile systems,
without any veto or say by other countries, certainly including
Russia. That arrogant foreign policy has led to several wars and to a
widening rupture of relations between the U.S.-led bloc of nations and
the rest of the world. As an adviser to Russia from late-1991 to
late-1993, I experienced first-hand the early days of neoconservatism
applied to Russia, though it would take many years of events afterward
to recognize the full extent of the new and dangerous turn in U.S.
foreign policy that began in the early 1990s.     

Subscribe to Drop Site News

Thousands of paid subscribers

Independent news on politics and war

 

* Soviet Union
[[link removed]]
* neocon
[[link removed]]
* Russia
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]