Who Actually Set The Russia Hoax In Motion?

I asked myself that question listening to the terrific (1:40:00) discussion yesterday among Glenn Diesen, Alexander Mercouris, and John Mearsheimer. To be more precise, I asked that question while listening to the last few minutes of their discussion:

The West in Decline - John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

At the very end, Mearsheimer reminds the other two of the historical roots of this tragic war—all the way back to 2008! But then Mercouris and Diesen pile on, and in the blink of an eye we’re back to the end of the Cold War. Here’s how it goes:

AM: [AM is referring here to the scheme being floated of arresting Ukrainian refugees and sending them back home to serve as cannon fodder.] ... this extraordinary venture which has destroyed Ukraine. I mean it's difficult to convey how bizarre and sad this really is.

JM: I think, Alexander and Glenn, when you go back to that April 2008 decision to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO you can see that that was one of the greatest strategic mistakes of modern times. I don't believe I'm exaggerating when I say that. When you think of the consequences of trying to bring Ukraine into NATO trying to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia's borders and where this all led--Oh my God! Mainly for the Ukrainian people, but also for the Russians, for that matter. The Russians have lost significant numbers of troops and many people have been wounded. This is horrible but, if you think about Ukraine--what's happened to Ukraine—the country is being dismembered. It's going to turn into a dysfunctional rump State. The number of people killed, I don't know what the exact number is, but I think it's at least 500,000 casualties—that would be dead plus wounded! Oh my God! That decision in April of 2008, and then the fact that we doubled down at every turn! You have a war over Georgia in August 2008--isn't this evidence that the Russians are not going to tolerate Georgia and Ukraine coming into NATO? Then trouble in 2014, and what do we do? We double down again! And then in 2021, 2022, when it looks like you're going to get a war, do we try to prevent a war? No! And then when we have peace negotiations, the Istanbul track, and the Israeli track with Naftali Bennett, what do we do? We basically push the Ukrainians to walk away from a possible deal. Just hard to believe how remarkably foolish we have been and what the utterly horrible consequences are for Ukrainians.

AM: I can only agree. I can't add anything to that.

JM: These people claim to be defenders of the Ukrainians--they're Ukraine's saviors, and it's people like us who are anti-Ukrainian! This is what an upside down world we live in!

Now, this is important. Mearsheimer explains this foolishness as just that: foolishness. Diesen, in effect, takes issue with that. He says that these events have been driven by “propaganda.” English isn’t Diesen’s native language. I take him to mean “cynical manipulation and calculation”. The “propaganda” aspect is to move the public along, but those responsible knew what they’re doing. This suggested, to me, that the beginnings of the Russia Hoax go much further back than Trump. It was a hoax all along—the idea that Russia was a mortal threat to the US—it’s just that when Trump turned up the hoax was put to different use.

GD: I think this is the product of propaganda, though. Because everyone knew that this would happen. Both of you have referred many times to when that horrible decision was done in 2008 to try to expand NATO to Ukraine. This is when the guy who's now the CIA director, Willam Burns, made this warning--'This will trigger a civil war [in Ukraine]', which it did, 'and then will Russia will likely intervene,' something they would not want to do. All the warnings were there, and still this is all brushed over in order to make it so we can pretend that any of this has anything to do with helping or supporting Ukraine. This is why I think that the rhetoric, the propaganda, is so important in this conflict. It washes across everything. We say Ukraine has to join NATO now, because Russia would never dare to attack a NATO country but, also, we have to support Ukraine because if Ukraine falls then Russia will invade NATO countries. None of this makes any sense. You have to choose: either Russia will never attack a NATO country or that's what it will do. There's no consistency anymore. Reason is deafened, I guess, by this moral sloganeering. Even our recent historical memories have gone. Like Putin. He's now this eternal enemy of the West, like Hitler, who we can't negotiate with. You know, he has been in power for 24 years. For 22 of those years he was attempting to make peace. He wanted to integrate into a greater Europe. We had someone who was often willing to ignore partners in the East in order to steer Russia towards the West. This idea that everything is some external enemy looking to destroy us and we have no blame in it, it's just delusional, it's, it's obscene! But this is where we are.

That gets Mearsheimer digging back into the past.

JM: Glenn, one final point. You don't want to forget that in the 1990s, when NATO expansion was first broached and pushed forward by the Clinton Administration, there were a substantial number of prominent people--to include George Kennan, Paul Nitze a superhawk, the Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, that's Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--all of whom said that NATO expansion is going to lead to disaster. There was huge opposition in the 1990s. Most people forget this. And those people proved correct. So it's not just people like us--people who started arguing in 2008 or started arguing in 2004--that this was going to lead to big trouble. Going back to the creation of this policy in the mid 1990s, all sorts of prominent people with establishment credentials--and in some cases very hawkish people--said this was a prescription for disaster. And of course they proved correct.

The reference to “hawkish people” jogs Alexander, who brings up Richard Pipes, a Neocon’s Neocon, but one who favored drawing Russia into the West rather than, well … Obsessive desire for revenge against Russia has always been a hallmark of Neoconism (Pipes apart). That is apparent in spades throughout the Russia Hoax, but we’ll also see that this was a very motley group, indeed, with all sorts of motives—most of which were venal, at best, when not simply wrongheadedly malign.

AM: Absolutely. Amongst them was a man I knew briefly, Richard Pipes, who was a brilliant historian but had, shall we say, solidly critical views about the Soviet Union, and not particularly favorable views about Russia, I would say, overall. But he also said, this is going to be a terrible mistake. Right across the scene people were saying, 'This is going to be a mistake,' and of course it was still done. From the moment it started, they got this ball of NATO expansion rolling, there doesn't seem to have been any ability, intellectually, to stop. To say, 'Look we we've got as far as we can, the Russians are pushing back. In the interest of maintaining, preserving, peace in Europe--which ought to have been the priority, the paramount priority, after all, that was what we appeared to have secured, peace in Europe--in the interest of securing peace in Europe the time has come to stop and to move forward and to see how we can sort things out with the Russians. In their interests and in ours.’ We didn't do it, and here we are.

GD: Just to add a few names to the long list that John just had, I would also add that Bill Clinton himself made a speech in January of 1994 when he actually cautioned that NATO expansion could mean drawing a new line between East and West which could then create a self-fulfilling prophecy of a future confrontation. That's Bill Clinton. If he would say that today he would be a Putinist. Then you had people like Jack Matlock, who actually were part of negotiating an end to the Cold War, who warned, 'This will bring the Cold War back.’ And the same with James Baker. He also cautioned, 'This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we do this we're going to have war--not war, necessarily, but conflict with Russia.' And there a great line by Roderic Lyne, the former British ambassador to Russia. He actually said in 2020 that it was a huge mistake in 2008 to try to pull Ukraine into NATO. The direct quote: "If you want to start a war with Russia this is the best way to do it." This is right up there with Angela Merkel saying that Russia would interpret this as a declaration of war. This is what frustrates me. This is what is considered today to be Putinism or Russian propaganda--something which was stated by all top officials for 30 years until it was deemed to be something that lends legitimacy to the opponent. So now we have to pretend it never happened.

This led me to do a search: Who was the architect of NATO expansion? What I came up with was a 1999 article by James Goldgeier for the Brookings Institute:

THE U.S. DECISION TO ENLARGE NATO

That was 25 years ago, but the article still reads as prescient. Here are some key excerpts that illustrate the political lay of the land in the US of that time—the 90s. These excerpts will resonate with the discussion of The Duran Trio. I start by listing some of the key supporters, who were opposed by the galaxy of eminent statesmen and academics listed above:

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

National Security Adviser Anthony Lake (listed as the most important of the early expansion supporters)

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke

Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) and Henry Hyde (R-IL) introduced legislation in the House of Representatives, followed by Paul Simon (D-IL) and Hank Brown (R-CO) in the Senate. Other vocal supporters included Republicans Richard Lugar (IN) and William Roth (DE).

Second, the administration’s specially created NATO enlargement ratification office waged an effective national campaign, assisted by leading members of the Senate NATO Observer Group, by the Central Europeans and their ethnic supporters, and by Republican heavyweights in the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Endorsements poured in from business, labor, state and local governments, Jewish organizations, veterans, and leading former officials and retired military personnel. Columnists and academics who opposed enlargement on the op-ed pages and in leading journals had no comparable effort.

Finally, Senate Republicans believed that they—not Bill Clinton—had been the engine driving enlargement.

Republicans had written enlargement into the Contract with America in 1994. They had driven the legislative process from 1994 to1996.That Senate Republicans could claim this issue as their own made their consent far more likely than if the initiative had been seen as Democratic-inspired.

Three thorny issues that were finessed during the Senate debate of 1998 will have to be addressed as NATO looks beyond the first round. The first is Russia’s reaction to enlargement. While some NATO aspirants, such as Slovenia and Romania, are not particularly threatening to Russia, any second round puts the Baltic issue to the fore. The Russians have repeatedly stated their visceral opposition to including any former Soviet republic.

The war in Kosovo has exacerbated all three concerns. Russia’s reaction to NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia has caused greater despair among those who already feared that expansion could lead to a new Cold War in Europe.

A truly cooperative relationship between a new NATO and a new Russia requires that NATO convince Russia that neither taking in new members nor adopting new missions is directed against it. It also requires that Russia convince NATO that it will stay on the right track politically and diplomatically.

The reference to the PR campaign for enlargement gave me an idea. Who was it who came up with the mocking title for the GHWBush speech (written, mark you, by Condi Rice!)—the Chicken Kiev speech. It seemed to me that that PR masterstroke was a key. It was invented in an article written by William Safire (Guardian of Zion Award recipient in 2005). The meme went viral, as we would now say, setting the tone of Russia policy—at least in the MSM—for years, decades, to come.

Have you noticed someone missing from this picture. That’s right. I could not find Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints on this issue. She was certainly abrasive enough after the fact, but two searches came up negative. My guess is that Hillary used the Russia Hoax meme opportunistically, a sort of judo move working off the undoubted fact of heavy Republican involvement in NATO expansion—even attempting to take credit for it away from Clinton. Based on Diesen’s claims, it appears that neither of the Clintons were reflexively anti-Russian—their close friendship with their Russophile adviser Strobe Talbott is a clear indicator in that regard, and Talbott urged moderation and compromise rather than outright NATO expansion. So it appears that the ever unprincipled Hillary simply seized upon the Russia Hoax as a weapon of convenience to separate Trump from the anti-Russian base of the GOP—not suspecting that the GOP base had changed over the years. Instead, the Left latched onto the hoax.

What do you think?