On June 3-4 president Barack Obama is going to Poland before moving on to the G7 summit in Brussels. Obama’s visit is theoretically devoted to the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of Poland’s first post-communist parliamentary election, in 1989.
Obama though is unlikely to talk much about the past, he is much more likely to want to discuss the future, especially about the "containment" of Russia (the State Department’s new policy line on Russia, first hailed by the former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, in his recent opinion piece in The New York Times).
In Warsaw, Obama will meet the Polish and American pilots of the Poland-based F16 fighter jets, a new symbol of this "new" containment. (It should not be forgotten that the "old" containment policy was launched in late 1940s on the advice of the great American diplomat George F. Kennan, also a former ambassador to Moscow, who from the 1990s opposed NATO’s expansion and other hostile US and allied action against the new, non-communist Russia.)
So, what can the US offer Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), whose leaders will be present for his speech in Warsaw on Wednesday?
The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is going to "reaffirm US commitment to the region’s security." However, some voices from Warsaw and Washington give us to understand what Washington’s real plans are and why its "commitment" in Europe did not save the old continent from (some would say: led to) the wars in the former Yugoslavia and now in Ukraine, the first armed conflicts in Europe since World War II.
For example, the comments of George Friedman, CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, do not quite fit the "mainstream" Western pattern of an "aggressive" Russia and of a "passive" (even naively benevolent towards Russia) NATO. Here is his description of recent events in Ukraine in an interview with the Polish Rzeczpospolita daily:
"What we are seeing is not a return to the cold war. Russia has suffered a huge defeat in Ukraine. The pro-Russian government has fallen, Putin barely managed to keep Crimea and a couple of cities in Eastern Ukraine… From a strategic point of view, Russia needs a lot of space to the west of Moscow to fall back on in case of an attack. Meanwhile, the Baltic states are already in NATO, and if the Kremlin loses Ukraine, the West will have only 500 miles to go to reach Moscow."
These don’t sound like the ruminations of someone concerned with "unpredictable Putin," eh? Sounds like the calculations of an aggressor, for whom the whole region, including not just Poland, but also Ukraine, is just a place on the map, from where Russia can be attacked and, let’s call a spade a spade, destroyed.
The question is: are Poland and the other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries happy to be "the battlefield" in the event of a conflict with Russia? Isn’t NATO membership a threat, rather than a boon, to the security of Poland and other new NATO members in the center and east of Europe?
"I keep hearing from some mentally unstable politicians in Poland that Russia wants to invade and subjugate Poland," explains Stanislaw Ciosek, a former Polish ambassador to Moscow, who faced a lot of hostility in Warsaw’s post-communist MFA because, before 1989 he had been a VIP inside the pro-Soviet Poland’s United Workers’ Party. "I always ask them: why do Russians need Poland? What will they do with Poland if they get it? Not one of them has been able to give me a satisfactory answer so far."
Could danger to Poland be coming from the West rather than the East? In his interview, Mr. Friedman argues against NATO as a spineless organization, suggesting instead individual "contracts for defense cooperation" between Washington and countries from the Baltic sea to the Black sea, which the Polish Hitler-admired military ruler Joseph Pilsudski dreamed of uniting in 1930s (Poland, Rumania, etc.) Sounds like a terrible plan for dragging Poland into an unlimited war, much more dangerous and realistic than an attack from "those crazy Russians."
In reality, the unnecessary and unwise confrontation with Russia is opposed by many Poles, but since their views differ from the Polish political and media "mainstream," voicing their opinions is becoming increasingly difficult for those peacemakers, who are usually labeled "appeasers" in Poland. Just recently, all true human rights activists in Poland were alarmed by the worrying case of Anna Razny, a professor at Jagellon University in Poland, who "incidentally" did not have her job contract extended, immediately after she signed an open letter to Vladimir Putin supporting his policies in Ukraine.
The Western press, usually quick to react to any cases of Russian professors facing any kind of criticism for insulting Putin (like professor Andrei Zubov, who compared Putin to Hitler). That same press preferred not to notice the case of professor Anna Razny.
Together with professor Razny, the letter was signed by several dozen other Polish intellectuals, who condemned their government’s policy of blindly following the US against Russia.
"The EU is gradually sliding towards fascism," said Jon Hellewig, a former candidate in the recent European parliamentary elections in Finland. "Contrary to many predictions, this new fascism is not coming from the stigmatized "far right" parties of Western Europe, like the French Le Front National. It will come from the European "mainstream" politicians who justify the truly Nazi violence in Ukraine simply because this violence is committed by people who swear allegiance to the EU."
Unfortunately, recent events seem to confirm this theory of an "unholy alliance" between anti-Russian extremist nationalism and the mainstream politicians in the CEE. For example, the recent article by the Washington Post’s top "authority" on Russia, Anne Applebaum, published in The New Republic, has a truly alarming headline: "Nationalism is Exactly What Ukraine Needs"
In her article, Mrs. Applebaum, wife of the hyperactive Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, praises the "controversial" Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose members were responsible for the killing of thousands of Jews in Ukraine during World War II and, who at the epoch would certainly have put their hands on Mrs. Applebaum’s relatives too, in the framework of the "final solution to the Jewish problem," which they enthusiastically supported. Short memory for the crimes of Nazi-supported local nationalists and long memory for presumably unavoidable hostility with Russia are now in vogue in the East European politics. And Warsaw is not exception.
So, this is the true audience that Obama will be addressing in Warsaw with his calls to "isolate" or even to "contain" Russia. A pretty dreadful and almost indecent repetition of history – between 1917 and 1941, Western powers led the same policy. And they would have been no more now, if Russia had stayed "isolated" and "contained" during our common fight with Nazism in 1940s.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_06_02/Obama-in-Poland-the-real-danger-is-from-the-West-2264/
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_06_02/Obama-in-Poland-the-real-danger-is-from-the-West-2264/
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