Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts

Monday, March 3, 2025

The Current Big Lie: There was an agreement in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart that prevented former Eastern bloc countries from joining NATO

 

‘There was no promise not to enlarge NATO’ - Harvard Law School

Mar 16, 2022 By Jeff Neal

When President George H.W. Bush sat down with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the peaceful end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, former Under Secretary of State Robert Zoellick ’81 was in the room where it happened.

During the 1990 summit, Zoellick says President Gorbachev accepted the idea of German unification within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, based on the principle that every country should freely choose its own alliances.

“I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement. Those facts have undermined one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine — that the United States had agreed that former Warsaw Pact nations would never become part of the North Atlantic security alliance.

Zoellick, a former deputy and undersecretary of state, deputy White House chief of staff, U.S. trade representative, and World Bank president, shared his recollections about the Cold War’s end and its ties to the ongoing war in Ukraine as part of a broader conversation with Harvard Law Today about the 75th anniversary of the Truman Doctrine, an American foreign policy aimed at containing Soviet expansion following World War II.

He is the author of “America in the Word: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy.” An alumnus of both Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, where he is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Zoellick believes Putin’s false claim about NATO enlargement is part of a disinformation campaign by the former KGB agent to mask his true intentions.

Zoellick vividly recalls the White House meeting he attended nearly three decades ago in which Bush asked Gorbachev if he agreed with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe principle that nations are free to ally with others as they see fit. When Gorbachev said yes, he says, the Soviet leader’s “own colleagues at the table visibly separated themselves.”

Sensing the import of the possible breakthrough, he says a colleague at the meeting, Robert Blackwill, sent him a note checking what they had heard and asking if they should ask Bush to repeat the question. “Gorbachev agreed again,” Zoellick recalls, to the principle that Germany could choose to enter NATO.

“The reality was that, in 1989-90, most people, and certainly the Soviets, weren’t focusing on whether the Eastern European countries would become part of NATO,” Zoellick says. Knowing Soviet and Russian diplomacy, he believes Moscow would have demanded assurances in writing if it believed the U.S. had made such a promise. And even in 1996, when President Bill Clinton welcomed former Warsaw Pact nations to join NATO, he says that, “[o]ne of the German diplomats involved told me that as they discussed the enlargement with the Russians, no Russian raised the argument that there had been a promise not to enlarge.”

But if the West never gave the promise Putin has used to explain his decision to invade Ukraine, what does Zoellick think motivates the Russian president’s decision to inflict death and destruction on one of Russia’s nearest neighbors? “Putin does not see Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state,” he says. “He has a view of Russian history where the Rus [the medieval ancestors of the people who came to form Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine] began in Kyiv. He believes that they are all Russians, living in a greater Russia. And I think at age 69, Putin feels that this is a question not only of Russian history, but his place in Russian history.”

Zoellick says that when Putin’s earlier attacks in the Crimea and country’s eastern regions failed to halt Ukraine’s drift towards the West, the Russian leader believed he had no other choice but to invade. “That’s his motivation. And I think we need to be aware that he’s going to double down. The resilience and resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist has been a surprise to him and everybody else. I don’t think he’s going to ultimately be successful. In addition to today’s brutal battles, Russia faces a difficult occupation and insurgency, even if it can seize cities and territory.”

The experienced diplomat also credits Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with rallying the Ukrainian people by refusing to flee Kyiv and through adept use of social media and language.

“We’re seeing that the skills that he developed as an entertainer and a communicator can be used in different ways, just as Ronald Reagan did,” he says. “It does raise a concern that, if something happens to Zelensky, what will that do to morale? Will he be a martyr or will his loss break the public will?”

Zoellick also notes that, as the war in Ukraine has garnered the world’s attention, many of the questions being asked today about the West’s relationship with Russia are similar to those he had dealt with at the end of the Cold War, including “Russia’s sense of whether it feels like a great power or threatened by NATO … those are the issues that are at very much at play in dealing with Ukraine.”

“Can Russia forge peaceful, constructive ties with the West?” he asks. “Failed economic and political reforms left Russia behind. Its economy depends on energy production. Putin played off public frustrations, but many Russians don’t want war and isolation.”

When thinking about global diplomacy and the factors that might have led to the Russian invasion, Zoellick harkens back to a comment made by his boss for eight years, James Baker, who served both as secretary of state and the treasury, as well as White House chief of staff: “As you address the problems of one era, you’re often planting the seeds for the next set of challenges. History doesn’t stop.”

More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Zoellick says the legacy of decisions made at the end of the Cold War are echoing throughout Europe today: “Would we keep NATO alive? Would it enlarge into Central and Eastern Europe? How far? What would be the effects on Russia of its loss of empire?”

“That leaves the question of whether the U.S. could have avoided Russia’s turn,” he says. The answer, he believes, depended on Russia’s choices. “Certainly, we wouldn’t have wanted East and West Germany to remain divided.” The related questions are many: What if Eastern European countries had been barred from joining NATO and therefore remained, like Ukraine, outside the western security umbrella? And how would they react to the Russian threat and being left again as “lands between” Germany and Russia? The U.S. and Europe, he notes, offered Russia partnerships, but Russia felt humiliated by the loss of its empire.

“I was the U.S. negotiator for German unification,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that a democratic Germany was unified in NATO. I don’t think anybody would think that’s a bad idea today. And if anything, we’re now seeing Germany stepping up to a security role for NATO and the European Union.”

In 1989-90, Zoellick was also focused on the idea that Poland — long subject to invasions by Russia and Germany — should be able to eventually join NATO. He made sure that the treaty on German unification kept that possibility open. “Given Putin’s behavior, can you imagine what the effect would be on Poland today if it weren’t in NATO? I think it’s wise to have Poland and Germany on the same side. The Baltic countries were a tougher choice for NATO, not because they don’t deserve the security, but they’re very hard to defend.” Nevertheless, he adds, because the Baltic states are now NATO members, he believes we must “take serious steps to defend them from both direct and hybrid threats.”

Ultimately, he believes supporting Ukraine economically and supplying arms for self-defense, rather than opening the potential for eventual NATO membership, would have been a better approach than the one the West has taken in recent years.

“If NATO gives a security guarantee, it has to mean it,” he says. “It has to be serious about providing deterrence under Article Five of the North Atlantic Alliance treaty. … I support Ukraine’s economic reforms and its democracy, [but] I doubted that the American people were ultimately willing to fight for Ukraine. The worst thing to do was to suggest Ukraine might join NATO, but without a serious pathway to membership.”

The U.S., he adds, “isn’t going to defend everybody all the time, everywhere in the world; we have to know what we will and won’t defend. Having said that, I think the Obama and Trump administrations erred by not giving more military support to Ukraine. I believe that we should help the Ukrainians defend themselves. But those are the exact issues debated today.”

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/there-was-no-promise-not-to-enlarge-nato/

Friday, February 21, 2025

America is gone: Like Hitler and Stalin carving up Poland in 1939, Trump and Putin carve up Ukraine in 2025

 


Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: To watch our ally of 80 years, the USA, turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days

 

Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe:

The new regime in Washington is testing pro-American sympathies to breaking point

 

We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.

The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.

George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.

Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.

This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.

He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.

Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.

Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.

Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.

Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?

The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.

He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.

I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.

We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.

Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.

Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.

Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.

Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.

The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.

Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.

Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.

But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

GOP candidate positions on Ukraine demonstrate nothing but groveling to the anti-war right

 And the kernel there is pretending things that are not true, the mark of an unserious country.

Nikki Haley is simply incoherent. She says we have to win this war, but without more financial assistance. 

“I don’t think we need to put money in Ukraine,” Haley said last week before an audience in Iowa. ... “This is not a war about Ukraine, this is a war about freedom—and it’s one that we have to win,” Haley said. “If we win this war, this will send a message to China, it will send a message to Iran, it will send a message to North Korea, it will send a message to Russia. If we lose this war… they said Poland and the Baltics are next, and you’re looking at a world war.”

Ron DeSantis pretends Russia never invaded and simply has a territorial dispute with Ukraine.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests—securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party—becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week.

And The Daily Beast isn't wrong about Donald Trump's position, who to this day touts the myth that he is some great deal-maker who can untie the Gordian Knot:

Former President Donald Trump has said he would have let Russia “take over” parts of Ukraine if he were still in the White House.

It is also the case that there is plenty of pretending on the other side, that the West wasn't responsible for the Ukrainian revolution of 2014 which ultimately provoked the current conflict.

Statesmen tell hard truths to their people. But none of ours seem capable of telling even the simple ones, including Joe Biden.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Biden's daring visit to Kiev had more to do with repairing his own image at home as a bungler than with helping Ukraine

The visit, combined with VP Harris' labeling of Russia guilty of crimes against humanity, has resulted today in Russian suspension of the last nuclear arms treaty remaining.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous, impetuous, self-serving, unnecessary, game. 

Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. has determined Russian forces have committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

Putin pulls back from last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the US

"Talk softly and carry a big stick" would be a much better policy right now than this.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Despite 2015 Paris climate agreement, global reliance on coal grew by about 8%, looks to grow 23% more, shattering Greta's world, lol


 The NGOs report said there are currently more than 6,500 coal plant units globally with a combined capacity of 2,067 gigawatts. ...

Urgewald’s Schuecking told CNBC that since the 2015 Paris accord was signed, the global coal plant fleet had seen a net increase of roughly 157 gigawatts. That’s the equivalent of Germany, Russia, Japan and Poland’s coal fleet added up together.

The research found that 467 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity were still in the pipeline worldwide. And, if realized, these projects would increase the world’s current coal power capacity by 23%. ...

China was found to be responsible for 61% of all planned coal power capacity additions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top four coal plant developers were found to be Chinese companies . . .. China Energy Investment Corporation was the world’s top thermal coal producer last year. This was closely followed by Coal India . . ..

I omitted Schuecking's temper tantrum parts of the story, here.

She is, predictably, a German environmentalist wacko who is also against nuclear power. Urgewald is full of crazy Karens just like her who agitate against corporations and try to get individuals like David Malpass of the World Bank fired because they don't mouth the right words like the Paris Climate Accord hypocrites do.

Urgewald is Exhibit A for the prospect of Germans freezing to death this winter.





Saturday, March 26, 2022

I swear Joe Biden is going to get us all killed


 So far on this trip to Poland to rally NATO to the defense of Europe, Joe Biden has

1) threatened to respond "in kind" if Russia uses chemical or biological weapons;

2) told members of the 82nd Airborne they're about to deploy to Ukraine ("when you’re there, you’re going to see women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying 'I’m not leaving.'");

3) specifically called for regime change in Russia (“For god’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”).

 

 

 

 

We're not supposed even to possess chemical and biological weapons.

Russia has stated NATO intervention in Ukraine is a cause for war with NATO.

Making removal of Putin the NATO objective is the existential threat Putin also says is a cause for war.

At least in 1984 when Ronald Reagan quipped in a sound check, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.", he was only joking.

The Reagan joke was deliberately leaked to embarrass him, which it did. But today's White House scrambles to correct all these Biden statements because none of them are jokes.

Joe Biden is the loose cannon on the ship of state. 

And they used to call this guy a dunce.


 

 

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

The Nazi past of the family of Canada's Chrystia Freeland, financial henchman for Adolf Trudeau, isn't some fabrication

 The Globe and Mail in 2017:

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War. ...

Ms. Freeland has never acknowledged that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and suggested on Monday that the allegation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.


More.

Monday, March 1, 2021

US COVID-19 update through Feb 2021

Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.












Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.












Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized. 

The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that.  We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out. 

Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.

Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.

Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated. 

It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.


  






Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Washington DC Injuns to Catholic kids: "White people go back to Europe, this is not your land"

Here.

Fellow tribalists Rashida Tlaib, Helen Thomas, Barack Obama, and friends: "Jews get the hell out of Palestine, go back to Poland, Germany and America."

Monday, September 17, 2018

Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic refuses to acknowledge the facts of illegal immigrant crime

The crimes of illegal immigrants, apart from being here illegally, continue as we speak, and continuously are noted in the Twitter feeds and websites of conservatives. Of course all of that is illegitimate to the Anne Applebaums of the world. Nothing is legitimate unless it is sanctioned by coverage in the press which her side owns, and this story is not covered by her press, for political reasons. That story forms the heart of the Trump political campaign, and to give it expression is to do the work of her political enemy, which is what the essay is really all about, her political enemies, in Poland, Hungary and the United States. At one point she even solemnly informs us that "(A ruling party that has politicized its courts and suppressed the media is a party that finds it much easier to steal.)", as if that isn't a perfect description of liberal democratic rule in the United States since FDR. It's now a country where the words "illegal alien" are banned on Twitter. That's how important cheap landscapers are to The Establishment.

From the story here:

Much as Trump used birtherism and the fabricated threat of immigrant crime to motivate his core supporters, Kaczyński has used the Smolensk tragedy to galvanize his followers, and convince them not to trust the government or the media. Sometimes he has implied that the Russian government downed the plane. At other times, he has blamed the former ruling party, now the largest opposition party, for his brother’s death: “You destroyed him, you murdered him, you are scum!” he once shouted in parliament.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Rick Santorum is suddenly doing robocalls for Sandy Pensler for US Senate here in Michigan, which sounds like desperation

Just got the call a few minutes ago.

Turns out the race is now deadlocked after some time with Pensler in the lead.

Pensler has been advertising vigorously in Rush Limbaugh's timeslot on the radio as well.

His opponent John James has been relying on direct mail to reach his voters.

Pensler is spending an awful lot of money to win when he went out of his way in January to alienate voters by stating for the record that the Polish people were complicit in the Holocaust in World War II.

That's hardly how to win friends and influence people in Macomb and Wayne counties if you really want to be elected to the US Senate in 2018! 

'The Polish legislature yesterday, with particularly insensitive timing, hammered home humanities [sic] dangerous proclivity to insulate ourselves against others. It passed legislation outlawing calling Polish based concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzic and others as “Polish concentration camps” rather they must now be called . [sic] “Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland”. This attempt to whitewash and deny complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust is dangerous.'

Monday, July 10, 2017

John O'Sullivan still refuses to accept the meaning of "ourselves and our Posterity"


Notice that Ronald Reagan did not say that the great civil ideas of the West were the property of those Notre Dame graduates who were descended from the Founding Fathers and their generation. Nor did he say that they were the property of white Anglophone Protestants who had fetched up on these shores in the meantime — since that would have excluded the son of an Irish Catholic father like himself. Nor that the children of black slaves or other non-white migrants were excluded from that same moral and intellectual Western inheritance which the black former slave and passionate reader, Frederick Douglass, so cherished and claimed as his own.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

It looks like Emmanuel Macron has become Marine Le Pen's chief advocate

He's pointing at his head, but he's not using it.
Macron, quoted here:

“When the rights and values of the European Union are not respected, I want sanctions to be taken.”

“In the three months after I’m elected, there will be a decision on Poland.”

“You cannot have a European Union which argues over every single decimal place on the issue of budgets with each country, and which, when you have an EU member which acts like Poland or Hungary on issues linked to universities and learning, or refugees, or fundamental values, decides to do nothing.”