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War Danger in the Gulf Grows:
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Proposed Eurasian Landbridge routes. |
The American Japan expert Steve Clemons has reported on his website the Washington Note, that Vice President Cheney is allegedly trying to circumvent President Bushs policy of seeking regime change in Iran only through covert operations and diplomacy, and to thus create the preconditions for a military strike. If this information checks out, the question of impeachment of Cheney suddenly is dramatically heightened.
On another front, but not without an intrinsic connection to the developments in the Gulf, the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Sergei Ivanov, proclaimed at a press conference that Moscow has declared a moratorium on the CFE Treaty (the treaty for the reduction of conventional forces in Europe). This decision is primarily a reaction to the provocation by the West, to install U.S. ballistic missile defenses almost directly at the Russian border, because in Russia, no one believes the strange explanation that these systems are necessary in Poland and the Czech Republic, to defend them from missiles from North Korea and Iran. But one can very clearly see the danger that these missile silos could very easily be converted and mounted with atomic weapons, whose flight-time to Moscow would be three minutes.
For this reason, President Putin has raised the comparison to the stationing of the Pershing II missiles in Germany in 1983. Ignoring this, the U.S.A., on May 25, tested the system which is supposed to be set up in Eastern Europe, with one of the missiles fired in Alaska, which was supposed to be destroyed a short time later by a defensive missile fired from California. Therefore, no one should have been surprised when the president of the Russian U.S.A.-Canada Institute, Sergei Rogov, warned that the strategic partnership between Washington and Moscow had failed, and that we stand on the verge of a new Cold War.
Ivanov further elaborated at his press conference, that Russia would no longer allow any foreign troops on its territory, would not announce its troop movements to foreign governments, and, at the beginning of July, would install around Moscow an air defense system on the basis of the most modern S-400 ground-to-air missiles. Moscow is threatening the total abandonment of the CFE treaty, in the case that the NATO member-states dont ratify it themselves.
In the West, we have seen for months a coordinated, escalating campaign against President Putin, in which neo-conservative politicians, media, NGOs, and think-tanks are participating. Putin is thus defamed as a dictator, of letting journalists be murdered, of abandoning democracy in Russia, etc. But, in reality, the participants in this campaign are agitated about something quite different: namely, the situation in which Putin has begun to protect Russian interests, after these were shattered in the 1990s by the Yeltsin clan on behalf of the Western and Eastern oligarchies, and the national patrimony was sold at clearance-sale prices to Western enterprises, and the notorious Russian oligarchs became billionaires overnight.
What was previously invisible is now obvious: The eastern expansion of NATO didnt enhance the security of its member-states, but rather worsens it unnecessarily. The systematic exclusion of Russia through the simultaneous expansion of NATO into the region of the former Warsaw Pact, and the erecting of military bases in Central Asia as air-support points and depots for American strike forces in Romania and Bulgaria, are seen by Moscow as what they are: as a damming-up and encirclement strategy, whose target of attack is ultimately the integrity of Russian territory itself.
While the population, not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Russia, had great expectations of the West after 1989-91, the experience of the 1990s led to a situation where the mood largely turned sour. Today, around 80% of Russians support President Putin. And since 2004 at the latest, the European Union (EU) has no longer been viewed as a harmless vehicle for eastern expansion of the West, but as a source of pressure for an imperial policy. For not only was the support of the EU responsible for the different color revolutions, but for the whole doctrine behind it, of humanitarian intervention and limited sovereignty of such EU ideologues as Robert Cooper and his theory of a new liberal imperialism. Its not only the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Russia thats shattered; also in the relationship of Russia and the EU, the porcelain has been broken into pieces.
It is more regrettable that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has not even understood enough to preserve the legacy which former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder left her, in relation to the German-Russian relationship. Instead of using the German presidency of the EU to lend German contours to its policies, she became, as they say in Saxony, more EU popish than the Pope. In Berlin its not: The Chancellor decides on the correct policy line, but Brussels demolishes the foreign and domestic policy of Germany.
Unfortunately, the government declaration by Merkel for the upcoming G-8 Summit (June 6-8), leaves little hope that anyone might really bring about solutions for the great challenges of mankind there, as she had declared. Because that would be, in the first place, a guarantee of world peace, which is not possible without a change in the composition of the government in Washington; and secondly, it would require a new financial system, a new Bretton Woods to overcome the threatened crash of the systemand not through a greater liberalization of world trade, the removal of protectionist barriers, the battle against fraudulent production and piracy, and better climate protection. Even with the best PR tricks, globalization will not achieve a human face, but must be abolished, and replaced with cooperation between sovereign nations oriented toward the general welfare.
So, as the balance of power currently exists in the world, the necessary initative for the great challenges of mankind will come neither from the EU nor from the G-8, which includes the EU, Japan, the U.S.A., and Russia. A solution would only be possible if the four strongest nationsRussia, China, India, and an America changed on the basis of the tradition of Franklin Rooseveltunite around a new, just world economic order. The first step in this direction was taken by Russia with the recent conference on the construction of the Bering Strait tunnel, as an essential part of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
A policy in the interests of Germany must concentrate on this programmatic perspective, and prepare for it, even if this would appear at the moment to be very difficult. But the failure to realize the agenda which Mrs. Merkel has presented in her government declaration, will very soon be obvious. And for this imminent situation we need a political perspective, which is based on a partnership with the real America of the American Revolution, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, and defends and builds the positive connection between Germany and Russia in the tradition of the joint work of the Prussian reformers with Russia in the war against Napoleon, of Bismarck, and, in the recent time of Schröder and Putin. At this time, the BüSo (Civil Rights Solidarity Movement) is the only party which is putting forth such a policy.
schiller@schillerinstitute.org
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