From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Sep 03 2008 - 00:46:02 EDT
http://www.truthout.org/article/violating-someones-sphere-influence-can-be-dangerous
Violating Someone's "Sphere of Influence" Can Be Dangerous
Tuesday 02 September 2008
by: Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
photo
Truman giving Truman Doctrine address, March 12, 1947. (Photo: Truman
Library)
What is it about American foreign policy that constantly gets the U.S.
military involved in another country or region and then winds up with our
troops bogged down in a dimly understood local conflict? Are our
strategists and international experts missing something?
When other countries stir up trouble in Latin America or the Caribbean,
the U.S. regards this as a violation of its hegemony (the Monroe Doctrine)
in its home "sphere of influence." But we seem unable to comprehend that
other major countries have their own "spheres of influence" in their
regions - Russia in Eastern Europe, Iran in the Persian Gulf area, China in
Asia, for example - which they feel very strongly about and are willing to
defend by force of arms, if necessary.
Such U.S. ignorance (which derives from a belief that America as the
world's self-designated Good Guy and lone superpower can do whatever it
wants) inevitably leads to big trouble. For instance, even with the U.S.
spread thin and quagmired in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CheneyBush regime
seems anxious to provoke a major quarrel with a resurgent Russia in a
relatively minor regional dispute in the Caucasus.
In the midst of the juicy theatre of presidential campaigns, it might
be wise for all of us to step back and attend to that foreign-policy
reality and to consider the grim implications of a renewed Cold War between
the U.S. and Russia.
The Larger Picture
I'm not just referring to the contretemps over what's happening in the
Caucasus right now, especially with regard to Georgia. No, we're talking
about major realignments of political, economic and military forces that,
if not handled correctly, could put Russia and the U.S. into a potential
active conflict.
It's clear that John McCain and his neo-conservative backers would look
forward to such a confrontation; they thrive on crisis; it's where they
come alive and can roll out their black/white simplicities and threats to
use force, utilize an "enemy" as their way to increase their domestic
power, cranking-up the old military-industrial complex. And, at least for
the purposes of the election campaign, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have
joined in, using Russia as a bete noir and are warning Russia to back off
and back down and back away.
Part of the problem is that Superpower America continues to see the
world almost exclusively through U.S. eyes and thus is not taking into
account how the world appears to Russia and others. Thus, diplomacy is
ignored and the Cold War, and potential hot wars, draw closer. And, of
course, all this is taking place between two fading empires, as new major
powers emerge in Asia/South Asia (China, India). Russia and the U.S., in
effect, are battling for regional dominance before the new movers and
shakers are fully up to speed.
"Scare the Hell out of American People"
To better understand the current Russia/U.S. clash in the Caucasus, and
why Russia is moving so aggressively in its perceived "sphere of
influence," we need a bit of historical context.
My area of concentration in graduate school was the origin of the Cold
War, and my dissertation was on the "Truman Doctrine," the governmental
policy that declared for the first time that the U.S. would launch a global
struggle against what was seen as a monolithic Soviet Empire bent on
worldwide communist domination.
Actually, President Truman in 1947 was mainly interested in a much
smaller issue - sending financial and military aid to Greece and Turkey, to
keep them safely within the Western fold - but was informed by Senate
Republican leaders that the only way he'd get a large-scale
aid-appropriation through Congress was to "scare hell out of the American
people." So Truman refashioned his message by talking about a Soviet Union
moving toward "worldwide domination" through the use of force, a red menace
that had to be stopped in its tracks before it conquered the globe.
Thus the Truman Doctrine was born, Greece and Turkey got their money,
and the U.S. from that time forward was locked-into battling "world
communism" wherever it seemed to be raising its head. The result was that
the U.S. sent massive cash infusions to dictators all over the globe who
claimed they were "fighting communism." (Similar today to any tinpot
dictator who claims to be "fighting terrorism.") In reality, much of that
anti-communist U.S. money went into Swiss bank accounts or was used to
crush reform movements in those countries, the effect of which was to push
reformers toward revolutionary options. The debacle in Vietnam can be
traced back to the ramifications of that earlier Truman Doctrine.
Please don't misunderstand me. Stalinist communism (like fundamentalist
Islam today) was a despicably brutal, totalitarian system. And Stalin was a
monstrous authoritarian leader, who did entertain theoretical/ideological
dreams of communist uprisings abroad. But, though he was a certifiable
paranoid, Stalin was not a madman in how he related to the outside world.
Despite the conventional myth, he had no desire or ability (don't forget
that 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II) to take
over the world by force.
Soviets' Need for a Buffer
My research confirmed that Stalin was an old-style national leader who
wanted, at all costs, to protect the homeland and home base of communism,
which is why he was so desirous of controlling the Eastern Europe countries
and Baltic states as part of the Soviet empire. They would serve as a
protective buffer between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, from whence
three European leaders' armies invaded Mother Russia: Napoleon, then Kaiser
Wilhelm, and then Hitler.
Whenever confronted elsewhere, Stalin tended to back away, abandoning
local Communist Parties to the tender mercies of their enemies, the example
of the Greek Communist Party being a case in point. (My Master's thesis, by
the way, was on the Greek Civil War of that period.)
There was so much misunderstanding, misreading, among the Allies that
led to so much Cold War misery when WWII was over. And we're repeating the
pattern today. Just one contextual episode, which I've written about
previously.
Stalin couldn't understand why Truman and other Western leaders were
screaming so loudly about his harsh treatment of the Eastern Europeans
absorbed into his satellite-states buffer zone after the end of the war.
After all, he reasoned, the Americans and British had recognized his right
to control those states in the so-called "percentages agreement" or
"spheres of influence" agreement worked out in a secret Moscow meeting in
October 1944.
The "Percentages Agreement"
Short history: At that meeting, Churchill gave Stalin a piece of paper
on which he had written percentages of which allies in the post-war period
would control which countries in their "sphere of influence." Since the Red
Army was (or soon would be) effectively in control of most of Eastern
Europe, and neither the Americans nor Brits had the wherewithall (or
desire) to fight another massive war right after defeating the Germans,
they recognized the reality of Soviet boots on the ground and gave Stalin
90% control of Rumania and so on, while the Brits got 90% control in
Greece, Yugoslavia was 50-50, etc. Stalin began acting under this agreement
during the final year of the war, and the Americans and Brits likewise
honored the percentages pact, seemingly unconcerned about the brutal way
Stalin was absorbing Eastern Europe into the Soviet empire.
Upon the death of FDR, President Truman took over. After war ended and
with anti-communism affecting domestic politics, Truman began objecting to
the Soviet Union's harsh behavior in Eastern Europe. Stalin interpreted the
strong Western reaction to his unbridled use of power in that
"sphere-of-influence" region as reneging on a solemn agreement; his
paranoia convinced him that the West was out to try to overthrow him, so he
conceded that the "percentages agreement" was no longer in place and began
making life more difficult for America elsewhere in the world.
So there was that gross misunderstanding from the Soviet side. What
about the U.S.? Americans, including most government officials, had just
fought a war against one set of totalitarians and now were confronted with
another, in the form of Stalin's Soviet Union. They tended to see this
movement as monolithic and as aimed at world domination, so anything the
Soviets did was interpreted in that light.
"Nationalist Communism"
The Soviets talked such a good game about "international communism,"
centrally directed from Moscow, that the Americans had no inkling that
something called "nationalist communism" existed, or even could exist. If
they had, they might have altered their foreign policy accordingly,
recognizing that Tito's communism in Yugoslavia was distinctly different
from Stalin's in Russia, from Mao's in China or from Ho Chi Minh's in
Vietnam. Antagonisms among and between Communist regimes abounded, and
nationalism almost always was stronger than a monolithic ideology. (An
analogous distortion today would be America viewing radical Islam through
the lens of a monolithic Al-Qaida, supposedly pulling all the militant and
terrorist strings around the world. If it ever was, it's not that way now.)
After communism imploded in the Soviet Union and its satellite states
in the late-1980s, Russia went into a decade-long psychological and
economic tailspin. But Russia has climbed back, economically and militarily
stronger and determined to re-assert what it considers its rightful
superpower status in its "sphere of influence" and in the world. And, once
again, it sees its major threats coming from the West, engineered mainly by
the United States.
Russia Nervous About Missiles, NATO
The U.S., for example, is luring former Soviet-satellite countries
(Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, etc.) toward the European
Union and, especially frightening to Russia, into NATO, the military pact
originally set up to stop the Soviet Union from even thinking about moving
westwards. Putin, like Stalin, sees his country's "sphere of influence"
being violated, with Russia being ringed by potentially hostile enemies,
effectively controlled by the U.S. and other Western powers.
This growing split between Russia and the U.S. has been building since
the early 1990s, with Putin, for example, warning the U.S. not to position
its missile-defense system in the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern
Europe. But just the other day, Poland signed an agreement to do just that
(as did the Czechs earlier) and the Russians are furious. The U.S. claims
that the system is aimed at stopping incoming missiles from rogue states
like Iran, but few believe that unlikely rationale. The Russians, not
unrealistically, are convinced that the missile-defense system is aimed at
them, and is provocative in the extreme, placed as it is right next to its
borders. (Look how freaked out the U.S. got in the early-1960s - ready to
go to war - when the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90
miles off the American coast.)
When President Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops into South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, two ethnic-Russian regions inside Georgia that wished to
break away and be annexed by their Russian neighbor, Putin and Russian
president Medvedev ordered their "peacekeeping" troops (there under a U.N.
resolution) to resist and sent tanks and troops across the Georgian border
to occupy large parts of Georgia. Putin said he's convinced that the
Americans approved of their ally Saakashvili's invasion since the U.S. has
been building up Georgia for years with military weapons and training.
Hit the Bear on the Nose
But whether the U.S. openly urged Saakashvili to invade, acquiesced to
it, or was somewhat surprised by it, the point is that the proxy
confrontation between Russia and the U.S. was on, and the two sides began
their move toward a dangerous renewal of the Cold War. Without even
acknowledging Georgia's brutal invasion of Ossetia and Abkhazia, American
leaders - out of knee-jerk anti-Russianism - started bashing the Russian
bear for its harsh occupation in Georgia, including CheneyBush, John
McCain, and Barack Obama/Joe Biden.
We'll probably never know for sure who "started" this current phase of
the long-simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia. This situation
there, and in the Caucasus in general, is infinitely complex, steeped in
nationalistic, tribal and ideological rivalries that are barely
understandable, and dangerous for Americans to get sucked into. But that
didn't stop McCain, a neo-con warmonger of the first order, from
immediately making ill-advised, threatening anti-Russia comments. (Not
incidentally, McCain's foreign-policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, up until
a few months ago was a lobbyist for the Georgian government and his firm
continues in that role.) Even the initially-cautious CheneyBush
Administration jumped into the name-calling and threatening, joined in a
bit later, with only slightly more sense of nuance, by the Democratic
nominee Obama. (Biden, in his acceptance speech, was even more outspoken in
his angry denunciation of Russia.)
Neo-con Dick Cheney is being dispatched to Georgia as a hard-line
message to Putin that the U.S. is not backing off its support of Georgia's
anti-Russian stance. The U.S. is moving toward isolating Russia, starting
by kicking it out of the G-8, blocking its ascension to the WTO, cutting
back on investments, etc. Even the conservative British journal The
Economist believes there are dangers in these kinds of moves that need to
be measured against possible consequences:
"Suspending business as usual should not be pushed to the point that
drives Russia into the sort of sulk that will make its behaviour worse.
Finding the line between disapproval, pressure and continued engagement
will be hard.... But there is vital work to be done - on nuclear
proliferation and arms reduction, for example - in which the need for
cooperation with Russia simply outweighs the need to punish it."
That intelligent prescription requires highly nuanced diplomatic smarts
- and some understanding of Russia's perception of its "sphere of
influence" - neither of which is much in evidence in the nation's capital
these days.
Election-Year Posturing
Because of the high stakes involved, our working alliance with Russia
is crucially important. We don't need to approve of their leadership, their
ambitions in their region, or how democracy is being compromised inside
Russia. But the U.S. does need their help in negotiations with Iran, for
example. Additionally, given the fact that the Russians still possess
thousands of nuclear missiles, one would have hoped for cooler U.S. heads
to prevail, that at least a move toward high-level diplomacy would have
been made before the harsh threats were issued.
But, no. It's an election season. The big verbal guns were hastily
moved into place and firing began, with Medyedev responding by recognizing
the "independence" of the two breakaway regions in Georgia and telling the
Americans they're not afraid of a new Cold War. Russia says it will be
deploying its missiles at a wide variety of locations, and aiming them at
Western European capitals. The other day, it test-fired a new ICBM,
designed to defeat an anti-missile system, as a metaphorical warning shot
across the bow of American policy.
In short, the two countries are not playing patty-cake here. The
evolving relationship with Russia is loaded with potentially explosive
dangers, and great care needs to be exercised to keep that relationship on
an even keel for the good of both countries, for Europe, and for stability
in the world. So far, good sense seems in short supply and thus the two
fading empires slide closer to confrontation and potential war.
Are you reading much about this in your local newspaper? Hear any
serious discussions about this on national TV? I thought not. The
politicians and mass-media are focusing on who's wearing a flag-pin, Paris
Hilton and what candidate is ahead by two points in the daily poll. And
thus we drift toward disaster.
-------
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D,, has taught government and international
relations at universities in California and Washington, worked for two
decades as a writer/editor with The San Francisco Chronicle, and currently
serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 9/2/08.
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