Ukraine: Why Is Obama Always Half Pregnant?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

22 April 14

ig Bad Vlad has some nerve. On the very day he sent his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to Geneva to negotiate an agreement to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine, the Russian president told his annual live question-and-answer session that his parliament had given him authority to send troops into Ukraine. “I very much hope that I will not have to exercise this right,” he said, “and that, through political and diplomatic means, we will be able to resolve all the pressing, if not to say burning, issues in Ukraine.”

Barack Obama paints himself very differently. If the bare-chested Vlad plays bad, Obama has shown himself “reserved and analytical,” writes Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “Far from marching off the cliff, Obama stayed safely on the sidewalk.”

“Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution,” writes Peter Baker in Sunday’s New York Times, “President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.”

Both journalists are on the right track, but looking in the wrong direction. As in most Western reporting of the cold war since it began, they see the leader of the free world responding to a threat from Moscow rather than abetting, inflaming, or provoking it. Even when Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were talking about “a reset” with Russia, they were practicing the strategy of containment, as has every American president since George H. W. Bush refused to end the Cold War.

Who ordered the build-up of the pro-Western networks that worked with Washington to put together the American coup in Kiev? (See Part I and Part II.) Believe, if you will, that some “deep state” or “shadow government” or neocon conspiracy put all this in motion while Obama, a known stickler for details, was not paying attention. But the “civil society” build-up in Ukraine was standard operating procedure (SOP) in Obama’s Washington, just as it was in the Orange Revolution under George W. Bush. For those who lack Obama’s grasp of details, the same SOP led to General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s July 2013 coup in Egypt.

The difference in Ukraine was the expansion of NATO and the European Union, both now part of containing or encircling Russia. Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), brought together the “pro-democracy” and “anti-Russian” themes in September, just before the Maidan protests began. This was in an op-ed that the Washington Post called “Former Soviet States stand up to Russia. Will the U.S.?”

“Ukraine is the biggest prize, and there Russia’s bullying has been particularly counter-productive,” Gershman wrote. “In addition to the usual economic threats and trade sanctions, including a ban on the import of Ukrainian chocolates, Putin offended Ukrainians during a state visit in July, saying that they and the Russians were a “single people,” and that the Ukrainians had flourished under Soviet rule — totally ignoring the famine of the early 1930s that Ukrainians call the Holodomor, or “extermination by hunger.”

An old social democrat, Gershman has become a leading neocon. But he was not a free agent expressing his own political views. He is paid and NED is funded by Obama’s government. He and NED work under the supervision of Obama’s State Department and National Security Council (NSC). And he was doing his job selling Obama’s official foreign policy.

Obama similarly has his hand on NATO, which moved with warp speed to militarize the conflict. US and European planes are now flying over the Baltic, while US and French ships sail the Black Sea face-to-face with the Russian fleet in Crimea. According to Pentagon spokesman Col. Steven Warren, the presence of the USS Donald Cook “demonstrates our commitment to our … allies to enhance security, readiness, and capabilities.” The ship is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, which is designed to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles.

“What we are seeing for the first time since 2008, NATO is creating a naval battle group outside the Russian border,” a source told Russia’s Interfax news agency. This will include the French reconnaissance ship Dupuy de Lome and destroyer Dupleix, along with the French rescue vessel Alize, which has been in the Black Sea basin since last month.

“The purpose of this is to provide moral support for the regime in Kiev, but also a demonstration of power to make Russia come to heel,” said the Interfax source. The ships will also “collect information on Russian military activity in Crimea and on the Ukrainian border.”

According to American media, a Russian SU-24 fighter jet spent 90 minutes making a total of 12 passes at the Donald Cook. Pentagon spokesman Warren called the buzzing “acts of provocation and unprofessionalism” that “do nothing to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine, which we called on the Russians to do.”

Without wishing to engage in hyperbole, I’m afraid that this could be one of the most dangerous moments since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.

Obama, in the meantime, showcases his restraint. Where his NATO commander General Philip Breedlove has asked for as many as 4,500 U.S. troops to be stationed in Poland, the White House is considering deploying some 150 soldiers for military exercises in Poland and Estonia. If this is too few to make a difference militarily, it’s more than enough politically for cold war lovers in the Pentagon, State Department, Congress and the media to build pressure for an ever greater military confrontation in the name of strategic containment.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria, we’ve seen this side of Obama far too often, refusing to close the door to the hawks while trying to seem reasonable by being only half pregnant.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

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