The White House

FROM: W. George Krasnow

DATE: November 7, 2016

RE: Your letter of October 21, 2016

Dear Mr. President:

Thanks for responding to the concerns with the growing tensions in US-Russia relations that I expressed in a short email letter allowed to US citizens by the White House. Both my letter and your response are in English and Russian on the site of Russia & America Goodwill Association of which I am the founder and president.

Frankly, I am very disappointed by your response. I gave you a chance to defend your Nobel Peace Prize as justly deserved. I also gave you the opportunity to lay the foundation for peace policy for your successor. Instead, you chose to attack Russia and her president Vladimir Putin as if I were their apologist.

You are my president, and you owe me an explanation. The intent of my letter was not to argue about Russia, Putin or Bashar Assad. I am sure they can defend themselves. My hope was that you would engage them diplomatically, via a peaceful dialogue, to avoid any chance that the current shooting hostilities, be it in Syria, Iraq or Ukraine, do not degenerate into an armed confrontation with Russia and thus put the world at risk of nuclear conflagration.

Your letter lacks the introspection, self-analysis and humility that are necessary for a sound foreign policy. After all, we live in a world in which the United Nations and its Security Council still have a role to play, a role that you and your Republican predecessor try to usurp on behalf of the USA.

Let me remind you that The Charter of the United Nations proclaims that in pursuit of peace THIS Organization is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” In my letter, I reminded you about Edmund Burke’s profound philosophical underpinnings for the concept of sovereignty of different forms of government, including those we may disapprove of on ethical grounds. I hoped you would return to the time-honored concept of Westphalian sovereignty that ended the bloody period of religious wars in Europe in 1648. Instead, you assert the policy of world domination in which the United States decides which government is allowed to exist and which is not. Thus, the US finds itself in a wasp nest from which we are unable to extricate ourselves.

I believe you are fundamentally a decent man who wanted to steer the US on the road to peace and justice, domestically and overseas. Not only did I vote for you, but I also published an article, “Obama’s Perestroika Challenge: US & Russia”, to encourage you to do what you promised.[1] Even though “The New York Times” described your election in 2008 as “a catharsis and return to the American dream that was destroyed - politically, economically and socially - under Bush,” I pointed out that at the very start you made the wrong appointments that “bear little signs of new thinking. They… lack a vision of the evolving global community and the role the United States and the West should play in it.”

The bad omen was the scandal with Hillary Clinton, your Secretary of State, when she presented her Russian counterpart with a gift-wrapped red button, which said “Reset” in English and “Peregruzka” in Russian. Alas, the latter means overcharge, or overload. The incorrect translation implied hostility, not peacemaking.[2] While Clinton’s Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov kept his diplomatic cool, she quipped: “We won’t let you do that to us, I promise.” She kept her promise, and US policy toward Russia has been indeed overcharged.

As a former USDS contract interpreter, I am pained to know that US top leaders do not take relations with Russia seriously, even on a linguistic level. Since the early 1990s we have ignored the voices of such wise, experienced and diverse politicians such as George Kennan, who devised the successful containment strategy but berated the expansion of NATO; Jack Matlock, former ambassador to Moscow, who warned against US meddling in Ukraine, Chas Freeman who likes Putin’s approach to the Middle East[3], Steve Cohen, a long-time champion of better relations with Russia, and Henry Kissinger of the realist school of diplomacy.

I suspect that as soon as you entered the White House, you were surrounded by a group of ideologues espousing the so-called neo-conservative ideology with which they had already infiltrated US intellectual establishment, academia, the Big Media, all branches of government, both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, they are neither “conservative”, nor “neo”, for their main inspiration is Leon Trotsky, the proponent of permanent revolution. Jonas Alexis of the dissident Veterans Today sees the Neo-Cons (that should be the proper name) as “the reincarnation to some extent of both Leninism and Bolshevism”. Mr. Alexis does not spell out to what extent. However, Francis Fukuyama, a former Neo-Con, remembers that the leading Neo-Con Irving Kristol boasted he was “a member in good standing of the [Trotskyist] Young People’s Socialist League (Fourth International).”[4]

Be that as it may, the Neo-Cons are not a mere replay of history. They do not proclaim, “Proletarians of the World unite!” On the contrary, they favor the neoliberal economics and globalization under the hegemony of the United States. The slogan that suits them best is “Oligarchs of the World unite!” Truly, the USA has replaced the USSR as the chief protagonist of a global ideology, albeit it is no longer class struggle and proletarian revolution for global socialism but rather a series of color revolutions aimed at establishing world capitalism. That is why the reset policy you promised failed to take off.[5] That is why you became the champion of the endless wars.

Sometimes, one remembers the Old Cold War with nostalgia, for there was then more professionalism among US diplomats. I was fortunate to review a remarkable book “Stepping out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-2012”. It is by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, my colleague and RAGA author who helped resuscitate the American Committee for East-West Accord. If then, says Doctorow, the West was guided by George Kennan’s containment strategy, now “the legacy of Realpolitik has been… marginalized by the resurgent forces of Neoconservatism in Washington”. As a former Soviet dissident, I admit it was heart-warming to read a book devoted to the American dissidents now dissenting from the Washington Pravda line.

If you go online, you will find a multitude of American dissidents opposed to the monopoly of Big Media, and the number is growing. Do I have to explain to you, Mr. President, who the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) are? This is what they wrote to you on October 2, 2016:

We write to alert you, as we did President George W. Bush, six weeks before the attack on Iraq that the consequences of limiting your circle of advisers to a small, relatively inexperienced coterie with a dubious record for wisdom can prove disastrous. Our concern this time regards Syria... The door to further negotiations remains ajar. In recent days, officials of the Russian foreign and defense ministries, as well as President Putin’s spokesman, have carefully avoided shutting that door, and we find it a good sign that Secretary Kerry has been on the phone with Foreign Minister Lavrov. And the Russians have emphasized Moscow’s continued willingness to honor previous agreements on Syria.[6]

One of the fifteen signees of the memorandum is Ray McGovern, a former CIA career officer who used to brief President Reagan on Soviet affairs.  I first learned about him when he was severely beaten by the security detail for wearing on his back a protest sign during Hillary Clinton’s speech at the GWU. Veterans for Peace, an organization to which I belong, demanded an apology. Doubting that the media would report the brutal manhandling, I posted the news on Veterans Today.[7]

Another signee was Col. (Ret.) Ann Wright, one of RAGA’s authors, whom I heard speaking at a peace rally in Washington. I was proud to place the VIPS memorandum next to my email letter to you inside RAGA Newsletter Antidote 30.

I have been issuing these ANTIDOTES since your government opted for reckless meddling in the internal conflict in Ukraine in February 2014. If the old Realpolitik school diplomats never called for a war against the USSR nor tried to provoke it by stepping into Soviet sphere of influence, Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State made herself famous when she dismissed the EU role in Ukraine, kicked Yats (Yatsenyuk) upstairs, and put Klitch (Klitchko) in his place, all in unprintable language.[8] While accusing Russia of meddling she boasted that the US spent $5 billion to foment anti-Russian hatred in Ukraine.

I believe your world vision lacks introspection and is devoid of curiosity about how the USA might be seen from outside. After the end of the Cold War against the Soviet bloc in late 1990s, millions of people around the world were hoping for the “peace dividend” that would benefit economic development and social services of all countries concerned.  Instead, the US retained NATO and embarked on its expansion. As I already addressed this issue, please read my article The Folly of the New Cold War.[9]

On October 25, 2016, I received a letter from a fellow graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. I have not seen him since 1973 when I defended my PhD dissertation there. “I think you have hit a great many nails squarely on the head”, he writes about my article. “It’s so very, very hard to find writing these days that makes any attempt to look at Russian policies from other than a crudely Russophobic point of view, depicting the country as some sort of beast or sinister eminence afoot in the world”. A specialist on ancient China, my friend was ready to swallow all that tripe. “These last several months I’ve found myself writing frequently to the editors of the Guardian Weekly (which I subscribe to) scolding them for a steady raft of editorials and commentaries that seem to me very much in this vein. No attempt to present a multi-sided analysis of circumstances involving Russia”.

Another RAGA reader’s comment was brief but to the point: “America’s biggest threat is neither China nor Russia, but rather an ignorant, gullible populace. There is a remedy to this: learn to think independently regardless of the cost”.

I am sure, Mr. President, you too have to deal with the avalanche of information, which needs to be checked for veracity. Alas, you get only the opinions tainted by Neo-Con ideologues. This applies to all information you receive on Russia, Syria, and Ukraine. As Ambassador Jack Matlock wrote about Ukraine, the first and most important spin put on the situation was to portray it “as a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, not among culturally, ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse people in Ukraine”.[10] He is convinced that “Ukraine cannot normally exist in isolation from Russia” and that sending western weapons there “would be madness” that “would hurt primarily Ukrainians.”

You are surely familiar with Ambassador Chas Freeman’s outstanding career and varied expertise. It was your Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Admiral Dennis C. Blair, who named Freeman as chair of the National Intelligence Council, which compiles intelligence from sixteen U.S. agencies into National Intelligence Estimates. It was very unfortunate that the pro-Israeli lobby blocked Freeman’s appointment. As you may have noticed, any person critical of Zionism and Israel is automatically smeared “anti-Semitic.” This practice not only puts in jeopardy academic freedom but it also obscures our vision of the Middle East and the world at large. It may have started with the campaign of vilification against Professors John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt, the authors of “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” but such accusations are even more ominous when made against Freeman who is a Jew.

Freeman’s recent talk “U.S. Policy and the Geopolitical Dynamics of the Middle East”[11] contains a number of suggestions, which cannot be ignored in any formulation of a sound US policy in the Middle East.

Freeman explains the key reason for the failure of US policy in the Middle East: “Wars don’t end until the militarily humiliated accept the political consequences of their defeat.  Saddam gave lip service to UNSCR 687 but took it no more seriously than Netanyahu and his predecessors have taken the various Security Council resolutions that direct Israel to permit Palestinians to return to the homes from which it drove them or to withdraw from the Palestinian lands it has seized and settled.  Like Israel’s wars with the Arabs, America’s war with Iraq went into remission but never ended.  In due course, it resumed”. Freeman’s advice is just as sound: “The United States needs to get into the habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies.”

The most scathing criticism Freeman aimed at the Israeli policy which the US is not only unwilling to challenge but tries to placate and emulate. “Israel’s lack of concern about the consequences of its occupation and settlement of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza has facilitated its progressive abandonment of the universalist Jewish values that inspired Zionism and its consequent separation from the Jewish communities outside its elastic borders.  U.S. subsidies underwrite blatant tyranny by Jewish settlers over the Muslim and Christian Arabs they have dispossessed.  This is a formula for the moral and political self-delegitimization of the State of Israel, not its long-term survival.  It is also a recipe for the ultimate loss by Israel of irreplaceable American political, military, and other support”. Concludes Freeman: “The United States needs to wean Israel off its welfare dependency and end the unconditional commitments that enable self-destructive behavior on the part of the Jewish state”.

And yet, Mr. President, you found it expedient to reward Israel with the gift of $38 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment for the duration of the ten long years of one, two, perhaps, three presidents whom you deprived of diplomatic freedom.

You seems to be oblivious that it was not Netanyahu, but Putin who got you off the hook[12] when US hawks were about to push you into a bombing attack on Syria for the alleged use of chemical weapons. As to your principal peace-making achievement, the Iranian nuclear non-proliferation deal, it was again done with Russia’s assistance while your friend Netanyahu did everything to abort the agreement even by meddling in US domestic affairs.

Remarkably, the man who should have been compiling national intelligence estimates, Ambassador Freeman, finds Russia’s policy in the Middle East sounder than either American or Israeli. According to him, “Moscow sought to reduce the complexities of Syria to a binary choice between life under the secular dictatorship of the Assad regime and rule by Islamist fanatics… Russia succeeded in forcing the United States into a diplomatically credible peace process in which regime removal is no longer a given and Russia and Iran are recognized as essential participants… The campaign reduced and partially contained the growing Islamist threat to Russian domestic tranquility, while affirming Russia’s importance as a partner in combating terrorism”.

Your failure to live up to the promises you’ve made is highlighted by May 15, 2016, report: “Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln”, or any or any other American president.[13]

It is not a good record, for any president, much less, for the one awarded the Nobel Peace Prize largely on credit, not for actual accomplishments. Forget about score keeping among presidents. We are talking about thousands of American soldiers killed, tens of thousands maimed, wounded, disabled, committing suicides, their families shattered. The count of “enemy” combatants and collateral civilian deaths is even more devastating for the people of the Middle East. The Europeans are forced into accepting millions of displaced persons, including terrorists. Because of US meddling, the Middle East is being de-Christianized, de-secularized, and split into multitude of fanatical sects in search of a foothold while infrastructure for development has crumbled.

US meddling in Ukraine has been no more successful, bringing no benefits for the Ukrainians, nor improving US strategic posture in Europe.

It all started with US meddling in Russia in the early 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin. Until then the USA and Americans were very popular in post-Soviet Russia. I know this because I was visiting then Russia numerous times. However, the heavy-handed US meddling on the side of “pro-Western” neoliberal Russian reformers left a very bitter taste in the mouth of millions of Russians. When the US government tried to blackmail Russia by pressing the IMF to deny her loans, I protested. In March 1999, in the name of RAGA, I mailed an Open Letter on the Russian Crisis to President Bill Clinton demanding to stop meddling in Russian affairs. More than a hundred American experts on Russia signed the letter.[14]

In a cover letter to President Bill Clinton I wrote that “The very survival of Russia as a distinct civilization and a major contributor to the cultural ‘biodiversity’ of the planet is at stake. Anyone who has studied Russian history knows that Russians will survive. And they will remember how they were treated by the West”.[15] Clinton replied in a diplomatically evasive way, but asked me to stay engaged. I have. 

(To be concluded...)