united states

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It Is A Tragic Mistake

U. S. statesman doubtful about wisdom of NATO expansion

By Thomas L Frledman

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion, it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.

“I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War,” Kennan said from his Princeton home. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.

(NATO expansion) was simply a light- hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.” “What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Kennan, who was present at the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed “X,” defined America’s Cold War containment policy for 40 years.

“I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.” “And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was ambassador to Moscow in 1952.

“It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then (the NATO expanders) will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are but this is just wrong.” say. If we are lucky, they will say NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it.

They will say the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky, they will say, as Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new Cold War, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

But there is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U. S. foreign policy in the late1990s.

They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between1989 and 1992 – the collapse of the Soviet empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world.

Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms-control agreements with the United States. And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO Cold War alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders. Yes, tell your children, and your children’s children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you, too, were present at the creation of the post-Cold War order, when these foreign-policy Titans put their heads together and produced… a mouse. We are in the age of midgets.

The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age – one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage. As he said goodbye, Kennan added just one more thing: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

Thomas L. Friedman – is a columnist for the New York Times

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The Persecution of Francesca Albanese

The sanctioning by the Trump administration of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, is an ominous harbinger of the end of the rule of international law.

CHRIS HEDGES

United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese holds a press conference in Geneva on December 11, 2024. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)

When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written, one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and the adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, who today the Trump administration is sanctioning. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on human rights violations that Israel commits against Palestinians.

Albanese, who regularly receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” that allows the genocide to continue. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, called “Genocide as colonial erasure,” I have reprinted as an appendix in my latest book, “A Genocide Foretold.”

She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide in Gaza. She announced that if true, as has been reported, that the former British prime minister David Cameron threatened to defund and withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, which Cameron and the other former British prime minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense for, under the Rome Statue. The Rome Statue criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted.

She has called on top European Union (EU) officials to face charges of complicity of war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat which was intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies, but a message of humanity.

You can see the interview I did with Albanese here.

Her latest report lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.

You can read my article on Albanese’s most recent report here.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned her support for the ICC, four of whose judges have been sanctioned by the U.S. for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant last year. He criticized Albanese for her efforts to prosecute American or Israeli nationals who sustain the genocide, saying she is unfit for service as a special rapporteur. Rubio also accused Albanese of having “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.” The sanctions will most likely prevent Albanese from travelling to the U.S. and will freeze any assets she may have in the country.

The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.

“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass forced displacement and the mass homelessness, while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation — how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asked in an interview I did with her when we discussed her report, “Genocide as colonial erasure.”

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheidesque existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance, are as familiar to desperate migrants along the Mexican border, or attempting to enter Europe, as they are to Palestinians.

This is what awaits those who Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth.”

Those that defend the oppressed, such as Albanese, will be treated like the oppressed