The Ukrainian elite have been obsessed with obtaining security guarantees from the West since the early 1990s. Over the years, as Kiev has increasingly sought conflict with Russia, it has also tried to hide behind the US-led bloc's back, hoping to one day join NATO and the European Union. 

This carry-on eventually led to the start of Russia’s military operation, almost two years ago. Its first stage ended with negotiations in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Under the agreements, Kiev was supposed to receive security guarantees as long as it complied with the terms. France, the UK, and the US were supposed to become the guarantors. 

It's not yet fully understood why the deal collapsed but, apparently, President Vladimir Zelensky had a problem with the security guarantees. He reportedly thought they meant that the West would fight against Russia directly. But Boris Johnson, who visited Kiev at that time, seemingly said that neither he nor anyone else would agree to such terms. However, it was possible to help Ukraine fight by providing weapons and money.

For the next year, the Ukrainians were full of bravado. Kiev considered the defeat of Russian troops a ‘done deal’ and stated that the West was interested in accepting the country into NATO in order to control its supposedly immense military power. They also claimed that Ukraine itself would decide whether or not to join the bloc because security guarantees provided by individual countries might have been a better option; and that Kiev would see what the West offered and dictate its own terms.

https://www.rt.com/news/590822-uk-ukraine-defense-agreement/

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by Seymour Hersh

From Hiroshima to the Houthis, American presidents tend to go too far when they believe they are confronting communism or terrorism, and the world is paying the (heavy) price.

I wondered how to put in context Joe Biden's recent decision, against a backdrop of unfavorable polls and disastrous engagements in Ukraine and Gaza, to plunge headlong into a naval war against determined Yemeni Houthis, and against the dhows, these sailboats present in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea for millennia, which supply them.

The matter is not simple. But modern U.S. history is riddled with presidents who made disastrous decisions when faced with what they view as challenges from Moscow. The Soviet Union was America's most important ally during World War II, but even before the war ended, the emerging superpowers entered into a deadly new rivalry. While the Cold War seemed to have ended thirty years ago, this rivalry was reignited and Russia, although no longer communist, came back to haunt the Biden administration. This rivalry shapes America's relations, friendly and hostile, with China, Ukraine, Israel and, today, the Houthis of Yemen. Here is an account of some of the bad decisions made by presidents driven by their political insecurities and those of their close advisers. One of the constants is the lack of reliable intelligence on their adversaries, as in the case of the Houthis who continue to fire missiles despite repeated attacks by the Americans.

Our new president, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in April 1945, was Harry S. Truman, the Missouri mercenary who was the third politician to serve as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president. John Nance Garner, who served as FDR's first vice president for eight years, described his role as "not even worth a bucket of warm piss."

When it came to foreign policy, Truman was at a loss, to say the least. He was easily manipulated by the hawks in his cabinet and the State Department1. They were eager to take on the Soviets and convinced Truman not just to demonstrate the power of the American nuclear bomb via an explosion somewhere in the South Pacific, as had originally been planned, but to drop two bombs on Japanese cities that had nothing to do with the war effort there, while deliberately portraying both cities to the media as centers of warmongering activity.

Truman continued to be complacent under pressure from hawks in the early postwar years, as America and its allies embarked on a global campaign to keep communism in check, particularly in Europe. and in Southeast Asia. It was for this purpose that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] was created in 1947, as the successor to the war-era Office of Strategic Services.

President Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II army general who came to power in 1953 as a Republican, gave the Dulles brothers, John Foster at the State Department and Allen at the CIA, authorization to supporting the French, with far more weapons and funds than publicly stated, in their losing war against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, among other fronts in the fight against communism. By the end of his two terms, however, Eisenhower was able to sound the alarm about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.

In his final months, Eisenhower nevertheless assented to a CIA plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first independent prime minister, by poisoning. The details of his involvement were officially known during the famous 1975 and 1976 Church Committee hearings on CIA covert operations - hearings triggered by a series of articles I had written for the New York Times on CIA activities. CIA domestic espionage during the Vietnam War. It was Eisenhower's involvement that led Republicans on the committee to threaten to make public what they had learned about similar CIA activities endorsed by President John F. Kennedy.

Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, was running for president and needed the help of Senator Ted Kennedy and his family to do so. He approved a negotiated statement in the final report of the Commission on CIA Assassination Attempts, which said only that no definitive assessment of the involvement of Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy in assassination activities could not be established. I had moved to New York before the auditions began, and although I continued to work for the Times, the paper's management, clearly concerned about my propensity to sow chaos, decided that I should no longer interfere. stories of domestic espionage and its fallout. (I was then beginning to realize that the mainstream media itself, when it comes to certain high-impact stories, is not worth a bucket of lukewarm piss).

In 1955, Eisenhower warmly supported the American decision – it is still unclear whether it was his or that of the two extremist Dulles brothers in his administration – Secretary of State John and CIA Director Allen – to install an anti-communist Catholic named Ngo Dinh Diem as president of predominantly Buddhist South Vietnam. Those who share my chronic aversion to the war that followed know the rest.

Jack Kennedy, America's first made-for-TV president, took office in 1961 and continued the anticommunist crusade in Europe, Southeast Asia, Cuba and elsewhere. The Kennedy years did not make the world a safer place, as we discovered and are still discovering. Stunned by his failure at the Bay of Pigs three months into his term, Kennedy was shocked to learn, during his first summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev two months later in Vienna, that the Russian knew a lot more than him on the world and communism. He would later tell James Reston, star columnist of the New York Times, that he would prove himself in South Vietnam. Reston did not reveal this conversation until much later, in his memoirs. Lyndon Johnson took office after JFK's assassination in 1963, convinced that his presidency would be measured by the scale of Jack's war in South Vietnam. The collateral damage, which resulted in the death of millions of people, is now well identified. A lesser known aspect of these few years is that Johnson, whenever a serious peace offer was made by America's enemies in Hanoi, refused to stop the intense and constant American bombing, both North and South. South Vietnam, on the grounds that this would be seen as a sign of weakness. Stunning madness.

President Richard Nixon continued the bombing of North Vietnam and initiated the bombing of Cambodia for another reason: he wanted to cover up his decision to begin withdrawing American combat units from the battlefields. He began this withdrawal in the summer of 1970. The bombings did not improve the morale of the South Vietnamese army, which knew that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese troops could not be defeated, especially with the withdrawal of American forces. But Nixon and Henry Kissinger can be credited with using force – and many Vietnamese deaths – to evacuate American troops from the war. Nixon also understood that he could cajole his skeptical allies - some call them realists - the leaders of Russia and China, by promising them trade deals and future arms control agreements, so that They stop supporting North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

As president, Gerald Ford was a genius non-entity who was perhaps better than a bucket of lukewarm piss. His openness and kindness were comforting, as was his ability to admit American defeat in South Vietnam. President Jimmy Carter's single term ended with a wink, although he successfully concealed the fact, well known to the American intelligence community, that Israel was testing its burgeoning nuclear weapons program with help from South Africans. The CIA provided very valuable intelligence – we had an extraordinary undercover agent in Johannesburg – but to no avail. Israel's deployed arsenal of nuclear weapons continues to be a question that will never be debated, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to lead his country's rampage against the Palestinians in Gaza and turn a blind eye on the escalation of constant violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians. (As the author of a first update on the Israeli arsenal in my book “The Samson Option(1991), I can't help but wonder if Bibi's relentless assault on the Palestinians is underpinned by his sense that Israel still has a nuclear ace up its sleeve.

Ronald Reagan first threatened, then offered to make peace with the Soviet Union. Despite its array of nuclear weapons, the USSR was then living its last days before the advent of glasnost and perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the chance to see the end of the Cold War begin was missed at this time. era. Reagan had his charms – a big Star Trek fan, he invariably called senior naval officers serving in the White House “Captain Kirk” – and he managed, even as an ardent defender of the Cold War, to bring down tensions and the temperature between Washington and Moscow, perhaps making Gorbachev's task easier in implementing his reforms. But he also endorsed a CIA-led anti-communist crusade in Central America.

His successor, President George HW Bush, was haunted by his major role in the Iran-Contra scandal – the secret smuggling of weapons to support anticommunist activity in Nicaragua. But Bush led the most compelling commitment in American foreign policy at the time, when American planes and troops routed Iraqi forces in the first Gulf War. He also supported some of Central America's worst elements, such as Panama's Manuel Noriega, who was allowed to continue his drug and arms trafficking and assassinate his political opponents, in exchange for supporting U.S. anti-communist operations, until 'until Bush saw fit to oust him in 1989.

The show of force of expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was not enough to save Bush from being defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton's years in office were marked by his decision, inspired by Strobe Talbott, Secretary of State. deputy state and old friend, to break a promise to Russia and expand NATO to the east. James Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, assured Moscow that such enlargements would not take place if the USSR accepted the unification of East and West Germany, which which it did, by allowing the new Germany to remain within NATO. The betrayal of this promise by his successors in the White House can be considered the trigger for the war that Ukraine is losing to Vladimir Putin's Russia.

George W. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was by far the most successful and powerful vice president in modern U.S. history, and the primary architect of Bush's wars. I spent years writing about Cheney's machinations, and won awards for my reporting, but my efforts did not deter Cheney from heavy-handed tactics or unconstitutional power grabs. I was stunned when John Kerry and John Edwards failed to defeat Bush and Cheney – then battling Iraq – in 2004. Kerry's decision to focus not on the horrors committed by Bush and Cheney, as the abuse committed by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison, but on his own past as a naval officer in Vietnam constituted a monumental error.

In his first term, Obama played it safe and allowed Hillary Clinton, his surprise pick as secretary of state, to wreak havoc in Libya. There she orchestrated a revolution that ended in the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan head of state. Since then, chaos has continued to reign there. Mr. Obama delivered a brilliant speech in Cairo on the crisis in the Arab world and raised hopes that his administration would confront Israeli intransigence and bring Israel and the Palestinians into serious peace talks. This does not happen. Obama failed to follow through on an earlier pledge to close the horrific US prison at Guantánamo, which has become the symbol of anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East. He disappointed many after his re-election in 2012, when he became a president like any other, using his power not to try to combat the problems abroad that gave rise to terrorism - particularly issues related to Israel – but increasingly resorting to military action, with his Tuesday sessions in which he and his national security team decided which enemies to target for killing that week.

Arguably, the foreign policy failures of Obama and Hillary Clinton while in office paved the way for Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.

Donald Trump's years in office are still quite recent and there is no need to dwell here on his policies, his escapades and the rhetoric that led Americans to elect Joe Biden in 2020. However, in many respects , regarding Russia and Israel, Donald Trump has continued the policies that his predecessors, Democrats and Republicans, have implemented since the end of World War II with the creation of Israel as a nation in 1948.

And here we are with a president who combines the worst characteristics of his post-war predecessors. As a senator, he was considered by some of his peers to be vain, lazy, and not exactly bright. After voting against the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991, Biden, as a senator, always favored a hawkish foreign policy. To everyone's surprise, Biden has ardently supported Israel in its current war against Hamas in Gaza, and shows no intention of suspending U.S. arms shipments to Israel or joining the many international leaders who are loudly insisting in public to that Israel cease its deadly attacks in Gaza and the increasing violence by Israeli settlers, supported by the Israeli army, against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Joe Biden's support for Ukraine and Israel in their struggles and his recent decision to attack the Houthis in Yemen have brought him into the club of the two leaders, Bibi Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky, the most reviled in most countries. country of the world. The irony of Biden's mandate is that, in addition to the West, Putin and Xi Jinping (China) are increasingly esteemed. American presidents, Obama included, have been seen this way before, even when their worst instincts cultivated by their fanatical advisors led them into unnecessary wars. But by attacking the Houthis today, Biden is showing obvious signs of political panic.

source: Seymour Hersh via Spirit of Free Speech

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