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| US Secretary of War Ashton Carter |
We restarted the Cold War: The real story about the NATO buildup that the New York Times won’t tell you
Our leaders and media push time-worn nonsense about American innocence, while taking aggressive moves. Look out
By Patrick L. Smith
Salon
Have you picked up on the new trope du jour? We are all encouraged to
bask in our innocence as we lament the advent of a new Cold War. The
thought has been in the wind for more than a year, of course, at least
among some of us. But we witness a significant turn, and I hope this
same some of us are paying attention.
As
of this week, leaders who know nothing about leading, thinkers who do
not think and opinion-shaping poseurs such as Tom Friedman are confident
enough in their case to sally forth with it: The Cold War returns, the
Russians have restarted it and we must do the right thing—the right
thing being to bring NATO troops and materiel up to Russia’s borders,
pandering to the paranoia of the former Soviet satellites as if they
alone have access to some truth not available to the rest of us.
James
Stavridis, the former admiral and NATO commander, quoted in Wednesday’s
New York Times: “I don’t think we’re in the Cold War again—yet. I can
kind of see it from here.”
I can kind of see it, too, Admiral, and
cannot be surprised: NATO has missed the Cold War since the Wall came
down and the Pentagon’s creature in Europe commenced a quarter-century
of wandering in search of useful enemies. At last, the very best of them
is back.
The inimitable (thank goodness) Tom Friedman on the same
day’s opinion page: “This time it seems like the Cold War without the
fun—that is, without James Bond, Smersh, ‘Get Smart’ Agent 86’s shoe
phone,” and so on.
Leave it to Tom to recall the single most
consequentially corrosive period in American history by way of its
infantile frivolities. He is paid, after all, to make sure Americans
understand events cartoonishly rather than as historical phenomena with
chronology, causality and responsibility attaching to them.
You
have here a classic one-two. Stavridis’ successors in the military get
on with the business of aggressing abroad and trapping Russia in a
frame-up J. Edgar Hoover would admire, while Friedman buries us in
marshmallow fluff sandwiches.
A couple of columns back I wondered
aloud as to what all the talk of renewed Russian aggression, begun in
mid-April, was all about. It certainly had nothing to do with Russian
aggression for the simple reason there was none. If you saw any, please
tell us all about it in the comment box.
A couple of columns
earlier I questioned why John Kerry met Vladimir Putin and Sergei
Lavrov, his foreign minister, in Sochi. Altogether weirdly, the
secretary of state suddenly appeared to make common cause with the
Russian president.
My worst predictions are now realities. We have
just been subjected to a tried-and-sometimes-true campaign preparing us
for a Cold War reprise—begun, like the original, by spooks and Pentagon
planners ever eager to escalate unnecessary tensions in the direction
of unnecessary conflict.
Think with history, readers. We are now
back in the mid-1950s by my reckoning, when the template at work today
was perfected in places such as Guatemala. The Dulles brothers
double-handedly transformed Jacobo Árbenz, offspring of a Swiss druggist
and Guatemala’s second properly elected president, into an agent of
“Communist aggression,” as the Times helpfully described him at the
time. Árbenz was deposed in 1954, of course, and most Americans were
obediently relieved that another “threat” had been countered. (I have
always loved the purely American thought of an aggressive Guatemala.)
On
through the decades, from Ho to Lumumba to Allende to the
Sandinistas—every single case falsely cast as a Moscow-inspired
challenge to the “free world,” every case in truth reflecting America’s
ambition to global dominance. There is a golden rule at work here, so do
not miss it: Americans never act but in response to a threat to human
freedom originating among the mal-intended elsewhere.
Any good
historian—and stop being so negative, you find good ones here and
there—will tell you that the golden rule has applied without exception
since the 18th century. It applied to the Mexicans in the 1840s, the
Spanish in the 1890s, and countless times during the century we call
American.
Even now, the golden rule is inscribed in any American
history text you may pick up. It is integral to Americans’ consciousness
of themselves. And in consequence it is near to impossible for most of
us to grasp our role in events as they unfold before our eyes, never
mind our true place in history.
So long as the rule applies, all
notions of causality and responsibility are erased from the story. This
reality is very close to the root of the American crisis, if you accept
the thought that we are amid one.
I view the marked deterioration
of the West’s relations with Russia since April in precisely this
historically informed light. We have entered upon a new Cold War, all
right, and its similarity to the last one lies in one aspect more
important than any other: Washington instigated this one just as Truman
set the first in motion when he armed the Greek monarchy—fascist by his
own ambassador’s description—against a popular revolt in 1947.
You
would think it something close to a magician’s trickery to conduct a
century and more’s worth of coups, political subterfuge and military
interventions and keep Americans convinced that all done in their names
is done in the name of good. But we live through a case in point. We now
witness an aggressive military advance toward Russia’s borders on a
nearly astonishing scale, yet very few Americans are able to see it for
what it is.
Such is the power of our golden rule.
Read the rest of the article
here
~ Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.” He was
the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then
Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from
Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and
has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the
Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.
