RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/02/the-failure-of-bidens-friends-and-allies-strategy/

For two years, from the campaign trail through to the White House, all of Joe Biden’s foreign policy pronouncements have been punctuated with one phrase: the pledge to “work with friends and allies”. It’s a mantra that everyone associated with his administration has clearly been instructed to repeat, ad nauseum. Biden and his minions have pledged to “work with friends and allies” to solve the border crisis, to protect Taiwan, to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal, to contain the Taliban, to promote democracy, to prevent global warming—you name it, and you can Google it.

But not with Russia. In response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Biden administration updated its catchphrase to allies and partners. Boris Johnson apparently missed the memo, sticking with friends and allies. So did the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington, Oksana Markarova. So the friends are out, and the partners are in. Maybe that’s because the friends failed to deliver.

Biden claims to have imposed “profound sanctions” on Russia that “exceed anything that’s ever been done” before. These include a prohibition on Russia raising dollar-denominated debt, penalties on Russia’s leading banks, personal restrictions on the travel of influential Russians, and a re-suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Russia directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine (a Trump suspension that Biden lifted last May at the behest of erstwhile friend and ally Angela Merkel). Unspecified further sanctions await the cooperation of allies and partners.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18274/first-round-to-putin

Initially, aware that he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] must cast himself as victim in order to win sympathy in Western public opinion that warms up to figures like Saddam Hussein or George Floyd, he presented Russia as a victim of NATO “expansion” and his saber rattling as an act of self-defense.

Never mind that NATO is a defensive pact and not allowed to attack anyone unless one of its own members is first attacked. Even then, Article V under which military action is allowed is not automatically applicable and hasn’t been applied since the alliance was created. In contrast, led by the now defunct Soviet Union, the rival Warsaw Pact was used for military interventions in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia to crush popular uprisings against Russian domination.

[U]nder NATO rules, a country that has unsettled irredentist disputes with its neighbors cannot be admitted as a member. That rule applies to both Ukraine and Georgia, another country invaded by Putin, both of which are barred from NATO membership because of their territorial disputes caused by Russian aggression.

Thus, Putin was making a song and dance about something that couldn’t happen under NATO’s own rules.

[Putin] can no longer play wolf disguised as sheep. Even his apologists, not to say mercenaries among Western politicians and journalists, are able to defend his latest move let alone presenting him as a victim of “Imperialism”.

Putin would be wrong to think that with the passage of time the rest of the world will endorse his “conquest”, just as no one ever recognized the annexation of the Baltic republics by Stalin.

The spectacle of ancient Russian tanks and armored vehicles creeping into Donbass showed how antiquarian Putin’s arsenal is.

At first glance, the latest twists and turns in the Ukraine poker game might present Russian President Vladimir Putin as the winner.

After all, he is reaping what he sowed eight years ago, when he incited ethnic Russian secessionists to set up breakaway “people’s republics” in parts of Ukrainian territory, in Donetsk and Lugansk. By stationing troops in the two enclaves, Putin makes official an occupation that he had indirectly exercised through Wagner mercenaries and local militias. Imposing two “cooperation treaties” on the breakaway “republics,” he also shows their annexation in all but name by Russia.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/26/the_growing_threat_of_a_world_run_by_dictators_147250.html

Early Thursday, an authoritarian ruler deployed troops into an embattled democracy in clear defiance not only of that country’s sovereignty, but of condemnation and threats from the rest of the democratic world. The Putin regime’s incursion into Ukraine is just the latest symptom of a much larger pattern of antidemocratic aggression.

In 2021, for the 16th consecutive year, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report found that respect for political rights and civil liberties declined globally. Military coups proliferated, and authoritarian regimes staged utterly uncompetitive elections in Hong Kong, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, and elsewhere. An astonishing 8 out of 10 people in the world now live in countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free.

Fueling the spread of authoritarian practices has been a new kind of mutual aid society for dictators – less formalized than the Communist International (Comintern) of the Cold War era, but perhaps more effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global dominance of democratic states meant that all nations needed to move or – appear to move – toward democratic standards of governance in order to gain credibility, access international trade and financing, and receive development or military aid. Over the last decade and a half, however, wealthy and powerful authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and the Middle East have made it possible for an increasing number of despots to openly pursue antidemocratic systems, safe in the knowledge that any repercussions from the world’s democracies will be offset by assistance from their autocratic friends.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have long been propped up by other authoritarian regimes: Havana, Moscow, and Beijing in the former case and Tehran and Moscow in the latter. More recently the practice has benefited Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the leaders of military coups in Myanmar and Sudan.

When tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens turned out to protest the fraudulent presidential election of August 2020, Russia’s Vladimir Putin came to Lukashenka’s aid – not only with words of support, but also with a $1.5 billion loan. The Kremlin sent propagandists to “report” on the election when real journalists in Belarus went on strike, provided security forces to backstop the regime’s brutal crackdown, and dispatched election observers to validate the farcical results.