Mykola Volkivskyi and Artem Oliinyk write for The Baltic Times about what NATO membership means in post-Soviet times for Central and Eastern European countries and the Baltic states.
NATO is no longer a classic defense alliance: the Alliance now marks the border between the faults of civilization, and the dynamics of political processes in Europe directly depend on which side of this "fault" Ukraine remains. One should not deceive oneself: Ukraine's surrender to Russia's sphere of influence will doom the whole of Eastern Europe to hybrid attacks, and the Baltic states to annexation. Poland, which is a strong opponent of Russia and is ready to act decisively against all attempts by the Russians to undermine stability and security, will not be delayed.
In this regard, Putin's eloquent words about the "red lines" for the Russian Federation, marked by NATO enlargement to the east, are highlighted. The West views NATO as a supranational military-political institution with a set of stringent requirements and selection criteria for potential participants. The Alliance is open to democratic cooperation and provides a "window of opportunity" for the international community. No member country identifies NATO with hypothetical aggression, expansion, or human rights abuses, which, in contrast, cannot be said of the Kremlin's position. Vladimir Putin has originally held the Soviet view of the Alliance, postulating it as a strategic adversary created to destroy the Soviet Union and now trying to do the same with Russia. This is the official position of the Russian Federation. The personal image of Putin, whose career as a KGB intelligence officer was lost as a result of the peaceful civilian transition of East Germany and then Eastern Europe to a free world, leaves a picture of the world by those ancient standards. Propaganda and the imposition of a lost past on an uncertain future have created a fantasy in Russia that is crumbling before our eyes. The Alliance poses no military threat to Russia, even in the context of a hypothetical nuclear confrontation, as well as considerations of "depth of defense" and "how much a nuclear warhead can fly to Moscow." In the 21st century, when there are nuclear strike repulsion systems and hypersonic weapons that are much more mobile and versatile than nuclear, physical distance does not matter. Especially now that a direct military conflict between NATO and Russia is virtually impossible.
The truth is different: any post-Soviet country that has joined the Alliance is forever moving away from Russia, from its imposed values of the "Russian world" and the formation of a "common Slavic identity." Unwilling to accept the choice of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics, the Kremlin openly advocates withdrawing weapons to the Iron Curtain, which the Soviets called (specifically in Germany and later on) the anti-fascist defensive wall. The attempt to veto or prevent the accession of other post-Soviet countries (primarily Ukraine, and the Eastern Partnership trio) demonstrates a hidden but rational fear. Not the fear of being conquered or humiliated, on the contrary - the fear of not being selected, the fear of giving freedom - that's what rules Moscow.
I wish that I had read this op-ed two weeks ago when it was first published. I’ve struggled to articulate my irritation at the unquestioned expertise of foreign policy experts like former Ambassador Michael McFaul and Anne Applebaum and their insistence that “NATO expansion means nothing and has nothing to do with the situation in Ukraine;” a “situation” that has now descended into a full-blown invasion of Ukraine thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ambassador McFaul is correct, for example, that ultimately, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin “acquiesced” to NATO expansion in 1997 but in 1995, the summary report of Yeltsin’s and President Clinton’s one-on-one meeting in Moscow indicates that Yeltsin told Clinton that “I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed” and felt that if he acquiesced, that NATO expansion would “constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.”
That’s pretty strong language for one leader to say to another. That doesn’t validate any of the spin and fantasy and propaganda that Vladimir Putin is talking about. Far from it.
In response to Yeltsin, Clinton says something very similar to what the Baltic Times essay says:
The truth is that for the people in the Central European countries who most want to be in NATO, it's part of being accepted by the West. But they also have security concerns. That's where it gets complicated. They trust you, Boris. They know it would be inconsistent with your interests for them to be in NATO overnight. But they are not so sure what's going to happen in Russia if you're not around.
The NATO membership of Central and Eastern European countries as well as the Baltic states probably doesn’t mean all that much to the audiences that the McFauls and Applebaums of the world are writing for, by and large. But “NATO membership” and “democratic freedom” are conjoined for those countries that joined NATO in the post-Soviet era for security and symbolic reasons.
And I think that it’s important to note that.
Lorne Cook/AP:
The countries closest to the conflict — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland — have triggered rare consultations under Article 4 of NATO’s founding treaty, which can be launched when “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the (NATO) parties is threatened.”
“The most effective response to Russia’s aggression is unity,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted. “Russia’s widespread aggression is a threat to the entire world and to all NATO countries.”
Kallas called for measures “for ensuring the defense of NATO Allies.”
NATO began beefing up its defenses in northeastern Europe after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. It has around 5,000 troops and equipment stationed there, but those forces have been beefed up with troops and equipment from several countries in recent months.
Hayes Brown of MSNBC Daily reports that during Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya’s speech at an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting last night, he challenged The Russian Federation’s legitimacy in ascending to the Security Council seat previously held by the Soviet Union.
Gutsy move. I think China vetos that if it comes to a vote, for starters.
Wesleyan University history professor Victoria Smolkin writes for the Latvia-based independent Russian news outlet Meduza about Vladimir Putin’s “fantasy” history lesson about Ukraine.
In Putin’s narrative, the reason for the current crisis is Ukraine’s persistent ingratitude for — and, what’s worse, squandering of — Russia’s “gift.”
Listening to the speech, one might be forgiven for asking, alongside Putin: Why was it necessary to “give such generous gifts”? Why, indeed. That the Bolsheviks would give away Russian lands on the cheap could only be considered “some kind of madness”! One might also be forgiven for thinking that the Bolsheviks were in possession of “Russian” lands and that the lands were theirs to give. In fact, Putin’s history lesson is conspicuously vague on what happened between February 1917 (when the Russian tsar abdicated and, in effect, dissolved the Russian imperial autocracy), and 1922 (when the Soviet Union was constituted on the empire’s remains). In the speech, we don’t really learn what happened to the Russian empire: one moment it’s there; the next, the Bolsheviks are giving away Russian lands to Ukrainians.
However, it was not the Bolshevik revolution in October of 1917 that created the possibility of Ukraine as an independent nation-state, but the collapse of the Russian empire nine months earlier, in February of 1917, under the weight of long-standing contradictions that could not withstand the pressure of the First World War.
Moving on to domestic news and pundits, Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune notes that Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s remarks politicizing academia is nothing new for the state of Texas.
The lieutenant governor said he’s in favor of academic freedom, but he said it in the middle of a news conference where he proposed cutting off tenure for professors at state schools, and threatening the funding of public universities that teach critical race theory, a line of study that he says makes “oppressors” of white people and “victims” of people of color.
“Go to a private school, let them raise their own funds to teach, but we’re not going to fund them,” he said. “I’m not going to pay for that nonsense.”
Here’s a prompt for a class discussion: CRT isn’t what made white people the oppressors and people of color the victims in Texas and American history. Argue for or against.
Patrick doesn’t want the variety of academic freedom that allows people to teach things he himself doesn’t agree with. It’s an old story: populist yahoos screeching at people in the ivory towers.
It makes a lie of the rest of what Patrick is saying — academic freedom and all that folderol — but it makes for a good speech in the tradition of blowhards like “Pappy” Lee O’Daniel and Huey Long.
I am speechless about Texas Gov. Greg Abbot’s order that trans children should be snitched on.
Usha Lee McFarling of STATnews writes that systemic racism in medicine hasn’t gotten any better in the 20 years since a landmark report on the subject was published.
“Unequal Treatment” was the first major report to point to longstanding systemic racism — not poverty, lack of access to health care, or other social factors — as a major reason for the nation’s deeply entrenched health disparities. The authors, a blue-ribbon panel of the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, hoped their work would kickstart a national discussion and lead to much-needed change.
At the time, the report sent shock waves through medicine. David R. Williams, a committee member and health equity scholar then at the University of Michigan, called the findings “a wake-up call for every healthcare professional.” There were front page headlines, pointed editorials, and several congressional hearings. “For us as people of color, we are just not going to be sick and tired anymore,” Donna Marie Christensen, a physician and congresswoman representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, said at an April 2002 hearing held a few weeks after the report’s release to push the Department of Health and Human Services to do a better job.
But today, the disparities — poorer outcomes and higher death rates for nearly every medical condition the panel examined — and the structural racism underlying them, remain. That grim truth has been made startlingly clear by both the pandemic and by statistics that show Black Americans continue to die up to five years earlier than those who are white.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe writes about the defacing of a bust of the late Dr. Maya Angelou at the Copley Square Library in Boston (among other things).
The legendary poet, author, and activist died in 2014, years before this pandemic proved to be as lethal to common sense and basic decency as it continues to be for human lives. In recent weeks, there have been what the Boston Public Library Professional Staff Association describes as “multiple hateful incidents” involving unmasked anti-vaccine protesters who trespassed in children’s rooms and intimidated staff and visitors in at least two Boston libraries. During one of them, a bust of Angelou was vandalized at the Central branch in Copley Square.
“Someone had poured gasoline on the statue,” Maty Cropley, the library association’s president, told Boston 25 News. “These are really ugly incidents at the library.” [...]
This is the venom driving the well-financed outrage over critical race theory and LGBTQ issues. These are the same forces backing Florida’s “don’t say gay” and “discomfort” bills that are designed to diminish LGBTQ existence, bowdlerize American history, abolish discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and ban books.
Here in Massachusetts, we arrogantly cling to the false narrative that this state has outgrown the archaic attitudes prevalent in red states. What’s happening in Boston’s libraries speaks to white extremism that has never been bound by geography. In Waltham this month, someone removed every book with an LGBTQ reference in the title from a “Little Queer Library,” a small decorated structure that offers free books to the public. The little library, which sits outside the home of Katie Cohen and Krysta Petrie, is adorned with rainbow colors.
Finally today, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the leader of the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, writes for The New York Times about the Pentateuchal imperative of helping the stranger.
What happened to us at Beth Israel in Colleyville is only the most recent, dramatic event. Even before the Jan. 15 attack on my synagogue, many Jewish people were on edge. Antisemitic attacks have increased in recent years. Hatred has already led to harassment and even bloodshed in too many houses of worship. These problems have been with us for far too long.
At least part of the problem is because we, ourselves, are strangers. Jews are strangers. Muslims are strangers. People with a different religious tradition — or no religious tradition — are perceived as strangers. People of different ethnicities can be considered strangers. People who hold different political views are seen as strangers. We’re strangers because one can look from afar and make judgments without understanding another’s reality. We’re strangers because it takes too much work to be curious, to give others the benefit of the doubt. It is a lot easier and a lot more comfortable to stick with one’s group. “Love your neighbor” is hard enough.
And that’s why I, and so many other religious leaders, have pointed out again and again the sacred obligation to love the stranger. The command to care for the stranger is mentioned at least 36 times in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible — more than any other mitzvah. It’s mentioned so often because we need the reminder, because it isn’t natural. It is hard. Just getting past the notion of fearing the stranger is a big enough hurdle.
The imperative of helping the stranger, of providing strangers and any other guests hospitality isn’t only in The Torah, of course; similar passages can be found in the New Testament, ancient Greek mythology and ethics, and in most other ethical systems of antiquity, I believe.
Everyone have a great day!