MB Civic

US-PUTIN—Suddenly  facing  an avalanche of Cold War clichés  the two traditional superpowers, are squaring off for a fall debate about who’s to blame in the current drift to superpower confrontation.  Arnaud de Borchgrave.
COLD WAR REDUX
by Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI Editor at Large
Washington,  March 19 (UPI)–It was a sad and worrisome geopolitical spectacle.
The old cold war clichés were back in style, from doves to hawks, from appeasers to warmongers. The fact that Crimea was already a Russian satellite state that was annexed by Catherine the Great was conveniently overlooked by hawks who urged confrontation with Putin’s Russia over what they described as a crude land grab.
But it was a fait accompli, and Putin’s already high numbers rose dramatically in the polls. A mere glance at the map would indicate that Crimea couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else since it was already the home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
The geopolitical and ideological contest drew first blood as Vladimir Putin, in Russian imperial splendor in the Kremlin’s marbled hall illuminated by gigantic gold chandeliers,  told his top executives and parliamentary supporters – and worldwide TV audience — that Crimea had voted for mother Russia.
One Ukrainian soldier was killed inside a Crimean base. Russia announced these soldiers would either be repatriated to neighboring Ukraine or would be given the chance to continue serving – in the Russian army.
Following U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Puttin dripped smugness as he reminded a global audience – on BBC, VOA and hundreds of other radio and TV networks around the world – that Crimea had long been part of Russia.
Crimea was detached from the Russian republic in 1954 by then Soviet supremo Nikita Khrushchev after what roving columnist Eric Margolis described as “a drunken dinner and then  given as a grand (but then empty) gesture to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.” But it was purely symbolic as Ukraine was then an integral part of the Soviet Union.
The recent March 17 referendum on the reunification of Crimea with Russia showed 97 percent in favor, with 82 percent of those eligible casting ballots. For once, Russia did not have to fake the numbers.
Following World War II, the British and French empires gradually dissolved in a sea of newly independent states. Some fought rearguard actions – the French in Indochina for eight years followed six months later by the same French army in Algeria for eight more years – but Europe’s colonial powers emerged from the trauma considerably strengthened.
Indochina and Algeria were humiliating defeats for France, but France then had a much wiser leader, name of Charles de Gaulle, who went on to cast off the remaining threads and turn France’s ambitions to a far more profitable future – from civilian jet aviation (Caravelle and Concorde) to nuclear power for 85 percent of the country needs.
This is the kind of leader Russia needs today. But Russians are convinced that the end of the Cold War coupled with the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a humiliating defeat. They see the US as the dominant world power, free to fight thousands of miles from its borders in Afghanistan and Iraq in what strikes Putin & Co. as neo-imperialism.
So Putin clearly feels that now is a good time to do a little geopolitical muscle flexing and peacock strutting of his own.
America, he has apparently concluded, is going down to a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union suffered the same fate in 1989, which caused the citadel of communism to implode.
For western governments to react by imposing sanctions against Russia was a double-edged sword. Under the new age of perestroika, France was building an aircraft carrier and escort vessel for the Russian Navy. These were the first items on France’s not-to-do list.
The G8 group of advanced industrialized countries are in danger of cutting off their noses to spite their faces as they read Russia out of the club and became G7.  Nine out of ten Europeans have no idea what G nations do at their periodic summits.
China, astutely, did not vote against Russia in the UN Security Council. It didn’t vote for Russia either. It wisely abstained.
As an UnderSecretary of Defense when the Soviet Union collapsed, Fred Ikle pointed out the importance of not conveying to Russia the image of defeat as it emerged from the nightmare of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, said Ikle, Russia should be welcomed as a major, newly liberated power into the Atlantic alliance.
But Ikle was ignored and Russia became tantamount to the defeated successor to the Soviet Union.
Putin has endured two decades of humiliation at the hands of U.S. and EU governments. Both kept putting Russia down as a third rate power.
Liberal commentator Christopher Dickey correctly points out that “the bitterness in (Putin’s) narrative was palpable as he described more than two decades of humiliation at the hands of America and European governments that treated his country like a second or even third rate power.”
Putin asked he Western powers why Albanians in Kosovo could win their independence, but not Russians in Crimea. So far, no answer.
Canada-based roving columnist Eric Margolis reminded us that Crimea is “a place where a lot of Russian blood was shed, conquering it in the 18th century, trying to hold on to it against the Turks, French and British in the 19th century, and weathering a ferocious German siege in the 20th.
In Crimea “every place is sacred to us,” Putin told his rapturous parliamentary audience in the Kremlin.   Winning pride back seems to be Putin’s bottom line. Endit. (901).Co