Russia, NATO, the Ukraine—and the Baltic States: John Batchelor Interviews Stephen F. Cohen

NATO continues to push for war in Europe against Russia especially in the Baltic States and defence budgets rise dramatically all across Europe. What is the motivation? Batchelor considers this a kind of escalation cycle, and given that troops are moving to the border regions with Russia and Russia is in turn increasing its troop presence to meet what it considers a building threat, Cohen is beginning to interpret this as going beyond the New Cold War stage into one that is more an active preparation for war. But the question arises, from where comes the threat of war? Is it from a hostile Russia, and from a hostile NATO? Or is this, as some have stated (including this writer), an artificial construct, a business model being pushed by Washington to support its own military industrial complex? Cohen has not discussed this area in the past and it is a welcomed offering in this podcast. Note that as an academic, Cohen does not like to speculate about that business model. But surely these NATO states have the national security institutions to be able to measure a threat level from Russia with considerable accuracy, and hence we should strongly suspect that these captured governments, these vassals of Washington, are being influenced to the common purpose of Washington’s foreign policy. After all the realities of a bellicose Washington has often been stated by retired foreign ministers (Germany) and retired top echelon Pentagon people that have even aired their anti Washington policy views on Russian television. But as dangerous as these preparations are we should be reminded that they are laughably small as of yet to initiate any kind of conventional war in a European theatre.
In the second half of the podcast the focus shifts to Ukraine where President Poroshenko has allegedly reached out to the other members of the Normandy Four, Merkel, Hollande and Putin with a request to renew efforts to resolve the Minsk2 Accords. There is much talk about where this effort is coming from, but Cohen speculates that Washington has concluded that 1) Kiev no longer has the military means to win the Donbass back and 2) that politically the Kiev government may be on the verge of failing to a coup from the extreme right – including neo-Nazi elements. We have been watching this develop for months and it remains to be seen whether Poroshenko’s ‘waving the white flag’ in Cohen’s words, will not precipitate the very coup that Washington and the EU fears. But Cohen links a Minsk2 settlement as a step back in the New Cold War, and he may be right unless one considers that a western Ukraine disintegrating into anarchy or sectioned into war lord dominated enclaves would not serve Washington’s colonization goals there.
The last segment is a fascinating discussion, some might say comparison, between Putin and Gorbachev. Given that the whole anti-Russian campaign has its source in Ukraine and the so-called annexation of Crimea back to Russia, the fact that Gorbachev, as an anti-war leader of his day (like Reagan), supports Putin in his actions over Crimea indicates that these geopolitical responses are not about leadership styles, but are about what all Russians would do in these circumstances. From my point of view there really was no choice but to return Crimea to Russia given the danger from Kiev to ethnic Russians, and the danger to a major Russian naval base present in Crimea. That Washington and the West did not recognize this amalgamation by legal plebiscite only confirms that the whole New Cold War is an artificial construct by Washington in its world where only the Empire of Chaos gets to make the rules.

This post was published at Audioboom