Hillary Clinton and the Fear of War With Russia – Truthdig
By Joe Lauria
The cover of How I Lost by Hillary Clinton. (OR Books)
Editors note: The following is an excerpt from How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, introduced and annotated by Joe Lauria and reprinted by arrangement with OR Books. The book draws on the WikiLeaks releases of Clintons talks at Goldman Sachs and the emails of her campaign chief, John Podesta, as well as key passages from her public speeches. How I Lost by Hillary Clinton also includes extensive commentary by Lauria and a foreword by Julian Assange, editor in chief of WikiLeaks.
From remarks to Goldman Sachs in Bluffton, South Carolina, June 4th, 2013.
CLINTON: I would love it if we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia. I worked very hard on that when I was Secretary, and we made some progress with Medvedev, who was president in name but was obviously beholden to Putin, but Putin kind of let him go and we helped them get into the WTO for several years, and they were helpful to us in shipping equipment, even lethal equipment, in and out of out of Afghanistan.
So we were making progress, and I think Putin has a different view. Certainly hes asserted himself in a way now that is going to take some management on our side, but obviously we would very much like to have a positive relationship with Russia and we would like to see Putin be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States so that we could work together on some issues.
Weve tried very hard to work with Putin on shared issues like missile defense. They have rejected that out of hand. So I think its what diplomacy is about. You just keep going back and keep trying.
Hillary Clinton made these remarks before the eruption of the crisis in Ukraine the following year, which plunged U.S.-Russia relations into what seemed like a new Cold War, and three years before the neo-McCarthyite reaction to Russias supposed interference in the 2016 election. But she made them after her aggressive stance against Syria while secretary of state. On the 2016 campaign trail she railed against Russias involvement in Syria, raising fears that a Clinton presidency could lead to conflict with the second largest nuclear-armed nation.
Some background on recent U.S.-Russia relations seems to be in order. The events in Ukraine took place after Clinton left the State Department. As detailed in the Introduction, the U.S. helped engineer the violent coup of February 2014 that overthrew democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych, prompting a Russian response. It was up to Clintons successor, John Kerry, to make the inflated and hypocritical accusation that Russia invaded Ukraine. You just dont in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext, Kerry said after he had voted in the Senate for Americas actual full-scale ground invasion of Iraq just eleven years earlier. The U.S. has never provided convincing evidence of such a Russian invasion. In fact, German intelligence, unmasked as dangerous propaganda fabrications by Gen. Philip Breedlove, then head of the U.S. European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, who told reporters on February 25th, 2015 that Russia had well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery inside eastern Ukraine.
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didnt understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasnt the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germanys foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATOs Supreme Allied Commander Europe, wrote the German magazine Der Spiegel. False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATOand by extension, the entire Westin danger of losing its credibility. Breedlove then told the Frankfurter Allgemeine news- paper in November 2014 that there were regular Russian army units in eastern Ukraine. But just a day later he admitted to the German newsmagazine Stern that they were mostly trainers and advisors.
In March 2015, U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges identified a direct Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Senior officials in Berlin immediately asked the BND for an assessment, but the intelligence agencys satellite images showed just a few armored vehicles. ... One intelligence agent says it remains a riddle until today how [Hodges] reached his conclusions.
From the start of the Ukraine crisis Breedlove said Russia had assembled 40,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and warned of an imminent invasion. But intelligence officials from NATO member states had already excluded the possibility of a Russian invasion, wrote Der Spiegel. There were perhaps even fewer than 20,000 troops on the border and they had already been there prior to the beginning of the conflict.
None of this deterred Clinton. As a presidential candidate, she picked up the Russia as aggressor theme in Ukraine, even alleging that Moscow was an aggressor in Syria, though it was invited in by an internationally recognized government to help defend against a largely foreign-backed rebellion. After the U.S. won the first Cold War back in the early 1990s, Bill Clintons administration, with Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs in the lead, teamed up with Russian oligarchs to plunder the once state-owned economy.
The U.S. was in a unique position in history to bring progress to the world. Instead it pursued a furtherance of its rulers wealth and power at the expense of millions of people at home and abroad. Hillary Clinton today is at the center of this deception of pretending to deliver democracy and social progress to the majority, while doing the opposite.
Still further back, when the Second World War ended, there was fear that the U.S. would return to the Great Depression. But rather than making massive government investment in civilian industries, it was defense spending that saved the economy and became the basis of growth throughout a Cold War in which the Russian threat was hyped to keep American Cold Warriors in power, armaments factories humming and profits pouring in. This came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, there was considerable money to be made by Western corporations and banks in the wide-open economy of a defeated Russia. None other than Goldman Sachs was hired by the Russian government to take the lead in bringing foreign investment into the country. The deal was signed for Goldman by Robert Rubin, a year before he became Bill Clintons treasury secretary.
A compliant Boris Yeltsin, whose re-election, ironically, was in no small part due to the interference in Russian domestic politics by American election advisers, opened the doors to carpetbagging American banks and businesses.
Returning to a peacetime economy during the Clinton administration for the first time since 1940 would have meant dismantling the military-industrial relationship that Dwight Eisenhower warned about. But instead, with the Pentagon and NATO struggling for meaning in the immediate post-Cold War era, a new enemy was found, first in Islamist extremism and then in Serbia during the Kosovo crisis.
Meanwhile the newly elected Vladimir Putin began to reassert Russian sovereignty. He forbid oligarchs from entering pol- itics and threw some in jail. Under President Dmitry Medvedev relations with the U.S. improved. It was just after this period that Clinton made the remarks above, in which she says shed love better relations with Russia. The Goldman audience knew what she meant: allowing Wall Street to continue its major access to the Russian economy. But Putin was back and, as Clinton put it, hes asserted himself in a way now that is going to take some management on our side. She still wanted better relations with Moscow but Putin has to be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States. By this time, Putin had raised Russians living standards, restored their pride and was riding huge favorability ratings.
The U.S. hides its intense interest in Russian markets and vast natural resources behind allegations of human rights abuses by Putin, for instance that he murders journalists and political opponents, allegations that may be true but are extremely difficult to prove. Russia has pro-Western liberal opposition politicians and several opposition newspapers that regularly and openly criticize Putin. Russia is not a model democracyfew countries arebut it has more freedom than many U.S. allies.
About a year before she made these remarks to Goldman Sachs, relations with Putin had soured when, in 2011, he blamed Clinton by name for stirring up anti-government protests in Russia. Clinton doesnt mention this in her remarks. Rather, she accuses Putin of not cooperating on a missile defense system the U.S. later installed in Romania. The U.S. claimed the missiles were for defensive purposes against Iran but they could also be used offensively and Russia saw them as a threat. Putin next moved to eject American NGOs from the country, fearing they could stir up revolt to replace him with a Yeltsin-like figure. Relations plunged after U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Ukraines democratically elected president in February 2014, detailed in the Introduction. Clinton became a vocal critic of Russia, calling Putin Hitler after he acted defensively in Crimea.
Indeed, the Ukraine crisis appeared to be a neoconservative-inspired plan to provoke Putin. With the Western press full of stories about Russian aggression, NATO staged significant war games in 2016 with 31,000 troops on Russias Western frontier. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retraced the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
What we shouldnt do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering, the then German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Bild am Sontag newspaper. Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliances eastern border will bring security is mistaken. Instead Steinmeier called for dialogue with Moscow. We are well advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation, he said, saying it would be fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.
A day after Steinmeiers remarks, General Petr Pavel, chairman of NATOs military committee, dropped another bombshell. Pavel told a Brussels press conference that Russia was not a threat to the West. It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing, he said.
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Hillary Clinton and the Fear of War With Russia - Truthdig