[spectre] a terrible day

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Dear Lanfranco,

I would like to come back briefly to your long argument, and make two 
points.

Am 02.03.22 um 19:42 schrieb Lanfranco Aceti:
> Like you, I very much like facts, but I think
> you might be too confident in the 'innocence of NATO' 

I didn't say, and I didn't mean to say that NATO is inncocent per se; I 
do however believe that Putin's government and the Russian military are 
responsible for the military attack on Ukraine, for the ongoing killing 
and destruction. In your message, you remind us of many historical 
facts, and it is not entirely clear from your argument whether you see 
those historical events as a way to explain, or to justify the Russian 
attacks. I presume that it is the former, i.e. that you want to offer a 
historical analysis. But you basically only write about faults of the US 
and NATO over the past 60 years, and not half as much about the current 
war. - The impression that your discourse thus creates is that you think 
the West, NATO, and consecutive US governments in particular somehow 
provoked and necessitated the Russian attack. - As a German pacifist and 
voter of the Green Party who is currently represented by Annalena 
Baerbock as the German minister of foreign affairs, I find your argument 
untenable (and to me it sounds revanchist, even though I find it hard to 
imagine that you intend that).

My second point concerns something that you appear to firmly believe and 
that you reiterate five or six times (see some further examples, below):

> and yes, unfortunately so, the world is divided into imperialistic 
> spheres of influence. 

I'm not a political scientist, but my feeling is that this is not 
necessarily a fact, but a trope that is used to explain the geopolitical 
situation. I think that it was definitely like that until the 1990s, 
large parts of the world divided between the spheres of influence of the 
US on one side, and the USSR  on the other. But I wonder whether this is 
still the case, whether (for example) the NATO of 1988 is still the same 
as the NATO of 2022 - with Poland, Hungary, Romania, and others as 
member states, and governments including Biden/Harris, 
Scholz/Baerbock/Habeck, Orban, Morawiecki/Duda, Sanchez, etc.

What if the hypothesis of the "spheres of influence" was incorrect? What 
if there is now a more diverse, less consistent, also more fluid 
geopolitical situation in which agency is not primarily determined by 
the acknowledgement of the efficacy of such "spheres of influence"? 
(Isn't this hypothesis one of the main points of Putin's justification 
of the war on Ukraine?)

Personally, I would prefer to start the conversation with the simple 
question, what is required so that everybody can live in peace and 
freedom? And rather than assume a trope like the "spheres of influence" 
as a given, I would only want to discuss how this war can be stopped, 
and how a situation in which future wars can be prevented.

Best regards,
-a


> NATO represents the arm of a sphere of influence in Europe to protect 
> American interests. Why has it not been dismantled after the Cold War?

> The sphere of influence of the United States expands to Central and 
> Latin American countries with over a century of policies that have 
> produced some of the worst dictatorships in the world. 

> It appears that for whatever reason, economic or strategic that it might 
> be, for President Biden and its administration was necessary to push for 
> a conflict with disregard for the consequences for the people of 
> Ukraine, for the Russians (may remind you all that the soldiers are 
> human beings as well), and for the security of all Europeans.
> 
> To look at this with naive eyes is dangerous for our own future. Ukraine 
> is a participant in this conflict with what I consider to be 
> unreasonable demands, backed by the United States that wants to keep on 
> reducing the sphere of influence of Russia to its own advantage. It has 
> failed with Georgia and it seemed destined to fail again.

> Having said all of this, and there is much more that I would like to 
> add, I have been obsessed by this question: why hasn't President 
> Zelensky pursued a policy similar to that of Finland, that is to achieve 
> a status of neutrality and demilitarization, perhaps even with the entry 
> in the EU, without joining NATO? To answer Andreas' statement earlier, 
> yes I do not believe that Ukraine had or has a right to join a military 
> alliance like NATO without expecting retaliation, when instead it had 
> every right to join in the EU as a neutral and demilitarized state, 
> freely negotiating to do so, without fear. Perhaps our role as European 
> is that of striking a balance between competing interests and not siding 
> with one part or the other. It is finding solutions or even imposing 
> them to both the United States and Russia that they might be unwilling 
> to consider.