Cacophony and heavy metal not the stuff of reflective resolution

With Putin's puppets in the Kremlin moving to approve the secession of the Crimea from Ukraine and its adoption by Russia, a move the west says is illegitimate, and Putin himself rebuffing Obama's call for negotiations including officials from Kiev, and publicly threatening reciprocal sanctions on the U.S. while changing the terms of the gas sale to Ukraine by removing the discount offered to Yanukovich, and the dialogue of the "deaf" continuing between Kerry and Lavrov, it is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, this morning, who calls for Ukraine not to become an outpost for either the west or Russia, but rather a bridge between the west and Russia.
The ninety-year-old academic-turned diplomat-turned-international consultant still merits serious listening, in the old "E.F. Hutton" mode (people listen when Hutton speaks). However, seeing the 'big picture' is unlikely by many, including both Obama and Putin, at this time, in the midst of a flurry of mixed reports, rumours, innuendo and threats, that amount to a kind of rock-concert cacophony in which no one really hears the words of any single song, but rather pulsates to the monster "beat", almost hypnotically, (and the beat here is one of a counterpoint of statements and counter-statements from Washington and Moscow, interrupted occasionally by a few milder riffs from Berlin and London, and the occasional trill from New York's United Nations.
There is a kind of unfolding, moveable theatre being staged by the chief diplomats, purportedly for the benefit of their respective theatre audiences back home, that seems to evoke echoes of the dysfunctional dialogue between the history professor and his college-president's daughter wife in Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, in which both protagonists were quickly becoming inebriated. Much anger, accusation, counter-accusation, charges of hypocrisy by both sides, without any sign that either side would prefer a resolution to the actual furor of verbal jousting.
It is drama that portrays a kind of hollow emptiness, both to the words and to the prospects for anything substantial to emerge, especially given all the old wounds and scars and pre-rehearsed rhetoric of combat, in which all sides are steeped, and perhaps even mired.
The core learning from the tobacco industry's fight to survive, given the compelling arguments against their products from science, we now learn, was "doubt"....sow doubt and the chaos that results will preserve our position to sell cigarettes.
Both Obama and Putin seem to have lifted a page from the legal manual of those tobacco companies, and thrown their "hypocrisy" and "doubt" rhetoric at each other; of course the respective media agents on both sides run with the latest salvo, and the more thoughtful and more insightful and the more reflective and less combative words of people like Kissinger get lost in the fray.
We have already crossed the proverbial threshold of war, in which the first casualty is "truth"....and who knows where this drama will finds its denoument, or its peaceful resolution...and when.
However, what we do know is that heavy metal rhythm and cacophonous arguments are not the stuff of calm, reflective and serious "getting-to-yes" processes. In fact, they are our guarantee that getting-to-yes is not the goal of either side. Kissinger's bridge seems only a mirage on a foggy oil painting hanging over the Maidan, noticed by no one walking by. Perhaps one day, it will hang in the very room where Kerry and Lavrov or perhaps Obama and Putin put this mess to a resolution, without firing a shot.

Putin: be careful what you wish for....

Earlier in this space, I compared the Russian 'incursion' into Crimea with Kruschev's installation of missiles in Cuba, from which position, through some high-level diplomatic manoeuvres with the Kennedy White House, Russia backed down. Kennedy in the west, is seen as successful in providing an honourable escape from the crisis for Kruschev, and agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, as part of the settlement. In that argument, I was nudging Obama to claim his "kennedy spine" by showing strength through diplomacy.
There are others today who consider the Russian 'incursion' (notice the avoidance of the word invasion in almost all reports, perhaps as a gesture to help in the de-escalation process itself, perhaps in recognition of the fact that so far, no shots have been fired) more analogous to Hitler's invasion of Austria, given the similarity of his words "to protect the German citizens living there" to Putin's words, "to protect Russian citizens living in Crimea". The argument is not, apparently, that Putin is behaving like, or should be expected to behave, as Hitler did, and begin the process of an all-out European conflict.
However, there are scholars whose view is that should Russia swallow Ukraine, then the EU is finished. In his nuanced and insightful piece on CNN, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, currently living in Vienna, expresses this thesis, and in his piece he references a Russian historian, Andrei Zubov, who because of his expressed views on the similarity of Putin's and Hitler's actions in Crimea and Austria respectively, has been fired from his post. It is the courage and the insight demonstrated by Zubov that especially demand our respect and our notice.
Here is a brief quote from the Snyder piece on the CNN website:
The Russian historian Andrei Zubov, for example, has published a sophisticated comparison between Putin's seizure of Crimea and Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria, seeing both as the beginning of a chain of events with fatal consequences not just for the subjects of the aggression but for the aggressors themselves. (From Timothy Snyder, If Russia swallows Ukraine, the European system is finished, special to CNN, March 5, 2014)
The world, and especially Putin's Kremlin, would do well to reflect on the ousted historian's premise of the potentially dangerous and explicitly ironic potential of the downside to the aggressor in both today's events and those in Austria in 1938-9.
If Putin is indeed attempting to shake the roots of the European Union, especially what he considers its values, and especially those values that he considers corrupt, including the human rights of the gay and lesbian population, and he persists in what could become an attempt to swallow Ukraine, he might one day wish he had not even considered his ambition to re-establish the glory that was once Russia. Even a peaceful 'incursion' that prefers "talk" to "war" could land Russia and the whole of Europe in a predicament that even the ambitious and cunning and czar-like Putin would regret. And firing the historian that expresses that view is a certain sign that someone somewhere inside Russia does not like Zubov's pungent pen and ink, and his incisive mind.

To what degree is the Ukraine conflict about access to oil and natural gas reserves under the Black Sea?

Pardon me for being more than a little sceptical about the theatre that is being played out over which direction Ukraine takes, toward Europe and the west, or more toward Russia. While the high-sounding idealistic phrases burping from the mouths of Putin and Kerry et al, about protection of human rights, democracy, the rule of law and the escape from a corrupt cleptocracy probably have some relevance to the fast-moving story, there is another spectre that has begun to raise its head from under the Black Sea.
And that is the spectre of billions of dollars of oil and gas that are allegedly resting, undisturbed deep under the water, like gold nuggets in the economy of whichever "developer(s)" get there first, with the deepest pockets for exploration and development.
The Russians already control a considerable portion of the European market for energy, by some estimates providing up to 40% of Germany's total energy needs. There is a natural gas pipeline running through the middle of Ukraine carrying Russian natural gas, and we all know that the world continues, and will continue for at least the foreseeable future, to need billions of gallons or cubic feet of oil and natural gas respectively. We already have too many "petro-dependent" economies, reducing their dependence on manufacturing while stoking their reserves and balancing their budgets on the profits from the sale of fossil fuels. And in some, including both Russia and Ukraine especially under Yanukovich, oligarchs have grown rich through their corrupt seizure of the levers of influence and thereby gaining access to those petro-profits.
It would seem to this outsider that the world needs to prevent a repeat of this kind of economic and fiscal "rape" of the natural resources by and for the few members of the inner circle, and find ways to distribute the profits in a more equitable, and yes idealistic, manner. so that all the people will have access to good education and health care for their children, jobs and decent incomes for the parents of those children, and freedom from a hostile and vengeful state through legitimate laws and an open and transparent legal system.
However, so long as we continue to demand the kind of lifestyle, dependent on the products that are produced by the machines that are themselves dependent on fossil fuels for their motive power, the discharges from which we all know are sucking the very oxygen we need to live out of the atmosphere and replacing it with carbon dioxide, it will  merely be a matter of who gets the mining rights to the black crude and the natural gas who also has the power and influence in too many states' economies and political system.
And, as in the past, there are those willing and able to go to war to secure access to those mining rights, and if they will go to war, they will also compromise many of the other minimal standards that can only develop and grow under a governance that is not so deep into political and economic and fiscal incest and greed and power-addiction, that it actually turns a blind eye to the needs of ordinary people, so blinded is it to its own narcissism.
Maybe, yes maybe (and this is going to raise hackles in many places) it is time for the world to examine and to accept, after considerable debate, that not all natural resources are up for sale, and open to corporate profit, greed and exploitation. Maybe it is time to examine the notion of a set of "common interests" like water, access to food, health care and education to which all people are entitled by birthright, and we would also argue, that there is reason to suggest that even fossil fuels could become part of that "common" inheritance, and not open to private rape pillage and the pursuit of either economic or political power generated by the sale of those common resources.
We are a very long way down the road to corrupt capitalism, and the world needs leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, who reigned in the trusts and the corporations when they became too greedy and too selfish and too narcissistic....and can anyone see such a leader on the horizon?

What has happened to compassion, empathy and the complexity of human encounters?

What happens when the world acts as if it believes the maxim that s/he with the most money/toys/power/status wins?
Those who are searching for purpose, meaning, identity and what has been known as a "good life" get caught in a trap of following along on a path that can and will only lead to enhanced anxiety, vacuity and perpetual searching....for another "thing"....
And, in that equation, naturally, other people become just another "thing" to be manipulated, used, trashed, and abused.
Politicians use their bully pulpits to trash their opponents.
Corporations use their opportunities to engage with clients, for their own profit first, and then, provide a thing or a service for the client.
Universities, colleges use their students as numbers on a graph that demonstrates their percentage of graduates, as compared to their competitors across town, employing the short-term marketing guidelines that devour numbers as proof of success.
The Mayor of Toronto goes on Jimmy Kimmel to reel off his accomplishments, especially the one about saving the people $1 billion, in front of a back drop of scandal, deception, high-living and contempt for both the office and the city.
Putin marches thousands of troops into Crimea just days after pouring billions into Sochi, in an unabashed triumph of both his will and his hubris. He does it because he can.
And the world, weary from one war, in Iraq that was executed on specious and contemptible rationale, faces Putin with no money, energy or will to counter his 'invasion' except with words of threats...most of them hollow if they are not coming from a unified voice.
Women on campuses are being "raped" allegedly in a culture in which students speak idly and openly about "raping" an exam...as if they "scored" another notch on their "achievement" belt....once again for bragging rights in the pub with their peers.
"Scoring" is just another way of keeping track of what have to be orgasmic experiences, of the extreme variety, as if extreme sports are not restricted to some man-made pipes and rails and bumps in snow and ice on a hill somewhere.
Even some of our best novels are written as treatises, deploying individual people as the mouthpieces conveying the thoughts and world views of their writers, leaving the readers gasping for some way to connect with those characters as authentic people.
We compartmentalize, and we compare and we trash 'the other' no matter what the reason, even when those reasons are little more than "stubbing the toe" of the other, as if we would never be so stupid or so  dumb or so self-absorbed as to stubb our tow in a similar manner.
We have lost, or at least are clearly losing our desire to see human beings as whole, and as vulnerable and as somewhat pathetic, yet also as more than just another "thing" providing some kind of  instant gratification, or not, depending on the degree to which each person buys into the requirement to conform, in the transaction.
We have become mere chess pieces in somebody's or some corporation's or some family's chess board, and we did not negotiate that development, nor agree to its terms, nor do we know how to change the 'contract' to which we did not sign our names. We are in danger of rendering the complex and messy and natural and unpredictable encounters in human lives to some accountant's version of reality, as if our emotions and our politics and our ambitions and our institutions can be reduced to various spread sheets that demonstrate our determination to polish all details for a public viewing, every hour of every day of every week and month of every year.
We have become empty robots seeking just another thrill, as if we are frozen in a form of adolescence from which most of us were relieved to be free.

Putin choreographs the chess board on Ukraine....can and will the west "act" or just "threaten" to act?

The China card....that is the one the world is waiting for in the current impasse between the 'west' and Russia. The G7 has condemned the Russian move into Crimea, and the Voice of America this morning is reporting that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov claims he has spoken to his Chinese counterpart and that the Chinese are in sync with Russia on this file. However, those reports could be little more than wishful power-brokering on Russia's part.
Nevertheless, there could be a clear and permanent, and possibly unsurmountable division between the G7 countries and NATO on one side, with China and Russia (and their allies, Syria, Iran, North Korea) on the other side, in this fluent and potentially explosive situation.
While the Russian currency has dropped nearly 2% since the crisis erupted last week, the markets could provide early signals of just how serious this crisis could become. If, for example, Russia decides to collect its stated debt of $1.5 billion in unpaid natural gas payments from Ukraine, and also to hike the price of natural gas to the other countries on the European continent dependent on Russian natural gas, the world could witness a war played out in energy prices, with the west having to replace Russian natural gas to those countries.
It would seem reasonable that not only preparations for but the actual convening of the G8 meeting in Sochi scheduled for June could be cancelled. It also seems possible that Russia could be expelled from the G8 itself, if Putin remains intransigent in his determination to "protect Russian people living in the Crimea"...possible code for "protect my reputation in the restoration of Russian pride" on the world stage. 
Ukraine is near bankruptcy, and has already called on its oligarchs to come to the aid of their country, (from which many became wealthy through corruption under Yanukovich). The Head of the Navy was sworn in one day and dismissed for treason the next because he refused to fight the Russians and called for the Ukraine to surrender to the Russian troops already in Crimea. Now reports of a rush of western diplomats to Kiev Foreign Secretary Hague and Secretary of State Kerry, plus Ban Ki-moon's assistant will be there this week, plus additional meetings of NATO and the Security Council will provide 'white noise' as background to the real drama whose current choreographer is Putin, make no mistake, and how he decides to play his cards and his pawns and his generals and his own national media, and his ambitions will be the major factor in the level of unrest and potential violence that emerges from this impasse.
Whether the west is reading Putin accurately, and whether he is indeed dangerous or merely attempting to restore Russian pride after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is another of the guiding perceptions for all those outside Russia who might have to reconcile with Putin. Painting his "invasion of the Crimea" as a nineteenth century move, as Kerry has done, may say more about Kerry's cold war mentality than it does about Putin's desire to resume the cold war. While there are always vestiges of history that cannot be excised from any contemporary conflict, it would do both sides well to agree to bring a clean slate of expectations to any negotiating table, in order to prevent and even to preclude military conflict's escalation.
Also, continual threats of "costs" and repercussions from the west, and especially from Washington, without credible action in the form of sanctions and decisions that would bear fruit in the Kremlin, only emphasize the desperation and the hollowness of the western diplomatic arsenal and capacity to push back. And we must not make the mistake that this is a crisis that includes only Ukraine and Russia; it is a situation that enmeshes the world, and the kind of future we share on many levels, not the least of which is national security, economic, political and international capacity for co-operation.

Once again we call for international co-ordinated response to radical Islamic terror

If there is truth to reports of Muslim ethnic Uighur involvement in the most recent vicious stabbings in China, then then world is becoming "infected" with a common and determined and perhaps unstoppable political and violent cancer.(* see excerpt of story, "Deadly China Attack Blamed on Islamic Separatists," by Philip Wren, from The Sydney Morning Herald, March 2, 2014, below)
This is not your average, reversible disease, that, with early detection and prompt and disciplined treatment, can be reversed and cast into remission. Nor it is able to be surgically excised from the global body politic. And, while many of the world's largest and most influential countries are being "infected", so too are some of the near-collapse, and/or failed states being overrun by a movement within a movement, a segment of radical Islam that has taken upon itself to use violence to spread its interpretation of the Islamic faith into all of the globe's many national cells, making it nearly impossible either to ignore or to eliminate.
Strategies that in varying degrees seek both legal/police/intelligence assistance as well as military push-back, while providing limited relief from this monster, seem also to have the counter-effect of generating more foot-soldiers in the radical Islam camp, and thereby exponentially growing the risk to individuals, families, communities and regions on all continents.
While the United Nations talks about the threat of Islamic terror, and obviously many countries are confronting the plague of its heinous presence (in Boston this year, all participants and spectators are banned from carrying bags of any kind to the event), the world is on collective and serious notice that this disease seeks to consume all of the political and cultural oxygen in the room, in order to establish its hegemony, and bring the world to heel to its nefarious and sinister demands.
This cancer is not restricted to one linguistic group, nor to one ethnic minority, nor to a single business or cultural group. It cannot be framed as just another frustrated minority seeking some kind of independent state, within a larger state like China. It must be framed as a threat to the peace and stability of all countries, and consequently must also be regarded as a significant global threat, requiring a concerted, co-ordinated and sustained global response.
Unlike global warming and climate change to which we are all contributing, radical Islam has different roots and causes from those facing the world's air, water and land pollution and the impact of that creeping (or is it now galloping?) phenomenon. It is a quasi and pseudo-religious form of proselytizing that includes in its expansive quiver of instruments every form of violent action known to human life. If and when it gets its hands on, or creates by itself, abandoned nuclear material, it will deploy the bombs when and wherever it sees appropriate. In fact, millions, if not billions of many national budgets are now being poured into protecting people everywhere from this scourge.
What does not seem to be happening in a dramatic, public and concerted way is the development of an international, co-ordinated and co-operative assault on this disease, as appears to be the case with many of the world's most invasive cancers.
While there are increasing efforts at sharing intelligence among many world capitals, and also shared approaches to which methods prove most useful and effective in finding and eliminating this tumour, it is still growing and still infecting potentially all regions on the planet. While it may be true that social media is making tyranny and dictatorship obsolete, it is also providing a significant key to the spread of this toxic and deadly disease, leaving us all vulnerable to similar threats that imposed death, dismemberment, shock and trauma on the people in the streets of Boston, one of the world's most coveted and peaceful and highly developed urban centres, with some of the most advanced and sophisticated protective shields of public protection.
Surely, leaders around the globe can and do see the size and the severity of this global threat to all people, especially to those who do not identify with Islam, and can and will also see the value as well as the urgency of their putting considerable energy, resources and human intelligence into a concerted campaign to stamp out this human and toxic cancer....
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*Authorities have yet to identify the attackers but said "evidence found at the scene" showed it was a "an organised, premeditated violent terrorist attack" carried out by Xinjiang "separatist forces".
Chinese authorities have also blamed a series of violent incidents that have escalated in frequency and severity in the past year on extremists from the Muslim ethnic Uighur minority from Xinjiang, accusing them of conspiring with overseas based groups, including the murky East Turkestan Islamic Movement, in an effort to split Xinjiang from the rest of China. (Deadly China Attack Blamed on Islamic Separatists, by Philip Wren, The Sydney Daily Morning Herald, March 2, 2014)
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/deadly-china-attack-blamed-on-islamic-separatists-20140302-hvfs7.html#ixzz2unsuzv9V

Can Obama recover his own and American reputation through a resolution of the Ukraine crisis?

There was a moment outside the White House earlier this week, during which Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, used the phrase, "Minimum Wage President" to describe what he perceives as a reductionistic interpretation of the Obama administration's mere vestige of power and influence. It made the news first because normally partisan comments are not the norm on White House property immediately following meetings with the President. Connecticut Governor Molloy, also an attendee at the same meeting with Jindal and the President, immediately jumped all over the Jindal comments, pointing to many other subjects that were discussed and strongly objecting to the reductionistic views of the president coming from Jindal.
We have been consistent and even sometimes combative supporters of the president, especially given the kind of obstruction and head winds he has faced since the day of his first inauguration in 2009, from the Republican party, both the establishment and the Tea Party radicals. We have lauded his achievement of the Affordable Care Act, the measured responses to Middle East uprisings, his collaborative attempts to work with his contemporary world leaders  on all issues including economic, social unrest, inequality, fiscal crises and two wars he inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush.
However, in his exemplary attempt to modify the United States responses to world events, to move toward diplomacy and away from the military, something the whole world can and should be thankful for, Obama may have relinquished what had been considered a fact of geopolitical reality: that the United States was a super-power in both diplomacy and in military might. In fact, inside the outside the United States, the world took it as a matter of "faith" that the military always had the back of the diplomats, even if and when the rest of the world thought such deployment might be over the top, unjustified and unworthy of the good name and reputation of the United States, especially with regard to Iraq. Obama, in fact, was first elected primarily because of his strong opposition to the Iraq war, although he was later to enhance U.S. forces in Afghanistan and expand on the use of drones against terrorist enemies started by Dubya. His bona fides on the use of hard power, contrary to the views of his opponents, have been consistently and persistently earned, and one solid piece of the evidence to support that view came with the capture and the killing of Osama bin Laden, even secretly without official Pakistan knowing or being engaged as a partner in the expedition.
The incident in Benghazi, in which the U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered along with four of his compatriots, may have exposed some failures of omission (as opposed to those of commission) on the part of the State Department for not providing military and intelligence support for the Ambassador and his staff, in spite of his clear wish to live and work close to the people of Lybia, without an armed "wall" separating him from the people and the street. That incident also may prove, when examined by researchers in the future, as the pivotal point at which the fortunes of the Obama administration turned downward, even though there is no clear evidence that no one in the administration, including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a former political foe, deliberately turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to requests for additional military and intelligence support for Stephens.
Perhaps it was the preceding flow of constant and vicious critical onslaught on all issues that culminated in a perceived loss of trust by the American people in the president's capacity to deliver on his responsibilities, capped by the public relations fiasco that the very word Benghazi has become, along with the depressing and persistent bad numbers on economic recovery at home linked also to a slow drop in the unemployment rate, and the consistent defiance of presidential proposals from the Republicans that has generated a perception deeply embedded in the American body politic, that the president has lost the confidence of the majority of the people.
And anyone who says or thinks that what happens at home does not impact what happens on the world stage is simply out of touch with the reality of that complex interface. If Obama is perceived at home as wanderingly decent but indecisive, such a perception could possibly impact directly, or certainly indirectly, how the United States is treated by foreign leaders, especially those with the name Putin, whose preening capacity and ambition, both personal and for his country's reaching the top of the diplomatic mountain of world respect, culminated in the Sochi Olympics.
After Syria, with the Russian proposal to negotiate an agreement to dispose of chemical weapons, weapons that Assad had previously denied even possessing, now in considerable disarray given Assad's failure to meet deadlines to which he committed, and given Putin's "cover" for his failures, and after Putin's support of Iran's ambitions to develop nuclear power, currently under another cloud of uncertainty as to the verifiability and trustworthiness of any Iranian commitment to cap the enrichment at levels appropriate only for energy and not for nuclear weapons development, another cloud "covered" by Putin's protection...now Obama and the west face a deepening crisis in Ukraine, and especially in the Crimea.
There is a danger that Obama is and will be perceived both by Putin and the people of the Ukraine as a very decent, but impotent, American president who has very few options to provide support and a counter-punch to the military intervention of the Crimea "to protect Russian people living in that region" already voted on and vetted in advance by the Russian parliament, at Putin's request.
A $1 billion cheque from the U.S. Treasury, for example will do little to meet the Ukraine's current need for some $35+billions to escape national bankruptcy. Even if all of the oligarchs who have profited from the corruption that flowed into their bank accounts under Yanukovich were forced to turn that money over to the government in Kiev, and the IMF were to write a sizeable cheque in support of an international bail-out, the U.S. contribution would still look feeble and somewhat insulting, not only to the people of Ukraine, but also to the fading reputation of the Obama administration. There is also little if any likelihood that the U.S. will engage Russia militarily over the Crimea, or over the stabilizing of the Ukraine itself. Obama faces a serious challenge not only in the Ukraine crisis, but to the historic legacy and reputation of his presidency.
And, if he were ever moved and motivated to dig deeply into his imagination and his reservoir of courage, wisdom, insight and foresight, this is the time for him to commit all of his many talents and personal and professional resources to the resolution of the huge risk and opportunity that faces him and his country and the world in Putin and the Ukraine.
And the Taiwan model of a independent Crimea still attached to both Ukraine and to Russia, is not the best outcome of this crisis. Obama needs to provide strong, decisive and significant American "innovation and leadership" that demonstrate both his command of the situation and his capacity to rise above the "micro" politics of the minimum wage on the international stage.
The world needs the best and the most creative and the most courageous Obama, just as the world needed the best, most creative and most courageous Kennedy over Cuba....and there not an unlimited time frame for him to act.
The whole world is watching...and waiting...and wondering if there is a Kennedy spine still occupying the desk in the Oval Office...clearly there is more than a Kruschev in the Kremlin.