Author: Jason Ditz

Speaking Thursday at a State Department dinner, Secretary of State John Kerry said of Nigeria that “only the United States is there offering the assistance to help find those young woman,” adding “other countries, not only aren’t they invited, but they did not even offer.”

Kerry’s comments aimed to brag about the US “leadership” position globally, while presenting American intervention as not only effective but uniquely welcome.

There are a lot of problems with that, but lets first address the most obvious: the facts aren’t true. Several nations are aiding Nigeria in the search, including Britain, France, and Israel. China has also offered to help.

When presented with the facts, the State Department insisted Kerry only meant Russia and China, and meant to show that “we are the partner of first resort to many countries.”

While the Obama Administration’s massive foreign aid budget and willingness to look the other way has indeed made it the “partner of first resort” for many governments, particularly those like Nigeria with egrigous human rights records, the notion that this makes them uniquely welcomed by the people in the areas of those interventions simply isn’t true. A cursory look at places like Yemen and Pakistan, the top US “parntership” targets, show record levels of anti-US sentiment that continue to grow worse with every new fiasco they perpetrate therein.

With an eye on the New Cold War, NATO officials have been examining existing defense plans and are finding, much to the delight of those advocating more spending, a stark reality: the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are not prepared to fight off a full-scale Russian invasion.

What we’re meant to take out of that analysis is that NATO is not doing its job with respect to those nations, and that the military alliance ought to follow US recommendations, dramatically increasing spending to send more ground troops from across Europe to the area to fend off the Russian attack.

From an historical perspective, that policy is unrealistic, and the reason why Latvia and Estonia have struggled to retain independence throughout history is that the tiny nations are all but undefendable from their much larger neighbors.

Active and reserve, Russia has about 2.8 million soldiers. Latvia has about 2 million people. The idea that NATO could realistically fortify the capital of Riga to the point that it could fend off a full-scale invasion from the Russian military is complete nonsense, and the costs of the alliance trying to make the Baltic frontier theoretically impregnable would be staggering.

If the criteria for NATO membership were complete military defensibility from Russia, it would be an inescapable conclusion that allowing any of the Baltic nations to join was complete folly. Cobbling together defensive strategies based on that assumption is also a waste of time, because it’s unnecessary, beyond being virtually impossible.

NATO’s Cold War strategies were never built around the idea that they could stop the entire Warsaw Pact instantly at the border in the case of total war. The whole point of NATO Article 5 is to oblige all members of the alliance to intervene militarily to reclaim any territory lost in an initial invasion.

The point of Latvia and Estonia joining NATO is not to get Europe and the US to throw impossible numbers of troops at them to build some sort of Sparta on the Baltic. The point is to bring them under the alliance umbrella, such that they can’t be attacked without de facto starting a war with the entire alliance.

NATO as a defensive alliance wouldn’t need to talk about a buildup on any frontier. Attacking a NATO member nation is all but unthinkable for anyone, and even if Russia had a reason to attack any of these nations to begin with (which they don’t), the NATO deterrent is the same with or without a buildup.

Rather, the whole reason this has become an issue is that NATO is not a defensive alliance anymore, and the false narrative of a Russian “threat” is being played as a justification for increased military spending, primarily for the benefit of major, well-connect US arms exporters.

Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.

A Congressman since 1995, Rep. Jones was challenged almost exclusively on his foreign policy positions, including his opposition to various US wars and foreign aid to Israel.

Griffin, by contrast, was heavily bankrolled by the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Ending Spending Fund SuperPAC, who put in over $1 million combined, though his own campaign site made scant mention of foreign policy, beyond presenting a big military as good for the district’s economy.

The funding paid for ads attacking Jones as “liberal” for voting against Iran sanctions and having “forgotten” the people of North Carolina in his foreign policy votes.

Determined not to let a good piece of rhetoric go to waste just because it was untrue and discredited nearly 24 hours ago, Western media outlets are running frenzied stories about Jews in the protester-held Eastern Ukraine cities being forced to register, providing a new chance to make World War 2 comparisons, and advancing the US narrative that the Russians, and not the “pro-West” protesters with swastika stickers on their helmets, are the “real anti-semites.”

Incredibly, the State Department is endorsing the myth as absolute fact, because what USA Today claims unnamed Israeli media claims they saw posted outside a synagogue in Donetsk is good enough for them.

The truth, not so much.

The leadership of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk insist the official looking leaflets are fakes, and the signature of one of their leaders a forgery, designed to discredit the protest movement. The putative Jew registration service simply doesn’t exist, and Ukrainian Jews who show up at the government building expecting to have to pay a $50 “registration fee” are wasting their time.

Though USA Today appears not to have noticed while trolling the “Israeli media” for stories, the news that the rumors were untrue has been a top story in the Times of Israel for almost 24 hours, because Israeli papers may run a story about what someone saw on a leaflet, but they also follow through on the story afterwards.

Lord knows following through on whether or not urban legends are true isn’t done in the US, which is why all the top stories in US papers today are either Jew registration that’s not happening, or a handful of kids in Tokyo wearing zentai, because that’s sure to be the new fad nationwide.

I love a good argument too, but I think the Crimea situation is less about race, nationalism and the East-West divide than it is economics.

Crimea is dirt poor, even by Ukranian standards, and was intensely dependent on government aid. The regime change brought about a lot of philosophical shifts in government, but the big change from the Crimean perspective was economic in that:

a) Ukraine’s struggling economy is heading further into the ditch, with EU trade ties likely not to make a major difference for years and the loss of Russia trade ties likely to be a quick impact.

b) The IMF bailout came amid intense conditions of austerity, which means Crimea’s subsidies were likely to be on the chopping block .

Whatever else one may say about Russia’s economy, it’s got a lot of money from oil and gas exports, and they were in a position to not only replace the aid Ukraine had been giving Crimea, but to increase it considerably. I’d say you can’t buy that kind of loyalty, but you clearly can.

Interviews on the streets with Crimeans told similar stories, of local retirees expecting their pensions to go from $100 a month under Ukraine to $500 a month under Russia. Similar pay hikes were expected for soldiers who transferred to the Russian military, and they played a big role in the sheer size of the defections.

From Russia’s perspective, it’s also a pretty straightforward economic move. They kept the Yanukovych government close with billions in subsidies and loans for all of Ukraine, and with the regime change removing that option and the Sevastopol base the only real asset Russia needs to keep, it is much easier to just buy Crimea’s accession into the Russian Federation (which will cost Russia billions annually anyhow) than it was to try to get another Yanukovych elected.

Historical claims to the peninsula certainly provided a pretext for the secession/annexation, and are interesting from an academic perspective, but if Ukraine wasn’t broke I don’t think we’d be having this discussion at all.

A quick timeline of the backstory:

Late last month, international charity Oxfam split with “ambassador” Scarlett Johansson over her involvement with SodaStream, an Israeli company with a factory in the occupied West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. SodaStream accused Oxfam of having joined the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement against Israel.

A week and a half ago, Israel held a ministerial meeting about a planned “media blitz” against boycott backers, ordering its spies to dig up dirt to use against them and openly plotting to portray them all as supporters of terrorism.

You can see where this is going.

Today, it was announced that Oxfam is being threatened with a lawsuit by Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin, which was founded in 2003 explicitly to sue opponents of the Israeli government. They are accusing Oxfam of having ties with a pair of Palestinian charities, which Shurat Hadin claims are “instrumentalities of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).”

Oxfam hasn’t responded to the totality of the allegations but insisted in the past that its support for one of the charities, the Union of Health Workers Committees (UHWC) was not a problem, and that the UHWC is registered to legally operate in Israel.

Still, the first whiff of Oxfam as a “terrorist organization” is out there, and it’s likely not to be the last, if Israel’s planned media blitz continues to progress.