FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Saner Voices Urge Calm After Ukraine Provocation in Kerch Strait
Dec. 3, 2018 (EIRNS)—Writing from Moscow, John Helmer, “the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia,” tears apart the unfortunately “over-doctored” Stephen Blank’s geopolitical fantasy of World War III (see above, “British Empire, Geopolitical Assets Deploy for War against Russia in Ukraine”), most appropriately adding,
“Blank has never served in the U.S. armed forces, nor held command posts at the Pentagon. Instead, he has made a career of fighting Russia from an armchair at the U.S. Army’s War College, the Air Force University, and a consultancy at the CIA. Blank proposes doing what the U.S. military, and some White House officials, contemplate doing if only they had the firepower to get away with it unscathed. But they don’t.”
Thomas Graham, Jr., managing director of Kissinger Associates, while observing the difficulties, nonetheless calls for calm in his Nov. 29 piece, “Neither Russia nor Ukraine Will Easily Give Up the Sea of Azov.” Stating that there will be no resolution of the Donbas conflict without progress on Crimea, Graham, writing in The National Interest, writes:
“To be sure, there is no easy solution to the Crimea dispute, but creative diplomacy has resolved no less vexing issues in the past, such as the status of Taiwan or Russia’s right of access to Kaliningrad through Lithuanian territory."
Writing the lead on his website Dec. 1, Pat Buchanan appropriately asks, “Is Putin the Provocateur in the Kerch Crisis?” After thoroughly undercutting the “mainstream” version of events, Buchanan writes, “The incident in the Black Sea was a provocation organized by the [Kiev] authorities and maybe the President himself ... [Poroshenko’s] rating is falling ... so he needed to do something.” Furthermore, he states, “For his part, Putin has sought to play the matter down, calling it a ‘border incident, nothing more.’ ”
While acknowledging the neo-con tendency to inflame every controversy, Buchanan—ever the isolationist—continues that “there is a larger issue here. Why is control of the Kerch Strait any of our business? Why is this our quarrel, to the point that U.S. strategists want us to confront Russia over a Crimean Peninsula that houses the Livadia Palace that was the last summer residence of Czar Nicholas II?
“If Ukraine had a right to break free of Russia in 1991, why do not Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk have the right to break free of Kiev?
“Why are we letting ourselves be dragged into everyone’s quarrels—from who owns the islets in the South China Sea, to who owns the Senkaku and Southern Kurils; and from whether Transnistria had a right to secede from Moldova, to whether South Ossetia and Abkhazia had the right to break free of Georgia, when Georgia broke free of Russia?
“Do the American people care a fig for these places? Are we really willing to risk war with Russia or China over who holds title to them?”
