President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry
How should one characterize President Obama's trip to Poland yesterday? He pledged a new $1 billion security plan for Central and Eastern Europe to stand against Russian "aggression". He reassured the old Warsaw Pact counties of Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, now all NATO members that the US in his words, "the security of our allies in Central and Eastern Europe is a cornerstone of our own security and it is sacrosanct. As friends and as allies, we stand united, together and forever". So maybe it was "coach" Obama attempting to reassure his "players".
You'd never know it though considering all the perceived (contrived?) jitters of the leaders of those countries in attendance who display seemingly in unison-since the Russian annexation of Crimea in March with all dismissing the popular referendum as illegitimate even after the people voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation-the dread Russian President Vladimir Putin was ready to pounce, waiting for the right time to invade one or all their countries-as a sort of replay of the USSR's crackdown in Hungary in 1956 and Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Such is their fantasy which has no basis in fact.
The idea of Putin invading a NATO country is patently absurd. He even realizes sending Russian troops into Eastern Ukraine is a fools errand, though the ethnic Russian speaking people there would like him to do just that.
But that would be the "provocation" the US would like Putin to act on and be the pretext for NATO-aka the US-to initiate a war with Russia.
Thus far Putin isn't taking the bait, even after the horrendous events in Odessa that occurred in early May when Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi Right Sector thugs perpetrated the massacre at the Trade Unions House building setting fire to the building, beating and murdering the demonstrators protesting against the coup led government in Kiev by trapping hundreds in the inferno.
Getting back to Obama in Poland it was nothing more than an opportunity to stick it to Putin and reiterate his new cold war stance against Russia; strictly a US inspired policy with NATO as a convenient fig leaf to disguise US plans for eventual war with Russia.
Remember, moving NATO eastward was the US reneging on its 1990 agreement with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev not to move one inch eastward if he agreed not to interfere with German unification after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.
So with NATO now in the three Baltic countries, in all the former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe, its declaration in 2009 ready to accept Georgia and Ukraine into its alliance as well as the US placing ABM missiles and advanced radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic-all on the pretext to defend against an non-existent Iranian nuclear threat-it becomes clearly provocations aimed at Russia.
This is an ominous situation, fraught with the possibility of a nuclear war, or better a nuclear holocaust.
Can it be the US expectation of a war with Russia would be strictly a war using only conventional weapons? Or if nuclear weapons are used they'll just be "tactical" nuclear weapons.
But really, any use of nuclear weapons "tactical" or otherwise, is simply insane.
Apparently insanity has gripped Washington with the neo-cons running the show.
Speculation [i] grows a first strike capability is being contemplated by the US as if a Russian retaliatory strike can be prevented. This too is insane.
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