Title of 1 February 2008 cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: "NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT RED LINES."

I just came across Professor Robert Wade of the LSE - these are excerpts from something he wrote in Le Monde  in 2015. He points out that the threat from Russia was exaggerated during the Cold War, something that is certainly true. Writing in 2015 he thought the Russian threat again exaggerated. 

The full essay is here and is worth reading. 

The distinguished Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus explained on 12 January why it is so dangerous – to us in the West – to keep framing security issues in the cold war framework, as though Russia and China constitute our major threats. He starts with the US Navy’s current claim that it must spend hundreds of billions of dollars in order to keep ahead of Russia and China’s rapid upgrading of blue-water naval capabilities. Then he shows how far behind the US Russia and China are, using the examples of nuclear-powered supercarriers and advanced submarines. He goes on to observe: “These days, terrorists are the first threat, and not a single one will be deterred by a nuclear warhead.”

So why does “US vs. Russia” and “US vs. China” continue to dominate the security agenda and security budget? Pincus’ short answer is that the defence firms earn vast profits from no-competition capital-intensive projects to build armaments against Russia and China; but much less from labour-intensive projects to build capabilities against terrorists.

Whether Russia invaded the eastern provinces is even less clear. A group of eight retired US intelligence analysts wrote to Chancellor Merkel on 30 August 2014, alarmed at the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping official Washington and the spectre of a new cold war. They reported the contents of a (leaked) 1 February 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The cable said that U.S. Ambassador William Burns was called in by foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who explained Russia’s strong opposition to Nato membership for Ukraine.

The analysts’ letter to Merkel continues: “Burns gave his cable the unusual title, ‘NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT RED LINES’, and sent it off to Washing with immediate precedence. Two months later, at their summit in Bucharest NATO leaders issued a formal declaration that ‘Georgia and Ukraine will be in NATO’. In our view, [President] Poroshenko and [prime minister] Yatsenyuk need to be told flat-out that membership in NATO is not in the cards” (1).

The US intelligence analysts sent their letter to Merkel shortly before the Nato summit on 4-5 September 2014. They warned her to be very cautious about accepting the intelligence about Russia’s role provided by U.S. leaders. “The accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. We saw no credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq then; we see A, whose aim was regime change in Moscow. no credible evidence of a Russian invasion now.”

We know the necessary conditions for durable peace: international guarantees that Ukraine and Georgia will not join Nato (reversing the organisation’s declaration in 2008 that “Georgia and Ukraine will be in Nato”); substantial political and fiscal autonomy for eastern provinces, but not independence or political integration with Russia; and removal of heavy weaponry from the eastern provinces. Then all the parties should agree on Ukraine as a neutral country in a free trade arrangement with both the EU and Russia. Russia should accept that it does not own Ukraine and that – within this constraint of Austrian-type neutrality – Ukraine is free to choose its own path. The Ukrainian government should accept equal status for Russian-speaking Ukrainians, as for Ukrainian speakers (just as French speakers in Canada have equal status), and remove the grounds for Russian speakers to fear that the Kiev government is using the civil war to get the West to bolster the ascendancy of Ukrainian speakers.

On March 30 2022 he wrote that the Russians had fallen into a trap set by the Washington whose aim was regime change in Moscow. He made a good case but I do not believe the Americans were so cynical. I do believe that they wanted and want regime change and have for a long time. 

Professor Wade thinks the Kiev government is Greek Catholic and Ukrainian speaking. I do not believe that. Zelensky for one is Jewish and did not start taking Ukrainian lessons till 2015. This makes me doubtful about how well informed Professor Wade is.

A lot of professors are very stupid. He made a schoolboy error here.

On 26 March, President Biden, speaking in Warsaw, said, unscripted: “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” Such an overt statement of intention for regime change in Russia has not gone down well in most of Europe. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken later clarified Biden’s Warsaw remark: “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter”. Blinken has apparently forgotten Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, and quite a few more.

He had forgotten nothing - he said 'we do not have', not 'we never had'. 

This paragraph is interesting. Is it true?

But the US and Nato’s objectives are still more complicated than Moscow regime change and keeping costs to themselves tolerable. The objective of securing a Russian regime respectful of US and Nato primacy is intertwined like a double helix with the objective of keeping Russia as an external enemy in order to provide glue for cooperation between the West’s often fractious member states under US leadership.