Friday, June 06, 2014

Obama's $1Billion to Ukraine Downpayment for NATO

The Voice of Russia's Andrew Hiller speaks with Francis A. Boyle about Ukraine.  Here is their summary of the 23 minute audio report:

WASHINGTON (VR) – The current American policy when it comes to Eastern Europe has its seeds as far back as 2008, according to University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis Boyle.
America is pursuing a policy that he calls a significant "reorientation in the direction of a major confrontation of Russia." In addition to the danger posed by heightened rhetoric about the duty of the West to defend Eastern Europe, Boyle calls the one billion dollars proposed to to boost US military presence in Eastern Europe "a down payment" and considers the 23 million in military equipment and training already supplied to Ukraine a dangerous foreshadowing.
The call to defense of Eastern by Obama in Poland on Tuesday seems drawn from the counsel and influence of former security advisor and statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski, but the roots go far deeper than that. Boyle says that you can trace the tree back to the policy philosophy taught at Harvard University, an ideology that unites Obama with Brzezinski with Henry Kissinger and one of the political who serves as his mentor when it comes to foreign policy, but the roots of the policy can even be traced back to Kissinger and the man who taught them both at Harvard, Professor William Yandell Elliott.
"Ukraine is sort of the cutting edge of this," Boyle contends, "but now as you see the expansion of U.S. and NATO forces in the Baltic Republics and Poland... it appears to me regretfully that this is an across the board confrontation with Russia."
Boyle worries at the nature of the friction between the two superpowers. He says that the ratcheting up of tensions and hostility comes " despite the fact that President Putin made several conciliatory gestures." such as agreeing to recognize the results of the election of Petro Poroshenko and agreeing to cut down the demands of Gazprom on the price of gas thereby de-escalating the economic crisis faced by Ukrainians.

"I think that President Putin has tried very hard to conciliate here, but if you look at President Obama's speech there in Poland, you know, it... it was basically an ultimatum."