Category: News

International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a "breach of international law." Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is "in direct, overt violation of international law."

Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.

Fifty years ago, another former law professor, Senator Wayne Morse, condemned such arrogance of power. "I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right," Morse said on national TV in 1964. "And that’s the American policy in Southeast Asia – just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it."

Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw.

Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how "international law" has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm, mainline U.S. media are now transfixed with Kremlin villainy.

Continue reading “Heard the One About Obama Denouncing a Breach of International Law?”

This is something Secretary of State John Kerry actually said. It is not from The Onion:

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

He was criticizing Russia’s incursions into Crimea and Ukraine. But the condemnation apparently did not strike him as hypocritical.

Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted the hypocrisy on Twitter:

US politicians and pundits newfound commitment to state sovereignty and non-interference in other country's affairs is admirable.

— Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) March 1, 2014

Originally published at LobeLog, reprinted with permission.

In my 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service, only one institution has denied me admission to their press or public events. That was the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) shortly after the broadcast in 2003 of a BBC Panorama program (its equivalent, more or less, of our “60 Minutes”) on neoconservatives and their promotion of the Iraq war. The segment was entitled “The War Party” and I was interviewed at several intervals during the program. In that case, I was told forthrightly (and somewhat apologetically) by the think tank’s then-communications chief, Veronique Rodman, that “someone from above” had objected strongly to the show (I had my own reservations about it) and my role in it and had demanded that I be banned from attending future AEI events. My status as persona non grata there was reaffirmed about five years later when LobeLog alumnus Eli Clifton went there for an event and was taken aside by an unidentified staffer and told that he could attend, but that he should remind me that I was still unwelcome.

Now it seems I’ve been blackballed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, although, unlike AEI, AIPAC has so far declined to give me a reason for denying me accreditation for its annual policy conference, which runs Sunday through Tuesday. All I’ve received thus far is this email that arrived in my inbox Thursday morning from someone named Emily Helpern from Scott Circle, a public relations firm here in DC.

Thank you for your interest in attending this year’s AIPAC Policy Conference as a member of the press. However, press credentials for the conference will not be issued to you. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

I emailed Emily back as soon as I received it to ask for an explanation and pointed out that this is the first time in a decade that I’ve been denied credentials to cover the AIPAC conference. When no reply was forthcoming, I sent a second email to her and to Marshall Wittmann, AIPAC’s communications director, seeking an explanation, but, alas, it seems I’ve become a non-person.

Continue reading “Jim Lobe: Blackballed by AIPAC?”

The Bibi who cried wolf:

Report from Thursday, February 26, 2014 (today):

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry decried what he called a “new isolationism” in the United States on Wednesday and suggested that the country was beginning to behave like a poor nation.

Speaking to reporters, Kerry inveighed against what he sees as a tendency within the United States to retreat from the world even as he defended the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts from Syria to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Report from Saturday, February 1, 2014:

[Secretary of State John Kerry]…presented an emotional defense of the Obama administration’s engagement in international crises in the face of widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States was retreating from a leadership role.

Speaking here at the Munich Security Conference, the most important trans-Atlantic security gathering, Secretary of State John Kerry expressed some exasperation with the criticism, rejecting “this narrative which frankly has been pushed by some people who have an interest in trying to suggest that the U.S. is somehow on a different track.” He went through a litany of American involvement in places like Afghanistan, Libya and the Middle East, saying, “I can’t think of a place in the world where we’re retreating.”

At the beginning of this month, John Kerry vehemently dismissed the criticism that America is “retreating” from the world. Not even four weeks later, he is making that very criticism. He was right the first time. Like the John Kerry of February 1st, I can’t think of one single place in the world where the United States is withdrawing.

• Continue reading “Kerry Was Right the First Time: America Is Not ‘Retreating’ Into ‘Isolationism’”

In response to the revolution in Ukraine, Moscow has ordered a 150,000-troop Russian military exercise in the semi-autonomous region of Crimea, right on Ukraine’s border. Amid the commotion, pro and anti- Russian residents residents of Crimea have protested.

Dmitri Trenin and Andrew S. Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace give a brief primer on the Crimea situation:

Crimea is a very special—and delicate—case. It is Ukraine’s only autonomous republic, though its autonomy was sharply curtailed in the mid-1990s. Its population of nearly 2 million is about 60 percent Russian, many of whom are retired Russian military personnel. Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol is home to some 15,000 active-duty servicemen, and much of the city essentially lives off of the base. About 12 percent of Crimeans are Tatars, who are generally loyal to Kyiv due to their tragic history. (They were persecuted and repatriated by Stalin for alleged disloyalty at the end of World War II and were only able to return to Crimea at the very end of the Soviet period.) Throughout independent Ukraine’s twenty-plus-year history, Crimea’s residents, only 24 percent of whom are ethnic Ukrainians, have seen themselves as a breed apart from the Ukrainian mainstream.

They explain that Russia’s military exercise could be a dangerous move:

It would be a surprise if Russia moved to annex the region outright. Although Putin has maintained his silence on the situation in Ukraine since this past weekend, events on the ground are challenging Ukraine’s territorial integrity and raising the possibility that Russian troops will become directly involved in pulling the country apart.

Putin’s hand could be forced (and conflict could come to the region inadvertently) depending on how the new authorities in Kyiv respond to recent moves by the local population. One can easily imagine a harsh Russian response if Kyiv takes rash steps to reassert its authority in Crimea either by sending in troops or by allowing revolutionary paramilitaries to launch a “people’s march” on Crimea.

Today, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel warned Russia not to intervene, failing to mention that (1) Washington has been intervening in Ukraine from the start, and (2) it’s really none of our business what Russia does.

“We expect other nations to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and avoid provocative action,” Mr. Hagel said. “That’s why I’m closely watching Russia’s military exercises along the Ukrainian border…”

In any case, telling Russia to behave itself has about zero chance of helping the situation. “Russian leaders believe, rightly or wrongly, that the West drove events in Ukraine to the brink of collapse to secure geopolitical advantage over Moscow,” Trenin and Weiss say. “Thus, Western appeals for Russian restraint in the event of a crisis over Crimea are unlikely to resonate.”

But the eagerness in Washington to steer events in Ukraine and beat out Russia in some pointless geopolitical game has not yielded. In this Daily Beast report, Republican leaders Buck McKeon and James Inhofe berate Obama for being too soft on Russia; they both express a deep longing for the Cold War era when it was easier to justify any reckless military action abroad on the grounds of opposing Soviet designs.

David Rhodes, a Reuters columnist, quoted former Romney adviser Nile Gardiner as reiterating Romney’s 2012 line that Russia is America’s greatest geo-political foe and arguing that “an ‘ideological war’ was underway and Putin is winning.”

Gardiner then worries that Washington’s inability to force Russia to lay prostrate at the feet of American power is encouraging other countries to defy their American master: “Putin is viewed by American adversaries and competitors as someone who has stood up to American influence and gotten away with outflanking the United States. Adversaries take note of this and they sense weakness and that’s dangerous. Dissidents also take note.”

Obama’s State Department, which as we know has quietly tried to pull off regime change in Ukraine (only to be outed by a leaked phone conversation), prefers to apply the Republican bellicosity, just to do it quietly:

“What we’re trying to do is work through diplomatic channels with the Russians,” a senior State Department official told Rhodes. “That doesn’t mean going public with some tough rhetoric that might please some domestic constituencies. This is not an era where tough talk gets the job done.”

Tough talk is so 1980. Secrecy is now the American way.