According to a recent poll, a majority of Ukrainians still don’t want to join NATO:
Maybe we shouldn’t have helped stir up the hornet’s nest that resulted in the Maidan coup of 2014. Not only does a majority of the Ukrainian population still not want NATO membership, it is the second poorest country in Europe per capita and is still beset with a lot of corruption.
In further signs that a Biden administration will mark a return to the Neocon-Liberal Interventionist war orgy of the Bush-Obama years, many of the members of the Biden transition team come from think tanks funded by war profiteers and fossil fuel companies. According to a report compiled by Antiwar.com:
On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.
These think tanks include Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and RAND Corporation.
A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 [transition] team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skelly, from CACI International, and Victor Garcia, from Rebellion Defense.
Jimmy Dore goes into more detail in the video below.
House representatives Barbara Lee of California and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin have sent a letter to Biden asking that whoever is nominated for Secretary of Defense not come from the defense industry. The Hill reported last week:
As House members, Pocan and Lee will not get a vote on Biden’s eventual nominee. But the letter signals the progressive position on the woman widely seen as Biden’s likely choice, Michèle Flournoy [though she was not mentioned by name in the letter].
Flournoy, who was under secretary of Defense for policy in the Obama administration, co-founded consultant group WestExec Advisors, which counts defense contractors among its clients. She is also on the board of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
While I commend this gesture from Lee and Pocan, I will not hold my breath that it will make a bit of difference.
The poll is encouraging and I hope it would also reflect a wariness about taking IMF loans that could turn Ukraine into a vassal state of the EU as well as the US. Ukrainians should observe what has happened to Greece and take n independent course before it’s too late.
A Gallup poll conducted in October 2008 showed that 43% of Ukrainians associated NATO as a threat to their country, while only 15% associated it with protection.