By Dmitry Trenin, Profil, 12/18/24 (Translated by karlof1)

There is a rule: in peacetime, prepare for war, and in wartime, think about organizing peace. Now, while the conflict in Ukraine is not over, our thoughts are about victory. We are sure it will come. But it is time now to start thinking about the world that will follow. Paraphrasing Stalin’s famous statement, we can say: Bandera come and go, but the Ukrainian people remain.

Ukraine within the borders of December 31, 1991 has not existed for a long time. Part of the territories of the former Ukrainian SSR—Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya—became part of the Russian Federation through referendums. It is possible that over time, some other regions will follow this path. Perhaps Odessa with Nikolaev, perhaps Kharkov with Dnepropetrovsk. Perhaps something else. But definitely not all. It is worth attaching only what can be really integrated and, if necessary, retained.

Some part of today’s Ukrainian territories will remain outside the Russian Federation. What will this Ukraine be like? The future of Russia depends on the answer to this question–-and in fact it is a very serious challenge. In the recent example of Syria, we received a clear confirmation of the military maxim of the great Alexander Suvorov: an undercut forest grows.

In civilizational, cultural, historical, and ethnic relations, Ukraine–-or at least most of it–-is an integral part of the Russian world. However, today this territory is at the mercy of forces desperately fighting the Russian world. It is impossible not to notice that even these forces themselves and the West standing behind them are fighting us with the hands, in fact, of Russian people fighting in the Russian way— stubbornly, inventively and evilly, despite huge losses.

The liberation mission of Russia–-its historical task–-does not end with the liberation of the cities and villages of Donbass and Novorossiya. It is aimed at liberating the whole of Ukraine from the anti-Russian Bandera regime, its neo-Nazi ideology, as well as from the influence of external forces hostile to the Russian world.

Like any other country, Ukraine belongs first and foremost to the people living on its territory. Russia, however, is closely and inextricably linked with this people and the land on which they live. After the end of the war, we owe it to ourselves, first of all, to help our neighbors build a new Ukraine–-initially a reconciled and then a peaceful neighbor, in the medium term–-a partner, and in the long term–-an ally.

Russia has historical experience in turning military opponents into friends or reliable fellow citizens. Suffice it to recall the revival of the Chechen Republic, which became a stronghold of stability in the North Caucasus; the alliance of former mujahideen with the Afghan “northern alliance” or the example of the GDR and a number of other satellite countries of Nazi Germany after World War II.

In the Russian expert community, there are different visions of post-war Ukraine.

The most radical option is for Russia to take control of the entire territory of Ukraine, up to Lviv, and access to the borders with NATO countries. Logically, this military success is followed by a political continuation–-the second “reunification of Ukraine with Russia”, which actually means the abolition of Ukrainian statehood. We will not discuss the realism of such an outcome of the NWO [SMO] from a military point of view. But we can say for sure: there are reasonable doubts about the ability to keep all of Ukraine under Moscow’s control and then integrate it entirely into the Russian Federation, as well as about the material cost for Russia of such a solution to the issue.

The opposite, least acceptable and most dangerous option for us is an embittered Bandera pro-Western Ukraine with slightly reduced borders compared to 2022. It is a fiercely anti-Russian state, an instrument of the West to constantly put pressure on Russia and provoke it, and then, at an opportune moment, a springboard for a new war for the “liberation of the occupied territories.” The main idea of this “undefeated” Ukraine will be revenge. Such an option should be completely excluded.

There is one option—a weakened Ukraine, a kind of large “gulyai-pole”, an entity abandoned by the West as unnecessary and dependent on Russia. In this incarnation of the Makhnovshchina, the various interest groups and criminal gangs will fight each other incessantly and tirelessly. It is assumed that Moscow will be able, by manipulating local elements, to turn such a Ukraine into a safe buffer for Russia in the southwestern direction. In this option, two things are doubtful. First, the fact that the West will “retreat” from the Ukrainian “gulyai-pole” and will not use its “heroes” to fight Russia, which will not stop after the end of hostilities in Ukraine. Secondly, that Moscow will be able to control this Makhnovshchina.

The best and not entirely fantastic option for us would be to oust anti-Russian, revanchist elements to the western regions of Ukraine. There they could create their own “free Ukraine” under the protectorate of the West or become a zone of influence of neighboring states—Poland, Hungary and Romania. The West could console itself with the fact that part of the country has avoided falling under Moscow’s control, and speculate that Western Ukraine, consisting of five or seven regions, will become an analogue of the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War. Let [Пусть]. It is not scary to give up what is not only expensive for us, but also dangerous to have. The mistake of Stalin, who annexed Galicia and Volhynia and thereby infected Soviet Ukraine with the virus of nationalism, cannot be repeated.

The main thing is that “Galicia”, taking into account all possible assistance to it from the West, does not pose a danger to Russia, that is, it would have a subcritical mass. The rest of Ukraine–-isolated from the hotbed of ultranationalism, and without regions that have already joined or may yet join the Russian Federation–-would become a new sovereign Ukrainian state. At the same time, by a state that is not under our occupation. It makes sense to offer such a prospect to the Ukrainians, explaining how beneficial it is to them.

The new Ukraine would be much more Ukrainian than the Ukrainian SSR or even Ukraine without Crimea and the four regions that voted to join Russia in 2022. The Ukrainian economy would gain access to the market of Russia and the EAEU countries. At the same time, the New Ukraine would be rigidly separated from the alien Bandera element, which was historically formed in isolation from Russia and on an anti-Russian basis. Kiev would have freed itself from those who flooded and desecrated it after the Maidan coup of 2014.

A new Ukraine as a state and society would be created on a broad all-Russian–-or, if you like, East Slavic–-basis. Such a Ukraine would inherit Kievan Rus and the Zaporozhian Cossacks; it would be proud of the contribution of its people to the strengthening and prosperity of the Russian Tsardom and the Russian Empire, as well as the Soviet Union, of which the Little Russian lands were an important component. Finally, it would embody the historical dream of several generations of Ukrainians about independence.

In the realities of the modern world, the true sovereignty of Ukraine–-as well as other neighboring states of the former USSR–-is possible only in conditions of close cooperation with Russia. At the same time, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church would remain the spiritual basis of society.

The “New Ukraine” project does not have to wait for Victory Day. You can start planning now. There are many Ukrainians in Russia who are not indifferent to the fate of their homeland. Many of them have the necessary competencies to join the work on state, economic and cultural building of the future Ukrainian statehood. At the same time, it should be emphasized that this work is aimed precisely at creating a new statehood, and not at restoring the Ukraine that was swept away by the Maidan almost 11 years ago.

We are not talking only about those who have moved. After our victory, there is work to be done to separate war criminals, criminal figures, ideological opponents and incorrigible Russophobes from the bulk of the population of Ukraine. From its ranks, the New Ukraine could attract patriots–-officers, public and cultural figures, businessmen—who are ready to rebuild their country in cooperation with Russia. We, in turn, will have to give these people an initial credit of trust and treat their “Ukrainianness” with respect. They are not “khokhly”, “ukrops” who speak “language”, and not just neighbors, but a part of the Russian world that we have to return. Not for their sake, but first of all for the sake of ourselves, our safe (in this direction) future.

In our work with the Ukrainians, it is already necessary to emphasize that for the West, Ukraine and its population are only a tool, an expendable material in weakening Russia. That for the West, Ukrainians (who were massively “discovered” there only three years ago) are strangers, second- or third-class people. That the wonderful Ukrainian folk values are destined to be buried under the avalanche of Western mass culture and all the latest innovations in the field of gender policy. That the Ukrainian language is experiencing increasing pressure from English. That Ukrainian wealth – black soil, subsoil – was bought up by American and Western companies and in fact for the most part no longer belongs to Ukraine. That a hypothetical attempt by Ukraine to protect its identity will be met with the same wave of arrogant pressure from the West as the actions of the current Georgian authorities.

So, to sum up: we need to be ready for war, but we also need to be ready for peace. We will expect that all the goals of the NWO will be achieved, and hope at least for the optimal option for ending the war described above. In other words, for our victory. But this will be a victory, first of all, over the attempt of the collective West to restrain our development and weaken us. This will be a victory over the Ukrainian Bandera followers—enemies of both Russians and Ukrainians. For ordinary citizens of the New Ukraine, the day of our victory will be the day of their liberation. This was the name of Victory Day in the GDR.

YouTube link here.

By Ben Aris, Substack, 12/18/24

The EU is under intense pressure to seize Russia’s frozen $300bn of reserves, as crises in funding the war in Ukraine and finding the funds to pay for reconstruction loom.

The US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to pay for the Ukraine war anymore. It ran out of money for Ukraine completely at the start of 2023, then struggled to get an emergence $61bn aid package through in April, but according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy only 10% of these funds and supplies have actually arrived in Ukraine since, with the rest caught up in committee in the US – a problem confirmed last week by US National Security Advisor of Jake Sullivan.

Washington has already passed laws making seizing the $5bn of Russian assets still on American territory legal. Now it wants Europe to do the same.

The confiscation would be unprecedented. Central bank reserves have been frozen many times, and indeed, the US continues to hold the reserves of Iraq and Afghanistan, but technically they remain the property of the country’s central bank and should eventually be returned after the wars are over. Central bank reserves of another country have never been confiscated before.

In May, the EU approved the use of profits from the frozen assets—approximately €3bn annually—with 90% allocated to military aid for Ukraine and the rest reserved for humanitarian purposes. This compromise ensured the participation of neutral EU countries.

What is driving the renewed debate to seize the principal assets as well is Western officials are increasingly unable to fund Ukraine. At the same time as US funding dries up, the EU has also been slacking on fulfilling its commitments. Europe has pledged a total of €241bn in support of Ukraine since the start of the war in 2022, but it has only delivered half of this amount (€125bn), according to monitoring agencies, and there are no concrete plans to send the rest.

With Europe sinking into recession it has reached the point where EU governments have run out of money to pay for an expensive war that is consuming some $100bn a year, according to Timothy Ash, the senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London.

Germany has been in a budget crisis all year, and cut its allocation for Ukraine in half from €8bn to €4bn in 2024, with commitments falling to €500mn in the following two years. Likewise, France, which is also suffering from a government debt crisis, cut its allocation for Ukraine from €4bn to €3bn in October and will struggle even to meet that. Finally, the G7 $50bn loan to Ukraine, approved on June 13 at a G7 summit in Italy, has also got snarled up in red tape and was supposed to be distributed this month, but now it has been split into three tranches paid out over three years, with the first tranche of $22bn due in the first quarter of next year.

Ukraine needs about $40bn a year in international funding to make the budget work and keep the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) supplied, but even the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) anticipates this halving to some $22bn a year over the next two years, according to the most recent version of the three-year budget.

And all these problems are made worse by the anticipation that President-elect Donald Trump will cut US funding for Ukraine entirely. In a precursor to the new Trump policy, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson just shot down a US President Joe Biden proposal to add a fresh $24bn of funding for Ukraine to a congressional spending bill for 2025.

With the sources of funding for Ukraine rapidly evaporating the calculus is changing.

Brussels remains committed to supporting Ukraine, even if several member states are more hesitant. One of the big changes in recent months is the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as the EU foreign policy chief, who is an outspoken Russia hawk. The discussion about seizing the CBR’s money was tabled at a meeting of EU foreign ministers that was chaired by Kallas, who inevitably put the issue back on the agenda. As an Estonian, that sits cheek by jowl with Russia and was occupied by the Soviet Union for 48 years, she is fully focused on holding Russia to account and cares little about the economic or financial consequences.

The Estonians have a particular hatred of Russia following the mass deportations in 1941 and 1949 when thousands were sent to Siberia overnight. Every family in Estonia lost a family member to the deportations, which are marked by a Remembrance Day every year on June 14 that keeps the tragedy fresh in everyone’s memory.

Kallas argued that the assets could be appropriated within a legal framework. “I won’t use the word ‘confiscation’ because it’s actually using assets in a legal way,” she said at the meeting.

Kallas has little power to force the confiscations policy through. The European Commission (EC) has the mandate to set EU trade policy, but foreign policy remains the prerogative of the member states. Several EU countries are not keen on the idea, led by the conservative Germany and Belgium, which would find themselves in the front line. Given all EU decisions have to be unanimous, getting permission to confiscate the CBR’s money will be very hard.

In the meantime, many EU members remain resolutely against a confiscation. Valerie Urbain, CEO of Belgium-based Euroclear, which holds €190bn of the assets, has been particularly outspoken: “We cannot end up in a situation where assets are confiscated and then a few years later Russia comes and demands them back, when the assets are no longer there. If assets are confiscated, then liabilities must also be transferred,” she said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Her predecessor, Euroclear’s CEO Lieve Mostrey, similarly slammed the G7 plan to use Russia’s frozen assets to fund the war in Ukraine and finance its reconstruction in an interview with The Financial Times in February.

Bankers are also not keen on the idea as they anticipate years of very expensive lawsuits from Russian entities. The problem is that the decision to seize the CBR’s funds is political, however, its assets in Europe are protected by the same strong property rights as other assets in Europe and so are vulnerable to lawsuits. They want part of the funds, if they are seized, to be put aside to fund the anticipated wave of Russian lawsuits that will tie up the courts for years.

This is one of the objections to the confiscations: either Euroclear will lose in court and be on the hook to repay €190bn it no longer has, or the courts will be pushed to uphold a political decision and massively undermine trust in Europe’s financial system that could lead to massive capital flight. The share of the US dollar in sovereign reserve funds has already fallen to a 40 year low, thanks to the White House’s decision to weaponize its currency via sanctions that has undermined trust in the dollar.

Another problem is the Kremlin is threatening to launch cases in Russian courts and seize billions of dollars in Russian accounts that belong to Western firms. As bne IntelliNews reported, only 9% of western companies have left the Russian market and they still owned significant assets in Russia.

A decree signed by Vladimir Putin in May enables the use of foreign-owned assets in Russia to compensate for damages caused by Western sanctions. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced in October that Russia has initiated “mirror responses” against the West.

Reconstruction elephant

But the elephant in the room is where the money will come from to rebuild Ukraine after the fighting stops. Trump has famously promised to stop the war “in 24 hours” after taking over. With the Ukrainian defence in the Donbas slowly crumbling – military analysts predict the fall of the key logistics hub at Pokrovsk in the next 2-5 months that could lead to the collapse of Ukraine’s resistance – the war appears to be in its end game.

Estimates of the damage caused by Russia’s campaign start at just under $200bn for the physical damage and run up to between $500bn to $1 trillion, depending on what is included in the calculation. The Centre for European Policy Analysis released a detailed report analysing the damage sector by sector in April this year.

All the talk and funding plans so far have focused on funding the budget to keep the government and the AFU working, but as the end of the war looms thoughts are slowly turning to how to pay for reconstruction. Currently, there is no plan.

At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London last year it was suggested that the private sector pays for the rebuild. However, fund managers told bne IntelliNews that was going to be a tough sell.

“Of course, Ukraine is a fantastic opportunity, but I would want to wait for at least a few years,” one famous veteran of Eastern Europe investment told bne IntelliNews. “We need to see the domestic political turmoil that will follow a ceasefire die down first and Bankova prove its commitment to a stable and predictable investment climate. And then there is the threat of a second Russian invasion that also needs to be abated.”

It’s a Catch-22 situation: the investment won’t come until the investment has already come and the post-war bounce-back-boom is well underway.

In the first year it will be up to the EU to prime the pump, however without the CBR’s $300bn budgets will be tight. According to another study by Elina Ribakova, non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, counting out the CBR money there is a total of some $75bn committed in the form of the EU’s Ukraine Facility and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) commitments. That may or may not be enough. And even getting old of that money will be hard: pre-war Ukraine typically received about $3bn a year from the IMF – half of its three-year Extended Fund Facility commitments, reduced due to Kyiv’s foot-dragging on promised reforms and eventually downgraded to a one-year Stand By Facility.

All these problems are likely to resurface after the war is open as Ukraine remains one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Ironically, Georgia is much further down the road to complying with the EU accession criteria thanks to the Saakashvili administration and the work of the late former-oligarch and reform major domo Kakha Bendukidze.

Damage is already done

In this context, confiscating the CBR’s money starts to look a lot more appealing. There is no other way to fund the investment needed to kick start Ukraine’s recovery and start that bounce-back-boom. And the investors are interested. In a long-forgotten story, there was a banking gold rush in 2006, when foreign investors rushed to Kyiv to snap up banks at crazy six-times book multiples after it appeared that Ukraine’s economy had finally turned the corner. But it all went wrong again in 2008 during the Great Financial Crisis and those same investors have been left licking their burnt fingers.

The biggest question left is what damage will seizing the CBR’s money do? The lawsuits are inevitable, but that problem can be coped with. However, in my personal opinion the damage to the EU’s reputation and the euro has already been done.

In the first week of the war European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held a press conference where she announced both the seizure of the CBR’s reserves and the introduction of the SWIFT sanctions that effectively cut Russia off from using the dollar. Both sanctions were unprecedented. The SWIFT sanctions had been mentioned in the run up to the war, but ruled out by Berlin in particular. The CBR sanctions came completely out of left field.

Underlying the objections to confiscating the CBR’s money is the assumption that once the war ends things will go back to normal and so preserving the trust in the euro and European banks is paramount. But thanks to the sanctions that trust has already been undermined in the eyes of the Global South bankers and central banks. The dollar is so deeply ingrained as the currency of choice to settle international trade deals that it can probably cope with the dent in its reputation it has taken from its weaponization, but the euro is a lot more vulnerable. Moreover, the reputational damage the EU has taken from its unabridged support of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, versus its backing of a de facto proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been significant.

Confiscating the CBR’s money will do a lot less damage than feared as the damage has already been done. Bottom line, there is no other way of funding Ukraine’s recovery other than seizing the CBR’s money.

Russia Matters, 1/3/24

1. Russia has refrained from direct attacks on the three nuclear plants which are located on the territories controlled by Kyiv and which are now responsible for most of Ukraine’s electricity. Rather than target these NPPS in what could trigger a “catastrophic disaster,” Russian forces have recently focused on crippling these power plants’ abilities to transmit power by destroying the substations connecting them to the grid, according to NYT. In an effort to prevent such crippling, Ukraine has asked the IAEA to have its personnel stay at the substations, but the agency has only agreed to send periodic monitoring missions. Together, the three NPPs can provide 7.7 gigawatts of electricity, more than half of the country’s current generation capacity, according to DiXi Group. Thus, Ukraine is left dependent on three old Soviet nuclear reactors for as much as two–thirds of the country’s electricity generation. It is also highly unlikely that the IAEA will agree to have its personnel serve as human shields at Ukraine’s three NPPs.
2. Russia gained 227 square miles of territory (589 square kilometers, roughly the size of Chicago) in the month preceding Dec. 31, 2024, according to The Economist. In the past two weeks alone, the Russian armed forces have captured Makarivka, Sukhi Yaly and Zelenivka, Ukrainka, Dachenske, Novyi Trud and Vovkove, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group. To compensate for being outgunned and outmanned, the Ukrainian armed forces have recently resorted to badly-needed innovations, such as the first attack relying solely on unmanned ground vehicles, which occurred north of Kharkiv City on Dec. 20. In another instance of innovation, on Dec. 31 a Ukrainian naval drone shot down a Russian military helicopter for the first time, according to Ukraine’s intelligence service cited by Bloomberg.  
3. Ukrainian authorities have launched a criminal probe into mass desertions in the country’s 155th mechanized brigade named after Anne of Kyiv and trained in France, according to Kyiv Independent. At least 50 of the brigade’s servicemen disappeared while they were still being drilled in France, according to Telegraph. By the time the brigade entered battle for the first time, at least 1,700 of its troops had gone AWOL, according to this UK newspaper. Figures published by the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office show that more than 90,000 cases have been opened into instances of soldiers going absent without leave or deserting since Russia invaded in 2022, according to AFP.
4. The U.S. government has said it will allocate almost $6 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, as Biden rushes to provide Kyiv with fresh firepower before his presidency expires, FT reported. The transfer includes $1.25 billion in assistance from U.S. weapons and ammunition stockpiles, as well as $1.22 billion which allows Ukraine to purchase goods directly from the U.S. defense industry. The package includes ammunition for the high mobility artillery rocket system, air defense munitions and anti-tank missiles.
5. Russia’s two top diplomats have signaled the pending end of what the Kremlin has claimed to be a self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles that were once banned by the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. First, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused the U.S. of deploying such missiles in Asia and Europe in an interview with Kommersant on Dec. 27. Then his boss, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov weighed in two days later, asserting that “it is obvious that, for example, our moratorium on the deployment of INF missiles is already practically unviable and will have to be abandoned.”
6. In the waning days of 2024, Vladimir Putin expressed readiness to meet Donald Trump in the new year to discuss ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the Russian leadership was also quick to reject some of the key elements of a hypothetical peace deal proposed by Trump’s aides and his Western European counterparts. Among the rejected elements were immediate unconditional ceasefire, the stationing of a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine and the deferral of Ukraine’s membership in NATO for 20 years. In fact, “nothing from the incoming U.S. administration suggests anything of interest to us,” Russia’s envoy to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya said of the Trump team’s proposals.
7. A most paradoxical feature of Russian-Ukrainian interaction throughout the course of the war has been that, in spite of the hostilities, Ukraine has continued to allow the transit of Russian gas through its territory. Not anymore. At 8 a.m. on Jan. 1, Russian gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine stopped, following the expiration of the transit contract. The route through Ukraine was one of the last two routes still carrying Russian gas to Europe. Its closure means EU countries will lose about 5% of gas imports in the middle of winter, according to FT.

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 12/30/24

The former President Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter was elected by a convincing margin over the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 and served one term. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, passed away in November 2023.

His presidency is perhaps among the most misunderstood in recent American history.

==

Unique among presidents, Carter’s post-presidential years will likely be the focus of much of the forthcoming commentary on his life. If we agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “greatness is the perception that virtue is good enough,” then on that basis, Carter’s post-presidential life was indeed great.

The caricature that emerged of Carter’s presidency—one that has been lodged in the popular imagination for some 40 years—has always been misleading. Carter, so we are told, was idealistic but weak. The truth is far more interesting—though ultimately the direction his foreign policy took does not redound to Carter’s credit.

No real discussion of U.S. foreign policy under Carter is possible without an in-depth consideration of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who broke into Carter’s inner circle early on. Like his fellow emigre Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was ambitious to the point of shamelessness. During the ’76 campaign, Brzezinski, according to the former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, also made himself available to a number of Carter’s opponents including Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh.

Some saw trouble brewing early on. Robert Lovett, one of Washington’s legendary “Wise Men” and Harry Truman’s fourth and final secretary of defense, sniped, “We really shouldn’t have a national security advisor like that who isn’t really an American.”

Lovett was righter than he knew. In the decades that followed, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was flooded with Brzezinski proteges, including Bill Clinton’s foreign-born secretary of state, Madeleine Korbel Albright. The parochial concerns of bureaucrats, operatives and think-tank fixtures with competing national loyalties have had an undue influence on American foreign policy in the decades since—even resulting in the impeachment of a sitting president in December 2019 on the grounds that these people did not like what their ostensible boss, the president, was saying to a foreign leader.

The importance of a new president choosing the right people or the right combination of people cannot be overstated. Carter fumbled early on when, under pressure from the growing caucus of neocons (who were still, in late 1976 and early 1977, mainly Democrats, before jumping ship for Reagan four years later) led by Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, he decided not to go with his first choice for secretary of state, the former under secretary of state George Ball.

In a conversation with the historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002, Carter recalled his concerns over whether Ball could win Senate confirmation; after all, “he had the courage to question aspects of America’s attachment to Israel.” And Ball’s “outspokenness on the Middle East would have made it difficult for him to pass confirmation hearings. So I chose Cyrus Vance.”

Brzezinski would likely have had a harder time besting Ball, whose lonely, principled, and prescient opposition to the war in Vietnam as a member of Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle is too often forgotten. Carter’s first mistake, then, was to hand the Israel lobby a scalp without so much as a fight. The second mistake was making Brzezinski primus inter pares among his advisers.

After the election, Carter’s campaign manager Hamilton Jordan was quoted as saying, “If after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” But as Brinkley wryly notes, “Both men, as it turned out, were selected for those posts, and Jordan never quit.”

Brzezinski’s scholarly work on the Soviet Union should have been a red flag. He was a leading proponent of what was known as the “totalitarian school,” which posited that the internal dynamics of the Soviet system largely explained its behavior abroad. Scholars like Brzezinski drew a straight line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no allowances were made for the vagaries of succeeding Soviet regimes. The late professor of Russian politics at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, who was a leading theorist of the rival “revisionist school,” had crossed paths with Brzezinski at Columbia in the 1960s. Cohen was critical of what he saw as the “deterministic quality” of the scholarship produced by high profile members of the “totalitarian school” such as Brzezinski and Harvard’s Adam B. Ulam, who, like Brzezinski, was a Polish immigrant.

Brzezinski, drawing that straight line, had posited that, “Perhaps the most enduring achievement of Leninism was the dogmatization of the party, thereby in effect both preparing and causing the next stage, that of Stalinism.”

Yet, as Cohen later noted,

‘the totalitarianism school became consensus Sovietology on the basis of generalizations that claimed to explain the Soviet past, present and future. It turned out to be wrong, or seriously misleading, on all counts.”

The myopia that characterized Brzezinski’s approach to U.S.–Soviet relations was perhaps to be expected from the son of a Polish diplomat. Under Brzezinski, Kissinger and Nixon’s detente (a policy they borrowed from France’s Charles de Gaulle) never stood a chance. And his misreading of Soviet history led, quite naturally, to mistakes down the line.

The power that Brzezinski wielded on behalf of “the Captive Nations” lobby (i.e. emigres from the nations comprising the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) led Carter into some perilous cul-de-sacs. And nowhere was this more so than in Afghanistan, which ranks among the Carter administration’s most serious foreign policy bungles.

What happened in Afghanistan in 1979–1980 was essentially a Soviet overreaction to American meddling that was met with a subsequent American overreaction. The sequence—if not the interpretation—was confirmed by Brzezinski himself in a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur.

“According to the official version of history,” said Brzezinski,

“CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Once the Soviets intervened to protect the regime of their client, the Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki, the Carter administration, at Brzezinski’s urging, convinced itself that Moscow’s ultimate aim was to dominate the Persian Gulf. Carter melodramatically pronounced the invasion as “the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War.” Yet, as the distinguished Cold War scholar John Lamberton Harper notes, “to consider such a move plausible meant assuming Moscow believed it could overcome the combined resistance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Once again, it required doubting not only the Russians’ declarations but their sanity as well.”

The Carter Doctrine, authored by Brzezinski, was the formal policy response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the same way the Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to a perpetual role in Europe, the Carter Doctrine transformed the Persian Gulf into a U.S. protectorate in all but name. Carter’s policy was unveiled during his final State of the Union address in January 1980 in which he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Our decades-long misadventure in the Greater Middle East had begun in earnest.

Brzezinski passed away in 2017 at the age of 89, yet his approach to foreign affairs remains broadly influential. For years, he served as a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and as a fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. He helped spawn generations of imitators who staff the think tanks, graduate schools of international relations, and the national-security bureaucracy today. While a number of his later books correctly castigated the errors of the Bush administration and eloquently warned of the increasing fragility of the American social order, it would be hard to argue with the withering judgement of Hodding Carter, a journalist who served as State Department spokesman under Cyrus Vance. He condemned Brzezinski as “a second-rate thinker in a field infested with poseurs and careerists [who] never let consistency get in the way of self-promotion or old theories impede new policy acrobatics.”

No account of Carter’s foreign policy would be complete without a consideration of his administration’s policy toward Iran.

By the late 1970s, the regime of the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a stalwart U.S. ally since the CIA-engineered overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, was teetering on the precipice of collapse. In November 1978, George Ball was summoned back to Washington at the request of the president in order to provide an objective analysis of the unfolding situation in Tehran.

Ball had long experience in dealing with Iran, going back to his days as under secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson; from his perch as a partner at Lehman Brothers, he had kept in intermittent contact with the shah in the ensuing years.

What Ball saw upon returning to Washington did not encourage him. Assigned to an office in the NSC, Ball witnessed the dysfunction that plagued the policymaking process under Brzezinski, who, as Ball recalls, “was systematically excluding the State Department from the shaping or conduct of our Iranian policy. To ensure the Department’s insulation, he admonished me, immediately on my arrival, that I should not talk to the State Department’s Iranian desk officer, because he ‘leaked’—an instruction I, of course, immediately disregarded.”

Ball handed his report on the situation to the president and the NSC just over a year later, December 1979. He recommended that Washington help the shah accept the reality of his “precarious power position and help him face it.” Carter should, Ball advised, make clear that the only chance he had to “retain our support is for him to transfer his power to a government responsible to the people.”

But Carter and Brzezinski wouldn’t budge.

As Princeton’s Richard Falk observed at the time, “when most others in Washington had given up on the shah, Brzezinski continued his plot for survival.”

The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 66 American hostages was a direct consequence of the decision by Carter (with the support of, among others, Kissinger, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Brzezinski) to admit the shah into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. The decision was made over the objections of the State Department’s man in Tehran, chargé d’affaires L. Bruce Laingen, who opined in a memo that “with the power of the mullahs growing, admission of the shah, even on humanitarian grounds, might provoke a severe disturbance.”

By April 1980, Vance felt he had no choice but to resign. He was and remains only the third secretary of state to do so. The proximate cause was Vance’s opposition to Carter’s decision to send in American forces to rescue the hostages.

The deeper issue was the betrayal and unprofessionalism of Carter and his national security team, led by Brzezinski, which called a meeting of the National Security Council to approve the ultimately ill-fated hostage rescue plan while Vance was on vacation in California. In this, Vance was also betrayed by his deputy, Warren Christopher, later to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, who declined to inform Vance of the meeting until after Vance had returned to Washington. The mission failed. On April 24 one of the eight rescue helicopters collided with a parked C-130 transport plane in the Iranian desert. The doomed mission likely also doomed Carter’s prospects for reelection.

Carter’s reputation as a peacemaker rests largely on his successful brokering of the Camp David Accords and his post-presidential diplomacy. His reputation also benefited thanks to his elevation of “human rights” as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy which has often been the object of praise by scholars and foreign policy practitioners. Indeed, the moralizing that has become a defining feature of American foreign policy in recent decades has it roots in the Carter years.

The problem, as we have come to see, is that such sentiments are too easily appropriated by those who wish to see the U.S. forever embroiled in far-off sectarian conflicts in the Middle East. It was, of course, under the cover of such “humanitarian” concerns that Brzezinski’s heirs in the Obama national security apparatus, including Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and, above all, Hillary Clinton, fought tooth and nail for the disastrous policies of regime change in Libya and covert war in Syria.

By the end of his presidency he had come around to fully embracing Brzezinski’s worldview. The decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s blundering military campaign in Afghanistan was a deeply unserious way for a great power to conduct itself—not least because it was the actions of the Carter administration that precipitated the Soviet invasion.

None of this was lost on a sizable number of Democrats who, by the time Carter ran for reelection, had urged Ted Kennedy to challenge him in the Democratic primary. Perhaps foremost among Carter’s critics within the Democratic establishment was the historian and former Kennedy adviser, Arthur M. Schlesinger. He denounced Carter in the pages of the New Republic, writing, “1980 has been his banner year for blunders; and what is finally destroying his immunity is less his confusion in grand strategy, impressive as this has been, than his incorrigible incompetence in detail.”

Carter, who had easily bested Schlesinger’s friend in the primaries, owed his resurrection in the polls to, in Schlesinger’s words, “two international crises—Iran and Afghanistan—that he himself helped bring about.”

Still worse, with the passage of time, Carter’s presidency more and more resembles that of a more recent vintage—that of another inexperienced Southern governor who campaigned on cleaning up a sordid mess left by his predecessor. Like Carter, that president was captured by hardline neoconservative advisers and schemers put in place around him. His experienced and moderate secretary of state got frozen out—indeed, had circles run around him by the fanatical hardliners within the national security bureaucracy. The president, on the advice of these hardliners, stumbled and overreached and committed the U.S. to a series of objectives it could not possibly, even plausibly, fulfill.

The big difference, of course, is that George W. Bush got elected to a second term. But the policies—particularly in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf— adopted by Carter on the advice of Brzezinski paved the way for what was tragically to come some two decades later, in the autumn of 2001.