BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
As the big-business media hailed the "warm personal relations" between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his friend "Bill," U.S. president William Clinton reaffirmed Washington's war preparations against Russia with its plans to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into eastern and central Europe. At his March 20-21 conference with Yeltsin in Helsinki, Finland, Clinton maintained the U.S. rulers' course. Washington's ultimate goal in this endeavor is overthrowing the workers state in Russia and reestablishing capitalism there.

Speaking to the Russian parliament two weeks before the Helsinki meeting, Yeltsin said NATO's proposed eastward enlargement would cause "direct damage to our security." Its purpose, he added was "the desire to oust Russia from Europe, to achieve its strategic isolation," and would "have a high cost for the peoples of Europe."

"I have reaffirmed that NATO enlargement and the Madrid summit will proceed," Clinton declared at a news conference after the Helsinki meeting. He said the meeting addressed the challenge of helping Russia "complete its remarkable transformation to a market economy."

The NATO conference in Madrid is scheduled for July 7-9, where a formal announcement for new candidates for membership is expected to include the governments of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Plans will be discussed to accept them into the imperialist military alliance by 1999 - the organization's 50th anniversary. NATO officials say other nations could join the alliance by the end of the decade.

In a joint statement signed by both presidents, Yeltsin reiterated "Russian concerns that NATO enlargement will lead to a potentially threatening buildup of permanently stationed combat forces of NATO near to Russia." Almost every political figure in Moscow has opposed Clinton's plan to move NATO troops closer to Russia's borders. "Russia's approach to NATO expansion will not change regardless of any summit, bilateral meetings, and negotiations," Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the presidential spokesman, said on the eve of the Helsinki meeting.

Anatoly Chubais, who was recently appointed deputy prime minister by Yeltsin and is widely touted in the bourgeois media as a pro-capitalist "reformer," told Time magazine the NATO enlargement "will lead to negative consequences for the security of Russia and for the whole of Europe."

Several days before the Helsinki summit, Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov met with U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and defense secretary William Cohen to discuss disagreements over missile defenses and strategic arms.

Although NATO issued a pledge claiming it has "no need, no intention, and no plan" to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members, the Clinton administration officials asserted NATO will not promise "never" to do so. The imperialist spokespersons also insisted on the right to send in combat troops whenever they deem necessary and rejected Moscow's demands not to modernize military installations and equipment in the new member nations.

Operation Sea Breeze
An article in the March 20 Washington Post reporting on U.S.-Ukraine war games scheduled for Aug. 26-31 - just weeks after the Madrid summit - highlighted "rising Russian distrust" of Washington's military intentions. According to the article, Clinton administration officials supposedly rejected the original scenario for the military maneuvers called "Operation Sea Breeze," where a separatist revolt by an unnamed "ethnically based party" is threatening the integrity of Ukraine. The separatists - thinly disguised Crimean Russians - are backed by an unnamed "neighboring country."

Officials in Washington instead supposedly proposed an alternative plot for the military operation in which civil unrest by unidentified "armed factions" is sparked by an earthquake. Under that scenario the Ukrainian government is supposed to call for a multinational "peacekeeping force" and "humanitarian aid." Washington then leads a naval convoy on a rescue mission to provide medicine, blankets, and evacuation for the wounded.

News that the U.S. government was organizing a major naval exercise in which the main enemy was Russia provoked an uproar in Moscow. "It's a provocative scenario," stated Dmitri Ryurikov, a foreign policy adviser to Yeltsin.

Clinton administration officials claimed the operation is "in the spirit of" NATO's Partnership for Peace plan and suggested that the Kremlin along with military forces from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and other European regimes were invited to participate. A previous U.S.- Ukrainian exercise was conducted in 1995 off the Crimean coast, which went off without controversy given that Washington had not yet presented its military expansion plans.

In response to news about Operation Sea Breeze, Russia's air defense forces staged a defense maneuver against mock air and territory attacks, the first such war games since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. "The exercises have shown that the air defense troops reliably protect Russian air space and guarantee its national security despite an acute shortage of funds," remarked air defense head Gen. Viktor Prudnikov to the Russian Tass news agency.

Military concessions from Moscow
Secretary of State Albright, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili, and several other senior U.S. military officials joined Clinton in arm-twisting sessions to press the Kremlin into swallowing other proposals.

Yeltsin agreed to push the Russian parliament for ratification of the so-called Start II arms reduction agreement, which calls for elimination of Moscow's land- based multiple warhead nuclear missiles by 2003. These missiles have been the backbone of Moscow's nuclear arsenal. The parliament has balked at ratifying the treaty, signed in 1993, out of fears that Washington has been pressing for an unfair advantage in nuclear weapons by developing strategic missile defenses. The negotiations allowed Washington to keep its submarine-based multi- warhead missiles and to proceed with all six anti-missile systems currently under development by the Pentagon, including the most advanced, known as Navy Upper Tier.

The Clinton administration tossed a sop to Moscow for accepting some of the military concessions. "We will substantially increase Russia's role at our annual meeting, now to be called the Summit of the Eight in Denver this June," Clinton announced at the Helsinki news conference. That meeting of government officials from the Group of Seven major industrialized capitalist countries will still exclude Russian officials from some of the economic discussions. Another bone dangled at Yeltsin was an offer to promote Moscow's membership in the World Trade Organization by 1998 and the Paris Club of "creditor nations."

Politicians continue NATO debate
The debate among ruling-class figures over NATO has continued in the media. Ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan added another word of opposition to NATO expansion in his March 19 New York Post column. Buchanan's main objection is that Washington is not "truly prepared for an all-out naval war or nuclear confrontation."

Another bourgeois "skeptic" of NATO enlargement, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, said Clinton's argument that expanding NATO will bring stability to Russia and Central Europe is based on "white lies." The way to overthrow these workers states is by "bringing these nations into the EU common market, not by giving them nukes," he added.

Friedman's hesitations mirrored those of George Kennan, who warned in a February 5 New York Times opinion piece that NATO expansion could "inflame the nationalistic, anti- Western and militaristic tendencies in Russia" and constitute "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era."

Kennan, dubbed the "Dean of American Sovietologists," was the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952 and helped formulate the Truman administration's policy of containment of the Soviet workers state, which heralded the period known as the Cold War. While warnings by Kennan and others may have an effect on bourgeois public opinion on this issue, "all the pressure, in terms of organized pressure, is in favor of expansion," an unnamed Clinton administration official told the Washington Post.

One cheerleader for the imperialist military preparations, columnist William Safire, demanded Clinton stop "apologizing" for the war preparations and instead broaden the expansion by "bringing in the Baltic states." Safire is pinning his hopes on "Yabloko, the only serious non-Communist party" that is "building a national political organization" to overturn property relations in Russia. He called on Chubais, who helped mastermind Yeltsin's election campaign, to make peace with Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of Yabloko.

Chubais, for his part, tried to assure the imperialists that their war moves are unnecessary. In Russia "there were no massive demonstrations as in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia," he told Time magazine. "There is no huge social tension in Russia."

Meanwhile, Moscow is $10 billion behind on paying wages to workers, soldiers, and other layers in society. The unions are planning a national day of protest strikes March 27. London's Financial Times reported March 19 that Russian politician Alexander Lebed "has warned that these protests could ignite an Albanian-style popular revolt."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home