Promises Promises

Little South East Asia trust in US, Lula's Zelensky moment at G7, Denmark seeks peace role after taking Ukraine side, NATO's broken promises, Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia

May 25, 2023

UPDATE: South East Asian countries overwhelmingly identify China as the most influential economic, political and strategic power in the region. The majority of ASEAN member states generally do not look to the US to champion the global free trade agenda.

Lula had an eventful few days at last weekend’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, with one clear takeaway: relations between Brazil and Ukraine are colder now than they were last week. Indeed, one might even conclude that the Brazilian president is now giving up on the prospect of contributing to a formal peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine ally Denmark is willing to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia next July said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, “If Ukraine finds that the time has come to have such a meeting, that would be fantastic.”

Southeast Asian Views on the United States: Perceptions Versus Objective Reality

Every year since 2019, the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute has been publishing its State of Southeast Asia (SSEA) survey report to capture the perceptions of experts and opinion-makers across Southeast Asia on strategic matters. The most recent paper focuses on the data trends surrounding the region’s perceptions of US power and influence in contrast to those that it has on China, views on US leadership on the economic, strategic and political fronts, and levels of trust and confidence in the US.

Data trends from 2019 and 2023 show respondents have overwhelmingly identified China not only as the most influential economic power in Southeast Asia, but also as the most influential politically and strategically.
The trends also suggest that ASEAN countries have remained ambivalent about the US’ regional leadership role on multiple fronts. The majority of ASEAN member states generally do not look to the US to champion the global free trade agenda. The European Union is most often looked to as an alternative to US leadership on this front.
Among the ASEAN6 economies – Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines – confidence in the US as a reliable strategic partner and provider of regional security has been steadily declining since 2021. The decline has been sharpest in Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia.
But when forced to choose between China and the US, the region in general has expressed a growing preference to align with the US. However, it is significant that in 2023, respondents from the three Muslim-majority states - Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei - picked China over the US.

These indicators suggest that there is still a reservoir of goodwill towards the US in the region, but this is being depleted in some countries and cannot be taken for granted. Secondly, many ASEAN countries probably still hope that the US would exercise stronger leadership in the region especially amidst growing anxieties about the rise of China, but there is a clear undercurrent of pessimism and some disillusionment even amongst some of the US’ closest partners about its willingness and commitment to do so.

Download the report here.

Lula walks away from G7 less interested in ending war in Ukraine

Brazil’s president claims Zelensky stood him up at the summit in a he-said, he-said tit-for-tat, making his role as peacemaker more elusive. Lula had an eventful few days at last weekend’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, with one clear takeaway: relations between Brazil and Ukraine are colder now than they were last week. Indeed, one might even conclude that the Brazilian president is now giving up on the prospect of contributing to a formal peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Since before taking office in January, Lula has insisted that both Russia and Ukraine should stop fighting and begin discussing peace terms. He has argued for convening a small group of countries — including Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation and the world’s fourth-largest democracy — with no direct involvement in the conflict to mediate negotiations.

This position has been criticized widely for equating Russian and Ukrainian culpability in the ongoing conflagration and indicating a tacit endorsement of Russia’s position that the war resulted from years of NATO-led provocations on its Western flank.

Some have called Lula either hopelessly naïve or deeply cynical. The reality, however, is that Lula’s position is rational considering his nation’s interests. As Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, wrote in a recent piece, “while it is tempting to dismiss Lula’s quest for peace in Ukraine as quixotic, Brazil’s assertiveness reveals broader misgivings across the global south about the inclusiveness of the supposedly liberal international order.”

With this stance clearly expressed, Celso Amorim, Lula’s former foreign minister and closest adviser on international affairs, visited Ukraine earlier this month after having previously traveled to Russia. While Ukraine’s deputy minister of foreign affairs tweeted: “We are slowly changing the mood between Ukraine and Brazil”, Brazil hasn’t appeared to change its position in the days after that trip. The Ukrainians invited Lula to visit but he has yet to accept the offer and there has been very little reported communication between Brazilian and Ukrainian officials. This is why President Volodymyr Zelensky’s sudden arrival at the G7 summit on Saturday — a visit “decided in haste and kept secret until the last moment,” according to Le Monde — was such an intriguing diplomatic development. Would he and Lula finally sit down together?

Ultimately, they would not. As Zelensky entered the room where heads of state were gathered on Sunday, footage shows several leaders approaching to greet him. Lula, eyes fixed on a piece of paper in his hand, did not get up. Zelensky would go on to hold private meetings with most of the assembled heads of state. He apparently got no firm response from the Brazilians for hours. Finally, Lula scheduled a talk for Sunday at 3:15 p.m., but when the time came, he claims Zelensky stood him up. Lula then met with the Vietnamese president for an hour during which, he said, the Ukrainian never showed.

The broader dynamics that Lula has been criticizing for months remain unchanged, as he noted, with neither Zelensky nor Putin serious about an immediate ceasefire. Biden, Lula said, “doesn’t talk about peace,” insisting instead on unilateral Russian surrender, an approach that “doesn’t help” end the conflict. The Brazilian president reiterated his condemnation of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine’s sovereignty and his recognition that Ukraine has the right to defend itself but wondered, “how long will this go?”

Overall, the G7’s attempts to more prominently feature major players from beyond the richest democratic nations produced little substance. As Max Lawson, head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, put it, “if the G7 really want closer ties to the developing countries and greater backing from them for the war in Ukraine, then asking Global South leaders to fly across the world for a couple of hours is not going to cut it.”

Denmark wants to host Ukraine peace summit in July

Denmark is willing to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia next July. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said “Copenhagen would ‘obviously like to host’ negotiations”. “If Ukraine finds that the time has come to have such a meeting, that would be fantastic,” Rasmussen said upon arriving at the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels.

“Then Denmark would obviously like to host the meeting” which would need engagement from “countries like India, Brazil and China,” the foreign minister said, adding that it was “hard for [him] to see” Russia attending.

Although Moscow and Kyiv have said they were open to peace talks, they hold diverging views on what the starting point of negotiations should be.

Ukraine has set the restoration of its territorial integrity, as well as “building security architecture in the Euro-Atlantic space, including guarantees for Ukraine” as preconditions for peace talks.

Russia has said Ukraine needed to be “neutral,” refrain from joining NATO and the EU, and wants the international community to recognize the territories it annexed for peace talks to begin.

Several countries from the Global South have sought to position themselves as intermediaries for peace talks in recent months.

China and Brazil have both sent emissaries to Moscow and Kyiv, while India has said it was ready to contribute to a peace process — but Ukraine’s Western partners have raised doubts over their credibility.

Some Western leaders have slammed Beijing’s attempts as unrealistic, given its position as one of Moscow’s top allies.

In April, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sparked fury among Ukraine’s Western allies by saying they were prolonging the war by supplying Kyiv with weapons.

Lula was supposed to meet his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the G7 summit in Japan over the weekend, but the meeting could not take place because Zelenskyy was late, Reuters reported.

NATO’s Broken Promises

NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe never had anything to do with security in any meaningful sense. In the continuing conflict between the United States and Russia, the central issue has always been the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from its original boundaries in Central Europe during the Cold War. Recent efforts to incorporate Ukraine into NATO have greatly aggravated Russian suspicions, contributing to Russia’s rationale for their massing of troops on Ukrainian borders.

It is true that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a repressive leader with a poor human rights record, but that is no reason for the U.S. to risk undertaking a war. On the issue of NATO expansion, Putin has a legitimate complaint. If Ukraine were to join NATO, it would establish a U.S. ally on Russia’s southern border with the potential of U.S. military bases being aimed against Russia. We must consider this counterfactual: How would the U.S. respond if Russia were planning a military alliance with Mexico or Canada? There is no way of getting around the fact that NATO’s expansion has been profoundly destabilizing.

It is important to consider the historical context of Russian grievance: It is a matter of record that in 1990, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not expand NATO into the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe. In exchange, Gorbachev agreed not to oppose the upcoming reunification of Germany. Gorbachev fulfilled his part of the deal — Germany was reunified without Soviet objection — but then the U.S. promptly began laying plans to expand NATO. By 1999, the former communist states of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic all joined NATO, disregarding the promises made to Gorbachev. Then, NATO continued expanding into most of Eastern Europe, as well as three former Soviet states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russian officials have repeatedly objected to what they describe as U.S.’s bad faith regarding its past promises not to expand NATO.

Some former officials contest this history. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently stated: “The idea that we somehow crossed some line with the Russians, I think, is a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, just like the idea that somehow Jim Baker, all the way back in 1990, said we would never move east. What we were talking about at the time was East Germany… Nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.” These claims are very doubtful. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has released a large number of previously classified documents that strongly suggest that — as Russian leaders have argued — the U.S. did indeed promise not to expand NATO, and that this promise extended beyond East Germany. I will quote from the summary of the documents, written by Archive staff:

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. [Emphasis added.]

Clearly, present-day Russian complaints about U.S. deceptions regarding NATO’s expansion have a foundation in the historical record.

It is a matter of record that in 1990, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not expand NATO into the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe.

The U.S. expansion of NATO reflected an attitude of recklessness and hubris. According to former Defense Secretary William Perry, the predominant view of Russia in the Clinton administration was: “Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.”

At least some senior figures were alarmed by the U.S.’s arrogance. Former CIA Director Robert Gates later criticised NATO’s eastward expansion, arguing that it was a bad move since Gorbachev was “led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

Read full article here.

Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be renewed.

The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.

Key Takeaways

Henry Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and groundbreaking interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
The archive offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.
Previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks reveal new details of the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.
Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
When questioned about these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians; to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

Read full article here.

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