>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov4uHDqyHzI

President Nixon's Trip to China: Fifty Years Later

>173 views | Feb 25, 2022 | CFR

On the anniversary of President Nixon's February 1972 trip to China, our panelists examine the significance of the trip and its influence on U.S. foreign policy, how U.S.-China relations have fared in the fifty years since the visit, and the challenges ahead for the two countries.

The Lessons From History Series uses historical analysis as a critical tool for understanding modern foreign policy challenges by hearing from practitioners who played an important role in a consequential historical event or from experts and historians. This series is made possible through the generous support of David M. Rubenstein.

Speakers

Winston Lord

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Lord

Chairman Emeritus, International Rescue Committee; Former U.S. Ambassador to China (1985–1989); Former President, Council on Foreign Relations (1977–1985); Former Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor (1970–1973); CFR Member

Oriana Skylar Mastro

>https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/oriana-skylar-mastro

Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University; Senior Nonresident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Member, CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on a U.S. Response to China's Belt and Road Initiative; CFR Term Member

Timothy Naftali

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Naftali

Clinical Associate Professor of History and Public Service, New York University; Coauthor, Impeachment: An American History; Founding Director, Richard Nixon Presidential Library

Presider

Douglas G. Brinkley

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Brinkley

Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History, Rice University; Coeditor, The Nixon Tapes; CFR Member

wl down

>>15723899

>wl down

>https://www.unz.com/pescobar/from-the-black-sea-to-the-east-med-dont-poke-the-russian-bear/

From the Black Sea to the East Med, Don't Poke the Russian Bear

>PEPE ESCOBAR • FEBRUARY 24, 2022 • 1,200 WORDS • 219 COMMENTS

This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born in breathtaking speed.

From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a history lesson delivered by President Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to their appeal to President Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process.

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced its paws to pounce – was Zelensky the Comedian, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon.

Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American concept invented to launch wars in MENA (remember Libya?) was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.

First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since going to Syria in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation (…) aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine”, as Putin defined it.

Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandon any plans to join NATO; negotiate directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarize and declare Ukraine as neutral.

Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters: the Russian demand for “indivisible security”.

The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were boxed in as the occupying force of territories of two Russian allies that Moscow had just sworn to protect.

So it was Get Out – Or Else. “Or else” came as rolling thunder: the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air Force, Navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.

And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the artillery of one of the Baby Twins, the DPR, that hit the HQ of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.