US Scholar Scolds Obama for Letting Neocons Run Wild in Ukraine

In an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “What Went Wrong,” David Bromwich summarizes the lost chances of Obama presidency to generate real change in the US domestic and foreign policy, and make a clear break from the policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Bromwich, one of top professors from Yale University, criticizes Obama for choosing “the path of least resistance” and not making enough sacrifices for his views and pre-election promises.

In a page on the US role in the Ukraine conflict, the author elucidates what we have been saying all along here at Russia Insider.

Referring to the aftermath of the coup in Kiev, Bromwich writes:

The later stages of the enterprise called for the defamation of Vladimir Putin, which went into high gear with the 2014 Sochi Olympics and has not yet abated.

When Nuland appeared in Kiev to hand out cookies to the anti-Russian protesters, it was as if a Russian operative had arrived to cheer a mass of anti-American protesters in Baja California.

We have witnessed 18 months of relentless, unwarranted Russia bashing by the corporate media, and Western diplomats. Bromwich is one of the rare scholars willing to admit at least that.

Bromwich goes on to say that neo-cons took a hold of Obama’s foreign policy–letting Obama off the hook for the Ukraine chaos – and that he, choosing the path of least resistance, did not object as it absolved him of the responsibility for the outcome.

Through the many months of assisted usurpation, no word of reprimand ever issued from President Obama.

An intercepted phone call in which Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the ambassador to Ukraine, could be heard picking the leaders of the government they aimed to install after the coup aroused no scandal in the American press.

But what could Obama have been thinking? Was he remotely aware of the implications of the crisis—a crisis that plunged Ukraine into a civil war and splintered U.S. diplomacy with Russia in a way that nothing in Obama’s history could lead one to think he wished for?

His subsequent statements on the matter have all been delivered in a sedative nudge-language that speaks of measures to change the behaviour of a greedy rival power.

As in Libya, the evasion of responsibility has been hard to explain. It almost looks as if a cell of the State Department assumed the management of Ukraine policy and the president was helpless to alter their design.

There is a big question mark whether he was in fact "helpless" to affect US foreign policy. How can that be? Doesn't the corporate media tells us that US president is the most powerful person on Earth?

The author’s explanation for Obama’s frequent change of mind is the power of the State Department over the White House:

There is a sense—commonly felt but rarely reflected upon by the American public— in which at critical moments a figure like John Brennan or Victoria Nuland may matter more than the president himself.

There could be no surer confirmation of that fact than the frequent inconsequence of the president’s words, or, to put it another way, the embarrassing frequency with which his words are contradicted by subsequent events.

Bromwich adds:

Edward Snowden, in an interview published in The Nation in November 2014, seems to have identified the pattern. “The Obama Administration,” he said, “almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts . . . leaks and things like that.”

John Brennan gave substance to this surmise when he told Charlie Rose recently that the new president, in 2009, “did not have a good deal of experience” in national security, but now “he has gone to school and understands the complexities.”

This is not the tone of a public servant talking about his superior. It is the tone of a schoolmaster describing an obedient pupil.