Opinions #1/25

New Year’s Eve, good intentions. As Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, hoped in Forbes nearly a decade ago. The laudable goal is simple: before we accuse others, we should avoid committing the same “sins” we are protesting against. He was referring to the interference in the American election, which during Trump’s first victory (over Hillary Clinton) was attributed without a shadow of a doubt to Moscow’s actions. The same thing, but on a smaller scale, was replicated in recent months during the USA-2024 campaign, then Trump’s big win has drawn the gun of the mainstream. Since then, and it’s been less than two months, the Biden administration’s finger against Russian meddling has moved to other sectors. First in Moldova, where the opposition, which has given Euro-Atlantic President Maia Sandu a hard time, was accused of receiving direct and indirect support from Moscow to bring the small former Soviet republic back into its orbit. Ignoring the intervention of European Commission President von der Leyen, who, a few days before the presidential election, raised the risk of non- payment of the nearly two billion euros promised in Chisinau in case of defeat of the pro- European front. The real game will unfold next summer, during the political election. Meanwhile, accusations of anti-democratic conspiracy have hit an even more significant country, Romania, a full member of the EU and NATO. Here, alleged foreign interference even led to the cancelation of the first round of the presidential election, in which right-wing nationalist candidate Calin Georgescu, who opposed military aid to Ukraine and favored restoring relations with Russia, unexpectedly stood out. The sensational decision, also called “illegal and immoral” by the leader of the pro-European Front, was explained by a report by Romanian intelligence services, according to which one million euros were spent on the TikTok platform for Georgescu’s election campaign. The payer could be programmer and businessman Bogdan Peshir, whom the media call “the Carpathian Elon Musk”. In reality, there were no violations, falsifications, protests at polling stations. But the “uncomfortable” candidate is accused of using ads paid for on a social media platform by a patron who admired him. Those who followed the American presidential election will find curious analogies to the case in Romania, but that doesn’t make censors and propagandists any more cautious. In a feverish action in support of “our principles and our values”, street mobilization was also cultivated in Georgia, another former Soviet republic. In Tbilisi, as they had twenty years earlier against President Shevardnadze and his majority in parliament, protests began against the “illegitimate” assumption of power by the elected deputies and the president they had voted for to replace the ultra-Atlantic Salome Zurabishvili, at the end of her term. At the time of the election, international observers (International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy, ISFED, and OSCE) did not identify any significant violations or irregularities that could invalidate the result announced by the election Commission. Nevertheless, attempts to propose another “color revolution” near Russia have been going on for weeks now, using the same tools and resources that Washington has invested over the past 25 years, from Belgrade to Bishkek. Nina Agrawal wrote, at the time, an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the many tools her country, the United States, uses to advance its interests: “These acts, two- thirds of the time done in secret, include funding specific party election campaigns, disseminating disinformation or propaganda, training locals of one party in various methods of campaigning or voter incitement, helping a party develop its own party materials, making public statements or threats in favor or against a candidate, and giving or withholding foreign aid ”. Bandow himself, by the way, recalls that “in 1996, Washington did everything it could to guarantee the re-election of Boris Yeltsin over the Communist opposition. The United States backed a $10.2 billion IMF loan, a poorly disguised bribe that Yeltsin’s government used for social spending before the election. Americans also went to Russia to help. Time magazine put Boris Yeltsin on the cover with an American flag; the article was titled ‘Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win’ ”. And more: “In 2000, Washington backed opposition presidential candidate Vojislav Kostunica against Slobodan Milosevic, the Americans’s main enemy in the Balkans. The USA has provided the opposition with money and communications (…). The USA subsequently turned against Kostunica for being too independent and used ‘pro-democracy’ financial aid to help his opponents.” And we could go on, flipping through an in-depth studies of election interference published by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh or the University of Arizona. Moreover, the passing in recent days of former President Jimmy Carter, whom I met a couple times over the past thirty years in Africa and Indonesia, as a man of world peace, brings us back to a crucial moment in the history of relations between Washington and Moscow. Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, recognized with satisfaction that the USA had set a trap for the USSR. “Actually, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for covert assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day I wrote a memo to the President explaining that I thought this aid would provoke Soviet military intervention… This covert operation was an excellent idea. As a result, the Russians got caught up in the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret that? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in essence: ‘Now we have the opportunity to give the USSR the ability to wage war in Vietnam.’ Indeed, for nearly 10 years, Moscow had to fight a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that led to the demoralization and eventual collapse of the Soviet empire”. This passage was quoted almost three years ago on the London School of Economics website by Robert H. Wade regarding the dynamics that led to the war in Ukraine. Today, however, Wade presents us with an “unorthodox” analysis of the state of climate change on planet Earth, its causes, and possible solutions. While Ambassador Daniele Mancini focuses on one of the most important issues of international balance in the coming years: the relationship between Trump’s America and Modi’s India.