The Belarus Challenge – USA Gov Policy

Not many Americans can identify where Belarus is located on a European map. That may be changing soon if its president, Alexander Lukashenko, decides to permit Vladimir Putin to stage Russian nuclear weapons inside the country. Belarus’ importance to political stability throughout the West today far outweighs the limited knowledge most in the US have about the state or the status of Minsk’s relationship with Moscow. In November Lukashenko made a public statement that dramatically raises the risk level of war in Europe when he stated: “I will suggest that Putin return nuclear weapons to Belarus,” and that “those nuclear armaments would be the most effective” deterrent.

Belarus is propped up by the Russian state. It purchases about half its exports and provides the former Soviet satellite state subsidized oil which it resells at a huge profit. Oil sales account for a large part of its GDP. The country borders Russia on the east and Ukraine on the south while Poland sits on its western border. Although Belarus is a smaller nation-state about the size of Kansas it is strategically important to Russia as a buffer with the European Union and NATO. Putin is willing to absorb the financial and political costs for it to remain within his sphere of influence.

Lukashenko has turned to Russia for well over a decade for financial aid, political backing, and the support needed to keep him in power. The bilateral relationship with Moscow has grown in significance in recent years as other former Soviet republics have moved closer to the West. Last year Putin saved Lukashenko’s regime by promising him a $1.5 billion loan and developing a law enforcement group for the president to ensure security inside the country. Since the August 2020 election Lukashenko, with Putin’s assistance, has cracked down heavily on protestors and the indigenous democracy movement. Putin retains regional hegemony over the area as Belarus is highly dependent on Russia’s largesse and Lukashenko is fully compliant and catering to Putin’s priorities.

“As President Lukashenko said, we are considering the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus as one of the potential responses to future possible actions by the NATO bloc on the territory of Poland,” Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei told RT Arabic in an interview on Friday. Lukashenko suggests that that such a deployment is in response to a potential deployment of US atomic missiles in Eastern Europe in the future.

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Tensions have increased on the Belarus-Polish border over the last year as many are trying to illegally enter Poland to escape the harsh Lukashenko dictatorship. Belarus continues to align closely with Russia politically although Putin and Lukashenko have had their differences in the past. The EU and other Western nations refused to recognize the results of the August 4-8, 2020, presidential election due to corruption and falsified results. After backing up Lukashenko, Putin declared later in August 2020 that he knew he could “always count on Belarus for support.” It looks like Putin may be calling in the chips soon.

Recent intelligence reports suggest that the two countries are integrating additional Belarusian special forces units with Russian troops. After joint exercises earlier this year Putin left a number of troops inside Belarus. This pushes Lukashenko into a corner. He intends to retain his power and the independence for his country. At the same time, he is increasingly dependent on Russia for financial, political and military support. Should a skirmish occur with any of Belarus’ neighbors it could draw in NATO and Russian military forces and spread into a wider conflict with the potential to escalate into a nuclear war. Putin needs Lukashenko and Belarus but not the complications it brings to Russian-West European relations. How Putin gets resolves its Belarusian headache may determine if there is war in Europe in 2022.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government.

Quick Analysis

America’s Terrorists in Training

When students, trained and equipped by Hamas and its financial backers, occupy campuses and threaten Jews and anyone who disagrees with them, it is neither a peaceful protest nor an exercise of free speech. It is a terrorist attack. Those students are not peaceful protestors. They are terrorists in training. It has been reported that many of those arrested are not even students, but individuals with ties to terrorists or anti-American activities. Their mission is not to protest, not to persuade, but to force institutions to bend to their will. Their targets are two-fold: First, in adherence to Hamas’ anti-Semitism, an attack on not just Israelis but Jews everywhere. Second, to weaken America’s influence in the crucial Middle Eastern region. But students do make up the majority of those involved. The blatant ignorance of so many protestors did not occur spontaneously or recently. Years of preparation went into it. Radical extremists infiltrated the educational system, from kindergarten through graduate school, for decades with the purpose of destroying pride in America and imposing a leftist agenda. On-air interviews of involved students have been revealing. Beyond chanted slogans, the students appear to have little knowledge of the actual dynamics of the Middle Eastern conflict that they appear to be so passionate about. What did come clearly though was a hair trigger response to condemn America and American institutions. That is the intentional result of many years of academic indoctrination. History has been taught through the prism of anti-Americanism. The extraordinary accomplishments in human freedom, the enormous good done by the nation have been obscured, while faults, even though they were corrected, are magnified. The Federalist notes that “America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display… many administrators claim to be stunned. Yet those of us who’ve been following the disastrous decline of American higher education have been warning for years about the inevitable. America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display. Years ago, America’s most prestigious academics made a conscious choice to elevate indoctrination over education. Training activists became their highest goal. Radical ideologies that began in Ethnic and Gender Studies swallowed once-proud social science and humanities disciplines. Their influence surged into administration, as new DEI offices redefined diversity, equity, and inclusion to mean their opposites, then spread their toxin throughout university operations. Wildly generous foreign money — with Qatar and China in the lead — anchored this noxious brew in place. The American Enterprise Institute found that “The 1619 Project and its companion resources have spread to thousands of schools (and counting) in all 50 states, priming students to reject America’s founding principles and even literally black out the Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, tales of politically radical K–12 instruction seem to break into the news almost daily.” The Discovery Institute notes that “ teacher unions, rather than modeling positive social behavior, instead promote indoctrination of students on partisan political viewpoints…. Today, leaders holding high government offices at the federal and state levels are quickly exploiting an underlying principle: The less educated our citizens are regarding civics, the more pliable they are to the acceptance of radical philosophies and agenda, and the more government power can grow. The end result will be a loss of the American Dream — life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Don’t believe this? Take a look at the citizens of today’s socialist and communist countries around the world. According to Ben Shapiro, “while advocates of Marxism today disown the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Castro regime and Venezuela and North Korea, all of those nations thought they were fulfilling Marx’s dream, too.” A Manhattan Institute review reports that “Results of a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20 suggest that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools. Ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex. Additionally, 90% of respondents had heard about at least one CRT concept and 74% about at least one radical gender concept. The campus protests are a window of what’s in store for the nation if the influence of anti-American educators continue.