How U.S. Meddling In The Romanian Election Is Part Of The Larger War With Russia.

The United States' Meddling In The Romanian Election Fits A Long Pattern Of NATO Regime Change In Europe.

Pictured Above: Calin Georgescu

The Romanian election has recently wrapped up with Romanian court’s certifying the election win for the pro-NATO candidate Nicusor Dan, over the NATO skeptical candidate George Simion.

What the mainstream media has not mentioned is that the more popular NATO skeptic in the election, Calin Georgescu, was kicked off the ballot after a bogus lawfare campaign backed by America’s ‘NGO’ cut outs of the CIA.

What is further not mentioned is that this election meddling fits a long standing pattern of the United States and NATO, meddling, backing coups and even dropping bombs to prevent any country in Europe from getting too close to Russia and keep them in line with NATO.

I will eventually get into the details of the American meddling in Romania, but first will review the history of this long standing NATO policy.

Dropping Bombs For NATO Expansion.

In 1997, the veteran diplomat George F. Kennan wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning about the consequences of further NATO expansion eastward.

He wrote that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”, writing “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

He also wrote that the policy would “make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.”

Kennan wrote that this view “is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters.”

Ignoring the actual experts, the Bill Clinton administration and NATO went forward with the NATO expansion policy anyways.

The biggest roadblock to the NATO policy of encircling Russia was the former country of Yugoslavia, the country led by Slobodan Milošević which was non aligned and not hostile to Russia.

Given Milošević’s past history of atrocities such as his killing of 8000 Muslim men and boys in Bosnia in 1995, the United States and NATO cooked up a phony “humanitarian” justification to balkanize Yugoslavia.

The official reason for NATO military intervention in 1999 was to stop atrocities from being committed against Albanian in Kosovo from the government of Yugoslavia.

The justification on its face was bogus. As Noam Chomsky noted at the same time, Turkey, a NATO member, was carrying out ethnic cleansing of Kurds and “had driven probably several million Kurds out of their homes, destroyed about 3500 villages laid waste the whole place, (done) every conceivable form of torture and massacre you can imagine, killed nobody knows how many people, tens of thousands of people”, an atrocity that NATO stayed silent on.

The United States also backed groups that attempted to incite a brutal response from the Yugoslav government.

As Chomsky noted before January of 1999, “a majority of killings” in Kosovo “came from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) guerillas who were coming in as they said, to try to incite a harsh Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb.”

As Chomsky noted the Kosovo Liberation Army “was receiving financial and military support” from NATO and “were being supported by the CIA in those months”.

Based on this phony justification, the Clinton and administration and NATO allies conducted a bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.

Far from a “humanitarian intervention” the bombing actually directly caused and helped accelerate atrocities.

As Chomsky noted, the majority of atrocities that happened to Albanians in Kosovo took place “after the bombing”.

NATO itself committed a long list of war crimes in Yugoslavia.

As journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote NATO in Yugoslavia “killed between 90 to 150 civilians in cluster bomb attacks”, ordered a “deliberate missile attack on Radio Television Serbia that killed 16 media workers , an act which Amnesty International labeled a war crime” and ordered a bombing of “the Chinese Embassy, which killed three journalists”.

Scahill noted that NATO even attempted to cover-up it’s war crimes in Yugoslavia, writing :

The U.S. and its allies also sought, at times, to cover up or justify incidents in which they killed civilians. In one attack, NATO struck a civilian passenger train on a bridge, killing 10 people. It later released a videotape that was played at three times the speed, making it appear as though the strike was a split-second decision and a tragic mistake. But moments after the strike, NATO fired another missile at the train.

He also noted that in another instance “NATO bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees fleeing Serb forces on April 14, 1999. Some 73 civilians, including 16 children, were killed in the attack, which was carried out by an American F-16.”

He wrote that “After initially suggesting that Serbian forces had killed the refugees, NATO was forced — when international journalists traveled to the scene — to admit responsibility for the strike.”

Scahill also noted other NATO war crimes from the bombing included “use of depleted uranium munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube River”.

In a separate article Scahill noted the actual effect the bombing had on Kosovo, writing:

Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human trafficking, organized crime and narco smuggling. In short, it is a mafia state.

Unsurprisingly dropping bombs on people does not achieve a “humanitarian result”. What the bombing did achieve though was the fall of Yugoslavia and its balkanization into smaller ethnic states.

As Scahill wrote “Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure para-states”. He noted that soon after “(George W.) Bush’s immediate recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation was the icing on the cake of destruction of Yugoslavia”.

The intention of the Yugoslavia bombing was never about saving Albanians but was actually about destroying the last state in Europe that was not hostile to Russia, and not subservient to U.S. demands.

As Noam Chomsky noted this was something admitted by top officials in the Clinton administration. As he said:

Actually, we have for the first time a very authoritative comment on that from the highest level of the Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted.

This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that’s very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians.

It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level.

The bombing was one of the sparks of the New Cold war with Russia. As Chomsky later noted “High U.S. officials confirm that it was primarily the bombing of Russian ally Serbia — without even informing them in advance — that reversed Russian efforts to work together with the U.S. somehow to construct a post-Cold War European security order”.

Pictured Above: The Train bombed by NATO missiles in Serbia, 1999

Covert Coups.

The policy of meddling in European states that were too friendly- or even too neutral towards-Russia continued albeit in a far more covert form.

This was done by funding and backing coups against governments that were too close to Russia through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cut out of the CIA’s meddling machine.

The CIA whistleblower Philp Agee revealed that the organization was birthed from the CIA as a “a mega conduit” for “the millions or the tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.

Allen Weinstein, a top official with the NED admitted to the Washington Post in 1991 that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.

In 2013, then president of the NED, Carl Gershman wrote an article in the Washington Post advocating for the United States to back coups in European countries friendly to Russia in hopes it would eventually lead to the overthrow of the Russian government.

He wrote “The United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to ensure that the reform process underway”, writing that “an association agreement with the European Union should be seen not as an end in itself but as a starting point that makes possible deeper reforms ”.

He went on to write that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”, because “Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents”.

Indeed, the NED along with its sister organization USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) soon went on to fund civil society organizations in Ukraine which organized protests against the country’s then democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.

Documents show that the U.S. government used the organizations to send tens of thousands of dollars into the group “New Citizen” which the financial times said “played a big role in getting the protest (against Yanukovych) up and running”.

The protests were eventually taken over by a far-right paramilitary group called “right sector”.

When in Ukraine’s Maidan square, members of the right-sector took over the “Hotel Ukraina” and began firing at protestors with sniper rifles, killing 48 people and wounding 172.

The group then falsely blamed Yanukovych for the massacre and used it to force him to flee the country in a violent coup.

The coup was supported by the United States all the way.

The U.S. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy went to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far right Ukrainian political party, Svoboda, while he called to overthrow the Yanukovych government.

After the coup against Yanukovych, Chris Murphy appeared on C-span and bragged that the United States “has been very much involved with respect to Ukraine” stating that the United States had “members of the senate and members of the State Department” who had “been on the (Maidan) square”.

He went on to say that the Obama administration and Senate “passing sanctions” on Yanukovych and bragged that U.S. involvement was “in part what has helped lead to this change in regime”.

Then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland was caught on tape plotting to install the Ukrainian opposition politician Arseny Yatsenyuk as the leader of Ukraine.

After the coup Arseny Yatsenyuk was installed as the interim prime minister of Ukraine because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”, as Forbes Magazine wrote at the time.

The economist Jeffery Sachs was invited to Ukraine to help the new government and left one day later revealing he left because “somebody explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan coup” saying an American official bragged about funding think tanks that helped organize and spark the coup.

Aside from the neo-liberal IMF imposed shock therapy on Ukraine, a large motivation for the coup was that Ukraine- under Yanukovych- had neutral relations with Russia, something the U.S. and NATO could not accept.

As,Konstantin Bondarenko, one of Ukraine’s top political scientists wrote in his recent book:

The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.

The coup, unsurprisingly led to more hostilities between Ukraine (and de facto the U.S.) and Russia.

Russia used the opportunity to illegally seize Crimea as their own.

Ethnic tensions raised between Russian separatists and far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

The new government had multiple members of extremist nationalist groups in top positions of power.

The tensions reached a boiling point when clashes between pro-Russia and pro-West Ukrainians took place in Odesa eventually leading to the Ukrainian nationalists trapping pro-Russia Ukrainians in the Odessa Trade Union Building while it was on fire, killing 42 of them.

According to a recent ruling from an EU court, the new government intentionally allowed this burning to happen by “deliberately delaying the deployment of fire engines to the site for 40 minutes”.

The tension eventually led to full scale war in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region.

In the 2019 Ukrainian election, the United States needed to make sure hostilities between Ukraine and Russia continued.

This was largely complicated by the fact that at the Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to implement the “Minsk 2 Accords” a peace plan that would have ended the war in the Donbass.

As the aforementioned Konstantin Bondarenko documented in his book, “On March 7, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale held new meetings with the main presidential candidates (including Zelensky). He shared this information at a press conference in Kyiv the same day”

Bondarenko noted that at the meeting “Zelensky was clearly told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine and the need to follow the rules set by the American authorities in Ukraine after Maidan: cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements, and protecting the interests of transnational corporations, among other things”.

He wrote that at the time, the U.S. backed Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko “believing that the State Department would see him as the only viable candidate to lead the country as the main outpost of American policy in Eurasia” and “could not believe that the State Department would view him with indifference and reach the same agreement with Zelensky”.

Zelensky was eventually blackmailed through threats of violence from far-right paramilitary groups in Ukraine that were empowered from the 2014 U.S. coup against implementing the Minsk 2 agreement.

At the time the late professor of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen said that the United states was siding with the “quasi-fascist movement” over Zelensky and noted that “unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war”.

As is now apparent this was all done to trigger a Russian invasion of Ukraine which the United States could use to weaken Russia.

This is underscored by the fact that the “collective west” sent Boris Johnson to Kyiv to sabotage peace talks taking place in Istanbul, Turkey in April of 2022 that could have ended the war.

The former Germany chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former Israeli president Naftali Bennett and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan- who all took part in the peace talks-confirmed that the talks made significant progress only to be sabotaged by the “collective West”.

The Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi has said the talks were “very close” to stopping “our war with some peaceful settlement” and that Russia “tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement” while the lead Ukrainian negotiator at the talks, David Arakhamia confirmed that the talks were stopped when “Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) ‘let's just fight.’”

While Ukraine was the “biggest prize” in this strategy, the United States has also meddled in Belarus in an attempt to overthrow the country’s Russia-friendly president Alexander Lukashenko.

Investigative journalist Alan Macleod reported that “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is spending millions of dollars yearly on Belarus and has 40 active projects inside the state, all with the same goal of overthrowing Alexander Lukashenko and replacing him with a more U.S.-friendly president”.

Macleod uncovered a Zoom call where “the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko last year (in 2020) were trained by her organization.”

Macleod quoted her on the zoom meeting saying “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight” bragging that the NED made a “modest but significant contribution” to funding the protests.

Pictured Above: Press Conference With Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky in 2024.

Romanian Election Meddling.

Pictured Above: Calin Georgescu speaking to the press.

All of this history leads to the current moment in the Romanian election. The United States played a financial role that effectively rigged the Romanian election in favor of the more pro-EU/pro-NATO candidate.

The frontrunner in the election was Calin Georgescu, who opposed funding the war in Ukraine saying “I have to take care of my people. I don't want to involve my people” and wanted to take Ukraine out of NATO and the EU.

This was of course a major threat to the Romanian (and NATO) establishment.

Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s vote but the results were annulled by the Romanian Constitutional Court and he was barred from running in the election because of a declassified report from Romanian intelligence that falsely claimed he was being supported by the Russian government through a Tik-Tok campaign.

The intelligence report gave no evidence at all to prove that Georgescu was supported by Russia through social media.

As the New York Times wrote “The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that ‘Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states’ and vague claims that what happened in Romania was ‘similar’ to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova.”

(Emphasis: mine)

Opponents of Georgescu condemned the court ruling as undemocratic, one of his election opponents Elena Lasconi called the ruling a “hijacking of the electoral process” and said “Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy. God, the Romanian people, the truth and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy”.

Later, the Romanian investigative outlet Snoop exposed the report as even more of a fraud, discovering that Romanian National Liberal Party, Georgescu’s opposition, actually paid for the Tik Tok campaign the intelligence report claimed was backed by Russia.

The investigative journalist Lee Fang uncovered another major layer to this scandal finding that “Think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID foreign aid programs, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the State Department – have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup (against Georgescu)”.

With Georgescu kicked off the ballot due to a U.S. funded lawfare campaign, Nicusor Dan, a pro-NATO centrist, won the election.

The New York Times wrote that “Mr. Dan’s victory will likely calm fears in Europe’s political mainstream that Romania, which borders Ukraine and plays a vital role in defending NATO’s eastern flank against Russia, might join Hungary and Slovakia in opposing help for Ukraine and in cozying up to Moscow.”

The Times also wrote that “Last year, a Romanian court ordered a last-minute cancellation of a presidential election that an ultranationalist (Georgescu) appeared well positioned to win”.

This shows that the election was rigged with the help of the United States to prevent a candidate opposed to the Ukraine war from winning.

The Romanian establishment ran a fabricated propaganda campaign- funded by the state department and CIA cutouts-which got the candidate “well positioned to win", kicked off the ballot, leading to victory for the pro NATO and pro Ukraine war candidate.

This story is yet another piece of the longstanding New Cold War with Russia, where the United States and NATO cannot tolerate any country in Europe that is not hostile to Russia, in order to further their agenda of using surrounding states to “weaken Russia”.

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