Her Excellency
Kathleen KAVALEC
Us Ambassador to Romania
Dear Ambassador,
I start by welcoming you to Romania.
1. Until almost a decade and a half ago, your predecessors were arriving in one of the most Americanophile European states. Today, you end up in a country where Americanophilia is collapsing and is replaced by Americanskepticism, if not Americanophobia.
As one who initiated, in the spring of 1997, in the discussions held in Washington with the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the strategic partnership between Romania and the US, then co-chaired, together with former Secretary of Defense William Perry, the US-Romania Strategic Partnership Action Committee, as well as one who actively participated in the process of Romania’s entry into NATO, I consider that this trend, more and more obvious, which characterizes Romanians’ feelings toward the Americans, constitutes a danger to the national security of my country, as long as my country has linked its security to the alliance with your country. Obviously, the mentioned trend represents a danger for the US as the expected effects of obedience with which the Romanian leaders have been implementing the directives coming from Washington DC for a long time, without making the effort to harmonize them with the Romanian national interests, and which seems to fully satisfy american planners and political operators, cannot be guaranteed when a popular wave rises against the critical mass. We are very close to reaching this level.
It is not primarily the Romanians who are to blame for this situation. The main culprit is our American ally. The culprits are the American diplomats accredited in Bucharest for the last two decades (of course, first of all the ambassadors, when the diplomatic mission was not led by business officers), who behaved as true pro-consuls in this country. As detached from the realities as they are arrogant. As unempathetic as they are abusive.
The top three points of your agenda must be reviewing this policy, repairing the damage it has caused and recovering trust, if not sympathy of Romanians.
2. The fight against corruption, the freedom of the press, the protection of minorities of all kinds in Romania are not your problems. You have a lot of work to secure them in your own country. This is especially so now that the correctness of the American elections is repeatedly questioned by the American citizens and their results are the subject of violent contestation, when the chain bankruptcies of American banks, the result of American neoliberalism, have been brought into question. As well as the greed and irresponsibility that infects American corporatism at the foundation of the “Washington consensus,” it risks contaminating the entire world by inducing a crisis worse than the Corona SARS-VOC 2 virus.
In Romania these are our problems and we manage them as we can. The better the less you interfere.
Here you have to stimulate American investments and bilateral trade, to ensure the cancellation of the travel visa requirement, to accommodate the American strategic interests with the Romanian ones, to explain why American politics in the world is compatible with the legitimate aspirations of the Romanian nation and does not make Romania a vulnerable target of US rivals.
3. I do not believe that Romania can find a security system (not only military, but also economic) outside the Euro-Atlantic alliances.
This system, however valid from a theoretical point of view, cannot survive, however, the situation in which the US promotes its interests in the region to which Romania belongs, but also in the rest of the world, without communicating in advance with the Romanian strategic partner, without consulting with him or coordinating his actions with him. Communication, consultation, coordination and cooperation (which is something other than servile subordination) were, in fact, the “four C’s” which have been placed at the foundation of our strategic partnership since the discussions in autumn 1997, held in Bucharest, based on a non-paper proposed by the Assistant Secretary of State, Mr Marc Grossman.
I add that, in order to be strategic, any partnership must be based on the congruence of the strategic interests of the parties. These interests can change naturally, with the evolution of the partners’ internal situation and the international context, but also through negligence or errors committed by partners when they, or at least one of them, do not strive to continuously define their vital interests in such a way as to maintain their convergence, complementarity or even compatibility. It should be noted that now the Romanian-American strategic partnership has lost its base in congruence of strategic interests; or, at least, it is about to lose it.
You will say, of course, that in the Romanian-American relations the US sticks to the principle of the “four C’s”, negotiated and agreed in 1997, immediately after President Bill Clinton’s visit to Bucharest. This is not the case and you know it well. You should not insult our intelligence and common sense by denying it. In time – and especially after 2012, the year in which Secretary of State Assistant, Philip Gordon, descended to Romania with the mission of making the referendum by which the Romanian people had decided to dismiss a president that proved bad for the destiny of the Romanian nation to remain without effect – the partnership turned into a “protectorate”. A protectorate that no one here needs. It is your mission to rehabilitate the partnership and resuscitate the principles agreed upon at its birth.
4. Romania has never conceived the alliance with the US as directed against Russia or China.
The Romanian nation has no strategic interest in fueling a war with Russia near its borders. This is all the more so as such a war is almost impossible not to destroy the balance of power between the states in Romania’s immediate and close eastern neighborhood. In the absence of this balance, peace in the region becomes only a small bridge between wars that will succeed indefinitely, putting Romania in a state of perpetual insecurity.
Romania became an ally of the US by choice; that is, by free choice. As a result, it can choose and change its allies (as it has done in his history). It cannot choose its geography.
Throughout history, Russia, whether tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet, has been a power with an imperial vocation (like the US) that, depending on its interests, has supported or obstructed the aspirations of the Romanian nation. The most persistent Russo-sceptic feelings of Romanians date not from times of adversity with Russia, but from those in which we were, willingly or necessarily, allies (the problem of the hoard, the problem of the counties in southern Bessarabia, the problem of sovroms, etc.). The arrogance and myopic egoism with which the Russian leaders behaved toward Romania precisely when the Romanians expected their compassion and solidarity, made the feelings of the Romanian nation toward the Russian one to be if not of hatred, at least of suspicion and fear. Fear of Russia has marked the entire foreign policy of Romania in the modern era. It also determined the pro-Western orientation of the Romanians.
There is a risk that the US will follow the same pattern of imperial behavior. If so, for the identity of reason there will be an identity of result. This could mean turning to Russia. The phenomenon is happening before our eyes. Do you want that?
5. If after 1991 Romania supported the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which had just been detached from the USSR, it was because it was considered that in its eastern neighborhood a balance of power was achieved, which would increase its security, in the Russian-Ukrainian relationship. So did our western neighbors, Poland and Hungary, with whom we correlated our steps and policies then.
For the same reason, namely the strengthening of our national security, but not on account of the insecurity of Russia or Ukraine, but by strengthening their security by offering them a stable and calm Romanian neighborhood, Romania joined NATO. At that time, we knew very well that Russia would not allow NATO expansion beyond the Dniester line and that is why we advocated a Ukraine of Ukrainians that would not be either a Russian outpost or a US/NATO outpost. In the same context, we considered that Ukraine can and must become a member of the EU, but only in an undefined future, by which its political association, economic integration, legislative harmonization and institutional interoperability with the EU should have been achieved. However, this process could only progress to the extent that relations between the EU and Russia remained cordial and were carried out in the framework of a Russian-European partnership for development. The imperial temptations of Russia had to (and should) be tempered by interdependence, not exclusion, integration, not isolation. (To this end, as Head of the European Parliament delegation for relations with Ukraine, Permanent Rapporteur on Russia and Vice-President of the S&D Group for the EU’s foreign, defense and security policy, I drafted a position paper containing the principles of EU-Russia relations in 2010.)
Today’s US policy has blown up all this strategy. Unfortunately, this policy will not bring any good to the US either. This also explains my criticism of the policy of the current American administration, which is not anti-American but pro-American. The true ally is the one who tells you the truth, not the one who encourages your folly. I also mentioned this principle in a letter to Mrs Madeleine Albright in 1997, warning her that if she, like me, wants our countries to become partners, she must accept the principle of full sincerity and expect us to apply it.
6. Thus, the war that the US is waging with Russia and in which Romania has also been involved, is not in line with Romania’s strategic interests.
If the US loses the war and Ukraine disappears (altogether or for the most part), Romania will again directly border with a Russia carried by victory potentially toward new expansionist ideals, along a border of dizzying length for our forces. The US will never be able to and will never want to bring enough forces to Romania to defend this border. The forces it has moved and will move will be useful only to control Romanian politics. Which for us is neither desirable nor acceptable.
If the US wins the war, Romania will find itself at its borders with a Ukrainian regional power that will overtake its own power and threaten it with its traditional nationalism and expansionism. This power will not be controlled by the US either and will not be in line with NATO’s requirements. The European integration of Ukraine involved (and implies) the realization of structural transformations of the Ukrainian state and society, which would make them compatible with the logic and structures of the soft power that the EU was and should remain. The process aimed at the deSovietization of Ukraine and, of course, its democratization and decentralization. If a military power with a nationalist agenda rises on the foundations of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic instead of deSovietization, the whole of Europe and the entire Northern Hemisphere, but first of all neighboring Romania, will have problems.
That is why, through the perspectives it configures, the US policy toward Ukraine is contrary to Romania’s vital interests.
7. According to the same observation that Romania can change its allies, but not its geography, it must be said that before it is America’s ally, it is a European nation. In the logic of this objective truth, Romania became a member of the EU.
We fully understand that the weakening of the EU and the creation of a health cordon of Eastern and North-Eastern EU members separating Russia from Western Europe is an objective pursued by the US in the belief that its achievement will be able to perpetuate its control over Europe-Asia and, as a consequence, supremacy in the global order based on the rules established in Washington. We are neither stupid nor blind. It is not about defending democracy or other values, but about the power struggle between powers.
Like the US, Romania does not want to reissue a Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, aware that the signatories of that agreement have accidentally given their name to a perennial German strategy.
As a member of the EU, however, it cannot be interested in the bankruptcy of the EU. However, the war between the US and Russia waged through and on the territory of Ukraine has as collateral, if not as the main target, the EU. This is achieved by breaking the EU from cheap Russian energy sources and the Russian market, by destroying the mutually beneficial interdependence with Russia, which has been worked on for decades, by draining the military arsenals of Western and Central European states, and by transforming the EU from soft power to hard power.
Romania needs a strong EU from which it can draw its power, and not a belligerent union, but dependent both militarily and economically on the US, in which Romanians receive the mission to stand guard at the edge of the “Slavic desert”.
8. Also, the Romanian nation does not have the strategic interest of renouncing its comprehensive and in-depth partnership with China.
In all the modern history of the two states there have been no disputes to oppose them. China is not Russia’s rival. On the contrary, China has always been the strategic support of Romania. Support beyond political ideologies or regimes. However, Romania is not interested in replacing its old friends with new ones, its interest being to add new friends to the old ones. Much less can it accept to prove its loyalty to the new allies by gestures of adversity to the old ones.
We understand that there is a strategic rivalry between the US and China. In this relationship, however, Romania can only be neutral. If necessary, it can offer its good offices to enable both partners to co-exist peacefully, profitably and worthily within a multi-polar global order, enjoying both collective security and cooperative security. Even if you don’t like such a perspective, we don’t believe in a world where American alliances are designed to encircle China and stop its natural access to its role as the protagonist of the multipolar world order. Supporting such an approach is counterproductive for the US and lethal for Romania.
It is an undeniable fact that the unipolar world order has already died. The only problem is how to organize a decent funeral. It is obvious that Pax Americana has exhausted its resources. Romania is interested, at least for reasons related to cultural affinities, for the US to have a say in the calibration of the future post-American multipolar order. In this respect, we can also help the US by capitalizing on our traditional good relations with China. This is provided that we do not destroy those relations under American pressure, as is currently the case. From the good Romanian-Chinese relations the US has only to gain. From their subversion, USA has everything to lose.
9. It is possible that, beyond propaganda, you also have rational arguments to contradict the above considerations We are ready to discuss them. You do not want this, however, preferring, instead of dialog with deep Romania, instruction meetings with the bought or blackmailed representatives of that part of the Romanian society frustrated and alienated, or confused and lost.
Of course, the latter are also Romanians, and they have the right to representation in the state leadership. But do not make the mistake of believing that they are all Romania and that if you control their representatives, whom you have supported to seize the power of the state, you can control them, as well as, through them, the rest of the Romanian society. Popular support or popular tolerance for leaders you like is constantly decreasing because if everyone could be deceived for a while and of course some will remain deceived forever, it is impossible to deceive everyone permanently.
The world is waking up, and the obedient government, which the US is so pleased with today, risks relying solely on US support. This means that the US will have nothing to support in Romania except itself. And what profit does the US have in supporting something that cannot provide support?
10. Perhaps the US also has a price to offer for the support it expects from Romania. That would be more correct, and then there will be more to negotiate.
Of course, not everything is negotiable. Honor, for example, cannot be negotiated because it is precisely trade that compromises it.
For the moment, the US is not negotiating anything in and with Romania. It takes everything for free. It also takes the prospects of our national reunification, of reparation for our prejudices suffered in the war of 1941-1944 lost to the USSR, of raising Romania to the rank of regional power (possibly alongside Poland), status for which it meets all the conditions, to obtain security guarantees in relation to a neighbor from the east, whom they arm and who arouses its appetite as a regional protagonist, obliging us to support it with all our strength, though it has always been hostile to us with all its forces and indoctrinated its society with anti-Romanian narratives. Let’s be clear! “Glory to Ukraine!”/”Slava Ukraini!” is not a Romanian agenda. What is the US ready to pay and what guarantees is it ready to offer to support it (of course, within reasonable limits)?
11. Instead of talking to Romanians who think like this, and who are majority, which would be, at least, in line with democratic principles, you continue, since you arrived in Romania, to exclude us not only from dialog, but also from society. While former President Donald Trump’s is reduced to silence in America, you quickly held a meeting with supposed representatives of Romanian civil society to discuss media freedom in Romania.
I do not understand what worries you about this freedom, as long as the vast majority of the Romanian press (especially the electronic one), well established by the “pro-American” government and controlled by the Romanian secret services, in turn “pro-American”, does merely repeat American narratives on the justice of the holy war between US-led democracies and autocracies led by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?! The same stories in the American main stream media that make demonizing the opponents of American unipolarism an alibi for the lack of political vision of US leaders. (A media approach that my American friends complain about, including many former US administration officials and American diplomats sent to various parts of the world.) What we see is that even one opposite opinion for you is too much. The love of unanimity, however, is specific to autocracies, not to democracies.
12. Going beyond this, another finding shocks. At the above mentioned meeting you invited only interlocutors whose heads serve only as a resonance box. Many are completely unknown in Romania.
To take a single example, we mention a so-called media platform called “Context”, which emerged out of nothingness at the end of last year, funded from extremely obscure, if not confidential sources. While the most respected representatives of the Romanian press or NGOs that are not just clandestine opposition political parties, eager to have and exercise power without participating in the elections, were not invited.
A natural question is how did an ambassador just landed in Romania know the existence of a “Context” type of entity, about which nobody knew anything here? On what criteria did this entity come to talk to none other than the US President’s envoy in Bucharest? What did the US ambassador hope to find out from it and what was it based on when it thought that from the exchange of views with it would come a freer press?
What followed answered these questions. “Context” published a pseudo study that, without any argument or evidence, circulated a “black list”, such as those drawn up in Nazi regimes, including those who do not unreservedly embrace American political orientations. They were not and are not (at least in the vast majority) supporters of Vladimir Putin and Russian narratives, but critics of Joe Biden and certain American policies. Just as there are critics of John Mearsheimer, Jeffery Sachs, Noam Chomsky, Henry Kissinger or Donald Trump.
Therefore, your first concern after coming to Romania seems to be the division of the Romanian society and the organization of the “guerrilla fight” of forces coagulated by the workers of the US Embassy against the exponents of certain important segments and schools of thought in the Romanian society. It may not be so, but that is how it is seen.
In order to clarify things, the members of the Romanian Press Club asked you for a meeting. We are waiting to see if you will accept it and how it will take place in order to better understand who you are and what mandate you came to Romania.
13. Until then, it is appropriate to recall the bad role played by the US through the so-called “support” granted for reforming the Romanian judicial system and fighting corruption.
Your predecessors confirmed by silence or ambiguous responses such as “denial that does not deny”, the effective presence of FBI envoys in the activity of the National Anticorruption Directorate and beyond.
The forced transfer of practices that would have been successful in the American environment, into a world with different legal and political traditions, has produced disastrous effects, transforming the rule of law into the rule of secret powers and the democratic state into a police state. The crossing of secret services with justice in Romania led to the birth of a real underground state that liquidated the national elites in all fields – political, economic, academic, technical, medical, political, political, economic, social and economic. art, sports, etc. If today the electoral offer of political parties is derisory, if the national capital has almost completely disappeared, if the sports performances of Romanians are embarrassing, if the universities are rolling out impostors and if all these have made stupidity and incompetence the most serious form of corruption in Romania, the “merit” belongs to the american “help.”
Does America want such a strategic partner? Does it need such a partner? Certainly not.
I am convinced that many Americans are exasperated by the fact that they do not find valid interlocutors in Romania. This is not, however, the effect of the inability of Romanian society to produce admirable elites, but the consequence of the exceptional ability of the US to force us to destroy our elites; perhaps not with intent, but from the negligence or recklessness with which they imposed on Romanians recipes inappropriate to their specific and which acted like those superefficient insecticides that kill the useful insects along with the harmful insects. Over time, these therapies have been used mainly for the removal from power of the Romanian critics of American politics, whether by chance or not. Political competitors of local veleitaries ready to cede Romanian national interests to foreigners willing to give them access to power in Romania and to ensure their power.
Today, you must know, Madam Ambassador, the US has in Romania leaders lacking any authority and credibility, hidden behind an apparent legitimacy, so incompetent that they can serve nothing and so wicked that they can “turn their weapons” at any time, moving exclusively after the smell of steak, as well as an increasingly american-skeptical people who spontaneously chose the path of passive resistance. This people will not go out on the streets too quickly to protest against the government that is ready to drag Romania into the US wars, including ignoring the danger of a nuclear world war, but will not raise a finger to support the US in those wars, thus turning Romania into the place where American interests will be hit from all sides at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.
14. Here are the challenges you face in Romania!
You will not be able to hope to be successful if you do not dialog with all segments of Romanian society; especially with those with whom you do not think the same.
You will not be successful if you do not sift the embassy staff. American friends with long-standing reports in the US foreign service and in the US intelligence agencies shared my concern about the belief that in the US Embassy in Bucharest not everyone works for the US, some of the employees (especially local ones) being suspected of being infiltrated by foreign services (including Russian). The way in which they misinform the leadership of the embassy and design actions whose effect is to destroy the relationship of trust and sympathy between the US and Romania is a good reason to take such warnings seriously. I think they know that they have been brought to the attention of the American authorities, who, for unknown reasons, do not seem to have taken any action. Reiterating them here is the sign of the sincere friendship I carry to your country and my desire to help you fulfill your mandate.
You will not be successful if you continue to summon the Romanian dignitaries at the embassy headquarters or you will unnecessarily descend to their headquarters to ask for their account and give them instructions. In the past, such practices have not increased the authority of the US, but the contempt of Romanians for their envoys.
You will not be successful if you persist in trying to convince us that increasing the foreign military presence in Romania, under the American flag or under the NATO flag, is the solution for strengthening our national security. The real solution lies in the increase of American support for strengthening the Romanian army (as supported by the Ukrainian army), as an army of an allied NATO member state, to the extent that it is able to defend the alliance’s external border in peacetime against any attack launched by surprise by a third power.
You will not be successful if instead of transparent dialog you create networks of fake NGOs and media institutions with the role of libel and intimidating opinion makers whose views do not coincide with the official US views. The more you encourage and finance the creation of blacklists of those who supposedly carry the messages of America’s rivals, the more Romanian minds and souls you will lose, pushing them to the larger and more numerous Americanophobic camps.
You will not be successful if you persevere in fighting the propaganda of the US adversaries by spreading the American propaganda, imposing its narratives in the Romanian public discourse with the hope that the Romanians are naive enough to allow themselves to be convinced. Let us fight together the propagandistic lie from wherever it is and whoever insinuates it, opposing the truth! Only the truth will set us free and give us the power to succeed against enemies and enmities, whatever they may be.
You will not succeed unless you abandon the thesis of the uniqueness and universality of American values, which, consequently, should be imposed on all nations in contempt of their cultural identity. European nations, including the Romanian one, were born as political entities precisely in order to be able to defend their cultural identity from which their ideals spring. Such a history does not allow them to melt into a cultural crucible like the American one.
Robert Kagan is right: America stands under the sign of Mars, the God of war, while Europe, which is blooded by so many fratricidal wars, has come to stand under the sign of Venus, the goddess of love. We have called the Americans to Europe twice in the last century, so that they can stop the war between us and not push us into war with others, especially Asia. I still believe that the United States must remain a European actor, but only if it is ready to be here the balancing element that guarantees the preservation of peace (as it happened during the Cold War). Otherwise, without catching the news, everything that moves in Europe will act to send you back to where you came from. Then the victory will belong entirely to Eurasia and I don’t think you want it. I don’t think the Romanians want it either.
Finally, you will not succeed if you do not religiously comply with the provisions of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic Relations between States. Romania is a sovereign state, not a province of the United States. The foreign ambassadors accredited here cannot speak with the national authorities through the media, nor can they pronounce on issues related to the public order and internal politics of Romania. The travel and contacts of foreign diplomats, including American ones, in Romania must be notified and agreed in advance with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign diplomats, including American diplomats, have no place in courts or prosecutor’s offices (especially DNA and DIICOT) except for the purpose of carrying out consular tasks. The decoration of those who lead the Romanian intelligence and counter-intelligence services is equivalent, in the eyes of the Romanians, to the “kiss of death”. These services are intended to gather information that, among other things, ensures the loyalty of our allies, identifying those who abuse our loyalty to undermine our legitimate interests. The fact that they are paid homage by a foreign state creates suspicion, if it does not provide even certainty, that these services have not fulfilled their mandate. I myself supported the cooperation between the Romanian and American intelligence services. I am afraid that you have taken this cooperation, of course also with our complicity, toward a transfer of loyalty to the detriment of Romania. We are waiting for this unacceptable situation to be repaired.
15. With these thoughts, Madam Ambassador, I accompany the welcome from the beginning of this letter. Take them as an outstretched hand from that Romania with which the last few of your predecessors didn’t want to meet and talk. Of that Romania whose representatives are not invited to the colloquia, conferences and receptions organized by your Embassy. That Romania, however, which, hidden in the depths, will endure long after your favorite and privileged interlocutors, ephemeral and passengers, provisional and transient today, will have disappeared in the mists of history. Make peace with this Romania, for otherwise, paraphrasing a great Romanian poet, it will eventually make the relationship with the US and the interests of the US in Romania ”one with the earth”, as happened with all those who came before to our country to “ask for land and water”.
That said, with best wishes and feelings, as well as waiting for the opportunity to detail the ideas expressed here in a direct meeting, I remain yours
Prof. dr. Adrian Severin
Former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania
Former President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly
Initiator and co-founder of the Strategic Partnership between Romania and the USA
