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Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

So now at the start of a new year, the world faces a precarious predicament in Europe orchestrated by officials in Washington. They and their deluded European collaborators have a helluva nerve placing the entire world at risk to indulge their egos. Diplomacy is out the window. Ideologues are in the saddle.

http://www.patrickfoydossier.com/New-Entries/Entries/2023/1/battle-for-eurasia.html

Dear Friends + Interlocutors,

The Russo-Ukraine war, starting date either 2014 or 2022, is the culmination of NATO’s eastward march which began in the 1990s. The conflict did not spring from out of the blue, which is the impression you might get from the mainstream media. 

But why, one wonders, did NATO enlarge east in the first place? This policy decision was predicated on somebody’s dubious assumption that Russia remained an enduring enemy of the U.S. and Europe, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

If you bought that premise, then Russia still needed to be contained and checkmated by military power. In any case, certain Neocon characters in Washington were eager to prolong the Cold War no matter what. This time around they could lord it over Russia in a unipolar world created by the crack-up of the Soviet Union.

Note what the dean of Sovietologists, George Kennan, stated in At Century’s Ending: Refections, 1982-1995:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

The unchallenged assumption—or was it just a pretense?!—that Russia remained an enemy of “the West” is without factual foundation. It was little more than a Neocon-Neoliberal wet dream to justify the prerogatives of American geostrategic primacy.

The U.S. and NATO won the Cold War, or at any rate were left standing, when communism imploded on the streets of Moscow and in the eastern bloc. No mystery. Russians and Eastern Europeans wanted a better life like everybody else. Karl Marx and the USSR were not up to the task.

The Soviet Union had vanished, almost overnight. The Warsaw Pact disbanded soon thereafter. Moscow was now anti-communist. Russia was reverting to its pre-Bolshevik, pro-Orthodox Christian status, a European state within the eastern outskirts of Europe. This renaissance scenario was what Vladimir Putin had in mind going forward when Yeltsin passed the baton to him in 1999.

Not surprisingly, Putin wanted to recoup Russia’s great power standing, reform and expand its wrecked economy, and cooperate with Europe in every way possible. He needed western Europe to resuscitate Russia. And Europe needed Russia’s raw materials, especially petroleum and natural gas. It looked to be exactly what it was: a win-win relationship based upon mutual self-interest.

But then Putin, like Yeltsin before him, could not help but observe NATO’s puzzling march east—which finally ended at Russia’s doorsteps. Why? What did Washington expect Moscow to conclude from this odd development? How would it react? Was it a deliberate provocation?

Remember that Washington had promised, after the unification of Germany in the early 1990s, that NATO—a military alliance controlled from Washington—would not move eastward one inch. But that promise was repeatedly broken, even in the face of strong protests and red-line warnings from Moscow.

See the rest here

Be seeing you