Collective security, the official goal of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, seems plausible on its face. A group of nations ostensibly concerned about a common threat agree to defend one another in the event of an attack. “All for one and one for all,” as the Three Musketeers said.
But like many things, the principle, even if sincerely invoked, is more problematic than the first glance indicates. This is particularly true with governments, and in no area more so than foreign policy and armed forces. Schoolyard analogies involving bullies do not hold.
NATO was established soon after World War II ostensibly to keep the Soviet Union from overrunning Western Europe. The Red Army was present in Eastern and Central Europe, including eastern Germany, having driven back the Wehrmacht in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. It is by no means clear that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin aspired to have his armed forces conquer Western Europe, and his doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which suggests a conservative foreign policy, hardly supports a militarily aggressive posture toward the West. For one thing, the Soviet Union was exhausted from the savage war – it lost well over 20 million military personnel and civilians – and was hardly in a position to begin a new one against the Americans.
While many American politicians, fearing a return of the prewar public sentiment against foreign intervention, spoke of a Soviet threat, not all agreed. The influential Republican senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, whom I will discuss below, questioned the consensus and thus the official premise of the Cold War.
On April 4, 1949, 12 countries – the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland – signed the treaty that created NATO. (The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s counter-alliance with the Eastern European countries it occupied, would not be founded for another six years.) Since 1998, 18 more countries have joined NATO, for a total of 30, including former Warsaw Pact members and the former Soviet Baltic republics that border Russia – with the predicted disastrous consequences. (Austria is not a member, having agreed to neutrality in 1955, in return for the Soviet withdrawal. West Germany became a member in 1955, and then a reunified Germany became a member in 1990 as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were being dismantled.)
The heart of the treaty, the “all for one and one for all” provision, is Article 5:
What then is the strategy that government in Kiev and its overlords in Washington DC are following? Why has the Ukraine not given up? Why didn’t it continue to negotiate with the Russian side?
Is their hope that their daily over the top ‘Russia is losing’ propaganda will create enough political momentum for a large scale NATO intervention?
Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion.
On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere:
Russia had given the Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol until Sunday morning to lay down their weapons or be “eliminated.” On Sunday, the forces at the plant ignored the deadline, and Ukrainian officials vowed that they would not surrender. In response, the Russian assault intensified, with missiles and bombs hitting the city and new attacks occurring near the plant, according to the Ukrainian military. … Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that the struggle was not over for Mariupol, which for two months has tied up Russian troops and resources that are badly needed elsewhere.
The Azovstal complex is a 2 by 2 miles industrial area. It can be surrounded and controlled by a relatively small force. Those within the area no longer have heavy artillery ammunition and presumably little other supplies. The Russian forces can see and bomb anything that moves on the open ground and can otherwise sit back and wait their enemies out.
I do not believe that holding on to Azovstal will significantly delay the upcoming second phase of the Russian operation which will surround and destroy the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front.
The Russian military has two huge advantage over the Ukrainian forces in the east. One is of course its air superiority. The other is the unimpeded supply line which allows it to get as much heavy artillery ammunition, fuel and food to its forces as it needs.
Without fuel the Ukrainian army can not move and without constant supply, especially of large amounts of artillery munitions, it can not counter Russian artillery which will be in heavy use against it.
This pictures of a former Ukrainian position show the devastating result of such a situation. bigger
Nearly all of the Ukrainian ammunition and fuel supplies have been bombed and destroyed. What is trickling in through its western borders has difficulties to reach the eastern front and is anyway not enough to supply an actively fighting and maneuvering army.
On April 16 Russia shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was bringing ‘western’ weapons to Odessa. Today it destroyed another ammunition depot near Lviv were ‘western’ weapons are crossing the border into Ukraine. Some bits of fuel allegedly still reach the Ukraine through trains from Moldova. But that is far from enough.
Since the beginning of the war, the number of gas stations in Ukraine has decreased three times, and private fuel consumption has decreased by about the same amount, said Sergey Kuyun, director of the A-95 consulting group.
“According to our estimates, a third of the total number of gas stations is operating, this is about 2.5 thousand stations, before the war there were 7.5 thousand. Of course, the main reason is the lack of fuel. Consumption has also decreased three times compared to the pre-war level,” he said at a closed briefing at the Media Center in Lviv on Monday.
At the same time, Kuyun noted that traders or network owners are forced to provide their most strategic and powerful facilities, located mainly in regional centers or on main routes, while peripheral stations are forced to stand idle, although there are also a lot of consumers there.
According to him, the shortage of fuel became especially aggravated after the shutdown of the Kremenchug Oil Refinery as a result of a missile attack by Russian invaders. … On April 2, the Russian invaders destroyed the infrastructure of the Kremenchug oil refinery with their shelling, and it stopped working.
The damage done daily to the Ukrainian military and military industry is huge. One can get a sense of it when one reads through the briefings of the Russian defense ministry. From today’s morning brief (here in full as some have difficulties accessing the site):
The objective of the BRICS group is simply to present an alternative trade mechanism that permits them to conduct business regardless of the opinion of the multinational corporations in the ‘western alliance.’
This is not some grand conspiracy, ‘out there‘ deep geopolitical possibility, or foreboding likelihood as an outcome of short-sighted western emotion. No, this is just a predictable outcome from western created events that pushed specific countries to a natural conclusion based on their best interests.
You can debate the motives of the western leaders who structured the sanctions against Russia, and whether they knew the outcome would happen as a consequence of their effort, but the outcome was never really in doubt. Personally, I believe this outcome is what the west intended. The people inside the World Economic Forum are not stupid – ideological, yes, but not stupid. They knew this would happen.
[Left to Right] Xi Jinping (China), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Narendra Modi (India) and Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa), the BRICS group.
The finance ministers of the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have decided to create their own financial mechanisms to continue trade between nations of similar disposition. Once the internal issues inside the BRICS alliance are resolved, and once the mechanisms are created, then other nations will be able to decide to join or not. The great global cleaving will commence.
(Reuters) – Russia, hit by Western sanctions, has called on the BRICS group of emerging economies to extend the use of national currencies and integrate payment systems, the finance ministry said on Saturday.
[…] On Friday, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told a ministerial meeting with BRICS, which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, that the global economic situation had worsened substantially due to the sanctions, the ministry’s statement said.
The new sanctions also destroy the foundation of the existing international monetary and financial system based on the U.S. dollar, Siluanov said.
“This pushes us to the need to speed up work in the following areas: the use of national currencies for export-import operations, the integration of payment systems and cards, our own financial messaging system and the creation of an independent BRICS rating agency,” Siluanov said.
International payment cards Visa and MasterCard suspended operations in Russia in early March and Russia’s biggest banks have lost access to the SWIFT global banking messaging system.
Russia set up its own banking messaging system, known as SPFS, as an alternative to SWIFT. Its own card payment system MIR began operating in 2015.
[…] They were part of Moscow’s efforts to develop homegrown financial tools to mirror Western ones, to protect the country in case penalties against Moscow were broadened.
The finance ministry said BRICS ministers have confirmed the importance of cooperation in efforts to stabilise the current economic situation.
“The current crisis is man-made, and the BRICS countries have all necessary tools to mitigate its consequences for their economies and the global economy as a whole,” Siluanov said. (link)
For a deep dive on BRICS, as predicted by CTH, {SEE HERE}. The bottom line is – the 2022 punitive economic and financial sanctions by the western nations’ alliance against Russia was exactly the reason why BRICS assembled in the first place.
The multinational corporate control of government is exactly what the BRICS assembly foresaw when they first assembled during the Obama administration. When multinational corporations run the policy of western government, there is going to be a problem.
In the bigger picture, the BRICS assembly are essentially leaders who do not want corporations and multinational banks running their government. BRICS leaders want their government running their government; and yes, that means whatever form of government that exists in their nation, even if it is communist.
BRICS leaders are aligned as anti-corporatist. That doesn’t necessarily make those government leaders better stewards, it simply means they want to make the decisions, and they do not want corporations to become more powerful than they are. As a result, if you really boil it down to the common denominator, what you find is the BRICS group are the opposing element to the World Economic Forum assembly.
The countries run by multinational corporations are in Yellow, the countries who have not yet chosen a side are in GREY:
The BRICS team intend to create an alternative option for all the other nations. An alternative to the current western trade and financial platforms operated on the use of the dollar as a currency. Perhaps many nations will use both financial mechanisms depending on their need.
The objective of the BRICS group is simply to present an alternative trade mechanism that permits them to conduct business regardless of the opinion of the multinational corporations in the ‘western alliance.’
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Milley, told Congress that NATO needs to build more permanent bases on Russia’s border in response to the Ukraine conflict and that the conflict will last years. More US troops on Russia’s borders will act as a “deterrent.” The military-industrial-Congressional complex is no-doubt thrilled. Also today – New York City mom fired from city job after asking the mayor about his new toddler mask mandate.
It helps whenever you botch a Ukrianian foreign government overthrow.
So, if the regimes of Europe are ever going to stop being the world’s welfare queens—sponging off the hard work of America’s productive population—the US regime is going to have to be starved of defense dollars until the regimes of Europe are forced to go justify the cost of military defense to their own taxpayers.
American policy makers have shown a surprising about of sanity so far in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While some war enthusiasts among the American punditry have certainly been agitating for World War III, the leadership in both the White House and Congress has repeatedly and straightforwardly refused most calls to escalate the conflict.
Unfortunately, a number of foreign parliaments among the US’s NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) “partners” have not been nearly as hesitant to escalate matters. Among the most reckless on this issue have been lawmakers from a number of Eastern European states. For example, policymakers in the Baltics in recent weeks have called for a no-fly zone in Ukraine. Newsweekreported this month:
Lithuania’s parliament unanimously approved a resolution calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine—joining other NATO members Estonia and Slovenia in the appeal. Rihards Kols, chairman of the Latvian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also announced [on March 17] his country is calling for such a zone.
But here’s the problem: a so-called no-fly zone would be a de facto declaration of war on Russia by NATO. Moreover, when we say “by NATO,” we mostly mean “by the United States.”
At around the same time, the Polish regime began its own scheme to escalate the war and bring the US into direct conflict with Moscow. Warsaw, apparently without consulting Washington, hatched a plan to send fighter jets to Ukraine via US military bases and then have the US “backfill” Poland’s air force with F-16s. This would have constituted a significant escalation as well, and was fortunately quashed by the White House.
This sort of behavior that free rides on the American taxpayer has become an identifiable pattern with countries that see themselves as benefiting enormously from US military spending but who contribute next to nothing to US security or even to the NATO alliance.
As a result, when Estonian lawmakers—Estonia being a country that has no air force at all beyond a few unarmed surveillance aircraft—want a no-fly zone, these people know it will be mostly somebody else who will fight, die, and sacrifice to pay for it all. “Someone else,” of course, will often mean American pilots and American taxpayers.
Moreover, the idea that these countries offer any sort of strategic advantage to the US in terms of defending vital American interests is implausible. The current war in Ukraine has well illustrated just how weak the Russian regime is in terms of projecting power anywhere beyond its immediate neighbors. The idea that Poland and Estonia serve as valuable “buffer states” between the US and a second-rate power like Russia is hardly convincing. These NATO members are simply not critical allies. Rather, they are net liabilities that may even end up forcing an escalation that draws the US into a war with another nuclear-armed power. The US’s pledge to defend Eastern Europe through organizations like NATO can at best be described as a form of humanitarian aid for member states that have nothing to offer in terms of vital American geopolitical benefits.
Lots of startling changes yesterday. Russia announced, apparently, a gold-backed or gold-related ruble. I haven’t had time to think about all the implications. Information is hard to come by, because the US blocks Russian news in order to control the Ukraine narrative and war propaganda. The Bretton Woods system collapsed when the West seized Russian central bank reserves, and it seems that the gold ruble adds to the end of the US dollar as world reserve currency under Bretton Woods. The implications could be vast, and the Washington idiots might very well wish they had left the Russians alone. I told them over and over that Russia had had enough of them, but the arrogant idiots didn’t listen. The sanctions, it seems, have brought about regime change in the West, reducing its power and influence.
Another big development is that apparently Ukraine has agreed to be a neutral country, no NATO, no foreign bases, no nuclear weapons, and accepts eastern Ukraine gong its own way. We will see if US puppet Zelensky is permitted to sign what Ukraine has agreed. Meanwhile, Russia has stopped its assault on Kiev, and is focused on clearing the remaining Nazi militias out of the Donbass region. I think the low-intelligence governments in Poland and Romania will get the message, and the US missile bases in those countries will be closed before too long.
These are major developments with many large implications. The World Economic Forum’s “reset” has likely been replaced by a Russian-Chinese reset.
Present generations of Americans will not recognize their country. Rivers, mountains, streets, schools, public spaces, even towns are losing their names and acquiring new politically correct names. Normally, this is what outside conquerors do to a country, but we are doing it to ourselves. A country that destroys its own monuments and history is lost.
My conclusion is that the days of the West are over. The West is drowning in accumulated mistakes and degeneracy. The moral fiber in the leadership ranks is gone.
A White House spokesman had to clarify that, “the president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”
Clear? Well, not really. He had just said the opposite to our own troops!
Mar 28 – Previewing President Biden’s trip to Europe last week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that, “the president is traveling to Europe to make sure we stay united.”
That sure didn’t go as planned. This may have been the most disastrous – and dangerous – Presidential overseas trip ever.
The US and its NATO allies have repeatedly proclaimed that “protecting Ukraine’s democracy” has never been about threatening Russia. Holding out NATO membership and sending billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine, starting under Trump, was not threatening Russia. CIA training camps in eastern Ukraine, where paramilitaries were trained on US weapons systems, was not about threatening Russia.
But at every stop, President Biden seemed to undermine the narrative his own Administration had carefully crafted. First up, warning that Russia might use chemical weapons in Ukraine, Biden promised it would “trigger a response in kind,” meaning the US would use chemical weapons as well. That would be a serious war crime.
National Security Advisor Sullivan had to be brought to explain that the US has “no intention” of using chemical weapons.
Later, speaking to the 82nd Airborne in Poland, President Biden told them that US troops would soon be in Ukraine. He said to the troops, “you’re going to see — you’re going to see women, young people standing — standing the middle of — in front of a … tank, just saying, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.’”
A White House spokesman had to clarify that, “the president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”
Clear? Well, not really. He had just said the opposite to our own troops!
Then, at the end of Biden’s final speech in Poland, the President inadvertently told the truth: the US involvement in Ukraine is all about “regime change” for Russia. Speaking of Russian President Putin, he told the audience, near the border of Ukraine, “for God‘s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The President’s disaster control team immediately mobilized in the person of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who offered this pained interpretation of Biden’s clear statement, “I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else.”
No, that’s not what he said. The president has a leading Constitutional role in the formation of US foreign policy, and he said in a public speech that “regime change” in Russia is US policy. Any attempt by his staffers to try to explain it away looks terrible: either the President has no idea what he’s saying so we should not take seriously what is essentially a declaration of war on Russia, or the President took the opportunity on the border with Ukraine to essentially declare war on Russia.
Presidents Reagan, Ford, and Bush Jr. were all known for their gaffes. Some were funny and some were serious. But none of them declared war on a nuclear-armed adversary in that adversary’s own backyard and then afterward had to send out staff to explain that the president didn’t mean what he just said.
Interestingly, Biden saved his most hawkish and bombastic statements for this final speech in Poland, at which none of the more cautious NATO partners like Germany and France were present. So much for “unity” being the prime purpose of the trip.
There is a real problem in the Biden Administration and the sooner we face it the better.
The antiwar movement, the anti-imperialist movement of America, has nothing to apologize for and obediently doing so now is tantamount to facilitating our own systematic demonization, silencing, and persecution.
There were notable analysts in the independent media, antiwar orbit who called this correctly, predicting a Russian attack, leaving the door wide open to an invasion as a major possibility. Those who apparently assumed American policymakers would choose diplomacy and not ultimately risk the deaths and displacement of millions of Ukrainians and Russians, a possible global economic meltdown, catastrophic destabilization in Europe, or all out brinksmanship between the two greatest nuclear superpowers were unfortunately mistaken.
However, the U.S. antiwar scene has always opposed America’s hostile post-Soviet Union policy of coups, color revolutions, NATO’s eastward expansion menacing the Bear, ringing Russia’s borders and coasts with NATO troops, bases, missiles, tanks, bombers, and warships.
The reason for this is not simply because these policies are plainly unnecessary for American security, abhorrently costly, polluting, and aggressive. These new Cold War policies are condemned rightly because they inevitably lead to war, or more likely nuclear war.
For instance, the George W. Bush government’s decisions to tear up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and place dual use “anti-missile” launchers capable of firing hydrogen bomb-tipped Tomahawks in Poland as well as Romania were not in any way authored by non-interventionist libertarian writers and thinkers.
Likewise, the Bush regime made the unprecedented choice to—in the midst of killing countless Somalis and Afghans plus more than one million Iraqis—expand the NATO Article 5 umbrella to include Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. If we maintain our hostility with Russia, this expansion is destined to lead to World War III. For decades, old right conservatives and libertarians alike have opposed U.S. involvement in NATO and this later eastern European policy. This has nothing to do with America’s interests properly understood. There is nothing “sacred” about collectively pledging to blow up the whole world with nuclear bombs for Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, or even London.
In 2014, Barack Obama launched the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Following the “Orange Revolution,” this was the Washington regime flipping Ukraine’s government for the second time in a decade. The government installed by coup plotter Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century founder Robert Kagan’s soulmate, was infested with anti-Russian Nazis. Nuland teamed up with then Vice President Joe Biden, who helped lead the coup from the White House.
This illegal overthrow of a duly elected government led to a brutal war in eastern Ukraine which has killed more than 14,000 people. This is the war that precipitated the crisis we see today. The ethnic Russian people of the Donbas region, the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, refused to be ruled by an anti-Russian coup junta. Kiev launched a merciless so-called war on terror against them. Nazis and jihadists attacked the people of the Donbas. Putin then sent deniable, clandestine forces to support the republics’ autonomy. But he refused to recognize their independence for seven years.
Five years ago, Donald Trump began arming Ukraine with anti-tank missiles. As with Biden’s administration, the Trump regime poured weapons into Ukraine, which fell into the hands of Nazi security forces. The arms were sent to Kiev and used in the east to mass murder ethnic Russians in a violent effort to consolidate control of the divided country. Though they knew well that thousands of people were dying in numbers far higher than anything we have seen thus far during Russia’s war, Washington continued to funnel tons of weapons into the country including armed patrol boats, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and more missiles.
Trump bombed Russian mercenaries in Syria while American troops illegally occupied the eastern third of that country, itself a key Russian ally, explicitly to steal its oil resources. He also expanded NATO and continued the GOP tradition of ripping up critical arms treaties such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Open Skies.
Beginning with the Obama government, CIA paramilitaries and the Pentagon’s Special Forces were deployed to train militants to carry out Kiev’s war. Concurrently, the CIA has been training these same forces at a secret base in the southern United States.
Vladimir Putin wants to keep Russia’s wealth for himself, for his supporters and also for his people. He sees what the globalists have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and others. They invaded and destroyed these countries and sucked out whatever wealth they could. And while millions in those lands have been killed and had their lives ruined, the architects of these disasters are well and enjoying their ill-gotten gains. One of them is Joe Biden who had his hand in all these ventures as he was a high government official while they were being planned and executed.
In his recent appearance on Face the Nation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Margaret Brennan:
“The Ukrainians have killed more Russians in three weeks than we lost in Afghanistan and Iraq in 20 years. I think we ought to go into this believing the Ukrainians can actually win. And the way they win is for us to get these defensive weapons system to them as rapidly as possible.”
Listening to this one is seized with despair, because McConnell’s words reveal the monstrous strategy that is being adopted by the western ruling elites regarding the Ukrainian war.
These elites now smell blood in the water. They hope to drag the war on Ukraine for as long as possible, get Russia bogged down and bleed it out, both in terms of human life as well as financially.
This is an inhuman and misguided strategy that is likely to backfire.
To begin with, this war has been provoked by western globalists who were imperiously bent on driving NATO all the way to the Russian doorstep. This was understandably and rightly perceived by Russia as a move that posed a serious threat to its national security.
Russia had for years warned, pleaded, and implored the West not to do this, but to no avail. NATO, lead by the United States, did something the Unites States would never allow were the situation reversed. The United States would never allow a hostile military alliance on its borders. We saw what happened during the Cuban missile crisis when the Soviets were trying to bring military installations to Cuba. The United States threatened both Cuba and Russia and was ready to start a nuclear war if necessary to halt that undertaking. The United States was, of course, justified in its demands then. The Russians now feel the same about Ukraine.
Please watch the lecture below in which one of the world’s most distinguished political scientists Prof. John Mearsheimer explains who is responsible for this crisis. It is sufficient to watch only the first 25 minutes of the video.
Whatever we may be told by the media, the Ukrainians cannot win this war, since they are greatly overpowered by the Russian forces. The main reason why the Russian advance has been slow is because the Russians have been careful to minimize civilian casualties. The Ukrainian fighters have been taking advantage of this by using their own people as human shields.
If you do not believe this, please watch Ukrainians soldiers setting up rockets on top of a residential building in the city of Mariupol. Having been scattered by their more powerful foe, this is the only strategy for the embattled Ukrainians left to pursue.
If they keep doing this, sooner or later the Russians will become more ruthless, and the death toll will skyrocket. Whether we like it or not, the Ukrainians simply cannot come out on top in this dreadful conflict. The longer this war lasts, the more people will die and more of Ukraine will get wrecked.
But this is apparently okay with the western ruling elite who see a chance to bleed Russia in the same way we bled in Afghanistan and Iraq. That a country will get completely wrecked and hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die does not particularly seem to bother them.
Not only do they want to prolong the war in Ukraine, they, in fact, want to expand it further.
A couple of weeks ago they tried to goad the Poles into giving their jets to the Ukrainians even though Russia had made it clear that it would consider such a move an act of war. This action would be akin to Russia urging the Syrian government to give airplanes to the insurgents in Iraq while we were conducting military operations in that country. We would have doubtless declared such a provocation an act of war by both Syria and Russia, and we would have taken retaliative actions which would almost certainly include some kind of military punishment of the offending parties.
The Poles, however, saw through the ploy and did not take the insidious bait which would have brought them into direct conflict with Russia. Instead, they called the bluff and turned the tables on the warmongering schemers in Washington, DC. Without consulting the Biden administration, they issued a statement in which they said they would make their jets available by flying them to an American base in Germany, but it would have to be the Americans who would do the actual handover.
Exposed and humiliated, the Biden administration declined the Polish “offer” and promptly dispatched Kamala Harris to Warsaw to pacify the Poles who were seething at such betrayal by a supposed ally.
Now Joe Biden has come to Europe with promises of support and weapons for Ukrainians. He will encourage the Ukrainians to fight until the last drop of their blood. He will do it even though he knows all too well that the Ukrainians can never win this fight and will get slaughtered and shattered in the process.
But never mind. The Washington schemers do not care about the lives or well-being of the Ukrainian people. They are using Ukraine as a proxy in a war with Russia, hoping that their fighters will inflict sufficient damage on the Russian military to destabilize Putin’s regime in Moscow.
It is awful to think that our regime could be so cynical. For their part, they probably soothe their conscience by telling themselves that they are only engaging in realpolitik 101. The Soviets did this to us in Vietnam, which they used as their proxy against us, so we now do the same thing to Russia.
But the question is why do the global elites hate Russia and Putin in particular? They tell us that Vladimir Putin is a bad and corrupt man who stole from his people to accumulate great wealth and luxury for himself. But this surely cannot be the main reason, because the leader of the free world is also corrupt.
It is well-known that while he was vice president of the United States, Joe Biden would sell his influence around the world for his own personal enrichment. This he did through his lamentable son Hunter. Hunter, for example, was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. Even though Hunter knew little about gas, he was being paid one million dollars a year in an obvious influence peddling scheme. His father, “The Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to him in his emails, would get a cut from the loot.
Rudy Giuliani called the Bidens a crime family. Even though this may sound harsh, it accurately describes their activities. Like some global gangsters, they prowl around the globe filling their pockets through illicit ventures while scheming with some of the most corrupt people in places like Ukraine, China and Russia. The plentiful evidence of their mischief is contained on Hunter Biden’s hard drive. This hard drive is authentic beyond any doubt, which is something even the New York Timeshas recently conceded. And yet our compromised institutions – such as the Department of Justice and the FBI – refuse to investigate these crimes.
The main reason why the globalists loathe Putin is because he does not want to play their game. He refuses to accept their woke ideology and become part of their corrupt global order based on the collapsing dollar and driven by the desire to plunder the world’s resources and populations.
Vladimir Putin wants to keep Russia’s wealth for himself, for his supporters and also for his people. He sees what the globalists have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and others. They invaded and destroyed these countries and sucked out whatever wealth they could. And while millions in those lands have been killed and had their lives ruined, the architects of these disasters are well and enjoying their ill-gotten gains. One of them is Joe Biden who had his hand in all these ventures as he was a high government official while they were being planned and executed.
Since Putin does not really want to share the great mineral and natural wealth of his vast country with the globalists, they want to take him out. Once they bring Putin down – or so they think – they will install a puppet in his place who will throw the doors open for multinationals to plunder Russia’s resources in the same way they have done in other places.
But they seem to forget that they cannot kick Putin around in the same way they did Saddam Hussein and Moammar Khadafi.
For one thing, Putin has more nuclear warheads than anyone else on earth. If backed into a corner, it is likely he would use them.
We would do well to remember the wise warning of John Quincy Adams who advised us not to go abroad in “search of monsters to destroy.”
We should always try to pursue peace and not warmonger, especially in places like Ukraine where we have no vital national security interest.
To get ourselves bombed with thermo nuclear warheads over Ukraine would be a terrible mistake indeed.
The empowerment of far right extremists since the 2014 coup, a significant number with openly Neo-Nazi affiliations, is reflected in the dramatic rise in attacks on Jews, feminists, and the LGBTQ and Romany communities. It has further led to the banning of books that question Kyiv’s nationalist propaganda, which itself features the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators.
Having been lied into war in Iraq in 2003, the American public swore it had wised up. Sure, it went on to drop the ball by supporting the Libya intervention, itself prefaced by lies, and supported the government’s intervention in the civil war in Syria (or at least didn’t mind it), even though the US sided with the very Sunni extremists it had been fighting a few years before in Iraq. But these were admittedly obscure conflicts, made all the more so by the blatantly biased coverage of events by Western media, which parroted obvious lies about impending massacres and staged chemical weapons attacks.
But in Europe, where the US had extensive military alliance commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the US population should ostensibly have been more informed and less prone to beguiling, it has been disappointing to see the American public once again so easily led down the path to supporting a war that never had to be—never would have been—but for the policies enacted by our government.
And just as with the baseless rush to war with Iraq, which every outlet of mainstream media loyally supported, those who refuse to repeat slogans of “Ukrainian democracy” or “Russian aggression” are denigrated, either as cowards or as apologists for the heinous actions of others, for which they are obviously not responsible. Besides being inaccurate, the latter accusation is particularly perfidious because it effectively makes reasoned dissent impossible.
But by pretending that history started with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the story is made simple, a clear case of right and wrong. And while it is true that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine and so is responsible for the present war, such a Manichean telling of the story does little to further informed policy discussion. Indeed, that is precisely the point: to ignore the decades of declared Russian security interests in the orientation of states directly at its border, as well as to obscure a history of US meddling in Ukraine.
So unless you think context is irrelevant, that recent history is unimportant to understanding current crises, here are four things you aren’t supposed to say about Ukraine but that are absolutely true and that all Americans should be aware of before forming a hasty opinion regarding a deadly serious matter that until a few weeks ago most knew nothing about.
The “Revolution of Dignity” Was a US-Backed Coup
The 2014 ouster of slightly Russian-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who drew his support primarily from the ethnic Russian–dominated eastern parts of the country, was spun by Ukrainian nationalist and Western media as a ”revolution of dignity.” It was in fact, in the words of Western security analyst George Friedman, ”the most blatant coup in history.” In case the obvious nature of events on the ground weren’t enough, this was confirmed by the leaked phone call between then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, then the US ambassador to Ukraine, during which they picked their favorites for the new Ukrainian leadership and plotted how to prevent the meddlesome EU from screwing it all up by moving too slowly, potentially allowing Russia a chance to interfere in the obviously illegal ouster of an elected government through a street putsch.
The proximate cause of the coup was Yanukovych’s taking of what was essentially a large Russian bribe to eschew an EU association agreement. In a country ranked 122nd in corruption, literally the most corrupt country in Europe, none of this was a surprise. But what was a surprise was the US move to sweep in and take Kyiv—something US foreign policy insiders publicly bragged about in the immediate aftermath.
There Is a Significant Neo-Nazi Problem in Ukraine
This is something that until a few years ago the mainstream media reported seriously on; of course, that was before they knew they were going to have to try and lie us into another war. Now any mention of what was taken to be an obvious problem just a year ago is decried as “Russian propaganda!”
The empowerment of far right extremists since the 2014 coup, a significant number with openly Neo-Nazi affiliations, is reflected in the dramatic rise in attacks on Jews, feminists, and the LGBTQ and Romany communities. It has further led to the banning of books that question Kyiv’s nationalist propaganda, which itself features the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators.
What are we to think when at the same time that public witch hunts for supposed white nationalists are carried out domestically with something near hysterical zeal, state-of-the-art shoulder-fired antiaircraft and antitank weaponry is shipped in great volumes to extremist white nationalists in Ukraine that would make the top of any of our own domestic terrorist watch lists?
We aren’t supposed to think about it all, at least not critically—just like we aren’t supposed to think critically about anything else.
The Russians Always Objected to NATO Expansion into Ukraine
For example, how about the fact our government always knew the Russians vigorously objected to any NATO involvement in Ukraine but downplayed or dismissed the obvious steps they were taking in that direction—downplayed it to themselves, to the American public, and tried to downplay it to the wider European community. Of course, Germany and France knew better and refused to grant a membership action plan to Ukraine despite Washington’s intense pressure. And though blocked from de jure absorbing Ukraine into the alliance, Washington was taking de facto steps to that effect—conducting joint military exercises in Ukraine at the same time that it was shipping the US-coup-installed government sophisticated heavy weaponry whose only obvious use was against Russia. Since at least 2014, when Putin ordered Russian forces to seize the Crimea to protect the only warm water port of the Russian navy after threats by Kyiv to evict them despite Moscow’s legal lease, Washington has known Putin feels particularly threatened in Ukraine. Even in the years since then, Washington has rejected repeated attempts by Moscow to establish an officially neutral Ukraine, including in the weeks leading up to the invasion.
Biden Could Have Prevented the War
Yes, even at that late date in January 2022—and all it would have taken was agreeing to Putin’s minimum terms: Ukraine could never join NATO, and new missiles could not be deployed in eastern European NATO member states. Outrageous and rightly rejected? Not according to Joe Biden, who claimed NATO membership for Ukraine was not on the table nor a serious priority at any point in the foreseeable future. Taking him at his word, why wouldn’t Biden simply agree to put it on paper and prevent what he himself repeatedly said were imminent Russian plans to invade and destroy Ukraine? What we’re told, and have been told since NATO expansion began, is that “keeping the door open” to alliance membership is a ”sacred principle.”
Perhaps it should be made public exactly how many Ukrainian lives the State Department and the Pentagon reckon this principle to be worth and how such calculations are made.
Conclusion
Really, what this looks like is a tragic combination of the brief 2008 Russo-Georgian War and the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War. In the first instance, US encouragement of actions by Tbilisi directly contrary to Russian interests led directly to a Russian military intervention; in the latter case, the leading US policy maker at the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admits precipitating that war on purpose: provoking the USSR into fatally overreaching in an attempt to protect an allied government from being undermined by the US—in this case by funding the proto-Taliban mujahideen in Afghanistan from bases in neighboring Pakistan.
As Poland gets set to potentially play Pakistan to Ukraine’s Afghanistan, serving as a staging area and training ground for rebel fighters slipping back and forth across the border to Ukraine, thereby further threatening war between NATO and Russia, we should recall that this all, in a sense, happened because the local governments in Donetsk and Luhansk could see the obvious: what had happened in Kyiv in 2013–14 was a coup, and they refused to recognize the new government. Further, we should remember that it was only when the Ukrainian military attempted to retake these regions by force that Russia intervened—and that since the Minsk Two peace accords failed to bring about a durable ceasefire, over 80 percent of those killed have been ethnic Russians living in the breakaway regions, and they were killed by the government in Kyiv.
With Democrats and Republicans fighting about who supports intervening in Ukraine more, and with uninformed and misled people increasingly calling for even more disastrous interventionist measures, the American public needs to be reminded that it is entirely possible for us to have a foreign policy that keeps us perfectly safe while not getting large numbers of people killed elsewhere, and further, that most of the various crises around the world that we are told the US needs to play a direct and integral part in solving are themselves the direct result of previous US interventions in those places.
A graduate of Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist and graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. A writer and blogger, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasian Review, Libertarian Institute, and Sage Advance. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter.
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