US foreign policy is based on treating Americans like mushrooms. We are kept in the dark and fed ■■■■■■■■■■
There is little to no discussion in mainstream media, which does little more than publish press releases from Washington. The actual policy appears in Rand studies, neocon journals, government-sponsored conferences, etc. Russia and China and other foreign governments see the studies. American voters do not.
Consider this commentary from Rand in January 2022 that questioned whether refusing to compromise on NATO membership for Ukraine was worth the risk of a war that would destroy Ukraine and destabilize Europe.
A statement that the alliance has no intention to offer Ukraine membership at present should only be made in return for a tangible drawdown of Russian forces on the border. It concedes nothing to declare that NATO is not planning to do something it has no intention of doing anyway. If acknowledging this reality averts a conflict that might destroy Ukraine and destabilize Europe, that seems like a small price to pay. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2022/01/speaking-aloud-what-nato-has-left-unsaid-could-help.html
It was always clear that NATO membership was the provocation for the war. The unprovoked-invasion narative has been a blatant lie since day one.
Russia has recruited so many inmates that its prison population has plummeted significantly. Russia’s Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov said in October that the country’s prison population had plunged from 420,000 before the war to 266,000, a historic low, per The Washington Post.
Those radars are relatively old technology still operated to back-up satellite surveillance technology. (We operate them too for the same reason.) The satellite system provides warning from the moment of a missile launch and gives very precise trajectory information. That’s not to say that Russia couldn’t use destruction of those radars as an excuse to initiate a war, but it does not leave them blind and vulnerable to a NATO first strike.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact should have made NATO obsolete. Instead, NATO went from being a strictly defensive alliance to being an aggressive, expansionist military pact. As Boris Johnson says, the war in Ukraine is all about protecting western hegemony, which means NATO’s right to be world’s most aggressive bully since the Axis Powers.
The trillions of dollars in resources in Ukraine and trillions in military spending are factors as well. Follow the money explains a lot about US policy.
Biden commemorated the 80th anniversary of D-Day by sending more military aid to Azov.
Of course, any suggestion that NATO is perpetuating Nazism is Russian propaganda.
Compare that with this passage from Reagan’s address at D-Day 40 years ago:
It’s fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II. Twenty million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action. American Rhetoric: Ronald Reagan -- 40th Anniversary of D-Day Address
The Cold War was about preventing the Soviet Union from imposing its form of government and imposing domination from Moscow. Since Reagan’s words, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union are gone, but instead of allowing countries to live in peace, the US been pushing its form of government and domination from Washington. We have become what we were fighting.
NATO staged a bloody coup in Kiev in 2014. A similar Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was an official start of the Cold War. The difference was that the 1948 coup did not involve mass murder, and it at least nominally followed the constitutional requirements.
The US has consistently sabotaged any peace agreements in Ukraine. That was true with the Minsk Agreements since 2015. That was true with the tentative agreement in April 2022.
Zelensky ran as a peace candidate in 2019. Azov and other US-back paramilitaries made sure to keep the war going, and they got key roles in the government and secret police.
Creating and exploiting puppet states under the control of Washington is what “defending democracy and freedom” has come to mean.
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs was intimately familiar the events in Kyiv in 2014. Here is an excerpt from his description.
. . .When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession roadmap with the EU, the United States took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014.
The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them onward even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene. US NGOs spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow. This NGO financing has never come to light.
Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, now Under-Secretary of State; Jake Sullivan, then the security advisor to VP Joe Biden, and now the US National Security Advisor to President Biden; and VP Biden, now President. Nuland was famously caught on the phone with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, planning the next government in Ukraine, and without allowing any second thoughts by the Europeans ■■■■■■ the EU,” in Nuland’s crude phrase caught on tape). . .
US Film director Oliver Stone helps us to understand the US involvement in the coup in his 2016 documentary movie, Ukraine on Fire. I urge all people to watch it, and to learn what a US-regime change operation looks like. I also urge all people to read the powerful academic studies by Prof. Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa (for example, here and here), who has laboriously reviewed all of the evidence of the Maidan and found that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail, as alleged, but from the coup leaders themselves, who fired into the crowds, killing both policemen and demonstrators. The ninth anniversary of the Ukraine war — Jeffrey D. Sachs
