The only article you need to read on Ukraine
... until the nukes start flying.
Excerpts from Harper magazine’s surprisingly sane article on Ukraine, broken down to three main points:
Why Are We in Ukraine?
by Benjamin Schwarz , Christopher Layne
The “foreign policy community” missed the Cold War and decided to bring it back.
As the Soviets quit Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO might be dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. …
Washington would have none of it….
[The United States cavalierly enlarge[d] its nuclear and security commitments while creating ever-expanding frontiers of insecurity…
Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,” … Writing in 1997, [George] Kennan predicted that this move would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” …Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States. …
Successive U.S. administrations have thrown American power around, ignored their own stated principles, and repeatedly taunted and provoked Russia.
Washington’s covert, overt, and (perhaps most important) overtly covert interference in Russia’s affairs during the early and mid-Nineties…culminated in American meddling in Russia’s 1996 presidential election. … [B]y so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered….
NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at the airport in Kosovo’s provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander U.S. general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: “I’m not going to start World War III for you.”) …
[T]he U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia … and the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime [in Libya] transformed [NATO] from a supposedly mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the preeminent military instrument of American power in the post–Cold War world…
It’s all about Ukraine joining NATO. It’s always been about Ukraine joining NATO.
[R]ussians of every political stripe… have viewed the prospect of [NATO’s] expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic. …
Anatol Lieven…then Moscow correspondent for the Times of London, concluded that “moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would trigger a really ferocious Russian response,” and … would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions.” …
But rather than attempting to reach a modus vivendi with Russia, U.S. officials continued to push for NATO expansion and supported color revolutions ….
[I]n April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. [America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J.] Burns… had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
NATO would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” Burns concluded. “Today’s Russia will respond.”…Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to push NATO to its borders “as a direct threat.” …
Far from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine …all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,” as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022. “We are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO,” Putin elaborated two days before invading Ukraine, “because this poses a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it.” …
[G]iven that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor. To acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism.
Read the whole thing here.
The Cold War repeats itself: the first time the Americans were the good guys, this time they are the villains. In the first Cold War the Russians were Marxists and this time the Americans are Marxists. Back then Russia censored the news and kept political prisoners in gulags and now Biden does that. The Soviets bankrupted themselves with socialist policies and imperial military adventures which the current American Regime now emulates. The American experiment will likely end in Soviet-style economic collapse or nuclear annihilation unless the reckless people in charge of our government are stopped.
Trump for all his faults (innumerable) kept us out of this quagmire. Putin for all his faults is protecting Christianity in Europe/Asia. Biden for all his faults is a demented scumbag who wouldn’t care or even know if the US is nuked.