A reply to a Jewish friend (early) in the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022
Dear (…),
Thanks for your response, and I am reassured though I never doubted that our relation might suffer because of totally frank and honest conversations/correspondence on any issue regardless of how sensitive it might be politically or otherwise. I am sorry I did not get back to you earlier, as I have been rather low in energy during this past week toward the end of the month of Ramadan fasting.
Let me take this opportunity to share with you my thoughts on the larger picture of the war in Ukraine, or the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022. Though I might not have a dog in this unfortunate war, the consequence of this war affects all of us around the world and so I have been driven to take my time to get informed of the context of the war and the history of Russia, past and present. I have expressed myself in several emails with attachments and links that I sent out to you and others in my list. Here I will condense some views already expressed, and then add to them based on my readings in the history of Europe and WW2 as they specifically shed light on Ukraine and Russia, and in the response to what you have expressed in your email. I will be brief, even though as you might well know that each of the points made can be expanded into an essay, or chapter length piece, with footnotes and bibliography that I will not be able to provide here or bore you with. So, let me begin.
(1) Any historical-political analysis of events is required to provide a context/framework within which those events are fairly explained. Without context there is most often an absence of objectivity and impartiality, and without them what we have is “narrative”, an exercise in apologetics, polemics or worse. WW2 did not begin, for example, on September 1, 1939, when Germany launched the invasion of Poland. The seeds of WW2 were sown in the aftermath of the armistice ending WW1 and the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany by the Allied powers. Keynes published in 1920 his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, soon after the Treaty of Versailles was agreed upon by the Allied powers as a warning of the foolhardy thinking behind the Treaty and what might be the consequences of imposing a vengeful policy of reparation on Germany when the blame for the war fell squarely on all the European powers involved. On the diplomatic history of the twenty years between the Treaty and the beginning of WW2, A.J.P. Taylor’s book The Origins of the Second World War, in my view, is one of the finest one volume studies of that period in which, as Taylor documents, no major European power, including the U.S., was blameless.
Similarly, the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 did not erupt on February 24 without a long period of gestation; how far this period is taken back to greatly depends on the analyst, but as with Keynes and Taylor’s books the further back one reaches the greater is the clarity acquired of the causes in the eventual eruption of the event being analyzed. The seeds of the Russo-Ukrainian war were sown by the Western powers, particularly the U.S., following the end of the Cold War in the period after 1989-91. Any effort to obscure or erase the post-Cold War history of the collective West and Russia in explaining the Russo-Ukrainian war would lack objectivity and impartiality and would be a “narrative” spun, in this case by the West, to indict Russia for initiating a war that given the record when examined shows that the U.S. and its NATO partners instigated it by using Ukraine as the bait.
The first draft of history, or media narrative, is just about always written and presented by the victors of any war. Eventually “victor’s history” gets revised, as it must, with time and distance providing perspective when suppressed facts as new evidence begins to emerge. So, what we have at present is the mainstream media “narrative” presented as unvarnished “truth” and “history” in the West. Anyone looking at the world through the window provided by the western media, which has until now enjoyed an overwhelming global reach and influence, has only a blinkered understanding of the world. But this near monopoly of the western media to substitute narrative for facts is breaking down, and the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 could well be the pivotal moment when the cumulative lies of more than half-century peddled by the western media begins to crash and with it comes an end to the unipolar moment of American hegemony in post-Cold War world politics.
What surprises or, rather, irks me is why so many of my Jewish friends have bought into the western media narrative about Russia, Putin, Ukraine, and the war when just about all of them reject the same western media narrative as hostile or one-sided when it comes to reporting Israeli politics and conflicts with Arabs, Palestinians, Iran, and Muslims in general.
(2) Once it is understood that the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 did not begin on February 24, that its fuse was lit during the Clinton administration when NATO expansion to the east began in 1996 with invitations to the former Warsaw Pact countries to join the alliance as did Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, then explaining recent events acquires an entirely different dimension. Clinton’s opening of NATO to former Warsaw Pact members was in direct and egregious violation of assurances given by the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations to Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not advance eastward beyond the existing membership. There were suggestions to dissolve NATO by Americans who had served at the highest levels of foreign and national security policy in Washington, such as George Kennan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The U.S. was warned that for Moscow there is a red line beyond which NATO expansion would not be acceptable to Russia. The most recent and unambiguous warning of Russia’s red line was conveyed to Washington by the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, William Burns, in 2008, when he wrote to Condoleezza Rice that “nyet, means nyet” for Russia when it comes to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Burns is now the CIA Director in the Biden administration. The same warning was given when Georgia was being lured into NATO, and then followed a similar “special military operation” undertaken by Putin in 2008 to reverse the colour revolution backed by the U.S. that had earlier ousted the ruling party. The Georgian event or colour revolution was a precursor of the one in Ukraine in 2014, and the conflict in Georgia was a precursor of the conflict of far greater intensity at present in Ukraine.
(3) Between the eastward expansion of NATO after 1996 and the launch of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia on February 24, a few diplomatic agreements were negotiated pertaining to Ukraine between Moscow and Western powers (UK, US, Germany). These were notably the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 on security provision to Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan relating to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as these states handed back to Moscow nuclear stockpiles deployed in their territories during the Soviet era and in return their independence and security were guaranteed; the Minsk Agreements 1 and 2 of 2014 and 2015 to end the ethnic conflict in the Donbass region between the Kyiv regime and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (districts); and the referendum in Crimea in 2014 that led the Crimeans seek reunification with Russia.
(4) The question, therefore, is why Russian security concerns were ignored and then Moscow humiliated repeatedly through the colour revolutions of 2005 and 2014 in Ukraine? Again, why did the U.S., except for the Trump period 2017-2021, impede Kyiv to honour the Minsk Agreements the Ukrainian governments of the period had signed? Or why did the U.S. and the EU/NATO members remain heedless to the ethnic conflicts perpetrated by the Kyiv regime against the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbass region during this period 2014-22? Independent sources have reported the heavy casualty figures among civilians in the Donbass region, upward of 14,000 dead, because of relentless bombings and militia raids by Ukrainian military and territorial security forces.
(5) What is known independently is the escalation of tensions by Kyiv after the 2014 ouster of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his regime by the support of the Obama-Biden administration ultimately led to the February 24 SMO by Moscow. The SMO was launched by Putin after the autonomous regions (or oblasts) of Donetsk and Luhansk had taken steps to implement their right of self-determination as independent republics and then requested international recognition of their independent status. The Russian parliament or Duma voted on their requests recognizing their independence, which then gave Putin as the chief executive or president the right to invoke UN Charter’s Article 51 authorizing the SMO in assisting the two Donbass republics defend themselves against the Kyiv regime. Furthermore, the SMO is analogous to R2P (Responsibility to Protect), a non-binding commitment of the UN signed after the Rwanda genocide, that might be invoked to defend people under attack by an aggressively violent regime.
(6) Again, I have spelled out briefly what goes unreported in the western media, and the SMO is portrayed wrongly as an invasion. Unless these are fairly understood, any narrative such as those pushed by BBC, CBC and the mainstream legacy media on the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 is anti-Russian propaganda. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and the U.K. have engaged in war-making/invasion running into double-digits against hapless third world people and states, from Iraq through Libya into the Balkans (Serbia and Kosovo), the greater Middle East, horn of Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. None of these war-making, including the Iraq war of 2003, was provided with UN Security Council authorization; and the reason for this is simple. The Security Council could not, because of Russia and China’s likely veto, pass any Chapter VII resolution authorizing the U.S. and U.K to unilaterally make war. In the lead up to the Iraq war of 2003, the Bush/Blair administrations refused to table any resolution for the Security Council authorization after the earlier passage of UNSCR 1441 that demanded Baghdad to comply with the final weapon inspection because France, under President Chirac, informed it would veto such authorization. This was the reason why Prime Minister Chretien refused to join the “coalition of the willing” in the Iraq war of 2003 and kept Canada out of that conflict when earlier Canada did join a Security Council approved military operation in Afghanistan after 9/11. But no one in the West calls out the U.S. for “invasion” or “rape” of Iraq regardless of the wrongs of Saddam Hussein, or the “invasion” of Libya and the murder of Gaddafi, or the invasion of Panama and the arrest and imprisonment of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.
Simply put, since the end of the Cold War the double standard, or blatant hypocrisy by the Western powers to go around the UN in pursuing its war-making/invasion stands out for any individual who has done his due diligence on such matters. In Serbia, for instance, the Clinton administration with European allies engaged itself invoking R2P on behalf of Kosovo by deploying NATO forces and without seeking Security Council authorization knowing that no such authorization would be forthcoming, since Russia and China together would veto such a resolution if tabled. It was during that military operation against Serbia that China’s embassy in Belgrade was bombed in May 1999 by an American cruise missile.
The failure of the Clinton administration to respond to the Rwanda crisis led to the passage of R2P in which the role of Canada was instrumental. But invoking of R2P falls upon individual members of the UN; consequently, the Russian SMO, both as R2P (even though Putin has not invoked it) and based on Article 51 of the UN Charter, which Putin invoked on request of the two Donbass republics, is a lawful act contrary to the western propaganda. Since no Western government, or opposition parties in the West (except for Marie Le Pen in France, and if she had won the presidency there would be now an entirely different scenario within the EU/NATO councils), has raised the issue of R2P as it would apply to the people in the Donbass region, we have as a result this blatantly hysterical branding of Putin as a war criminal and invader of Ukraine that most of the non-Western countries, such as India and Brazil, are not buying.
(7) It is important to distinguish Putin’s authorization for SMO in Ukraine from that of calling it an “invasion of Ukraine”, like the U.S. led “coalition of the willing” invading Iraq in 2003. Again, failing to do so is simply partisanship, and uncritically accepting the “narrative” of the western media makes allowance that for the nearly insane rhetoric of Western leaders that we have been witnessing. Goebbels would be proud, and in the absence of any seriously informed discussions about the war we should be honest enough to point out that “Goebbels-ism” is alive and well in the West nearly eight decades after the defeat of the Third Reich.
If Russian forces had “invaded” Ukraine the military operation of the past two months would have had a completely different look. Invasion of Iraq was, as Bush 43 called it, a “shock and awe” operation that indiscriminately bombed and destroyed population centres and infrastructures of that country. The modus operandi of American military operations in third world countries has been one of “shock and awe”, of levelling countries and indiscriminate bombing resulting in mass civilian casualties. Do we need to recall Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and then the 20-year regime change and nation-building exercise in futility in Afghanistan for the sort of high-tech wars the U.S. has waged in poor third world countries, or simply be gullible low-information western consumers of packaged propaganda as Infowars against Russia?
On the contrary, the SMO is, as implied by Putin in his February 21 address to the Russian people and Ukrainians if such an action was to occur, a limited operation to secure the Donbass region and in aid of the two republics proclaimed by their people. Kyiv and western cities, such as Lviv, remain open cities with EU leaders, including Pelosi and her Congressional colleagues, openly going there without fear of any retaliation. Justin Trudeau is the latest high-level visitor taking the obligatory tour of Kyiv, as was done by Boris Johnson a few weeks ago. All these western leaders from the EU and NATO countries are now belligerent parties in an undeclared war against Russia. On the other hand, Russia could well retaliate if Putin had declared a war instead of SMO against Ukraine, and Kyiv would not then be hosting these belligerent actors for photo ops. The military operations, as I have studied the maps and reports from observers outside of the mainstream media, are focused on the Donbass region and along the Black Sea coast while targets outside of this theatre of conflict, that is west of the river Dnieper, are primarily military targets including bridges and roads to interdict Ukrainian supplies sent by NATO from reaching Ukrainian forces in the Donbass area.
My information based upon independent observers, both American and non-American, is that the main objective of the Russian SMO has been achieved. The goal was to encircle Ukrainian forces in the Donbass, isolate them and grind them down to surrender or be eliminated. There was no intent, again as per the deployment of Russian forces and shown by satellite imagery, to take cities and population centres. The 40-mile columns of armoured vehicles and tanks outside of Kyiv were, as they became clear over time and then with their redeployment, a massive feint to draw Ukrainian forces in defence of the capital instead of moving to reinforce those in the Donbass region. In the initial phase of the operation, that is the first 48 hours, the Russian forces swiftly decapitated the command-and-control centres of the Ukrainian forces and destroyed much of the Ukrainian air capabilities. Therefore, there was no attack from the ground or the air upon the 40-mile columns of Russian armoured vehicles outside of Kiev.
The only major city that was fought over by the Russian forces against the entrenched Ukrainian military was Mariupol in the south. It is here that the siege of Azov Steel complex is reaching an end with the Ukrainian marine force and the neo-Nazi Azov brigade holding a weakened entrenched positions inside the huge complex. It is rumoured that among the Ukrainian forces are foreign mercenaries, including some senior officers from the U.S., the U.K., and France, including presumably a military general from Canada. I have been reading reports that Macron has been making repeated calls to Putin to allow some sort of arrangement for these entrapped NATO officers to get out. There were rumours based on radio signals monitored that among these foreign fighters and military officers was sighted the French intellectual, and friend of Macron, Bernard Henri-Levy. I understand that it is too late now for Macron’s desperate requests to be met by Putin, and unless there is going to be a mass surrender of those inside the Azov Steel complex most will end up dying of hunger and dehydration. There are reports that Russian forces surrounding the Azov Steel complex opened a humanitarian corridor for civilians, women and children held hostage, to walk out and that presumably most have come out.
What makes the situation in the Azov Steel complex so grim, and why the fighting in Mariupol has been bloody, is the presence of the Azov battalion made up of the neo-Nazi soldiers inside the Ukrainian army. It was reported that Zelensky ordered them to hold on without surrendering, and so it will be a matter of time before this siege ends with surrender and deaths as to be expected.
The western media reports on Russian atrocities, again as I read reports from inside the Donbass area, are mostly fake news. We were inundated with similar fake news of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. The story of a hospital bombed by Russian forces in Mariupol turned out to be fake and debunked by later reports from the city, as was the fake atrocities of civilians killed in Bucha that turned out to be killings carried out by neo-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian forces once the Russian forces, the 40-miles columns, re-deployed from Kyiv and Kharkov to the south. Again, wars are atrocities and modern wars result in civilian casualties. This is one main reason why the Russian forces have not engaged in capturing cities, especially when the enemy forces choose to hide behind civilian populations, as when Israelis claim their soldiers contend with in anti-terror operations in Gaza and elsewhere.
(8) Zelensky was elected in 2019 on the platform that he would negotiate a peace settlement with Russia. Zelensky told Ukrainians if elected he would restore the Minsk Agreement of 2015, work out an agreement for the autonomy of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, end the military operations in the Donbass region against ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and recognize Russian language as an official language, instead of suppressing it, since majority of Ukrainians conduct their affairs in Russian.
What went wrong?
President Trump was impeached in 2019 for the call he made to Zelensky to congratulate him, and in that call he asked to be kept informed of the investigation into the Burisma affair which involved the Bidens, father and son. What has not been disclosed is if President Trump spoke about Zelensky’s plans in respect to his platform for peace with Russia. But the late Professor Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, a Russian specialist, in one of his last public interviews given 2019 while Washington was focused on the impeachment of the president, he discussed the peril surrounding Zelensky in pursuing with his promise of peace-making. Cohen pointed out that the neo-Nazi Right Sector in Ukrainian politics had delivered in no uncertain term the message that Zelensky would be executed if he negotiated with Putin. What has also gone unreported in the U.S. media is the Democrat party under Obama-Biden had invested in the politics of the Right Sector to wage a proxy war with Russia by stepping up ethnic violence in the Donbass region. This is how Rep. Adam Schiff, the leading member of the Democrat team making the case for removing President Trump in the Senate, opened his brief: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people, so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
The question for Schiff, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer et al is when and by whom was the decision made that “we [Americans] can fight Russia over there”? I am not aware that any such resolution calling for fighting Russians over there in Ukraine was voted upon in the Congress. Therefore, what we have here, beginning with the charade of the Trump impeachment, is the American Deep State made up of the military-industrial complex, about whom Eisenhower warned the American people, and the Intelligence Community, about whom John Kennedy warned, unilaterally and lawlessly funding armed conflict against Russia.
Those Republicans, or RINOs, who together with Democrats make up the Uniparty, have been equally invested in turning Ukraine into a bait for proxy war and regime change in Russia. The late Senator John McCain was a notorious hawk, warmonger, and a leading member in the Congress as spokesman for the arms industry and the military-industrial complex. In Ukraine, as in Georgia, McCain with his sidekick Senator Lindsay Graham (R) was at the helm of both the Bush and the Obama administrations pushing for regime change. In December 2016 McCain and Graham travelled to Ukraine. McCain told his Ukrainian audience in Kyiv, “We are with you, your fight is our fight, and we will win together. In 2017 we will defeat the invaders and send them back where they came from.” Graham echoed McCain, “Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia… It is time for them to pay a heavier price.”
Whether out of fear of the neo-Nazi Right Sector or on having understood the Uniparty/Deep State message delivered repeatedly about regime change in Russia, Zelensky’s peace platform was shelved, and Madison Avenue-Hollywood joint effort launched to sell him as Ukraine’s Churchill to the public in the West. The Kyiv offensive in the Donbass we now know was timed for the spring season of 2022. From late December 2021 we began to hear from Biden about intelligence reports being given to him that Putin was assembling Russian forces to “invade” Ukraine. These reports gathered momentum in January-February 2022. Zelensky responded in a tweet with a correction on January 20, 2022, “that there are no minor incursions and small nations.” Through these various remarks from Biden and his officials about expecting a Russian invasion the subject of Ukraine joining NATO, not joining, sending application for joining, the application getting fast-tracked or turned down, became loud and Putin’s address to his people on February 21, 2022, dealt with what by then had become a crisis primed to explode. This speech by Putin is a required reading to understand the Russian point of view of the crisis and the history behind it.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
(9) The SMO of February 24 pre-empted Kyiv’s offensive in the Donbass region that Biden was referring to ominously since late December. Putin’s pre-emption took Washington by surprise, since Biden’s remarks of Russia making minor incursions were belied by the SMO and with it the hidden agenda of the Uniparty/Deep State war mongers got exposed. At the NATO meeting in March followed by Biden’s visit to Warsaw, Poland, he openly stated “Putin cannot remain in power.” Since at least the 2014 Maidan coup against President Viktor Yanukovych supported by the Obama-Biden team led on the ground in Kyiv by Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (presently Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs), the use of Ukraine to provoke a U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia materialized as planned.
(10) The rejoinder repeatedly posited, as you have done, that Ukraine did not join NATO, nor was it about to join NATO and, therefore, for Putin the issue of Ukraine joining NATO was merely a pretext for invading Ukraine, which was always his intent. Such an argument conflates intent with history. Putin’s intent of what he, or any Russian leader, would do in defending Russia’s red line on an eastward advancing NATO was repeatedly made unambiguously clear at least since the pre-emptive war in Georgia in 2008. In 2007 at the Munich Security Conference Putin reiterated his position on American unilateralism and unipolar ambitions as threatening to Russia. Putin’s intent on the question of Ukraine joining NATO was not left to anyone’s guessing, it was openly stated as conveyed by Ambassador William Burns to Condoleezza Rice in 2008.
Why is it then the Biden administration, and the previous administrations, did not take heed of Putin’s intent clearly and repeatedly stated about Ukraine being the red line, which if breached or perceived by Moscow as preparatory to being breached will not be allowed? In the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy and Khrushchev heeded each other’s warnings, de-escalated the crisis, and took measures to remove Soviet and American missiles respectively from Cuba and Turkey. The precedent between Washington and Moscow was established for not crossing their respective red lines on security matters in the nuclear age. Why instead Washington in the post-Cold War period began to humiliate Moscow through proxies, as in Georgia and Ukraine?
So, what is it that was not understood about Putin’s intent from before 2005 until February 24, 2022? Was it reasonable to expect that Putin would/should wait out until Ukraine officially became a member of NATO before he acted? From Putin’s perspective all the signs out of Washington and Kyiv were steps leading ever closer to the announcement of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, and once Ukraine became a NATO member-state Kyiv’s unrelenting military operations in the Donbass region would inevitably draw Russia into a conflict with NATO.
However, what is more relevant is what is it about pre-emption on the part of Putin in Ukraine that is vague or unacceptable, when the issue of Ukraine turned into a platform for U.S./NATO war-threatening and war-making against Russia both conventional and nuclear is an existential issue for the Russians? Let me pose this question in a comparative sense with the case of Israel as an example.
Does Israel have a red line or not when it comes to dealing with its neighbours?
Israeli leaders have made it amply clear that any of its immediate neighbouring states seeking to acquire nuclear weapons would become an existential threat to Israel. In such a circumstance, would Israel wait to act only after that neighbouring state (Iraq, Syria, Iran) had acquired nuclear weapons and demonstrated its capability, as North Korea or Pakistan has done?
Israeli leaders have given the answer. Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in June 1981. Begin did not wait until the Osirak became operational and Saddam Hussein demonstrated Iraq’s nuclear capability before responding to the existential threat to Israel turned real. I assume Israel is not going to be waiting until Iran openly discloses its nuclear capability.
Iranians, on the other hand, have also openly declared that if they possessed nuclear weapons, they would consider annihilating Israel.
Given the situation of Israel vis-à-vis its immediate neighbours and the intensity of the enmity, it should not be surprising to anyone regardless of how Israel is viewed by its friends and enemies that for Israelis there is a very real reddest of red lines that no Israeli leader is going to wait and see crossed before responding.
This is what pre-emption is about. The June 1967 Arab Israeli war was a pre-emptive war waged by Israel against Egypt and its Arab partners.
Putin was not going to wait indefinitely, given the provocations and risks escalating as the U.S. armed Ukraine, talked in circles about Ukraine joining NATO, supported and organized colour revolutions in neighbouring countries, and hinted obliquely and directly on bringing about regime change in Russia. Putin acted before he and Russia would be acted upon.
(11) But, you write, “The point today – and this is where we disagree – is that in my opinion, we have passed the stage of what Ukraine should or should not have done leading up to the war, and we are now looking at a people – impoverished as their democracy may be – who are resisting with their lives the onslaught of a murderer, one who is no different than Hitler in my opinion. Russia is not threatened militarily by Ukraine, not today and not tomorrow” (emphasis added).
Let me first respond to the Putin-Hitler comparison. If anyone among heads of governments that for any number of reason western leaders or the public find distasteful, unacceptable, and is vilified as an enemy, and the recourse in such vilification is to immediately brand such a person, Putin in this case, as Hitler, as once Saddam Hussein was vilified as Hitler, or Idi Amin as Hitler, and so on and so forth, then Hitler is no longer to be taken as sui generis, the absolute embodiment of evil and, indeed, ironically then Hitler is not Hitler any more. This is the utter trivialization of what Hitler has represented. But even apart from such trivialization, to make comparison of Putin as Hitler leaves so much open to questioning that I can only dismiss this idea as indicative of lazy and poor thinking on the part of anyone resorting to ad hominem and vilification in making an argument. Putin is not Hitler, nor is he Mao or Stalin, not even Trotsky. At best one might somewhat credibly say Putin is an autocrat. And I might then ask, so what? Our world is full of autocrats, petty ones, and big ones, and we have them in Ottawa as we see them in Washington. The one in Ottawa is petty. The ones in Washington are and have been big and their dirty works are all on record. Let us put aside such rather sorry efforts in vilification and remain focused on arguments based on evidence, not narratives, on issues open to dispute.
The proper thing to do, instead, is situate Vladimir Putin in the context of Russian-Soviet history. For our purpose we might bracket Russia’s history with the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 to the present. For three hundred years 1613-1917 the Romanovs ruled an expansionist Russian empire across Eurasia as Czars, the representative of God (Father and Son) in Moscow as the third Rome. The Russian empire was agrarian and peasant-based, modernization and industrialization with the idea of democracy and politics of representative government were introduced very late under the Romanov rule. The last two decades of the Romanov rule were marked with anarchist terror, assassinations, martial law, Russo-Japanese war, experiment with an elected Duma, efforts in land reform and then the Great War of 1914-18. The Romanov dynasty collapsed with the twin revolutions of 1917 and the Bolshevik-Communists seized power. There then followed four more years of internal wars between the White counter-revolutionary forces against the Bolsheviks who had Nicholas II and his entire family murdered in 1918.
From 1917 until 1991 the autocracy of the Romanov Czars was replaced by the totalitarianism of the Communists. In other words, practically the entirety of the last century was one of grim dictatorship in Russia of the Czars and Russia of the Communists. The post-1991 post-Communist Russian Federation is for all practical purposes a “new state”, as are India and China – new states but old societies only in recent modern times making transition from pre-modern to modern form of representative government and democracy. In Russia’s case this process of transition is barely thirty years old and on-going within which the old mindset of people under authoritarian/totalitarian rule is adapting to new conditions without a history of non-authoritarian rule by those in power to provide any sort of guidance.
What needs to be understood, in my view, is that Putin is both a part of this process of an immense upheaval and change across the old Russian-Soviet multiethnic empire and a leader at the helm of this change. This means Putin can neither be simply cast in the old mold of bygone leaders of Russian-Soviet empire, nor can he be simply compared to leaders of western democracies where history of democracy stretches back, as in the case of Canada, into the 19th century and earlier.
History will eventually assess Putin on how during his term in office he assisted in or retarded the development of Russia that fell upon him after the fall of the Soviet empire in terms of democracy and in economic potential as an industrial power. Any balanced assessment at this juncture of Russian history will show that Putin might fairly be compared to Deng Xiaoping of China assisting China’s transition from the post-Mao period into opening China’s economy to the world. The difference is that Deng did not assist in opening China to a multiparty form of elected and representative government, which remains under a one-party totalitarian rule. Putin, on the other hand, has opened Russia to a rule of elected representative government in a multiparty system. The authoritarian aspect of Putin’s rule is reflected in the way he has dealt with the alternative centres of power that emerged in the period under Boris Yeltsin’s regime with corrupt money-laundering schemes of those Russians as oligarchs who plundered the wealth of Russia with the full connivance and complicity of western governments, particularly the U.S. In my reading of this aspect of Putin and this phase of recent Russian history, those who complain most about Putin’s authoritarianism are the outsider non-Russian people, while his electoral victories indicate that segments of the Russian people and nationalities who have been voting for him and his party have no such complaint. It is silly to argue that Putin’s political success is or might be indicative of electoral corruption in Russia given what we know of how brazenly corrupt the mechanics of election is in the West. Pot calling the kettle black has no merit in any argument.
Putin is a nationalist. He is not unlike Trump, or Modi of India, Bolsonaro of Brazil, and Xi of China, a Russia-first nationalist. I may also include in such a list Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin to have been Israeli-first nationalists. This characteristic of contemporary nationalism in the present post-Cold War era is denigrated as bigotry and racism by members of the World Economic Forum. Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Xi, and Putin as nationalists are hence viewed as enemies of Globalism and, accordingly, vilified by the “Davos man.”
It was the late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in a 2004 essay coined the term “Davos man” to describe the thinking of those pushing the WEF Globalist agenda. The “Davos man” is someone, Huntington described, who belongs to or identify with the emergent economic elite forming a global social-elite caste which has “little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that are thankfully vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.” The 2016 election bringing Donald Trump into the White House was largely due to that plurality of voters who intuitively understood that he was an opponent of the ideology of Globalism and the thinking of the “Davos man”, or woman in the case of Hillary Clinton who insulted Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” For this crowd of Democrats, Liberals, Macron-istas and the EU elite Putin and the Russians are “deplorables” to be denigrated, humiliated, and dismissed through a colour revolution and regime change.
The EU is a sort of model for the WEF agenda of, as spelled out by Klaus Schwab in his manifesto, The Great Reset. In the seventies and at the peak of the Cold War, the major communist parties of Western Europe came up with a common platform named Eurocommunism separating them from Moscow. Without going into fine detail, Eurocommunism morphed into the blueprint for the EU that came into being following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A non-elected body of EU commissioners, reminiscent of the Soviet Politburo and the Central Committee, was designed to run the EU out of Brussels, while the EU parliament in Strasbourg, again reminiscent of the Soviet parliament, was designed to be the toothless assembly of elected members. The seat of the Soviet-Communist empire was relocated from Moscow to Brussels in a peaceful inversion of Marxism/Eurocommunism in what has come to be the EU. But the EU has no credible military muscle of its own and this void is filled by NATO. The U.S. effectively subordinates the EU through the politics of NATO to the unipolar requirements of the American empire, and this blends well with the Globalist agenda of the WEF.
For the EU/NATO/Globalists and the “Davos man” thinking, after the removal of Trump through the rigged 2020 election the most difficult obstacle in their “Great Reset” agenda remain Putin and Russia. The emergence of Russian nationalism and patriotism under Putin’s leadership, the revival of the Russian Orthodox Christianity and the return of the Orthodox Patriarch to his seat in Moscow, is the re-birth of Russia after the horrors of Bolshevism-Communism. A Russia re-born as Orthodox Christian once again is as epochal for Russians as the re-birth of Israel after two thousand years has been for Jews.
But for the Globalists, for Klaus Schwab and the “Davos man” who by definition is post-Christian, post-humanist or transhumanist, post-nationalist as “rootless cosmopolitan”, the re-birth of Russia is catastrophic and requires to be steamrolled with regime change in Moscow. It is in this context that we might best explain that the war in and over Ukraine, instigated by the American Uniparty (Democrats and RINOs) complicit with the Deep State, is the Globalist war against Russia.
In defending Russia from an existential threat looming ever larger out of Ukraine, while in this period of escalation 2014-22 the Kyiv regime continued to recklessly bomb and kill Ukrainians of ethnic Russian origin in the Donbass region which culminated in Putin’s response of February 24 to defend the newly declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin is called out as a murderer. What are we then to call those who were involved in murdering people in the Donbass region in contravention of the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015?
War is murder regardless of how any war is described in partisan terms as “just war” or “unjust war.” To describe Putin as a murderer and as Hitler is no less ridiculous than celebrating Zelensky as Churchill, and the killings of ethnic Russians in the Donbass as “just war” and not murder and crimes against humanity. We need clarity, honesty, and impartiality if we are to engage in assessing rights and wrongs in any war, while recognizing that once war begins there will be atrocities regardless of what the parties engaged in warfare claim.
In response to your words quoted above, “we have passed the stage of what Ukraine should or should not have done leading to the war”, I do not see that stage has been passed. The war effectively provoked by escalating events following the 2014 Maidan coup will run its course until it is ended by surrender or negotiation by which Ukraine accepts the terms Russia set forth once the SMO got launched. But the war would not have come about if those responsible for the war in Kyiv had acted prudently and with wisdom, which required respecting the security interests of Russia and recognizing that as a buffer state between Russia and the EU a neutral Ukraine, as guaranteed by the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, could not so lightly set aside its neutrality for the lure of gains by seeking membership in NATO.
Instead of waging war with the backing of the EU/NATO members and financing provided by the Biden administration, Ukrainians leaders have the wherewithal to end the bloodletting at once by accepting the Russian terms on the table rather than continue fighting to the last of their compatriot for the Globalist agenda. It is the West that has set forth the narrative of the war for Ukraine as one of defense against Russian invasion, and Zelensky as Ukraine’s leader has bought that narrative to wreck Ukraine on the altar of Globalism. The analogy here is not much different from that of the endless asymmetrical conflict of Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza that would immediately end if Gazans recognized Israel and its security interests and acted accordingly, which would not only bring peace but improved conditions for people on both sides of the Gaza-Israeli border. What is it that the Gazan leadership do not understand despite the continuing impoverishment and suffering of Gazans by waging an improbable terror-based conflict with a bigger power, Israel, is also the question that may be asked of the Ukrainian leadership?
(12) You write, “The Russians simply don’t believe that Ukraine has the right to exist as an independent state. This is Russian history and nationalism. And of course, the Ukrainians will never forget the Holodomor.”
The assertion that Russians do not accept Ukraine’s independence is without any evidence. The facts are that Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the Russian Federation as the successor state/republic of the Soviet Union recognized the decision of the Ukrainian people. Similarly, other former republics of the dissolved Soviet Union claimed independence and were acknowledged by Moscow. Putin in 2000 expressed in public to the Russian people the following, “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” Once again it is the western narrative that Putin’s motive is driven by the desire to reconstitute the Russian-Soviet empire that existed until December 1991. And this western narrative is as ludicrous as the Democrat funded BLM-Antifa narrative that Trump and the Republicans want to return the U.S. to its history of slavery, as some sort of justification for the mobs that went on rampage of vandalism in the summer of 2020.
There is no evidence that Putin’s Russia has given any indication of reconstituting the Russian-Soviet empire. Those who offer such opinion do so without facts, for the facts are that the Russian Federation lacks the capacity to forcefully reconstitute what disintegrated in 1991, nor is there any public evidence of motivation or aspiration expressed to engage in such effort. On the contrary, Putin has sought good and proper relations with the former republics of the Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact countries. There is, however, no denying that the history of the Soviet Union is burdened with the criminal legacy of Bolshevism-Communism and the Russian people have suffered no less than other nationalities of the Russian-Soviet empire. This legacy continues to haunt and hurt people whose forebears were victims of Soviet Communism and its policies.
But the past wrongs cannot be flung indiscriminately on the face of those in the present who were not around for the past wrongs done. This is the problem with dredging the past to indict the present if people want to move beyond the past and write a new more promising chapter for the present and the future. Yet the past is dredged, and if dredged it should not be selectively done without an effort for a fair and full accounting of that past.
Ukrainians rightly cannot forget the Holodomor. But while this history is grim and horrific, accounting for who was responsible and why it happened is as important as what happened and who were the victims. This was the evil done deliberately by the Bolshevik-Communist leaders of the Soviet Union in pushing the forced collectivization of the peasantry to pay for industrialization. Ukraine felt the full force of this collectivization of peasantry and the great famine that followed in the period 1932-33. The result of Stalin’s first 5-year plan implemented between 1926 and 1932 brought about death from starvation of nearly 4 million people. The recent book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), provides a chilling detail history of what led to 14 million deaths between 1933 and 1945, the responsibility for a third of this estimated total number of dead falls on Stalin and the Bolshevik-Communists.
The “Bloodlands” was Eastern Europe from the eastern borders of Germany and the coast of the Baltic Sea to the Caucasus, and its heartland was the Ukraine. This area also overlapped the Pale of Settlement wherein the largest number of Jews were resident through the period of the Russian empire and into the Soviet Union. The policy of forced collectivization in Ukraine was carried out on the orders of Stalin by party members, Old Bolsheviks as Stalin’s comrades in the Politburo among whom many were of Jewish origin, and most Holodomor victims were non-Jews. I mention this because the cycle of criminality that consumed the “Bloodlands” in part was driven by those Ukrainians who later participated alongside Hitler’s army in the massacre of Jews as vengeance for the crimes of Stalin and the Old Bolsheviks in the Holodomor. And that cycle continues right into the present with neo-Nazis in Ukraine (the Right Sector and members of the Azov battalions) and Jews (the neocons in the U.S.) making for the most bizarre and criminal partnership between them against ethnic Russians, Putin, and Russia that has culminated in the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022.
The story of the famine in Ukraine in real time was disputed in the West. The New York Times reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, notoriously denied in his reports of any famine related deaths and won his Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for what amounted to the cover-up of what occurred. New York Times has not returned Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for his discredited reports. Snyder writes, “Duranty knew that millions of people had starved to death. Yet he maintained in his journalism that the hunger served a higher purpose.” And what was that higher purpose? The Bolshevik-Communist policy of building socialism in an agrarian society through forced collectivization of the peasantry. There has been a cover-up here of the Holodomor and the role of the Old Bolsheviks of Jewish origin in the starvation deaths of Ukrainians (including poor Jewish peasants, since there would have been very few if any among Jews designated as “Kulaks”, rich peasants, who were specifically targeted for elimination) that goes beyond the vile cynicism of the New York Times and the Sulzberger family in censoring news out of Ukraine. This remains a smouldering issue with the neo-Nazis in post-Communist Ukraine. As it is said, once an old scab is removed putrid pus of all sorts begins to ooze out of the wound. The story of the Holodomor is that once the scab gets pulled, and Snyder’s book does an immense and long overdue justice in removing the scab, the horrific details that ooze out indict a very large and wide circle of individuals among whom were those of Jewish origin who carried out Stalin’s policy resulting in nearly 4 million dead Ukrainians before Hitler’s army arrived.
Stalin made a U-turn on his Old Bolshevik comrades in the purge that he ordered beginning in 1935 and then followed it with the great terror of 1937-38. Trotsky as an Old Bolshevik was forced out of the party and exiled in 1929. Trotsky was the proponent of world revolution and denounced by Stalin as the leader of the Left Opposition to the policy of “socialism in one country”. By the end of the purge and the great terror, Stalin removed everyone from the party associated with Trotsky and had senior Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, executed in the purge of 1935-36. They had been involved in implementing collectivization in Ukraine, and like Trotsky they were of Jewish origin. Those of the Left Opposition who fled abroad from Stalin and his purge and terror later became the staunchest Cold War warriors after 1945. They have flourished in the ranks of the Democrat party, while some later joined the Republican party. But the common thread among them is their past connections to the Old Bolsheviks as Trotskyites, and while in the mainstream media this is a taboo subject not to be discussed or exposed their politics as neocons is revealing of their anti-Russian ideology in the post-Cold War era.
Jews among the neocons are the progeny of the Old Bolsheviks. Their Trotskyism was widely known and as Cold Warriors their Americanism morphed into messianic liberal internationalism. George Washington had warned Americans against entanglements in the affairs of Europe and the rest of the world. He was the first of America First founding fathers. But for the neocons the sin of America First politics is isolationism, which in the neocon thinking needs to be purged from American politics. The end of the Cold War re-opened the debate of America’s interventionist role in world politics, and with Pat Buchanan’s run in the 1992 primary for the Republican nomination against the incumbent President G.W.H. Bush the politics of America First re-surfaced. The neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, the Kagan clan [Donald, and sons Fred and Robert] and the list is long) responded with the “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC), a policy of seizing the post-Cold War moment of American unipolar hegemony in world politics and turning it into policy for American-backed regime change under the banner of promoting democracy. This is how the PNAC’s policy paper published in 1997 “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” described the grand objective for the American Empire: “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible” (emphasis added).
Through the years of the Clinton-Bush 43-Obama administrations, that is 1993-2017, the neocon thinking provided the platform for American foreign and defense policies. These were the years of endless wars, interventions, colour revolutions, in direct opposition to anything that would smack of America First politics. Donald Trump’s four-years became the hiatus from the neocon directed America’s role in world affairs. In recent days Trump has spoken out in his rallies damning George W. Bush as the worst American president in modern times for his Iraq war and in doing so Trump has again raised one of the key issues of his 2016 primary campaign that catapulted him over other Republican candidates. But the Never Trumpers in Republican ranks were and remain unapologetically neocon in their thinking. I am recalling this to underline the deep schism in American politics and the place that the neocons occupy in subverting America First politics of the founding fathers.
The expansion of NATO eastward and the use of Ukraine to bait Russia into a proxy war are right out of the playbook of the neocons. And as the schism in American politics worsens with the Russo-Ukrainian war, a crisis is looming and a reckoning, I believe, will not be avoided. America today is a highly polarized country, and the American people are awakening to how their lives have been impoverished in the post-Cold War decades by the Uniparty/Deep State through endless wars abroad and politics of “woke-progressivism” run amuck at home.
The great irony is that Ukraine through this entire period 1993-2017 emerged as the centre of the neocon run American Globalism, whose roots go back to Trotsky and his ideology of world revolution. It is again ironically in Ukraine that all the various threads of criminality of the last century converge. As Snyder described, Ukraine was the hub of the “Bloodlands” during 1933-45, and once again through the period 2005-2022 Ukraine was turned by the neocons and their accomplices in Kyiv into the “badlands” for the American Globalist agenda. Clintons, Bush, Obama, and Biden made Ukraine the spigot of their money-laundering schemes. But the role of Americans goes even further back to the years after 1945 when the CIA and MI6 used Ukrainian Nazis or the Stepan Bandera’s followers to maintain low-level insurgency against the Soviet Union in Ukraine. This insurgency was eventually crushed in the final years of the Stalin era.
The West basically closed the books on Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials while intelligence agencies assisted large number of Nazis to escape through ratlines out of Europe and recruited many Nazis for using them in the arms industry and elsewhere, as in rocketry, or for counter-intelligence purposes in the Cold War activities. All of this makes for sordid history. How is it that, for example, Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather found a haven in Canada despite the public knowledge of his role in Ukraine and Poland as a member of Goebbels’s ministry? How is it that Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, the Kagan family (Fred and Robert) have engaged with the neo-Nazis in Kyiv and driven Ukraine into the ditch of this present war with Russia? How is it that Zelensky as the puppet of Igor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch and puppeteer, so readily became the mask for the neo-Nazis, and the New York Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, has engaged in suppressing this story, as Walter Duranty did in suppressing the Holodomor?
If any people, apart from Jews, who knows and understands at great depth who the Nazis were, are and what their brand of politics is, are the Russian people. When Putin speaks about the de-Nazification of Ukraine, this cannot be taken lightly or dismissed as Russian propaganda only because Zelensky provides the mask for Ukrainian neo-Nazis. It becomes even worse when the western media and such moronic political leaders, as is Justin Trudeau, label Putin as Hitler and war criminal, when on the question of Nazism and war crimes the Russians are scarred with the deepest wounds of Nazism and Nazi war crimes. The Russian death toll in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany is estimated at 27 million, nearly five times the number of Jews dead in the Holocaust. It is truly, I confess, horrific to recall such numbers to make any point about the comparative suffering of Jews and non-Jews (Russians) brought about by the Nazis and I immensely dislike doing it. And yet, I believe, the need to recall such numbers as Snyder has done in telling the story of the “Bloodlands” is necessary, since how twisted and decrepit the history of this appalling mass murders have become in the West that the EU members, Americans, Canadians, Australians, with the neocons at the forefront, have engaged so brazenly with the Ukrainian Nazis to ignite a war against Russia.
(13) Lastly, you write, “So, in my view, we are now in a situation where the Western alliance, weak as it is, is being challenged by an authoritarian regime, while another one – China – is watching in the wings. In a way, you’ve convinced me that there is not really much difference between the U.S. and Russia – both are run by corrupt élites. Yet even if it is only lip service –and I don’t think it is – the West has created more than an illusion of freedom. Elections can be stolen, but there are boundaries as to what the élites are allowed to do. Those boundaries are not where you and I would like them to be, but they do exist, and they are situated in a better place than the boundaries that limit Putin or Xi. If Ukraine wins this war – or is seen to win it – then the world will be a slightly better place, and the West will conceivably be a little stronger vis-à-vis Russia and China and other bad actors who may arise.”
On the contrary, it is the Western alliance that has pushed and goaded Russia into a war in Ukraine. Without the macabre machinations of the neocons embedded in the American Deep State, Ukraine by itself would not have made a kamikaze assault in provoking Russia to launch SMO in the Donbass region. The unintended consequences for Zelensky and company to have hired themselves as tools for the neocons and their Globalist paymasters will be dire.
A fish rots from the head down. This is what we are witnessing about the post-Cold War American empire, or as many have now been calling out this America as the Empire of Lies, gone rotten from the head down. The face of the Empire of Lies, represented by a demented walking carcass that Biden is, speaks volume about the rottenness that sadly grips the once great republic that it was at least through the Cold War decades. The warning signs were furiously blinking but given the arrogance of those running Washington at the outset of the unipolar moment in American history they threw all caution to the wind, and with the triumphalist fever running through their arteries they have driven the great republic headlong towards a precipice.
The war in Ukraine with Russia will likely be the comeuppance for these pathological liars and sociopaths. The only unanswerable question is how these Deep State actors – the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama, the Biden crime family, Pelosi, Schumer, Mitch McConnell et al and the functionaries, such as Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Fauci and their underlings – will be held accountable for their crimes. Will there be an American version of the Nuremberg Trial for these folks, or will they slither and slide away from their reckoning that American patriots rightly want to see as part of the restoration of their great republic?
We agree that there must be boundaries, or guardrails, that cannot be crossed by the elites or two-tier justice system, one for the powerful and another for the rest. But it is the Deep State and the Washington establishment that together have subverted the constitution of the republic and turned America into a post-constitutional two-tier system. As John Adams remarked, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
For the past half-century, the Democrat party and the ruling class have waged an anti-Christian, anti-religion cultural war against the founding values of the American republic. The politics of gender identity, radical feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, have shredded the traditional meanings of sex, family, and marriage, while political correctness has been used punitively to violate protected First Amendment rights of Americans. Radical and extremist left-wing Marxists and secularists in North America have relentlessly waged the culture war against Christianity; lately churches have been locked or fenced, and pastors have been arrested; and with the “closing of the American mind”, as described by Allan Bloom, it became easy for the radical left to eviscerate the founding culture of America as one of “white privilege and slavery”. The situation in Canada is worse, while Europe has become a wasteland denuded of its former self, its churches empty, and the void created by its negative fertility rate rapidly filled by mass migration from the global south. The result is staring in our faces but rhapsodically celebrated by the western elite as a superior culture, which in effect is a culture of abortion-euthanasia-population displacement/culling-neopaganism, or a return to the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah with 21st century science and technology. This is a culture of virtue-signalling that cannot be exported or imposed on Russia, China, India, the Middle East, most of Asia, Africa, and South/Latin America. The culture of the West now is in effect a culture of death and hi-technology serfdom.
Ukraine is not only a laboratory of the clash of civilizations between the EU/NATO/WEF and Russia, but also a clash between virtue-signalling neopagan culture of the West and the rebirth in Russia of its Orthodox Christian values and patriotism. Therefore, given the West’s espousal of multiculturalism meaning all cultures are equal, the embrace of and support for the neo-Nazis in Ukraine has occurred without any questioning, or from collective amnesia, on the part of the western elite. But though the vast majority of nations around the world for political reasons or the mendacity of their own elites beholden to western countries economically might still vote at the UN on motions condemning Russia, the sentiments of the people, even governments, as demonstrated in the case of the vote in the Security Council with India and Brazil abstaining on the American motion to condemn Russia, reflect the real support for Russia is extensive and will grow in time. The West no longer has a claim to moral leadership in global affairs that it once took for granted.
The moral disintegration of the West, instead, is increasingly illustrated by incidences of mob-rule and vandalism behind the push for the agenda of the Globalists and the progressivists against all opposition of the traditional right. Justices of the Supreme Court in America are threatened with violence by Democrat party supporters, their homes made targets for intimidation with mob demonstrations; and the summer of unrestrained riots and mob violence in Democrat run cities across the country orchestrated by the militia wing of the Democrat party, the BLM and Antifa, preceding the 2020 election brazenly rigged and stolen denying President Trump his second term was enabled by the American ruling class without any penalty imposed on the offenders. What prevails through intimidation of the left is a mockery of the rule of law. So, yes America once not too long ago did have boundaries and guardrails for the maintenance of ordered liberty, but it is now wishful thinking to believe any longer that they exist and remain protected by law enforcement agencies.
America was not founded in 1776 to be the policeman of the world. The American constitution did not empower “We the people” to venture abroad and seek out monsters to destroy. The Monroe Doctrine was set forth as the red line for American security and to keep the quarrels and entanglements of the old world at a safe distance away from the western hemisphere, and not the other way around of giving Americans a free pass to intervene in the affairs of the world beyond the shores of America. It has been the steady and incremental erosion by the ruling class of the founding principles of the republic and warnings of the founding fathers against entanglements with the politics of the old world that have brought America to the sorry state of the present.
“If Ukraine wins this war,” you write, then presumably “the world will be a slightly better place.” It is precisely the opposite. First, Ukraine will not and cannot win this war despite whatever the Globalists provide for Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainians against Russia. It is, as the retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has calmly, logically, and professionally explained, it is absurd for anyone to believe that if the U.S. was drawn into a conflict with Mexico it would lose to the Mexicans, similarly it is an absurdity to believe that Russians will lose to Ukrainians.
Russia will take its time to grind Ukraine’s military down to the inevitable surrender that Ukrainian leaders should have known would come about if they provoked a war. Putin and his commanders are not operating on the timetable of the western media and in keeping to the schedule of the talking heads calling out the daily scorecard of wins and losses in the battlefields of Ukraine. The Russian forces are methodically moving to reach their stated objective of compelling Kyiv to accept its neutral status as a buffer state on Russia’s borders.
It is quite likely that eventually Ukraine might be partitioned and reduced to a minor vassal state within a much-reduced territory as it was in the period going back to the mid-17th century. The map below tells the story of how Ukraine grew with additions of territories, especially after 1917 when Lenin extended the boundaries of Ukraine by gifting the Donbass region and followed by Khrushchev adding Crimea in 1954, as gift to the Ukrainian branch of the Bolshevik-Communist party for supporting his leadership bid in Moscow following Stalin’s death. Those territories in the west and north-west added to the Ukraine of the 1650s might well be offered back to Poland and Belarus, and territories added by Lenin and Khrushchev rejoined to Mother Russia, as has already been done with Crimea, and the republics in the Donbass region (Donetsk and Luhansk) becoming members of the Russian Federation, as is Chechnya. Ukraine then will be reduced to a small landlocked state, a result brought about by the criminal folly of the current crop of Ukrainian leaders.
But more importantly Russia’s win in Ukraine will be the defeat of the Globalist agenda of the “Great Reset”; a defeat for America’s Deep State and the neocons imagining of making the post-Cold War moment of America’s unipolar hegemony permanent; and a win for those Americans who want to take their country back returning it to the America First principle and American republicanism, which had made America great and respected around the world. Russia’s win, I must also add, will be a win for a multipolar world and a huge set-back for any ideology that pushes for Globalism and desecrates the sovereignty of people and nations, as does Marxism and the Globalist ideology of the “Davos man”.
You mention China is “watching in the wings” the war in Ukraine and, therefore, preparing for its own stated goal of the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. One China policy, Beijing’s formulation, or as Deng Xiaoping stated, “one China, two systems”, was accepted by the U.S. and most countries going back to Nixon’s 1972 historic visit to meet with Mao Zedong. This reunification will occur at the moment of China’s choosing. What cannot be ascertained at the present is whether this reunification will take place without Taiwan mounting a token resistance or Taiwan negotiating terms without China having to launch an invasion. There is not going to be any military offensive by the U.S. and its allies to prevent this reunification when the Beijing leadership decides the time has come to end the status quo over Taiwan. When this occurs China will have definitively turned the page on its past humiliations by western colonial-imperial powers. India, for example, after 1947 took time but eventually moved against Portugal-ruled island of Goa to end the last vestige of western colonialism-imperialism in South Asia.
Time is on China’s side and as China grows militarily stronger, the West relatively becomes militarily weaker. The Globalist/neocon war in Ukraine has reunited Russia and China into one Eurasian partnership that Nixon and Kissinger worked hard to drive a wedge into and keep them apart. This should have been predictable, but the arrogance of unipolar hegemony blinded the neocons and their comeuppance, I believe, will surely be hastened following the next round of 2022 mid-term and 2024 presidential elections in America.
(14) There is much more that can be discussed relating to the war in Ukraine and its consequences. For instance, the sanctions by the West have not resulted in bankrupting Russia; instead, we are likely headed into a post-U.S. petrodollar based global economy as Russian rubles have gathered strength despite sanctions, the ouster of Russia from the Western-driven banking system, and the illegal seizure of some $300 billions of sovereign Russian wealth deposited in Western banks. The full negative effect on the EU of its sanction policy will at a minimum have negative consequences for the EU member-states, for NATO and for Germany as the keystone EU member in NATO. In my view the EU/WEF/Globalist agenda of the “Great Reset” has been set back if not knocked out with the “Great Rupture” likely coming in the world economy and the place of the King $ undermined or replaced as the global reserve currency.
Let me conclude by simply re-stating the obvious, that history has not ended and the war in Ukraine will be seen retrospectively as the hinge moment when the interregnum of the post-Cold War world came to an end bringing with it an end to America’s unipolar moment. There is an analogy here to be made that with the end of WW2 the curtain came down on the leftovers from WW1 of the British and French empires. We are now in uncharted waters, and if a nuclear war over Ukraine is avoided the long historical shift in power from the Atlantic basin to the Pacific basin will likely accelerate as the world becomes truly multipolar.
Salim
May 2022