• Tag Archives Russia

  • Will Armageddon Be Joe Biden’s Final Legacy Regarding Russia?

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    When the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, the world seemed poised for a new, more peaceful era no longer haunted by the fear of a nuclear Armageddon. The principal successor state from the wreckage of the USSR was a noncommunist Russia that was intent on becoming part of the democratic, capitalist West. President George H. W. Bush and his top advisers exercised considerable diplomatic skill managing the twilight years and ultimate demise of the Soviet Union. Their core achievement was to gain Moscow’s assent to Germany’s reunification and membership in NATO. The implicit tradeoff (unfortunately never put in writing) was that NATO would not expand beyond the eastern border of a newly united Germany.

    The contrast between the benign end to the original Cold War and the current status of relations between the West (especially the United States) and Russia could not be greater or more alarming. NATO’s meddling in the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia has become an outright proxy war for the Alliance. As NATO’s leader, the United States has pushed a series of extremely dangerous escalatory steps. The latest provocation is the decision by Joe Biden’s administration authorizing Ukraine to use long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that are capable of striking at least 190 miles inside Russia. Moscow has responded by adopting a new nuclear doctrine warning that the use of such missiles by NATO’s Ukrainian proxy would mean that Moscow is officially at war with the U.S.-led alliance. Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin is bluffing, but the risk of a nuclear collision between NATO and Moscow now appears to be very high.

    It is bitterly ironic that the decision to let Ukraine use U.S. missiles that might trigger World War III has been made by the lamest of lame duck U.S. presidents. At the 59th minute of the 11th hour, the leaders of the Democratic Party pressured Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. They did so because the evidence of his cognitive decline had become undeniable. However, his hand-picked successor, Kamala Harris, then proceeded to lose the presidential election to Republican nominee Donald Trump.

    To say that the Biden administration has no mandate to make such a crucial decision involving war and peace would be a monumental understatement. In fairness, though, the current foreign policy crew is not solely responsible for fouling-up relations with Russia and provoking a new cold war with nuclear implications. That “achievement” has been a bipartisan effort taking place over more than 3 decades.

    Toward the end of George H. W. Bush’s administration, public opinion polls in Russia showed that nearly 80 percent of Russians held positive views of the United States. In the late stages of the Bill Clinton administration, nearly the same percentage held negative opinions.

    It was hardly a surprising development. During his years in office, Clinton and his Russian-hating advisers (especially UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) antagonized Moscow on multiple occasions. Washington went out of its way to attack Russia’s long-standing religious and political clients, the Serbs, as the Yugoslav federation disintegrated. However, the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, struck the biggest blow to East-West relations.

    Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, continued and intensified the policy of provoking and antagonizing Russia. Subsequent rounds of NATO expansion brought U.S. military power to Russia’s immediate neighborhood by adding such new members as the three Baltic republics, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Most provocative of all, Bush pushed to add Ukraine to the Alliance. Although Germany and France temporarily blocked immediate moves to make Ukraine a member, Washington’s ultimate goal was quite clear.

    A rising number and volume of warnings against making Ukraine a NATO asset also came from Putin and other officials. Washington and its key European allies ignored those warnings, but it became clear in 2014 that the Kremlin was not bluffing. When President Barack Obama and key European leaders helped overthrow Ukraine’s generally pro-Russia president and install a regime subservient to NATO, Moscow struck back emphatically, seizing Ukraine’s strategic, but majority Russian populated, Crimean Peninsula.

    Relations between the West and Russia continued to deteriorate thereafter. In the autumn of 2021, the Kremlin proposed a new relationship with the West that amounted to Russia’s minimum demands. Those demands included a guaranteed neutral status for Ukraine – thus foreclosing the prospect of Kyiv’s eventual membership in NATO. The Kremlin also sought the withdrawal of advanced U.S. weaponry from the easternmost members of NATO. It amounted to an ultimatum, and when the Biden administration treated Moscow’s demands with contempt, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That offensive, combined with the decision by the United States and its allies to impose severe economic sanctions against Russia, ignited an ever-escalating military crisis.

    It is uncertain whether President-elect Trump intends to end the dangerous impasse with Moscow. Contrary to the partisan myth that Trump has been Putin’s puppet, his actual policies during his first term were consistently hardline. One can hope, though, that he has fully understood what a disaster Washington’s love affair with Ukraine has become for both countries. Restoring cooperative bilateral relations with Russia is essential for global peace.

    Alarmingly, however, Trump might not get that opportunity, even if he wishes to back away from the beckoning abyss. The lame-duck Biden administration still holds power for nearly another two months, and, if administration leaders are so inclined, that is more than enough time to plunge the country into nuclear war. Biden’s conduct in recent weeks, especially authorizing Ukraine to attack Russia with U.S.-supplied, long-range missiles, is beyond reckless. Biden’s legacy is already bad, but it could become even worse.

    https://ronpaulinstitute.org/will-armageddon-be-joe-bidens-final-legacy-regarding-russia/


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  • DC’s Stance on Ukraine Is as Divorced From Reality as Its COVID Regime

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Theirs not to make reply,

    Theirs not to reason why,

    Theirs but to do and die.

    Into the valley of Death

    Rode the six hundred.

    From, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    I was a fourteen-year-old freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Kenmore, N.Y. when I was assigned my first term paper for Mr. Chaya’s World History class. The list of topics included the Charge of the Light Brigade. That’s the one I picked.

    Like any boy that age, I still retained a belief in the glory of war, something Tennyson seems never to have outgrown. This despite being trained in grammar school to scurry from my desk and duck against the wall under the classroom window when the air raid siren sounded.

    The possibility of being nuked by the Soviet Union at any moment had been a fact of life for all of my life at that point and would be for twelve more years.

    The term paper assignment was the first time I was asked to research a historical event, rather than just read a textbook summary about it. By the time I finished, I had my first inkling that “military intelligence” might just be an oxymoron and perhaps war wasn’t the glorious affair Tennyson had cracked it up to be.

    To this day, when I hear the lyrics, “a good old-fashioned, bullet-headed, Saxon mother’s son” in the Beatles song “Bungalow Bill,” I think of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the aforementioned six hundred light cavalrymen into the teeth of Russian artillery.

    The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1853-56). Despite the Light Brigade disaster, the port city finally fell to the British and French allies, but not before the Russian Empire sank its entire Black Sea fleet in the harbor to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

    That desperate act should provide a warning to Washington.

    The Russians had to fight for Crimea again during the Russian Civil War following the Bolshevik revolution. It fell to the Germans during WWII after a bitter 250-day siege, only to be regained by the Red Army in 1944.

    I never dreamed I’d be writing about the same port city thirty-six years after that first term paper. In 2016, the new global empire, the United States, having successfully orchestrated a color revolution to oust Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, was in a stare down with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin over his annexation of Crimea.

    Yanukovich had been falsely portrayed as “pro-Russian” by NATO in its haste to bring Ukraine into the European Union. The coup was the last straw for Putin after watching the U.S. break its promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO “one inch eastward” in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement to the 1990 reunification of Germany.

    A look at a map of NATO in the ensuing 30 years since that promise puts a somewhat different light on Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and at least calls into question just who is the aggressor in this situation.

    As I wrote back in 2016, Sevastopol is one of the few reliable Russian ports that remains ice-free all winter. Syria is home to another. If that doesn’t inspire skepticism regarding Washington, D.C.’s humanitarian motives for orchestrating regime change operations in both countries—while remaining bosom buddies with the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia—then, as my friends in the American southeast would say, “bless your heart.”

    President Biden told Reuters on New Year’s Eve that he had warned Putin, “if he goes into Ukraine, we will have severe sanctions. We will increase our presence in Europe, with our NATO allies, and there will be a heavy price to pay for it.”

    Sanctions don’t sound too ominous if one has zero historical perspective, including, say, the “sanctions” against the Japanese Empire in 1941. It doesn’t really matter who was right or wrong. Sanctions eventually lead to war if their consequences become dire enough.

    It doesn’t matter so much who is right or wrong on the matter of Ukraine, either. The reality is this: The Russians are never going to give up that port. They’ve bled for it in the past far more than any American army has ever bled for anything. It is an existential matter for them.

    In 1856, they sank their entire Black Sea navy before giving up Sevastopol. What would they be willing to do today?

    Meanwhile, it would make not one iota of difference to Americans living in the United States if Russia annexed all of Ukraine, much less Crimea. Washington’s interests in the region are purely imperial and contrary to those of most U.S. citizens. It is also questionable that the U.S. could win a limited conflict in the region against Russia, given the logistics.

    It is equally unrealistic that Russia could win a full-scale conventional war against NATO. The U.S. alone had a military budget in 2020 more than ten times that of Russia. That would leave Russia with only one alternative before surrender.

    Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has thought of itself as the “shining city on the hill” leading a “new world order” of democracy and peace. Considering its recent exploits in the Middle East and Ukraine, in 2021 it more resembles a drunk bully stumbling around the world slurring its words and picking fights with smaller opponents.

    That Russia can be treated likewise is as divorced from reality as Washington’s belief it can stop the spread of a respiratory virus with lockdowns and vaccine mandates. But as damaging as the COVID Regime has been to American society, Washington’s delusions about bringing Russia to its knees could result in far worse.

    This article was republished with permission from tommullen.net.

    Tom Mullen

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • US-Russia Tensions Are Escalating Because of Collusion Fever

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    trump-and-putin

     

     

    Establishment media and politicians began to sound the alarm on fake news after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, blaming deception and ignorance for his victory. But as much as they might worry about the spread of false narratives and disinformation, their thirst for stories about Russia colluding with then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election proved to be a powerful brand of fake news—one that has most certainly put lives at risk.

    In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the “Russia hacked the election” narrative quickly became the gospel of the mainstream left. It was only a matter of time, they claimed, until the facts revealed the nefarious relationship between Trump and the Kremlin and exposed the flagrant collusion that led to Clinton’s defeat. There was just one problem: the outlets drumming up this narrative lacked evidence to substantiate it.

    In one instance, The Washington Post reported that Russia had penetrated the US electricity grid only to be forced to issue a correction admitting they had their information wrong. In another show of sensational Russiagate journalism, The Post published a story citing an anonymous group called PropOrNot claiming Russia had infiltrated alternative news outlets to spread Russian propaganda.

    After respected journalists like The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi roundly condemned the article’s betrayal of basic journalistic standards, the Post issued a tepid clarification two weeks later—after the story had already made its rounds as fact.

    A slew of sparsely substantiated speculations and stories has flooded the consciousness of millions of Americans since 2016. In another example, a story published by The New York Times claimed the CIA had proof Russia was behind Trump’s victory but cited nothing more than anonymous officials’ statements. As Greenwald observed at the time:

    Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome.

    Despite apt criticism like this, elaborate theories of Russia’s infiltration of American democracy spurred hysteria among Americans, politicians, and journalists who oppose Donald Trump’s presidency. This panic, in turn, has plunged America into Cold War 2.0 with Russia, which, as Hillary Clinton warned, puts “lives at risk” without producing evidence to remove Trump from power.

    Despite rampant, unverified narratives that the president worked hand-in-hand with Putin, the media’s ongoing claims of his traitorous activity at worst contributed to the president’s already hawkish policies—and at best failed to hold him accountable for them. As The Nation magazine noted last April,

    Democrats and much of the media … have incessantly demanded Trump “‘get tougher’” with Russia and its President Vladimir Putin in order to demonstrate that his election had not been abetted by “collusion with the Kremlin.”

    As the Russiagate narrative insisted Trump was Putin’s pawn, the president was actually heightening tensions with his alleged collaborators, playing a global game of chicken. On numerous occasions, US forces have been in direct opposition to—and exchanged gunfire with—Russian forces in Syria. Considering the left-leaning media’s ongoing demonization of Trump, from his dietary preferences to his mental health, challenging this aggressive foreign policy should have been low-hanging fruit.

    He campaigned on the promise of ending America’s longstanding policy of nation-building, a promise he has failed to keep with his ongoing bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere which have killed record numbers of civilians. Despite his rhetoric indicating a withdrawal of troops from Syria, US troops remain stationed there. (This is, of course, not unique to Trump. It is par for the course in modern American politics: war is the health of the state.)

    Instead of seizing the opportunity to promote peace and discourage violent conflict, however, outlets chose to side with the jingoists. When Trump launched an airstrike in Syria over claims of Assad’s use of chemical weapons attacks in 2017, pundits from MSNBC and CNN lauded his aggression (only to later report that Mattis admitted the US lacked proof when they decided to launch the strike). Of the 47 editorials written about that strike in major outlets, only one expressed opposition. CNN host Fareed Zakaria praised him. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” he said.

    In contrast, when Trump announced he would be bringing US troops home from Syria, the media called it a “win for Putin.” This pro-war push from the left is not a fringe trend in the age of Trump. As Greenwald reported in January of this year following the president’s (now compromised) plan to withdraw troops,

    Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it.

    He continued:

    While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year [2017] on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining.

    Greenwald views this data as representative of a “reversal by Democrats on questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.”

    If Democrats were rationalizing Barack Obama’s pro-war policies when he was in power, they are now actively advocating for them as long as doing so is in defiance of Donald Trump.

    Despite his rhetoric, however, Trump’s overall foreign policy remains aggressive, and the media and Democrats’ animosity toward Russia could move the US toward a confrontation with Russia. In February, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing from the decades-old “Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces” treaty with Russia that previously banned the placement of nuclear weapons in Europe. Both sides had accused each other of violating the agreement, and Putin warned of retaliation against the US should they position missiles in Europe. The Nation magazine observed that

    more than two years of Russiagate allegations, which have demonized both Trump and ‘Putin’s Russia,’ have probably made it easier, if not tempting, for Trump to quit the INF Treaty.

    Similarly, Russiagaters admonished Trump’s diplomacy summit with Putin last year, dismissing the fact that such talks have been a tradition for US presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Stalin.

    The Trump administration is also posturing against Russia in other parts of the world; his ongoing trade war with China is part of the reason for the nuclear treaty pull-out, and late last month, Trump ordered Russia to remove its troops from Venezuela. He has also imposed numerous rounds of sanctions on Russia and Russian officials and armed Ukraine against Russian interests.

    This is not the first time Russia scares have influenced global politics. The first Cold War and the threat of the Soviets’ destruction of democracy was a foundational justification for US wars in Korea and Vietnam, for example. The “domino theory” compelled the US government to act aggressively. Years later in Afghanistan, the CIA armed and funded the mujahideen, which evolved into al-Qaeda, in the name of beating back Soviet influence in the country.

    Afghanistan remains war-torn and overrun with terrorists to this day. US aggression has also been encouraged by the media’s complicity with unsubstantiated government claims, whether in their perpetuation of Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie or the weapons of mass destruction debacle in Iraq. The media and politicians’ use of flimsy claims to justify militarism is nothing new.

    Unfortunately, fears of external threats serve to catalyze public support for government conflict over diplomacy and cooperation, as the left-wing reaction to Russiagate demonstrates. Equally concerning is the willingness of many citizens to embrace this heightened tension and drumbeat of war under the “fake” presumption that doing so is equivalent to opposing Donald Trump.

    In truth, one of the best ways to do that is to oppose his aggressive foreign policy, which has real-life consequences for innocent people around the world and consequently puts the lives of Americans at risk. Considering the US media has refused to own its failures on Russiagate, it’s likely the pervasive anti-Russian hysteria will continue to the detriment of humanity.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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