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President Biden’s decision to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine after promising not to do so is an act of criminal recklessness that further escalates the US/NATO proxy war with Russia. The F-16s are produced by General Dynamics Corporation. Biden authorized European puppet governments to deliver the American-manufactured F-16s to the Ukrainian military.
The commander-in-chief’s behavior violates the norms of international law but remains consistent with a “rules-based order” that allows the United States to issue edicts as a unipolar hegemon.
Unbeknownst to many, the U.S. military and CIA have waged 17 secret/proxy wars between 2017 and 2020 in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Niger, Kenya, Tunisia, Yemen, and beyond.
In ruthless fashion, the United States has imposed sanctions on 44 countries as part of a pattern of economic warfare waged against governments that demand political sovereignty.
The problem for the United States is that a multipolar world is emerging, led by China and Russia, that rejects the dictates of belligerent imperialist politicians in Washington. Hence the fanatical drive to arm Ukraine.
Biden’s action on the F-16s follows White House decisions to provide Ukraine with 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems; 2,00 Javelin and 1,000 light anti-armor weapons; 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems; 100 tactical unmanned aerial systems; 31 M-1 Abrams tanks; 20 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS); satellite imagery and analysis capability; secure communications and electronic warfare detection systems; along with vast quantities of additional military weaponry.
Congress allotted an astonishing $113 billion in aid to Ukraine in 2022. In 2023, the United States will apportion an additional $46.6 billion and counting to finance its proxy war and keep the corrupt Zelensky regime in power.
Not only is the United States arming Ukraine. It is providing intelligence that helps the Ukrainians target Russian forces. It is an active participant in the war.
Despite American involvement, both the economic and proxy wars have failed to deter the Russians from neutralizing the Ukrainian security threat, prompting the United States to up the ante.
At each step along an increasingly precarious path, the United States has deliberately crossed Russia’s “red lines” in its fanatical drive to depose President Putin, fracture the Russian Federation, rape Russia’s vast energy resources, and isolate China.
What red lines?
The first red line is Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Historically, Russia has opposed the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe. Opposition hardened significantly after the US/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Furthermore, the Russians view Georgian and/or Ukrainian membership in the organization as an existential threat to their security as a sovereign nation. The United States and its NATO vassals are acutely aware of the Russian position on NATO expansion but forged ahead with plans that integrated former Warsaw Pact countries into the alliance and made Ukraine a de facto member by militarizing the nation in the aftermath of the U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.
The second red line, closely related to the first, is the US/NATO militarization and nazification of Ukraine. In 2014 and 2015, Russia attempted to reach a diplomatic solution to the civil war between Washington’s puppet government in Kiev and separatist republics in the Donbass by negotiating the Minsk agreements. Despite these efforts, the United States conspired with Germany and France to sabotage the settlements while building a formidable Ukrainian military with a far-right neo-Nazi Azov regiment, in the face of strenuous Russian objections.
The third red line involves Ukrainian missile attacks that hit a Russian airbase located on the Crimean peninsula in August 2022. Russia considers Crimea to be part of the Russian Federation, having annexed the territory after a local plebiscite in 2014.
The fourth red line is the U.S. delivery of HIMARS long-range mobile missile systems and M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. On September 15, 2022, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the United States had become a party to the conflict by supplying advanced missile systems to Russia’s adversary. On February 12, 2023, the Russian envoy to the United Nations said that NATO countries are “pouring oil onto the fire” by continuing to supply Ukraine with military aid and weapons.
The fifth red line involves direct attacks on Russia. The United States destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022, with a series of underwater detonations. Seven months earlier, on February 7, 2022, Biden had promised to end Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine, which it did on February 24, 2022. He made good on his threat in an act of state terrorism.
Further attacks ensued. Evidence points to a Ukrainian drone attack on the Kremlin that Russia claims was an attempt to assassinate President Putin on May 3, 2023. Ukraine does nothing of military significance without the permission of its American overlord, denials notwithstanding.
The drone strike follows the assassinations of Russian journalist Daria Dugina and blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, which took place in August 2001 and April 2003, respectively. Most recently, Ukraine launched a cross-border raid into Russia on May 22, 2023; a drone attack on Russian pipeline installations on May 27, 2023; and drone strikes on residential buildings in Moscow on May 30, 2023.
The crossing of “red lines” must be seen within the following context. Bush Junior withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. Obama engineered a fascist-led coup d’état that removed a democratically elected Ukrainian government from power in 2014, authorized the transfer of $53 million in non-lethal military aid to Ukraine that same year, and placed Aegis anti-ballistic missile weapons systems in Romania and Poland in 2016. Trump withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 and allocated $250 million in lethal military aid to Ukraine in 2019.
Furthermore, the stated objectives of the United States in Ukraine are to degrade the Russian military in a war of attrition and engineer regime change in the Kremlin. In a speech delivered in Poland in March 2022, Joe Biden openly called for the removal from office of Vladimir Putin by stating, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” On April 12, 2022, Biden accused Putin of committing genocide in Ukraine. On a trip to Kiev on April 25, 2022, Lloyd Austin stated that Washington wanted to see Russia weakened by losing military capability and troops.
The political establishment represented by President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Senator Lindsay Graham does not seem to understand that if their strategy approaches success, it would create the exact scenario that might provoke a Russian nuclear strike.
Instead, the imperialists blame enemy states for crimes they have committed. The warmongers in Washington want the world’s people to remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the United States brought about regime change in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), South Vietnam (1963), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), Panama (1989), Iraq (2003), Honduras (2009), Libya (2011), and beyond. With constant reference to the struggle for “democracy” and “human rights,” they airbrush from history the U.S. genocidal wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and Iraq. Imperialists are only concerned about giving fascist orders to other governments, which, if disobeyed, have terrible consequences.
As for the Russians, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they escalate military operations to resolutely demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, they run the risk of provoking a direct military response from the West. If they do not achieve their objective, Western provocations will continue to brazenly cross red lines with ever-growing intensity. The United States has placed Putin in an impossible situation where Western intentions to weaken and exhaust Russia bring about the very scenario U.S. and NATO leaders seem not to believe will occur, namely, Russian use of nuclear weapons.
The game of power politics is becoming incredibly dangerous as the risks of miscalculation grow exponentially greater with every incremental escalation of the conflict, whose end result might be catastrophic as the Biden regime continues to back Russia and itself into a corner.
For Russia, the expansion of NATO, America’s desire for regime change in the Kremlin, and the prosecution of Putin as a war criminal constitute an existential threat.
For the United States, a Russian victory in the Ukrainian proxy war is an existential threat to the existence of NATO and to American global hegemony.
The neocon-infested Biden administration wants to do with the Russian Federation what the Clinton regime did with Yugoslavia: dismember it. They want to deal with Putin as the Bush gang dealt with Slobodan Milosevic: try him for war crimes in the Hague. When they finish with Putin, they want to plunder Russia’s resources as they did under Yeltsin. And the Russians know it.
Russian leaders also see the savagery of the West as demonstrated by its callous disregard for the thousands of injured, maimed, and dead Ukrainians, the millions of Ukrainian refugees, the dozens of cities turned to rubble, and the thousands of Russian lives lost in the war. Russia’s limited military operation was meant to achieve its security objectives while limiting the loss of life in Eastern Ukraine, a goal that became impossible to achieve due to Ukrainian military tactics. What is on full display in Ukraine is Western barbarism posing as democracy.
Biden’s recent announcement of F-16 deliveries to Ukraine came at a G-7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan. Was the location of this declaration a not-so-subtle message to Putin indicating that the United States is willing to use nuclear weapons if Russian forces defeat the Ukrainian army and NATO countries are unwilling or unable to reverse the loss? Or did the Americans not recognize the significance of announcing the escalation of the war in a city they annihilated with a singular atomic bomb? Do the Americans not understand the horror of nuclear war? Do they not comprehend what they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with crude atomic weapons? Can they not fathom the destructiveness of thermonuclear war? Are they so incredibly blinded by hubris that they blithely threaten life on the planet Earth by prolonging and deepening the Ukraine conflict in defense of empire?
In the fall of 2022, Biden, in a moment of unusual clarity, said the world faces the prospect of “Armageddon” for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The facile manner in which Biden made his remark is shocking to the conscience. The implications of his matter-of-fact statement are so incomprehensible as to make them seem unrealistic and therefore all the more dangerous. Is he serious? Or is he posturing? Does he want to call Putin’s hand? How about Xi Jinping in China?
Absent a vigorous and sustained anti-war movement capable of disarming the maniacs in Washington, Biden’s observation may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Donald Monaco is a writer and political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His most recent book is titled, The Politics of Empire, and is available at amazon.com.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from The Unz Review
