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The Democrats and Republicans are relentless warmongers. They kill, they maim, they ravage, and they deceive with impunity. They destroy entire countries to feed the dogs of war. Their latest victim is Ukraine.
The Biden regime is using the conflict in Ukraine to wage a proxy war on Russia with the unanimous support of Congressional Democrats, including so-called progressives. The Republicans are doing their part in a bipartisan effort to menace Russia by expanding NATO as an extension of the Pentagon’s war machine. As a direct result of the conflict, defense contractors are making money hand over fist, proving, once again, that the military-industrial complex needs perpetual war to thrive.
The immediate goal of the war is to weaken the Russian military and destroy Russia’s economy, thereby eliminating a major obstacle to global hegemony. The long-range goal is regime change in Moscow. The ultimate objective is the Balkanization of Russia and the exploitation of its vast resources by American corporations.
The means used to fight proxy war involve the delivery of astronomical amounts of financial and military aid to the puppet government in Kiev, a junta brought to power by a U.S. engineered coup in 2014. The total is $54 billion and counting. The money is being given to one of the most corrupt governments on earth, whose leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, has banned all opposition parties. Zelensky, despite being Jewish, leads an ultra-nationalist government that harbors fascist ministers and a fascist militia. Zelensky, the former actor turned president, is no more than a lap dog for Ukrainian oligarchs.
The means used to wreck the Russian economy involve unprecedented sanctions that will cause enough economic hardship, it is hoped, to bring down the Putin government. Russia’s foreign exchange reserves totaling $300 billion have been frozen. Russian banks have been removed from the international financial management system known as Swift. The United States has banned imports of Russian oil and gas. It has prohibited the import of Russian seafood, diamonds, and vodka. It has sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
The chief effect of military aid is the prolongation of death and misery in a conflict that will inevitably result in a Russian victory. U.S. militarists know this and seek to prolong combat to bleed Russia by arming Ukrainian forces as they once did by funding, arming, and directing an Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. But this time around, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that will be bankrupted.
Rather than crippling the Russian economy, sanctions have strengthened the ruble, a currency that must now be used to purchase Russian energy. The sanctions have led to a dramatic increase in the price of Russian oil and gas. Russian exports account for 20% of the world’s supply of oil. These conditions have led to an unprecedented increase in income for Russia as Putin redirects the sale of energy and food resources toward China, India, and East and West Asia, away from Europe and the United States.
Image on the right is from The Cradle
On a recent visit to Tehran, Putin announced a massive $40 billion oil deal and strategic partnership with Iran. Contrast Putin’s successful summit, where he also met with Turkey’s Erdogan, to Biden’s visit with the murderous Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salam in Saudi Arabia, whom the president once characterized as a “pariah.” In a disgraceful meeting, Biden begged the boy prince to increase oil production, only to come away empty-handed. Bin Salam’s Kingdom, it seems, is getting very close to Putin’s Russia in what is termed “OPEC Plus.”
The unintended impact of sanctions has sparked a dramatic inflation in the pricing of all commodities, particularly gas and food, in the United States and Western Europe. This comes as the U.S. debt has topped $30 trillion, largely due to massive tax cuts for the rich, limitless corporate welfare, and perpetual war.
The boomerang effect of sanctions on the United States is profound due to the shortsightedness of neoconservative war planners in Washington, who unwittingly undercut the dollar as the world’s reserve currency by creating conditions that encouraged nations targeted by sanctions to conduct financial transactions in their own currencies; effectively shattered globalization by fostering the emergence of regional trading-blocks led by China and Russia; and perpetrated another geo-political, military, and humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. In their quest for global dominance, the neocons are bringing about the global decline of the American empire, and they are too blinded by their own arrogance to see it.
Although defense of America’s empire is supported by both wings of the Property Party, the Democrats are more duplicitous as they claim to defend democracy and human rights in a quest for social justice, in contrast to Republicans, who rationalize foreign intervention with naked power politics.
Bill Clinton’s pursuit of “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian interventionism” and Barack Obama’s employment of “responsibility to protect” justifications for the use of military force can be contrasted with George W. Bush’s utilization of the Wolfowitz doctrine of unilateral and preemptive war to clarify each side’s pretext for military intervention. The latter approach tends to generate more public opposition than the former.
Trump’s advocacy of an “America First” doctrine that emphasizes global military primacy can be compared to the Biden doctrine that pits the American struggle for “democracy” against “autocracy” to rationalize militarism and war. Biden’s approach illustrates the latest version of the “lesser evil” argument advanced by Democrats, which is a fiction.
All foreign policy “doctrines” represent the continuity of American military dominance and are designed to maintain the U.S. empire, but some are more deceptive than others. Here is where the Democrats excel: in deception.
The Biden administration includes a Black/South Asian Vice President, a Black Secretary of Defense, and a Black UN representative, all of whom vociferously support proxy war with Russia. How progressive. This is a hideous example of equal opportunity imperialism at its best, resulting from a politics that allows the Democrats to co-opt racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and cultural identities to provide the illusion of social change while promoting capitalist exploitation, empire, and war.
It should be remembered that Barack Obama, the United States’ first Black president, used NATO bombing and Islamic jihadists to prosecute an illegal war on Libya in 2011. Obama’s war, supported wholeheartedly by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, led to the overthrow of the Libyan government; the brutal torture and execution of its leader, Muammar Gaddafi; the fragmentation of the country; and the introduction of Black slavery to the North African nation.
With regard to NATO, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 made the military alliance obsolete. But rather than dissolve the alliance, the West, under U.S. leadership, expanded the organization from 12 original members in 1949 to 30 members today.
The key to understanding Russia’s position on Ukraine was the promise made by Secretary of State James Baker on behalf of President George H. W. Bush to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO “one inch eastward” if the Kremlin would allow the unification of Germany. The promise was given on February 9, 1990. The promise was broken by succeeding U.S. presidents. The continued expansion of NATO, with proposals to include Ukraine and Georgia, is seen by Russia as an existential threat to its security.
There is an ominous history fostered by Democrats that validates Russian concerns.
For the greater part of the 20th century, the United States led hot and cold wars against the Soviet Union. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, allied countries, including Great Britain, France, and the freedom-loving United States, invaded Russia in an attempt to strangle the revolution in its cradle. They failed. Their troops were defeated by the Red Army in 1918. President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, ordered the infamous invasion. Domestically, Wilson unleashed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to arrest, jail, execute, and, in the case of immigrants, deport anarchists, socialists, communists, and labor organizers during the first “Red Scare” in the years 1919 and 1920.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted the Soviet Union as an ally in the fight against the Axis powers during World War II. It was the Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in 1943 that turned the tide of battle against Nazi Germany and signaled its eventual defeat. The Soviet Union lost 25 million lives as a result of Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” an invasion that inflicted indelible scars on its people. Vladimir Putin, whose parents were terrorized and whose younger brother died during the war, has vowed that Russia would never again fight a land war on its territory, a statement that should serve as an ominous warning to the West.
President Harry Truman, a Democrat, ushered in the Cold War and the national-security state in 1947. Truman announced his doctrine in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, when he pledged his support for Greece and Turkey in their fight for “freedom” against Soviet communism. In reality, Truman armed and financed repressive governments to crush rebellions under the guise of fighting communism. By so doing, he set the template for numerous CIA and military interventions in support of right-wing governments by his successors. Domestically, Truman’s administration launched an infamous campaign of political repression that came to be known as Truman/McCarthyism, a period that saw the persecution of socialists, communists, and their supporters during America’s second “Red Scare.”
Image below: President Harry Truman
Prior to announcing his anti-communist doctrine, Truman, in an attempt to intimidate Josef Stalin, dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, committing a monstrous crime against humanity to demonstrate American military superiority. Truman’s despicable act was the first shot fired during the thermonuclear age. The development and use of the first atomic bomb by the United States touched off a decades long arms race that continues to this day with the recent deployment of hypersonic weapons capable of delivering nuclear payloads in minutes.
President Kennedy brought the world closer to nuclear war than it has ever been by imposing a naval quarantine on Cuba after the discovery of Russian nuclear weapons on the Caribbean island. The crisis lasted 13 tension filled days in October of 1962. Kennedy, however, had the good sense to secretly negotiate the removal of those weapons with Soviet Premier Khrushchev after being confronted with demands that he bomb the island by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an act that would certainly have resulted in nuclear war.
It was Pentagon policy, as formulated by maniacal war planners in the military’s infamous think tank, the RAND Corporation, to fight and win a nuclear war by destroying every city in the Soviet Union and China at the cost of 475 million lives in the two communist countries. Such was the level of homicidal hatred generated by anti-communist ideology that prevailed within the military-industrial complex during the Cold War.
Kennedy subsequently gave a powerful speech asserting the need to begin the journey toward nuclear disarmament and effect détente with the Soviet Union during a commencement ceremony at American University on June 10, 1963, articulating a posture on peaceful co-existence with the communist state that, along with his desire to abolish the CIA after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, undoubtedly led to his assassination by operatives of the national-security state. Before his death, Kennedy matched word and deed by negotiating a Limited Test Ban Treaty that prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water, with the Soviet Union.
President Lyndon Johnson prosecuted a war in Vietnam that cost the lives of over 1 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American soldiers in the name of fighting communism. The Soviet Union and Mao’s China supported North Vietnam in its struggle against U.S. imperialism. The United States military met defeat in the jungles of Vietnam, as it would do in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan in future asymmetrical wars.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian and Democrat, took the advice of his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and directed the CIA to arm, finance, and deploy Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan to induce the Soviet Union to send troops into the country in defense of a secular government, which it did in December of that year.
Carter delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress on January 23, 1980, by articulating a foreign policy doctrine that promised the use of military force against any country that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf region, an area he defined as crucial to the “vital interests” of the United States. The doctrine was announced in response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan that Brzezinski had secretly provoked. What Brzezinski termed the “bear trap” worked, allowing the United States to give the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam” from 1980 to 1988.
It should be noted that the Carter administration was staffed by prominent members of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, an inter-imperialist policy discussion forum once chaired by Brzezinski. It should also be recalled that a step-child of U.S. covert intervention in Afghanistan is Al-Qaeda, an Islamic jihadist organization that has been used repeatedly by the CIA to destabilize unfriendly governments in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and beyond. The U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan contributed to the weakening of the Soviet Union and its eventual demise.
With the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, Western vampires, led by Wall Street investors and Harvard economists, imposed neoliberal “shock therapy” on Russia by privatizing its economy, bringing unimaginable misery and suffering to the Russian people.
Bill Clinton gave unqualified support to Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw privatization and the sell-off of state-owned industries and resources. Shock therapy led to the collapse of Russia’s economy during the years 1992 to 2001. Production fell by 50%. Investments decreased by 80%. During that time period, approximately 3 million premature deaths occurred in Russia. Additionally, 75% of the population was plunged into poverty, totaling 74 million people.
When the Russian parliament repudiated the Clinton/Yeltsin shock therapy and tried to impeach the Russian president in 1993, Yeltsin ordered troops to bomb the legislative body with tanks. He proceeded to dissolve the legislature in direct violation of the Russian constitution. Yeltsin’s overthrow of constitutional democracy was supported to the hilt by Bill Clinton’s public endorsements and through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front organization.
Clinton also manipulated a Russian election to elect Yeltsin in 1996, despite the hated Russian president having an approval rating of only 2%. This history should be kept in mind when recalling that Hillary Clinton falsely accused Russia of hacking the U.S. presidential election in 2016 to elect Donald Trump. The Clintons are adept at blaming others for crimes they have committed.
In addition to presiding over the looting of Russia with the approval of a puppet regime, Bill Clinton expanded NATO in March of 1999 to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, explicitly breaking George H.W. Bush’s pledge not to expand the alliance eastward toward Russia. In light of the present crisis in Ukraine, Clinton has tried to re-write history in order to justify his unjustifiable actions.
Not to rest on his imperialistic laurels, Clinton ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia with the support of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on March 24, 1999. The NATO bombing was commanded by General Wesley Clark, ostensibly as a “humanitarian” mission to stop ethnic cleansing by Serbia. In fact, the 78-day bombing was a culmination of U.S. imperialism’s attempt to promote ethnic conflict to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and privatize its economy. Clinton proceeded with the bombing despite the opposition of Russia and China, a crucial event that shaped the perception of the United States as a dangerous hegemon.
In August of the eventful year of 1999, Vladimir Putin was hand-picked by Boris Yeltsin to become Russia’s Prime Minister. Putin became President of the Russian Federation in 2000 and stopped the looting of Russia. From that time forward, he became an enemy of the United States and its predatory corporations and banks.
Barack Obama did yeoman’s work to expand the New Cold War and promulgate Russophobia.
Obama welcomed expanded NATO membership to include Albania and Croatia in 2009, extending the alliance into Eastern Europe.
Egged on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama, as previously noted, used NATO to attack Libya in 2011. The establishment of a “no-fly” zone over Libyan skies allowed the alliance to bomb government targets while Islamic jihadists fought the Libyan military on the ground. One prize that was seized by the West after the overthrow of Gaddafi, was Libyan oil, which had been nationalized to fund a version of Islamic socialism that raised the standard of living higher than any other country on the continent, except South Africa. Another reason for the attack was Gaddafi’s commitment to African unity and his support for revolutionary forces. The empire tolerates no opposition.
The U.S./NATO attack on Libya convinced Putin to draw a line in the sand on regime change in Syria, a country of strategic importance for Russia. Putin’s intervention stopped the U.S. dirty war in its tracks, earning him the empire’s contempt.
In 2014, Obama and his neoconservative flunkeys, led by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, fomented a coup d’état in Ukraine. The Ukrainian neo-Nazis were instrumental in driving the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych from office. By supporting the coup, Obama effectively endorsed the resurgence of fascism in Ukraine, and planted the seeds for Russia’s military intervention in 2022.
One of the first acts of the newly installed puppet regime in Kiev was to outlaw the use of Russian as the second official language, an act that precipitated a civil war with Russian speaking-people living in the Donbass who, not surprisingly, sought independence. Between 2014 and 2022, 14,000 Russian speaking Ukrainians were killed by Kiev’s war in the break-away Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. It was the massing of Ukrainian troops in February of 2022 for a final assault on the East that prompted Putin to order a military intervention in Ukraine on the 22nd of that month. The United States has used the intervention to turn a Ukrainian civil war that it provoked into a long-anticipated proxy war against Russia.
In addition, Obama further antagonized Russia by imposing sanctions on officials after the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to reunite with Russia in a referendum held on March 16, 2014, as a result of the U.S. coup. The Crimea was annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 and officially ceded to Russia by Ottoman Turkey in 1791, in a treaty that ended a series of Russo-Turkish wars. As a gesture of solidarity, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, himself an ethnic Ukrainian, gave the Crimea to Soviet Ukraine in 1954.
In 2016, Obama deployed an Aegis land-based anti-ballistic missile system in Romania, which poses a direct threat to Russia. A second launching site planned by Obama is set to become operational in Poland in 2022. The land-based systems are complimented by four U.S. navy ships equipped with Aegis missiles that routinely patrol the Mediterranean, Black, and Baltic Seas. The Aegis system is equipped with interceptor missiles and vertical launchers. Russia sees the Aegis system as a threat because defensive interceptor missiles can be replaced with offensive nuclear missiles. Even the deployment of a defensive system is a threat because it encourages a nuclear first strike against Russia, which is the primary reason the now defunct ABM Treaty was negotiated in 1972. Obama lied when he said the Aegis system would protect Europe from Iranian missiles. As Putin has correctly observed, the Aegis systems are aimed at Russia. Although the defensive capability of Aegis has been neutralized with a new generation of hypersonic weapons, the offensive threat remains at the forefront of Russian security concerns.
And then there is Russiagate. In 2016, Obama extended sanctions on Russia by leveling the baseless accusation that the Kremlin hacked the U.S. presidential election of that year. In an egregious violation of diplomatic protocol, Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and seized Russian diplomatic property in the United States in retaliation for non-existent “electoral interference,” further escalating the New Cold War. Aside from some insignificant social media messaging posted on Facebook by Russian trolls, no forensic evidence of Russian government interference in the presidential election exists.
Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, led by Charles Schumer in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, and supported by FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, used the Obama fiction of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump and sabotage Trump’s attempt to normalize relations with Putin’s Russia. Trump was accused of “colluding” with Russia to win the election.
Clinton and the Democrats, embarrassed by their loss to Trump, had to find an excuse for their electoral defeat, and find it they did by blaming Russia. Their commitment to globalization, free trade, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, mass-incarceration, and militarization of the police escaped notice among political pundits and elite media, but not, it seems, many American workers who were thrown on the scrap-heap of a vast American wasteland and responded by giving the political establishment the middle finger by voting for Trump.
The problem for Democrats and their allies in the deep state is that no hard evidence of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee or Trump collusion could be found, not even by the Mueller investigation, despite their claims of wide-spread “Russian interference.”
Not to be deterred by facts, House Democrats voted to impeach Donald Trump on December 18, 2019. The pretext: Ukraine. The Democrats accused Trump of attempting to withhold $400 million in military aid unless Ukrainian President Zelensky, launched an investigation into Vice-President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s activities in Ukraine. As fate would have it, VP Biden openly bragged in front of the Council on Foreign Relations, about how he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, fired a prosecutor who was investigating Hunter Biden’s activities with a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. Hunter Biden was reportedly paid $850,000 to sit on the company’s board of directors and serve as one of its lobbyists. In Trump’s case, Zelensky did not order an investigation, and the military aid was subsequently delivered. In Biden’s case, Poroshenko fired the prosecutor and the economic aid was released. In the cesspool of American politics, the Democrats are the dirty pot that excels in calling the equally filthy kettle black.
Rather than challenge Trump on policy issues, the Democrats manufactured the Russiagate scandal to dethrone the egocentric Donald, who responded in kind by falsely claiming the Democrats engaged in electoral fraud to steal the 2020 election. As both political parties serve the American plutocracy, not the American people, fraudulence prevails as politics degenerates into ugly partisan power struggles, devoid of ethics, not to mention constitutional or international legality, in what Putin correctly termed an “empire of lies.” The result is a dramatic loss of political legitimacy for the American state.
Enter Joe Biden as President. Biden ignored Russian attempts to make peace in Ukraine. Zelensky’s failure to honor the Minsk agreement, a protocol his country signed in 2015 to end the civil war and provide autonomy for Eastern republics, led to Russia’s recognition of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. Zelensky was no doubt following orders from the empire.
Biden also ignored the Russian demand that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO. Instead, Biden dismissed Russia’s security concerns and enthusiastically prosecuted a U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine once Putin decided to send his military to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine, a state that sits directly on Russia’s border.
At a recent NATO summit held on March 24, 2022, Biden promised to increase the U.S. military presence in Europe. Then, on March 26th, Biden gave a speech in Poland, calling for Putin’s removal from power in a breathtaking act of imperial arrogance. In May, Biden asked the U.S. Senate to certify support for NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, two formerly neutral countries. Biden is on record as wanting Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, directly crossing a Russian red line. In June, NATO announced plans to expand its rapid deployment forces from 40,000 troops to 300,000 troops. In July, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, announced a plan to purchase $500 billion in weapons.
Rather than defuse tensions and negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, the United States and NATO escalate provocations against Russia that are unremitting and dangerously irresponsible.
Biden’s unlimited support for the proxy war in Ukraine is not being undertaken with the best interests of the American people in mind. He and his lackeys, led by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are waging a war for empire. And it carries the real possibility of escalation to nuclear war.
Given this history, the Russians may have concluded that they are dealing with deranged lunatics, and it appears they are, as the American political class becomes further and further detached from reality.
The Republicans have done their part to advance U.S. hegemony in Russia, a pipe dream that, if continued, may end in nuclear annihilation.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower continued the Truman policy of containment of the USSR. Eisenhower, no rabid militarist, wanted to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty and an arms control agreement with the Soviets, particularly in light of the development of the hydrogen bomb by each country. On May 1, 1960, a U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured. The incident was condemned by Soviet Premier Khrushchev, who stormed out of a Paris summit with the United States, ending the possibility of arms control during the Eisenhower administration. The summit’s failure did not prevent Eisenhower from warning the nation of the growing power of the military-industrial complex as he left office.
President Richard Nixon expanded Johnson’s war in Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, becoming a certifiable war criminal for waging a genocidal war in Indochina. Despite, or it may be argued, because of, his history as a rabid anti-communist, the clever Nixon embarked on a historic visit to China aimed at deepening the Sino-Soviet split that fractured relations between the two communist nations in 1972. Nixon’s visit was made possible through secret negotiations undertaken by his National Security Advisor and fellow war criminal, Henry Kissinger.
Washington’s bellicose policies formulated during the Obama, Trump, and Biden regimes have driven Moscow and Beijing closer together than at any time prior to the vaunted split, prompting Presidents Putin and Xi to declare the Russian-Chinese relationship will not be broken by any third nation in a signal to the United States.
It should be noted that Nixon concluded a major nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union when he and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) in May 1972. Nixon and Brezhnev also signed an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) that year. A new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed by Barack Obama and Russian President Medvedev in 2010 and is set to expire in 2026. Medvedev recently stated that the U.S. will have to beg Russia for another agreement in light of America’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Ronald Reagan embarked on a global anti-communist offensive for the purpose of rolling back communist, socialist, and anti-imperialist governments and progressive social movements around the world. Reagan’s CIA, under the direction of William Casey, funded global counter-revolution and repression in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Grenada, South Africa, Mozambique, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Poland, and beyond.
Reagan’s military and nuclear arms buildup was unprecedented during peacetime in U.S. history, and was funded in part by massive cuts in social spending that, coupled with union busting and deindustrialization, ushered in decades of class war against American workers and poor people. His deployment of short and medium-range Pershing and Cruise nuclear missiles in Europe aimed to counter Soviet SS-20 missiles and his funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a country Reagan, with visions of Armageddon and the Christian Rapture dancing in his head, referred to as the “Evil Empire.”
Reagan did pull back from the brink, and in 1986, he met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, to lay the groundwork for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction (START I) Treaty of 1991. He did so despite his belief in the “End Times” and his history as an anti-communist ideologue. The Reagan militaristic buildup is credited with helping to bankrupt the Soviet Union and quicken its downfall.
In a demonstration of global supremacy in January of 1991, President George H.W. Bush prosecuted Gulf War I against Iraq to secure control of the region’s oil resources. The Soviet Union, an erstwhile ally of Iraq, refused to support Saddam Hussein, clearing the way for Bush’s war. In a speech to Congress on September 11, 1990, Bush declared the need to create a “New World Order” that is “freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace,” to justify the war. George Orwell’s indictment of Stalinist dictatorship, written in his prophetic novel, 1984, can be applied to the American empire, whose leaders regularly, and without the slightest bit of shame, invent enemies and invert reality.
In triumphalist fashion, neoconservatives used the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991 to declare the beginning of a “New American Century” of global domination. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently proclaimed “the unipolar world has ended” and “the U.S. is no longer master of planet earth.” So much for the American century of world domination that saw the United States fail to prevent the emergence of global rivals in Russia and China; fail to win asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; fail to depose the Ba’athist government in Syria; fail to overthrow leftist governments in Nicaragua and Venezuela; and fail to disarm North Korea. Not that the neocons did not try.
President George W. Bush and the neocons, led by Dick Cheney, used the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to defend the “New World Order” of American primacy by declaring a fraudulent “War on Terror” that served as a pretext for global interventionism. By so doing, the neoconservative Wolfowitz doctrine was adopted as the Bush doctrine.
The infamous Wolfowitz doctrine continues to animate U.S. policy toward Russia as Biden’s minions ignore the reality of a multipolar world and seem oblivious to U.S. debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as they press ahead in Ukraine.
Bush withdrew from the aforementioned Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, paving the way for the subsequent deployment of Aegis systems in Romania and Poland.
Proving that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows when money can be made in the free market, Bush’s State Department, the CIA front organizations known as the U.S. Agency for Economic Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, the NGO Liberty Institute, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, unleashed a “color revolution” in Georgia in 2003. Known as the “Rose Revolution,” it swept Eduard Shevardnadze, who once served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Soviet Union before becoming Georgia’s president in 1995, from power. He was replaced by Mikhail Saakashvili, an American puppet educated at George Washington University and Columbia University Law School. The coup’s goal was to ensure free market reforms that enabled American corporations to access the region’s energy resources.
Seeking to extend control over other former republics of the Soviet Union, the same gang engineered a “color revolution” in Ukraine in 2004. Not surprisingly, the “Orange Revolution” brought to power a government that expedited the privatization of the country’s industries and resources, facilitating the rise of oligarchical rule behind the façade of democracy. Also, unsurprisingly, the revolution eventually collapsed. In the process, Ukrainian politics, came to resemble a Las Vegas slot machine as corruption became rife.
In March of 2004, Bush continued Clinton’s enlargement of NATO by supporting membership in the alliance for Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The dim-witted ex-president recently admitted he broke Baker’s promise not to expand NATO, as he cheered the U.S./NATO war with Russia. It should also be noted that Bush pushed for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO as far back as April 1, 2008.
Last but certainly not least, Bush, the neocons, and their allies in Israel provoked a Russian military intervention in Georgia in August of 2008. In a breathtaking demonstration of hypocrisy, Western imperialists immediately condemned Russian aggression, ignoring the many invasions committed by the U.S. empire and the Zionist state.
As for Trump, the orange opportunist enthusiastically embraced Russophobia once his initial attempts at establishing détente with Russia were so vehemently attacked by the U.S. political establishment, the intelligence community, and the elite corporate media. The empire has no friends, only vassal states and enemies. The vassals submit to the neoliberal Washington consensus, the enemy states do not, preferring economic nationalism and sovereignty to subservience to the American hegemon.
To make matters worse, Trump withdrew from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty of 1987 in 2018. The treaty, as previously stated, prohibited the use of short-and medium-range nuclear weapons, which were widely deployed in Europe and the Soviet Union during the Reagan era.
Democrats and Republicans are two heads of the same imperialist monster. The imperial monster is menacing the Russian bear.
In February of 2007, President Putin gave a speech at the Munich security conference during which he indicated, with some degree of prescience, that NATO expansion does not provide security for Europe. He pointed out that, conversely, it constitutes a serious provocation because it places NATO frontline forces and anti-missile systems on Russia’s border. He also stated, in reference to the United States, that a unipolar world is unacceptable as it is a world with one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, one master, and one sovereign that has nothing to do with democracy. He pleaded for multilateral diplomacy, economic development, and integration, particularly with Europe, along with mutual security and prosperity. He was ignored.
Instead of collaboration on matters of economic development and mutual security, the United States and its NATO cat’s paw continued to perpetrate political intrigue, subversion, a coup d’état, a civil war, belligerent expansion, hyper-militarization, and economic warfare that backed the Kremlin into a corner. The result is a full-blown U.S./NATO proxy war with Russia unfolding in Ukraine.
Washington is fully responsible for provoking this war. The Ukrainian and Russian people are paying the cost in lives lost as the masters of war profit from their misery, secure for the moment within the iron triangle Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
The American people are also paying the price of war. Their economic and social rights are under attack. Their cities are deteriorating. Their schools, shopping centers, and workplaces have become a shooting gallery, with mass gun violence nearly an everyday occurrence. Housing and medical care have become unaffordable.
Americans are deeply divided by Democrats and Republicans, who strive, unscrupulously, for power. As political discourse becomes increasingly polarized, the politics of identity is pitted against the politics of supremacy by politicos who unite to practice the politics of empire once they are elected.
At the core of power politics lies the pernicious ideology of “American Exceptionalism,” which claims that America is an extraordinary nation, uniquely virtuous in human history. American virtue is a myth; American exceptionalism is not.
The United States of America is exceptional. It is an exceptionally violent, war-like nation. Its leaders demonstrate exceptional arrogance and duplicity. It possesses an exceptionally vast military empire. And it is exceptionally destructive. So much so that it threatens life on earth.
An existential question remains: can the myth, through popular struggle, become a reality, or will reality destroy, once and for all, the myth?
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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.
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