It is important to note that Nuland, a neoconservative married to Robert Kagan, of the influential neocon Kagan family, has served as a top US diplomat in both Republican and Democratic administrations. President Obama denied it, but it was obviously true. Washington was meddling in Ukrainian affairs for some time. Do you remember the intercepted 2014 conversation between then-US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, in which they discussed US manipulation of the Ukrainian government to get Washington's men in power? The one in which Nuland infamously said, "F**k the EU"? In this 2013 DC press conference, she talked about how she's "still jet-lagged" from her "third trip in five weeks" to Kiev. In 2014, the United States helped engineer the color revolution in Ukraine that ousted the pro-Russian elected president. Vladimir Putin is not a saint, but he's not a fool, either. Bush declared that NATO would consider membership for Georgia - a Caucasus nation! - and, yes, Ukraine. It is strategically important to Russia in ways it is not and never can be for the US. Russia could not accept NATO in Ukraine, and for overwhelmingly good reasons. The Russians didn't like it when NATO brought in the Baltic countries, but that wasn't a red line for Moscow. How many Americans are aware that at the end of the Cold War, the US led the Russians to believe that NATO would not expand to the East? You can't blame the US for reneging on that stance to bring in the former Warsaw Pact countries, which are clearly part of Europe. You're going to convince them to fight for Ukraine? Do you honest to God think that any western European government could stay in office if a formally declared war broke out between NATO and Russia? European armies are small, and the results of a 2015 Gallup poll show many western Europeans wouldn't even be willing to fight for their own countries. And don't think it would be any kind of "coalition of the willing" it would be Americans. What's it going to take? American soldiers being deployed in Ukraine? Don't think it can't happen. And if people start thinking about what's going on, and what might well happen, they will cease to support the war policy being carried out in their name. The obvious answer is that to examine the situation might lead ordinary Americans (and Europeans) to conclude that as awful as Russia has been, and as brave as the Ukrainians have been in defending their country, it is in nobody's interest for this conflict to escalate, because it would be fatally easy for it to go nuclear. For someone who remembers the way the disastrous Iraq War was sold to the American people, this is infuriating and depressing - and even back then, there was more critical discussion of that war in advance than this one, despite the stakes here being infinitely higher.ĭo the American and European peoples understand what their ruling class is doing here? Why is the news media not informing them, or at least facilitating discussion and debate? Why are the media in the tank for the war parties? Does this not strike you as strange? If anything, the Democratic Party is more hawkish than the Republicans. I don't follow the networks in the US from afar, but I do read the newspapers and the print press online, and as far as I can tell, this is a forbidden topic. Why aren't we talking about that? Why aren't we talking about that a lot, given the stakes? Here in Europe, Viktor Orban is the only European leader willing to raise the question, but he's a pariah. And now we're in it to win it, though what "win" looks like in a conflict with a nuclear-armed country is madness. We provoked this stupid war with Russia - which, let there be no doubt, needs to turn around and go home. It meant that our policymakers had to be extremely careful, as did theirs, so the entire world didn't go up in a quick series of flashes and mushroom clouds.Īpparently all of that has been pushed aside. We used to live in a world where that horrible fact meant something. (A party who, by the way, seems to be run by people who steal our money.) Whatever the morality of the Ukrainians cause, the fact remains that Russia has nuclear weapons. There is no other way to understand America and Germany (under intense US pressure) sending advanced tanks to Ukraine, other than the West inserting itself into a war, on behalf of one party.
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