Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told NBC’s Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that no meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is currently in the works. The Russian diplomat indicated his government is not interested in such a meeting until a “presidential agenda” was agreed upon that included certain Russian demands, including an agreement Ukraine will not seek membership in NATO and will discuss ceding some territory to Russia.
“When President Trump brought … those issues to the meeting in Washington, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelenskyy said no to everything,” said Lavrov.
Trump has positioned himself as an arbitrator, a peacemaker between two warring governments. And therein lies the problem. As Daniel McAdams pointed out several months ago in an interview with this writer, Washington can’t be an arbitrator in this conflict because it is a party to the conflict. “It’s like having a boxing match and the referee starts punching somebody,” quipped McAdams.
Indeed, I said the same thing just days after the war started. It has been clear from the beginning to anyone being honest with himself this war was never between Ukraine and Russia. It was a war between Washington and Russia, fought by Ukrainians on their land but funded and directed by Washington. It began in 2014 when Washington overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government and installed a Washington puppet, who immediately tried to take away Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol.
The Trump administration, which won the 2024 election promising libertarians smaller government and an end to endless wars, has summarily dumped its libertarian promises. Elon Musk has split from the administration after spending several months identifying myriad opportunities to cut federal spending under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has replaced those cuts with spending increases that will outpace those under the previous Democratic administration, as every Republican administration of my lifetime has done. Funding the Ukraine War is also back online.
History isn’t just rhyming here; it’s repeating. It is the mirror image of the post-Revolutionary War split between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian libertarians after their common enemy, the British, was defeated. Today, the MAGA Republicans embody classic Hobbesian/Burkean conservatism, while modern libertarians carry the torch of Jeffersonian principles rooted in John Locke’s property based inalienable rights. The defeat of the modern “British”—the progressive left—has exposed this divide, revealing that the MAGA movement’s heart beats closer to Hobbesian control than Lockean liberty.
Many conservatives may object to my identification together of Hobbes and Burke, given the quite different visions they had for the form of government. But they both agreed on the purpose of government: to hold back man’s savage instincts at any cost, including liberty.
In my book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From?, I argue that conservatives, at their core, believe that the “inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection,” as Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Men are entitled only to what liberty the government allows after fulfilling this primary purpose. Burke agreed with Hobbes on this essential point, quoting Hobbes directly in explaining the problem with natural rights: that they give men “a right to everything.”
Burke’s only departure from Hobbes was the means for this thwarting. Hobbes argued that only a unitary, all powerful central government could achieve it. Burke argued that what he called “prescription” – the power of long-established traditions to restrain the savage impulses – could also play a part.
MAGA Republicans are a striking combination of both visions. Their rhetoric often champions “law and order,” a Hobbesian call to maintain societal stability against perceived threats. They have no problem with a massive military establishment, although they reject wars of choice for the purposes of benefiting the peoples of foreign nations rather than purely for domestic security.
The culture wars, on the other hand, are rooted in Burkean prescription. The overturning of long-established norms and traditions – standard ops for the revolutionary left – are a direct threat to civilization that must be reversed. Here there is some overlap with libertarianism. If those traditions are the non-involvement of government in certain areas of human activity, libertarians are all for it. But even if the particular tradition is inconsistent with libertarian principles, those traditions must be maintained, similar to the conservative insistence on maintaining primogeniture in Jefferson’s day.
The natural economic system of conservativism is mercantilism. Since the natural state of man is a state of war, economic activity must have winners and losers. Recall Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. His constant complaint was “we don’t win anymore” when speaking of international trade. He promised instead that Americans would “get tired of winning.” Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists saw the economy precisely the same way and made the same promises.
“Yesterday, Decembuh seventh, nineteen fawty-one, a date which will live in infamy…”
I first heard that speech on television in the 1970s during a special promoting the official myth. You couldn’t pull it up on your phone whenever you wanted as I did just prior to this writing. My father remembered first hearing the news Pearl Harbor had been bombed and either hearing the speech live on radio or shortly after in a movie theater newsreel.
Like most people, no one in my family had any reason to question FDR’s assessment of the attack as “dastardly and unprovoked.”
It was certainly dastardly, but not unprovoked. Nor was its provocation unprecedented. FDR had employed a strategy with a long tradition among American presidential administrations seeking a casus belli while not wanting to appear the aggressor. Roosevelt wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to execute this strategy.
“Just say it. Cry out. Mercy,” said the magistrate to William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995). Wallace had already been drawn and quartered, so the king’s torturer was not offering to save his life. He promised only an end to the torture with a quicker, more merciful death.
The Wallace of the film refuses to speak the words the king’s magistrate commands and cries “Freedom!” instead. Realizing further torture will not produce the desired result, the magistrate reluctantly gives the order to cut off Wallace’s head.
Gibson’s film is short on historical accuracy but serves as a perfect metaphor for life in America today. The citizens of the former “land of the free” are being metaphorically tortured to say the words their rulers wish them to say, whether they be “safe and effective” or “they/them” or “plucky little democracy.” For some, like Gonzalo Lira, it is not metaphorical.
Lira was an American citizen, born in Burbank, California, and living in Ukraine – the supposed “plucky little democracy” – where he had two young children. Lira was arrested in May of 2023 and charged with violating laws prohibiting certain types of speech. Specifically, Lira criticized the Zelensky government, contradicted the narrative that the Russian invasion was unprovoked, and generally painted a much more pessimistic picture of Ukrainian success in the war than was claimed by the Ukrainian government and western media.
Importantly, virtually all of the “disinformation” Lira was accused of spreading turned out to be true. As Tucker Carlson has said on more than one occasion, one is not punished for lying about the regime. One is only punished for telling the truth.
That it was not the U.S. government that tortured and killed Lira directly should fool no one. Since the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine (for the second time) in 2014, nothing has happened in that country that wasn’t either directed or given tacit approval by the U.S. government.” We have direct evidence of that from the leaked recording of Victoria Nuland discussing her plans for who would run Ukraine with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.
This includes Zelensky’s nonstop shelling of civilian neighborhoods just before the Russian invasion in February 2022 and the imprisonment and death of Gonzalo Lira over the past several months.
As Daniel McAdams wrote in his piece about Lira, “One call from the White House or State Department could have saved California-born journalist Gonzalo Lira’s life.” But that phone call never came, because the U.S. government wasn’t interested in saving the life of a U.S. citizen critical of its pet project on Russia’s border. If it were, it certainly would have been easier to get Lira out of Ukraine than it was to get Brittney Griner out of Russia.
A month ago, Europe was facing a prospective humanitarian disaster. Having no substantial natural energy resources of its own and having virtually eliminated its nuclear power capabilities, its loss of Russian energy imports threatened to leave hundreds of millions in the freezing cold.
The good news is Europe does have a plan to muddle through this winter. They have stockpiled enough reserves to avoid disaster this year, as long as it is not abnormally cold, and Russia doesn’t cut off what gas it is still exporting to Europe before the weather breaks.
The bad news is Europe has a plan to muddle through this winter. That they will be able to avoid catastrophe means there is no reason the war can’t continue through next summer. Even war cheerleader CNN admits there may be a much bigger problem next winter, but for now Ukrainians and Russians will continue to die before their time.
And while Europe won’t have an historic calamity on its hands, things will still be bad there, especially for the most vulnerable. Just as with Covid lockdowns, the laptop and latte class will repeat vapid slogans like “We’re all in this together” while people on the margins struggle with choices the former can’t even fathom, like between energy and food, or medicine.
So, in addition to the deaths on the battlefield and collateral civilian deaths, many will die of cold in Europe this winter who wouldn’t have otherwise.
The Biden administration continues to support Ukrainian President Zelensky’s position to fight the Russians until they relinquish all former Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Western media continues to bolster this departure from reality. Last week, Newsweek described Biden’s statement that Putin “could just flat leave, and still probably hold his position together in Russia,” as “an off-ramp” for Putin, but one he probably would not take.
The last part is true. Putin isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the Russian army suffering major losses of territory. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor said during his appearance on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom, Russia controls a “banana-shaped” band of territory from the Luhansk Oblast (roughly “province”) to Kherson, north of Crimea, and down to the sea along that line. 95 percent of Ukraine’s GDP is produced in this Russian-controlled territory.
German police yesterday arrested demonstrators protesting their country’s energy policies. No, they weren’t protesting the German government’s support for sanctions on Russia that have resulted in the latter cutting off natural gas supplies Germany depends upon to maintain modern civilization. They were protesting the German government’s decision to deregulate (viz. “allow”) the use of coal as an energy source in a desperate attempt to replace the natural gas imports no longer forthcoming from Russia.
Who can blame the protestors? Most likely have believed the fairy tale told by green energy proponents for at least a decade that wind power and other “renewables” are cheaper than natural gas. By 2018, U.S. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman had declared there were no longer any technological or economic obstacles to total decarbonization of the U.S. economy. All that was needed was the political will.
It is curious that Germany is falling back on coal in particular because as late as 2019, we were told that, “This April, for the first time ever, renewable energy supplied more power to America’s grid than coal—the clearest sign yet that solar and wind can now go head-to-head with fossil fuels.” The point of that Bloomberg article was that not only were solar and wind a viable alternative to coal, but that they were outcompeting coal in the free market without government intervention.
So, why can’t Germany at least use renewables for that portion of the lost Russian energy they plan to replace with coal? Wouldn’t it be cheaper?
We all know the answer to that question. The story politicians and the media told the public about renewables was a fairy tale. No, the factoids above weren’t technically false; they’re just cherry picked information with misleading parameters.
For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration always picks April to compare the percentage of electricity provided by renewables to coal because “overall electricity consumption is often lowest in the spring and fall months because temperatures are more moderate and electricity demand for heating and air conditioning is relatively low.” The information they provide also indicates the total electricity from renewables and coal combined has fallen from 2005-2019 from about 210 million megawatthours (MWh) to about 130 million MWh.
So, either the larger population in 2019 was consuming far less electricity or some other source besides renewables and coal was making up the difference. That other source would be “not renewables.”
Indeed, a study by industry group Renewables Now indicated that between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of total energy consumption supplied by fossil fuels “barely changed,” going from 80.3% to 80.2%.
There has been no significant increase in renewables share of the energy market in the past decade. None. Politicians and media who have said there has are either lying or engaging in willful ignorance. But politicians lying isn’t dangerous in and of itself. It only becomes dangerous when the public believes them and allows them to act upon the assumption their lies are the truth. Germany has done so and it is going to cost lives, potentially a disastrous number of them.
Anyone inclined to question their federal and state governments, the national media, and corporate America – aka, “the establishment” – wonders how much longer the American public can possibly go on believing what they’re told. The long-suspected “liberal bias” of the media has morphed into outright falsehoods told the public about Covid-19, Ukraine, “climate change,” and a host of other issues.
One after another, previous narratives enforced by de-platforming dissenters has crumbled, although the establishment seeks to cling to as much of the previous narrative as minimally plausible.
For example, natural immunity to Covid was at first ignored as if it didn’t exist at all. Then, it was reported as waning faster than vaccine immunity. Once it was undeniable that natural immunity was broader, more robust, and more durable than vaccine immunity, the focus was shifted to the superiority of vaccine immunity and natural immunity together over merely natural immunity.
Why at that point were people with only natural immunity excluded from participating in large swaths of civil society while those with only the inferior vaccine immunity not excluded? A few people screamed about it; most did not. The dissenters were censored or simply drowned out by establishment information.
A particularly egregious lie perpetrated throughout 2020 and 2021 was that immunity to previous infection no longer existed after antibodies were no longer detected in the blood. Forty years after my last biology course, I knew this had to be wrong. Doesn’t the body remember previous infection even after antibodies disappear from the blood?
Of course it does. It’s called T-cell and B-cell immunity. B-cells produce new antibodies upon new exposure to the same virus and T-cells kill infected cells directly. This is not new or controversial information. But even now, people seem to operate on the assumption that immunity from previous infection ends once antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. The establishment does everything it can to encourage this false belief.
Then, there are the “safe and effective” vaccines themselves. Americans were told by no less than the president himself, in addition to presumably more reliable sources, that the vaccines would keep them from getting infected with and spreading Covid. When that untruth was no longer defensible, the establishment tried to tell us they had never said any such thing, that the vaccines would only prevent serious illness from infection.
This begged the question of why, if they did not prevent infection and transmission, the vaccines would be mandated for employment and/or admission into publicly accessible spaces. If the risk to others is the same with or without the vaccines, what is the justification for the mandates?
Again, a few people asked; most did not.
Now, evidence is mounting that the vaccine is not only ineffective, but not as safe as previously advertised. Certainly, it is important to question all claims about the vaccines, positive and negative. The theory that Covid vaccines are a plot to depopulate the earth don’t seem to jibe with reality. But neither does the claim they are completely safe.
Alex Berenson was recently reinstated on Twitter following settlement of his lawsuit for de-platforming based on his reporting on all the lies of the Covid Regime, including the exaggerated danger of the disease itself, the ineffectiveness of the nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates, etc.), and the ineffectiveness and danger of the Covid vaccines. Had the company been able to definitively disprove any of his reporting, no settlement would have been made.
“Promoter of misinformation” Steve Kirsch is willing to pay any “doctor, professor of medicine, epidemiologist, or public health official anywhere in the world” $50,000 to demonstrate on camera where his information on vaccine deaths is incorrect. There have been no takers.
Kirsch recently presented evidence from multiple sources of massive spikes in daily deaths five months after significant vaccine rollouts.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Face the Nation the U.S. would “greenlight” Poland sending fighter jets to Ukraine. Later in the day, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby issued a statement indicating it would not allow Poland to use the U.S. Ramstein AFB as the middleman for this transfer. However, Kirby also said, “the decision about whether to transfer Polish-owned planes to Ukraine is ultimately one for the Polish government.”
Apparently, the Pentagon recognizes fighter jets sent to a hot war to benefit one side would be recognized as an act of war by the other. This is nothing new. See the Lusitania. But why the statement leaving it up to Poland to send the jets directly? Poland is a NATO member and any attack on a NATO member brings the United States into the war anyway.
What’s going on here?
Nothing good for Poles who remember their history. In 1939, Poland was in a dispute with Nazi Germany over a city called “Danzig” at the time (it is now Gdansk). It’s strategic significance on the Baltic coast is obvious and it had a long history of changing hands politically. However, it had been a part of the Kingdom of Prussia and subsequently the German Empire from 1793 until the end of World War I.
After regaining its independence at the end of the war, Poland wanted Danzig placed under Polish rule. However, as the city was majority ethnic Germans, the wise masters of the universe who imposed the disastrous Treaty of Versailles upon Germany made Danzig an independent city under the authority of the League of Nations.
The cartoon version of history most Americans learn says Hitler’s invasion of Poland was just the first in his quest to conquer the whole world. It wasn’t. Danzig was merely a strategic point on the map in the foreign policy plan he clearly laid out in Mein Kampf:
“We put an end to the perpetual Germanic march towards the South and West of Europe and turn our eyes towards the lands of the East. We finally put a stop to the colonial and trade policy of pre-War times and pass over to the territorial policy of the future.
But when we speak of new territory in Europe to-day we must principally think of Russia and the border States subject to her.”
By Hitler’s reasoning, communism was just part of the “Jewish conspiracy” and since Russia had become communist, “Fate robbed the Russian people of that intellectual class which had once created the Russian State and were the guarantee of its existence.” And since Germany needed land to become the first-tier power Hitler believed it must become to survive, it was entitled to carve this new territory out of the USSR, including Ukraine.
Was any of this justified? Of course not. But here is the connection to yesterday’s news. Poland had a choice to make: stand firm on keeping Danzig out of Hitler’s hands or make a deal with Hitler and allow him to proceed east towards his true objective: conquest of Ukraine and other Soviet territory. This was not a choice between good and bad. It was a choice between two bad alternatives. Giving up Danzig strengthened the evil Nazi regime. Standing firm would lead to a war Poland could not win.
It was here that the dominant global empire of that time, England, stepped in. It issued a war guarantee to Poland should Hitler invade that England could not and did not keep. This strengthened Poland’s resolve to deny Hitler Danzig.
As conservative author Pat Buchanan documents in his book, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Hitler did not want a war with England. Once learning of England’s war guarantee, he postponed his invasion of Poland to try to negotiate. It was only after those negotiations were unsuccessful that Hitler went ahead with his invasion, leading to war against the allies.
This isn’t “apologizing” for Hitler or diminishing Hitler’s atrocities, as Buchanan’s critics claim. It is simply a fact that Hitler did not want war with Western or Southern Europe, as he stated clearly in his own book.
Sometimes reality has no room for moralizing. When Hitler invaded Poland, England reneged on its war guarantee, as Poland should have known it would. England had disarmed itself after WWI, as had most of the Allied powers. Poland spent the next fifty-two years in darkness, occupied first by the Nazis and then the communists. Had they allowed Danzig to rejoin Germany, WWII may have been a fight to the death exclusively between Hitler and Stalin, resulting in both evil regimes being destroyed.
Is Poland facing a similar choice today? Why is the U.S. government telling Poland it is free to provide fighter jets to Ukraine, as long as they do not involve the U.S. government in doing so? If the U.S. were planning to honor its NATO commitment, it wouldn’t really matter whether those jets went directly to Ukraine or via a U.S. military base. Either scenario leads to a U.S. war with Russia should Russia retaliate against the sender.
Unless the U.S. plans to renege on its war guarantee in 2022 just as England did in 1939.
Until he invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had been the world leader who showed the most restraint during this century. He had sucked up color revolutions run by the U.S. in Georgia and Ukraine in 2004-08 and Syria and Ukraine in 2012-14. Syria and Ukraine are both home to vital Russian warm water ports, while the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine sought to install hostile governments on his border that would host NATO troops and missiles.
This in addition to constant demonization as a meddler in U.S. elections by the most prolific foreign election meddler in human history.
February 24, 2022 may have marked the end of Putin’s restraint period. Let’s hope not. If Polish military aircraft end up in Ukraine, it will only be restraint on Putin’s part that prevents a NATO country from being dragged into the war. Then, it will be a matter of whether Washington commits much of the Western World to possible nuclear annihilation or leaves Poland high and dry as England once did.
There was no good answer to Hitler in 1939. But there were plenty of strategically better ways to handle him than the one chosen, which was arguably the worst. Faced with a choice between leaving the USSR to fight Nazi Germany alone or allying with the Soviets to defeat him, hindsight says the former choice would have been better.
It was prevented by English government officials blustering about a moral duty to defend a country they could not and did not defend anyway. Does that sound familiar?
Poland should know better than to trust the current world empire.
Whatever one thinks about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there are no denying two things: Russia has invaded a European country and U.S.-led NATO will not respond militarily.
President Biden’s reason for not intervening is technically that Ukraine is not a member of NATO. But the United States and NATO have launched military interventions in plenty of countries that are not members.
The real reason the U.S. won’t engage Russia to defend Ukraine is Russia is a nuclear power and nuclear powers cannot fight a war that isn’t destined to end with the possible extinction of the human race.
Thankfully, both President Biden and President Putin are keenly aware of this. That’s why you also won’t see Putin expand his military operation beyond Ukraine.
This begs the question: why are U.S. taxpayers paying for a worldwide standing army built to fight First World powers that can never be used?
The U.S. has over 50,000 troops deployed in Europe, not counting the over 9,000 in the United Kingdom. These troop levels were maintained or increased after World War II as a deterrent to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. When the Soviet Union dissolved, American taxpayers were promised a “peace dividend.”
The peace dividend would naturally be centered around bringing home those troops deployed to Europe. But over time, the story eventually evolved that Russia under Vladimir Putin – elected by the Russian people as a direct reaction against the disrespect Russia had been shown by the U.S. and NATO – was a threat that necessitated keeping those troops there, now thirty-one years since the USSR dissolved and almost eighty years since the end of WWII.
The events of the past two weeks just proved this was all either a delusion or a lie. Push has come to shove and those troops are not going to be sent into action against Russia. Some have been moved to the borders of NATO countries, but this is merely for appearances. Putin will not breach NATO, not for fear of tens of thousands of U.S. troops deployed in Europe, but because he doesn’t want to risk nuclear Armageddon any more than Joe Biden does.
So, why keep the troops there?
Ditto the 56,000 troops warehoused in Japan. These are ostensibly a deterrent to rising power China, but they are never going to fight the Chinese army for the same reasons U.S. troops in Europe will never fight the Russian army. If they do, it won’t matter much who wins.
Russia’s military budget is somewhere between $61 billion and $150 billion per year, depending upon which source you consult. Somehow, Russia is able to maintain a larger nuclear arsenal than the United States and conduct a full-scale war in Ukraine on anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent what the United States spends on “defense.”
North Korea and Iran, also perennial boogeymen, manage to threaten the whole world on less than $20 billion per year.
The $750 billion per year (not counting military spending hidden in other departments) American taxpayers have been fleeced for produced a military that couldn’t defeat the Taliban.
As I wrote eight years ago, conventional warfare is largely obsolete in the nuclear age. The days of generals like Patton triumphantly marching into enemy capitals and accepting their counterparts’ surrenders are over. No nuclear power is going to let that happen without firing its nukes first.
If war is truly a last resort, only justifiable when one’s country faces an existential threat, then nuclear weapons are always justified before surrender. When they aren’t, the war wasn’t justified in the first place.
American taxpayers are going to be regaled with propaganda about the need to increase military spending in reaction to Putin’s invasion and accede to even more troops deployed overseas. The logical conclusion to draw from all this is precisely the opposite.
U.S. military spending should be cut drastically, and its overseas deployments ended as obsolete relics of a bygone age. America’s nuclear deterrent, air force, and useful portion of its navy could be maintained at a fraction of the gargantuan rip off currently being perpetrated against American taxpayers.
Since this bloated military won’t ever be used against a First World power and has already demonstrated its inability to defeat a Third World one, we have nothing to lose but runaway deficits and a massive debt that will eventually destroy our currency and way of life.
While we’re in cost-cutting mode, it’s time to clean house at the U.S. State Department and within the “intelligence community,” too, rooting out all the career “foreign policy experts” who get us into so much trouble around the world.
Call it “American Taxpayers First.” Someone ought to run for high office on that.
Yes, Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to invade Ukraine. His troops have captured key cities and are methodically surrounding the rest. But he’s not at war with the Ukrainian people. He’s at war with the D.C. empire and its puppet president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Contrary to the propaganda put out by the usual suspects, it is not going badly for the Russians. They are conducting the operation patiently and methodically, reflecting the disposition of their leader. And they’re killing far less civilians and destroying far less civilian infrastructure than the U.S. does during a typical war crime.
Oh, was that unpatriotic? Sorry, not sorry.
The power of the propaganda machine is impressive. Suddenly, everyone has amnesia. Putin has attacked Ukraine “for no reason.” It is an “unprovoked attack” serving only Putin’s imperial wish to reconstitute the Soviet empire or perhaps preserve his own power within Russia.
How can anyone believe this?
For the record, Putin gave two speeches which spell out his reasons for going to war. They are lengthy and full of historical context. For those interested, links are below.
Putin’s argument generally aligns with the story I’ve been writing about for many years. Back in 1991, when Gorbachev agreed to pull his troops out of East Germany and allow reunification of the nation that had invaded his country four decades earlier, killing tens of millions of Russians, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and a host of other NATO leaders promised Gorbachev that NATO “would not move one inch eastward.”
The U.S. government spent years denying this promise was made until declassified documents proved it clearly was. Now, the official story is that since there wasn’t a formal “treaty,” the promise could be broken. But it doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. government lied about this for decades, to the Russians, who knew they were lying, and to U.S. citizens, who didn’t.
If there wasn’t something wrong with what they were doing, why did they lie?
U.S.-led NATO spent the next 30 years admitting country after country into an alliance whose sole purpose is to make war on Russia. This map shows the progress over time.
During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. government declared an intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine, instigating color revolutions in both countries for that purpose. The coup in Georgia sparked renewed hostilities between Georgia and the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Putin briefly invaded Georgia in defense of South Ossetia and Russia eventually recognized the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, drawing a rebuke from President Bush and other western leaders but no more.
What else could Bush do? As I wrote in 2014, conventional war between nuclear powers is not a possibility. That makes the gargantuan U.S. military a giant rip off of American taxpayers, since it can never be used to fight a major power, but that’s a subject for another day.
The D.C. empire backed off for a few years, but they basically ran the same drill in Ukraine in 2014. Democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed with John McCain literally on the streets of Kiev encouraging the revolution Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland had been caught planning on a leaked phone call.
That’s when Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine, populated almost exclusively with ethnic Russians, broke away. Note this was a reaction to the U.S. interfering in Ukraine’s elections so overtly that no two-year investigation was necessary. We have firsthand video and audio evidence.
For the next eight years, three successive U.S. presidents have sent arms to Ukraine, ostensibly to put down an internal rebellion and aid Ukraine in its defense against Russian invasion, but in reality to ethnically cleanse Ukraine’s population of its Russian population. The smaller the Russian population within Ukraine, the more unified it is as an anti-Russian state.
As Putin said accurately in his speech, Ukraine has behaved as a de facto member of NATO over the past eight years, with NATO conducting military exercises within Ukraine’s borders.
On Russia’s borders.
Now, we can wax philosophical about what constitutes aggression all we want. Everyone knows if Russia or China tried anything remotely similar in Mexico or Canada, we’d be bombing them before the day was over.
Putin made a last ditch effort appeal for a diplomatic solution via a proposed treaty that amounted to two very reasonable requests: 1) a guarantee Ukraine is never admitted to NATO and 2) stop deploying troops and weapons (including missiles that could carry nukes) in areas of eastern Europe where they could be a threat to Russia’s national security.
President Biden responded with a lukewarm verbal assurance Ukraine wouldn’t be admitted to NATO within the next ten years. Given the history of U.S. promises outlined above, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that wouldn’t be good enough, especially coming from the U.S. Vice President put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration when it carried out the 2014 coup.
That was confirmed on February 24, 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine. He has now gone to war against Washington, D.C. in the country Washington weaponized against him, casting the Ukrainian people as unfortunate pawns.
President Biden has said consistently throughout the current crisis that the United States would not go to war to defend Ukraine. Yet, he has repeatedly ratcheted up the tension and has been dismissive of Putin’s very reasonable proposal to end the conflict diplomatically. One can only assume Biden and NATO just couldn’t conceive that Putin might do what the “exceptional nation” has claimed prerogative to do with far less (or any) justification over the past several decades.
So, we’re now in a situation where Biden and Europe are desperate to keep people from figuring out what Putin’s invasion means: the empire has no clothes. Multiple narratives are being put out in desperation.
One of the more striking is the image of Zelenskyy as the rugged comedian-turned-military hero, bravely standing his post in Kiev. Russian sources say Zelensky left Kiev on February 23, the day before the invasion, and the photos and videos of him in military garb were all taken in advance.
That sounds more likely to be true, but it doesn’t really matter. What is really interesting is the empire’s portrayal of Zelensky as compared to Bashar Al-Assad. It has literally made mirror images of them after running essentially the same operations in their respective countries.
The U.S. ran regime-change operations in both Syria and Ukraine at roughly the same time during the early to mid-2010s. Both countries have economic importance in terms of planned pipelines. Each is home to one of Russia’s only two warm water ports besides Vladivostok, which is on the Sea of Japan.
In Ukraine the regime change was successful; in Syria, it was not. The leaders of both countries spent the next several years fighting civil wars, meaning they necessarily had to make war upon portions of their own populations.
Assad is condemned as a brutal dictator for doing so. Americans are asked to accept that portrayal unconditionally and they mostly do. Anyone who questions it can expect to be assailed by their fellow citizens who are so emotionally attached to this narrative they are unable even to consider evidence to the contrary.
This after no less than General James Mattis admitted there was no evidence Assad perpetrated the alleged chemical attacks that inspired multiple U.S. airstrikes on Syria.
The amnesiac effect of propaganda is at least as impressive as its emotional effect.
Forgotten also is that until February 24, Zelensky was doing precisely the same thing Assad had been vilified for: making war against his own population. In addition, he tried to arrest his political opponent, who is still facing charges, and shut down opposition news media. He has been at least the dictator Assad is accused of being and his abuses are not disputed by anyone.
Yet, upon Putin’s invasion, all of this is forgotten. He is now and presumably forever the gallant hero in military fatigues, on the side of all that is good and just, against a dictator attacking his country “for no reason.”
Americans are asked to believe all this without question by a government that has lied to them over the past several years on a scale that would make Goebbels blush. They are asked to accept as genuine the manufactured, uniform opinions flooding news and social media. They are asked to reject all nuance, all dissent, and to completely forget well-document facts from recent history that flatly contradict the empire’s narrative.
