Clear and Present Danger… Made Totally in America

There is not one politician in Washington or among its Western lackeys who has the ability to think intelligently or reasonably. 

To blame the United States and its NATO partners for the escalating war with Russia over Ukraine would be lambasted by Western media as “Kremlin propaganda”.

But what if the argument is made not by Russia, but by a virtual pantheon of respected U.S. scholars, thinkers, diplomats and geopolitical planners?

A timely review article this week recalls the warnings made by some of America’s finest political thinkers over the past 30 years. These figures categorically warned against the eastward expansion of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance. They predicted exactly the clear and present danger that we are now seeing in Ukraine with regard to a possible all-out conflagration between nuclear powers.

The article cited above included references to Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Perry, who was Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration (1994-97), George Kennan, the founder of Containment Policy against the Soviet Union, as well as Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky and William Burns (the latter is now the CIA chief and one wonders how his conversations in the current Biden administration are squared). To that eminent list could be added the scholarly views of the late Stephen Cohen who died in 2020. Professor Cohen was strident in condemning what he called the “New Cold War” incited by the Obama administration from its support for a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. Obama’s point man in fashioning the rabidly anti-Russian regime in Kiev is none other than the present officeholder in the White House, Joe Biden.

All of these cautionary figures are on record for expressing staunch opposition to the expansion of NATO toward Russia’s western borders. Part of their objection was based on a matter of principle owing to historic commitments that the United States’ leaders had given to the Soviet Union on not expanding one inch east of Germany upon the latter’s reunification in 1990. But their opposition was also based on the hard-headed political reality that such an advance of the military bloc constituted an intolerable security threat to Russia.

It is notable that the aforementioned American thinkers and diplomats shared an appreciation of history and in particular the searing experience of the Soviet Union from Nazi aggression. Lamentably, such historical sensibility seems bereft in recent U.S. administrations and among too many European politicians.

It is particularly relevant that the enlightened American thinkers were keenly aware of the sensitivity of Ukraine with regard to Russian culture and national security. Kissinger and the others were all too aware that Moscow would never contemplate the artificial severance of Ukraine and the turning of its neighbor into a staging post for NATO weapons against the Russian heartland.

Of course, for some U.S. strategists, like the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted American hegemony at any cost, the subjugation of Ukraine under Western control was precisely the desired aim in order to destabilize Russia.

The more reasoned and saner thinkers, however, knew that such a ploy was infeasible. Not only infeasible but a path to inevitable confrontation and war.

NATO was founded in 1949 as an overtly ideological and military enemy of the Soviet Union. Evidently, the hostility has been seamlessly transferred to the Russian Federation. Since 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NATO alliance has doubled its membership to the present number of 30 states. Some of the newer members share borders with Russia and espouse irrational animosity that can be traced back to World War Two collusion with Nazi Germany.

The past U.S. commitments of non-expansion have been thoroughly trashed with flagrant denialism. And the brazen expansion has been conducted with insulting provocation to Moscow that speaks of deliberate calculation. A certain misplaced hubris about “winning the Cold War” and imperialist notions of “full-spectrum dominance” have taken hostage of any rational, law-abiding foreign policy.

Despite repeated concerns expressed by Russia, the United States and its transatlantic allies in NATO would dismiss these misgivings with supercilious arrogance. When Russia presented a proposal for a security treaty in December 2021 involving the exclusion of Ukraine from NATO and the withdrawal of NATO strategic weapons from its borders, the proposals were dismissed out of hand. Furthermore, the U.S. and NATO weaponization of Ukraine continued apace posing an imminent threat to Russia. The launch of a special military operation by Moscow on February 24 earlier this year was necessitated by years of build-up of aggression by the Kiev regime.

All of this execrable situation was forewarned by Russia and by the eminent American thinkers cited above.

We are in a diabolical dilemma of increasing war in Ukraine between the U.S.-led NATO bloc and Russia. The United States and its allies seem to have but one policy: to continue arming the Kiev regime with heavier and heavier weapons that pose a threat to Russian territory.

Washington does not have a policy except for driving up war. The imperial ambitions of the U.S. depend on inciting divisive global tensions and recreating Cold War demarcations. The U.S. capitalist economy, reliant on the military-industrial complex, needs a policy of aggression and conflict towards Russia and China in particular. A new White House National Security Strategy published this week attests to that irrepressible warmongering mentality.

An honorable U.S. politician and former presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, commented to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson this week: “We have too many people in Washington who are warmongers, subservient to the military-industrial complex, and continuing to put their own selfish interests and the interests of their donors first, with no mind for the cost and consequences that their decisions have on the American people.”

The same could be said for European political elites.

Gabbard, like the other U.S. thinkers referred to above, also warned against NATO expansion and the recruiting of Ukraine for membership.

The clear and present danger in Ukraine is a vindication of such views as intelligent and of having pragmatic respect for peaceful international relations.

It is equally telling that such views are largely excluded from Western news media or disparaged for being those of “Russian apologists”.

That’s what is truly disturbing. There is not one politician in Washington or among its Western lackeys who has the ability to think intelligently or reasonably. That inability for dialogue and diplomacy is damnable.