United States – Empire and domestic

Aaron Maté March 18, 2022 After backing a far-right coup in 2014, the US has fueled a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine that has left 14,000 dead. Russia’s invasion is an illegal and catastrophic response. “The United States aids Ukraine and her people,” Adam Schiff declared in January 2020, “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” Schiff made this statement during the opening of Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, where the Democratic Party’s bid to ensure unimpeded US weapons sales to Ukraine was presented, and widely accepted, as a valiant defense of US democracy and national security. Originally published at mate.substack.com Two years later, the US use of Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” has reached its logical end-game: illegally, murderously, and catastrophically, Russia has invaded Ukraine to end the fight. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter. Without UN authorization, states...

Wikimedia map of NATO expansion since 1949 created by Patrickneil.  Bryce Greene March 18, 2022 Originally posted on FAIR.org on March 4, 2022 Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law. But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.” It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.” The “unprovoked” descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we got here, and what...

Gordon M Hahn March 9, 2022 One of the ideational-cultural causes of the NATO-Russian crisis is what one author has called American hubris. This is a neo-imperial attitude engendered in the U.S. as a result of America’s post-Cold War status, now waning, as the lone superpower. Originally posted on Gordon Hahn’s homepage on March 3rd, 2022 A classic example of such hubris is the American view that Russia has no ‘right’ to a sphere of influence. The deception attached to this is that there is no threat to Russia from NATO expansion, a policy that will deprive Russia of a sphere of influence along its western borders. Of course, possession of a sphere of influence – which the U.S. actually claims globally – is not a right that one is given by God or fate, but it is won by the exercise of power and effective diplomacy. Ambition to a...

Even during wartime – maybe especially during wartime – you should be allowed to ask uncomfortable questions Robert Wright at Nonzero Newsletter March 7, 2022 Twice over the past two decades I’ve felt outraged by a massive invasion that violated international law. One time was last week, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The other time was in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq. This post is originally from Nonzero Newsletter You’re not supposed to talk like that! To bring up America’s past wrongdoing as if it’s comparable to some other country’s wrongdoing is called “whataboutism”—as in “Yeah, they did something bad, but what about the time America did something that was bad in kind of the same way?” Most American foreign policy elites hate whataboutism, and they especially hate it at times like this, when a war is going on and you’re expected to focus all your rhetorical firepower on the enemy. Consider...

Edward Curtin February 21, 2022 Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Originally published at Off-Guardian.org on January 23, 2022 In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said: What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana...

Robin Edward Poulton February 11, 2022 1 Feb 2022 – Secretary of State Blinken’s statement on January 26th was a disaster: a statement pleading for peace in Ukraine that was laden with aggression against Russia. The statement suffered from the lack of imagination we associate with U.S. imperialism, and a wanton refusal to understand how and why Russia feels threatened by NATO and the USA. Originally published at Transcend Media Service (TMS) Ukraine is a buffer state between Russia and Germany/Europe/NATO. And we need buffer states. Buffer States are often necessary for stable peace. No less a person than the Secrétaire Permanente de l’Académie Française – Madame Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – commented recently that Helmut Kohl and James Baker had promised Mikael Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards…. which it then did, now expanded to 30 member states. Madame Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was born in Russia. Her magisterial book L’Empire Eclaté described the break-up of the Soviet...

Thomas De Waal February 3, 2022 Many people are trying to rewrite the history of the 2008 Georgia-Russia War in the light of the Ukraine crisis. The EU’s report on the war is still a useful baseline and a reminder of how different the two conflicts are. Originally published at Carnegiemoscow Six years ago, on September 30, 2009, the European Union made a bold and mostly successful attempt to deal with recent history. The report on the Georgia-Russia war of 2008—known informally as the “Tagliavini Report” after its team-leader, Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini—came out little more than a year after the events themselves. The idea of the “Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia,” was to separate truth from fiction in the information war which both sides had waged and in particular to explain how the conflict started. It would be wrong to simplify the...

David SwansonTFF Associate January 27, 2021 Have yall learned absolutely nothing? The U.S. government’s internal memos said that the only way to get Iraq to use its weapons if it even had any would be to attack it. The U.S. government’s public statements were that Iraq certainly had weapons and therefore must be attacked. The U.S. government itself had every single one of the weapons in question, and knew Iraq used to have some of them because the U.S. had provided them. Originally posted on Let’s Try Democracy on January 25, 2022 This was not a question of faulty information. This was not a question of political ideology. This was a question of absofuckinglute insanity. The U.S. government’s internal memos right now, if we see them years from now, will be found to have said that expanding NATO and putting troops and weapons into Eastern Europe including Ukraine has provoked...

Public opening session between Lavrov and Blinken on Friday. (Ruptly screenshot.) The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people, says Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter January 26, 2022 Originally published by Consortiumnews on January 22, 2022 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a hastily scheduled, 90-minute summit in Geneva yesterday, after which both sides lauded the meeting as worthwhile because it kept the door open for a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. What “keeping the door open” entails, however, represents two completely different realities. For Blinken, the important thing appears to be process, continuing a dialogue which, by its very essence, creates the impression of progress, with progress being measured in increments of time, as opposed to results. A results-oriented outcome was...

By Ted Snider January 19, 2022 On January 10, American and Russian officials met to discuss Putin’s proposal on mutual security guarantees. Western media and political analysts have cast Putin’s demands that NATO not expand further east to Ukraine and that NATO not establish military bases in former Soviet states nor use them to carry out military activity as bold and impossible. Here are six crucial pieces of background that the western media will not tell you. Originally published at Antiwar.com The NATO Promise Putin’s demands are only bold if it is bold to ask NATO to keep its promises; his demands are only impossible if it is impossible for NATO to keep its promises. On February 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker assured Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany – a huge concession – NATO would not expand one inch east of Germany. The next day, West German Foreign...

But there’s already a solution. Anatol Lieven January 19, 2022 Amid the public storm in America over the fall of Kabul, it is important not to lose sight of other looming crises around the world – some of them potentially much more dangerous than Afghanistan. For if the US political elites were so surprised by the speed of the Afghan state’s collapse, that was largely because the US media stopped paying attention to developments on the ground in Afghanistan once most US forces withdrew and Americans stopped dying there in large numbers. Originally published at The Nation in November 2021 Of these potential crises, one of the most menacing is the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Limited numbers of Russian troops (lightly disguised as “volunteers”) are stationed in the Donbas region, and Russia has deployed large forces in southern Russia to defend...

Clinton and Yeltsin in Naples, July 10, 1994.  Dormant Vesuvius is in the background.  (Eruption wouldn’t happen until Budapest).  Source:  Inosmi.ru Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?” By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton (Compiled and edited) January 7, 2022 Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 – The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin’s “cold peace” blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 – was the result of “combustible” domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive....