Yves here. Rob Urie covers some aspects of the long-standing US campaign against Russia which remain badly understood, which is compounded by the abject stupidity of the current Administration (not that Team Biden was deserving of any acumen prizes). At some point, Russia’s progress on the battlefield will become undeniable. That will lead to further histrionics and threat displays before a slightly less deluded Western view takes hold.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
The intellectual, and with it political, bind that the West is in with respect to the conflict in Ukraine is that two different US administrations have— purposely or not, mis-diagnosed the genesis of the conflict. Joe Biden did so, one would imagine, because the thirty-year lead-up to the launch of Russia’s SMO in 2022 is more favorable to Russia’s case than it is to the West’s.
Likewise, Donald Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ implies that the conflict can be resolved using military force. However, when a single nation can end all human life on the planet with nuclear weapons, peace through strength is a formula for nuclear annihilation. That neither Biden nor Trump appear to understand this places them both in a pre-nuclear age.
Correct diagnosis is essential to solving the problem. Mr. Trump’s infantile treatment of the conflict in Ukraine as a fight between two children that he must mediate is the least honest framing of the war to date. In the first place, the US is the lead belligerent in the war because it both assumed political control of Ukraine with the US-led coup there in 2014, and as the New York Times reported over a year ago, it was the CIA that organized, armed, funded, and built-out the only army that is at war with Russia in the present, the CIA’s (links below).
Whether Donald Trump was aware or not, US preparations for war (see here, here) were solidified during his first term in office. Moving the CIA’s war forward was the central motivation for the Russiagate fraud. Having promised to improve relations between Washington and Moscow, Mr. Trump was occupied with accusations that he had been compromised by Russia. Reams of ‘evidence’ faked by MI6, the CIA, and the FBI were used to persuade Americans that the CIA assuming control of domestic US politics was actually ‘the Russians.’
In terms of left-wing politics, the American left broke with the international left to support the US war against Russia under the dubious theory that US foreign policy is a liberatory force. The mutually-exclusive propositions that the US is 1) imperialist and 2) yet US foreign policy is liberatory, are now held by the supporting cast of American empire, Question, how liberated are the Palestinians in Gaza feeling right now? Gaza is the pure product of US foreign policy. The only people surprised that Gazans aren’t flourishing are American liberals.
This is an important aspect of the unsolvable predicament that the US has been placed in by the people running the place. The political interests and prerogatives of elected officials and the permanent government differ from those of the American people. Conventional wisdom has it that admitting defeat in Ukraine would destroy the political fortunes of the politicians / party whose name is on the deed, as well as the sense of unipolar might that George W. Bush imagined that he was revivifying with his catastrophe in Iraq.
“Joe Biden, whom I talked to about this at length, thought that Russia should be destroyed. And Europe, which held a middle-ground position for some time, finally sided with Washington and now is spending billions to rearm itself. That concerns me. If you keep speaking only about war there will never be peace,” Brazilian President Lula da Silva, 2025, Tass.
Joe Biden has long been a Cold Warrior who believes the Manichean pablum that 1) ‘we’ are good and 2) the Russians are bad. Following from Woodrow Wilson, Biden is also a racist crank. But the object of his racial hatred, Slavs, makes it acceptable in US ruling class circles. Many of the anti-Slavs in the US were also antisemites. From the Bolshevik Revolution forward, Judaism and communism were conflated in Western eyes. Western anti-communism was, in its European incarnation, also antisemitism.
In terms of contemporary politics, Woodrow Wilson was 1) Progressive, and 2) a racist crank. Progressive race science in the US, along with the Eugenics movement, formed the basis of Nazi race ‘science.’ The Progressive desire to ‘improve’ humanity most often meant ridding it of ‘undesirables.’ While this history may be uncomfortable for modern Progressives, the Progressive ‘position,’ meaning the CIA’s, on the war in Ukraine, is racist to its core. How many American Senators need be quoted regarding ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’ for this to be clear?
In recent comments made about the US – British attacks on Russian nuclear assets inside Russia. V. Putin offered two possible paths for Russian retaliation. One would be an Oreshnik attack that is intended to end the Ukrainian regime. The other would be substantial, but more restrained than the first option, with the intention of continuing the peace talks restarted in Istanbul. This follows the US double-daring the Russians to nuke Washington, New York, and Los Angeles.
Mr. Trump and his band of one-half, one-quarter, and one-tenth wits, are working from their precepts about the war rather than from what the Russians are saying. They are aging ideologues sitting together in a closed room without input from the outside world, just making shit up. Recall Elon Musk’s promise that DOGE would find $2 trillion in Federal waste and fraud. DOGE didn’t find it because it doesn’t exist. The claim was the result of an ideological closed circuit. The rest of Trump’s program is dubious for similar reasons.
Donald Trump both 1) does know and 2) doesn’t know that the Russians have not only agreed to negotiations to end hostilities, but have been requesting meetings with the Americans to resolve outstanding Russian security concerns, including NATO expansion, for thirty years. Not only this, but having prevailed militarily in Ukraine, the Russians were acting with relative restraint until the Americans and the Brits tried to assassinate the President of Russia while crafting a fake nuclear attack on Russia to see how it would respond.
That the American political leadership is criminally stupid, and is apparently too stupid to know how stupid it is, is a problem for the world. Rumor had it in DC-world that the nation that recently changed its nuclear doctrine in response to Western provocations in and around Ukraine would treat an assault on its nuclear assets favorably (not). In terms of sheer numbers of nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump’s measure is a mercy 6” compared to Mr. Putin’s 10” of hardened steel. Translation: the US, irrespective of who is president, loses ‘peace through strength’ when it comes to nuclear weapons.
By analogy, in reading a press account of a murder where one person walks up to another and shoots them in the head, most readers conclude that the act was ‘unprovoked.’ After all, the victim was unarmed and was minding their own business when he / she was shot. However, what if the person who was shot had raped the shooter’s spouse, murdered his / her family, and burned down his / her house the week before? The point is that history matters. How events are interpreted is a matter of context every bit as much as the proximate facts.
Readers may recognize here a crude parallel to the American response to the launch of Russia’s SMO in February, 2022. The obvious question of that day was why? Why was a border crossed to carry out a military assault against a hapless victim— Ukraine? Question: which foreign invasion of Ukraine are the Americans responding to so unfavorably, the one carried out by Russia in 2022, or the one carried out by the US in 2014? In 2025, 98% of the educated bourgeois in the US still have no knowledge of the American regime-change coup in Ukraine in 2014.
The American bourgeois conceit that the US is helping Ukraine misses that since the US and the Brits interfered to halt the first agreement to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, the so-called Istanbul Accord of April – May 2022, over one million Ukrainians have been killed. In Istanbul, Ukraine had agreed to the peace deal that it had negotiated with Russia. The Ukrainians were happy. The Russians were happy. It was only Ukraine’s American and British ‘helpers’ who objected to one million Ukrainians still being alive.
Recall the quote from Lula da Silva above that Joe Biden’s intention was to use the military of the US to destroy Russia, with zero regard for what is best for the US. Biden hated Russia and Russians, and filled his foreign policy team with the intellectual equivalents of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team. This is the rot that accompanies imperial decline. There is no way out for the US because the people who run the country have contrary interests to those of the American people.
In ways that American liberals and progressives likely haven’t considered, the American coalition in favor of war against Russia today is class-analogous to the majority of Americans who supported the US war in Vietnam to the very end. Chicken hawks in the White House and Congress allied with the ‘my country, right or wrong’ contingent of urban bourgeois and rural soldier culture to pose themselves as the saviors of the world’s downtrodden through bombing rural, agrarian, Vietnam into dust.
Three-and-one-half-million Vietnamese died (per former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) in a war that was explained to the American people as benefitting the South Vietnamese. A tiny nation of plucky fighters was being saved from the unspeakable horrors of widespread literacy, health care, and human flourishing, went the Western spiel. The liberals in 1968 (I was there) chided the anti-war movement for not understanding the larger geopolitical issues in play. History has been quite unkind to the supporters of that war.
Within Clausewitz’s ‘war is politics by other means’ logic; the question arises of what politics the Russians were pursuing when they launched their SMO in 2022? What Russian President Vladimir Putin offered at the time was 1) an end to NATO expansion along Russia’s Western border, 2) an end to US political control over Ukraine achieved through the US coup in 2014, and 3) an end to Ukrainian fascists committing ethnic cleansing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas. The wording varied, but this is the gist.
From the perspective of the self-interest of Russia, these are reasonable requests. With respect to the ‘freedom’ of nations to join NATO, certainly Russia has the same right to coup the Mexican government and set up a wall of nuclear weapons along the US – Mexico border pointed at Washington, New York and Los Angeles, right? Isn’t this what the Americans are telling the world? That NATO has a right to do this to Russia?
Quite obviously, the US view is based in a sense of military hegemony that George W. Bush threw into the trash with his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Political power represents an agreement between nations as to who possesses it and who doesn’t. Volunteering to demonstrate to the world that a nation’s power is less than the world had perceived it to be, as Bush did with his assault on Iraq, is strategically debilitating. The US couldn’t have demonstrated itself to be stronger than perception had it. Only weaker. This was Bush’s gift to the US.
And it is why the American regime-change coup in Ukraine in 2014 is unknown to the Western bourgeois who get their news from establishment sources. Had it been understood that the Americans and Brits have controlled Ukraine politically since early 2014, it would be difficult to explain how precisely the Russians ‘invaded’ it in 2022? And it is doubly hard to explain how such an invasion would be ‘unprovoked.’ What Russia is doing in Ukraine is a gentle version of what the US would do to chase the Russians out of Mexico, were they to enter.
Ironically, CIA mouthpiece, the New York Times, again comes in handy here. In his second installment, Times reporter Adam Entous offered that the US and the Europeans have actually been running the war in Ukraine, meaning telling the Ukrainians what to do and when to do it, from remote locations including Wiesbaden, Germany, since the onset of war. The result, the CIA organized, armed, funded and built the ‘Ukrainian’ army while the US State Department enlisted the Ukrainians to be cannon fodder in an American war.
Russia has prevailed militarily against Ukraine. The only thing keeping Ukraine in the battle are Western arms shipments. Had Donald Trump wanted to end the US war in Ukraine, he would have ended the arms shipments. He has not done so. He has surrounded himself with morons, meaning people who develop their ideas in closed forums, thereby doing an end-run around their capacity for informed thought. To those of us who have studied this war, nothing that has come from Washington regarding the conflict has been either informed or true.
American and European politicians, having created this mess, are now engaged in a furious effort to rewrite the history of the war to portray it in terms that are untrue. Curious readers can find V. Putin’s speeches from 2022 onward, online. In them he states in clear language why the Russians launched the SMO, both the proximate and long-term causes, and how the conflict could be resolved. The security guarantees from the US that the Russians have requested would have been considered reasonable were the goal us the US not to overthrow Russia to claim its resources.
A problem that surely the Russians have considered is that with the breadth of Western opposition to Russia being in Ukraine, even if a deal were negotiated between the Trump administration and Russia, neither Congress nor future administrations will abide by it. In 2020, it was the Democrats who were the dim ideologues who promised a new way forward. In 2024, it is the Republicans who are the dim ideologues promising a new way forward. The pattern isn’t difficult to read.
Americans imagining that such a result would be a victory for the West should look the word ‘empathy’ up in the dictionary and ponder its meaning. By posing the Western position as: unless Russia stops us, we will never, ever, ever end the attacks on Russia, provides a strong incentive for the Russians to end the threat once-and-for-all. From what I’ve heard from V. Putin’s speeches, this isn’t his desire. Which makes Western regime change comments as clueless as the people making them.
What this means is that the Americans are going to have to speak with the Russians to solve the political differences between them. The empire-in-freefall nature of the US at present means that the worst that the US has to offer (e.g. Biden, Trump) will be on the receiving end of Russian entreaties. While the Russians are reportedly happy to have someone to answer the phone on the American side, getting a lecture from Marco Rubio on the fake genesis of the conflict in Ukraine every time that they call will quickly grow tiresome.
With respect to retaliation for the US attacking Russian nuclear assets, V. Putin is cautious and conservative. As long as Russia sees a path, however improbable, to resolving US – Russian differences peacefully, he will remain cautious. Where the mismatch will be found, however, will be between Mr. Putin’s actions and Western interpretation of them. To quote Upton Sinclair. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Mr. Putin will likely expect the US to consider, and possibly to understand, the military logic of the Russian retaliation. However, the Trump administration is still trying to figure out the drive-through window at the local Burger King. And the vested interests of the people doing the interpreting will be very different from the interests of the American people.
re: “thirty-year lead-up to the launch”
New German SoS Wadepuhl just last week was spreading nothing short of lies when claiming that there were never any promises by Kohl made to Gorbachev:
via NACHDENKSEITEN:
“It didn’t happen…” – Disinformation from Foreign Minister Wadephul to the Bundestag
During the last question time in the Bundestag on June 4, when asked why the Kohl government’s promise to the Soviet Union not to expand NATO eastward had been broken, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul stated that there had never been such a commitment. Against this background, NachDenkSeiten wanted to know whether the incumbent Foreign Minister was aware, among other things, of the recorded statement by the then Political Director of the Federal Foreign Office, Jürgen Chrobog, dated March 6, 1991, in which he explained that in the Two Plus Four negotiations it was promised that NATO would not expand eastward and that therefore Poland and the other Eastern European countries could not be offered NATO membership – and if so, why does he continue to claim that there was no such commitment?
By Florian Warweg
https://archive.is/PTxs5
German:
https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=134374
The text also contains a link to the – German – minutes of the Bundestag discussion over Wadepuhl´s comments
Here the excerpt from Warweg´s questions to the press guy:
“(…)
Excerpt from the minutes of the government press conference of 11 June 2025
Question Warweg:
During the last question time in the Bundestag on June 4, when asked why the Kohl government’s promise to the Soviet Union not to expand NATO eastward was broken, Foreign Minister Wadephul explained that such a statement had never been made. Now, in the real world, in addition to all the documented statements by Genscher and Baker, there is the recorded statement by the then Political Director of the Foreign Office, Jürgen Chrobog, dated March 6, 1991, after the so-called reunification, in which he stated, I quote – – –
Chairman Detjen:
Be brief, please!
Follow-up question Warweg:
Very briefly! – “We made it clear in the Two Plus Four negotiations that we will not expand NATO beyond the Elbe. We therefore cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.”
I’m curious to know: Is the minister aware of this official statement by one of the highest-ranking German diplomats at the time? If so, why does he maintain that these promises never existed?
Hinterseher (AA)
I don’t think I have a place to comment on the minister’s statements at this point. I don’t want to. But I believe that NATO’s eastward expansion was not a matter for Germany, but rather a matter for the states that, as part of NATO’s eastward expansion, sought precisely this protection in a defensive alliance, and it was their sovereign decision. In this respect, this sovereign decision was then unanimously adopted within the NATO alliance, and I believe that still holds true.
Supplementary question Warweg:
Okay, but my question was about the fact that the incumbent German Foreign Minister expressed something in very absolute terms to the Bundestag that is simply untenable in that form. There are other statements as well. For example, I can cite the then top US diplomat———
Chairman Detjen:
, you’re making a huge fuss! There’s a lot of literature on this!
<strong>Addition Warweg:
Yes, but that’s no small matter!
Chairman Detjen:
Yes, but we are now in the last two minutes of the government press conference!
Hinterseher (AA):
Mr. Warweg, you’ve already provided the interpretation. So I’d leave it up to you to interpret it. As I said, the statements speak for themselves. You’re free to interpret further, and you’ve already done so here. We don’t share that, of course.
(…)”
Not that it´d matter, but SoS´s name is Wadephul not Wadepuhl.
And it’s pronunciation is best summed up as ‘What-a-fool’.
I am going to steal that one
I was thinking what-the-famblog….
The Americans have been promoting the ‘never happened’ lie since Bill Clinton was in office. Here, once again, is the link to George Washington University’s archive of documents related to what the West— including Kohl, actually said to Mr. Gorbachev.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
The Western practice of talking-over actual history makes negotiations that actually solve what they are intended to solve impossible. It is the state equivalent of a three-year-old holding his / her hands over their ears while shouting NA NA NA NA.
That same link is provided in the above German NACHDENKSEITEN article.
So: This info has been around for ages in Germany. It has been gone over dozens of times here.
German scholarship is aware of it. So is the government. And so is the German public.
So if you draw comparison to a three-year-old, that child is a safer bet than our SoS because the kid is at least more honest than our successor to Anna-Lena Baerbock in the halls of “Auswärtige Amt” which once was the home of a Joachim von Ribbentrop. So the history fits the level of decency.
How do you call that? Right, continuity.
NA NA NA NA
How do you say “Ministry of Truth” in German again?
Bundespressestelle
(nah, that´s just a German tongue in cheek)
Any ‘relation’ to the word Lugenpresse?
Journalist: “We pretend to tell you the truth.”
Reader: “We pretend to understand.”
I guess they would be related, although I personally don´t use the term “Lügenpresse”, because it strikes me as very self-righteous. In meaning and linguistically. (Presse and Lüge in combination sound harsh and aggressive to my ears.)
Some use “Lückenpreses” (which has an irony to it). May be that´s better. And there is Gleichschaltung. Although that too is regarded as non-admissiable (3rd Reich, again) I find it less aggressive in tone and more factual.
p.s. then again: This is very subjective. Consider a historian who has been studying the Third Reich for 30 years. Those people can´t even take the slightest joke on these matters. And I was told young people today were amazed to hear that there are such comedies as “To be or not to be” shot in 1942. Comedy about Nazis? No way.
Much less Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.”
I am of two minds concerning the concept of “laughing at the absurdity of evil.”
If you cannot laugh at the absurdity of life, you are ‘captured’ by it. If you can laugh at the absurdity, are you “unfeeling” towards the evil in the world? It is not a simple question.
Tulsi Gabbard is warning of nuclear war
3:30 min.
https://x.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1932368919039459348
I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, because I did not understand what exactly does she wants us to do? Vote for her? Like and subscribe? Support Israel? Run to the hills?
In this particular case I actually think we have the very rare case of an honest DC hack.
It is what it is: Let us not do WWIII.
Or am I missing something?
So, she is just telling us that nukes are bad, and that’s it. Maybe she could do an episode on genocide, wars, and all the other great things that great USA does. Or am I missing something?
My “Or am I missing something?” was genuine.
So yeah, as things are “she is just telling us that nukes are bad, and that’s it”.
Ted Postol did it several times. Now she does it.
I don´t see how this video could be interpreted in any counterintuitive way.
She doesn´t name names. It´s not US, it´s not RU, it´s just war in general.
For DNI that´s okay, I guess.
p.s. Spytalk, which is a CIA Substack outlet constantly smears her. By no means am I a Tulsi fan (like Mark Sleboda). But you gotta work with what they give you…🙄
Now that I think of it, maybe this video was not made for us at all, but for Donald J. Trump. There were recently news about Trump not caring about briefings, and that they will try making them more like TV stuff. Maybe this is Tulsi Gabbard briefing Donald J. Trump that nukes are indeed bad. I don’t think he will like it, because she forgot to mention that USA won WWII, and that USA has the best nukes, the greatest nukes.
most beautiful nukes?
Big, Beautiful, Best Ever, Bombs.
The most beautiful nukes, that Russians stole the plans for. :-)
Right!😂
Perhaps this is a way of disclaiming involvement in or knowledge of the extremely reckless UAF “conventional first strike” on a leg of the Russian Federation nuclear triad.
Perhaps the intended audience is VVP.
I somehow don´t consider her that duplicitous.
I watched the Senate Committee Hearing of hers by that asshole Warner.
She was probably the most decent person in the room.
DNI defending Snowden?
Based on Rob Urie’s post it seems to me that nuclear war is a very real risk. Russia basically has only one choice – destroy the West before the West destroys it. The other choice which is really not a choice is to meekly surrender to the West and offer themselves up as slaves while the country is looted. China should be paying close attention because it too has only one choice.
Exactly.
The biggest problem remains the refusal of western politicians and analysts to accept reality and remain in wishful thinking mode. Kaja Kallas, EU chief ‘diplomat’, still calls for Russia to be broken up into numerous smaller, and less powerful, entities. Oxford history professor and columnist in the Guardian and other publications, Timothy Garten Ash, has stated that Russia needs to be occupied by the west for the next 50 years. American equivalents talk along the same lines.
Russia has clearly won the SMO, but whenever Putin hears the nonsense spouted by Kallas, Garten Ash, McFaul, Snyder et al, the west will remain an existential threat to Russia until reality finally seeps through their deranged mindsets.
Good god these people are so damn stupid it starts to really hurt to even read their names.
Goddammit, JohnA. Now you made me look up who Timothy Garten Ash actually is when he is at home-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Garton_Ash
So a British historian, author and commentator and also a Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford. Come to think about it, I think that his name has appeared before on NC – and not in a good way either. But as he is an Oxford Don, I guess that the British establishment likes him.
And for years, I simply can’t stand to listen to the guy. Fortunately I have not heard his name is a long time. He is a textbook academic darling of the establishment and a great top-rank sycophant.
What’s an SMO?
It means the Special Military Operation which is what the Russians call their actions in the Ukraine. In practice it means that the Russians have been keeping the gloves on and not conducting it the way that the west would conduct a war.
There’s slightly more into the term than just what the Russians call it. For our purposes, we need to consider two facets in trying to define the military and the legal basis for the it.
The Russian military thinking is more holistic and networked than the Western one, which tends to be sequential and linear. In it, to sketch it very roughly, strategy controls the Theater of War and operational art controls the Area of Operations. In this sense Ukraine is not a theater of war but an area of operations, and it follows that what happens in Ukraine is not “war” but military operations. One can argues that the conflict with NATO is in some sense the theater of war, of which Ukraine is merely an operation following the overall strategy against NATO.
Then, the Russian law makes a distinction between Defense, State security and Military security. As the specific laws are only a few decades old, there is a gray area regarding the use of military force outside of Russia – which in most countries not USA or UK is downright illegal without parliamentary consent. Whether it’s Georgia, Syria or Ukraine, the State Duma has to accept the Security Council’s decision of using Russian military or other security forces outside of Russia. Since the conduct of the armed conflict in Ukraine and the politico-economic conflict with the West are defined in multiple laws regarding the state defense and state security, the definition they came up with was – following the military thinking – Special Military Operation as it is more about state security than state defense.
Or something like that. I’m trying to convey the assessments of Jacques Baud and Denis Iroshnikov, but assume all mistakes are mine.
and its now (or shortly will be once the formaliti`es are completed) a TMO – Terrorist Military Operation – with a different set of rules.
In Kursk it was not SMO but “counter-terrorism operation”/”Anti-Terrorist Operation”/whatevertheyactualynamedit.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qedq0penko
Absolutely on the mark. And necessary. Compliments, Rob Urie.
This matters, although I will quibble: “In terms of left-wing politics, the American left broke with the international left to support the US war against Russia under the dubious theory that US foreign policy is a liberatory force. The mutually-exclusive propositions that the US is 1) imperialist and 2) yet US foreign policy is liberatory, are now held by the supporting cast of American empire, Question, how liberated are the Palestinians in Gaza feeling right now? Gaza is the pure product of US foreign policy. The only people surprised that Gazans aren’t flourishing are American liberals.”
I will go with Richard Kline’s essay (archived here at Naked Capitalism): Liberals (useless politically and with any moral authority now drained away by the likes of Kamala Harris) and progressives (so-called, their moral authority also no longer in existence) have gone in on the war against Russia. The most serious doubts that I see in the US of A are from the genuine left as well as from paleoconservatives.
Yet I also note that bringing up U.S. racism, as described in this essay, makes U.S. liberals all “uncomfortable” and less glib. And we wouldn’t want the darlings to be “uncomfortable,” eh.
For context: In Italy, resistance to the Ukraine Adventure is coming from the “radical left” (Sinistra Italiana) as well as the Five Stars (who, ironically, now define themselves as progressives — but we are talking Italian progressives). There is considerable skepticism from the Forza Italia (Berlusconi clones) and the hodgepodge of the Lega.
End of quibble.
I want to highlight that quote from President Lula, because of some pooh-poohing here a few days back. Lula is very savvy. He knows what the U S government and intelligence agencies did to him and to President Dilma Roussef. So if Lula says that Biden went on and on about destroying Russia, Lula is offering a fact — and sticking in a digger. Good for him. Good for the Brazilians, who have put up with U.S. shit for years.
Summing up: It is impossible to criticize the behavior of the Israeli government and its spendthrift sponsor, the U.S. government, and remain agnostic about Russia and the designs of the likes of Biden and Kallas on Russia.
It is all one U.S.-sponsored massacre and genocide.
“History has been quite unkind to the supporters of that war.” I am already ready to be more than unkind to the supporters of these two wars. Let’s not pretend as if the likes of Hillary Clinton and Tom Cotton retain an iota of moral authority. Unfortunately, Italians sometimes say, There are no just wars and no just peaces.
The question is: When does the moral crisis begin in the U S of A? Ever?
The idea here is that the American Elites have never seriously entertained the concept of “morality” as an operative policy. Transactionalism is but the latest iteration of the pure and diamond hard policy of old-fashioned Pragmatism that guides the Elites in their dealings in not only foreign Elites, but especially their own subject populations.
The general “moral crisis” that erupts in America will probably begin when the American Organs of State Security begin to openly shoot members of the American public, in public. Maintaining “Law and Order” is the traditional rallying cry used to legitimate such oppressions. Such was the case in the past, such as the calling out of the National Guard back in the 1900s to put down striking workers. The “crisis” will follow upon the Public demanding that “morality” be included in the inputs used to determine public policy. Then the forces of the Organs of State Security will clash with those benighted deplorables who dare to try and tell the Elites what is best for America.
The real trick here is to control the definition of what America means. Does it describe a nation of myriads of cultures, ethnicities, classes mixing and compromising on how the society is run? Or is it the tool for the advancement of the interests of the small cliques of Elites who assume the mantle of power in the Capitol City? There is where the real struggle will take place.
The Russians will probably sit back and make the best of a bad situation. They have suffered through at least three major Revolutions in the last 120 years: 1905, 1917, and the 1990s. The older and more experienced “America Hands” in Moscow are now perhaps finishing the furnishing of their nuclear bunkers. It never hurts to be prepared.
ambrit: I agree that morality likely is not in play. Yet there was some smoke-and-fire-and-fog that indicated that some groups, like the Calvinists, had moral authority. That’s over.
If the U.S. elites were pragmatic, they wouldn’t go out looking for war with Iran, Russia, and China. Something is being derailed by belief — and the less one sticks to beliefs, the better. But the elites have many beliefs — including that they are the elect. [Unfortunately, U.S. pragmatists have no problem beating up Cuba or Venezuela, because there will be no repercussions.]
As to organs of state security shooting the citizenry: black America experiences that all the time. So we are talking about the militarized police shooting white people, now aren’t we?
Alas, you are quite correct in your last point. Where we now live, the population is half black, half white, and increasingly Latin. The phrase “Driving while Black” is still current “on the street” here. What has changed over the years is the racial composition of the police forces enforcing those types of laws. It seems that the Organs of State Security are truly “equal opportunity.” There is a stark example of the true class-based nature of the internal divides in our society.
Stay safe in the Undisclosed Bournes.
To give a better sense of how Italians put it, a quote from a writer who uses the name Annabelle Lee: ‘Io la penso come Cicerone con “una pace ingiusta è meglio di una guerra giusta”, appurato che non esiste una guerra giusta.’
I think of it much like Cicero, that “an unjust peace is better than a just war,” although I’d clarify that no just war exists.
My translation
although, Cicero was an imperialist
i.e. he never experienced a war for survival
considering that almost the entire vocabulary of international law is built on the experience of imperialist nations it says something about our legal terms and language
The glib talk about “liberationing” countries bugs the heck out of what little of Korean that’s still left in me. After all, we’d been “liberationed” by Japan in 1895 and again in 1905, then by the Soviets and US in 1945. None of these went well just few years later in each case…
Terror fails when the victims (targets?) remaining on plan.
US terrorism, on questionably “unready” bombers or civilian passenger railcars, is provocative. These tactic are to get a response. One not serving the target.
Russia will not respond in kind, it has moved toward calling the terrorists terrorists! Negotiation will be more reality observing.
Not the anticipated reaction to the provocation.
The kinetic responses will be in tune with Russian strategic outcomes!
Response in kind is not in the works.
So long as the US pushing materiel to the Donbas to be wasted…..
thanks
I agree.
Am trying to tell people.
Many like to see more “response” almost as if just to be proven right in their assessment.
p.s. forgive me the pathetic quote, there is this phrase in the Alan Turing biopic “Imitation Game”: “People like violence because it feels good.”
That´s not totally wrong. It confirms something. It simulates action and progress.
Of course you eventually end up with “activism”.
Vietnam is the correct precedent and the only lesson the elites seem to have learned from that one is to throw fewer American bodies into the meat grinder because the grim body bag reality makes it harder to “catapult the propaganda.”
Whereas Americans in our insular way are quite content to ignore proxy conflicts as long as the ruling class confines its predation to the foreigners. The enemy within is the one we have to worry about and since they have suborned the political process and even economic reality in 2008 it seems we have to wait for them to defeat themselves. A threatened war against Iran just might do it.
Urie’s mention of anti-slav racism is something that is frequently overlooked. Slav killing slavs is a good thing, especially when it means not killing our boys. That morally abhorent position comes from deep within the racist heart of the Anglo-American-Zionist political elite. Not to get too psychological but the English word slave is derived from the Latin name for the Slavic people because they were so commonly enslaved during the medieval period.
Look at how viciously they treated Yugoslavia, for a primer in what Western elites think of Slavs and Slavic culture. And it continues there as thinly disguised looting. A rich socialist country that would not be allowed to survive.
Slavs/Russians/OrthodoxEast have been denigrated by the “west” since the Great Schism of 1054, and even before.
“Orientalist” bias against the east has been institutionalized for many years.
A certain notorious regime in the 20th century considered Slavs, and especially Russians, as subhuman. The Russians needed to be “cleansed” from the land to make “living space” for master-race types. Russians are all violent, unstable, autocratic, drunkards, hell-bent on world conquest. (or does that describe the British and their US offspring?)
The Drang Nach Osten is being recycled, they want to continue the NATO eastward expansion and try to destroy Russia. The current crop of kakistocrat-vassals in Germany forgot their history, and fantasize about Barbarossa 2.0. They are still bitter about the utter defeat by the Red Army in 1945. Silly monkeys never learn
Meanwhile the new subhumans (Palestinians) are being exterminated with the full blessing, support, weapons and finances of the US/UK and EU vassals. How’s that for irony eh.
Ukrainians have internalized anti-Slavism. They are proud that Galicia was once part of the Austrian Empire and that the Nazis considered Ukrainians “honorary Aryans.” In other words, the Nazis recognized that Ukrainians are not Slavic, which is why the Nazis are popular among Ukrainians.
I’m not sure about Nazis considering Slavic Ukrainians “aryan” or even honorary. All Slavs were considered “uentermenschen”.
The modern Banderite neo-Nazi types bizarrely ignore that several millions of Ukrainian civilians were slaughtered by the Germans during the war. Ukrainian Stockholm Syndrome on steroids.
There were some oddities: Croats, Slovaks, and Bulgarians, after all, were Nazi allies and the Croats, in particular, came up with some weird racial theories of their own. Of course, Croats have a lot of things in common with the Galicians, especially vis a vis WW2 history.
Croats and Galicians/Ruthenians got their racial theories from the Austrian Empire (and Vatican). They were groomed to be Slavic-Nazis long before the first moustache appeared on the Austrian Moustache Man. This war in the Germanic-Slavic Borderland (that is also Western-Eastern Christianity Borderland) have been going on for a very long time. Even longer than the Crimean one.
During WWII, the Nazis used the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) to 1) help the Nazis traverse Ukraine to attack the USSR, while 2) committing atrocities along the way.
The Ukrainian nationalists apparently believed that they were on the inside with the Nazis. They imagined that Adolf Hitler would let them lead Ukraine as an independent fascist state.
Of course, Hitler screwed them, with the Nazis making it clear that they would rule the world, including Ukraine, without help from Ukrainian nationalists.
It is these Ukrainian fascists that modern Ukraine looks back fondly on, Bandera et al, rather than the German Nazis.
While this doesn’t clarify the race question, the Nazis did not hold the Ukrainian fascists in high regard. They were a means to an end.
Yes, although I have been told by more than one Ukrainian that Germany was defending itself from Russian aggression during WWII and that the war was Stalin’s fault. They claimed Stalin had plans to invade Germany and double-cross Hitler on the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” pact. Hitler was “forced” to invade the USSR.
One Ukrainian electrical engineer told me that Russian is not a Slavic language, and Ukrainian is. He said that Russian was related to Finn-Ugric or some such nonsense.
The folks who told me these things, were not overt Banderite types, just indoctrinated by official discourse in Ukraine since the coup.
That seems to be the prevailing ethno-nationalist ethos in “modern” Ukraine: they are the only True Slavs, as the Russians have been mixin’ with the Turkic and Fenno-Ugric subhumans, while Poles and Belorussians have merely lost their way and can eventually be brought back to being True Slavs. Or, you know, be “dealt with”.
I just want to confirm everything written in this subthread, from my own meandering experience of a lifetime on the mountainous Balkans.
P.S. Mountainous Balkans is a phrase from a poem we studied in elementary school back in the day, that remained ingrained in this now rather old brain of mine. Here’s an English translation:
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/krvava-bajka-bloody-fairytale.html
It’s about Germans executing schoolkids in Kragujevac.
No, Putin has been opaque on where his boundaries are. Exactly which countries are allowed to join NATO and which are not, according to him? “None” is not an answer because that is not how alliances work. “Russian speakers” is not a boundary. Anyway, the Kremlin now wants all the Baltic States free of influence other than Russia’s paternal glove. That’s a novel ahistorical condition. Also not a boundary. Demanding one-way security guarantees from parties Putin reminds us are incapable making those same agreements is beyond the bounds of logic and recognizable contracts, frankly.
Incoming German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle asked his Russian counterpart in 2009 to formally join NATO. Angela Merkel grew up and enjoyed success in a system which emulated Russia. She was committed to bringing Russia to the party, and Medvedev’s ascendence seemed like Putin’s rule by endless emergency powers was no longer required. Merkel, alone in this opinion, thought the invasion of Georgia made Russia’s point: limited in scope and orderly withdrawal. Nothing which couldn’t be hashed out over tea.
However, no official response was drafted ahead of the G8 summit but on the sidelines, an answer was terse, “Great powers create coalitions; they do not join them. Russia is a great power.”
The Great Power is making its third advance toward Dnipro, having withdrawn from the city in November 2022. Then Russia withdrew further east from the Left Bank region in November 2023. Russia can advance wherever it wishes until the cloud cover lifts. 10 days of moderate drone weather and Russian infantry won’t get resupply. Fire all the missiles into cities and this still won’t change the reality that your spent soldiers have to walk home in the dark.
If a Great Power such as Russia can’t steer Ukraine without their guy getting tossed out, what makes Putin think the US can pull Ukraine’s strings any better? Now that Trump has authorized the use of more kinetic force in Los Angeles than he has in Ukraine, it should be more obvious that the Ukrainians, alone, are doing all of the fighting and dying. I’m glad, though, that someone could shoehorn Woodrow Wilson into justifying this ongoing abattoir because it shows how crackers defending this position has become. Maybe what we can’t observe is, in fact, the only parts that matter but there is no way to authentically argue what one cannot observe. “Stupid” is not a reason upon which someone acts and is of no use in historical discourse. In would be easy to dismiss Trump’s deference to Putin, and Putin’s failure to ever capitalize on this deference, under this term but it is not an argument.
The hypothetical of the US reacting to Russia arming Mexico to the teeth has historical precedents: the Cuban Missile “Crisis”, the Zimmerman Telegram, and preparations for intervention in Mexico when Napoleon III and Palmerston were looking to meddle there. And of course the Monroe Doctrine
I endorse everything in this post and the comments that follow, but I think that it’s important that we take history back even further than 2014 and the U.S./CIA coup d’état in Kiev. I studied this region as an undergrad many years ago.
What so many ignorant “liberals” fail to understand is that there is no such thing as “Ukraine” — it is a “breakaway region” of the former Soviet Union. “Ukraine” translates as “borderlands” and under its Soviet-imposed 1991 borders constitutes a region that was contested for over 1500 years between the Russian, Mongol, Ottoman Turk, Polish-Lithuanian, and Austro-Hungarian empires, with assists from Napoléon, the Light Brigade, and the Nazis. It is not an ethno-national state in the Wilsonian sense of self-determination at all.
From what I can glean from translated Russian sources, the SMO was provoked when it became evident that Putin had been hoodwinked by Hollande and Merkel, and that the Minsk Accords were a smokescreen for the armament of the breakaway “Ukrainian” government in order to militarily pacify the Donbass and Crimea as a precondition to NATO membership. This was in furtherance of the American neoconservative cabal of anti-Russian émigrés obsessive desire to atomize the former Soviet Union along outdated 19th century ethno-nationalist lines.
The Russian military build-up in 2021 was defensive in nature once Putin had been educated about how badly he had been deceived. The SMO was eventually launched under the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine of international law to save the Russian-speaking majorities in Donbass and Crimea from ethnic cleansing, a form of genocide.
Yes, there’s a reason why many Ukrainian “patriots” are neo-Nazis. They dislike Ukraine because it lacks a rich history and tradition.
My understanding, which may be flawed, is that R2P was not the front-and-center legal justification for the intervention. In the days prior to the beginning of the SMO, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics declared independence from Ukraine, were recognized by the Russian Federation as independent states, executed a mutual assistance treaty with Russian Federation, and then asked for assistance under the terms of that treaty in the face of imminent invasion by the armed forces of Ukraine.
My perception is that R2P, while it certainly was in the background (and especially in terms of internal Russian politics), was not the legal justification for RF intervention. It was acting on the terms of treaty obligations it had undertaken with the newly-recognized-by-RF sovereign states of LPR and DPR.
Of course, the hasty nature of the “papering” of the legalities invites criticism that this was legalistic artifice. The critics rarely object to the evidently intentional failure of Ukraine to implement the Minsk accords for reintegration of LPR and DPR into the Ukrainian state.
So many ignored opportunities for peace. It’s almost as if there are people in charge who prefer war.
Borderland (i.e. Kraijina) exists in the Balkan too, with rhyming events/history to match rhyming names. Planned Ukrainian operation in Lugansk and Donetsk was supposed to be direct copy of televised ethnical clensing operations that happened in Slavonija and Krajina. Russians knew that, and launched preemptive SMO. That’s the real reason for SMO, and it’s specific timing. Legalities are just legalities.
The historical problem is that US power is partially based on the Unmentionable tradition of Whiteful geopolitical homicide. The racial geo-homicide is directed against White people, notably slavs, as well as the multicolored peoples and powers. We cannot understand US foreign policy, or that of the White West, until we admit a conception like Whiteful geo-homicide into our analysis and, especially, synthisis.
Thanks Rob, for this fine write up.
Does the commentariat on NC see any ideological closed circuits in their own political thinking?
I chose my alias based on the fluctuations I have perceived within my own ideological circuits*, but I can’t really say if those are closed or not.
* and also as a play of words reflecting my current location on the globe.
Oh, there’s no question avout that, at least speaking for myself. We/I lack info to make “good” assessments on most things. Prejudices and “ideology” necessarily have to fill in the gaps. What I’d like to believe, though, is that I’m not so attached to my prejudices that I fail to update my views when faced with new information.
One of the reasons I raised this question is my sense that the U.S. has basically imploded cognitively.
To me, there is no longer a shared horizon of meaning. Each camp lives in its own moral universe and speaks a language the other cannot hear.
I think it is generally assumed by opposition critics that most DC and EU foreign policy critters are delusional in the sense that they can’t accept that Ukraine is losing the war.
One thing I’ve learned about emergency situations is that people often react with a form of denial. They can’t believe what’s happening but the sooner you do accept what’s happening the better your chances of solving the problem.
It’s, imo, not merely that Ukraine is losing the war but, rather, Russia is now capable of defeating any Nato country in Europe, and that’s shocking. It is also capable of defeating the US in a ground war of attrition anywhere on the Eurasian continent. The US had trouble with the Afghan Taliban and Iraqi resistance; how will it confront Russia when the Russians threaten enough is enough?
How did this happen when, only recently, Russia was supposed to be weak; little more than a gas station with nukes. Russia now has a stable economy and a formidable military, and friends like China which can manufacture anything.
This war is not just about fighting to the last Ukrainian in order to weaken Russia, if necessary, it’s also about fighting to the last European, or at least until they all go broke, in order to weaken Russia. Europeans should stop living in denial and face reality; the US is desperately defending neoliberalism and US hegemony; nothing else.