Posted on 01/04/2023 4:02:11 PM PST by MarMema
The war in Ukraine has dominated the past year. Other global crises of soaring energy and food costs are collateral damage from the conflict in Ukraine.
The conflict is not simply a localized one in the center of Europe on Russia’s doorstep involving a reactionary anti-Russian regime in Kiev. The conflict represents a historic showdown between the United States and its allies in the NATO military alliance it leads, and Russia. The showdown has been a long time coming.
It didn’t have to happen in this violent, atrocious way.
Russia had long warned the United States and its NATO partners that the expansion of the alliance towards Russia’s borders was an unacceptable strategic security threat. Moscow’s warnings went unheeded year after year.
Almost one year ago, Russia offered a last-ditch diplomatic way to avoid conflict by appealing for a comprehensive security treaty, one based on the previously accepted principle of “indivisible security”. That diplomatic initiative was dismissed out of hand by Washington and its European allies.
Moscow had repeatedly warned that it would not accept the further militarization of the NeoNazi-espousing Kiev regime. Eight years of low-intensity war against Russian-speaking people in former Southeast Ukraine had to stop. Ukraine’s militarization by NATO and its touted membership of the alliance was Russia’s red line. It was the United States and its NATO partners who chose to cross that line. In that case, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to take military-technical measures. The military defanging of the Kiev regime that began on February 24 was the result.
What has transpired is a quasi-war between NATO and Russia. Ukraine has been flooded with NATO arsenals. Attacks are being perpetrated deep inside Russia and there is reckless, foul talk by Western politicians and pundits about assassinating the Russian leadership and pushing for regime change in Moscow.
It is clear that Ukraine was an opportunity to unleash long-held imperial plans by the United States to aggress Russia. Russia’s natural wealth is a coveted prize for Washington’s ambitions of global hegemony. The war in Ukraine has delivered partial gains for Washington. Europe has been subordinated more than ever to American tutelage. The selling of gas and arms to Europe has benefited America’s flailing capitalist economy. The Russians have been kept out, the Americans in, and the Germans (the Europeans) down, as NATO founders envisaged shortly after World War Two.
Geopolitical relations between the U.S./West and the Soviet Union/Russia have long been punctuated by episodes of detente, as the late respected scholar Stephen F Cohen noted in his final book, War With Russia?
In the 1930s, there was a detente after the U.S. finally acceded to recognizing the sovereignty of the Soviet Union. That detente produced an expedient alliance in order to defeat Nazi Germany. But as soon as the Third Reich was vanquished, the United States and its British ally promptly moved to a new era of hostility known as the Cold War.
Detente resumed again during John F Kennedy’s presidency in the 1960s owing to the fear of mutually assured destruction from nuclear war. Several landmark arms-control treaties were negotiated over the ensuing decades.
However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States quickly adopted a new imperial swagger and contempt for the Russian Federation. The arrogant notion of sole superpower and full-spectrum dominance took hold.
Despite earlier promises, the United States and its NATO vehicle for U.S. military power relentlessly encroached on Russia’s borders, more than doubling its membership over a 30-year period. War drills targeting Russia and new missile installations across Europe, the ripping up of arms-control treaties, and the deliberate recruiting of former Soviet republics were all signs of one thing: Russia was to be conquered in a way that Nazi Germany in previous decades could not achieve.
The on-off pattern of detente by the United States towards Moscow has always been a cynical game of expedience. After the Cold War supposedly ended, Washington took the systemic view that Russia was no longer a power that needed to be respected. It was a target to be subjugated.
But there was a problem. Russia refused to roll over in compliance. Moscow has asserted its strategic security interests and has refused to concede to American ambitions. Russia’s military intervention in late 2015 to defend its Syrian ally from a U.S.-led regime-change war using terrorist proxies was a bold demonstration.
There was a time when Moscow earnestly sought diplomacy to resolve the hostilities. But the realization now is that Washington’s zero-sum, winner-takes-all ambitions of global dominance are implacable and insatiable. Washington and American vainglorious media are good at narcissism and pretensions of virtue. When they talk about “rules-based global order”, they really mean total dominance under U.S. hegemony, always conceitedly presumed to be benign.
The upshot is either you are a vassal to serve American imperial interests or an enemy to be targeted with aggression and ultimately destruction.
Russia’s insistence on defending its strategic interests has exposed the ugly face of American power neath the genial mask. It isn’t just the end of a year, it is the end of a century of presumed American imperial swagger. The pretensions of self-righteous American power have been exposed. Washington’s demand to the rest of the world is for subjugation. It has always been so but in a latent form.
The nefarious nature of American power is now clearly seen in its naked brutality from the increasingly maniacal relations with Russia and China.
Russia’s line in the sand over Ukraine has exposed the violence that underpins American power. That power is unsustainable and unacceptable in a world supposedly based on the United Nations Charter. The conflict in Ukraine is a crossroads. Either a multipolar world emerges based on international law and equitable relations, as envisaged by the United Nations amid the ashes of World War Two, or the world is condemned to conflagration because of Washington’s imperialist zero-sum hegemony.
Russia, China, and a growing number of nations are calling for a multipolar world of parity in relations based on international law. The United States stands exposed more than ever as the would-be supremacist power harboring delusional notions of exceptional prerogatives. The U.S. under its prevailing political conditions is incapable and unwilling to abide by a multipolar world. Such a world of peaceful relations is fundamentally anathema to Washington. Hence its warmongering record is out on its own compared with any other nation in history.
Russia’s stand in Ukraine has exposed the world’s warmonger. And that defiant stand is marking the end of presumed U.S. hegemony.
“Trump gave Russian forces minutes to evacuate their airfield. Trump Orders Missile Attack in Retaliation for Syrian Chemical Strikes”
It was STUPID of Trump to do that attack. I suspect, knowing what he knows now, he regrets it.
(I’m not paid to blindly support anyone, be it Trump, Putin, She, or anyone else, so I will call out dumb things, regardless of who does it)
Trump failed when he gave the Russians warning.
He learned later when US Special Operations fighting ISIS in Syria, were attacked by Russian Wagner Spetznaz troops. The Russians crossed the agreed upon deconflicting area and then lied that it was them.
Trump ordered an Apache attack along with F18s on the Russian Wagner units, killing nearly 200.
Whatever, we still had NO BUSINESS starting that war.
Trump was definitely against the endless wars. I think he called them “forever wars”.
Most of the world, however, feels that way about us.
We don’t play well with others.
I wonder the same.
I don’t believe that. They have few Russian hit pieces. Lots more on other foreign politics than Russia.
Bogus.
What and who doesn’t the US sanction, if that were true?
A) Then they don't have to come here
B) I don't care
Thanks for the straight communist propoganda
Its nice to see someone who remembers real history. Not the made up history for the politics of the moment. It is a surprisingly common affliction among conservatives.
it is incredible that we have FReepers celebrating what they think is the downfall of the USA...
The Europeans in particular are more dependent on the US than before the Ukraine war and are actually taking serious steps to limit Chinese influence and find business opportunities elsewhere.
“The Neocons snowed him, and I suspect that even YOU know that. It was a White Hat False Flag - classic Neocon move.”
No, I don’t know that. And neither do you.
You see, that is the problem about creating a bogeyman: It is, of course, fictional, and used solely as a foil; even if that foil is a contradiction of the bogeyman itself. Which is what you have done.
Someone put into your ear the bogeyman of “neocon,” so you apply it so broadly that it comes back on itself, such that you yourself become that which you vilify.
US hegemony is already gone. It was a natural result of the rise of China and our own continuing malaise. Biden is just too stupid and senile to realize it.
“Just as I supported most (if not all) of the Neocon interventions during the Cold War, I base my opinion on whether it’s justified.”
But, you see, you have just proved my point, that the term “neocon” is meaningless; BECAUSE it is purely situational: You will support and applaud a “neocon” if you agree with his or her actions, or “justifications;” but you will vilify and condemn that very same “neocon” if you disapprove of his or her actions, or “justifications.”
“I’m not into absolutes, like BLIND SUPPORT of the Neocons, or blind support of any other country.”
Fine. You have just confirmed what I said: The term “neocon” is meaningless. You oppose “blind support” — which is a smart way to be, regardless of the subject — of neocons; but you DO support them if you agree with them. And, in some situations, you clearly DO agree with them, which makes you, by association at the very least, a “neocon.” You are, in fact, that which you condemn. Which makes the term meaningless, UNLESS you accept that you yourself fit the term.
Our “business” is not limited to whether or not something poses a threat to us; our “business” is if that something is in our national interests.
“Trump gave Russian forces minutes to evacuate their airfield.”
Yup.
“Nope, as I noted in a prior post, I don’t blindly follow anyone Democrat, Republican, or Neocon. If the intervention is shown to be in US interests, then I’m good with it. It’s very simple.”
Then you are, by definition, a “neocon” (unless you eschew capitalism), if the situation meets your approval. Democrat and Republican are political parties, and one actively joins enrolls in them; so you can be one or the other even though you do not approve of an action or policy the party has adopted. Whereas, “neocon” is strictly situational. And thus, its broad-brush employment is meaningless.
The Europeans are a very small part of the world.
“Trump was definitely against the endless wars. I think he called them ‘forever wars’.”
That’s true; he was. But he was not against intervention if he thought it was justified. So, by definition, Trump was a “neocon” (a capitalist who supported intervention). That’s why the term, as so broadly applied so often here on FR, is meaningless.
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