Grand Strategy to Nowhere
Monday, October 24, 2022 2:55 PM
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a coincidence.—Gore Vidal
Dear Friends + Interlocutors,
The other day I was made aware of an informative video from France, a French TV investigative report, concerning the CIA-orchestrated 2014 coup in Kiev. That violent coup threw out the elected government and replaced it with a U.S.-installed substitute.
The current iteration of that regime is headed by a comedian-actor named Zelensky who is hailed as a modern-day Churchill by propagandists for the Washington establishment. He has been on the receiving-end of unaccountable billions in money and equipment from the White House and NATO.
Papa Joe Biden, the amazing U.S. President, is now casually talking about nuclear war. The crazed Zelensky has requested a preemptive nuke strike on Moscow. A soon-to-be de-industrialized Germany is rearming.
That is where things stand, and where we are headed. Wonderful developments, don’t you think?
Last February, President Putin ordered Russian armed forces into Ukraine, on a so-called “special operation” to protect the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass from attacks by Kiev.
Predictably, the special operation expanded, and the conflict has now escalated to the faraway Baltic Sea in the north of Europe proper. And the Donbass voted to join the Russian Federation. The war is now open-ended. Joe Biden’s White House is picking up the bill.
Already, in the aftermath of the 2014 coup, Russians in the Crimean peninsula voted to join Russia and leave Ukraine. Crimea has been Russian for centuries. Putin naturally welcomed the development, an exercise in self-determination.
It made perfect sense not just from a humanitarian point of view, but also because of Realpolitik. Crimea is where the Russian Black Sea fleet is headquartered.
Did Washington actually expect Moscow to walk away from its Black Sea fleet? Let’s get real. Crimea was one of the primary targets of American mischief-making intervention in Ukraine.
Another was to poke the Russian bear repeatedly with a stick to bring about a war between Ukraine and Russia, a war that might result in Kremlin regime change, the ultimate goal.
My interlocutor and friend Chuck Spinney sent me the link to the French-produced video mentioned above, entitled The Masks of the Revolution. It is an eye-opener.
It brings you to ground level of the conflict, and includes sickening comments from Generals McChrystal and Petraeus, among other dubious American notables.
It is on the Vimeo platform, not Youtube, which is more accessible. YouTube banned it because the content deviates from the Washington narrative, from the official party line, if you will. See here.
Frankly, I am surprised that YouTube would do such a thing. I do not know who “they” are, working behind the scenes, but “they” have been working overtime to muzzle and throttle the free flow of ideas when it comes to their pet projects.
That is what Ukraine is, a Neocon/Neoliberal pet project masquerading as some kind of heroic, humanitarian enterprise. This prank may get us all killed at the end of the day and/or bankrupt the U.S. Treasury and destroy Europe.
I have watched the video and I see nothing objectionable that would disqualify it for either the French viewing public or for a wider YouTube audience. Call me naive or a Putin puppet. Take your choice.
The video makes clear that there is a very significant number of ultra-nationalist, rightwing crazies in Ukraine, inside the government and in control of important well-armed militias. What a fantastic terrain to be exploited for internecine, ethnic conflict!
Reminds me of Iraq, where the game plan was Sunni v. Shiite. Now it’s Ukrainian v. Russian, a blood feud. It almost a race war, a fratricidal religious war. All thanks to American intervention, indeed, to Washington’s deliberate instigation.
Chuck Spinney hit more than a few nails on the head back in February when he wrote an article soon after Putin moved into Ukraine. How the Narcotic of Defense Spending Undermines a Sensible Grand Strategy.
U.S. strategy post Cold War has been predicated upon creating conflicts or “threats” to justify and expand “defense” spending. It’s just plain cynical. There is no rational, pro-American and pro-humanity grand strategy in Washington. Hence the Ukraine train wreck.
Why this should be the case is open to debate. My own view is that the USG has been hijacked by an ever-expanding fraternity of busybodies and lunatics, and that Americans have been brainwashed, misled and programmed. The suppression of the French video is a typical example of the latter.