Here’s something all of us need to internalize. Just because something seems far-fetched, or it seems crazy, or it seems totally destructive to core American interests doesn’t mean the U.S. government won’t do it. That’s the main lesson at the moment we’re living in.
So with that in mind, do not discount, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, a hot war with Russia. Yes, that is a lunatic idea. There is nothing we could possibly gain from a military confrontation with Vladimir Putin and there’s very much we could lose including of course many thousands of American lives. But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden won’t do it.
Biden is unpopular, he’s incompetent and he’s desperate. More than anything Joe Biden is weak. He’s a pawn of his staff in the hard-eyed ideologues who surround him. Russia is currently involved in a border dispute with neighboring Ukraine. Many of Biden’s closest aides are pushing the United States to get involved militarily. Among the many, many ironies here is the Ukraine crisis was largely created by Joe Biden’s own aides and many people like them throughout all levels of the U.S. government.
So here’s the Russian position. For Russia, the core question is NATO. NATO is the post-war military alliance created in 1949 to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe. And it worked pretty well for about 40 years. The Soviet Union has not existed in more than three decades; it’s part of history now. And yet NATO very much lives on, better funded than ever. It’s an army without a purpose. So at this point, NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin who, whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading Western Europe. Vladimir Putin does not want Belgium. He just wants to keep his western borders secure.
That’s why he doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO. And that makes sense. Imagine how we would feel if Mexico and Canada became satellites of China. We wouldn’t like that at all. In Russia’s case, this is an existential question. A NATO takeover of Ukraine would compromise Russia’s access to its Sevastopol Naval Base – that’s the site of the Russia Black Sea’s fleet and one of the country’s only connections to international waters. In the words of Russia scholar Richard Sakwa, if Russia lost the Sevastopol Naval Base, it would be “the biggest military geopolitical defeat of Russia in the last thousand years.”
So for Vladimir Putin that’s unacceptable. It’s a disaster. He cannot let it happen, he will not let it happen. But for the United States, and this is the main point here, there would be no benefit either. The United States would gain precisely nothing from taking over Ukraine. Why would we want to do that? At best, we would be driving Russia, and we are in fact, deeper into the arms of the government of China. Now it would be a disaster for the United States and a disaster for the world.
So why are we doing this? Why is the U.S. government pushing Ukraine to join NATO? Well, God knows why. But we are doing this, both parties are doing this. The neocons around Joe Biden are for it, of course, as they are for every sinister and stupid idea. But so is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a smart man. So is Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. So are many Republicans. So this is a bipartisan sort of insanity. The question is can Joe Biden stand up to it? The answer is, come on, Biden has always been more lobbyist than leader. He says what he’s told to say. Once it was the credit card companies in Delaware that wrote his scripts. Now it’s the neocons at the state department. It’s the same idea.
Biden spoke today with Vladimir Putin by video call. According to the White House, he informed the Russian leader that the United States plans to control Ukraine no matter what. Secretary of State and struggling pop musician Tony Blinken repeated that message. He threatened to send American troops there. Here’s Tony Blinken’s spokesman.
Ned Price: If Russia chooses to fail to deescalate, if Russia chooses to move forward with any plans it may have developed to continue its military aggression or to aggress militarily upon Ukraine, to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty, its independence, its territorial integrity, we and our allies would be prepared to act. We would be prepared to act resolutely.
Ukraine’s territorial integrity. That’s the concern. That’s what this is really about, they’re telling us. Because if there’s one thing that the Biden White House cares about its secure borders. At least in Eastern Europe where borders are not racist. Ukraine’s borders must be defended. It would be immoral to open those borders to the world and allow, say, tens of thousands of unemployed Haitians to pour across. We can’t allow that. In fact, we will send American troops to Ukraine to prevent that. Open borders are only permitted in Texas, Arizona and California and anywhere else the potential Democratic voters might arrive uninvited from the Third World.
But Ukraine? No. Ukraine is a God-given right to territorial integrity and American soldiers will die to defend that territorial integrity. That’s our official position as a country.
Now according to CNN, we must stop these Russian attacks on the sacred borders of Ukraine because if we don’t stop them what we could have here is what CNN is calling a dire security situation. Now that phrase apparently comes from Joe Biden’s undersecretary of state, Toria Nuland who, according to CNN, gave a gloomy briefing to U.S. senators last night. Now, Toria Nuland is strongly in favor of war with Russia. What is amazing is that anyone anywhere is still listening to her. No serious person could take Victoria Nuland seriously. She’s a joke. Not only is she obviously unimpressive as a person, ask anyone who knows her, and she’s not especially pro-American, by the way, she’s one of the architects of the disaster in Iraq. So why is Toria Nuland still talking about foreign policy? Is the guy who designed Chernobyl still building nuclear reactors? Probably not.
Only in Washington where failure assiduously rewarded could someone like Victoria Nuland wield power, which she absolutely does. It’s scary when you think about it. Victoria Nuland is driving our Ukraine policy, which of course is being justified by our broader support for “democracy.” Now keep that in mind as you listen to this. This is the same – the same — Toria Nuland who was caught on tape several years ago scheming about how to end democracy in Ukraine. Here’s Nuland in a leaked audio recording plotting the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president. Listen as Nuland rattles off a list of potential puppets to install in place of the democratically elected president.
Victoria Nuland: I think Yats is the guy. He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. What he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in, he’s going to be, at that level, working for Yatseniuk. It’s not going to work.
Geoffery Pyatt: Yeah. I think that’s right. Okay.
It’s just not going to work. What about the voters of Ukraine who thought they were engaged in democracy? No. There’s Toria Nuland looking to overthrow democracy. Keep in mind, if they do it there, they’ll do it here.
You’re hearing this same State Department goon who worked to organize a coup in Ukraine telling us we need to go to war with Russia to preserve democracy in Ukraine. These people have no shame. So the question is what is this really about? Of course, it’s not about democracy for which they have zero respect. Well, in part, it’s a hangover from the lunatic Russia hoax that absorbed Washington for three years. Everything about Vladimir Putin is bad, therefore let’s have a war with him. A lot of people think that.
But there’s also a deeper cause here that’s rarely noted. For years, Ukrainian interests have pumped millions of lobbying dollars into Washington D.C. to change American foreign policy in the region. At one point, as you may have heard, they employed the president’s own son to repeat their talking points. So tens of thousands of dollars a month to tell us that Russia is bad and we need to stand with Ukraine because democracy, even as we work to overthrow democracy in Ukraine.
So with that in mind, now that you know that, maybe you’re not so surprised when Joe Biden concluded that Vladimir Putin doesn’t possess a soul.
George Stephanopoulos: He said you know he doesn’t have a soul.
President Biden: I did say that to him, yes. His response was we understand one another. I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. That’s how it came about. It was when President Bush said he looked in his eyes and saw a soul. I said I looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul. Vladimir said we understand each other.
Stephanopoulos: So you think Vladimir Putin is a killer?
Biden: I do.
These people are children. Again, children pretending to be leaders. Vladimir Putin is a killer. Presumably unlike every other head of state on earth through all human history. But honestly, that is not the relevant question. Vladimir Putin’s soul? Who cares. We can leave that to his priest assuming he has one. The only question that matters, the only question, is how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States? And, of course, that is the one question no one in Washington is asking.
Watch the Pentagon’s obedient little flak, the man with so little dignity he will say whatever he’s told to say, brag about how much military equipment we’re now sending to Ukraine. And notice while you watch this tape that he never even thinks about explaining why we would be sending that military equipment.
John Kirby: We have provided millions of dollars worth of lethal and nonlethal assistance to Ukraine in just the last ten months, 11 months. // Nothing has changed about our commitment to making sure that Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself.
So say what you will about Donald Trump and his Twitter account, maybe you liked him, maybe you were appalled by his personal style. But in retrospect, if there’s one thing that Donald Trump deserves eternal credit for is keeping idiots like that in their box for four years. There were no pointless wars under Donald Trump. That is not a small thing in recent American history. In fact, it’s rarely happened over the past century. But through unwavering determination for which he’s not gotten credit — and if there’s one thing he deserves credit for, it’s this — Donald Trump pulled that off. He resisted again and again when members of Congress, guys from Raytheon, when all the interested parties pushed him to go to war here, there and everywhere, Donald Trump resisted that. And in Washington, above all, they hated him for that. In the end, they impeached him for it.
Adam Schiff: As one witness put it in our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.
Really? We’re going to fight Russia here are we, Adam Schiff? Adam Schiff, of course, a dumb person and a partisan Democrat. But what is so interesting and ought to make you sit up and pay attention, is suddenly partisan Republicans are making identical noises. Just this afternoon, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, not a genius famously but still a sitting Republican senator, went on Fox News to say we may need to send American troops to Ukraine and possibly – not that this is insane or anything – think about the use of nuclear weapons. Got that in our back pocket – nuclear weapons. Roger Wicker, sitting U.S. Senator.
No one in Washington laughed at Roger Wicker. This is so crazy that no one seems aware of how crazy it is. They’re all just sitting back and listening to Toria Newland tell them what we need to do. How much has this penetrated the psyche of Washington D.C.? Well, here’s a sad piece of tape. This is Joni Ernst, who’s a totally affable, nice Republican, sort of reasonable on most things from the Midwest, suddenly sounding like a blood-thirsty warmonger; sounding a lot like actually Adam Schiff when she talks about that dastardly Vladimir Putin.
Joni Ernst: He needs to say to Vladimir Putin that we are no longer going to allow you to continue with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We need you to know and understand that we will defend Ukraine, we will provide them assistance. He needs to make that very clear.
Putin is so bad we’re going to cut off natural gas to Western Europe in retaliation against him in December. We’re going to freeze Germany and Luxembourg and that’s going to teach Vladimir Putin. Again, what you just saw there is a child who has no idea what she’s talking about but keeps talking anyway. We will defend Ukraine, says Joni Ernst. Remember, this is a senator from Iowa.
So what happens if we don’t defend Ukraine, Joni Ernst? Will kids in Des Moines grow up to speak Russian? No one asked her that question. She’s never thought about it for a moment. But all this reading from the same talking points — Adam Schiff to Roger Wicker to Joni Ernst. It turns out that foreign lobbying campaigns work pretty well. And that’s why the Ukrainians paid for one in Washington.
