The past few months have been very strange in American politics when liberals have been consumed by fear of Russia, reminiscent of McCarthyism from the 1950s, while conservatives now hope for détente with Russia and even express admiration for Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing and complete reversal of a hundred-year trend and reflects the power of both propaganda and party loyalty. This two-part series will discuss Russia and U.S. geopolitics, while disavowing the simplistic and fake narrative of mainstream media.
Isn’t Russia our enemy? Isn’t Putin a dictator who is a threat to western democracy in U.S. and Europe?
Those are dangerous words that will lead to more sanctions and Cold War 2.0, or worse, a hot war with a country that has 7000 nuclear warheads, many of which can reach the U.S. in thirty minutes. Russia is not Libya or Iraq to be bullied around.
Moreover, how can we call Russia an enemy when there is plenty of cooperation and trade between us? For example, current U.S. military satellites can’t be launched without Russian engines! Let’s also not forget that, in 2012, Obama warmly welcomed Russia into WTO; and Hillary Clinton approved the deal for Russia to acquire 20% of U.S. Uranium. In 2013, U.S. and Europe saw $450 billion worth of bilateral trade with Russia. You can go to Russia now in 2017 and find plenty of U.S. corporations happily doing business – McDonald’s, U.S. hotel chains, manufacturing/assembly plants of GE and Ford, financial firms (Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan) and many more.
Similarly, there are more than 5000 German companies in Russia; and 1000+ Russian companies in Germany. The reality is most Europeans and European corporations would like to end the sanctions and put this U.S.-Russia drama behind them. For example, a few months ago, both chambers of French parliament voted by large margins to lift anti-Russian sanctions.
Other countries such as Japan, China, India and Brazil – all major economies and strategic countries – also get along with Russia and Putin.
But all the mainstream media and most politicians clearly say that Putin is a threat to America.
It is really Orwellian to call Russia a threat to the U.S. when we place missile shields in Poland and Romania, deploy U.S. and NATO troops in half a dozen countries on Russia’s border, overthrow a democratically elected government in Ukraine, and try to cripple the Russian economy with sanctions.
The truth is that Neocons and warmongers in Washington D.C. were quite confident that they would be able to enact regime changes in Ukraine and Syria without any resistance from Russia. However, they were outsmarted by Putin in both those cases.
Calling Putin a thug, a dictator or even Hitler is simply propaganda that the U.S. media and politicians use every time they need a war. If you go back in time, you will find the exact language was used against Syria’s Assad, Libya’s Gaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Serbia’s Milosevic or even Panama’s Noriega.
The feeding frenzy about Putin is also simply a political tool to delegitimize Trump. Democrats are loving it since it gives them an excuse for Hillary’s loss and a chance to get back at Trump for his attacks on Obama’s birth certificate. The Establishment also uses Putin and Russia to distract the public from the actual revelations of criminal and unethical activities in WikiLeaks emails. The CIA might also be going rogue and leaking sensational stories, since Trump has been openly challenging the Deep State.
How about Russia hacking our election, as confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies?
Well, “hacking the election” is a strange phrase, but let’s assume it refers to the hacking of the DNC email server and John Podesta’s Gmail account. Many computer experts, prominent journalists, and CIA/NSA whistleblowers have dismissed the allegations of Russian hacking – John McAfee (of the famed anti-virus software), Glenn Greenwald, Bob Woodward, William Binney (the man who designed NSA’s spying system), to name a few.
The intelligence community has produced zero evidence or proof of Russian interference. The only malware that is mentioned in the Joint Analysis report is an old Ukrainian software that is widely used and publicly available for purchase.
There have been so many sensational stories which were later corrected. For example, Washington Post reported that Russia had hacked into our electricity grid, which turned out to be malware on one laptop that was not connected to the grid. Another Washington Post’s article about 200 U.S. websites that spread Russian propaganda turned out to be fake news when the Post admitted that the list was put together by an anonymous group called PropOrNot.
In DNI’s latest 25-page report, claims of Russian interference are made with “high confidence,” which is defined in the appendix as “judgments that may be wrong.” The CIA used the same sleight of words to claim that Iraq had nuclear and chemical weapons, which turned out to be blatantly false.
As for the trashy “dossier” that no media outlet except Buzzfeed would publish, there are so many obvious problems with it, it’s not even worth a discussion here.
But you can’t be 100% certain Russia did NOT hack the DNC and/or Podesta’s emails?
That’s true and we should treat cybersecurity as national security. However, note that the intelligence community hasn’t made any claims about Russia being behind Podesta’s email leaks. As for the DNC hack, it is strange that the FBI never analyzed the DNC computers. With the DNC headquarters just a mile away from the FBI office, one would think that dozens of agents would have gone down there and confiscated the computers!
It’s also worth noting that former UK ambassador Craig Murray has said that he flew to the U.S. and met with a whistleblower who handed him the DNC emails. Many people also suspect that this whistleblower was a DNC employee named Seth Rich who was murdered a few days before WikiLeaks published the DNC emails. What gives this story more credibility is the fact that Assange and WikiLeaks have offered a reward for information on Seth Rich’s murder.
How about Putin invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea? Isn’t that a sign that he is dangerous?
Without even discussing the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, let’s assume that Putin had done nothing. What would have happened? Ukraine would have become a vassal state of the U.S. and Europe; U.S. and NATO forces would build military bases and setup a missile offense/defense system; Ukraine would kick Russia’s naval base out of Crimea; U.S. corporations would get the rights to drill oil in Black Sea; and Ukraine could disrupt/block the transit of Russia’s natural gas to Europe.
As for the importance of Crimea, Russia has only one sea (trade) route to the Mediterranean and that’s through Black Sea. To give up control over Black Sea will be a national suicide for Russia.
To summarize, a hostile Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. If you can imagine America’s reaction to China taking over Mexico’s politics and placing missiles and tanks along the U.S.-Mexico border, you can comprehend Russia’s reaction.
Briefly, what is the history of relations between Russia, Ukraine and Crimea?
Ukraine can be considered the birthplace of Russia and the mutual history goes back more than 1000 years! When Ukraine was invaded by the Mongols, the Rus kingdom shifted to Moscow. Later on, Ukraine became once again a part of Russia in the 17th century. To celebrate the 300th anniversary of that unification, Russian leader Khrushchev – who was born and raised in Ukraine – gave away Crimea as a gift in 1954. The slogan at that time – referring to Russia and Ukraine – was “eternally together.”
As for Crimea, it has been a part of Russia since 1783. After the fall of the USSR, Crimea had a referendum in 1991 and it voted overwhelmingly to become the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea.” Thus it wasn’t a regular province of modern Ukraine. After the U.S.-staged coup in 2014, Crimea held another referendum and decided to join Russia.
Did the U.S. really stage a coup in Ukraine? The mainstream media definitely wouldn’t characterize it so.
Of course, the media wouldn’t call it a coup! The official propaganda is that we are always spreading “freedom and democracy,” whether it’s NATO bombing in Libya, arming rebels in Syria, or overthrowing a democratically elected government in Ukraine.
Fact is that several countries around Russia have been targeted for many years by Color Revolutions that are funded and coordinated by the likes of George Soros, USAid and N.E.D (National Endowment for Democracy) who are masters of regime changes, psychology, social engineering and propaganda. Some of the successful revolutions are Rose (Georgia, 2003), Orange (Ukraine, 2004), and Tulip (Kyrgyzstan, 2005).
In 2003, the “Rose Revolution” installed a pro-western government in the country of Georgia. Although it sounds romantic, the revolution involved a lot of planning that created 4000 fake NGOs (NonGovernmental Organizations), radio/TV stations, newspapers and grassroots groups that train/pay activists and provocateurs who can march, protest and riot.
The next target was Ukraine. In 2004, when the pro-Russian candidate won the presidential race, the opposition party claimed that the election was rigged. The so-called Orange Revolution led to a revote when the pro-West candidate won. Keep voting until you get the desired result. (This was also the election when the pro-West candidate was allegedly – and very likely – poisoned by Russian intelligence).
Six years later, in 2010, the same pro-Russian candidate (Yanukovych) won the election fair and square. Soros then put together a gang of regime change that included Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (she is married to Robert Kagan, a prominent Neocon and co-founder of PNAC – the think tank that not only dreamed of American military hegemony all over the world, but said in September 2000 that there had to be a “catastrophic and catalyzing event … like a new Pearl Harbor” that would convince the American public to support major military endeavors).
Next year, in 2011, Putin openly blamed Hillary Clinton for fomenting mass protests in Russia and meddling in its presidential election. Putin wasn’t being paranoid. 2011 was the year when the Libyan government was overthrown by NATO bombing, and while the protests in Russia were getting bigger, John McCain tweeted, “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you.”
Few years later, Putin actually banned several western NGOs, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
In late 2013, when Putin was busy with the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Soros organized his Euromaidan protests in the heart of Kiev – Ukraine’s capital. McCain and Nuland promptly flew in and posed for photo ops with the crowd; a propaganda group from N.E.D. created viral videos of young people yearning for freedom; and the west made a deal with neo-Nazi groups (Svoboda party) in Ukraine to stoke violence, riots and attacks on the police. The rest is history as the democratically elected president of Ukraine was ousted, and the men handpicked by U.S. elites became the new President and Prime Minister of Ukraine.
How about the shooting down of Malaysian airline MH-17 over Ukraine?
The facts regarding that incident are still murky. More than two years after the plane was shot down, an international group released a report, but there are still many unanswered questions.
Setting aside all those discussions, won’t Ukraine be simply better off aligned with the U.S. than with Russia?
Possibly but not necessarily. The eastern part of Ukraine is solidly pro-Russian and thus one cannot make generalized statements about entire Ukraine. Also, the American intervention has made things far worse for Ukraine – what was before an electoral/cultural division has morphed into a brutal civil war. Ukraine’s GDP and GDP-per-capita have fallen by more than 50% since the U.S.-led coup.
So we plunged Ukraine into a civil war and started Cold War 2.0 with Russia. What is the rationale?
Simply put, it’s about struggle for hegemony over Eurasia, which many believe is the key to America’s global hegemony (more on Eurasia in the follow-up article).
Ukraine has been a target for decades, even going back to the 1940s, as newly declassified CIA documents reveal. In the 1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski describes the U.S. strategy in his book, The Grand Chessboard: “Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform (“weaken”) Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” He also said that Ukraine should be brought into NATO by 2015. Brzezinski is one of the key architects of U.S. foreign policy and has been the advisor to U.S. presidents from LBJ to Obama. He has also been a member of influential organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and N.E.D. He was also the guy behind creating/arming Mujahedeen in Afghanistan as a proxy army to counter the U.S.S.R.
In Part 2 of this series, we will candidly discuss geopolitics and the struggle for supremacy and global domination among nations. Such topics are deliberately avoided by the mainstream media, since the Establishment elites want Americans to believe in fairy tales in which endless wars are inevitable, random and even noble. While corporate media’s deceptive version of foreign policy is easier to understand and accept, the complex truth about geopolitics will enable us to support policies that are good for America and world in the long run.
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