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I have rather a soft spot for Caitlin Johnstone, one of the few sane voices, it too often seems, left on the left. Johnstone has resolutely defended free speech. Vainly, it too often seems, she has tried to remind leftists that, having enabled censorship of the right, they will be next.
Because, as Johnstone points out, the Establishment are always bastards.
That’s just as true now, as the Establishment goes into propaganda overdrive, beating the War Drum and driving mass-media consumers like sheep towards jumping into another foreign war.
Although ultimate responsibility remains with Vladimir Putin for pulling the war trigger, for Western leaders to act as if they’re entirely innocent bystanders in all this is just more hypocrisy from the Masters of War.
To her credit, America’s greatest missed opportunity, Democrat politician Tulsi Gabbard, has posted a video addressing the propaganda fiction that the Ukraine is a liberal democracy led by a fearless champion of freedom.
Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscow’s fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance […]
It makes sense that they would have to do this. After all, if westerners were to get it into their heads that this whole terrible war could have been avoided by simply solidifying a policy of neutrality for Ukraine and issuing a guarantee that it would never be added to NATO, they would begin asking why this did not happen. NATO powers had no interest in adding Ukraine to the alliance anyway, so it doesn’t really make sense to refuse to make such low-cost concessions if the only alternative is mass military slaughter. I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military slaughter to advance your own geostrategic objectives.
So they work hard to present the narrative that the invasion has nothing to do with NATO at all, and occurred solely because Putin is an evil madman who hates freedom and wants to destroy democracy.
Australian Free Independent Press Network
There’s just one problem: Western pundits have been warning for years that NATO expansion would lead to an attack on the Ukraine. For instance, in 2015, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer warned: The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. Mearsheimer advocated a policy of strict political neutrality and economic engagement.
Historian Stephen Cohen similarly pointed out how, There has been a tremendous expansion of America’s sphere of influence since the mid-1990s… with all the while, every American administration saying to Russia…‘You cannot have a sphere of influence because that’s the old thinking.’
Cohen also wrote a 2017 polemic, Have 20 Years of NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?
NATO promises that Georgia might one day become a member state was an underlying cause of the Georgian-Russian war of 2008, in effect a US-Russian proxy war. The result was the near ruination of Georgia. NATO remains active in Georgia today.
Similar NATO overtures to Ukraine also underlay the crisis in that country in 2014, which resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war in Donbass, and in effect another US-Russian proxy war. Meanwhile, US-backed Kiev remains in profound economic and political crisis, and Ukraine fraught with the possibility of a direct American-Russian military conflict.
The Nation
Stephen M Walt, another international relations scholar, also wrote in 2015:
Today, those who want to arm Ukraine are demanding that Russia […] abandon its own interests in Ukraine, full stop. It would be wonderful if Western diplomacy could pull off this miracle, but how likely is it? Given Russia’s history, its proximity to Ukraine, and its long-term security concerns, it is hard to imagine Putin capitulating to our demands without a long and costly struggle that will do enormous additional damage to Ukraine.
Foreign Policy
Even back in 1998, former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, warned that: This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves… Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.
The CIA also warned then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice that NATO seeking to expand into the Ukraine would be the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). Everyone in the Russian hierarchy, Rice was warned, from old Kremlin “knuckle-draggers” to Putin’s liberal critics viewed such a move as a direct challenge to Russia’s strategic interests.
The last US ambassador to the Soviet Union, John Matlock is absolutely, bluntly, clear: the Ukraine invasion was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense.
The spin from the propaganda masters, of course, is that this is all just revisionist nonsense and that Putin never said anything about NATO expansion. Except for the inconvenient fact that he cited it as an explicit reason for his invasion.
As Caitlyn Johnstone concludes: if we’ve been warned for decades that NATO expansion would eventually provoke Russia into war, and if the Russian leader is explicitly citing NATO expansion as a driving motive, then that means that the West actually have a great deal of power to end the war.
Instead, they’re clearly doing everything they can to expand it, from selling arms to the Ukraine, to waving the NATO stick at Putin, to talking of establishing a no-fly zone (which would be a de facto declaration of war).
Which begs the question: Why?
