The shit-show reaction to the Trump/Putin Alaskan detente has been surreal. To listen to the radio and television, and read the New York Times or Washington Post for a few days is to be subjected to an alternate reality. The corporate media is competing with Washington officials as to who can sound more stupid as they bray for endless conflict.
There’s a poisonous incentive in Washington, where to get ahead you must promote war. The corporate media is fully in lockstep. The bellicosity requires not a shred of policy or intellectual honesty or adherence to facts, in fact the more free with the truth, the better.
What is clear is that the reaction to the US negotiations with Russia are exposing the limits of Trump’s independence from the US deep state. He’s threatening a multi-year, multi-administration effort to utilize Ukraine as a battering-ram to regime-change Russia and seize her vast resources. They yearn to return to the 1990s shock therapy in Russia when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country produced devastating results. The number of Russians living in poverty jumped from two million to sixty million in just a few years as workers were crushed.
By aggressively courting Ukraine as an ally and turning it into a military partner against Russia, Washington crossed Moscow’s brightest of red-lines. This was the culmination of a longer process of reckless confrontation by a generation of leaders who had only known the triumph of the end of history, where the same post-Cold War bipartisan consensus of invasions, proxy wars and color revolutions has now led the nation into a strategic defeat.
Yet, America’s bipartisan elites, out of hubris and butt-hurt, cling to the belief that Russia is losing the war and that any minute Russian citizens will rise up and overthrow the hated Putin, and so prolong a conflict they cannot win. To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin. (See Russia-gate). Meanwhile, the grim reality that Ukraine, the Europeans and the hawks in Washington simply refuse to accept is that however long the fighting may drag pointlessly on, Ukraine is the vanquished in this war; Russia the victor.
Neither Washington officials nor their corporate media sock-puppets dare mention the reasons for Russia’s Special/Military/Operation, namely NATO expansion combined with a callous disregard for Russian legitimate security concerns. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, let the cat out of the bag when she stated–“Moscow needs to know that the Cold War is over and Russia lost.” Condi apparently took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis literally, and Russia was supposed to remain passive as NATO wrested Ukraine away and advanced to their doorstep.
That’s why Washington was so invested in Ukrainian elections, protests, and changing the dynamics of Ukrainian domestic politics. Back in 2004, Charles Krauthammer put it plainly in The Washington Post: The Orange Revolution “is about Russia first, democracy only second.” “The West,” he continued, “wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east.” Russia needed to be driven back conclusively, and the place to do that was Ukraine.
Washington’s ambition for regime-change in Ukraine never wavered. Writing in The Washington Post in September 2013, Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy, described an intense competition for influence heating up all along Russia’s borders. Echoing Krauthammer, he named Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in this competition and called for a more assertive stance. By pressing Russia hard in its neighborhood, Gershman speculated, Washington might even bring down Putin.
It didn’t work out that way. Washington’s strategic error was that it had gotten America embroiled in a struggle of peripheral interest to it but of vital interest to Russia. By the time Donald Trump took office in 2017, the American national security establishment had already staged a coup, helped wage a terror war against the Donbas and built up Ukraine’s military and intelligence organizations to NATO standards, making the question of Ukraine’s membership in NATO meaningless.
DC foreign policy elites now know that Ukraine cannot win, but they would rather continue fueling a fruitless and deadly war than admit they were wrong and delusional about Ukraine’s prospects against Russia.
What should be understood is that the Ukrainian debacle follows a familiar pattern of inept destruction, and reveals a disturbing level of strategic illiteracy and incompetence among American defense intellectuals and their corporate media scribes. They can’t even acknowledge reality. They all drank the kool-aid. Yet no one has been punished or reprimanded. So far.
The sound and fury from corrupt politicians and media whores should be understood in this light. The Alaskan Summit and Trump’s overtures to Putin threatens this vast Potemkin Village of elite competence and must be resisted with all of their might.
Update: In the aftermath of the Alaskan Summit, the unreality continues.
“Europe will spend $100 billion it does not have, to buy weapons from America that it does not have, to arm soldiers that Ukraine now lacks,”
camelotkidd 