We are all aware of the ability of the Anglo-Zionist International Cabal of Gangsters (ICG) to propagate the preferred story-line for every occasion, as with the Russia/Ukraine conflict today. Generally, they employ the power of the Western media to overwhelm the world’s publics with the accepted version of events. But how do the US and Israel, and the ICG, manage so well to avoid the negative publicity from their own foreign policy adventures? Most of us would instinctively believe we have the easy answer to this question, since it appears to hinge simply on media censorship, but we might be mistaken. There is more to a successful information blockade than is superficially obvious.

The first part of course is the nearly-universal control of all Western media by a relatively small handful of people, all Jews. This includes first the news services like AP and Reuters, then the newspapers plus most recognised magazines, radio and TV stations and networks, virtually the entire book publishing industry, all of the social media and related internet platforms like Wikipedia and Google, “fact-checkers” like the despicable Poynter Institute, as well as 90% of Hollywood which includes both motion pictures and television programs. Their control on information is nearly total.

But control goes far beyond ownership. As one example, The Globe & Mail is (was) a respectable broadsheet long recognised as Canada’s national newspaper. Some years ago, the Globe published an article detailing the atrocities then being committed against Arabs by the Jews in Palestine. The article wasn’t inflammatory or ideological, but simply an accurate chronicle of events the editors believed should be brought to the attention of the world. The very next morning, the entire top half of the front page of the Globe carried a huge photo of a Jewish soldier giving candy to a supposedly Palestinian child, with text to match. You don’t need an imagination to know what happened behind a closed door somewhere. The date was 1983 and, in the 39 years since then, the Globe hasn’t published a single article that was critical of either the Jews or of Israel. That’s control. I have covered this part and more in an article on Propaganda and the Media – Establishing and Controlling the Narrative. You may care to read it.[1]

However, the first thing we do is to ensure that all media of consequence are reading from the same script and know what is mandatory to report, and what is forbidden. But this is largely the Western media, with little Jewish control outside this ‘democratic’ cocoon. What to do about the remainder of the world’s media, especially the “Axis of Evil” and similar, who are notoriously disobedient but whose publications are generally available to those in the West? How to avoid contaminating our children with leaky truth?

As one example, Al Jazeera is (was) a Qatari government-funded Arabic-language news channel based in Doha, with an international readership and an irritating tendency to reveal inconvenient truths about Western foreign diplomatic and military adventures. It was for years denounced in the West as an heretical and deplorable affront to the “official narrative” propagated by the West. Poor little Al Jazeera should have been cowering in fear from the Western character assassinations, but somehow it wasn’t. Then, suddenly, a climate change. Al Jazeera became mainstream, no longer blocked or censored, but actually recommended as a reliable news source, praised even by Hillary Clinton herself. What happened? The US made the Qatar government an offer it couldn’t refuse, and control was sold to the CIA. Today, Al Jazeera is even worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than CNN or Fox News or the UK Guardian. Often, one cannot tell the difference. Here is the link to Al Jazeera’s main page: click on it and see for yourself.

https://www.aljazeera.com/

But this sale was the end of the trail, not the beginning. America’s responses are invariably “Kill first, then negotiate.” Not letting us down, Bush’s first action was to bomb the bejeesus out of Al Jazeera’s foreign stations, first those in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. To assist in the justification, the Americans cited the usual “intelligence reports” that some Al Jazeera staff were ISIS agents, then put cruise missiles into their front doors.[2]

 With Iraq, it’s a shame that sometimes we contribute to our own demise; the head of Al Jazeera’s Kabul office was so terrified by the events in Afghanistan he made a special trip to the US military headquarters to give them the GPS coordinates of his location. That was a mistake. The next day, the US military used the man’s own coordinates to put a cruise missile into his front door.[3]

 They did the same with the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing all in both locations. After this, Al Jazeera gave up and pulled out of Iraq.[4]

 On the same day, another ‘accident’ blew up a Reuters’ vehicle containing several reporters and a ‘stray’ missile destroyed the office of Abu Dhabi television.[5]

When this still failed to silence brave little Al Jazeera, Bush’s next move was to nuke the Head Office in Doha, fortunately discouraged by Tony Blair. Hence the sale to the CIA. Reading between the lines, the US offer was, “You have already seen what has happened to your foreign offices. Either turn Al Jazeera over to us, or kiss it good-bye. Qatar had no choice. Hence, Al Jazeera/CNN.

That more or less took care of the newspapers and TV networks. The Western (Jewish-owned) ones were already onside and the remainder were now too terrified to report anything not approved by the Jewish-led ICG.

But there was more. I believe it was Chelsea Manning who released the video of a US gunship gleefully blasting two Reuters reporters and a dozen other people including two small children, filming the murders from their Apache helicopter. That video “caused the US government and military more reputational damage than all the other secret [Wikileaks] documents combined, and was what made Julian Assange “the foremost global enemy of state secrecy”.[6]

But that was only one of dozens. Those reporters, not embedded with the US military but still mostly from NATO countries, had a sense of immunity not shared by Al Jazeera and, while their media may have been more or less on the right page, these reporters were nevertheless leaking uncomfortable amounts of very inconvenient truths – to the tabloids if to no one else. The silencing process was the same, but targeting reporters one by one was monotonous and attracted too much public attention. For one, the news of the entire process with Al Jazeera leaked out, including Bush’s intention to nuke their Qatar headquarters. The UK Daily Mirror published “an explosive story riddled with implications” that attracted a hell of a lot of attention. So much so, that within 24 hours the Mirror and all British papers had been subjected to a “gag order” under the Official Secrets Act with threat of prosecution and serious imprisonment.[7]

Group Therapy

That killed the Al Jazeera story, but didn’t stop stubborn Western journalists from reporting many other nasty things. Since single assassinations were proving troublesome, the US military tried “group therapy”, and cleverly done, too. First, they found a ‘Timothy McVeigh’ to run a car bomb into the Hamra Hotel that housed among others, NBC News and the Boston Globe. The attack failed, so they tried again, but with similar results.[8]

 To improve the odds, they “relocated” all foreign reporters from the (unsafe) East side of Baghdad to the (safe) West side, where the only suitable residence location was the Palestine Hotel, with arrangements for the Hotel to evacuate the 15th floor and put all reporters in one place. Then they hired some Iraqis to push a truck loaded with explosives next to the hotel, but the heavy barricades prevented any damage and limited all the deaths to pedestrians on the street. A second attempt, with enough potential to make Timothy McVeigh envious, also failed; some damage to the hotel, but all the deaths again on the street.

We all know there are times when, if you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself. So, the US military rambled a massive Abrams tank down the streets of Baghdad, positioned itself conveniently to the Hotel, raised its turret barrel and blew out nearly all of the 15th floor, killing all the reporters present at the time.[9]

 And that took care of the mass media reporters.[10]

[11]

[12]

 Here are four other reports on the hotel bombings that killed all the journalists, if you care to read them:[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

The internet appears to have been completely scrubbed of photos of the aftermath. I searched for two hours and found nothing.

The Palestine Hotel functioned as home and office for more than 100 international journalists in Baghdad at the time. Forced to conduct an investigation into the matter, the US military report stated that (a) they had no knowledge that the building was a hotel, (b) after moving journalists into the hotel, they had no knowledge that journalists had been moved into it, (c) the building was believed to be an ‘enemy firing platform’, (d) the Abrams tank had come under sniper fire and was acting in self-defense, (e) The shelling of the hotel was “not a deliberate attack” on journalists and the media, but the result of a “breakdown of communications”, and (f) the firing was “clearly a proportionate and justifiable measured response”. To cap the report, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarkesaid journalists should know that “Baghdad is not a safe place. You should not be there.”[17]

A French TV crew filmed the attack, which put a lie to most of the military’s claims including the fiction of the tank coming under fire, and both the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders testified that all Pentagon officials as well as all US commanders in Baghdad knew full well “that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists.” Reporters Without Borders testified further that the US military had killed many dozens of journalists as well as imprisoning a great many more as “cyber dissidents” who posted information online and in the social media that the US military didn’t like.[18]

 Not even a whisper of this latter item leaked out.

One of the most powerful executives in the cable news business, CNN’s Eason Jordan, was forced to resign after he “spoke out of school” during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum. “In a rare moment of candor”, Jordan told the audience US forces had deliberately targeted and killed dozens of journalists in Iraq– including Al Jazeera.[19]

[20]

 Keep in mind that the Iraqis were very grateful to the foreign reporters because they were the only means of getting out the story of the destruction of their country by the Americans. The Iraqis were protecting foreign reporters, not killing them.

But there was still a problem with independent reporters. One in particular stumbled onto something he wasn’t meant to see. He happened to observe the US military burying large numbers of body bags in mass graves out in the Iraq desert. At first, he assumed these were Iraqi bodies being disposed of, but the secrecy intrigued him and he finally learned the bodies were of Americans – both military servicemen and Blackwater’s mercenaries. He said he was told the US military was reluctant to ship home many hundreds of coffins to the exposure of the media, even though photographing and reporting on these military coffins was prohibited as a felony offense. By classifying all those men as ‘Missing in Action’ (MIA), many family, media, and financial difficulties would be avoided. Also, recruiting for both the military and Blackwater’s mercenaries would be much eased with smaller death tolls. The reporter knew he was being monitored, informed his family he feared for his life, and said he needed only a few days to complete his report and send it off with all the photos. Oddly, it seems the US military suggested he attend a public function a day later that promised to be of much interest; he did so, and received a sniper’s bullet in the head. The news of the mass American graves in the Iraq desert has never leaked because all the evidence disappeared.

But still further complications arose. You may (or may not) be aware that the US fired millions of artillery and other rounds in Iraq that were made of depleted uranium (DU). I won’t go into details here, but one effect of DU is that since then about 25% of all births in Iraq exhibit the most horrible deformities, babies born with no head, one head, two heads, or three heads. I’m serious. Many infants are born with most of their internal organs outside the torso, and many with the brain entirely outside the cranial cavity. Many have any number of limbs emanating from any part of the body, and many with no limbs at all. Some have no eyes; some have only one large eye in the center of their foreheads, if the nose isn’t already there. A UN report described many emerging fetuses as “unidentifiable lumps of flesh“. It was so bad that the midwives who still at that time delivered most births in Iraq, were refusing to assist at birthing because “We don’t know what will come out.”

READ MORE! (BEWARE THE PICTURES THAT FOLLOW ARE VERY UPSETTING):

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/information-blockades-how-and-why/

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THIS IS WHY JULIAN ASSANGE IS KEPT IN A UK PRISON...

Gus wishes that John Richardson would have been the one to re-publish this article on this site... In many ways he was fiercer about the Jewish Cabal than Gus...

See also: 

Exiled Russian Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky said in an interview with FRANCE 24 from London that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is political "suicide" for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who "cannot win in Ukraine, even if he manages to take Kyiv or Kharkiv".  This war is the result of an "emotional decision" by Putin, the former oligarch said.

Read more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jxPqeOF5s

I would believe that Vladimir Putin, the Stoic, knows this. This is why he will carry on and push the border of Russia at the line between Ukraine and Poland/Slovakia/Hungary/Romania/Moldova. As NATO/USA did not want to provide Russia’s security with an agreement, he had to take the bloody initiative, otherwise Russia would be cactus within 20 years. Whether he succeeds in protecting Russia or not is for the future to decide. But in Putin’s mind, if Gus can guess, is that he is trying to defend the Heartland from the Anglo-Saxons.

He might succeed — and he has to believe he will succeed, otherwise just pack up and go home. Unfortunately, it’s going to be bloody, but far less bloody than should the US place nukes in Ukraine. It’s a very dicey assessment of the situation — Putin knows this. He is not a fool.

Putin would also know he can’t win the “info war”, thus not win “the hearts and minds” of the people in Ukraine and of Europe.

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Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (Russian: Михаил Борисович Ходорковский, IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈiɫ xədɐrˈkofskʲɪj]; born 26 June 1963) is an exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist[6] and former oligarch,[7] now residing in London.[8] In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion, and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires.[9] He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus, during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares").

In October 2003, he was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud. The government under Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, then froze shares of Yukos shortly thereafter on tax charges. Putin's government took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse of the company's share price and the evaporation of much of Khodorkovsky's wealth. In May 2005, he was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. In December 2010, while he was still serving his sentence, Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were further charged with and found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering, Khodorkovsky's prison sentence was extended to 2014. After Hans-Dietrich Genscher lobbied for his release, President Vladimir Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky, releasing him from jail on 20 December 2013.[10]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky

BY Peter Hartcher

Vladimir Putin eventually might win the battle. But he is losing the war. The point of Putin’s war? To prevent any further expansion of America’s military alliance with 28 European nations and Canada, the NATO treaty, he claimed. If so, his relentless use of violence and intimidation is backfiring.

A week of indiscriminate Russian killing has achieved what decades, even centuries, of European history could not. Public opinion in Finland and Sweden, countries that have been prepared to take their chances with Russia for centuries, has transformed.

For the first time, opinion in the two militarily non-aligned nations has moved emphatically in favour of joining NATO. Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt remarked: “The unthinkable might start to become thinkable.”

The Atlantic Council’s Anna Wieslander, formerly an official in Sweden’s Defence Ministry, observes: “Clearly, Russia’s unprovoked war is pushing the two countries closer to NATO membership than ever before.”

When the Russian invasion itself stirred debate on the question among anxious Finns and Swedes, Putin, apparently capable of only one mode, responded with yet more intimidation. Moscow warned them against any thoughts of joining the Western alliance.

Four Russian Air Force fighters intruded into Sweden’s airspace to drive home the threat, with Swedish jets scrambling to ward them off. “Completely unacceptable” came the response from Stockholm.

Says Wieslander: “Moscow’s recent, aggressive threats that joining NATO would bring ‘military and political consequences’ upon Finland and Sweden seem to have had the opposite effect on the public. Rather than hiding in the ditches, Finns and Swedes are turning to the alliance for security.”

In Finland, 53 per cent of people now favour joining NATO, about double the level of previous years, and only 28 per cent are opposed, according to a February 23-25 poll commissioned by broadcaster YLE.

“We’ve had a situation in the past 25-30 years where Finns’ opinions on NATO have been very stable,” Matti Pesu of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told the AP newswire. “It seems now to have changed completely.”

In Sweden, 51 per cent of people now favour NATO membership, up from 42 per cent in January. Those opposed number 27 per cent, according to a poll on Friday by Demoksop for Aftonbladet newspaper.

The Sweden Democrats party, long opposed to joining NATO and with enough parliamentary heft to be a potential swing factor, said it’s reconsidering: “It is clear that everything is put in a completely different light right now,” a party spokesperson said.

Would NATO accept the two? We don’t know, but NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, ventured: “I think it is possible to make a decision quickly and for them to join quickly.”

Congratulations, Vlad. Only you could have achieved this.

He should have learnt. In 2014, his resort to violence backfired when he first sent his troops into Ukraine to seize Crimea and occupy eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region.

Until that point, the Ukrainian people were uninterested in joining the Western alliance. For example, polling in 2012 showed only 28 per cent support for the idea.

But the moment that Russian forces attacked, Ukrainian opinion reacted. Not with fearful capitulation. Ukrainians did what Putin has not. They learnt from experience. They saw the Russian threat and sought protection. In 2014, for the first time, a majority of Ukrainians said they wanted to join NATO.

The wicked West had not lured Ukrainians away from Moscow. Putin’s bellicosity had pushed them towards NATO.

By January this year, as Russian forces built up along their border, 64 per cent of Ukrainians favoured membership. Of course, it was too late to save them with the protective power of the treaty.

Ukrainian governments have been on again, off again, since one first applied to join in 2008. NATO itself has been cool on the idea. So it might never have happened.

In any case, Putin made sure it couldn’t happen – by supporting the Donbass separatist fighters. A condition of NATO entry is that a country’s borders are uncontested; so as long as Putin was contesting them, he was vetoing Ukrainian membership of the alliance. No wonder so many people in so many nations fear that his NATO argument was just a cover story for the first phase of grander Russian designs on Europe. [BULLSHIT].

This helps explain the other transformative effects Putin has wrought inadvertently in Europe. In a heartbeat, Switzerland abandoned centuries of political neutrality and banking secrecy to join the EU sanctions against Russia. Germany renounced its postwar pacifism to rearm and to animate Europe with a new resolve.

Violence was critical to Putin’s rise. He has told us Putin’s Law: “Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: If a fight’s inevitable, you must strike first.”

But what if you’re not living surrounded by vicious thugs but peaceful neighbours? What if a fight is not inevitable? What if unprovoked violence turns countries against you and joins them in a hardening alliance?

This is an adjustment Putin seems unable to make. His behaviour only makes sense if he truly believes in his quasi-mystical vision of an imperial Russian reconstruction. Or if Francis Fukuyama is correct.

“The deeper problem for him is Ukrainian democracy,” Fukuyama writes in American Purpose.

“He is heavily invested in the idea that Slavic peoples are culturally attuned to authoritarian government, and the idea that another Slavic state could successfully transition to democracy undermines his own claims for ruling Russia.

Ukraine presents zero military threat to Moscow; it does, however, pose an alternative ideological model that erodes Putin’s own legitimacy.”

Whatever his real aim, Putin’s primitive murderousness is backfiring against his stated one. It is not weakening the Western alliance. It has doomed the concept of European neutrality. It’s uniting Europe, hardening its resolve and moving more Europeans than ever before to seek NATO’s protection.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

READ MORE:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/putin-s-primitive-murderousness-is-backfiring-20220307-p5a2fk.html

MESSAGE TO NEUTRAL COUNTRIES: Once part of NATO, you become attached to a US sponsored cancerous bag of demands and obligations that turn you into easy targets rather than protect you.

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----------------------

A laptop with intelligence data has been found at one of the headquarters of the Right Sector* (Ukrainian nationalists). The computer allegedly has a licensed NATO registry number, Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) head Denis Pushilin said on Sunday.

"The militants of the nationalists battalions have a special level of security clearance from the North Atlantic Alliance. This laptop contains a detailed map of the area with the location of our units," Pushilin said at a press conference.

In addition, he said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine planned to attack Crimea and Donbass in the spring of 2022.

"According to our intelligence and the testimony of prisoners, an offensive operation was supposed to begin on 8 March of this year. The facts indicate that the invasion was planned simultaneously both on the territory of the republics of Donbas and in Russia’s Crimea," Pushilin went on. 

The head of the DPR showed a map of Crimea with the locations of troops marked on it.

On 24 February, Russia began a military operation to "denazify" Ukraine in response to calls for help from the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics (DPR and LPR) in countering the aggression of Ukrainian troops.

Prior to that, on 21 February, Russia recognised the sovereignty of the LPR and the DPR.

*The Right Sector is an extremist group outlawed in Russia

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/20220306/nato-labelled-laptop-with-intelligence-found-at-ukrainian-nationalists-hq-dpr-head-says--1093639199.html

This item will be viewed as "Russian disinformation" by the Western media. Events in the past indicate that this article tends to lean towards the truth.

Meanwhile, Russia might stop supplying oil and gas to the Western world — oil and gas that could fuel NATO planes, ships and army trucks. Note, sadly the biggest plane in the world was destroyed by Russia as it could have brought more NATO weapons to Ukraine...

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/06/fascist-fitness-how-the-far-right-is-recruiting-with-online-gym-groups

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We can now add the lives of Ukrainians to the death toll of two decades of unnecessary war, spurred by Washington’s arrogance and myopia.

By 

Russia and Ukraine are at war. Despite the warm words flooding forth from the West for Kiev, allied policy has been anything but pro-Ukraine. Indeed, America’s approach can best be described as fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.

Most cynical has been the West’s Big Lie that Ukraine would enjoy eventual NATO membership. In 2008, at Washington’s behest, the transatlantic alliance told Georgia and Ukraine that someday they would be inducted. Western officials spent the last 14 years repeating that promise.

However, Tbilisi and Kiev are no closer to joining, an unofficial recognition that virtually no member wants to add either one. Yet Washington led the consensus rejection of Moscow’s demand that the two states be excluded in the future. Rather than admit the truth, alliance members prevaricated, even though admitting the truth might have forestalled Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Now, in the aftermath of a war virtually no one expected, the allies deny their culpability. And the Eastern Europeans are offering a different meme: the Russians never could be trusted. For instance, contended Latvian parliament member Rihard Kols, “In general, the Baltics have been warning our colleagues in the West to be vigilant and not fall into naïveté based on wishful thinking. The constant readiness to restart relations with Russia, regardless of what its breaches have been, is what got us to this day, unfortunately.”

Indeed, some East Europeans exude an arrogant sense of entitlement, as though America’s failure to fulfill some imagined obligation to protect them explains today’s crisis. Insisted Polish politician Radek Sikorski: “When I demanded on numerous occasions that our membership in NATO be fulfilled by physical presence—and I was only asking for two brigades, which is to say 10,000 American troops—this was regarded as outrageous.” [Italics added.] Countries like Germany “didn’t feel our pain of being a flank country, of being on the edge of the world of democracy, rule of law and security.”

Yet there is no evidence that Russians possess a double dose of original sin. Instead, it is apparent that Western leaders, and especially American policymakers, ignored what many Russians were telling them. Indeed, the arrogance was especially invincible on the U.S. side of the Atlantic.

Long forgotten is Vladimir Putin’s conciliatory speech to the German Bundestag more than two decades ago. He explained:

No one calls in question the great value of Europe’s relations with the United States. I am just of the opinion that Europe will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent center of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defense potential.

He went on to declare: “One of the achievements of the past decade is the unprecedentedly low concentration of armed forces and armaments in Central Europe and the Baltic. Russia is a friendly European nation. Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our country, which lived through a century of military catastrophes.”

However, his attitude changed as NATO advanced. Despite the mass amnesia that appears to have afflicted the Cold War’s victors, they offered numerous assurances to Soviet and Russian officials that NATO would not march ever eastward to Russia’s borders. For instance, reported George Washington University when it released a trove of declassified U.S. documents: “Secretary of State James Baker’s famous ‘not one inch eastward’ assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.”

The allies also whispered sweet nothings in the ears of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and those around him. Explained GWU: “Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin’s re-election bid in 1996 and telling the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not exclude, Russia.”

In a detailed study, UCLA’s Marc Trachtenberg concluded that the allies originally promised to respect Moscow’s security interests. However, he added: “It was only later that U.S. leaders realized that the USSR had become too weak to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted. So by mid-1990, the February assurances were no longer taken as binding. What Gorbachev called the ‘sweet talk’ continued, but the whole vision of a cooperative relationship based on mutual trust and mutual respect, it became increasingly clear, was at odds with the reality. All of this was, and still is, deeply resented in Russia.”

One of those unhappy Russians was Vladimir Putin. Nor was the issue just NATO expansion. The aggressive war against and dismantlement of Serbia angered the Russian people as well as government. So did Western support for “color revolutions” in Tbilisi and Kiev. Too accurately for comfort, Putin complained to the 2007 Munich security forum that Washington had “overstepped its national borders in every way,” whose “almost uncontained hyper use of force” was “plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”

Nevertheless, he returned to the transatlantic alliance, explaining: “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we…do not react to these actions at all.” He added:

I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.” Where are these guarantees?

Russian complaints continued. Early the following year a State Department cable(released by Wikileaks) reported: “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.”

Some outside observers recognized the danger created by this perception. State added: “[Dmitri] Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership. The letter requesting MAP consideration had come as a ‘bad surprise’ to Russian officials, who calculated that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were safely on the backburner.”

Last December, Trenin updated his judgment:

It’s crucial to note that Putin has presided over four waves of NATO enlargement and has had to accept Washington’s withdrawal from treaties governing anti-ballistic missiles, intermediate-range nuclear forces, and unarmed observation aircraft. For him, Ukraine is the last stand. The Russian commander-in-chief is supported by his security and military establishments and, despite the Russian public’s fear of a war, faces no domestic opposition to his foreign policy. Most importantly, he cannot afford to be seen bluffing.

None of this justifies Russia’s attack on Ukraine, of course. However, the problem is not that the allies ignored East European demands that Washington garrison states of little relevance to its own security. Rather, it is that the U.S. and its allies ruthlessly ran roughshod over Russian security interests in expanding NATO up to Russia’s border—just 100 miles away from St. Petersburg. Moreover, Washington repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to aggressively promote regime change, through financial and diplomatic support as well as military force.

Washington sought to impose its will not just in its own sphere of influence, the Western hemisphere, but in countries once part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Allied claims to be surprised and shocked by Moscow’s complaints are careless at best, dishonest at worst. The West thought there was nothing Russia could do. Alas, the U.S. and its allies were wrong.

Of course, the past will do little to solve the present. However, Washington policymakers should start learning from their mistakes. Two decades of disastrous wars have left thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of foreigners dead. To this toll can be added those dying in Ukraine, another unnecessary war spurred by Washington’s arrogance and myopia.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

READ MORE:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/we-poked-the-bear/

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