Biden’s Reckless Words Underscore the Dangers of the U.S.’s Use of Ukraine As a Proxy War

The U.S. is, by definition, waging a proxy war against Russia, using Ukrainians as their instrument, with the goal of not ending the war but prolonging it.

 UK officials similarly told him that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.”

As grave of a threat as deliberate war is, unintended escalation from miscommunication and misperception can be as bad. Biden is the perfect vessel for such risks. Glenn Greenwald, 28 Mar 22,

The central question for Americans from the start of the war in Ukraine was what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in that war? A necessarily related question: if the U.S. is going to involve itself in this war, what objectives should drive that involvement?

Prior to the U.S.’s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war — horrors which, contrary to the West’s media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own — left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.” Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.

That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism and loyalty impugned (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become more involved in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war “dissent” that is always permissible in American discourse).

With these discourse rules firmly implanted, those who attempted to invoke former President Obama’s own arguments about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine — namely, that “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one” and therefore the U.S. should not risk confrontation with Moscow over it — were widely maligned as Kremlin assets if not agents. Others who urged the U.S. to try to avert war through diplomacy — by, for instance, formally vowing that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine and that Kyiv would remain neutral in the new Cold War pursued by the West with Moscow — faced the same set of accusations about their loyalty and patriotism.

Most taboo of all was any discussion of the heavy involvement of the U.S. in Ukraine beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering last November) — all of which amounted to a form of de facto NATO expansion without the formal membership. 

And that leaves to the side the still-unanswered yet supremely repressed question of what Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland referred to as the Ukrainians’ “biological research facilities” so dangerous and beyond current Russian bio-research capabilities that she gravely feared they would “fall into Russian hands.”

As a result of the media’s embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition. U.S. officials are boastfully leading the effort to collapse the Russian economy. Along with its NATO allies, the U.S. has flooded Ukraine with billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry, with at least some of those arms ending up in the hands of actual neo-Nazi battalions integrated into the Ukrainian government and military. 

It is providing surveillance technology in the form of drones and its own intelligence to enable Ukrainian targeting of Russian forces. President Biden threatened Russia with a response “in kind” if Russia were to use chemical weapons. Meanwhile, reports The New York Times, “C.I.A. officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units.”

The U.S. is, by definition, waging a proxy war against Russia, using Ukrainians as their instrument, with the goal of not ending the war but prolonging it. So obvious is this fact about U.S. objectives that even The New York Times last Sunday explicitly reported that the the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire” (albeit with care not to escalate into a nuclear exchange). Indeed, even “some American officials assert that as a matter of international law, the provision of weaponry and intelligence to the Ukrainian Army has made the United States a cobelligerent,” though this is “an argument that some legal experts dispute.” Surveying all this evidence as well as discussions with his own U.S. and British sources, Niall Ferguson, writing in Bloomberg, proclaimed: “I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going.” UK officials similarly told him that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.”

In sum, the Biden administration is doing exactly that which former President Obama warned in 2016 should never be done: risking war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers over Ukraine. Yet if any pathology defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites — no matter how true — is dismissed as “Russian disinformation.”

As we witnessed most vividly in the run-up to the 2020 election — when that label was unquestioningly yet falsely applied by the union of the CIA, corporate media and Big Tech to the laptop archive revealing Joe Biden’s political and financial activities in Ukraine and China — any facts which establishment power centers want to demonize or suppress are reflexively labelled “Russian disinformation.” Hence, the DNC propaganda arm Media Matters now lists as “pro-Russian propaganda” the indisputable fact that the U.S. is not defending Ukraine but rather exploiting and sacrificing it to fight a proxy war with Moscow. The more true a claim is, the more likely it is to receive this designation in U.S. establishment discourse.

That there are few if any risks graver or more reckless than a direct U.S./Russia military confrontation should be too obvious to require explanation……………………………..

Speaking to U.S. troops in Poland on Friday, a visibly exhausted and rambling President Biden — after extensive travel, time-zone hopping, protracted meetings and speeches — appeared to tell U.S. troops that they were on their way to see first-hand the resistance of Ukrainians, meaning they were headed into Ukraine:      

It seems clear that this was not some planned decision to have the U.S. president casually announce his intention to send U.S. troops to fight Russians in Ukraine. This was, instead, an old man, more tired, unpredictable and incoherent than usual due to intense overseas travel, accidentally mumbling out various phrases that could be and almost certainly were highly alarming to Moscow and other countries.

……………………….  “Major nuclear actors are on the cusp of a new arms race, one that will be very expensive and will increase the likelihood of accidents and misperceptions.”

That Biden’s “gaffe” about U.S. troops headed into Ukraine could generate exactly this sort of “misperception” seems self-evident. So do the grave dangers from Biden’s sudden yet emphatic declaration on Saturday that Putin “cannot remain in power” — the classic language of declared U.S. policy of regime change: 

That clear declaration of regime change as the U.S. goal for Putin was quickly walked back by Biden’s aides, who absurdly claimed he only meant that Putin cannot remain in power in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, not that he can no longer govern Russia. But this episode marked at least the third time in the past couple weeks that White House officials had to walk back Biden’s comments, following his clear decree that U.S. troops would soon be back in Ukraine and his prior warning that the U.S. would use chemical weapons against Russia if they used them first.

That Biden seems to be stumbling and bumbling rather than following scripted recklessness seems likely in some of these cases but not all. The White House’s vehement denial, in the wake of Biden’s speech, that regime change in Russia is its goal was contradicted by Ferguson’s reporting in Bloomberg last week:

Reading this carefully, I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going….I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime”…..I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.  It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal………………………….

How does growing U.S. involvement in this war benefit the people of the United States, particularly as they were already — before this war — weighed down by the dual burdens of pandemic-based economic depravations and rapidly escalating inflation?

These are precisely the questions that a healthy nation discusses and examines before jumping head-first into a major war. But these were precisely the questions declared to be unpatriotic, proof of one’s status as a traitor or pro-Russia propagandist, as the hallmark of being pro-Putin. These are the standard tactics used to squash dissent or questioning when war breaks out. That neocons, who perfected these smear tactics, are back in the saddle as discourse and policy leaders — due to their six-year project of ingratiating themselves back into American liberalism with performative anti-Trump agitprop — makes it inevitable that such sleazy attacks will prevail…………   https://greenwald.substack.com/p/bidens-reckless-words-underscore?s=r&fbclid=IwAR3OXdwN5Y7GJq3e250Wc5OdDbPqwlIP0cUtvaLYtp096YeJOJa8w4whkXY

April 2, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Those yearning for regime change in Russia rarely consider what might come next

George Kennan and the Russian future The late US diplomat saw that those yearning for regime change in Russia rarely considered what might come next, Asia Times, By JAMES CARDEN, MARCH 29, 2022

US President Joe Biden’s ill-advised and reportedly ad-libbed call for regime change in Russia last week implicitly raised the question what kind of government Washington has in mind should President Vladimir Putin be deposed or voluntary step down ahead of Russia’s 2024 presidential election.

Biden’s line of what might charitably be called “thinking” has long tempted American policymakers. Writing in 1951, the diplomat George F Kennan observed:

“The very virulence with which Americans reject the outlook and practice of those who now hold power in the Kremlin implies in the strongest possible way the belief in, and desire for, an alternative – for some other Russian outlook and some other set of practices in Russia to take the place of those we know today.

“Yet it may be permitted to ask whether there is any clear image in our minds of what that outlook and those practices might be and of the ways by which Americans might promote progress toward them.”

These are the opening lines to Kennan’s Foreign Affairs essay “America and the Russian Future,” an indispensable corrective to the kinds of magical thinking that mark Washington’s current approach toward Russia and the world.

The planning for regime change in Russia has been under way for at least a decade. In an e-mail congratulating a State Department aide on her promotion to the White House national security  staff, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote, “… we need you at the White House to help plan and execute our Russian strategy post-Putin.”

Biden’s speech last weekend at the Warsaw Castle gave a clue as to what he and the US foreign-policy establishment have in mind “post-Putin.” In Biden’s telling, “Over the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe.” And Russia, which “has strangled democracy” at home, now seeks to do so elsewhere.

Biden’s speech attempted to recast the war in Ukraine as part of a larger battle “between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”………………………………………………….

 Washington’s attempt to remake Russia socially, economically and politically in the 1990s quite inadvertently resulted in the Russia we are confronted with today. 

So why does Washington insist on believing that its attempts to reshape Russia from the outside will somehow, someday work out? 

Kennan himself was under no such illusions:

“Of one thing we may be sure: No great and enduring change in the spirit and practice of government in Russia will ever come about primarily through foreign inspiration or advice. To be genuine, to be enduring and to be worth the hopeful welcome of other peoples such a change would have to flow from the initiative and efforts of the Russians themselves.”

The sooner President Biden and his advisers come around to the late George Kennan’s way of thinking regarding the desirability of regime change, the better.  https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/george-kennan-and-the-russian-future/

March 31, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

The entire world views it as I do; all except Kamikaze Joe and his puppeteers.. — The Goomba Gazette

The following are excerpts from CNN; one of the staunchest supporters of Kamikaze Joe. When the far left media starts getting on his ass, I would conclude the problem is absolutely severe. CNN Has Biden shaken international confidence in his so-far strong leadership in bringing the NATO alliance together in a united front against Moscow? 

The entire world views it as I do; all except Kamikaze Joe and his puppeteers.. — The Goomba Gazette

• And will Putin be able to exploit disquiet over Biden’s comments in European capitals?
• Did the President’s comment dangerously escalate already high tensions in the worst confrontation between the West and Russia in decades?
• Will the notion that Biden hopes to topple Putin — even if the US says it’s not true — harden the embattled Russian leader’s resolve against negotiations or cause him to further escalate an already merciless war against civilians?
• Has Biden’s now stinging rhetoric about Putin effectively ruled out any future direct diplomacy or meetings between the world’s top nuclear powers — and could it endanger global peace if they can’t communicate in a future crisis that threatens humanity?
• Or will Biden’s human reaction to spending time with Ukrainian refugees soon be overtaken by the daily unfolding horror of the war or come to be seen as a strong moral stand that changed the way the world views the Russian leader? After all, ex-President Ronald Reagan’s call for then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin was initially opposed by some of his own aides as too provocative.

• And finally, since Moscow already sees extraordinarily tough Western sanctions as economic warfare and given Putin’s deeply conspiratorial view of the West and its role in vanquishing the Soviet Union, can a few loose presidential words that rile up everyone in Washington really make things any worse?Because the United States has put itself into very precarious position electing this senile fool to the leader of the country, because of his disastrous decision making and uncontrollable disparaging remarks, it is imminent but there has to be a change………………

In the last few months Kamikaze has made some very disparaging remarks about Putin. Although they may be true, this is not path to a diplomatic solution.

March 29, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | 2 Comments