BEYOND THE BS: US and Russian Threats Over Ukraine- What They’re About and Who’s the Aggressor

Are the US and its allies bluffing over a war with Russia? Is NATO willing to start a world war over the issue of its own expansion? 

A military confrontation seems unlikely, and not at all practical for either side. At present, a new bill sits before the US Senate which would impose unprecedented new sanctions against Russia, as well as Russian individual said to be ‘close to President Vladimir Putin.’ These measures would be implemented immediately in the event that Russia is deemed to have ‘invaded’ Ukraine.

While an alleged “Russian invasion” is all but certain according to nearly every western politician and media platform, this rumor does not correspond with reality.

Dee Knight from Covert Action Magazine writes…

New York Times senior reporter David Sanger jumped on it: “Mr. President, it sounds like you’re offering some way out here, some off-ramp—an informal assurance that NATO is not going to take in Ukraine… and we would never put nuclear weapons there.” Sanger went on to say Russia “wants us to move all of our nuclear weapons out of Europe and not have troops rotating through the old Soviet bloc.” Biden quickly said “No, there’s not space for that.”

Biden’s blink was a break in the warlike atmosphere that has prevailed endlessly. Katrina van den Heuvel wrote the day before in The Washington Post that “Hotheads [were] having a field day. A White House task force that includes the CIA [was] reportedly contemplating U.S. support for a guerrilla war if Russia seizes Ukraine; Russian hawks talk of a military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela.” Biden had “installed a team of national security managers from the ‘Blob,’ marinated in successive debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and more.”

Guns and sanctions are the U.S. empire’s preferred options, van den Heuvel said: “with about 800 military bases outside the United States,” the U.S. has “more bases than diplomatic missions. (Russia’s only military bases outside the former Soviet Union are in Syria.)” She added that Secretary of State Blinken and the Blob “talk about a rules-based international order but respect it only if we make the rules, often exempting ourselves from their application.”

In the end, it comes down to a concept in geopolitics known as spheres of influence. Translated, this term basically means: ‘we reserve the right to exercise our dominance in this region as far as it’s deemed to be in our own direct security interest. If only it were that simple. The reality is that in a post-Soviet globalized world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know where to draw the line. Certainly, this is a struggle for the US who have over 1,000 military bases and facilities around the world. In other words, Washington is anything but consistent when it comes to where and when it throws its weight around, or what it deems acceptable from its international rivals.

“When will the U.S. stop lying to itself about global politics?” asked CUNY Professor Peter Beinart, writing in the New York Times on January 13. He took issue with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who pontificated last month that “One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

Beinart commented: “It’s a noble principle, just not one the United States abides by. The United States has exercised a sphere of influence in its own hemisphere for almost 200 years, since President James Monroe declared that the United States ‘should consider any attempt’ by foreign powers ‘to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety’.”

Blinken’s dustbin of history was still around in 2018, Beinart said, when Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” And Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton boasted that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

Blinken wants a one-way street where spheres of influence are concerned. The U.S., for him, has the right to wield influence everywhere, while others don’t.

It really boils down to that. But it’s also important to understand how the US and EU-backed coup d’etat in Kiev was really the foundation of the current escalation of tensions.

The CIA since 2015 had secretly trained elite Ukrainian Special Forces units in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas.

On December 7, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the U.S. has given $2.4 billion to Ukraine since 2014 “in security assistance”—$450 million in 2021 alone. (This week, the Biden administration approved an additional $200 million in military aid to add to the $450 million given last year).

Not until the western political class and its mainstream media of stenographers come to terms the factual context of this crisis will we stand a chance of a military and diplomatic climbdown by the western powers.

Continue this story at Covert Action

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