Putin Wins, Americans Not Told

 

Amid the blizzard of mis-, dis-, and un-information provided to us by our dully conformist messengers in the news media, one could easily miss the crucial outcome of the latest round of alarmism over Russia: Putin has quietly won his principal demand.

For three decades, Russians have raised hell over NATO’s eastward creep. Gorbachev insisted that the USSR would not oppose the reunification of Germany as long as NATO did not expand, and Bush I promised him that. West Germany duly swallowed up the East, and the hostile alliance promptly accrued former Warsaw Pact states such as Poland and the Czech Republic and added them to NATO’s forward military posture—an early example of the U.S. being “not agreement-capable.” NATO spokespeople openly clamored for more. Georgia (the country) was in NATO’s sights briefly until the Russians reacted. But the big prize was always Ukraine with its enormous Black Sea coastline and the strategically crucial Crimean Peninsula.

Dotting Russia’s borders with military outposts, including nuclear weapons systems that could reach major Russian cities in minutes, has been a wet dream of neocon warriors since the Soviet Union’s collapse. According to some commentators, Putin could have been ousted after the 2014 Ukrainian coup for failing to perceive the threat and prevent it. Apparently, the Russians were shocked at the successful putsch that put a hyper-nationalist pro-Western regime in power in Kiev, and Russia’s dual response—backing the quasi-separatist Russian ethnics in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea—followed swiftly.

That fighting was stopped by means of a truce and the Minsk Protocol (and its 2015 follow-up, known as Minsk II), which we westerners rarely hear about. That’s because the Ukrainian authorities signed them and then refused to carry them out, no doubt encouraged in this posture by their western masters.

Putin and his patient foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have been broken records on the subject of what must happen to bring the border tensions to some sort of happy stasis—carry out the Minsk agreements via direct talks between Kiev and its breakaway provinces, achieve some sort of federal modus vivendi among the warring parties, including, crucially, a commitment NOT to put hostile military forces in eastern Ukraine and NOT to contemplate Ukrainian membership in NATO ever.

These Russians demands lie behind the periodic pearl-clutching that our neocon-loyal news media cook up over a supposed Russian scheme to march into the rest of Ukraine. Such a threat is a hallucination birthed in the steaming miasmas of the Potomac, but it conveniently masks the source of hostilities: Washington’s hysteria over losing its accustomed power to dictate terms. Russia’s red line about NATO encirclement means that further NATO expansion will not occur, and Russia is extremely well placed to carry out its threat to stop it should the need arise.

Biden and his amateurish crew of bullies have realized this. While we hear all sorts of dire posturing from Blinken, Sullivan, Biden himself, and a gaggle of nutcases in the Senate (from both parties), they simultaneously acknowledge that the U.S. is not ready to ratchet up to a nuclear confrontation over a rickety, nearly failed state in central Europe.

Meanwhile, the idea that the Russians are plotting to seize more Ukrainian territory assumes that Putin is eager to be saddled with a state on the verge of internal collapse. On the contrary, the uneasy status quo serves Russia perfectly well as they can simply hold out and wait for Kiev to accept the new realities provoked by the errors of 2014—for which, incidentally, the neocon grandees in DC bear a large measure of blame. If Victoria Nuland and her buddies had not encouraged the overthrow of the corrupt but legitimate (i.e., elected) president at that time, the U.S. would not be in the current no-win mess.

The Americans continue to convince themselves that with just a little more aggression, a little more weaponry, a few more ultimata, a bit more butching up, standing tough, insults, and what have you, they will finally force the hands of its adversaries of the moment. Historical lessons from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan leave no trace.

Biden’s video encounter with Putin this week was a predictable dialogue of the deaf, but despite the loyal quotation on every channel here of the script Biden managed to read, Putin came out with a solid win. The U.S. admitted indirectly that NATO will not come to Ukraine’s defense and risk a nuclear confrontation. Our leaders have not yet completely lost their minds—though they’re working hard at it. 

In addition, “further talks” were endorsed, which seems underwhelming until one considers what Putin set out as Russia’s goal: a treaty in which NATO promises to back off. That won’t happen any time soon, if ever, but the fact that the Americans didn’t immediately faint dead away and scotch the idea is a sign of how weak Biden’s position is.

Russia is not worried about further U.S. economic sanctions—the big threat emanating from DC—and is prepared for them in any case. If the Ukrainians go crazy and mount an assault, they will be very sorry as will the European countries facing a new horde of desperate refugees fleeing what’s left of their erstwhile country. Unless some real lunatic gets Joe Biden’s ear, or—heaven forbid—the clueless Kamala Harris gets pushed into a role she is unprepared for, no one in Washington is going to bring on a new geopolitical defeat that would far overshadow that Afghan debacle.

The Americans refuse to grasp the end of the happy days of imperial dictatorship that followed the demise of the USSR. Think-tank chicken hawks must be so bedazzled by all that shiny hardware piled up all over the 800 U.S. military bases scattered around the world that they think its mere existence gives them unchallenged powers. It does not. This week was a tiny defeat for their galactic imperial arrogance: more will follow. The idea that countries might come together to find ways to occupy their respective corners of the globe for mutual benefit seems far beyond their intellectual and imaginative capacities.

Meanwhile, the citizenry is equally unprepared to face facts given the vapid stenography practiced by the herd of “national security” reporters echoing every unsupported assertion emanating from the parallel state at the Pentagon and Langley. The shock of realization once these defeats become impossible to ignore could be surprisingly destabilizing, both a danger and an opportunity.

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