Terrific piece, David. Though, I would argue Seymour Hersh's reportage has some distance to go to convince me Norway pulled the trigger on Nord Stream. And, as for Crimean annexation: The people there held a separatist referendum, much as the Quebecois did in Canada, (on two occasions) and voted overwhelmingly to reject the Maidan Putsch, with its attendant Nazi regalia and regressive philosophy and - like Edward Snowden - shelter behind the skirt of Mother Russia.
I also reject the notion it was the fear of NATO expansion alone driving Russia to come at long last to the defense of the Ukrainians in the Donbass being shelled by Kyiv since their attempt to escape the regime as the Crimeans had. That is the strawman argument clutched to by such luminary lefties as Greg Palast in his bitter denunciation of Russia's leader, neo-Hitler Putin.
Russia waited eight long years as the civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk were daily murdered - in contravention of every international humanitarian convention - before intervening to stop the onslaught. But, emboldened by US/NATO assurances, neo-Churchill Zelenskyy forgot his electoral promises of peace, dedicating instead his country's future to total victory, or Slava Ukraini, the mythical glory of war.
A cease to the fighting will come finally to Ukraine, and it will come through "jaw, jaw" not "war, war" as Winston the British Bulldog famously said he preferred. Until then, all who call for more war, war to bring peace are history deniers and enemies of Peace.
Another thoughtful, perceptive, and penetrating analysis, David, as your readers have long since come to expect from you.
I would add only this: As Carl Jung noted in The Undiscovered Self, in addition to their bloody wars of colonial conquest, European states have an even longer and at least as bloody history of wars against one another. When, though, has the world seen a European war such as the proxy war in Ukraine, provoked, as you've noted, by the USA and NATO, which is to say, the USA, in which millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians are pitted against one another? Russia and the former Soviet republics are home to a majority of the world's Orthodox Christians, who even before the proxy war began were struggling to recover from the effects of decades of Soviet religious repression. Blinken and Nuland, the Biden administration neocons who ginned up the proxy war, and who, according to Sy, planned the Nord Stream sabotage, an act of war, are reflexively pro-Israel Jewish Zionists of Eastern European ancestry. Is this neocon war, seen by many as a Blinken/Nuland project, widely perceived to be "good for the Jews" and a good look for the American Jewish community? Asking for various friends who happen to be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and of no particular religious tradition.
Don't forget Yugoslavia and Libya in the list of countries recently destroyed by NATO. in 2007 at a European Security Conference Putin stated that NATO had broken all its promises and that Russia's absolute Red Line was the absorption of Georgia and/or Ukraine. The US Nazi coup carried out with the intention of turning Sevastopol into a NATO naval base and stationing US nuclear missiles in Eastern Ukraine a short five minute flight away from Moscow forced Russia to react. Initially they tried to implement the Minsk Accords to make Ukraine a neutral state and guarantee the people of Donetsk and Luhansk the right to retain their language, culture, and education. As we now know from admissions by Merkel, Poroshenko, and Macron, they signed the agreements in bad faith with no intention of honoring them. The ongoing construction of NATO bases in Ukraine and the imminent attack on Donetsk and Luhansk sealed the issue and forced Russia to pre-empt the NATO/Ukrainian attack. Russia did not start the war; Poroshenko did in 2014.
The whole US plan traces back to the Project for a New American Century of the 1990's which among other things calls for preventing the reunification of Russia and Ukraine at any cost, and failing that, to start a war between them that would destroy Ukraine so that it would be a burden on the Russian economy for decades to come, slowing their recovery from the US created "Shock Privatization" of the 1990's which reduced Russia to a semi-deindustrialized state.
Terrific piece, David. Though, I would argue Seymour Hersh's reportage has some distance to go to convince me Norway pulled the trigger on Nord Stream. And, as for Crimean annexation: The people there held a separatist referendum, much as the Quebecois did in Canada, (on two occasions) and voted overwhelmingly to reject the Maidan Putsch, with its attendant Nazi regalia and regressive philosophy and - like Edward Snowden - shelter behind the skirt of Mother Russia.
I also reject the notion it was the fear of NATO expansion alone driving Russia to come at long last to the defense of the Ukrainians in the Donbass being shelled by Kyiv since their attempt to escape the regime as the Crimeans had. That is the strawman argument clutched to by such luminary lefties as Greg Palast in his bitter denunciation of Russia's leader, neo-Hitler Putin.
Russia waited eight long years as the civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk were daily murdered - in contravention of every international humanitarian convention - before intervening to stop the onslaught. But, emboldened by US/NATO assurances, neo-Churchill Zelenskyy forgot his electoral promises of peace, dedicating instead his country's future to total victory, or Slava Ukraini, the mythical glory of war.
A cease to the fighting will come finally to Ukraine, and it will come through "jaw, jaw" not "war, war" as Winston the British Bulldog famously said he preferred. Until then, all who call for more war, war to bring peace are history deniers and enemies of Peace.
Another thoughtful, perceptive, and penetrating analysis, David, as your readers have long since come to expect from you.
I would add only this: As Carl Jung noted in The Undiscovered Self, in addition to their bloody wars of colonial conquest, European states have an even longer and at least as bloody history of wars against one another. When, though, has the world seen a European war such as the proxy war in Ukraine, provoked, as you've noted, by the USA and NATO, which is to say, the USA, in which millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians are pitted against one another? Russia and the former Soviet republics are home to a majority of the world's Orthodox Christians, who even before the proxy war began were struggling to recover from the effects of decades of Soviet religious repression. Blinken and Nuland, the Biden administration neocons who ginned up the proxy war, and who, according to Sy, planned the Nord Stream sabotage, an act of war, are reflexively pro-Israel Jewish Zionists of Eastern European ancestry. Is this neocon war, seen by many as a Blinken/Nuland project, widely perceived to be "good for the Jews" and a good look for the American Jewish community? Asking for various friends who happen to be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and of no particular religious tradition.
Don't forget Yugoslavia and Libya in the list of countries recently destroyed by NATO. in 2007 at a European Security Conference Putin stated that NATO had broken all its promises and that Russia's absolute Red Line was the absorption of Georgia and/or Ukraine. The US Nazi coup carried out with the intention of turning Sevastopol into a NATO naval base and stationing US nuclear missiles in Eastern Ukraine a short five minute flight away from Moscow forced Russia to react. Initially they tried to implement the Minsk Accords to make Ukraine a neutral state and guarantee the people of Donetsk and Luhansk the right to retain their language, culture, and education. As we now know from admissions by Merkel, Poroshenko, and Macron, they signed the agreements in bad faith with no intention of honoring them. The ongoing construction of NATO bases in Ukraine and the imminent attack on Donetsk and Luhansk sealed the issue and forced Russia to pre-empt the NATO/Ukrainian attack. Russia did not start the war; Poroshenko did in 2014.
The whole US plan traces back to the Project for a New American Century of the 1990's which among other things calls for preventing the reunification of Russia and Ukraine at any cost, and failing that, to start a war between them that would destroy Ukraine so that it would be a burden on the Russian economy for decades to come, slowing their recovery from the US created "Shock Privatization" of the 1990's which reduced Russia to a semi-deindustrialized state.
I've been watching a lot of MASH reruns lately, Hawkeye Franklin Pierce had the right idea. War is hell, as seen through the MASH 4077 tent.