Going Off Script
The script of conventional wisdom on Ukraine, That Which Must be Believed, is getting a bit threadbare and here and there some of the pages are falling out. February was a tough month in this regard.
(Map from Naked Capitalism)
First, there was Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:
And at the same time, you have this aid for Ukraine held up here in this country. And to be clear, aiding Ukraine, giving the money to Ukraine is the cheapest possible way for the U.S. to enhance its security. The fighting is being done by the Ukrainians. They’re the people who are being killed.
You might want to read this over a couple of times to get the full impact. Of course it is just a more eloquent statement of the old line about American willingness to “fight to the last Ukrainian.” According to Beddoes, dead Ukrainians are the cheapest way we can “enhance” our security, which apparently extends to the outskirts of Avdiivka. Her sentence is more understandable, and certainly more truthful I think—particularly to Russians—if you substitute the word “hegemony” for “security.” This casual reference to others dying for our security is obscene and disgusting. I find that the British are even more Russophobic than we are—I suspect they were who we learned it from.
Then there was our current Under Secretary of State and perpetual neo-con provocateur, Victoria Nuland, in an interview with CNN’s Christianne Amanpour:
If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, he will keep going. And autocrats and tyrants all around the world will take comfort and think that they too can chunk off a piece of their neighbor. … we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world….not just for victims of tyrants like Putin, but in our own interest in preserving a free and open international order….And by the way we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the U.S. economy to make those weapons, including good paying jobs in some 40 states across the United States.
You usually get in trouble for saying too much rather than saying too little. In this way, Nuland kept talking and let some Truth slip out at the very end of her propaganda. She ticked-off the official narrative well enough: we have to stop Putin east of the Dnieper or else he will resurrect the Warsaw Bloc; our motives are pure and noble–democracy and freedom unpolluted by any ulterior power plays; an American international order; core beliefs, yada, yada, yada. All the while, the brave, desperate defenders of Democracy cling to hope as they await news from the U.S. Congress about whether those Republican meanies in the House will release their munitions.
But then as a sweetener she reminds listeners that the 60 billion dollars is really staying right here, lining the pockets of military industrial fatcats, and providing jobs for American workers. So the U.S. war machine churns on, providing profits for our warmongers and obituaries for Ukrainians.
And then for some reason, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence went off script as well. He stated that it was a blood clot, not Vladimir Putin, that killed Alexei Navalny.
I may disappoint you, but we know he died from a blood clot…more or less confirmed.
Finally, there is the recent explosive piece in the New York Times about the CIA bases in Ukraine. To be sure, this story broke only because the CIA wanted it to, for whatever Spy vs. Spy reason they may have. It seems that within days of the 2014 coup we engineered, the CIA and our new Ukrainian government agreed to establish 12 secret “forward operation bases” along the border with Russia, no doubt to foster harmony and understanding with the latter. As we are a force for good in the world, how could Putin think otherwise? But it has been noted that “this cooperation…went far beyond helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia in a narrow, technical sense — rather, Ukraine was drawn into a Western coalition for the purpose of waging a broad-based shadow war against Russia.”1
Of course, Ukraine is free to pursue whatever foreign policy it so chooses. That does not mean, of course, that they do so without consequences. Putin warned repeatedly, both before and after 2014, that Russia would not stand for Ukraine being turned into a staging area for our regime-change plans directed at them. As the old saying goes, you are not paranoid if everyone really is out to get you. As it turns out, we were doing exactly what Putin was accusing us of doing.
Things are changing as one order winds down. There are, of course, other scripts:
From Dr. Sachs, here and lots of places elsewhere:
Ditto from John Mearsheimer:
From the Quincy Institute:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/macron-nato-ukraine/
From random American billionaires:
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1758976951744897179?lang=en
And even from the Black Prince himself:
https://twitter.com/djuric_zlatko/status/1763574112989896760
“Why is this not seen as a provocation?” Mark Episkopos, Responsible Statecraft, 27 February 2024.