(LifeSiteNews) — What happened since the Soviets agreed to the peaceful breakup of their empire does much to clarify the situation in Ukraine today. Why is the West fighting a proxy war over a former Soviet state, when the fall of communism was supposed to bring a ‘peace dividend’? This was a very popular idea amongst the American public in 1990, who overwhelmingly favored that military spending should go instead towards solving problems at home.
There were other ideas which were current at the time, notably the assurances given to the Soviets over the reunification of Germany, the placing of NATO troops, and a pledge that NATO would not advance “one inch eastwards.” What happened in reality was that the U.S. did the opposite. In fact, recently declassified documents show diplomatic communications and top level transcripts which reveal that the U.S. was preparing for the expansion of NATO into ten former Soviet controlled nations at the same time as it was promising the Russians there would be no such move at all.
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The credibility gap is the term given to the disbelief of the American people in their government. It refers originally to the misinformation over the Vietnam War, which led to a collapse in trust between the U.S. Government and its people.
Something very similar has happened in U.S. and Western diplomatic relations. What the West tells the Russians, and what it goes on to do, has continued to widen over the war in Ukraine. Russia has been involved in this war since 2014, when two areas in the eastern region of Ukraine known as the Donbass declared independence. This began a civil war, with the rebels claiming that the U.S. had staged one coup after another in Ukraine.
Russia went on to annex Crimea, which is, like the Donbass, populated in the main by Russian speakers. The next year, Russian entry into the conflict resulted in the decisive defeat of the Ukrainian army following the notorious Debaltseve kettle, or encirclement.
In 2015, 2017 and again in 2019 Russia met with representatives of Germany, France and Ukraine in a process of talks known as the Minsk Agreements. Taking place in the capital of Belarus by that name, they ended the maneuver warfare stage of the conflict and froze the front lines, resulting in a peace plan which the Russians complain has never been implemented.
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It was the responsibility of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to see to it that Ukraine complied with the conditions agreed by all parties to end the war. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, complained of this at the 2019 Normandy Format meeting. As he did so, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine can be seen on camera laughing, in video which surfaced in the past fortnight.
To make matters worse, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced last June that these talks were never undertaken in good faith, and were a sham. The reason for their taking place was to give the West the time to rearm and retrain the Ukrainian army. It has done so over the past eight years, leaving Ukraine in 2021 with the largest and perhaps best equipped land army west of the Urals.
In a startling admission, Merkel remarked in an interview last November that the Minsk Agreements were indeed undertaken to “buy time.”
The result of these diplomatic deceptions has been not only humiliation for Russia, but has reduced their confidence in the reliability of negotiations with the West to zero. This did not cause the Russians to invade, as that is a decision made after these facts, but it is clear that the option of a negotiated settlement is simply unrealistic.
The war in Ukraine is concerning not only for being the site of a war between the West and Russia. It is that the war is largely directed not by Western generals, but by neoconservative ideologues and supported by managerial mediocrities such as the German foreign minister who made the startling admission that Germany is at war with Russia.
The neoconservative faction, devoted to forever war, is that which was rescued from obscurity by the events of September 11, 2001. Since then, their policies of regime change and the aggressive promotion of the rules-based order through warfare and the staging of color revolutions has led not only to chaos but to a series of costly defeats.
The policy over Ukraine was indicated in a RAND corporation study of 2019, which suggested a weak Russia vulnerable to coordinated international action. A plan emerged, which was put into place in April 2022, when the US and its satellites declared their entry into the conflict with pledges of unlimited support for Ukraine.
Over a hundred billion dollars later, and with masses of armaments poured into this post-Soviet border dispute, the plan of the US war faction is clearly not working. It prefigured the collapse of the Russian economy following sanctions. In fact, the Russian economy is doing well, with a record trade surplus, whilst 93 percent of Europeans complain of a worsening cost of living crisis. The nine rounds of sanctions have accelerated the deindustrialization of Germany, and led to soaring inflation. Russia has simply chosen to sell its gas elsewhere. No countries outside the Anglosphere and Europe have placed any sanctions on Russia.
The plan included regime change – that would come from bleeding Russia on the battlefield and Russian discontent due to economic collapse. Following this, Putin could be humiliated in a show trial at the Hague, whilst the plentiful resources of his nation were delivered into the hands of the West by a new client-state apparatus on the model of that installed in Ukraine.
Finally, Russia could be broken up into more manageable statelets. This too would allow for the Russian territory to be used as staging post for the coming war with China.
To step back from the insanity of these fever dreams is to return once more to reality. These are the notions on which the managers of this war have staked their reputation. It is for this reason they are dangerous. The power of the neoconservatives and of the political managers who ally with their devastating project of “Liberal interventionism” will be seriously undermined in a defeat against Russia.
A further casualty of this war will be a return, with a vengeance, of the credibility gap which plagued the U.S. government in the last years of the Vietnam war. When the populations of the West, so completely malinformed about the cause and course of this war discover they have been deliberately misled they will be very unlikely to believe in anything the media tells them for a long time. This is what happened in the early 1970s in the USA. This time round, the consequences of this war are being felt far closer to home, as the impact of the sanctions is destroying the European standard of living.
The people who direct these events are routinely indifferent to the suffering they cause. In the pursuit of the aims of their death cult they have wrecked nations far abroad, and are now wrecking nations some of us call home. What they care about is their own power, and their own humiliation. It is the vanity of murderous liars we must genuinely fear, the narcissism of people habituated to ignoring the opinion and welfare of the common man and woman. To such people, who will invoke the highest moral principles in service of the basest deeds, nothing is worse than the loss of face.
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The Western policy of escalation is mooted not to end with the delivery of tanks, but is suggested to be aimed at the supply of fighter jets to Ukraine as well. What will happen when this too fails to turn the tide? Talk of nuclear exchange may seem appealing to technocrats and ideologues who are used to getting their way. It is unconvincing to the generals, however. The Russians hold a superiority in missile technology which the West prefers not to mention, with its hypersonic capabilities without peer or means of prevention in NATO.
It also holds the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. It is likely that military heads will be far cooler than managerial ones when contemplating the limits of Russian patience. Our leaders appear to have forgotten that it is not only the West who has the option of escalation. The Russians have yet to show their own hand in the matter of escalation dominance.
Nuclear war is not a winning move for anyone, and it is not one I think the Pentagon will endorse. What we are living through is not just the banalization of atrocity as policy, but also a conflict of ideology with reality, where a faction refuses to accept its ideas have collided with the world and lost. We are hopefully living through the last days of the bloodthirsty cult which has for so long abused the good intentions of the people of the Free World. It is us or them. My money is on us.