• Tag Archives Ukraine

  • Will Armageddon Be Joe Biden’s Final Legacy Regarding Russia?

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    When the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, the world seemed poised for a new, more peaceful era no longer haunted by the fear of a nuclear Armageddon. The principal successor state from the wreckage of the USSR was a noncommunist Russia that was intent on becoming part of the democratic, capitalist West. President George H. W. Bush and his top advisers exercised considerable diplomatic skill managing the twilight years and ultimate demise of the Soviet Union. Their core achievement was to gain Moscow’s assent to Germany’s reunification and membership in NATO. The implicit tradeoff (unfortunately never put in writing) was that NATO would not expand beyond the eastern border of a newly united Germany.

    The contrast between the benign end to the original Cold War and the current status of relations between the West (especially the United States) and Russia could not be greater or more alarming. NATO’s meddling in the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia has become an outright proxy war for the Alliance. As NATO’s leader, the United States has pushed a series of extremely dangerous escalatory steps. The latest provocation is the decision by Joe Biden’s administration authorizing Ukraine to use long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that are capable of striking at least 190 miles inside Russia. Moscow has responded by adopting a new nuclear doctrine warning that the use of such missiles by NATO’s Ukrainian proxy would mean that Moscow is officially at war with the U.S.-led alliance. Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin is bluffing, but the risk of a nuclear collision between NATO and Moscow now appears to be very high.

    It is bitterly ironic that the decision to let Ukraine use U.S. missiles that might trigger World War III has been made by the lamest of lame duck U.S. presidents. At the 59th minute of the 11th hour, the leaders of the Democratic Party pressured Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. They did so because the evidence of his cognitive decline had become undeniable. However, his hand-picked successor, Kamala Harris, then proceeded to lose the presidential election to Republican nominee Donald Trump.

    To say that the Biden administration has no mandate to make such a crucial decision involving war and peace would be a monumental understatement. In fairness, though, the current foreign policy crew is not solely responsible for fouling-up relations with Russia and provoking a new cold war with nuclear implications. That “achievement” has been a bipartisan effort taking place over more than 3 decades.

    Toward the end of George H. W. Bush’s administration, public opinion polls in Russia showed that nearly 80 percent of Russians held positive views of the United States. In the late stages of the Bill Clinton administration, nearly the same percentage held negative opinions.

    It was hardly a surprising development. During his years in office, Clinton and his Russian-hating advisers (especially UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) antagonized Moscow on multiple occasions. Washington went out of its way to attack Russia’s long-standing religious and political clients, the Serbs, as the Yugoslav federation disintegrated. However, the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, struck the biggest blow to East-West relations.

    Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, continued and intensified the policy of provoking and antagonizing Russia. Subsequent rounds of NATO expansion brought U.S. military power to Russia’s immediate neighborhood by adding such new members as the three Baltic republics, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Most provocative of all, Bush pushed to add Ukraine to the Alliance. Although Germany and France temporarily blocked immediate moves to make Ukraine a member, Washington’s ultimate goal was quite clear.

    A rising number and volume of warnings against making Ukraine a NATO asset also came from Putin and other officials. Washington and its key European allies ignored those warnings, but it became clear in 2014 that the Kremlin was not bluffing. When President Barack Obama and key European leaders helped overthrow Ukraine’s generally pro-Russia president and install a regime subservient to NATO, Moscow struck back emphatically, seizing Ukraine’s strategic, but majority Russian populated, Crimean Peninsula.

    Relations between the West and Russia continued to deteriorate thereafter. In the autumn of 2021, the Kremlin proposed a new relationship with the West that amounted to Russia’s minimum demands. Those demands included a guaranteed neutral status for Ukraine – thus foreclosing the prospect of Kyiv’s eventual membership in NATO. The Kremlin also sought the withdrawal of advanced U.S. weaponry from the easternmost members of NATO. It amounted to an ultimatum, and when the Biden administration treated Moscow’s demands with contempt, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That offensive, combined with the decision by the United States and its allies to impose severe economic sanctions against Russia, ignited an ever-escalating military crisis.

    It is uncertain whether President-elect Trump intends to end the dangerous impasse with Moscow. Contrary to the partisan myth that Trump has been Putin’s puppet, his actual policies during his first term were consistently hardline. One can hope, though, that he has fully understood what a disaster Washington’s love affair with Ukraine has become for both countries. Restoring cooperative bilateral relations with Russia is essential for global peace.

    Alarmingly, however, Trump might not get that opportunity, even if he wishes to back away from the beckoning abyss. The lame-duck Biden administration still holds power for nearly another two months, and, if administration leaders are so inclined, that is more than enough time to plunge the country into nuclear war. Biden’s conduct in recent weeks, especially authorizing Ukraine to attack Russia with U.S.-supplied, long-range missiles, is beyond reckless. Biden’s legacy is already bad, but it could become even worse.

    https://ronpaulinstitute.org/will-armageddon-be-joe-bidens-final-legacy-regarding-russia/


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  • Can We Please Stop Sending Money to Ukraine Already?

    Posted on by Azrael 2 Comments

    The Biden administration asked Congress for $40 billion in funding on Thursday, including $13 billion in emergency defense aid for Ukraine and $8 billion in humanitarian aid for the war-torn country. The requested package also includes $12 billion in disaster response funding, $4 billion for the southern border, and funding for a host of other initiatives.

    Congress has approved four rounds of aid to date for Ukraine, totalling $113 billion dollars. The most recent funding was approved last December and consisted of $45 billion for Ukraine and NATO allies as part of a $1.7 trillion spending bill.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer enthusiastically welcomed the new request. “The latest request from the Biden administration shows America’s continued commitment to helping Americans here at home and our friends abroad,” he said.

    The Republicans, meanwhile, are striking a more cautious tone. “I look forward to carefully reviewing the Administration’s request to make sure it is necessary and appropriate to keep America safe, secure our borders, support our allies, and help communities rebuild after disasters,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

    Taxpayers, meanwhile, are surely wondering just how long this spending is going to drag on. Will the government continue funding the war in perpetuity? Is there any exit plan here?

    More to the point, American funding of the war in Ukraine should never have been a thing in the first place. Regardless of where you stand on the war itself, American citizens who want no part in this conflict should not be coerced into funding one side of it.

    The justification for this funding that we hear from politicians is that it helps protect “American interests.” But who are they to decide what our interests are and how to protect them? It’s an awfully paternalistic attitude when you think about it. “We know what’s best for the country,” they are effectively saying, “so we will decide for you what your money will be spent on.”

    In this case, that means war machines.

    And what of the people who deeply oppose such funding? “Tough luck” is the reply.

    Another response is to chastise detractors for being “isolationists.” “You can’t ignore what’s going on in the rest of the world,” they say. But being against government funding of the war hardly has to mean ignoring the rest of the world. Individuals and organizations can get involved in all sorts of ways using funds from voluntary donors.

    “But that won’t be enough money,” comes the response.

    It might not be enough to satisfy your desires. But why should your preferences regarding someone’s finances take precedence over their own? Taking people’s money by force and using it to fund a cause that many of them deeply disagree with is a gross injustice. And the fact that you personally think it would be “good for America” doesn’t make it any more justified.

    In his book For a New Liberty, the economist and political philosopher Murray Rothbard lays out the ethical problems with war, one of which is the fact that it is financed coercively. “Since all governments obtain their revenue from the thievery of coercive taxation,” he writes, “any mobilization and launching of troops inevitably involve[s] an increase in tax-coercion.”

    Though the US is only providing financial aid to Ukraine at this time, this is still an act of coercion, and it’s important to identify it as such. It’s not just that the government’s actions are impractical or distasteful. They are wrong. They are unjust. They are immoral.

    The French economist Frédéric Bastiat sharply condemned such coercive transfers of money, which he referred to as legal plunder.

    “But how is this legal plunder to be identified?” he asks. “Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

    Bastiat’s council is to abolish all such laws. “The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights,” Bastiat continues. “He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry…Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests.”

    Bastiat’s words are as relevant today as ever. The vested interests tell us that our very civilization depends on them receiving funding. They tell scary stories about what will happen should the flow be cut off. But we’d be fools to take them at their word.

    So what’s the alternative? Simply practice the foreign policy of Thomas Jefferson: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

    This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll is the Managing Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • DC’s Stance on Ukraine Is as Divorced From Reality as Its COVID Regime

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Theirs not to make reply,

    Theirs not to reason why,

    Theirs but to do and die.

    Into the valley of Death

    Rode the six hundred.

    From, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    I was a fourteen-year-old freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Kenmore, N.Y. when I was assigned my first term paper for Mr. Chaya’s World History class. The list of topics included the Charge of the Light Brigade. That’s the one I picked.

    Like any boy that age, I still retained a belief in the glory of war, something Tennyson seems never to have outgrown. This despite being trained in grammar school to scurry from my desk and duck against the wall under the classroom window when the air raid siren sounded.

    The possibility of being nuked by the Soviet Union at any moment had been a fact of life for all of my life at that point and would be for twelve more years.

    The term paper assignment was the first time I was asked to research a historical event, rather than just read a textbook summary about it. By the time I finished, I had my first inkling that “military intelligence” might just be an oxymoron and perhaps war wasn’t the glorious affair Tennyson had cracked it up to be.

    To this day, when I hear the lyrics, “a good old-fashioned, bullet-headed, Saxon mother’s son” in the Beatles song “Bungalow Bill,” I think of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the aforementioned six hundred light cavalrymen into the teeth of Russian artillery.

    The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1853-56). Despite the Light Brigade disaster, the port city finally fell to the British and French allies, but not before the Russian Empire sank its entire Black Sea fleet in the harbor to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

    That desperate act should provide a warning to Washington.

    The Russians had to fight for Crimea again during the Russian Civil War following the Bolshevik revolution. It fell to the Germans during WWII after a bitter 250-day siege, only to be regained by the Red Army in 1944.

    I never dreamed I’d be writing about the same port city thirty-six years after that first term paper. In 2016, the new global empire, the United States, having successfully orchestrated a color revolution to oust Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, was in a stare down with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin over his annexation of Crimea.

    Yanukovich had been falsely portrayed as “pro-Russian” by NATO in its haste to bring Ukraine into the European Union. The coup was the last straw for Putin after watching the U.S. break its promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO “one inch eastward” in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement to the 1990 reunification of Germany.

    A look at a map of NATO in the ensuing 30 years since that promise puts a somewhat different light on Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and at least calls into question just who is the aggressor in this situation.

    As I wrote back in 2016, Sevastopol is one of the few reliable Russian ports that remains ice-free all winter. Syria is home to another. If that doesn’t inspire skepticism regarding Washington, D.C.’s humanitarian motives for orchestrating regime change operations in both countries—while remaining bosom buddies with the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia—then, as my friends in the American southeast would say, “bless your heart.”

    President Biden told Reuters on New Year’s Eve that he had warned Putin, “if he goes into Ukraine, we will have severe sanctions. We will increase our presence in Europe, with our NATO allies, and there will be a heavy price to pay for it.”

    Sanctions don’t sound too ominous if one has zero historical perspective, including, say, the “sanctions” against the Japanese Empire in 1941. It doesn’t really matter who was right or wrong. Sanctions eventually lead to war if their consequences become dire enough.

    It doesn’t matter so much who is right or wrong on the matter of Ukraine, either. The reality is this: The Russians are never going to give up that port. They’ve bled for it in the past far more than any American army has ever bled for anything. It is an existential matter for them.

    In 1856, they sank their entire Black Sea navy before giving up Sevastopol. What would they be willing to do today?

    Meanwhile, it would make not one iota of difference to Americans living in the United States if Russia annexed all of Ukraine, much less Crimea. Washington’s interests in the region are purely imperial and contrary to those of most U.S. citizens. It is also questionable that the U.S. could win a limited conflict in the region against Russia, given the logistics.

    It is equally unrealistic that Russia could win a full-scale conventional war against NATO. The U.S. alone had a military budget in 2020 more than ten times that of Russia. That would leave Russia with only one alternative before surrender.

    Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has thought of itself as the “shining city on the hill” leading a “new world order” of democracy and peace. Considering its recent exploits in the Middle East and Ukraine, in 2021 it more resembles a drunk bully stumbling around the world slurring its words and picking fights with smaller opponents.

    That Russia can be treated likewise is as divorced from reality as Washington’s belief it can stop the spread of a respiratory virus with lockdowns and vaccine mandates. But as damaging as the COVID Regime has been to American society, Washington’s delusions about bringing Russia to its knees could result in far worse.

    This article was republished with permission from tommullen.net.

    Tom Mullen

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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