The Responsibility for this War in Ukraine is on the West's Side

˃˃˃A disclaimer at the beginning. I am a friend of Europe and the US, but not necessarily of their ruling political class and policy decisions. None of my criticism is meant malicious or adversarial. It is only intended to enlighten the discourse, extend horizons, and improve political relations and decisions˂˂˂

 

Although Western political elites and their media unanimously condemn President Putin's decision to recognize the breakaway regions of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) in eastern Ukraine as autonomous people's republics, Putin's strategic maneuver can be seen as one of the last resort.

 

Donetsk and Lugansk broke away from Kiev after the Western-backed Maidan coup in 2014. They did not tolerate the deposition of incumbent President Yanukovych and the installation of the Washington and Berlin henchman Poroshenko, who opened Ukraine to the political, military and economic imposition of the US and the West. Since then, the Ukrainian leadership has rejected – in disregard of the provisions of the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements – concrete considerations for its eastern territories and even tried to forcibly reintegrate the republics in a civil war-like conflict.

 

In 2014, in the wake of the Maidan revolution, it also became immediately clear that Putin would not accept without resistance the attempt to admit Ukraine into NATO and possibly expel Russia from its Black Sea ports in Crimea. For the first time, he was confronted with an anti-Russian regime in Kiev, which is why he annexed the peninsula and began to support the separatists in the Donbass, who refused to accept the transformation of Ukrainian territory into an anti-Russian NATO base. The predominantly Russian population in these areas also resisted the Ukrainian regime's attempts to destroy Russian traditions, language, and culture.

 

The annexation of Crimea and support for the eastern territories would have been easily predictable if the US and Europe had only considered the legitimate strategic claims of the Russian Federation and decided to make a long overdue intelligent assessment of the overall security situation in the region. How would the United States react if, for example, Mexico allied itself with Russia and Putin tried to deploy massive troops on the southern border with the United States?

 

Western political elites have not taken a single step to address Putin's legitimate security concerns. Instead, they asserted their ruthless regional and global dominance policies, with which they had shaped international relations and, above all, relations with Russia for more than a quarter of a century.

 

Resolving the crisis in Ukraine would have required only a revision of the misguided strategic calculations of Washington, Brussels and Berlin and respect for Russia's legitimate security concerns. Unfortunately, the amateurish political governments that currently call the shots in the centers of power in the US and Europe have not been able to muster the minimum restraint to resolve the conflict peacefully.

 

For example, neither the weeks-long Russian troop build-up on the border with Ukraine nor Russia's demands, which were reiterated in a letter to Western leaders before the start of the military action, prompted the US/EU/NATO leadership to recognize Russia's national security interests. They didn't give Putin a chance. The blame for the collapse of diplomacy and the first step towards Russian aggression and the use of military force lies solely with the West.

 

While the public and international discourse on this issue focuses on the Kremlin and the White House, there is little mention of Ukrainian President Zelensky's contribution to this predicament. If he had wisely and sensibly defined the national security interests of his country in the context of geopolitical and strategic factors in the region and in relation to Russia, he could have avoided the conflict and the loss of part of his country's territory. Instead, pushed by his Western backers and arguably megalomaniacal ambitions, he pushed national self-determination beyond the reasonable limits of an adequate security strategy and even advocated full membership in NATO and the stationing of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory.

 

Here is a relevant historical example for Mr. Zelensky to learn from. What would have happened in 1955, a decade after the end of World War II and after ten years of Allied occupation, if Austria had insisted on joining NATO instead of accepting the neutrality status demanded by the Soviet Union as a prerequisite for regaining Austria's national sovereignty? By this time, the Soviets had already pushed their defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact, to the border with Austria in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and if Austria had rejected the promise of neutrality and joined NATO, this would have been considered a threat to the security interests of the Warsaw Pact and a violation of the 1955 State Treaty. The Soviet Union would inevitably have responded with threats and military action.

 

No country in a geopolitically precarious situation would be well advised to use its political resolve to satisfy power-hungry ambitions and notions of hubris. In the case of Ukraine, a withdrawal from joining NATO, the freezing of all further armaments-related support by the US and its allies, and the transfer of Ukraine to a certain position of neutrality would have created the conditions for a diplomatic solution. If President Zelensky had acted in this direction, he would go down in history as a statesman. So, he will only be remembered as the comedian he was before his election. A role to which he has remained faithful even as president.

In truth, Zelensky and his predecessor Poroshenko, as well as their American-European masters, have been ruining the nation since the Euro-Maidan coup of 2014. It took them only eight years. According to the Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies, economic failure, drastic militarization (Ukraine's defense budget at the beginning of the war was six times higher than in 2013) and the termination of energy contracts with Russia led the country into a deep recession. Agricultural, industrial and energy crises as well as significant demographic changes were the result. Between 2014 and 2021, more than one million Ukrainians took Russian citizenship and over six hundred thousand received work permits for the European Union. One in four Ukrainians wants to leave the country, and almost two-thirds believe that the country is on the wrong track. Not a word about it in the Western media.

 

Putin never intended to go to war with Ukraine and NATO, nor is he driven by a desire to restore the borders of the old Soviet Union. These are all ridiculous accusations that are repeatedly made by the American president and subservient European governments under pressure from the arms lobby and other warmongering and irrational-Russophobe forces. The bottom line is that Western leaders have missed their chances and now have to foot the bill for their folly and imprudence. They have tormented the Russian bear for far too long, neglecting its needs. Now he has taken the strategic initiative.

 

The senile Biden, the neoconservative warmongers in the US State Department, the subservient EU leadership, the naïve NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg – who is desperately looking for an enemy image to justify NATO's existence – they all now stand there like the doused poodles that they are. In their helpless desperation, they also hurt themselves by imposing a new sanctions regime on Russia that further alienated Russia from the West, drove it into the arms of China, and accelerated the economic destruction of large parts of Central and Western Europe. In addition, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who obeys US control compliantly, to the detriment of his country and neighboring states, immediately stopped the ratification of the Nordstrom-2 pipeline, which was supposed to ensure a low-cost and much-needed supply of natural gas to Central and Western Europe.

 

The amateurish circles of American and European policy consultancy – the so-called national security experts in the US State Department and the European Commission – still insist on the correctness of their failed strategic paradigm. They call Vladimir Putin an imperialist invader and a violator of international law because he recognized the breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine as sovereign republics and came to their aid. In doing so, they forgot that the US and its transatlantic partners have often violated international law provisions in recent decades. Indeed, they explicitly based a significant part of their policymaking in the field of international relations on the deliberate negation of international law, in particular its principle of non-intervention. While they had no legitimate reasons for their interventions and regime-change operations, for example in Libya (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2011/03/ us-and-european-foreign-policy-blunder.html) and Syria (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/ 2013/05/disastrous-foreign-policy-failures.html), they demonize Putin for a strategic move to which they cornered him and for which the Russian leader in the interests of the He had legitimate reasons for the survival of his own nation.

 

The true causalities for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as briefly outlined here, remain completely ignored in the public discourse on this topic. Western governments, led by the United States, refuse to acknowledge their misconduct in the malaise.

 

If the news does not soon spread in Western foreign policy circles that any approach to shaping international relations – be it bilateral, multilateral, or global – that ignores geopolitical and geostrategic aspects and the legitimate national interests of other members of the international community is doomed to failure, there will be even worse consequences for European and global security.

 

For the time being, it is important that the transatlantic political centers of power keep a cool head, admit their guilt for the escalation and do not plunge the world into something like a Third World War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Earnest Facade of Lunacy: The Tragicomedy that is U.S. Domestic Politics

People interested in politics might not yet grasp the magnitude of the undignified and mortifying political spectacle in this country. 

There is no doubt that the U.S. is too mighty powerful to be destroyed from the outside. Yet, none outside power with that goal in mind needs to worry. However, there is ample evidence that the job is about to be carried out from the inside by the people of the U.S. themselves and their political representatives.  

Quite visibly, this lunacy of it all is reflected in the field of the more than 20 candidates initially running for the nomination of the Democratic challenger to President Trump in the 2020 election. Their stance on political issues is not just different but utterly unreasonable if not outright nuts and incompetent. Looking at how they try to out-left and out-Trump each other in their attempts to appear distinctive and exclusive leaves no doubt that they are unqualified for the office for which they are running. 

 

Their ideas on open borders, healthcare and voting rights for illegals, abolish ICE, Medicare for all, Green Deals for fighting Climate Change, wealth tax, to name just the major ones, are totally out of line and incompatible with a functioning and orderly society. Even more astounding is the seriousness with which media and news outlets cover the absurdity and futility of that contest. It makes one wonder at the time and effort wasted.

The overall ludicrous lawlessness of the Democratic Party, on the whole, heavily reinforces the foolish picture those candidates provide. Examples wanted? 

•  Watch Democrat Jerry Nadler abusing his role as Chairman of the House Judicial Committee for partisan agitation and the continuously unjustified attempt to impeach the sitting President;  
• Watch the Democratic Party and its head of the House Intelligence Committee, the particularly vile and depraved acting Representative, Adam' Pencil Neck' Schiff, supported by elements of the Deep State, to keep pushing the Russia collusion narrative despite the findings of the Muller Report, after two years of investigation, to the contrary; 
• Watch the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in the State Department and among the foreign relations-pundits on more or less all news stations interpreting President Trump's legitimate foreign affairs policy to improve the long-overdue betterment of relations with Russia as treasonous, even insinuating that Mr. Trump serves as a Russian agent; 
• Watch the neoconservative and neoliberal exponents trying to thrust Mr. Trump into unleashing a war with Iran. On the premise of the recent attack on the Saudi oilfields, for which Yemeni Houthi rebel claimed responsibility but didn't stop the United States from insisting on Iran being solely to blame for the incident. 
  

 

As I am writing these lines, a new chance for the Democrats to impeach Trump and get him out of office before he wins reelection presented itself. A whistleblower claims that Mr. Trump acted inappropriately in a telephone call with the new President of Ukraine. While President Trump considers this just another witch hunt to bring him down, impeachment proceedings are about to be launched, further damaging the Democrat Party. It will undoubtedly lead to nothing. Three years of irrational Trump-hatred seem to have taken reason and common sense out of the radical left. They appear incorrigible and immune to a more conciliatory approach in domestic political relations. 

   

However, the bottom line is that if the indomitable anti-Trump forces aren't able to remove Mr. Trump from office before the 2020 election, their final step for regaining the White House will be a massive, all-out decisive measure of voting fraud. It will be the subject of one of my next blog posts.

2016 U.S. Presidential Election - Political Intuition TRUMPS Propaganda

The United States, and with it the world, got a respite. The utter catastrophe, namely the prolongation of the past eight years' nightmare, so it seems, could be averted. A horrific and ultimately devastating third Obama-term was prevented by denying Hillary Clinton the presidency. Something already to be considered the political miracle of the century. 

Against almost all polls and the united predictions of media pundits and news outlets, Donald Trump got elected to become the 45th president of the United States. The good intuition of some 60 million Americans made them vote for Mr. Trump, despite unparalleled disinformation and defamation campaign against him, carried forth by the mainstream media and advanced on the school grounds and college campuses in the months leading up to the election. They voted for him despite the vitriol spewed at Trump not only from his Democrat opponent in the race but also from certain elements in his political party. But most importantly, they voted for him because their political instinct made them see through the concerted attempt of almost all forces of public information and discourse to cover up for the colossal failure of the first African-American president's presidency. 

Over the years, I have commented on the utter follies of Obama's policies in previous blog entries back to 2009, criticizing the pursuance of his Marxist-utopian notions of politics in domestic and international affairs. Imagine that after that sham of Obama's presidency, some people dare to consider anybody else unfit for that office! Mind-boggling political shortsightedness, cultural parochialism, and ideological prejudice of those who still approve of Obama's job performance. Yet, signs that he had turned the Democratic Party into an ailing enterprise and that he doomed Hillary Clinton's run were already tangible to all those who had kept an open mind, and heart for that matter. As the Daily Caller reported, under Obama, Democrats had lost more than 900 state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 U.S. Congress, and 13 Senate seats.

On regional and local levels, significant numbers of American people had already rejected the advancement of Obama's delusional globalist policies. They neglected human coexistence's ontological necessities and were therefore highly damaging to our social and political coexistence. (for more on the 'Ontological Principles of the Political,' compare my blog essay of November 15, 2015, on "Immigration – U.S. and Europe Governed by Lunacy" https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2015/11/immigration-us-and-europe-governed-by.html). 

However, I emphasized that the lunacy of such policies not only occurs on the side of the progressive Left in this country—the neoconservative elements in the Republican Party also support these ideas. Domestically, out-of-their-mind proponents like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan propped up Obama's policies of open borders and uncontrolled immigration. Internationally, prominent Republican politicians such as John McCain or Lindsay Graham went along with the Middle East's destruction by arming and supporting dubious insurgents and bringing down established nation-state structures. They also endorsed the U.S. government's idiotic stance toward Russia, most of all the aggressive posture and saber-rattling of the U.S. and NATO in Ukraine and the Baltic states. Quite clearly, neglecting other stakeholders' legitimate national interests in global affairs and negating the significant stakes of strategic thinking had turned the attempted imposition of this type of Pax Americana into an absurdity. 

As I made clear in a blog back in April of 2016, after the dropping out of Rand Paul of the Republican presidential preliminaries, only the election of Donald Trump could raise hope for an urgently needed turnaround to bring U.S. policies to its senses. Alas, the overdue reversal of U.S. foreign affairs policies is not a given now where Mr. Trump got elected. It will all depend on whether or not he will prevent the influence of neoconservatives from altering his policy promises. Of paramount importance will be the person the President-elect is going to assign as his secretary of state. Politicians of statesmanlike stature have always acknowledged the supreme significance of foreign affairs in governance and thus dedicated their prime effort and attention to it. 

The radical policies of ignorant and deluded people, who happened to reign over global affairs in the quarter-century gone by since the collapse of the Soviet Union, drove the United States and Western civilization in its entirety to a crossroads. They wasted the chances the post-Cold War order offered by a reckless U.S. strategy aiming at singular global dominance. At the bottom of this move toward a centralized world stood the weakening and indeed dissolution of the nation-state concept, combined with a pseudo-messianic democratic universalism, manifesting itself in attempts and support for interventionist regime-change for instance in Libya, Syria, in Ukraine and the Caucasus, as well as in imposing nation-building in the Middle East and Asia, most foolishly in Afghanistan. This strategic design for a new world order presented us with a new face of contemporary warfare, featuring the advancement of militant progressive secularism and the ethnic and cultural subversion of western societies by pushing and facilitating disproportional immigration from non-western nations and regions. Such strategies aimed to synchronize the masses and prepare the ground for continuous governance by liberal and progressive regimes.

 

In the face of all this, Mr. Trump's victory came at the eleventh hour. His empowerment by way of sufficient Electoral College votes was a clear rejection of globalist policies and politicians, against which Mr. Trump waged his presidential campaign in the first place. His victory also delivered a devastating blow to the hubris of those liberal and progressive elites who thought they had already won the struggle for the political future of the lead nation of the free world. 

 

It remains to be seen if Mr. Trump and his incoming administration will be able to redress, neutralize, and reverse the policy failures of recent years. The scope of what he needs to accomplish is vast. Above all, it ranges from foreign affairs, the pacification of the Middle East, the resetting of relations with the Kremlin, and preventing the U.S.'s political culture from further decline by overcoming the cultural and moral nihilism that has taken hold in significant segments of society and state. Additionally, an important task will be the narrowing of the ethnic and ideological division within the country. 

While the task is not an easy one, all good-willing people should dearly hope for Mr. Trump to succeed. The hour of decision for the survival of this republic as well as our whole civilization has arrived!