Can We Trust Russophobes with Our Foreign Policy?
Paul Craig Roberts
Biden on TV January 19 Threatening Russia with Disastrous Consequences and Being Held Accountable if She Invades Ukraine raises the question why Washington wasn’t held accountable when Washington invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and overthrew Ukraine with a color revolution? It is Washington that has invaded Ukraine, not Russia.
How come it is only Russia who is yet to invade anyone who is to be held accountable?
And how is Biden going to hold Russia accountable and deliver disastrous consequences to Russia?
Washington could not defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, or the Viet Cong, or a third world Chinese army 70 years ago in Korea. No one thinks Washington can defeat a Russian army. If the highly disciplined and motivated Wehrmacht that had the advantage of surprise couldn’t do it, no country can do it.
Note that no member of the presstitute media asked Biden why he has chosen NOT to defuse the situation by accommodating Russia’s security need. Why has Washington decided NOT to give peace a chance? This is the question of our time, and it is not asked.
Such pertinent questions do not occur to Americans, because they are indoctrinated to see Russia as the enemy. It is a holdover from the 20th century Cold War. Americans are accustomed to regarding Russia as the enemy.
Consequently, Americans do not see the danger in a situation in which America’s chief foreign policy officials, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, are Russophobes bubbling over with hatred of Russia. When the people entrusted with critical negotiations with the other side have emotional hatred of the other side, there is no balance. Emotion wins over reason, and the chance for accommodation is lost.
As a former member of the Cold War “Committee on the Present Danger,” I can say that the members of the committee were anti-Soviet. But everyone of us understood that if we permitted emotion to prevail over reason, the situation would become unmanageable. The stakes–nuclear war–were too high. The challenge was to wind down the threat, not to escalate it.
After the Soviet collapse the neoconservatives took over US foreign policy, demolished all the arms control and other agreements hammered out over the Cold War years and have been at work escalating the tensions with Russia since the Clinton regime broke the promise of the US government not to move NATO to Russia’s border.
Russia has been patient with Washington while her strength grew. Today Russia is a preeminent military power backed by another preeminent power, China, and Washington carries on in delusions of omnipotence.
This is a formula for catastrophe.
The situation can be defused extremely easily. Russia is not asking for anything but a sense of security. They have made it completely clear that they will no longer tolerate the sense of insecurity in which they exist. They are not demanding that Washington turn over Ukraine, or Eastern Europe, or Western Europe to them. They have simply said, “Get off our doorstep.”
It is an easy demand with which to agree. President John F. Kennedy saw the necessity of this step many decades ago.
The fact that Washington politics together with neoconservative blind hatred of Russia has prevented this necessary step from being taken leaves open a range of possible miscalculations that could result in the death of life on earth.
The profits and power of the US military/security complex are not worth this risk.