How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine

Something I have noticed: FTA: To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin.

This is a long read. It’s well researched and written. It gives a great history of recent world events and politics.

This is a very, very long comprehensive history of what mostly went wrong.. And who went wrong. It took me longer than most because my eyes are compromised. My own attention was focused on my own Life 101 throughout much of this period. I am grateful to the author for what seems to be a fair account and to OP for posting it. I am sharing it with others.

Outstanding article. It would be hard to synthesize it for a book report. But some of the characterizations about our recent “leaders” were fascinating, including Presidents and “experts.” This is only one of many worthy notes: [President Trump] “His appointments in April 2018 of two notorious Russia hawks—the ambitious yet unimaginative Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and the simple-minded and comically combative John Bolton as national security advisor—ensured that America would continue to slide down the same path toward a confrontation in Eurasia.” Agree with earlybird. Thank you for posting.

In olden thymes Luianne features artless like this as "Weedend Reades as we had more time to read them. This one was so omorehensiive and wellwriten. It was not a chore to read it. Like #4,that paragraph about Pompeo and Bolton was one of my outtakes. I already knew Victoria Newland was in this up to her eyebrows. Had forgotten MdCain's involvement. He crashed more than that plane. I was never a Condi Rice fan. Less so after I realized she was being\d some of the most disastrous appointments of Trump 1.0. McMaster, the SecDef guy who read Marus Aurelius, Kelly. Trump trusted her. because the Swamp was new to him. No more! I was stunned to see Fox employing Pompeo as its "expert" during yesterday's summit. What a joke!

It is a fine article, and it makes a point that needs to be understood. Russia has legitimate national security interests. They will not always align with the independent states along its borders. And there are times when interlocking military alliances to secure those states can threaten them and global stability more than they support it. The Great War happened because interlocking alliances and inflexible mobilization schedules triggered a continental war over a political assassination and a balkan conflict. Arguably, the Nazi Soviet pact, intended to ally the dictators against the weakened West, had the perversely appropriate effect of putting Nazi Germany on Stalin's border. Exactly where Hitler wanted to be. Exactly where Stalin should not have wanted the him. Extending American power to the edge of the Russian border was likely a bad idea. Some nations are better served as buffer states who remain scrupulously neutral when it comes to alliances. Poland was one; the Ukraine is another.

What made the invasion of Iraq an even bigger mistake was that they were the perfect offset to Iran. Neither country could cause much trouble in the Middle East because they were busy fighting each other for decades.

Here I come with the contrarian view again. Too many here find this drivel compelling. I don't. It's about 1/3 fact, 1/3 non-sense, and conveniently omits 1/3 of actual useful historical context. And it's entirely crafted to cast Putin as the good guy and the Russian Empire as "good things" for humanity. So basically, it's pro-Putin propaganda. Which is fine if you think Putin is a great guy. At this late date, most people don't -- not even the formerly pro-Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas who are now living in a hell-on-earth caused by the provocations of people like one-time Putin agitator Igor Girkin Strelkov (who's now in prison for speaking out against the boss), mastermind of the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 and who is "credited" with turning the Donbas from a hot bed area of partisan disagreements into a hot civil war zone. Furthermore, regardless of the interminable naval-gazing we can all do about NATO expansion, notice how Reynolds conveniently overlooks the real security concerns of the former Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic states, all of whom raced headlong to join NATO in the 1990s -- and didn't cease their efforts until they were admitted. NATO didn't recruit them, though Reynolds would like to give the impression that lame brains like Nuland and Brzezinski made it all happen. At the same time, Reynolds quotes meticulously curated data showing how NATO accession wasn't popular in either Ukraine or Georgia in the '00s. That may have been true then, but it's probably not true now. For evidence, we can look no further than the formerly stalwart neutral countries of Sweden and Finland. We can't possibly get an accurate poll from Ukraine or Georgia today, but reliable polls of Swedes and Finns show super majority support for NATO accession after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A key to the pro-Russian propagandists' narrative (I've seen it before elsewhere) is the notion that America's relations with post-Soviet Russia have been nothing but antagonistic -- as if we've never done a single positive thing for Russia. Reynolds' piece drips with this same non-sense. Excuse me, but in late 2001 GW Bush relaxed export controls on oil drilling equipment that could drill through permafrost, and suddenly Urals oil made Russia an oil exporting powerhouse. And this wasn't simple commercial equipment that any number of other countries could have supplied, because at the time Exxon was the only company in the world that had figured out how to drill through permafrost without breaking the drill bit. [In subsequent years, it appears that French company Schlumberger has also figured it out.] Putin desperately wanted to extract Urals oil, and Bush made that dream of Putin's come true. For several years, Russian GDP growth was accelerated because of Urals oil. Today, the only reason anyone inside OPEC pays any mind to Russia is because of Urals oil. The unfortunate reality I see with all these pro-Putin apologists is a fascination for "strong men" which is incredibly stupid, because as anyone who has ever studied our own Constitution knows, the checks and balances tend to assure that "strong men" either never get the reins of power or do not get to hold it for long. And though "strong men" can occasionally be a net positive for a country, if they stay in power for too long, their effects are usually negative. Russia is also no bastion of "family values" either: It has recently been the country with the highest divorce rate in the world, and it has the highest incidence of HIV of any country in the world. Whether the HIV is transmitted by intravenous drug use or intimate sexual contact matters not -- neither bespeaks a nation of "family values." I'm also appalled at Reynolds giving us a recent history of the Eastern Orthodox Church while conveniently overlooking the fact the Stalin had all of the Russian Orthodox Priests -- the "real" ones -- killed off during his reign and replaced with KGB agents. So the establishment of autocephaly separate from Moscow was entirely justified and probably should have been undertaken just after the end of the Cold War. Ultimately, no "empire" lasts forever, and for good reason: While they might be beneficent to majorities of populations early on, eventually they become burdensome even for their own citizens. The last empire with global reach to dissolve was the British Empire, in 1947. Just before that, the "1000 year Reich" came to end (after 12 years, thank God) along with Imperial Japan, and just two decades earlier, Ausria-Hungary. In prior centuries, we saw French and Spanish empires crumble. The "Russian Empire" has been living on borrowed time for far too long, having been buttressed by American and British war materiel in WWII and perpetuated by communist ideology for several more decades. Many indicators now point to an economic collapse, which will make its end mirror that of Germany in WWI. PDJT may accelerate that with deft use of sanctions. I, for one, hope our President succeeds. I wonder for whom Reynolds is pulling.