“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
— Verbal Kent, the Usual Suspects
For more than a year we’ve been regaled with headline after headline about how the War in Ukraine is a US war. It’s easy to think that, certainly. We’re the ones who started the process here, at least on the face of it.
Victoria Nuland and her cookies on The Maidan. John McCain and his money and support of Right Sector. Seymour Hersh’s expose on the Nordstream 2 bombing. The seemingly endless billions of materiel from Congress. Even this weekend’s continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown hinged on Ukraine.
The US has the political, economic, and military prowess and rightly should be first considered to be driving this bus towards war. And there are no shortage of commentators in the space helping that narrative along. And none of what I’m implying or about to say absolves these people from their actions which have led us to the current state.
Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of what should have been a fully avoidable war had someone been in charge on the West’s side that wanted peace.
But the West didn’t want peace. It froze the conflict in 2014 with the Minsk Agreements because Vladimir Putin believed German Chancellor Angela Merkel was honorable. He traded liberating the Donbass fully for building Nordstream 2 hoping that the pipeline would finally tie Germany and Russia together in a that bond couldn’t be broken.
This was Putin’s greatest mistake. And he’s still paying for it to this day.
In 2014 Ukraine was in no shape after the rout at Gorlovka to oppose a Russian-backed Donetsk and Lugansk forces to secure both Oblasts which included the important city of Mariupol. The land bridge to Crimea could have been secured then and the entire buildup to this version of today’s conflict avoided.
It would have changed the gameboard coming into 2022.
But Russia always knew that it wasn’t only the US pushing this conflict. That push was coming from the entirety of Europe and the US. One could argue that Putin understood there was never going to be peace without conflict, that the great war to end 300+ years of Russia fighting colonial Europe wasn’t going to end with the building of a pipeline.
But, to his credit, he had to try.
The problem, of course, is exactly this. Russian/European or, more explicitly, Russian/British animosity goes back centuries. Russia’s relationship with Europe is far more complex and violent than that of its relationship with the US.
Russia’s initial invasion created a real problem for the West, particularly the UK, and in that initial land grab, we almost forget that there was an opportunity for a settlement in May of 2022, until British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Ankara and blew up peace talks being brokered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It has been the British military and intelligence agencies acting as the grease between the Ukrainians and the Americans to ensure that the conflict continued. As my friend Alex Krainer always says, “All road lead to London.” And George Soros’ arguments about the clash of two civilizations, Open vs. Closed Societies, go back much farther than his raid on the Bank of England:
In his address to the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos in May 2022 George Soros explained that we are witnessing a clash between two models of governance. This was only slightly misleading: models don’t wage war on one another; it is the stakeholders in these models that are fighting. Soros characterized the two opposing sides as “open societies,” vs. “closed societies,” where open societies are liberal democracies that respect human rights, and closed societies are autocracies.
But Soros’s “open” societies are in fact oligarchies concealed behind faux democratic facades. To believe Soros, we’d have to accept that the trillionaire oligarchs in charge of open societies are die-hard defenders of democracy and human rights, willing to shed blood and treasure in their defense.
The term Neoconservative rightly describes a particular type of person who holds foreign policy ideals which are indistinguishable with that of British foreign policy going back over 200 years. They exist within the Soros framework of creating global governance by oligarchs at the helm of an open system that they argue benefits all of humanity.
This is a lie. What it really does is pull back the curtain on what the real goal is, total global domination through control over the value of money which fuels endless wars to subjugate the unruly and recalcitrant.
These ideas were codified by Halford Mackinder early in the 20th century, which I’ve written about and discussed ad nauseum.
Because of the dominance of Mackinder’s ideas and the policies erected to support it, the world has been subjected to endless conflict over his conception of the “World Island,” which is basically Eurasia.
And that’s why there can be no losing for the West in Ukraine. To the Mackinderists at the top of the power structures in London, Washington D.C. and Brussels, losing Ukraine means losing the entire world, because they have this very-outdated view of world geography.
Mackinder-ism in today’s world is a tautology, reducing to: We have to control the Heartland because we can’t lose the Heartland.
Because of the dominance of Mackinder’s ideas and the policies erected to support it, the world has been subjected to endless conflict over his conception of the “World Island,” which is basically Eurasia.
US foreign policy is shaped by these ideas, but the roots of it becoming so go back to Woodrow Wilson, if not further. Richard Poe has done amazing work illuminating the history on this that many would rather forget about. From creating communism, to their influence to stoke the US Civil War, to even creating “George Soros” himself.
You can listen to our 2.5 hour conversation on these topics in the podcast Richard and I did over the summer if you need a refresher course.
The Willfully Blind Hand
Denying the hand of the British Foreign Office, City of London, and the influence over US foreign and domestic policy is like denying that such a thing as history even exists. It’s easy to see once you look for it.
The question you should be asking yourself is who is driving the bus today, the US, the UK, or both?
It’s easy to believe the UK has no influence here. But if that’s the case why did they work so hard to neuter Donald Trump’s presidency at every turn (Christopher Steele, Joseph Mifsud)? Why did RussiaGate wind up with Trump being impeached twice, once for Joe Biden’s crimes in Ukraine?
When you trace the political lineage of people like Former CIA Director Gina Haspel, Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, and Fiona Hill, all of whom threw their boss under the bus for Nancy Pelosi’s inane witch hunt of Trump, you come a British cropper every time.
Trump’s only win as president was keeping us out of a direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine and Syria. But he was maneuvered by all of these people and Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, et.al. into doing the very things to ensure when he left office all the groundwork for the present conflict would proceed exactly as it has.
No deal with North Korea, severing diplomatic relations with Russia, empowering Polish and Baltic Russophobia, doing Israel’s bidding at every turn, every day in the Trump White House on foreign policy was “Opposite Day.” Whatever Barack Obama did on behalf of Europe and Davos he undid, playing right into the British goals of putting the US on track under Joe Biden to end up where we are today.
It doesn’t matter if he did this to support ‘our greatest ally’ to fight for a proper Brexit from the near comical evil represented by the European Union. Like Putin’s soft spot for Germany, Trump’s soft spot for the Union Jack made him susceptible to both flattery, a personal weakness of his, and incredibly biased ‘intelligence’ he got from his advisers.
Maybe a second Trump term will have him battle-hardened to see things more clearly, but I’m not holding out hope.
The Need for War
This need for Ukraine to ‘win the war’ is a uniquely Neoconservative talking point. It comes from the need to break the dominance of the US economy over global markets. For those who can only think in terms of the US being the “Evil Empire” of today I want to ask you a simple question,
Why would the US embroil themselves in a fight against Russia and/or China and all the tail risks that come with those wars when they could maintain their current dominance through working with both countries, keep the dollar the universal trade settlement currency and fix its problems?
In other words, folks, where’s the bono for the US in the Cui Bono analysis?
Because I don’t see any upside here. What I see are nothing but risks and bad returns on investment.
The US doesn’t need Russia’s oil and gas. We do not need the other natural resources like aluminum, timber, coal, iron, copper, etc. We make enough food to export to the world.
So, what’s the deal?
And don’t give me that tired, Malthusian, finite planet bullshit loved by so many, frankly, leftist ignoramuses. We are nowhere near the event horizon of the finite planet model. Just because you believe in it doesn’t make it true.
What is true is that US leadership is clearly operating outside the mandate of what’s good for America. And if you don’t ask simple questions like the ones above then how can you ever begin to think outside of the simple explanation put in front of you?
We see the US today as an empire in decline. But this empire was built on a particular model, the British model. And if you do the basic trace through history you can make a very compelling argument (not the only argument, mind you), that the US empire is simply the remnant of the British Empire outsourced to its former colonies.
That implies if we, as Americans, come to grips with this, make sense of it, then we can reframe our criticisms of US domestic and foreign policy as something other than incompetence mixed with a generous dollop of hubris. We can ask the hard question that maybe, just maybe, this is an operation to destroy the US from within for the purpose of transferring its power back ‘across the pond’ to either the UK, Europe or China.
Then all you really have to do is look at who’s really pulling the strings, who’s getting screwed and who’s opportunistically piling on during the chaos for their own benefit.
Why Now? Why US?
But when it comes to Ukraine, this has always been the UK’s war. This is why there has been such turmoil at the top of the British government, why at every turn they have been there making sure this thing escalates at a consistent pace and their partners in Congress, the State Dept., the CIA, the DoD and the K-Street think tanks are all in on the insane moralizing about America’s duty to Ukraine.
This is:
Why they are sending UK troops to Ukraine.
Why the Royal Navy is moving into the Black Sea.
Why they gave Ukraine Storm Shadow missiles to shoot at Crimea.
Why Biden approved sending cluster munitions to kill Russian civilians.
Why they helped Ukraine blow up the Kerch Strait bridge twice.
Why the Poles were set up to be the trip wire for a NATO Article 5 invocation.
Why Zelenskyy is allowed to run around the world begmanding for money.
Why Neocons on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill want an open-ended flood of money there.
Why all discussions of peace talks get shut down before they are allowed to be considered.
Why Putin invokes the “Anglo-Saxons” when discussing the war.
Why Medvedev implies London as the decision center needing a cleansing.
There is more than a distant whiff of desperation the air now over Ukraine coming from the usual suspects. Kevin McCarthy’s last minute deal to get Ukraine back door funding could cost him his speakership this week. Good.
The American people don’t want this war. They don’t want to fund it or fight it. Putin is being maneuvered into a decision that either destroys him politically in 2024 or pushes him into becoming literally Putler.
It’s 1938 all over again folks and the historical record isn’t as cut and dried as we were all taught in school.
This isn’t an existential crisis for the US, but it is for the old colonial powers of Europe, especially the UK.
It’s beyond time we face that honestly.
Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.
