EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis): Our readers know that I like to include left-leaning authors on our website when they are independent-minded and they focus on pursuing the truth against established media and interests. One such author is Jeffrey Sachs, one of the greatest economists of our time WHO was named one of the “hundred most influential people of our time” in 2004 and 2005 (please link here to see his full biography – it reads like a novel…) When an intellectual powerhouse like Jeffrey Sachs accuses the neocons and their allies in the DC “War Party” of the disaster in Ukraine we all have to listen…
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Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
June 27, 2022
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
” [T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony? ”
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence. In addition to serving as Bush’s Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden’s Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: “[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”
The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West’s economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their “boomerang” effect on the rest of the world has been large. Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s. Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
https://www.other-news.info/ukraine-is-the-latest-neocon-disaster/
Yes, tragically it is.
The article says:
“The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.”
Long wars can bring the bankruptcy of USA ,
as it is very costly to maintain troops abroad. Lets remember that it took 1 million$ to keep a US soldier in Iraq for a year! The barbaric Ottoman Empire lasted so long, expanding practically every year, because they LOOTED ,SOLD OR USED AS SLAVES the occupied countries and peoples, something US abhors .
The democratization of the WHOLE PLANET and adhering to International Law is a nobler way of bringing PEACE on EARTH, so we can all enjoy the ABUNDANCE technology can provide to ALL OF US !
(Watch ABUNDANCE in You Tube by Peter Diamandis.)
And you would trust these corrupt DC establishment actors to bring “democratization” to the whole planet? P-lease..
Exactly. People need to notice the subtlety of the slogans. “International Law” has lately been thrown out as the USA now pushes submission to the “Rules Based Order.” Of course the USA is the one promulgating the rules for the benefit of the New World Order’s various agendas. People are not exactly sold as slaves by the NWO, but they and their governments are made indentured servants to the banker/CEO/politico class.
The United States of America has never been a democracy, and it lasted as a republic for only a short time.
It is an actually an oligarchy cloaking itself in the results of manipulated elections. The only trouble with the author’s negotiations proposition is that — as Russia has already observed — The United States of America is “agreement incapable.” That is to say the United States of America has a long history of not keeping its word, i.e. breaking its treaties through some high-sounding manipulated pretext. Hence its puppets such as the EU and NATO cannot keep their word either. Written agreements are pointless as the only ones the USA wants abundance for are it’s own oligarchs, everyone else pounds sand eventually (when they are no longer useful to said oligarchs).
Aged like milk, I’d say.