Since the Trump administration started pushing for a settlement in Ukraine, I’ve seen a lot of people online claiming that Trump has fallen for Putin’s propaganda about the reasons behind the Ukraine war. But I think the opposite is true. I think these people are victims of U.S. propaganda. They’ve believed what they’ve heard from the Biden administration and mainstream Western media, most of which is either lies or, at the very least, slanted.
I see a lot of people claiming the war had nothing to do with NATO enlargement and that statement is simply not backed up by the evidence. And Western diplomats have known that NATO enlargement was a major concern for Russia for decades.
NATO IS A REAL ISSUE FOR RUSSIA – AND EVERYONE HAS KNOWN THAT FOR DECADES
Russians have been complaining about NATO enlargement since well before Putin. Their complaints go back to Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the 1990s. And everyone in who pays attention (even Americans) understood this. The whole “NATO enlargement isn’t a real issue” narrative is a recent piece of U.S. propaganda to coincide with the 2022 invasion.
The background is that in 1990 U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch” eastwards.
The Berlin Wall had come down three months earlier, and Western leaders were openly discussing whether a divided Germany would be reunified, something that Moscow feared — and if that happened, whether NATO forces would ultimately be stationed in what was then East Germany, something that terrified Moscow.
Here’s what he actually said:
“NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
Now – this promise never made it into writing. Nevertheless, it was made and accept by Russia on good faith.
Gorbachev’s position was that he trusted the U.S. would uphold the “spirit” of the agreement.
In an interview with Russia Beyond on June 27, 2010, Mr. Gorbachev was asked why he did not insist on the promises made to him – particularly Mr. Baker’s promise that NATO would not move one inch further east– be legally encoded?
This was his response:
“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice-Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.”
Later, in a Bild interview in April 2017, Mr. Gorbachev said:
“… . We cannot blame anyone for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, many people in the West were secretly rubbing their hands and felt something like a flush of victory – including those who had promised us: ‘We will not move one-centimeter further East.’
He said that the decision for the US and its allies to expand NATO into the east was made in 1993. “I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990,” he declared.
In the latter, he said, “… However, the West then used Russia’s weakness after the dissolution of the Soviet Union to declare itself the “winner” of the Cold War. The principle of equality in international relations was forgotten, and thus we all ended up where we are today.
Yeltsin wrote in a September 1993 letter to Bill Clinton. “We understand, of course, that any possible integration of East European countries into NATO will not automatically lead to the alliance somehow turning against Russia. But it is important to take into account how our public opinion might react to that step.”
But Yeltsin also cited what he cast as assurances given to Soviet officials during the negotiations on German unification, writing that “the spirit of the treaty on the final settlement…precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the East.”
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AMERICANS UNDERSTOOD THAT RUSSIA WOULDN’T REACT WELL TO NATO ENLARGEMENT
People often try to tell me that the U.S. doesn’t enlarge NATO – countries apply to join NATO. That’s a nice farytale, perpetuated by American propaganda to feed the gullible.
According to the NY Times in 1998:
“Despite fierce objections from Russia, the United States is pushing NATO to start membership negotiations with Ukraine and Georgia at an alliance summit meeting in Bucharest in April, diplomats said Wednesday.”
The U.S. under Bill Clinton had an agenda to enlarge NATO.
As Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute, wrote:
“Even that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.””
Speaking of Albright, she gave a speech before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1997 in which she answered the question “Why we are enlarging NATO”:
“…goal of our policy. It is to build, for the very first time, a peaceful, democratic and undivided transatlantic community…. Which democratic nations in Europe are important to our security and which are willing and able to contribute to our security?… as we plan the enlargement of NATO… The United States has important security interests in central and eastern Europe…. We have made a particular effort to reach out to Ukraine. We are working towards signing a NATO-Ukraine document and seek to strengthen NATO’s practical cooperation with Ukraine, to support the new Polish-Ukrainian peacekeeping battalion, to bolster military reform, to enhance interoperability with NATO, and to encourage Ukraine’s cooperation with its neighbors… President Clinton has been absolutely clear with President Yeltsin about the lines we will not cross and the barriers we will not build as we construct the NATO-Russia partnership… First, NATO enlargement will go forward with no delay…. Let me also stress that the point of the NATO-Russia agreement is not to convince Russia to agree to NATO enlargement. We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement. The point is to advance a goal that is worthwhile in its own right: our interest in promoting the integration of a democratic Russia and acting together to meet the challenges of the next century…. I do not expect the Russian government to change its mind about NATO’s plans to take in new members.”
“Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer.”
“George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.””
Even Australia’s former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, called the decision to enlarge NATO “an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system at the beginning of this century.”
Among others, Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995. That’s when Burns, then a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, reported to Washington that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
In 2008, in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Burns wrote:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . . I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
“After his reelection in November 1996, Clinton followed through on NATO expansion … As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage, a gathering storm of “stab in the back” theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
“Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.”
For the people who believe the U.S. doesn’t “push” countries into NATO, but that they “apply” to join, former CIA director Burns says differently:
“Where we made a serious strategic mistake … was in later letting inertia to drive us to push for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, despite Russia’s deep historical attachments to both states and even stronger protestations. That did indelible damage, and fed the appetite of a future Russian leadership for getting even.”
– Burns, “The Back Channel,” 2019
WikiLeaks released the full Burns memo from 2008, which says (in part):
Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. … Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership. … Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.
So don’t try and tell me “it has nothing to do with NATO enlargement”.
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Weeks before Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Putin claimed that Russia’s concerns about NATO enlargement were being ignored. “We need to resolve this question now … [and] we hope very much our concern will be heard by our partners and taken seriously,” he later said.
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If we go back to the late 1990s, even NATO understood that “the idea of Ukraine’s joining NATO is not very popular with the Ukrainians”. What the U.S. need was a change of government in Ukraine.
THE UKRAINE SITUATION STARTED WHEN THE U.S. ENGINEERED A “COUP” IN 2004
Then there were US-supported / engineered coups in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.
Many people in the West have this idea that the 2004 and 2014 uprising in Ukraine were spontaneous and that the U.S.A. wasn’t involved, which is pretty naive to anyone who has studied the history of the United States’ attempts at regime change (eg Operation Ajax, etc). There’s a model they have followed for over 75 years: covertly funnel money into the country for years, use it to create chaos, combine that with economic sanctions to make life difficult for the citizens, use friendly / controlled media to create anti-government propaganda, train / support a rebellion, promise that rebellion positive coverage and post-coup support, then position the coup when it happens as “a spontaneous uprising”.
The short version about 2004 is that US government agencies spent $280.48 million “to aid political organizations in Ukraine” in the fiscal year 2002 alone, including $157.92 million under the 1992 Freedom Support Act. Dick Morris, the former chief campaign adviser to Bill Clinton, (who resigned after a tabloid reported that he had a relationship with a call girl) was secretly advising Yushchenko’s team. Yushchenko, the U.S.’s preferred candidate, was married to a U.S. citizen who was a former U.S. State Department official who worked for the Reagan administration, the U.S. Treasury and the United States Congress. Ron Paul said the USG had “sent US taxpayer dollars into Ukraine in an attempt to influence the outcome”; Jonathan Steele, former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, wrote in 2004, that the U.S. had “exploited and financed people’s power”; Ian Traynor, the Guardian’s Europe editor wrote that the US was “engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience”. But Americans have recently been convinced it was “a spontaneous uprising”.
“When the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia’s most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.” The Guardian
The Orange Revolution was funded and co-ordinated by the US, according to the late Ian Traynor, the Guardian’s Europe editor.
In 2004, he wrote:
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.
But while the gains of the orange-bedecked “chestnut revolution” are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. “There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,” the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade, Vojislav Koštunica.
(Lukashenko is *still* the President of Belarus, BTW, has been since the post was created in 1994, he refers to himself as “Europe’s last dictator”.)
But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.
The operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.
Jonathan Steele, former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian in 2004:
Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by the US, which refuses to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic to its side.
In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls, prompting Russia to do likewise, though apparently to a lesser extent.
Steele again a few months later:
The way the US has exploited and financed “people’s power”, first in the Philippines in 1986, to a lesser extent in eastern Europe in 1989, and strongly in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine since 1999, came under the spotlight.
Even some Ukrainians and American politicians in 2004 believed the U.S. were involved:
The Guardian’s Nick Paton Walsh writing from Moscow:
Ukrainian MPs are seeking a parliamentary investigation into allegations that money from the US government was used to help fund the opposition during the recent electoral campaign.
Ron Paul, a Texas congressman, said in comments posted on the congressional website: “President Bush said last week that ‘Any election [in Ukraine], if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence. Unfortunately, it seems that several US government agencies saw things differently and sent US taxpayer dollars into Ukraine in an attempt to influence the outcome.” He said millions were sent by the US Agency for International Development to an NGO in Kiev called the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative, which then sent the money on to “numerous Ukrainian” NGOs, many of which were “blatantly in favour of Viktor Yushchenko”.
And Matt Kelley from the Associated Press:
The Bush administration has spent more than $65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders disputed runoff election. and helping to underwriteexit polls indicating he won last month’s disputed runoff election.
… officials acknowledge some of the money helped train groups and individuals opposed to the Russian-backed government candidate – people who now call themselves part of the Orange revolution.
The U.S. Agency for International Development also funds the Center for Ukrainian Reform Education, which produces radio and television programs aiming to educate Ukrainian citizens about reforming their nation’s government and economy. The center also sponsors press clubs and education for journalists.
And that’s just the stuff we know about. Like USAID’s leaked involved in building the covert ZunZuneo social media network in Cuba, which they tried to hide through “a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit[ed] unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the US government”, and Operation Ajax, the covert overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 (which the USG denied for 50 years), we don’t know what we don’t know. But what we DO know, is that the U.S. spent millions of dollars over many years trying to create regime change in Ukraine prior to 2004.
Plausible Deniability: Using contractors, NGOs, and shell companies allows the U.S. to distance itself from controversial operations, even as it directs their strategy.
In Andrew Wilson’s book “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution”, he writes:
The official figures are that all US government agencies spent $280.48 million in aid to Ukraine in the fiscal year 2002, including $157.92 million under the 1992 Freedom Support Act. The latter included $74 million through USAID, and $25 million for the US State Department Public Diplomacy programme.
What do you think they were trying to accomplish with that investment?
Dick Morris, the former chief campaign adviser to Bill Clinton, (who resigned after a tabloid reported that he had a relationship with a call girl) admitted to a clandestine meeting in an unnamed East European capital with members of Yushchenko’s team, at which he advised them that a big exit poll would not only be useful in helping to minimise fraud, but that it might also help to bring protesters out on to the streets if it indicated an obvious steal.
One thing that the U.S. media neglected to mention when talking about the preferred U.S. candidate in 2004, Yushchenko, was that he was married to a US citizen of Ukrainian descent, Kateryna Yushchenko, was a former U.S. State Department official who worked for the Reagan administration, the U.S. Treasury and the United States Congress. She was also co-founder and the vice-president of Ukraine-USA Foundation.
But even getting Yushchenko elected couldn’t speed up getting Ukraine into NATO.
Der Spiegel: The former head of the National Bank, Yushchenko, was once elected president in December 2004, with 51.9 percent in the course of the Orange Revolution – also with the help of millions of dollars from the USA. But for his course of leading the country to NATO as quickly as possible, he did not find a majority among the people.
Most Ukrainians didn’t want to join NATO – until the U.S. continued ran two successive coups in the country, then got their new pro-NATO governments to promote the idea.
Sascha Krader from Portland State University, in his paper “Template Revolutions: Marketing U.S. Regime Change in Eastern Europe“:
Between 2000 and 2005, Russia-allied governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and (not discussed in this paper) Kyrgyzstan were overthrown through bloodless upheavals. Though Western media generally portrayed these coups as spontaneous, indigenous and popular (‘people power’) uprisings, the ‘color revolutions’ were in fact outcomes of extensive planning and energy ─ much of which originated in the West. The United States, in particular, and its allies brought to bear upon post-communist states an impressive assortment of advisory pressures and financing mechanisms, as well as campaign technologies and techniques, in the service of ‘democracy assistance’.
The other U.S. agency that has worked extensively in Ukraine has need the National Endowment for Democracy aka NED.
NED was founded by Allen Weinstein.
According to the Washington Post back in 1991:
Weinstein founded the Center for Democracy in 1984 as an umbrella for his global meddling. He dispatched election-monitoring teams to the Philippines, Panama and Nicaragua that are credited with having helped topple undemocratic regimes in those countries through the ballot box.
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” agrees Weinstein. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.
And just to keep it cozy, Biden’s CIA Director William J. Burns sits on the NED board.
The Chinese government has a pretty good history of NED’s involvement in regime change.
S0 – is that a “coup”?
I think it depends on how we define “coup”.
When a country spends hundreds of millions of dollars inside a foreign country in order to bring about regime change, which succeeds, I think that is a “coup”. We can put fancy words around it, call it “supporting the democratic process” if you like, but then so can Russia and Iran if they interfere in the U.S. democratic process and Americans should just cop it on the chin.
When one country is interfering in another country’s elections, using money and influence to remove one government in favour of another, by engineering protests and uprisings, by manipulating the media, faking exit polls, using NGOs to covertly spread disinformation, then in my book it’s a coup.
But whatever we call it, the U.S. did it in Ukraine in 2004… and then again in 2014.
2014
On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on January 28, 2014, was published on YouTube
This is in the middle of the Maidan protests.
In their phone conversation, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should be in the government after Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster, to include Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a former European Central Banker, and in what ways they might achieve that transition.
They were basically planning on who was going to run the Ukraine government
Let’s listen to that call again.
Back to former CIA director Burns:
“I think he [Putin] was surprised by the pace of events, the speed with which Yanukovych abandoned the scene. He responded in the only way I think that he knew how, and the only way he thought would work in support of Russia’s interests were, if you talk about Russia’s sphere of influence, Ukraine was the reddest of red lines from Putin’s point of view. I’m sure in the Kremlin, there were contingency plans that had already been developed for retaking Crimea. Not that I think Putin was planning on that happening at that moment in history, but you can see quickly how he came to the conclusion that Russia [should] attack decisively to assert its interests, and swallowing up Crimea in a blatant act of Russian aggression was the obvious conclusion for him.” (Interview with PBS)
British journalist Peter Hitchens:
“I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis. I know that Ukraine’s current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.”
The timing of the 2022 invasion itself came as a result of two things – Biden’s refusal to discuss Ukraine’s entry into NATO with Putin, and Putin’s conclusion that the Minsk agreements were a sham, being used to stall negotiations while Ukraine was being armed by the West.
“In recent months, the German and French leaders in 2015, Merkel and François Hollande, have declared that the Minsk 2 agreement on Donbas autonomy was only a manoeuvre on their part to allow the Ukrainians the time to build up their armed forces. This is what Russian hardliners always believed, and by 2022, Putin himself seems to have come to the same conclusion.”
As for the argument that a country should be able to make its own decisions, eg Ukraine should have the right to join NATO, that’s a great idea – but it isn’t how major powers, including the USA, think about the world. Keep in mind that the U.S. inserted itself into the 2014 Ukrainian coup, deciding who the new government would be. And of course the United States has a long history of overthrowing governments, including, in recent decades, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And some of us remember Hillary Clinton’s giddy statement when they overthrew Libya’s Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”
And of course there’s a long list of countries where the USA has been involved in regime change, either directly or indirectly, when they didn’t like the way that country was heading.
Even during the early stages of the Ukraine war in 2022, one of the most senior US officials in the Pacific refused to rule out military action against Solomon Islands if it were to allow China to establish a military base there, saying that the security deal between the countries presented “potential regional security implications” for the US and other allies.
So the idea that Russia needs to respect other nations sovereignty, when the other major powers don’t, is a nice idea, but not one that is taken seriously by anyone in geopolitics, including the USA. It’s only used as propaganda against their enemies. The real world works on the basis of geopolitical realism.
“In short, the real world remains a realist world.”
“The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, John Mearsheimer
WHAT WAS THE UKRAINE WAR ALL ABOUT FROM THE U.S. PERSPECTIVE?
Probably a few things.
1. Weakening Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been trying to keep Russia weak by chopping away at its regional alliances and trade relationships. Why? A few reasons. Grabbing the oil and gas business away from Russia. And just good ol’ revenge for the Cold War. Just like WWI and WWII (and most wars before it), the Cold War was always mostly about economics and control over global trade. The U.S. wanted to control as much of global trade as possible and the Soviet Union was, for a few decades, their only major competition. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed in the early 1990s, the U.S. tried to grab as much control over global trade as they could, as quickly as possible.
MiddleEastEye: “The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow. An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.”
Trump’s demand for Ukraine’s mineral resources is just him saying the quiet part out loud. This is what the U.S. has always wanted – Ukraine’s riches.
Telegraph: “The US wants to get their hands on the trillions of rare earth minerals in Ukraine to keep them out of the hands of China.”
2. Isolating China. These days, of course, Russia isn’t the major economic threat it once was. These days it is China that the U.S. is mostly worried about. And rightly so – China is an economic force. Weakening Russia means weakening one of China’s largest allies in BRICS. Getting hold of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals keeps them out of the hands of China.
3. Funding the Military Industrial Complex. This is probably the most important reason. The U.S. military and their business partners (including their allies) love a good war (which is why they make sure they have one at least every decade).
“The United States has been at war for two out of every three years since 1989, fighting seven different wars.”
“Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities” John J. Mearsheimer
Military Keynesianism was perfected during WWII and helped save the U.S. economy. It works on multiple levels. The U.S. taxpayers fund the businesses that make weapons and other military supplies (everything from clothing to condoms, software, food, etc) with Pentagon and “aid” contracts. Most of the aid, of course, never leaves the United States. It just goes from the Treasury to the bank accounts of American companies, who then provide a line of credit to the recipient. A couple of hundred billion dollars here and there really helps drive those businesses and their profitability. Let’s say the war is between Country A and Country B and the U.S. is supporting Country A. If Country A wins, and Country B is defeated, the chances are the U.S. military (and allies) will continue for many years to come to supply Country A with weapons and, if they overthrow the government of Country B and install a friendly government there, they will get to supply them with weapons as well. If Country A’s infrastructure is destroyed during the war, guess who rebuilds it? U.S. companies (and allies) – again often with “aid” provided by taxpayers. And, again, most of that money never actually leaves the country. It goes into the bank accounts of American companies and their executives – who, in turn, use some of that to help fund a Congressional campaign here and there. If Country A loses the war – as is the case in Ukraine – then the U.S. will use that to scare the countries close to Country A into spending more money on weapons and joining NATO – which means more weapons sales.
It seems a guy called Bruce Jackson single-handedly drove a lot of the NATO enlargement project for Clinton – not just convincing European countries to join, but also convincing U.S. senators and congressmen to get behind NATO enlargement. Who was Jackson? “… a Washington neo-conservative, a member of the Project for the New American Century, and friend and colleague of other prominent neo-conservatives such as deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century. A former investment banker, he’s also president of a private NGO called the US Committee on Nato, one of the most influential in eastern Europe. He has also headed a neo-conservative think-tank called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. And he’s a former vice-president at Lockheed. His father, William Harding Jackson, was deputy director of the CIA from 1951 to 1956.”
According to Jackon,“When we started in 1995, around 70% of editorial boards and 80% of think-tanks were on the record as being opposed to Nato expansion.”
So a former vice-president of Lockheed Martin, whose father was high up in the CIA, flew around the world and made it his mission to get countries to join NATO – and to buy more American weapons.
“… When eastern European countries join Nato, they have to modernize their forces to be able to contribute capabilities that are interoperable with other Nato forces. In practice, this often means buying F-16s from Lockheed…”
(source)
In 2023, the 31 NATO members accounted for $1341 billion, equal to 55 per cent of the world’s military expenditure. (source)
The majority of spending, of course, comes from the USA, which has a defence budget of nearly one trillion dollars a year. (source)
And the U.S.A. is, of course, the world’s largest arms exporter. (source)
Now… I’m no arms dealer. But I’m willing to bet that a lot of money in brown paper bags (or Panama front companies) changes hands when it comes to multi-billion dollar arms deals. U.S. arms manufacturers are going to support U.S. politicians who support arms sales. They are also going to support European politicians who support buying U.S. arms.
It’s all about the NATO Benjamins or what I call “The Foreign Aid Shell Game“.