Russia and Ukraine: Know and understand US objectives

Standard media reportage of recent events has become so dogmatic and simplistic, there is no longer even a vague distinction between journalism and propaganda. Dissent and attempts to contextualize such events are treated as seditious inhumanity, ignorance of history, and even foreign agency or espionage as one has experienced. Therefore, in the few short paragraphs ahead, I will attempt to “shed light”, as it were, as an observer and critic of US foreign policy, on how standard narratives and media fare of late have been grotesquely disingenuous.

In the 1990s, the US adopted a strategy declaring its intention to block “the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” Influential American strategists have long desired the breakup of Russia to allow direct access to the country’s vast and abundant natural resources. For years, major US think tanks have advocated “destabilizing the Russian regime,” with the hope of eventual regime change. Should such efforts succeed—unlikely given Russia’s military might which includes a nuclear arsenal, Russia might be transformed into a staging ground for a much larger (and potentially omnicidal) war targeting the US’s central strategic competitor: China.

The Persian Gulf slaughter of 1991 was followed by the 78-day pummeling Serbia of in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (not to ignore the CIA’s incursion in 1979), the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (resulting in the deaths of millions), the destruction of Libya in 2011, and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria. The eruption of these and other conflicts have belied US claims that the implosion of the USSR and the “development” of China would somehow usher in a new era of peace and stability. Instead, the last three decades have been dominated by US-instigated wars and conflicts, all with a view to asserting US global hegemony, and all carried out under grossly fabricated rationales.

What’s more, standard pretexts for US intervention have always featured some monstrous “threat to humanity” as Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Patsy …. I mean, bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad, and Muammar Gaddafi. Now, of course, we have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Indeed, the names and the players have changed; US strategy and objectives have not.

Lest anyone doubt the US’s dark history of imperial brigandage, consider that over the 70 years, in the name of spreading “democracy”, “prosperity” and “human rights”, the US and/or its proxies have killed two million Koreans, three million Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands more in Laos, and Cambodia; three million Iraqis; close to a million in Afghanistan, one million in Mozambique, one and a half million in Angola, one million in Indonesia, and tens of thousands more, murdered or disappeared in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, East Timor and elsewhere.

Joseph Diaferia has taught college-level political science and history at various institutions in New York and New Jersey since 1996. In 2012, Professor Diaferia was the Green Party’s Nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 16^th Congressional District. He can be reached at: ProfJPDiaferia@gmail.com.