As Ayn Rand has said, “Morality is the strongest of all intellectual powers.” To Putin, his “moral” crusade is far more important than Russia’s GDP.  

At the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden seemed to have taken the right track. He opposed it as immoral and took immediate steps to impose harsh economic sanctions on Russia. Gradually these were increased, and some NATO countries followed suit to varying degrees. The U.S. then began to supply Ukraine with a limited number of defensive weapons such as guns, ammunition, drones, and anti-tank and anti-airplane missiles. He also gave them money, medicines, and food. Other NATO countries helped out. The heroic Ukrainians made the most of what little they were given. They outfought the Russian military on numerous occasions causing devastating causalities and destroying tons of equipment.

Recently, the U.S. and some allies moved to have Russia removed from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Shockingly, given the abysmal record of the U.N. in welcoming dictatorships as members, it worked. The voting margin was quite large. How could this happen? I believe the reason is epistemological. Moral principles are abstractions, and they can easily be lost in space. But the daily videos sent around the world of the appalling mass slaughter of civilians and the destruction of non-military buildings (schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, shops, not to mention people trying to leave the country) reduced evil to the directly perceivable level. Bodies and ruins littered the streets. Civilians were tied up, tortured, shot, and/or kidnapped. Recordings were intercepted of Russian generals saying that killing civilians was their deliberate strategy, this evidently functioning as a substitute for their military ineptitude.

Despite all this, the U.S. has severely limited its military actions. President Biden has been adamant about not providing Ukraine with “offensive” weapons such as airplanes, tanks, long-range missiles, and artillery. It was feared that these would upset the Russians who love to rattle their sabers by threatening to use nuclear weapons. The result of this is that the destruction of Ukraine has proceeded unabated and has even intensified. The economic sanctions, the U.N. vote, and the limited weapons given to the Ukrainian military have not deterred the Russians from their imperialistic, “holy war, which is fully supported by the Russian orthodox church. As Ayn Rand has said, “Morality is the strongest of all intellectual powers.” To Putin, his “moral” crusade is far more important than Russia’s GDP.  Economic sanctions, though important, are not enough to win the war.

President Zelensky has asked time and time again for more help. Ukraine seems to run out of its existing store of weapons every few days because Ukraine has not been reliably re-supplied. It is as if the U.S. does not fully grasp that the war is not slowing, so every Ukrainian request is like a new emergency. Given that Biden also refuses to supply more advanced weapons, what are we to make of the total picture? Biden’s goal is not to win the war but simply not to lose it. It cannot be won without a reliable supply of weapons, including many of the more powerful ones. Russia has many of these, especially artillery, long-range missiles, and planes supported by many thousands of soldiers, so it still has an advantage in firepower. Russia could wear Ukraine down by simply laying waste to the entire country and slaughtering its citizens—a deliberate strategy that is already in process.

If the war ends in a compromise (e.g., Russia gets some part of Ukraine), it will be a disastrous defeat for the U.S. and NATO. It will undermine Ukraine’s heroic resistance. It will show that imperialism and mass murder pay off. It will encourage Russia to attack other NATO countries like the Baltic states. Finally, it will ruin Biden’s credibility as a leader of the free world.

The only morally acceptable end to the war would have Russia withdrawing all its troops, paying reparations, and cooperating in turning over the guilty parties for war crimes trials.

A word is in order about Russia’s nuclear weapons. Russia has several thousand nuclear bombs as does the U.S. A full-scale nuclear war could destroy the planet. But it should be remembered that the principle of “mutually assured destruction” has been with us since the late 1940’s and no nuclear war has occurred. If Russia gets away with such a threat, they could take over the entire Western world, the world of the Enlightenment. If they use tactical nuclear weapons, NATO could respond with the full-scale engagement of their conventional forces.

Freedom has been under attack since the beginnings of human civilization. Those who want freedom have to fight for it or lose it.

Edwin Locke

You know, when I saw the media starting to say that victory in the Ukraine is impossible, with the New York Times Editorial Board coming out and saying it, and then Joe Biden’s initial refusal to send the HIMARS, I thought that we were really going to see a backtrack, where the US admitted the Donbass was lost, but claimed victory because Kiev is still in State Department control.

But no.

Guess not.

RT:

Kiev has given Washington assurances that US-supplied rocket launchers won’t be used to attack targets inside Russian territory, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday. He was the latest US official to raise the issue, as Moscow voiced concerns over the escalation of hostilities in Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Blinken was asked about the HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, the latest high-tech weapon the US has committed to sending Ukraine.

“The Ukrainians have given us assurances that they will not use these systems against targets on Russian territory,” Blinken said, adding, “There is a strong trust bond between Ukraine and the US, as well as with our allies and partners.”

He also dismissed Moscow’s warnings and concerns that Washington’s weapons deliveries to Kiev risked further escalating the conflict.

“The best way to avoid escalation is for Russia to stop the aggression and the war it started,” Blinken said, arguing that it could be “over tomorrow” if Moscow so chose, but is likely to go on for “many months” instead.

Okay, well, they’re not going to do that.

So now what?

“The only way to end this war is if the enemy offers an unconditional surrender” is an insane statement by any metric. In this case, it’s much worse than insane. The Ukraine military is destroyed, Russia is already occupying virtually all of the territory it claims, and there is just nowhere to go with this.

The Ukraine is suffering nonstop losses. Missiles are not going to make any difference to anything. The only thing that would make any difference to anything is a Western invasion of the country. From what I’ve read, as of right now they’re only planning on sending a few HIMARS systems anyway, which are going to get taken out quickly like all of the Ukraine’s other gifted equipment has been. So this is some kind of game that I don’t really understand.

US President Joe Biden officially announced the dispatch of HIMARS systems to Ukraine, along with other military equipment valued at $700 million, on Wednesday afternoon. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Colin Kahl, the launchers were “pre-positioned” in Europe pending the announcement, and the first batch of four will be handed over this week – though it may take three weeks to train Ukrainian troops in their use.

HIMARS fires barrage rockets with an effective range of around 30 km, but can also deploy tactical ballistic missiles with a range of up to 300 km. Russia has raised concerns with the US over the latter possibility.

Biden himself, his UN envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and now Blinken have all insisted that Kiev will not be provided with the long-range missiles. Blinken is the first to mention the Ukrainian promises, however.

The Ukraine has already attacked inside Russia. They probably will again. But none of this even matters. The Ukraine does not have anything close to a path to taking back the Donbass, and the US State Department and Ukraine government are claiming they are also going to launch an invasion of Crimea.

The idea that these missile systems are some kind of game changer – it’s just utterly baffling. There is no amount of equipment that could be a game changer, because the Ukraine lacks the military personnel.

This is all just like a psychedelic nightmare scene. What are they even talking about? It doesn’t make sense.

Last week, President Biden signed a massive $40 billion military aid bill for Ukraine. Who cares that inflation is killing the American economy and mothers can’t even get baby formula. For Washington, spending on war and empire always seems to trump America’s interests.

To put this giveaway to Ukraine in perspective: just since late February, the US has provided nearly $60 billion in “assistance” to Ukraine. That is almost half that country’s entire 2020 GDP! Washington has literally adopted Ukraine in our name and on our dime.

The Biden Administration claims that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia and that such an expenditure to protect Ukraine’s borders is critical to our national interests and worth risking a nuclear war over.

But protecting Ukraine’s democracy is no longer the stated goal of the Administration. Defense Secretary Austin outlined the Administration’s new intention not long ago when he said that the real goal is to weaken Russia.

Biden’s neocons are fighting a war with Russia, but once again Congress has no interest in voting on a war declaration or even in debating whether war with Russia 30 years after the end of the Cold War is a good idea.

There is a reason our Constitution grants war powers to the legislative branch. Forcing Members of the House and Senate to declare the US to be in a state of war also enables them – through the powers of the purse-string – to define the goals of the war and particularly what a victory looks like. That prevents the kind of mission-creep ahd shifting objectives that have characterized our endless wars in the 21st century – including this current proxy war with Russia.

Even the US mainstream media is beginning to notice. Last week the New York Times’ Editorial Board published an editorial originally titled, “What is America’s Strategy in Ukraine?” complaining that the Biden Administration has yet to answer any questions to the American people regarding its involvement in Ukraine.

While, as could be expected, the paper attacked the “isolationists” in the US Congress who opposed the $40 billion giveaway, the NY Times editorial board nevertheless registered what can only be seen as the first major sign of dissent among the usual media war cheerleaders.

They wrote:

…it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions. And the US aims and strategy in this war have become harder to discern, as the parameters of the mission appear to have changed.

While warning that Americans’ interest in Ukraine will begin to wane without more clarity from Washington as to its goals, the paper went on to directly contradict the Biden Administration’s predictions of a Ukraine victory:

A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.

Congress – with very few exceptions – has opened a financial spigot to the government in Kiev without asking a single question about how and why the money is to be spent. When Senator Paul simply asked for someone to keep track of the $60 billion we shipped over there he was met with near-unanimous opposition.

An endless supply of US taxpayer money to Ukraine with zero stated goals and zero oversight. Isn’t it time to stand up and demand that both parties in Congress start asking some hard questions?

During the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, President Bill Clinton told Americans, “That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.… It’s globalism versus tribalism.”

In 1999 very few Americans paid attention to Clinton’s remarks. Kosovo was yet another conflict on someone else’s soil with little or no relevance to daily life in America. Frankly, Clinton’s use of the word “tribalism” probably confused many Americans. To most Americans, nationalism means devotion to the country, the U.S. citizen’s readiness in crisis or conflict to place the needs of the country above the citizen’s own. American nationalists aren’t tribal. They want to protect and defend the United States, its historic institutions and the rights embodied in its laws, not start wars.

The term “globalism” has since evolved to mean much more than free trade and comity between nations. Today, the Western nation-state and the nationalism it inspires are condemned by globalists as the sources of prejudice, exclusivism, and war. In retrospect, Clinton’s use of the term “globalism” is in continuity with the Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia.

To Washington’s contemporary ruling political class, globalism involves more than purchasing products manufactured by cheap labor in non-Western countries. Washington-led globalism now promises the dissolution of traditional political and social forms of human organization—national governments, borders, identities, cultures—and replaces them with a world of consumers united only by their dependence on amorphous corporations, unaccountable non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and supra-national institutions.

Put another way, globalism is now synonymous with the progressive left’s view of the postwar liberal international security order that must expand to survive. Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine is the globalist scheme to transcend the continuity of history, culture, and geography embodied in the nation-state, to homogenize disparate peoples in the process of assimilating rapid social and technological change. In this sense, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent call for Washington and its strategic partners to establish global control of Russia’s nuclear weapons aligns nicely with the Biden administration’s progressive globalist vision.

And therein lies the problem. Nations and their peoples do not evolve in a vacuum, nor do they surrender their existence without a fight.

These points should alert Washington to the fact that its proxy war for globalism in Ukraine involves national identity, a dynamic force that stirs the deepest human emotions. Yet it is not just two kinds of nationalism, Ukrainian and Russian, rooted in language, culture, and history, that are in conflict. Washington’s brand of globalism, dressed in the guise of NATO expansion, directly challenges Russian national identity and culture. It is Russia’s unique geographic role in linking European and Asian civilization, as well as its Orthodox Christian culture—a belief system enshrined in Russia’s current state ideology, foreign, and security policy—that are imperiled.

In light of U.S.-led NATO military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it is fundamentally dishonest to pretend that NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s western border is benign. But it is far more dangerous to ignore the truth that, in Moscow’s view, NATO expansion into Ukraine is inextricably linked with the extension of globalism to Russia.

Statements by the U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State that Washington wants to “weaken” Russia make it clear that Washington’s allegedly benevolent “rules-based order” is of no benefit to Russia. In fact, the statements simply confirm in Russian minds the belief that the U.S. is a co-belligerent in Ukraine’s war for NATO expansion.

Perhaps even more important is the suggestion that Poland, NATO’s proverbial wild child, would provide so-called “peacekeeping forces” to Ukraine. It’s no secret to Europeans that Poland dominated most of Ukraine for nearly 400 years, or that Moldova, though technically Romanian, spent 300 years as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Washington’s apparent readiness to introduce revanchist Polish forces into Western Ukraine and, potentially, revanchist Romanian forces into Moldova suggests that Washington’s globalists will do anything to harm Russia even if it involves advancing the territorial ambitions of Russia’s historic enemies.

War still tests the legitimacy of those who govern inside the warring states, as well as the resilience of their societies. This observation applies to the Biden Administration as much as it does to the governments of Zelensky and Putin. As he presides over fiscal crisis, scarcity, and rising criminality in America, and displays his willful ignorance of Eastern Europe and its peoples, President Biden and his supporters on the Hill are stirring a regional pot that could quickly boil over with dangerous consequences for Washington and its NATO partners. As Sigmund Freud wrote of Biden’s “internationalist” predecessor Woodrow Wilson, Biden “has a marvelous ability to ignore facts and believe what he wants.” However, it’s much tougher now than it was in 1917 to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes.

Washington actively cultivated Ukraine’s war with Russia for many years, harnessing Ukrainian nationalism—the incendiary force globalists claim to loathe—in service to their cause. It worked. Now the same globalists are prolonging the war with arms, advice, and encouragement, even though Ukraine is being destroyed.

In the last 30 years, Washington’s overemphasis on military assistance and intervention in the pursuit of regime change has drawn the U.S. into conflicts and crises in the Balkans, the Near East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. American nationalists are not responsible for the current war in Ukraine or the last three decades of Washington’s self-defeating wars. But American nationalists are needed now more than ever to stop the globalist war to destroy Russia before that war spreads like a cancer across Eastern Europe. 

Douglas MacGregor

Yesterday morning I posted an explanation of why Russian liberalism was generating a wider war that could end in Armageddon. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/05/01/putins-liberalism-means-a-wider-war-is-in-the-cards/

I find no relief in The Saker acknowledging the same unfolding of events. https://thesaker.is/sitrep-operation-z-17/

The Saker and Andrei Martyanov are two competent analysts of Russian military capability. Until recently they have acknowledged no problem with Putin’s limited military operation in Ukraine. But The Saker now realizes that the slow Russian operation has made opportunities for Western mischief that will widen the conflict. No doubt Martyanov also sees the adverse consequences of delay, but he is yet to attribute any importance to them.

The Saker reports Western plans to bring into western Ukraine where Russia has no boots on the ground Polish and Romanian soldiers with NATO air cover for “military exercises.” The Saker also reports that there seems to be a military operation in preparation against Russian Transnistria.

Quoting other analysts, The Saker reports that on the Polish, Belarus, and Moldova borders with Ukraine a total contingent of 50,000 to 100,000 troops can be inferred. “NATO’s ultimate strategy on this issue is currently unclear, but several options could be considered. Firstly, this can be done for a banal intimidation of Russia and an attempt to put pressure on the course of the special operation in Ukraine, and secondly, in the West they perfectly understand that Ukraine as a country no longer exists and see its future on the principle of occupation sectors. And the third option is the most terrible, but the least likely: NATO decided to go all the way and, if lend-lease and hybrid warfare do not stop the Russians, then regular units of Western countries will step in. This, of course, is a 100% threat of the use of nuclear weapons. It looks utopian, but in 2022 everything is possible.”

The Saker quotes the Russian Colonel Cassad:

“The main topic that worries many today is the adoption by the US Congress of the lend-lease program for Ukraine. Delivery of large batches of modern weapons is expected soon. The war will reach a new level, because now we will also have to fight with the American military industry. Deliveries of American heavy weapons are expected, including F-16 aircraft. Today we wrote that Ukraine is already preparing pilots for these machines. Here you need to understand once and for all, we are at war with NATO, where Ukraine is just cheap service personnel and cannon fodder.”

The Pentagon’s John Kirby backs up Colonel Cassad’s report with his announcement: “Today I can announce that the United States has begun training the Ukrainian armed forces to use key weapons at US military bases in Germany.”

The lend-lease bill was introduced in the US Senate on January 19, 2022, a month prior to the Russian intervention in Ukraine. This supports the abundant evidence that Washington did intend to cause Russian intervention in Donbass by mobilizing a large Ukrainian army ready to attack Donbass.

The Saker also quotes this report:

“Kiev secretly sent Kharkiv cadets to the United States to learn to fly the F-16, which will soon enter service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine under lend-lease. Kiev decided in advance to retrain its pilots for the NATO fleet. As it became known to Readovka, the cadets of the Kharkiv Higher Military School were sent to one of the European NATO countries and to the United States in early February for emergency retraining in the management of American F-16s. The cadets were taken directly from the 4th year classes. All of them were transported in complete secrecy. Thus, it is more likely that NATO, together with Kiev, knew about the imminent deployment of a special operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and tried to work ahead of the curve. The law passed the day before by the US Congress authorizing the lend-lease of heavy weapons to Ukraine apparently involves the supply, among other things, of American F-16 fighters. There is also information that the lend-lease announced by the United States was launched solely to legalize the transfer of F-16 fighters to Ukraine.”

None of this information fits in the narrative that Washington has created as the controlled explanation of the Russian intervention fed by the presstitutes to the peoples in the West. The Western peoples in their “free societies” with their “free press” remain as ignorant of events as Big Brother’s people in George Orwell’s book, 1984.

My views on the dangerousness of the situation are, of course, ignored by the US foreign policy community, most of whom are busy at work with war propaganda. Only twice have my articles been posted on Johnson’s Russian List. In foreign policy, as in Covid and all else, dissenting views are no longer permitted.

It is now clear that the Kremlin’s limited military operation was a serious mistake. There was no reason for the Russians to believe that Washington would not use the larger part of Ukraine not under attack to force the Russians into a wider war on the West’s terms, a wider war that could have been avoided if the Kremlin had not been so anxious to minimize the use of force. As the situation spirals out of control, we might now be living in our last days.

During the 70 years that the Soviet Union existed, Ukraine was an integral part of the nation. Yet this geographic and political reality posed no threat to the United States. A Russia and a Ukraine, both inside the USSR, was an accepted reality that was seen as no threat for the seven decades that they were united.

Yet, today, because of a month-old war between Russia and Ukraine, over who shall control Crimea, the Donbas, and the Black and Azov Sea coasts of Ukraine, America seems closer to a nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Why? Time to step back and reflect on what is at stake.

Exactly what threat does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine present to us that is so grave we would consider military action that could lead to World War III and Russia’s use of battlefield nuclear weapons against us?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hinted at the use of such weapons, should NATO intervene in the Ukraine war and Russia face defeat, or in the event of an “existential” threat to the Russian nation.

We hear from our moral elites that morality commands us to intervene to save the Ukrainian people from the ravages of a war that has already taken thousands of Ukrainian lives. But what would be the justification for U.S. military intervention in Ukraine, absent a congressional authorization or declaration of war?

Consider. The year the Liberal Hour arrived in America with the New Deal, 1933, a newly inaugurated Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized Joseph Stalin’s murderous regime as the legitimate government of a Russia-led USSR.

FDR met personally with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov even as the Holodomor, the forced starvation of Ukrainian peasants and small farmers, the kulaks and their families, was far advanced. Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow, won a Pulitzer for covering up that crime of the century with its estimated 4 million dead.

The question remains: When did the relationship between Russia and Ukraine become a matter of such vital interest to the U.S. that we would risk war, possible nuclear war, with Russia over it? How did we get here?

We got here by exploiting our Cold War victory as an opportunity to move NATO, our Cold War alliance, into a dozen countries in Central and Eastern Europe, up to the borders of Russia. Then, we started to bring Ukraine into NATO, the constituent republic of the old Soviet Union with the longest and deepest history with Mother Russia.

Thus, while Putin started this war, the U.S. set the table for it. We pushed our military alliance, NATO, set up in 1949 to contain and, if necessary, fight Russia, 1,000 miles to the east, right into Russia’s face.

In the 1930s, when Britain’s Lady Astor was asked if she knew where Hitler was born, she answered: “Versailles.” At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which produced the Versailles Treaty, millions of Germanic peoples and the lands they had inhabited were severed from German rule and distributed to half a dozen nations across Europe. When we get back on our feet, we will take back all that we have lost, said Gen. Hans von Seeckt of the German General Staff.

We hear warnings that if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, NATO will react militarily. But if no NATO ally is attacked, why would NATO respond to a Russian attack on Ukraine?

Though outlawed today, chemical weapons were used by all the major participants in World War I, including the Americans. As for atomic weapons, only Americans have used them. And while we did not introduce the bombing of cities—the British and Germans did that—we did perfect the carpet-bombing of cities like Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Tokyo.

The Ukrainian war, now a month old, has demonstrated the utility of nuclear weapons. Putin’s credible threat to use them has caused the U.S. and NATO to flatly refuse Kiev’s request to put a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

And as Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons has deterred NATO from intervening on Ukraine’s side in this war, other nations will not miss the message: Possession of nukes can deter even the greatest nuclear powers.

The longer this war goes on, the greater the suffering and losses on all sides. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are already dead, with 10 million uprooted from their homes, a third of that number having fled into neighboring states of Eastern Europe.

The longer the war goes on, the greater the likelihood Putin resorts to indiscriminate bombing and shelling to kill off the resistance, and the greater the possibility that the war expands into NATO Europe.

Meanwhile, in the secure American homeland, 5,000 miles from Kiev, There in no shortage of foreign policy scholars beating the drums for a “victory” over Putin’s Russia and willing to fight to achieve that victory—right down to the last Ukrainian.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and a founding editor of The American Conservative.