Since 1991, the U.S. has carried out more than 100 military interventions in many regions of the world. Only the largest of them have taken place in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. Washington has been stubbornly ignoring the security interests of other nations.
“Why can’t America accept an imperfect world?” asks Cato Institute senior fellow Ted Galen Carpenter. Such wording, with a clear tinge of naïveté, suggests that while there is no place for idealistic conceptions in big politics, the reasons for certain developments must have understandable explanations.
It is necessary to start with the fact that more than 30 years ago the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and some American leaders got it in the minds that there appeared what they began to call a unipolar world, that the United States was the sole superpower, and they could totally run over the show.
The results have been disastrous. We have got three decades of militarization of American foreign policy. The U.S. approach is primarily a military approach and often only a military approach. Washington arms who it wants, expands NATO regardless of the fact that other countries say might compromise their security interests.
The U.S. keeps ignoring the security interests of other countries, and when those countries begin to complain or, even more so, become indignant, Washington supplies more weapons to its allies in the region, going to war when and where it wants.
The war in Ukraine could and should have been avoided through diplomacy. Russian President Putin has been saying for years that NATO should not expand into the Black Sea or Ukraine, much less into Georgia, which, if you look at the map, is right across the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Russia said it would encircle us, it would jeopardize our security, let’s resort to diplomacy, but the United States rejected all diplomacy.
In fact, Washington has never really sought peace. From the beginning, the Americans hatched plans for a military conflict involving Russia. Over the years of the Cold War, they became convinced that a direct confrontation with Russia could lead to a global catastrophe. But they have not abandoned the idea of destroying Russia. And for this purpose, the U.S. decided to resort to a strategy of local wars, which would weaken Russia as much as possible.
In the 1990s and early 2000s it was support of internal separatism and terrorism, which was expressed in the hidden activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in the North Caucasus and the provision of financial and logistical support to militants in Chechnya. In 2004, Russia succeeded in eliminating terrorists and the threat of their armed activity turning into a more protracted regional military conflict.
However, as early as 2008, at the instigation of Washington, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili launched a military attack on Russian peacekeepers on the territory of South Ossetia. Moscow’s decisive actions then prevented the outbreak of war, forcing Tbilisi into peace.
But the U.S. has not rested on this. In 2014, a coup d’état with American participation was staged in Ukraine, which brought militant Nazis to power. Pushed by Washington, they immediately began provoking war with Russia, but Moscow did not give in to dragging it into an armed conflict. Then the U.S. decided to raise the stakes: in addition to the incessant shelling of civilians in Donbass and NATO’s creeping advance into Ukraine, Russia was faced with the prospect of placing nuclear missile systems in the immediate vicinity of its borders. This is how the U.S. managed to provoke an armed conflict in Ukraine.
Now Washington denies everything. Officials of the White House and the State Department, as well as leading American and allied media, keep saying that “Russia has attacked Ukraine”, “Russia is the aggressor”, “Russia is a threat”. Under these slogans another expansion of NATO took place; U.S. allies are actively involved in the supply of weapons to Ukraine, becoming participants in the armed conflict, which balances on the brink of escalating into a world war.
But it is necessary to save the world from NATO and the U.S because they are pushing everyone towards World War III, to a global confrontation. And the blame, of course, is shifted to others. They say that Russia is behaving badly, China is behaving badly.
And what is not good?
Thirty years ago, the United States had a unique opportunity to build a new world system of international relations and security. In 1991, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, Washington could have offered the world its own model, a true claim to leadership with which virtually the entire world was ready to agree.
Instead, U.S. policymakers chose a different path. They could not do it; they did not cope with the tasks of world leadership, which obviously implied a balanced approach to taking into account the interests of other countries, rather than an undivided dictate. In fact the Americans preferred the more familiar role of colonizers, invaders and aggressors to the world leadership that was so much talked about.
Basically, the U.S. has “overdosed” on power and money. Quickly convinced of their permissiveness, they began to seize larger and larger spheres of influence. At first, they took over all of Eastern Europe. It seemed to them that it was not enough – give them the post-Soviet space. Well, okay, they took it, but still it was not enough. Now they want Russia too. If they get Russia, they will want China.
It seems that they have lost a sense of reality in Washington. They are not going to stop there. And it’s already hard to say which is better, whether they realize the consequences or not. That is why they need to be stopped. The rest of the world certainly does not need such consequences.
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