Analysis
Featured Image
Jack F. MatlockYouTube/Screenshot

(LifeSiteNews) — A full-page advertisement signed by 15 national security experts and printed in the New York Times called upon the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress to forge “a diplomatic settlement that stops the killing and defuses tensions” in Ukraine.

Titled “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World,” the May 16 advertorial laid out the broader perspective of the war, which while not excusing Russia’s invasion also presented a history of “[d]eliberate provocations” by NATO over the last 30 years, characterized as “hubris” on the part of U.S. policymakers representing a type of “Machiavellian calculation” aimed at destabilizing Russia.

READ: ‘Monumental provocation’: How US and international policy-makers deliberately baited Putin to war

Characterizing the conflict as an “unmitigated disaster” due to the hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties, the displacement of millions and more, they also warned that future “devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war.”

Sponsored and presented by the Eisenhower Media Network, these former U.S. diplomats, military officers and civilian officials charged that given such nuclear dangers “[t]he solution to this shocking violence is not more weapons or more war” but a diplomacy characterized by “strategic empathy, seeking to understand one’s adversaries. This is not weakness: it is wisdom.”

Echoing the position of former President Donald Trump, who also promised on May 10 to end the war within “24 hours” of his potential second inauguration, these foreign policy experts stated, “We reject the idea that diplomats, seeking peace, must choose sides, in this case either Russia or Ukraine. In favoring diplomacy we choose the side of sanity. Of humanity. Of peace.”

Explaining the conflict from the Russian perspective, the authors recalled invasions of the transcontinental nation by “Charles XII, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler” emphasizing that despite promises by U.S. and Western leaders to not expand NATO even “one inch to the east” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has over the years expanded to Russia’s borders presenting “a direct threat” to their security.

“Since 2007, Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the U.S. now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962. Russia further singled out NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative,” the authors wrote.

Having “made their red lines clear,” the Russians have also repeatedly shown that they will “use force to defend those lines” as they have done in Georgia, Syria and Crimea in recent years, the column reads. Furthermore, “even as the Cold War ended, U.S. diplomats, generals and politicians were warning of the dangers of expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and of maliciously interfering in Russia’s sphere of influence.”

One of the advertorial’s signatories, Jack F. Matlock, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991, also added his name to a 1997 open letter of 50 experts calling the idea of expanding NATO “a policy error of historic proportions.” President Bill Clinton at the time rejected this warning and endorsed the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO Alliance.

In addition, the signers state that with such resistance to expansion in play, “a group of neoconservatives and top executives of U.S. weapons manufacturers formed the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO” and spent tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying to ensure their objectives. As a result, these “U.S. weapons manufacturers sold billions of dollars of weapons to the new NATO members,” and continue this pattern providing approximately $30 billion worth of military equipment and weapons to Ukraine.

“War, it’s been said, is a racket, one that is highly profitable for a select few,” the experts observed.

“NATO expansion, in sum, is a key feature of a militarized U.S. foreign policy characterized by unilateralism featuring regime change and preemptive wars,” they wrote. And given the massive slaughter in “failed wars” such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Ukraine as a “new arena of confrontation and slaughter,” such a policy “may well be our undoing, unless we dedicate ourselves to forging a diplomatic settlement that stops the killing and defuses tensions.”

RFK Jr: Ukraine war being waged ‘against Russia’ to serve ‘the geopolitical ambition of the neocons’

Other commentators have emphasized that the neoconservatives, who dominate the Biden administration’s foreign policy apparatus, have not had the best interests of the United States or its people in mind as they pursue these aggressive policies.

In addressing these issues in a May 2 interview, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this is “a U.S. war against Russia” to serve “the geopolitical ambition of the neocons” that includes “regime change for Vladimir Putin and of exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.”

According to a 2016 analysis by former CIA officer Ray McGovern, the neoconservatives became “irate” when in August 2013, Putin intervened to broker a peaceful solution thwarting the enormous pressure they were putting on President Barack Obama to order military strikes against Syria.

With a motivation of serving Israel’s regional interests, the former intelligence officer said “Syria had been on the neocon ‘regime change’ list as long as Iraq and was supposed to follow the 2003 Iraq invasion,” and thus these interventionists “felt cheated out of their almost-war.”

McGovern, who spent his career as a Russian specialist at times providing briefings to U.S. presidents, explained that the neocons responded by immediately moving in earnest to “make Putin pay for his interference six months later by promoting an anti-Russian putsch in Ukraine.”

In addition, the late award-winning investigative journalist Robert Perry explained in 2014 how neoconservatives along with “other hawkish politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine Putin inside Russia.”

Kennedy also confirmed that these “geopolitical machinations” of “the intelligence agencies and the neocons, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction,” for their “geopolitical ambition,” has “been going on since 2014.”

Douglas Macgregor: Neocons ‘remind me very much of the Bolsheviks’ who were ‘completely uncompromising’

And yet, as commentator Alex Christoforou of the The Duran observed in a May 24 program, these ambitions of the neocons have amounted to “the greatest miscalculation in the history of geopolitics” given how they have driven Russia and China into a tight alliance putting the U.S. at a profound global disadvantage, with many nations joining their new BRICS alliance and others moving off of the U.S. dollar.

According to retired U.S. Colonel Douglas Macgregor, these neoconservatives who are driving this White House policy maintain “an ideologically pure organization that has decided that it must win a war against Russia in order to extend the LGBTQRS and everything else [agenda] to the rest of the world.”

And despite the devastating consequences for the U.S., Europe and the Ukrainian people, Macgregor has little hope that the neocons in the Biden administration have any potential of reversing gear and negotiating for peace.

“They remind me very much of the Bolsheviks in 1917, 18 and 19, who essentially described the world as something that deserved to be ravaged and conquered as soon as possible, and raised armies for the purpose of doing it,” explained the decorated combat veteran in a May 22 interview.

“Stalin steps in later and gets rid of them because he knows it’s impractical. But at the time they were unyielding, uncompromising. And that’s what we have in Washington. These people are completely uncompromising,” the retired colonel said.

Trump pledges a ‘complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment’

In the same Duran podcast, commentator Alexander Mercouris concurred stating the Biden administration policies in this regard conform, not to what is practical or in the best interests of all, but to “their ideological and visceral predilections. These people hate Russia. It’s as simple as that. They have this obsessive hatred of Russia. And if they’re neocons, as I’ve said many times, they have no reverse gear.”

“So asking them to make concessions to the Russians whom they hate, it’s just not going to happen. So of course, they went for this utterly reckless, utterly deranged, utterly crazy, totally impossible project [to conquer Russia] because they could not do otherwise,” he assessed.

Identifying this same problem in a campaign video last March, Trump proposed a solution: “There must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home.”

RELATED

Trump warns the ‘globalist neocon establishment’ risks turning Ukraine conflict into World War III

Media melts down after Trump tells CNN town hall that the ‘killing’ in Ukraine must end

Managed decline: How neocons politicized the US dollar and strengthened Communist China in the process

What does the shrinking of US military power mean for the ‘new world order’?

From one global power to many: How neocons managed the US into decline

3 Comments

    Loading...