Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com
It's hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.
The more people see how twisted and disgusting these deep state machinations in Ukraine are, the better. For, the sooner we can get ALL this stuff on the table and out into the open, the sooner we can actually start the healing of our broader civilizational, cultural, and epistemological wounds. Or put more simply, we in the West are doomed unless we do so.
Like they say, we are only as sick as our secrets.
What we do know about the US biological weapons involvement in Ukraine. And this is just a thumbnail sketch…
1991 – the US launches the Nunn-Lugar programme for the former Soviet countries to control/eliminate Soviet weapons of mass destruction including bioweapons. The Pentagon's Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) was named as the programme’s main executor.
1993 – the Ukraine-US Agreement on the Prevention of Proliferation of WMD is signed.
2005 – an additional protocol is signed to the agreement between the Ukrainian Health Ministry and the DTRA on the prevention of the proliferation of technologies, pathogens and know-how that can be used to develop bioweapons. This is the start of the transfer of the Ukrainian military biological potential into US specialists' hands.
2000s – large US military-industrial companies are engaged in military biological activity in Ukraine.
2005-2014 – Black & Veatch Special Projects, a DTRA contractor, builds and upgrades 8 biolabs in Ukraine instead of eliminating military biological infrastructure, as was originally claimed. One of the facilities, a biolab in Odessa, has been financed since 2011 for the study of “pathogens that can be used in bioterrorism attacks.”
2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently - Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
2009 – Rosemont Seneca Partners is established by former US Secretary of State John Kerry’ stepson Christopher Heinz and incumbent US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
2014 – anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Ukraine.
2014 – Hunter Biden joins the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
2014 - Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to "assert Ukraine's cultural & economic independence from Russia".
2014 - Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed "science project in Ukraine".
2014 - Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
2014-2016 - Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
2016 – US citizen Ulana Nadia Suprun, a descendant of Ukrainian Nazis, is appointed Acting Health Minister of Ukraine. The US DoD and Ukraine’s Health Ministry cooperation programme is greatly expanded.
2016 – an outbreak of swine flu among Ukrainian Defence Ministry personnel guarding a biolab in Kharkov, Ukraine; 20 dead. The incident is hushed up.
2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.
2016 – the DTRA and Ukraine’s Health Ministry extend the contract after getting approval from the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.
2019 – the COVID-19 mutated bat coronavirus pandemic begins with an outbreak in Wuhan.
February 24, 2022 – launch of the Russian Army’s special operation in Ukraine.
February 24-25, 2022 – rapid elimination of strains in biolabs in Ukraine.
March 8, 2022 – US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly acknowledges the existence of cooperation between the US and Ukraine in pathogens.
“Blue check” journalists and “fact checkers” fact check away!
The plan to turn the Russian public against Putin was doomed from the start: Russians are intelligent, and they can read and see what's going on around them. What these neocon-artists have managed is to further reduce the electorate's faith in the system. The endless autocratic litany of back-firing sanctions that will negatively impact every country's economy in the world will likely not be seen as "worth it", to use Madeleine Albright's terminology, of deposing Putin, were that even a realistic objective to begin with: after all this, If anything, Russians might want to have him cloned. Putin had no choice: the only acceptable alternative lay in the Minsk Accords, and they were not permitted implementation. There were no good will or good faith initiatives. And Russia understood that, reluctantly, and that vague suggestions of talk and more talk were diversions to allow further preparations on the part of the West, whose shocked indignation was feigned. .
The outcome is an existential threat to the entire planet. But the US and NATO own that, along with the EU states and Canada who cavalierly and callously added fuel to the fire, and ensured that Ukrainians would pay the price of their proxy war with Russia.
The United States led NATO alliance has been exposed as having declared war on the world. Military might as exercised through open attack, full scale proxy armament, unilateral sanctions and full spectrum propaganda are being used to full effect. The casualty count increases logarithmically. No one outside the profit gorged Western oligarchs is to be spared. The world economy is being hijacked to the interests of the ultra-wealthy. This is the return to fascist Germany’s principle of Total War. The State Department with the full consent of all three branches of the government is prosecuting a defacto war on global humanity.
Exactly. Despite Hillary hiccup the deep state proceeded with its plans albeit in a different manner and succeeded. Proves once more it doesn't matter who's at the helm, the party/president. The whole election scam is for the dummies which is the American electorate to keep busy and think they matter.
Yeah, whoever 2024 - dummies keep it up! You do matter! In your simpleton minds.
In hindsight providing weapons to Ukraine I'm sure was an unforeseen move on Trumps watch that I'm not even sure was his original plan had not been pushed via the deep state had his call not been intercepted and used against him for impeachment. Knowing that those weapons were really to be used against Russians living in Russian occupied area's of Ukraine instead of defense I'm sure was unforeseen.
The fact of providing billions of dollars in assistance for weapons or whatever from a government that is in dire debt and can't even pay our own bills is insane in itself. (Rand Paul)
Does anyone think things had been any different with Hillary at the helm?
Why do so many of our problems always point back to our intelligence agencies? Our agencies and our government have grown out of control and are literally unmanageable. They are nothing but political entities today which happen to be controlled via liberal elites.
Our Commander in Chief has no control of a deep state apparatus and overgrown political intelligence agencies.
These agencies don't give a fuck for the average American.
Wall Street and the elites have control far greater than most citizens would have imagined.
We're changing the meaning of sex/gender and creating a woke fake world with a military that is useless while pushing everyone to take a vaccine that has killed more than any vaccine in history.
This is truly creating a world that will not survive.
Trump 2024, he knows the game now and he’s pissed. Beware, he’s gonna rampage, rumbling and bumbling and stumbling, a great bloviating orange monster fucking as he goes - upheaval, chaos, revenge. I’m gonna donate 25 bucks to his election campaign.
I agree, and what stands out most about this truth is how absolutely stupid the people are (think Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland etc. etc.) who are driving this monster called the USA. By which I do not mean for a second to imply that the spineless Europeans are any better. If anything, they are worse for aiding and abetting the criminal state that is pushing the planet to self-destruction.
Caitlin, this article has a serious error in it that will mislead people, and needs to be corrected. Early on in the article you imply that Obama refused to provide aid to Ukraine for its war on Donbas.
But that is definitely not the case. The Obama administration provided *massive* amounts of military equipment and training to Kiev, with the sole *exception* of *offensive* weapons. Kiev would not have been able to bomb Donbas from 2014 to 2022 nonstop without Obama's aid, which massively bolstered Kiev's military capability, and most importantly freed up money for Kiev so that it could *buy* offensive weaponry. From 2014 to 2016 the Obama administration provided over $300 million in military aid to Ukraine.
And this US direct military aid was just the tip of the iceberg. from 2014 to 2016 the US and other western nations provided $30 BILLION in international loan guarantees ($3 billion of which came from the US) giving Kiev the ability to buy as much 'lethal aid' weaponry as it need to prosecute NATO's proxy war with Russia in Donbas.
So it is just not correct at all to imply that the US and NATO did not provide military aid, and money for lethal aid, under Obama. They most certainly did. Bigtime.
Here are two links to Obama White House briefing documents which detail this US aid to Kiev’s war.
I agree with your criticism of Trump's actions re: Ukraine, but I don't know about this idea that "the intelligence community" somehow knew that their attempts to impeach Trump would fail and did it anyways. I think these people were just "running plays" the outcome of which were favorable either way, but they would've loved to have the Trump family escorted out of the White House in handcuffs. He did a lot of damage to their agendas just by exposing them.
Brilliant, caitoz, thoroughly bril. It is stimulating to see how your focus is progressing as events unfold. And we are the fortunate beneficiaries.
I had been intending for some time to sit down and reread the book "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy", by William Appleman Williams, and am now doing so. The original text was published in 1959 (my copy is the 50th anniversary edition, published in 2009), but even upon just rereading the first few chapters, it is astonishing to realize that it could have been published just last year (excepting some of the dated references). It is just that prescient, and is oh-so-very applicable to our current situation.
One of the focuses of the book is to recount and analyze the adoption and implementation by the US of the “Open-Door Policy”, which, as Williams maintains, was an imperialist project from the start. It was a US policy formulated, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to address the constant refrain in institutional circles which stated, basically, that “We need foreign markets to absorb our excess production”. In current times, it could also be added that the US states that it has the need, and the right, to extract any and all raw resources from anywhere on earth to support that production (or even just the support of consumeristic patterns which are tied to that production over long periods of time). I highly recommend reading and/or rereading this book, to provide context and background to, and clear-eyed analysis of, today’s world. From our current vantage point, it helps us to see in greater detail “how we got here”.
Certainly, it could be argued that imperialist ambitions on the part of the US go back further than the late 19th century, even back to the founding of the country, but for our present purposes, it will serve to recall history at least back to the beginning of the 20th century. It’s an eye-opener, to be sure, how Mr. Williams spells out the exact motivations and intentions of the powerful classes that have mostly run and driven this country all this time, and to see how these motivations and intentions are still in full force, if only because once bad habits are formed, they are extremely difficult to dispel - and that assumes that one is actually trying to reform one’s bad habits. No such reforms of American foreign policy would appear to be in the offing.
Williams outlines four salient features which depict the importance of the Open-Door Policy in understanding American history, and indeed, the “Tragedy of American Diplomacy”:
1) It was not a military strategy nor a traditional “balance-of-power” policy. “It was conceived and designed to win the victories without the wars.” (My comment: The “victories”, of course, being the assimilation of foreign economies into the “American Way of Life”).
2) “It was derived from the proposition that America’s overwhelming economic power could cast the economy and the politics of… underdeveloped countries [my comment: or any others, I might add] in a pro-American mold.”
3) The policy was neither “legalistic nor moralistic”, but “…extremely hardheaded and practical.”
4) “Unless and until it, and its underlying Weltanschauung, were modified to deal with its own consequences, the policy was certain to produce foreign policy crises that would become increasingly severe”.
Perhaps the most lacerating summary that Mr. Williams produces to describe the events at turn of the 20th century, which provided the preamble to the adoption of this policy is where he states that: “The crisis of the 1890s (my note: centered around the Panic of 1893, which was every bit as serious as the Crash of 1929) was a major turning point in American history. It marked the close of the age of Jacksonian “Laissez Nous Faire” (my note: literally, “let us do it”), and provided the setting for the death scene of the individual and entrepreneur as the dynamic figure in American economic life. At the same time, it marked the triumph of a new system based upon, characterized by, and controlled by the corporation and similar large and highly organized groups throughout American society.”
Those statements were first published in 1959, folks! That is damn near all the way back to the year I was born. Fortunately, in these times, we have the help of inestimable “dot-connectors” such as Ms. Caitoz, to help us try to make sense of the whole thing. And given that it is one of the thrusts of action in the US (and, I presume, elsewhere) right now to “memory-hole” our true history, ala Orwell, I think it will do us well to “double-down”, if you will, and dredge up, revisit and reemphasize that very history, in hopes of offsetting the desperate efforts of those who forget - or indeed, who never knew.
BUT for pro-WAR U$/UK War-Criminals (ILLEGALLY invading Iraq & Afghanistan) while
HYPOCRITICALLY calling pro-NATO Putin 'a threat'?
In September 2022, during the 7th month of the Ukraine War, interviewed by Channel 4 about his nine meetings with Vladimir Putin, ex-NATO Head Robertson said, "At the first meeting (in Moscow, Oct 2001) Vladimir Putin clearly said, 'I WANT RUSSIA TO BE PART OF WESTERN EUROPE...at the 2nd meeting (in Brussels) he said..'WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE RUSSIA TO (apply to) JOIN NATO?'...I started to sort of reach out and engage them in so many activities that they basically couldn't fight with us.. but after I left NATO (in Dec 2003), the American administration, the Bush administration (DURING THEIR OWN ILLEGAL WAR ON IRAQ opposed by Putin), lost any interest basically in doing business with Russia, they saw it as a threat..they didn't really want to make it part of the overall partnership (for Peace). I think we missed an opportunity at that time because I think it's what he (Putin) wanted, and we could have grabbed hold of him!"
And, the WORLD'S WORST WAR-CRIMINALS U$A killing millions (including pregnant women/unborn babies, infants, children, the defenceless elderly and disabled in their own lands) - don't recognize the INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT!
The more people see how twisted and disgusting these deep state machinations in Ukraine are, the better. For, the sooner we can get ALL this stuff on the table and out into the open, the sooner we can actually start the healing of our broader civilizational, cultural, and epistemological wounds. Or put more simply, we in the West are doomed unless we do so.
Like they say, we are only as sick as our secrets.
What we do know about the US biological weapons involvement in Ukraine. And this is just a thumbnail sketch…
1991 – the US launches the Nunn-Lugar programme for the former Soviet countries to control/eliminate Soviet weapons of mass destruction including bioweapons. The Pentagon's Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) was named as the programme’s main executor.
1993 – the Ukraine-US Agreement on the Prevention of Proliferation of WMD is signed.
2005 – an additional protocol is signed to the agreement between the Ukrainian Health Ministry and the DTRA on the prevention of the proliferation of technologies, pathogens and know-how that can be used to develop bioweapons. This is the start of the transfer of the Ukrainian military biological potential into US specialists' hands.
2000s – large US military-industrial companies are engaged in military biological activity in Ukraine.
2005-2014 – Black & Veatch Special Projects, a DTRA contractor, builds and upgrades 8 biolabs in Ukraine instead of eliminating military biological infrastructure, as was originally claimed. One of the facilities, a biolab in Odessa, has been financed since 2011 for the study of “pathogens that can be used in bioterrorism attacks.”
2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently - Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
2009 – Rosemont Seneca Partners is established by former US Secretary of State John Kerry’ stepson Christopher Heinz and incumbent US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
2014 – anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Ukraine.
2014 – Hunter Biden joins the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
2014 - Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to "assert Ukraine's cultural & economic independence from Russia".
2014 - Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed "science project in Ukraine".
2014 - Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
2014-2016 - Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
2016 – US citizen Ulana Nadia Suprun, a descendant of Ukrainian Nazis, is appointed Acting Health Minister of Ukraine. The US DoD and Ukraine’s Health Ministry cooperation programme is greatly expanded.
2016 – an outbreak of swine flu among Ukrainian Defence Ministry personnel guarding a biolab in Kharkov, Ukraine; 20 dead. The incident is hushed up.
2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.
2016 – the DTRA and Ukraine’s Health Ministry extend the contract after getting approval from the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.
2019 – the COVID-19 mutated bat coronavirus pandemic begins with an outbreak in Wuhan.
February 24, 2022 – launch of the Russian Army’s special operation in Ukraine.
February 24-25, 2022 – rapid elimination of strains in biolabs in Ukraine.
March 8, 2022 – US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly acknowledges the existence of cooperation between the US and Ukraine in pathogens.
“Blue check” journalists and “fact checkers” fact check away!
The plan to turn the Russian public against Putin was doomed from the start: Russians are intelligent, and they can read and see what's going on around them. What these neocon-artists have managed is to further reduce the electorate's faith in the system. The endless autocratic litany of back-firing sanctions that will negatively impact every country's economy in the world will likely not be seen as "worth it", to use Madeleine Albright's terminology, of deposing Putin, were that even a realistic objective to begin with: after all this, If anything, Russians might want to have him cloned. Putin had no choice: the only acceptable alternative lay in the Minsk Accords, and they were not permitted implementation. There were no good will or good faith initiatives. And Russia understood that, reluctantly, and that vague suggestions of talk and more talk were diversions to allow further preparations on the part of the West, whose shocked indignation was feigned. .
The outcome is an existential threat to the entire planet. But the US and NATO own that, along with the EU states and Canada who cavalierly and callously added fuel to the fire, and ensured that Ukrainians would pay the price of their proxy war with Russia.
The United States led NATO alliance has been exposed as having declared war on the world. Military might as exercised through open attack, full scale proxy armament, unilateral sanctions and full spectrum propaganda are being used to full effect. The casualty count increases logarithmically. No one outside the profit gorged Western oligarchs is to be spared. The world economy is being hijacked to the interests of the ultra-wealthy. This is the return to fascist Germany’s principle of Total War. The State Department with the full consent of all three branches of the government is prosecuting a defacto war on global humanity.
Exactly. Despite Hillary hiccup the deep state proceeded with its plans albeit in a different manner and succeeded. Proves once more it doesn't matter who's at the helm, the party/president. The whole election scam is for the dummies which is the American electorate to keep busy and think they matter.
Yeah, whoever 2024 - dummies keep it up! You do matter! In your simpleton minds.
When Yanukovych was Ukraine's elected president, the IMF demanded he cut wages, slash social spending, and end gas subsidies to integrate with the EU.
He said no, and turned to Russia instead. That was his "crime".
So the US overthrew him in the 2014 coup.
https://theleaflet.in/international-monetary-fund-played-a-crucial-role-in-precipitating-ukraine-war/
Imperialism de-develops countries.
Ukraine has never recovered the GDP it had at the end of the USSR in 1990.
Integration with the imperialist West made it poorer.
Neoliberal austerity imposed by the IMF since the 2014 US-sponsored coup turned Ukraine into Europe's poorest nation.
Name one nation that has benefitted from IMF's austerity policy over the past 40 years.
In hindsight providing weapons to Ukraine I'm sure was an unforeseen move on Trumps watch that I'm not even sure was his original plan had not been pushed via the deep state had his call not been intercepted and used against him for impeachment. Knowing that those weapons were really to be used against Russians living in Russian occupied area's of Ukraine instead of defense I'm sure was unforeseen.
The fact of providing billions of dollars in assistance for weapons or whatever from a government that is in dire debt and can't even pay our own bills is insane in itself. (Rand Paul)
Does anyone think things had been any different with Hillary at the helm?
Why do so many of our problems always point back to our intelligence agencies? Our agencies and our government have grown out of control and are literally unmanageable. They are nothing but political entities today which happen to be controlled via liberal elites.
Our Commander in Chief has no control of a deep state apparatus and overgrown political intelligence agencies.
These agencies don't give a fuck for the average American.
Wall Street and the elites have control far greater than most citizens would have imagined.
We're changing the meaning of sex/gender and creating a woke fake world with a military that is useless while pushing everyone to take a vaccine that has killed more than any vaccine in history.
This is truly creating a world that will not survive.
Truly eye-opening... and well worth reading the full Consortium News article!
Trump 2024, he knows the game now and he’s pissed. Beware, he’s gonna rampage, rumbling and bumbling and stumbling, a great bloviating orange monster fucking as he goes - upheaval, chaos, revenge. I’m gonna donate 25 bucks to his election campaign.
Go Caitlin, go!! I just posted your recent essay on my blog: https://www.brianruhe.ca/if-it-feels-like-youre-being-manipulated-its-because-you-are-by-caitlin-johnstone/
Blessings upon you,
Brian Ruhe
I agree, and what stands out most about this truth is how absolutely stupid the people are (think Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland etc. etc.) who are driving this monster called the USA. By which I do not mean for a second to imply that the spineless Europeans are any better. If anything, they are worse for aiding and abetting the criminal state that is pushing the planet to self-destruction.
Caitlin, this article has a serious error in it that will mislead people, and needs to be corrected. Early on in the article you imply that Obama refused to provide aid to Ukraine for its war on Donbas.
But that is definitely not the case. The Obama administration provided *massive* amounts of military equipment and training to Kiev, with the sole *exception* of *offensive* weapons. Kiev would not have been able to bomb Donbas from 2014 to 2022 nonstop without Obama's aid, which massively bolstered Kiev's military capability, and most importantly freed up money for Kiev so that it could *buy* offensive weaponry. From 2014 to 2016 the Obama administration provided over $300 million in military aid to Ukraine.
And this US direct military aid was just the tip of the iceberg. from 2014 to 2016 the US and other western nations provided $30 BILLION in international loan guarantees ($3 billion of which came from the US) giving Kiev the ability to buy as much 'lethal aid' weaponry as it need to prosecute NATO's proxy war with Russia in Donbas.
So it is just not correct at all to imply that the US and NATO did not provide military aid, and money for lethal aid, under Obama. They most certainly did. Bigtime.
Here are two links to Obama White House briefing documents which detail this US aid to Kiev’s war.
2014: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/21/fact-sheet-us-assistance-ukraine
2016: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/15/fact-sheet-us-assistance-ukraine-february-2014
I agree with your criticism of Trump's actions re: Ukraine, but I don't know about this idea that "the intelligence community" somehow knew that their attempts to impeach Trump would fail and did it anyways. I think these people were just "running plays" the outcome of which were favorable either way, but they would've loved to have the Trump family escorted out of the White House in handcuffs. He did a lot of damage to their agendas just by exposing them.
So much for the liberal allegation that you never criticize Republicans.
Brilliant, caitoz, thoroughly bril. It is stimulating to see how your focus is progressing as events unfold. And we are the fortunate beneficiaries.
I had been intending for some time to sit down and reread the book "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy", by William Appleman Williams, and am now doing so. The original text was published in 1959 (my copy is the 50th anniversary edition, published in 2009), but even upon just rereading the first few chapters, it is astonishing to realize that it could have been published just last year (excepting some of the dated references). It is just that prescient, and is oh-so-very applicable to our current situation.
One of the focuses of the book is to recount and analyze the adoption and implementation by the US of the “Open-Door Policy”, which, as Williams maintains, was an imperialist project from the start. It was a US policy formulated, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to address the constant refrain in institutional circles which stated, basically, that “We need foreign markets to absorb our excess production”. In current times, it could also be added that the US states that it has the need, and the right, to extract any and all raw resources from anywhere on earth to support that production (or even just the support of consumeristic patterns which are tied to that production over long periods of time). I highly recommend reading and/or rereading this book, to provide context and background to, and clear-eyed analysis of, today’s world. From our current vantage point, it helps us to see in greater detail “how we got here”.
Certainly, it could be argued that imperialist ambitions on the part of the US go back further than the late 19th century, even back to the founding of the country, but for our present purposes, it will serve to recall history at least back to the beginning of the 20th century. It’s an eye-opener, to be sure, how Mr. Williams spells out the exact motivations and intentions of the powerful classes that have mostly run and driven this country all this time, and to see how these motivations and intentions are still in full force, if only because once bad habits are formed, they are extremely difficult to dispel - and that assumes that one is actually trying to reform one’s bad habits. No such reforms of American foreign policy would appear to be in the offing.
Williams outlines four salient features which depict the importance of the Open-Door Policy in understanding American history, and indeed, the “Tragedy of American Diplomacy”:
1) It was not a military strategy nor a traditional “balance-of-power” policy. “It was conceived and designed to win the victories without the wars.” (My comment: The “victories”, of course, being the assimilation of foreign economies into the “American Way of Life”).
2) “It was derived from the proposition that America’s overwhelming economic power could cast the economy and the politics of… underdeveloped countries [my comment: or any others, I might add] in a pro-American mold.”
3) The policy was neither “legalistic nor moralistic”, but “…extremely hardheaded and practical.”
4) “Unless and until it, and its underlying Weltanschauung, were modified to deal with its own consequences, the policy was certain to produce foreign policy crises that would become increasingly severe”.
Perhaps the most lacerating summary that Mr. Williams produces to describe the events at turn of the 20th century, which provided the preamble to the adoption of this policy is where he states that: “The crisis of the 1890s (my note: centered around the Panic of 1893, which was every bit as serious as the Crash of 1929) was a major turning point in American history. It marked the close of the age of Jacksonian “Laissez Nous Faire” (my note: literally, “let us do it”), and provided the setting for the death scene of the individual and entrepreneur as the dynamic figure in American economic life. At the same time, it marked the triumph of a new system based upon, characterized by, and controlled by the corporation and similar large and highly organized groups throughout American society.”
Those statements were first published in 1959, folks! That is damn near all the way back to the year I was born. Fortunately, in these times, we have the help of inestimable “dot-connectors” such as Ms. Caitoz, to help us try to make sense of the whole thing. And given that it is one of the thrusts of action in the US (and, I presume, elsewhere) right now to “memory-hole” our true history, ala Orwell, I think it will do us well to “double-down”, if you will, and dredge up, revisit and reemphasize that very history, in hopes of offsetting the desperate efforts of those who forget - or indeed, who never knew.
Blessings and thanks to all the readers here.
Spot on. Thank you for articulating this so clearly.
21st Century PEACE that should have been...
BUT for pro-WAR U$/UK War-Criminals (ILLEGALLY invading Iraq & Afghanistan) while
HYPOCRITICALLY calling pro-NATO Putin 'a threat'?
In September 2022, during the 7th month of the Ukraine War, interviewed by Channel 4 about his nine meetings with Vladimir Putin, ex-NATO Head Robertson said, "At the first meeting (in Moscow, Oct 2001) Vladimir Putin clearly said, 'I WANT RUSSIA TO BE PART OF WESTERN EUROPE...at the 2nd meeting (in Brussels) he said..'WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE RUSSIA TO (apply to) JOIN NATO?'...I started to sort of reach out and engage them in so many activities that they basically couldn't fight with us.. but after I left NATO (in Dec 2003), the American administration, the Bush administration (DURING THEIR OWN ILLEGAL WAR ON IRAQ opposed by Putin), lost any interest basically in doing business with Russia, they saw it as a threat..they didn't really want to make it part of the overall partnership (for Peace). I think we missed an opportunity at that time because I think it's what he (Putin) wanted, and we could have grabbed hold of him!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTuTsQ1kuYU
Feb 2022, quote formerly pro-NATO Putin rightly stating before wrongly invading, "De-Nazify Ukraine."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_Peace
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/03/18/russias-putin-calls-iraq-war-a-mistake/7fff0ba1-bfda-4970-a1a9-f7c7afd6aaa2/
And, the WORLD'S WORST WAR-CRIMINALS U$A killing millions (including pregnant women/unborn babies, infants, children, the defenceless elderly and disabled in their own lands) - don't recognize the INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT!
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/1093212495/the-u-s-does-not-recognize-the-jurisdiction-of-the-international-criminal-court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes