Dakota Beacon

We, who are of an age to have learned something of history in school,  will know that WWI - which changed the world forever - did not start because someone assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.  It began because of a web of defense alliances which dragged all of Europe into an all-out war between the great powers of the continent.  We are seeing this dynamic right now, in real time.  Maybe there is time to stop before we see WWIII.  The problem is that we are governed not by those we elect but by special interests and bureaucrats - chiefly the CIA.

Many of us watched at least a good deal of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, this week.  Some of us learned a lot about at least Putin’s version of Russian (and Ukrainian) history from the early Middle Ages up to the present time.  And some of us began thinking of some other U.S. policies throughout our past, policies which seem to have been far, far more successful that those we have been pursuing of late.

The reason we wanted to hear from Putin, obviously, was because we have been deeply involved in a proxy war with Russia since 2022, and long before that we were manipulating the internal politics of Ukraine - orchestrating a coup, in fact.  There is no point in denying any of this - it’s all right there, and some of it from Biden’s own lips (“well, sonofabitch . . . “).  Leave it to Tucker Carlson to go for the red meat and get an extended in-person interview with Putin himself.  And it was worth watching, if for no other reason than to see the somewhat refreshing image of a leader who at least appears to be competent - something we can barely remember in America.  Young adults today have grown up in a rapidly unraveling America with hopelessly incompetent leadership.  We enjoyed a very brief period of constructive diplomacy when the Trump administration worked to some temporary effect in finding solid common ground between Israel and the Arab countries and we had a lull in antagonistic behavior on the part of communist Asia (until they unleashed “covid”, at least).  But overall, the conduct of America’s foreign policies has been an unqualified disaster.  If you doubt this, recall if you will our departure from Afghanistan.  

The driving force behind our policies toward Russia seems to be a deep, abiding and unreasoning hatred for that nation.  Many of us who are, let’s say, “mature Americans”, grew up with a dread fear of Russia.  It was mysterious, a closed society to most Americans, in ways in which other European countries were not.  We knew a lot about life in France, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Greece.  We knew very, very little about Russia.  This was mostly because under Stalin and then under a succession of like-minded totalitarians, access to the people of Russia was strictly controlled.  We did not enjoy uncensored communication with Russian citizens.  We did not move freely within Russia when we did venture to go there.  This I know from family accounts.  

All of this changed drastically following the Reagan years.  He had taken a strong stand against the aggressive and oppressive nature of the USSR’s policies.  He memorably demanded that Mr. Gorbachev “tear down this wall”, in reference to the Berlin Wall, which represented this oppression.  Boris Yeltsin and his retinue successfully overthrew the Soviet leadership and attempted, at least, to institute a free society - not an easy project where people had become wholly dependent on the state for their very survival, and free enterprise was new and strange.  Yeltsin tried to accomplish this in a nation which had never experienced anything of the sort - which had transitioned from rule of Mongol hoards to medieval fuedalism to the Romanovs to the Soviets.  But his incredible effort broke the dam.  The scary USSR, subject of so many spy novels, so many movies, so many rumors and mysteries, was now, presumably, open for business.  

It wasn’t an easy transition.  Many of the same “takers” continued to take, but in other guises.  Those who had been feathering their nests well enough became oligarchs and beneficiaries of oligarchs.  Where the US might have been helpful in some ways, instead we decided to hold our thumb on Russian progress.  Maybe out of habit, maybe out of personal reasons, including financial gains, by western “oligarchs” (our “special interests”).  

In America our leaders cultivated a perpetual paranoia - hatred, fear and suspicion of everything Russian.  Russia might have anticipated at least some moral support after throwing off the yoke of government oppression of more than 1,000 years, but no.  Americans were taught to dislike and fear everyone and everything Russian.  We can speculate all day as to why, but it won’t change the fact.

The current conflict in Ukraine is an example of the mistake that this is.  Immediately following the conclusion of WWII, we turned our guns back on Russia.  Prior to the war we had had our problems with Soviet infiltration of our institutions, for example, and the “Red Scares” which followed the Russian Revolution.  These continued to fester, and although the communist system was being promoted non-stop in our universities and other institutions, including the press, our attitude toward the nation of Russia shifted immediately from “ally” to “enemy” (and perhaps - just my own thought - it was just cover for the importation of the Soviet governmental model).  But Russiaphobia set in.  We and 11 other nations set about establishing what was supposed to be a defense organization to roadblock Soviet expansion.  We began to conflate “Russia” and “Russian” with “Soviet”, an easy confusion for most who were not that familiar with Russian culture in the first place.  Soviets tended to co-opt much of it, but did not generate it.

NATO might have deterred Soviet aggression in western Europe, but when the former Soviet Union imploded - mostly under its own weight as a failed economy, not due to military failure - the need for NATO ceased to exist.  The former Soviet satellite states, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and others set up their own governments, some democratic, others much less so, but none of them with designs on taking over their neighbors.  We no longer needed NATO.  But as with other governmental and inter-governmental agencies, it took on a life of its own.  It became big business in and of itself.  It became a large-scale consumer of the products of the military-industrial complex of which we were warned by Eisenhower.  That’s the quick way to explain the Ukraine war.  

Over the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has made overtures in the way of limiting the growth of NATO - understandable inasmuch as since the early 1990s Russia has not rolled tanks into any European neighbor’s town squares or pounded any shoes on the table at the U.N.  For the most part it has been finding its way in the post-Soviet economy and world political climate.  For our part we repeatedly set limits on the growth of NATO.  We violated them all.  NATO grew from its founding in 1949, with 12 member nations, to add Turkey and Greece in 1952, Germany in 1955, Spain in 1982, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1999 (well after the fall of the Soviet Union), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, and Finland in 2023,  So who looks to be the aggressor?  It was supposed to be a “defense” pact, but defense against what, exactly?  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the “defense organization” formed to fend it off grew from 16 to 31 members.  NATO has become a force of aggression, not defense, and we and other western “non-aggressors” have invested heavily in it.  It would be good for the world if NATO were to be dissolved.

These treaties are not necessarily harmless just because they are termed “defense treaties”.  World War I, the war to “end all wars”, the war which changed forever the face of Europe and America, was built upon a series of treaties whereby local or limited territorial disputes ended up dragging the entire western world into a disastrous and devastating world conflict.  The situation brewing with NATO is not dissimilar.

The genesis of the Ukraine war, as we have said here before, was the U.S. aggressively promoting the expansion once again of NATO, this time to include Ukraine, a betrayal of our promises to support a “demilitarized zone” there. This, coupled with Ukraine’s violent suppression of the ethnic Russian population in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, and the installation of U.S. missiles within Ukraine (not to mention bio weapons labs just across the border from Russia) brought on the military response from Russia.  This was in February of 2022, long before our stealth attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.  By April, Russia and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy (which the U.S. had hand-picked in an earlier coup in that nation) met in Turkey and the result was a signed peace agreement.  Suddenly, the dollar bills, as in a Warner Brothers cartoon, grew wings and began to fly away, spelling losses for the military-industrial interests in the west.  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself rushed in to promise Zelenskyy the world if he would keep the war going.  

Zelenskyy has kept it going, betraying his own people as well as his promise to work peacefully to end the conflict, with repeated trips in his dingy green tee shirt to the U.S. Congress to demand more, more, more.  At a time when our own economy is increasingly fragile, leaders like Mitch McConnell have been urging more support, and justifying it by telling us that it’s an economical coup for us - we get to send our “old” equipment to Ukraine, so that Ukrainians will die in hundreds of thousands and their land will be destroyed, and thus we can commission more and newer stuff from our arms dealers at “no cost” in American lives.  What a deal.  

What has America become?  Clearly not an example of morality.  As to deeper motives, Col. Douglas Macgregor has some suggestions.  It is sad, indeed, that making war on Russia seems justification enough for the vast majority of U.S. Senators, to continue funding this slaughter of innocent people and the destruction of a nation.  We all understand the power of the arms dealers, but Macgregor also suggests the importance of Ukraine’s valuable agricultural potential for other greedy western oligarchs.  

It appears - from the mindset of our corrupt leaders, including many “conservatives”, neocons, all - that we will continue to pursue this mindless war until we are finally drawn in as first-hand combatants.  And we will likely do no better than we did with Ho Chi Minh.  It never needed to be, of course.  We have been in the driver’s seat throughout this entire conflict, starting it, kindling it, shoring it up if it began to fade, stepping it up whenever possible.  Our leaders have kept up the fiction of the old Soviet threat.  In so doing they are encouraging the rising of a new Russian adversary, far more likely to succeed than their predecessors.  They are playing with matches and American lives and treasure.

We could have gone in an entirely different direction.  Remember our animosity toward Japan and Germany during WWII?  We portrayed them in pop culture as monsters.  We interned them in our own country in camps, we dispossessed them of their businesses, homes, livelihoods.  We were quite brutal to our own citizens of these ethnicities.  And, sure, we regret it today.  But the climate was one of our young men being killed in violent attacks while “defending freedom” and their families and loved ones back home.  It was, perhaps understandable if not excusable - after all, these American citizens of Japanese ancestors were not our enemies.  

But when the war ended, over 400,000 Americans had been killed, nearly 672,000 wounded.  We wanted an end of war.  How did we attempt to do this?  First of all, we recognized what had started WWII in the first place - our reprehensible treatment of Germany and Austria following their defeat in WWI.  We left them little choice but to go to war again just to survive.  We left them hating us deeply and unforgivingly.  As they saw it, we were the aggressors, not they.  We started it in their view.  And they had a point.  But we learned from our reckless policies from that time.  At the end of the war we occupied the former enemy nations.  We sought to help rehabilitate their economies rather than punish the people.  We did all we could think of to disarm and pacify them and build good relationships with the people and the new governments as they began to emerge.  In Japan our greatest desire was that we could get out of Japan as an occupying force and let them take their place as a peaceful ally.

Who is our strongest ally in Asia today?  Japan.  Who has been our strongest ally in Europe for nearly 80 years?  Germany.  Who is our adversary in Europe today?  Russia.  One should be asking why.  What happened when the threat of Japan and Germany ended?  Peace, rehabilitation with lots of help from America, finally great prosperity.  They have become huge economic forces, great trade partners, peaceful allies.  What happened when the threat of the Soviet Union ended?  Endless, mindless, pointless hostility on the part of America.  What is likely to be the outcome?  We have squandered a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, but that is the least of it perhaps.  We surredered our good character and reputation when we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline (months after a peace was negotiated between the principal combatants, by the way).  In so doing, we severely damaged the economies of allies in western Europe, especially Germany - with the consent and cooperation of the German government, although not the German people, of course.  We might induce WWIII and we will not be at an advantage in that one.  We might well lose.  While Russia has been busy building its economy we have been ranging around the planet looking for conflicts we can inflate and involve ourselves in.  We’ve become adept at this.  The Bush presidents were good at this, policies of the Clinton and Obama years promoted the kindling of wars, including assassinations such as that of Gaddafi in Libya.  While we had a brief respite in the Trump era, that period was used by the Left to promote conspiracy theories about “Russian intervention” in our elections (ironic, but typical of a political group which did these things in other nations - such as Ukraine).  Now we are back to the hard politics of war.  

We could hope for a leader with the vision and knowledge to implement something like what we did after WWII in Japan and Germany, making fast friends of these nations which a year before had been shooting at us in an all-out world war.  But perhaps the ship has left the dock on that possibility.  America has shown itself to be an untrustworthy friend at best and a terrorist nation at worst, with our blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline.  This, you will recall, happened in September of 2022, months after a peace accord had been reached in Turkey which would have ended the killing.  At that point the death toll in that war was less than 2,500.  As of today, Ukraine has lost in excess of 130,000 in this war.  Many more have been wounded and many, many more have fled their homeland.  Of course Russians have also been killed, much to the delight of Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham.  What if we had just left well enough alone and allowed this peace initiative to flower?  Well, we’d have lost a lot of money for special interests that fill the coffers of the likes of Graham, McConnell and Nikki Haley and nearly all of our Senators and most of our Congressmen.  The price we pay for enriching these oligarchs is the potential for world-wide peace and prosperity we might have enjoyed had we joined forces with the Russian Republic instead of needlessly making them our enemy.  Instead we decided to go with a program that might well lead to WWIII.  

Russia’s foreign policies might have left something to desire - we can’t say they are perfect, but when we look at them in comparison to American foreign policy since Eisenhower’s era, or even just during the same period of time, we don’t look so virtuous.  We have a lot of explaining to do - not to the world as much as to our own people who are paying the price for this folly.  We should not idolize Vladimir Putin.  He is, after all, a dictator in his own country and if we continue to exhibit such terrible weakness in our leadership and if we display perpetual intransigence with regard to the conflicts we began with him, he may one day feel empowered to take up the aggression of his Soviet predecessors.  We should not want that.  

Oh, and the scorecard of Putin vs Carlson - I'd say Putin 9, Carlson 3.  Just my opinion.  What's yours?