Tag: ukraine

ith all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of US-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.

For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics.

Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party.

The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

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President Trump suggested in an interview with the Daily Caller published on Tuesday that he would be willing to back a European troop deployment in Ukraine as part of a security guarantee for a potential future peace deal, an arrangement Russia has made clear it would never accept.

Trump was asked if he was considering using US troops for security guarantees, and he said “no,” but made clear he was open to the idea of using US air power, something he has previously suggested.

When asked if he would use US planes for the security guarantees, Trump said, “Maybe we’ll do something. Look, I’d like to see something get solved. They’re not our soldiers, but there are, five to 7,000, mostly young people, being killed every single week. If I could stop that and have a plane flying around the air every once in a while, it’s going to be mostly the Europeans, but we, we’d help them. They, you know, they sort of need it, and we’d help them if we could get something done.”

The insistence from European officials on sending troops to Ukraine could be what ends up sinking the peace process. Russia has said that it must be involved in talks on security guarantees for Ukraine, but European leaders continue to discuss the idea with Ukrainian officials without Russian involvement.

Trump was asked how his support for the potential security guarantees squares with an “America First” foreign policy and pointed to the fact that NATO countries are now purchasing US weapons for Ukraine, although a recent deal that will arm Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles will be partially funded by US military aid.

“Look, we were spending hundreds of billions of dollars in that war. Now we sell equipment to NATO. I got them to go from two to five. Nobody thought that was, and pay. We sell equipment to NATO. We don’t sell it to Ukraine. We sell it to NATO. They pay for the equipment. We’re not spending any money on the war,” Trump said.

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