Imperialism On The Loose: The Showdown Between The U.S. and Russia

As of December, the notoriously unreliable US intelligence agency alleged that Russia was planning a "multi-pronged offensive as soon as early next year involving up to 175,000 troops" in Ukraine. Although the confrontation is supposedly between Russia and Ukraine, with the United States acting as a bodyguard; Ukraine is but a pawn in a geopolitical chess game.

The United States declared an invasion was "imminent" because it captured satellite images showing a buildup of Russian troops on Russia's border with Ukraine. That is, the United States claims that an increase in Russian troops on the Russian border, inside Russia, means that an invasion of Ukraine is imminent. This would be akin to the Mexican president claiming a US invasion of Mexico is imminent due to increased numbers of US troops on the Mexican border. But, of course, this never happens.

Biden has warned Americans living in Ukraine to leave the country in the event of a Russian invasion. Biden, responding to a reporter on whether Americans should leave Ukraine, said “I’d hate to see them get got in the crossfire if in fact they did invade and there’s no need for that. And if I were they, if I had anyone there, I would say leave.”

The White House recently approved a Pentagon plan to help evacuate US citizens should Russia invade Ukraine. About 1,700 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Infantry Brigade are being sent to Poland, but "they are not authorized to enter Ukraine and will not evacuate Americans or conduct air missions from inside Ukraine," according to US officials. Instead, the troops will help Americans evacuate Poland after they arrive from Ukraine if a Russian invasion occurs.

The Department of Defense authorized "the departure of some US embassy personnel and instructed family members to leave." There are around 30,000 Americans residing in Ukraine.

The Biden administration is even tossing out harebrained theories that Russia is filming a fake attack by Ukrainian forces on Russia to use as a pretext for a full-scale invasion.

But declarations of an "imminent" invasion by the ever-reliable US intelligence agencies are now going cold:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told a conference that the US government had stopped using the word "imminent" to refer to alleged plans for a Russian invasion.

"We stopped using it [the word 'imminent'] because I think it sent a message that we did not intend to send, that we knew that President Putin had made a decision," Psaki explained.

“He [Putin] could invade at any time,” she added – in a statement that is so deliberately vague that it makes no sense. “Any time” could mean that Moscow can invade in five days, five months, five years, or five decades.

The White House press secretary later confessed, "We still don't know if he [Putin] has made a decision."

Who is saying an invasion is coming?

Despite US media and government officials hyping a possible invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, along with other Ukrainian officials, have pushed back against the idea that it actually happens:

“The risks haven't been around for just a day, and they haven't gotten any bigger. The only thing that has gotten bigger is the hype that surrounds them,” he said, adding that the media should strive to “be a method of mass information and not mass hysteria.” Later, after Washington and the United Kingdom evacuated their embassies from Ukraine, Zelensky thanked Charles Michel, president of the European Council, and the leaders of the European Union countries for not doing the same.

Zelensky is not the only Ukrainian official to strike this note. In the same call, the Ukrainian foreign minister told Michel that the evacuations were "premature and a show of excessive caution." He later told reporters that the number of assembled Russian troops "is insufficient for a large-scale offensive along the entire border with Ukraine" and that they "lack some important military indicators and systems to carry out a full-scale offensive." such a large scale.

"We can say 100 times a day that the invasion is imminent, but this does not change the situation on the ground," he insisted.

In addition, the Center for Defense Strategies, a think tank headed by a former Ukrainian defense minister, published an analysis of the risks of a Russian invasion. They concluded that Russia is unlikely to invade due to an "insufficient number of Russian troops and a number of other indicators, including a lack of mobilization of medical infrastructure and strategic military units."

Aside from Ukrainian officials and neighboring countries, Russia itself has also repeatedly stated that it does not plan to invade:

Russia, for its part, has repeatedly rejected all accusations that it plans to attack Ukraine, calling them "fiction." “The talks about the coming war are provocative in themselves. [The United States] seems to be asking for this, wishing and waiting for [the war] to happen, as if they want to make their speculations come true,” Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia said.

Is the influx of Russian troops on its border with Ukraine something new?

The current buildup of Russian troops, some 100,000 on a 1,200-mile border with Ukraine, prompted US President Joe Biden to declare that this is "the most important thing that has happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II."

Hysteria about enemies of the state is almost a daily occurrence. It is the only way the National Security State can justify its existence. If everyone is deathly afraid of outside forces, they won't bother to look inward and fix problems in the U.S..

The corporate media is crucial for the oligarchs to build a narrative in the minds of the citizenry. A study of how the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been portrayed in the corporate media, by the independent news outlet MintPress News, found that "more than 10% of the articles studied directly or indirectly compared Vladimir Putin to Hitler.”

Here's an example from the Washington Post about Putin:

A brutal dictator, having staked a claim to power based on conspiracy theories and promises of imperial restoration, rebuilds his military. He begins threatening to seize his neighbors’ territory, blames democracies for the crisis and demands that, to solve it, they must rewrite the rules of international politics — and redraw the map — to suit him. The democracies agree to peace talks, hoping, as they must, to avoid war without unduly rewarding aggression.

What happened next at Munich in 1938 is a matter of history: Britain and France traded a piece of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany in return for his false pledge not to make war.

Bret Stephens, from the New York Times, regarding U.S. troop deployment, wrote:

The best short-term response to Putin’s threats is the one the Biden administration is at last beginning to consider: The permanent deployment, in large numbers, of U.S. forces to frontline NATO states, from Estonia to Romania. Arms shipments to Kyiv, which so far are being measured in pounds, not tons, need to become a full-scale airlift.

Another columnist for the Washington Post said:

Military budgets will have to grow as the U.S. increases its capacity against both Russia and China. The fantasies of withdrawing from some regions to focus on others will have to be set aside; Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America all require more American and allied focus and attention, even as we continue to gear up in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. will have to spend less time inspecting the moral shortcomings of potential allies and more time thinking about how it can deepen its relationships with them.

But the revival of Americans' fears of an atheistic Russian empire or an authoritarian Chinese communist regime in the mainstream outlets is nothing new. And the increase in troops on the Russian border isn't new either:

In 2015, outlets such as Reuters and The New York Times claimed that Russia was massing troops and heavy firepower, including tanks, artillery and rocket launchers right on the border, while normally sleepy frontier towns were abuzz with activity.

In 2016 there was an even bigger meltdown, with media across the board predicting that war was around the corner. Indeed, The Guardian reported that Russia would soon have 330,000 soldiers on the border. Yet nothing came to pass and the story was quietly dropped. 

With the next spring came renewed warnings of conflict. The Wall Street Journal claimed that “tens of thousands” of soldiers were being deployed to the border. The New York Times upped that figure to “as many as 100,000.” A few months later, U.S. News said that thousands of tanks were joining them.

In late 2018, The New York Times and other media outlets were again up in arms over a fresh Russian buildup, this time of 80,000 military units. And in the spring of last year, it was widely reported (for instance, by Reuters and The New York Times) that Russia had amassed armies totaling well over 100,000 units on Ukraine’s border, signaling that war was imminent.

Therefore, there are actually considerably fewer Russian units on Ukraine’s border than there were even 11 months ago, according to Western numbers. Furthermore, they are matched by a force of a quarter-million Ukrainian troops on the other side. 

What is the role of NATO?

According to Colonel Joe Ewers, in a press briefing, the focus of the mission of sending thousands of US troops to Ukraine's neighboring countries is to "reinforce the NATO alliance, build that trust, reassure our allies and strengthen the Eastern flank of the NATO alliance.”

But what is NATO? NATO is nothing more than the multinational military arm of the United States:

The West presents NATO as a force for good, the basis of peace and order in Europe. But a review of NATO's actions in the past, shows the exact opposite picture: it was conceived, created and deployed against the Soviet Union (USSR), and its entire history consists of wars and interventions that left traces in the form of destroyed states and millions of refugees.

Russia, in the mid-90s, tried to join NATO and was flatly rejected:

On March 31, 1954, the USSR Foreign Ministry sent a note to NATO member countries proposing that Moscow join the alliance, provided that the alliance maintained a neutral status. Soviet leaders had no particular illusions about the alliance's reaction, either consent or rejection would be acceptable. An agreement would reduce the military threat to the Soviet Union, since its entry would mean a radical change in the very essence of the alliance, while NATO's refusal would reveal its true nature: it was not interested in stabilizing the situation in Europe, but only in achieving hegemonic dominance.

Russia claims that if Ukraine is admitted to NATO, then they will have military bases from the world's largest empire, which has been trying to overthrow them for the last century, right on their border.

Western assurances that NATO will not expand to the Russian border have fallen by the wayside:

Moscow is right when it says that the West has reneged on its promises.

Such promises were made twice to Russia, in fact. In 1990, during negotiations on the unification of West and East Germany, and then again in 1993, when NATO was extending its Partnership for Peace policy eastward. In both cases, the guarantees were given by the US Secretary of State, James Baker and Warren Christopher, respectively. And in both cases, they took it upon themselves to speak, in effect, on behalf of NATO as a whole.

Despite the clear evidence, there are still Western publicists and even active politicians who deny or play down these facts.

So What’s All The Fuss About?

There are many things that are confusing with the US claim that Russia wants to invade Ukraine.

Among them are the facts that Russia does not have enough troops on its border to invade an entire country and occupy it, or the fact that the Biden administration has admitted that they are not sure that Russia plans to invade at all.

Furthermore, the citizens of Ukraine, Russia and the United States do not want any more conflicts:

Ukrainians perceive both Russia (63% of the population) and the United States (51%) as a threat, according to a recent report by a NATO-aligned think tank. Meanwhile, in the United States, despite media saber-rattling, there is limited public appetite for any conflict with Russia. Last week, a Rasmussen poll found that only 31% of Americans believe US troops should be sent to Ukraine, even if Russia launches an invasion.

There could be many reasons for this move by the United States. It could be that the administration is trying to deflect attention from its dismal approval rating by going to great lengths to maintain the status quo of austerity policies for the poor and massive subsidies and tax cuts for the rich.

Who Wants War?

War is a business and the defense industry is handsomely rewarded every time someone is shot or bombed in war. And they are not ashamed to say it:

Last week, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes said confidently, "I hope we see some benefit from [the Ukraine crisis]." Raytheon and Northrop Grumman shares are currently near all-time highs. Arms-industry-funded media outlets like Politico publish content asking whether the US should “rock Putin’s cage,” and reporters at White House press conferences continue to goad the administration into taking a more aggressive stance. President Zelensky himself has rebuked the Western press for its hyperbolic coverage of the situation. “The image created by the mass media is that we have troops on the roads, we have mobilization, people are going to places. That is not the case. We don't need this panic,” he said.

What Would War With Russia Look Like?

A war with Russia will have no victors when we talk about a nuclear war , but the United States seems ready to sacrifice the planet on the altar of imperialism.

Radio operator Abe Spitzer observed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II. He gave a description of what he saw:

Below us, almost as far as the eye could see, was a great fire, a fire such as we had never seen before. It had a dozen colors and all of them forced us to close our eyes. More colors than I imagined existed. And in the center, brighter than anything else, a gigantic ball of fire that seemed bigger than the sun. Actually, we had the impression that, without knowing how, the sun had fallen from the sky and after hitting the ground was beginning to rise again, directly towards us, very fast. At the same time, that ball dispersed until it covered the entire city. The ball was enveloped on all sides, half-hidden under a thick, impenetrable column of whitish smoke that extended to the foot of the hills that surrounded the city and burst and rose towards us with inconceivable speed. The ship lurched again. We heard explosions; as if giant cannons that fired at us from all directions hitting us. The purple light changed color and became blue-green with yellowish edges, and, below the ball of fire, like a sun turned upside down, the smoke, which seemed to follow it, moving towards us at an inconceivable speed - although to us , at the same time, it did not seem so to us—and moving away from what was left of the city. Suddenly we found ourselves to the left of the column of smoke, which continued to rise into the sky, reaching an estimated height, I later learned, of fifty thousand feet. It looked like a kind of huge pole that was narrowing towards the sky and reaching the stratosphere. Scientists later told us that they believed the column to be seven or eight kilometers in diameter at the base and two kilometers or more at its top. As we watched, mesmerized by the sight, the plume of smoke was changing color. From off-white to brown, then amber, then all three colors at once, blending into a shimmering, seething rainbow. For a second it seemed that it would lose its rage, but almost immediately a kind of mushroom gushed out of its upper part and rose to a distance that according to some reached twenty thousand or twenty-two thousand meters [...]. The whole column boiled and bubbled, and the top of the mushroom burst in all directions, like tidal waves in a storm. And then, suddenly, the mushroom broke free from the column as if it had been cut with a very sharp sword and continued to rise. How far he got I don't know; no one knew then and no one knows now. It does not appear in any photographs and none of our measuring devices recorded it accurately. There are those who say that it reached an altitude of twenty-five thousand meters, some that up to thirty thousand, others that even more [...]. Then another, smaller cloud gushed off the column.

After the atomic bombs are dropped, the few of us left on the planet will face extinction due to what is called a "nuclear winter":

If Russia and the United States launched an all-out nuclear war, it would spell disaster for everyone on Earth, a new study suggests. Explosions, fires, and radiation exposure would not only kill millions in the targeted cities, but a "nuclear winter" lasting months or years would also drastically alter Earth's climate, causing freezing summers and famine around the globe.

The Cold War may be over, but nuclear bombs are still exceptionally destructive, and there are more than enough of them to cause climate catastrophe, said study co-author Alan Robock, an environmental scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

It is not clear what the intentions of the United States are, but these tensions and potential conflicts are guaranteed to continue to arise as long as the oligarchy maintain their positions of power.