“All that remains in the West is an increasingly unnatural and insane attempt to stop the wheels of history… In this aging Europe, nations, states, and ruling classes…continue to believe in the hollow formulas of liberty and progress.”
Oswald Spengler, “The Decline of the West”
In June this year, German daily Handelsblatt reported that German leader Olaf Scholz, while he was finance minister in 2020, had tried to make a secret deal with the Trump administration to circumvent US sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Two years later, in early February 2022, just weeks before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the White House to discuss the escalating crisis with U.S. President Joe Biden.
In a live press conference after the meeting, Biden was asked about his views on the Nord Stream pipeline, which transports Russian natural gas to Europe. The US president responded, “If Russia invades Ukraine, there will be no Nord Stream 2. We will end it.”
Scholz, standing next to the US president, was asked to respond, and the German leader made it clear that the US and Germany were on the same page when it came to Ukraine, and although he did not mention Nord Stream, he implicitly supported its destruction.
But as he spoke, the German chancellor seemed uncomfortable: I wonder if he considered how history would view him for, in effect, approving the extrajudicial destruction of a vital piece of Germany's civilian infrastructure, and whether it would set a new precedent for international norms of behavior.
Russia Surrounded
At first glance, the West seems to have a divisive view of Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe and Russia strengthened their economic ties, and the first Nord Stream agreement was signed in 2005 between then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Washington opposed Nord Stream, ostensibly on the grounds that it would make Germany too dependent on Russian energy. Chancellor Merkel clearly did not share America's concerns.
US President Donald Trump nonetheless imposed sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream, for unclear reasons, as the project was part of Trump's “Make America Great” initiative.
The then-president signed a very deep-state bill known as the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which allowed the US to impose sanctions on any company working with German or Russian companies on Nord Stream to “protect the energy security of US allies.”
With friends like these, we don't need enemies. Or, as Henry Kissinger is reported to have said with uncharacteristic candor: “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but it is deadly to be America's friend.”
The Ukraine war was the result of the West's failure to remake Russia in its own neoliberal image. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States had an ally in Mikhail Gorbachev's successor, Boris Yeltsin.
President Yeltsin followed the advice of American economists to rapidly transform Russia into a neoliberal economy, who suggested that only shock therapy could put Russia on the path to a democratic market economy.
Subsequent “market reforms” resulted in Russia's resources being plundered by well-connected entrepreneurs, creating an oligarchic class that made billions of dollars.
They quickly moved their assets overseas, buying football clubs in England and luxury properties on the French Riviera, while Russian pensioners sat on the streets of Moscow selling drugs to buy food.
When nationalist Putin replaced globalist Yeltsin, the West doubled down on NATO expansion.
US Foreign Policy: Bipartisan Deep State Agreement to Encircle Russia, a Failed Strategic Gamble
Under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, the United States never abandoned its Cold War policies of undermining Russia. President Jimmy Carter supported the Afghan mujahideen, the precursor to the Taliban, and successive U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, continued covert and overt interference in the countries on Russia's southern border.
The ideological architect of the Russia containment strategy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Adviser to President Carter. Ukraine plays a crucial role in the so-called Brzezinski Doctrine, which is seen as the key to preventing economic integration between Russia and Europe. Even today, the US diplomatic establishment is full of Brzezinski's successors.
In Ukraine, the West made a huge strategic gamble that failed: crippling sanctions against Russia were supposed to collapse the Russian economy, spark a popular uprising, and replace Putin with a pro-Western leader, the mother of all regime changes.
Russia is the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources, so having another globalist in the Kremlin would have been a boon for Wall Street, and with natural resources becoming increasingly important, Russia offers a wealth of investment opportunities for the next 100 years.
End of the game
After the 2022 espionage attack on the Nord Stream, Western governments offered various “clues” to identify the perpetrators. No evidence was presented, but the hints served to confuse matters and provide an alternative narrative to Biden's bold statements about the Nord Stream.
Germany, Denmark and Sweden conducted mock investigations into Nord Stream sabotage and refused to make their findings public, while Western countries rejected Russia's requests for an independent UN investigation.
In early August, The Wall Street Journal reported new leads about Nord Stream, suggesting that Ukrainian agents had carried out the attack with the approval of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
An optimistic interpretation of the WSJ article is that the West is preparing public opinion to sacrifice Zelensky and pave the way for his successor to enter into peace talks with Russia, even though Zelensky has admitted that previous Minsk talks with Russia were aimed at buying time so that he could build up the Ukrainian military, disqualifying him as a sincere negotiator.
Apart from Ukraine itself, the Western powers are the big losers of the war. Dominated by a generation of neoliberals and Atlanticists who believe that ideology trumps economic, military and historical common sense, they encouraged and encouraged Ukraine to fight a war it had no chance of winning against a superpower with nuclear weapons and industrial military might.
For Atlanticists, ideology takes precedence over ethics and morality.
