Enough is enough: stop provoking Russia

Like many people, I’m eagerly awaiting Scott Horton’s upcoming book, Provokedwhich will explain in detail the US provocations that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But will it be too late?

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Biden administration, in cooperation with the Ukrainian government and most of Europe, has continually provoked Putin into a broader conflict with the West. It is possible to recognize the dangerous path we are walking without justifying any of Russia’s responses to these provocations.

The US and Europe have armed Ukraine to the teeth. The West has financed Ukraine’s military efforts – as well as massive corruption – to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Supposedly this is good for the US because it helps the US military-industrial complex, but it will be cold comfort in the event of a war with Russia.

Ukraine sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline, but initially everyone started to blame Russia. Ukraine launched an invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast in early August, apparently catching the U.S. government by surprise. Since the invasion and Wall Street JournalAfter the revelations about the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the US government’s support for Ukraine has not changed one iota. Indeed, the Kursk raid ultimately met with US approval.

The US government provided Ukraine with ATACMS missiles, which caused an explosion on a beach in Crimea in April. And now Ukraine is launching attacks on Moscow again, this time sending drones that attacked apartment buildings and an airport. Will our blank check to Ukraine – as its actions continue to grow in desperation – spark a war? less likely, as war hawks seem to imagine? Hardly.

The US is making an elementary mistake: it treats the war with Ukraine as a proxy war. But for Russia it is something completely different. Our Ukrainian plenipotentiary is not fighting the Russian plenipotentiary, but Russia itself. The fact that the fighting took place in neighboring Ukraine and not in Russia does not change anything. American money, weapons and intelligence are being used to wage war on Russia. For Russian leaders, it is that simple.

The American establishment is playing a dangerous game. Blinded by their own hubris, thinking they know better, they claim that Putin is bluffing when he suggests he might use nuclear weapons or when Russian officials indicate that Russia is changing its nuclear doctrine in response to Western actions. Establishment hackers claim that Putin is a “coward” who will give in to the West’s displays of strength and determination. (You could call this the “coward, coward, coward” narrative). No wonder the Ukrainian government tells the same story.

Of course, this narrative is grossly inconsistent and self-serving. Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and fanatical Russian hawk, at the same time he knows Putin will withdraw from US deterrence, but he can say with a straight face that “Putin has consistently acted aggressively, even when the costs appear to outweigh the benefits.” Moreover, he says, “US policymakers also underestimate the Russian leader’s tolerance for risky behavior, often assuming that he will respond predictably to threats and inducements.” Well, what is it? Do we know that Putin will step down, or is he unpredictable and willing to take costly actions out of fear? It would not be an exaggeration to say that everything is based on this one, unverifiable speculation about Putin.

When their narrative is invariably met with the harsh mistress of reality, they resort to the first page of the Washington playbook – unprecedented actions and funds are not enough, we must do and spend even more. If the West doesn’t finance Ukraine or if we make peace with Russia, say Putin’s hawks, we are rewarding aggression. Hundreds of billions of dollars to signal that we cannot “reward aggression” is typical Beltway or disconnected think tank logic: taking expensive, symbolic actions that have no meaning. Because in the end it will make no difference except prolonging the conflict and increasing death and suffering. Doing more will only bring us closer to the edge. As revealed in New York Times in late August, the Biden administration “feared that the likelihood of nuclear use could increase to 50 percent or even higher.” However, we continue to escalate.

At every turn, the American political establishment obstructed peace. Victoria Nuland, Biden’s former undersecretary of state for political affairs, recently admitted what we already knew: that the United States helped sabotage a peace proposal that could have ended the infancy Russia-Ukraine war. Their constant repetition that Putin cannot be trusted and that he is salivating at the thought of moving after Ukraine to Eastern Europe did not help either. History will remember that the war could have ended almost immediately and countless Ukrainians alive today had the American establishment had peace in mind and not Putin in its crosshairs.

When U.S. leaders say enough is enough: it’s time to end our support for Ukraine; it’s time to withdraw belligerence against nuclear powers; and the time has come for peace, trade, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling themselves in alliances with none? To paraphrase Murray Rothbard, while some may prefer death in nuclear war to Russian rule over Ukraine, most Americans – and many Ukrainians – rightly prefer not to end up in the graveyard of the “free world.”

Some European leaders are moving closer to peace. But only an intense and sustained peace campaign by the American people can counter the establishment’s hawkish impulses to defend Ukraine at all costs.