By Ted Belman
Caitlin A Johnstone Blog makes a very strong case that the Deep State provoked the War in Ukraine as a means to bring about regime change in Russia.
It may be summarized as follows:
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- The Deep State began working toward regime change in Russia even before Obama became president.
- Obama refused to arm Ukraine as a means of drawing Russia into invading Ukraine
- Russia gate was contrived to get Trump to be aggressive toward Russia to dispel the narrative of Trump being in cahoots with Putin.
- It worked. Trump armed Ukraine to show his anti-Putin credentials.
- In addition it gave us a constant drumbeat of anti-Putin rhetoric.
- Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin
- Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.
- The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia.
- The U.S. could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.
But as Dr Steve Turley pointed out in this monologue, it didn’t work as Putin is now more popular than ever and has weathered the sanctions.
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Caitlin A Johnstone Blog (March 28, 2022 ) |
It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.
A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.
Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the U.S. policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.
In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”
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It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the U.S. intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.
In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.
The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the U.S. intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the U.S. intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.
Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.
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Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of U.S. cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.
Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the U.S. intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.
And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the U.S. Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The U.S. could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.
Lauria writes:
The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.
The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.
This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the U.S. empire brought us here intentionally.
@Reader
Thanks for clarifying the good war phrase. There is little chance of a similar benefit from the US going to war with Russia, though, quite the contrary is all too likely, I believe.
I really am curious how Germany will find the means to rearm to be honest. They are facing an economic crisis the likes of which they have not faced before. It is July and they are about to lose access to all Russian oil in a week, albeit the claim is that it will only be for a few weeks, but their oil reserves are not full, they are already talking about rationing energy supplies, and once the reserves are full, it will only hold the nation over for a few months. There energy costs are crushing their industries, and businesses in existence since the end of WW2 or earlier are struggling to keep their doors open as energy prices are continuing to skyrocket and oil is becoming ever more difficult for Germany to access. With all of this in mind, where will the funds come from to pay for Germany’s rearmament? I read recently that they had only some few dozen working tanks as Ukraine was demanding these be sent to them, so it isn’t that Germany needs to expand their armed forces, they actually need to create them – not something to be done quickly, and not something to be done easily, especially amid a spiraling recession, the end of which may leave the world’s finances looking quite a bit different than they stand today.
The blame game only matters if you have the financial ability to act upon a sense of vengeance. The relative public’s rage will strike out at their own govt’s much more quickly than anyone will be in a position to sneeze at Russia.
My comments about Russia holding the West in Checkmate over Ukraine is not really a statement of Russia’s independence. Rather it speaks largely of the incapacity and stupidity of the West. The West has simultaneously arranged to enter a war with Russia, when Russia was prepared for war and they were not, while forcing a sanction war on Russia in which the West is the greater victim of the sanctions with skyrocketing inflation, while the Russians are quite fat with cash and their inflation having already spiked, are already recovering. All the West can do is continue the war for a few months, while Russia continues to score on the battlefield and improve her economy while the West suffers in their own sanctions trap. Russia certainly does have long term issues that they will need to resolve to prevent a future crisis, but I believe that Russia has been prepared for the inevitability of this war, and it being a slug-fest, for some time. The rate at which they are employing their missiles is a statement to their ability to continue this war without concern for a good long time. You have to hand it to Putin, in an age of historically bad leadership around the world, he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to break with the pack.
@peloni
“I am curious of what you mean by ‘another’ good war”
In the US WWII is known as the “good” war (no sarcasm intended) because it got the country out of the Great Depression, the US achieved 100% employment, and got to WIN THE WAR.
Another step toward a worldwide depression with the US coming out on top.
The comparison is relevant, watch at least the 1st half hour:
Germany is rearming again, and now they have NATO headed by the US which is even better than Germany fighting alone in WWII with the whole of Europe acting as Hitler’s factory.
And all of this is RUSSIA’S FAULT!!! (Of course, the public will believe it).
I really hope you are right but Russia has some very significant flaws in its economy (especially in manufacturing and technology) because of the decades’ long dependence on foreign trade and imports (replacement parts, etc.), and it takes years to make a country’ economy self-sustaining.
Also, don’t think that all the US is doing is giving weapons to Ukraine while Russia is “winning the war”.
The people who plan these things create situations and these situations force the actors involved do certain thing whether they want to do them or not.
BTW I hope Israel is learning a few lessons here while watching the events unfold.
@Reader
I am curious of what you mean by ‘another’ good war, are you referencing WWII with a sacastic note here? Serious question.
Regardless of what they want, they will not achieve it. Europe is quite insincere with regards to their war fever, more likely the further from Russia you travel, the personal animus by the public against the Russians drops off quite sharply, I believe. If the European govts persist in their mania, which is quite self defeating, they will be overthrown by the public’s rejection of the consequences of the current war, even with their own nations yet to take a swim in this blood bath. The economies in Europe are being devastated, Estonia has past 22% inflation for example. The comparison to WWII is quite irrelevant, as the nations of Europe were targeted by the German war machine, ie war was forced upon them. Furthermore, Russia has no intention in being taunted into taking on a similar role to the Nazi warmongers, no matter how directly they are taunted it seems, referencing their enormous restraint over the Kaliningrand fiasco. Regardless of the propaganda, people are only so gullible or even interested in what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and only Ukraine. Yes, the Poles are ever ready for the world to march on Moscow, but that is hardly new, and perhaps they are just stupid enough to start something they can not finish, but if they do, it will be their own tragedy in the making.
The West is not going to go to war. With the rise in energy costs the European economies are in meltdown, and many countries are facing rationing energy in the winter, and sooner. Germany is looking at a de-industrialization due to their incapacity to hold costs down to a point where the profit margin is actually profitable. The idea that Europe will be capable of increasing military spending as they are entering a recession is quite comical, despite NATO’s claim that 2% spending will be a floor rather than a ceiling. So, they can sputter and clamor as they like, spend what few dollars they care to strip from healthcare or retirement funds on troop buildups, but they do not have the means to go to war, not for years, likely, and that would be presuming that something in the Pacific does not go sideways, which would be quite a presumption at this point.
Russia has won this war, and the West financed it for them through their self imposed price increase on oil. More than this, in response to the US overplaying the sanctions card, Russia has rather significant allies now lining up alongside them, not for a fight, of course, but to support them economically in trade, with an ever increasingly valued rubble to offset against the ever increasing number of dollars being printed.
Hence, I think your concerns of anyone going to war with Russia are quite overblown. This is what checkmate looks like, failing something very large black swan event yet to be encountered.
@peloni
They want another “Good War” in order for the US to establish full dominance over the whole world, meaning, this time the Western Bloc is hoping to finally take over Russia..
For that, they’ll probably need to engineer another Great Depression, and possibly to revive the draft.
As far as what they are planning to do to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and other countries full of “Untermenschen”. – Google Generalplan Ost.
@peloni
They want another “Good War” in order for the US to establish full dominance over the whole world, meaning, this time the Western Bloc is hoping to finally take over Russia.
For that, they’ll probably need to engineer another Great Depression, and possibly to revive the draft.
As far as what they are planning to do to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and other countries full of “Untermenschen”. – Google Generalplan Ost.
@Adam
@Reader
It is an interesting point of conflict presented here, for which I would like to add my own insights, such as they are. When considering the motivation for the US administration’s moves to increase public support for Ukraine, I think Reader is correct that we must consider the greater context surrounding the limited quantity of aid (not to overstate the reality of what $6 billion might purchase, and this is just from the US coffers) being provided to Ukraine. The administration is still leveraging sanctions in an ever more severe and historic nature that has had a serious impact upon the American economy.
With this in mind, what might be rationalized as the incentive for the resulting dichotomy between the US policy regarding the aid and the sanctions. The sanctions are, in fact, part of the damage that Adam suggests is motivating the administration to be falsely representing their support for the fledgling Ukraine. So, if the purpose of the US is to benefit itself by using the somewhat fake aid package to distract the public from their troubles, why would the US simultaneously increase the troubles from which they need to distract the public by continuing to increase the aid in the first place?
I think the answer is, once again, to be found in the reality that the West have no interest in Ukraine or the Ukrainians, and that their only focus, even to their own detriment, is upon damaging the Russians to the purpose of creating enough economic hardships that they will overturn their leadership, ie remove Putin from power and send Russia back to the dark ages of the Yeltsin era which was highlighted by broad corruption and mismanagement, economic depression, national weakness and American dependency.
@Adam Dalgliesh
You forgot to mention the unprecedented sanctions the West headed by the US unleashed on Russia, and also omitted all the history of NATO expansion that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you watched the video I posted you would find some interesting parallels there, it is enough to watch the first 30 minutes if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing.
I am not saying that it is unthinkable that the PTB could start WWIII in order to distract and control the masses but I think they need a stronger motive to do this.
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There was a great deal of discussion at the time in the 90’s that Clinton and Yelsin were partners, but the reality was clear that this was not so. Nothing made this reality more clear than the negotiations regarding NATO. You can gain a flavor of things by reading about the humbling negotiations between Clinton and Yeltsin, here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210304064355/http://johnhelmer.net/the-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-the-secret-in-the-clinton-yeltsin-papers-which-the-kremlin-spokesman-regrets-to-see-exposed-is-the-love-of-submission/
You can start reading at the paragraph beginning with
and stop when you are convinced Yeltsin was an absolute puppet. His demands were ignored completely, and he was even manipulated into removing his Foreign Minister from the negotiations due to his objections to Yeltsin’s unilateral concessions. This was no partnership by any delusional standard. It was a give-take relationship where Clinton gave orders and Yeltsin took commands. The caveat of this was that the Clinton network of allies tapped the proceeds from the loans, and various financial scams into foreign bank accounts, with full exposure in the Russian press of much of this and little push back for many years.
Putin was a good manager. He took back enough control from the oligarchs to control the govt and he did an amazingly good job at doing so. In just a few years he was able to free Russia from her financial domination by the West and left her free to oppose NATO’s encroachment eastward beginning with his stated Red Lines in 2007 and the Georgian war in 2008.
A Western puppet by contrast would look like something akin to Yeltsin’s Russia or post Maidan Ukraine, where the puppet nation was completely mismanaged, incapable of paying their debts despite obvious assets being exported, the presence of significant political instability that is both cause by the West and supported by the West, and foreign exploitation thru politically induced financial scams that are clearly not in the interest of the puppet state while padding the pockets of many important advisors and politicians in the West.
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@Sebastien
It was due to his dependency upon the West, while allowing his nation to be so badly exploited by foreign interests and the demonstration of disrespect by the West for Russian interests, eg NATO encroachment.
Yeltsin was initially empowered in ’91 by the Russian parliament to unilaterally pursue market reforms with the Americans. The purpose of this power being placed into Yeltsin’s hands was intended to make the market reform quicker (and thereby irreversible). The policy employed, however, had no measures in place to pause the reforms should the hardships on the public be too severe, and this was no accident. Rather it was the very purpose of the policy to rapidly pursue market reforms regardless of the economic consequences – accurately described as ‘shock therapy’. The first wave of these reforms resulted in an unbelievable 2500% inflation and quickly devastated the Russian people, to which the Parliament and the VP demanded a pause in the reforms. By this time, Clinton was in power and Yeltsin had presented himself as Clinton’s man in Moscow to pursue the reforms. So when the parliament allied with the VP challenged Yeltsin, Yeltsin unilaterally disbanded them and called for new elections, after gaining Clinton’s support to do so. He then pursued a number of actions that the US supported: he conducted a mini-Civil War by attacking the parliament and arrested all his enemies, mandated new parliamentary elections (amid claims of thee elections being rigged), wrote his own revised constitution empowering himself, and ignored the public as he pushed forward with the next wave of market reforms which created the Oligarchic class. With the creation of the Oligarchs, among whom could be counted members of his American advisors, of course, he ceded any possibility of competently running the state or manage the economy. His resultant unpopularity caused him to seek out further loans while refinancing the previous loans, gained Clinton’s personal support and personal political advisors, while also begging the Oligarchs to help him in his hour of need. With all of this, it has been revealed that his re-election was also rigged. His dependency on his American overlord was next seen to take on a more personal note as he pleaded that Clinton arrange a US doctor handle his heart surgery after having 2 heart attacks leading upto the election. The economy continued to see-saw from bad to very bad and back again, and Yeltsin was consistently to be seen to be the worst manager at whatever task he attempted to manage, but persisted due to his American support which came at a price that his nation paid.
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Absurd. The USG couldn’t care less about who rules Russia, and they care even less about the Ukrainians. If they really wanted to admit Ukraine into NATO and then set up bases there to attack Russia, it had years to do so between 1991 and 2022. But it did no such thing. Whenever Ukraine requested NATO membership, it was told it would have it wait at least twenty years as abare minimum before its application could even be considered. As for NATO military bases inUkraine, several Ukrainian governments over the past 30 years have requested this. But the NATO countries, including the u.S., always refused these requests.
As for wanting :regime change” in Russia–the NATO states have many special ops teams who have always had the means and had numerous opportunities to assasinate Putin. They also have lots experience at making it look like some “lone” political fanatic committed the crime entirely on his own.
The western “Russia experts” know that Russia’s authoritarian form of government, headed by a seemingly absolute tsar (although in reality all of Russia’s rulers haver had to share power with entrenched bureaucracies and socioeconomic elites). They therefore have no motive for “regime change” since they know that Russia’s underlying regime has remained the same for the past 500 years, since the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Only the names and faces of the rulers, and less often the ideology used to justify the regime, has changed from time to time. If Putin is murdered or overthrown, someone who would pursue the same agendas and rule in the same way would quickly take his place.
Yes, perhaps there would be a power struggle oof sorts behind closed doors, as there was in 1924-29, 1953-64, and 1985-91. But power struggle always sorts itself out after a few years, and a single ruler emerges.
The Western governments thus have no motive for overthrowing Putin. I think they actually want to keep him in power because he seems calm and rational, and doesn’t drink heavily. They are afraid of a ruler who drinks is a loose cannon, someone like Zhirinofsky, replacing Putin.
Why then the bombastic anti-Russian rhetoric, combined with pathetically little actual military and economic aid to Ukraine? One major reason, I believe, is to change the political conversation at home by attempting to unite their people behind a supposed foreign enemy. They hope to distract many of their citizens from the desperate economic and human rights problems at home.
Putin is also attempting to distract his people from the very serious long-term “structural” problems within Russia, such as the enormous imbalences in wealth, the poverty of a large part of the population,the depopulation resulting Russians failure to reproduce, and a serious crime problem in the cities. He hopes to solidify his regime’s power and longevity by whipping up patriotic fervor as a means of softening domestic conflicts. This manuever has almost never worked, but ruler have tried it over and over again.
Unfortunately, the wars that rulers have unleashed against their neighbors as a way of silencing domestic discontent have often cost million of lives , as was the case with World War I and World War II. This time the conflict that our “sorcerer’s apprentice” rulers have unleashed could result in the extinction of the human species or even life on this planet. And there is no master sorcerer to restore peace and avoid disaster.
@Reader
The PA was always a false partner, willing to accept every benefit of negotiating while refusing to offer any recognition of Israel. Trump knew this. Friedman knew this. Everyone knew this. So, providing them with the test of their commitment to peace in a peace plan, requiring them to do what they are not willing to do is simply calling the PA out for their calculated role in the never ending peace process. Trump setting a sunset clause would demonstrate this reality clearly. If the Israelis were unwilling to push Abu Masen to the test, then it would be on them. If, however, Abu Masen refused to sign, regardless of the motivation, it would be enough to demonstrate his detachment from the peace processs to the Sunni nations. The US wasn’t colluding with Israel against the Arabs. They were ready to move forward with a final settlement, with or without the Arabs.
@peloni
You are not trying to tell me that the President of the United States colluded with Israel to present to Israel and the “Palestinians” a plan which was set up in advance not be accepted by the “Palestinians”?!
Or, if this is not the case, are you are trying to tell me that it is OK to present to Israel a plan which is deadly for the country if the “Palestinians” will just happen to accept it (the acceptance of it by Israel is assumed, I guess) but we can be sure that they won’t?