The US and its allies have set up a re-match for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which most people recognize as the time humanity was closest to a full-up nuclear war. Congratulations, American presidents!

I’m not saying Russia doesn’t bear some responsibility for the situation, too, but as always with this kind of he said-she said bullshit, it depends where you start your analysis.

In this case, you can start any time after WWII, but it’s really not a very long time in any case. What you can’t do is do what the American media is doing, which is to act as though the whole Ukraine crisis magically brewed up yesterday. If you look at Russia’s actions in the context of yesterday we do have to admit that they seem kind of grumpy and volatile. If you look at things in the context of yesterday then Putin seems like a strong-man who is trying to expand Russia toward being a shadow of the former USSR. But that’s it: a shadow. Not even the most palpitating war-hawk in Washington is (yet) implying that Russia is considering snapping up Poland or Finland or anything like that. Or Kazakhstan or Afghanistan – they’ve learned better.

But, to really understand the situation, you have to go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and run time forward from there. Briefly: [wik]

the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, tr.Karibsky krizis, IPA: [kɐˈrʲipskʲɪj ˈkrʲizʲɪs]), or the Missile Scare, was a 1-month, 4 day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba

Most Americans don’t know that bit about the missiles in Italy and Turkey. They simply accept the US government and media story that the Soviets just went all Crazy Ivan one day and decided to do something extremely provocative that nearly blew up in all of our faces. Back in 2017 I actually sat down with some coffee and found some of the old US missile platforms in Italy and Turkey: [stderr] I must note, again, that this all happened without the American public being informed – e.g: the US government proliferated offensive nuclear weapons that menaced the underbelly of the USSR, without any of its “democratically elected representatives” seeing fit to share any of that information with the press or public. That way, when the Evil Soviets made threatening sounds, the US was able to wring its hands and wail, “Crazy Ivan!” and John Kennedy was able to make himself look really good by trading removing those missiles for the Soviets removing their Cuba missiles and he’d have been re-elected president for life except someone(s?) decided to veto that possibility.

But before we really get stuck into that, we should remember some things about WWII, namely that Stalin was a gullible rube and Hitler was a genuine “Crazy Fritz” who seems to have decided to treat the world like some kind of fucked-up chessboard. To be fair: that was still in the day where you could carve out and hold an empire like Bonaparte almost did, so he was following a European tradition. The point, though, is that Hitler convinces Stalin that they were buddies and then lightning-shanked him in the face (I am trying to imply that Stalin should have seen in coming) by absorbing Stalin’s “buffer zone” in Poland and then jumping straight into the Soviet heartland with a massive, throbbing, bolt of fascistic gristle that penetrated as far as Stalingrad before dying. From then on, Stalin appears [this, I get from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s In the Court of the Red Tsar][wc] to have suffered extreme post traumatic stress disorder about being subjected, ever again, to a similar surprise attack. It’s not irrational: the Soviets lost more people during the Germans’ ill-considered attempt to annex Russia, than everyone else in WWII combined – some 24-32 million killed. Stalin’s political agenda after WWII was to have westernized “buffer zones” around all of the main paths into the Soviet Union, so that if – for example – the US decided to launch an attack via Germany, they would have to destroy Poland in the process. Poor Stalin thought that Henry Kissinger would cavil at such an atrocity, but Joe didn’t live to see what happened to Cambodia in the 1960s because he died in 1953. Psychologizing the old Soviets is a pointless game, I suppose, but the leaders the US was dealing with, at that time, had already been subjected to German invasion, British standing by and wondering aloud if “maybe they can kill each other off for us?” and Americans being mostly concerned with grabbing as much of what remained of Germany as possible and re-inventing Japan and South Korea into idealized vassal states. Stalin was able to fairly successfully build that buffer zone around the USSR, and pick up some highly useful real estate in the process (Gdansk!) (Black sea ports!)

Perhaps you don’t accept that argument, regarding buffer zones and Soviet psychology. That’s OK, if you don’t because it was a system that didn’t last long enough to matter. In case the acronym is not familiar, “IRBM” is “intermediate-range ballistic missile.” Those are the nukes that are close enough to arrive on target really quickly in a surprise attack, decapitating the target’s command/control and leaving them helpless to demands for “Surrender in 10 minutes or we’re going to roll the really heavy shit on you that will arrive in 45 minutes.” During the peak of the cold war, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, that was the scenario that weighed on the Soviets’ mind: they felt that the US was preparing to obliterate them (correct!) and they decided, unwisely, on a containment effort in Cuba. Or maybe it was wise. It’s hard to say. But the US’ response was a massive CIA-led effort to politically de-stabilize every Soviet ally that they could, to peel them away from the Warsaw Pact. Naturally, some of you are thinking, “surely, Marcus has been sniffing CIA Paranoia Glue, nobody can know that for sure.” Which is true – for now, nobody can – but you’ve got to look at the tea-leaves and see that the CIA was being used globally, to destabilize pretty much fucking everything: you have to be a special kind of naive to imagine that the CIA was not at work in Poland, for example. Especially since it’s pretty well documented that they were. [wik]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred around $2 million yearly in cash to Solidarity, for a total of $10 million over five years. There were no direct links between the CIA and Solidarność, and all money was channeled through third parties. CIA officers were barred from meeting Solidarity leaders, and the CIA’s contacts with Solidarność activists were weaker than those of the AFL-CIO, which raised $300,000 from its members, which were used to provide material and cash directly to Solidarity, with no control of Solidarity’s use of it. The U.S. Congress authorized the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy, and the NED allocated $10 million to Solidarity.

There is a whole posting I have been wanting to write for a year, now, but haven’t seen the right time – regarding the US’ use of NATO as a vehicle for an extremely illegal campaign of nuclear proliferation. It’s also a stupidly obvious campaign, that has been tacitly OK’d by the US government (makes sense: it’s theirs) and media (so much for thoughtful, investigative journalism). But the short form is that when a new country joins NATO, the US immediately uses them to stage first-strike nuclear weapons and usually that’s right up against the Russian border. In other words: that thing Stalin and Kruschev and Breznev were afraid of: it’s coming true. NATO was also used as a cover for those medium-range ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey. Just to give you an idea how bad this is: every F-16 in NATO has compatible bomb rails, so they can carry and drop American H-bombs at a pinch. And, the US has done some really crazy barracks-lawyering to claim that “that bunker full of US warheads it Incirlik in Turkey, that bunker is US Territory because the Turks leased it to us, so we are not stationing nukes in Turkey – that’s Turkey-USA!

The point of this – the problem of this – is that “NATO expansion” has come to mean, to the Soviets and Russia, that the US is preparing to do nazis one better: launch the mother of all surprise attacks. The Russian response to attempts to peel away buffer zone states has been pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be. Imagine if China tried to buy Cuba? Or, more precisely, if they had their intelligence apparatus in there for decades, deliberately screwing up US attempts to do anything, while bolstering relations. By the way, since I did it (said “China”) you should look at the USA/Australia technology exchange pact as an anti-China form of the NATO maneuver. If you don’t think that the Australians are going to have launch systems in those subs that can mount US-made nuclear cruise missiles, you need to be a bit more cynical. It doesn’t matter what you think, though, because the Chinese aren’t fooled for a second.

Now we’re back-filled and can run the clock forward from the 60s to the 80s. The USSR started to fall apart, in part because of those earlier-referenced CIA destabilization programs. This is all long-building history, and it’s not necessary to point at specific events and say “that was the critical moment…” except there were a few critical moments. One was when Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland, and Gorbachev made one last attempt to trade the USSR’s remaining political capital for a nuclear stand-down. Again, most Americans don’t know about that, but Gorbachev offered bilateral disarmament, and Reagan refused because his handlers wanted to build the missile shield, instead. I.e.: they chose something that made the world more dangerous. It was clear at that time that the USSR’s wad was shot, and the US had won the cold war – or, at least it was clear to Gorbachev – but Reagan was addled with Alzheimers and his handlers had a great deal of control over what he said and did, and peace was not on their TODO list. In terms of NATO expansion, this was not an important moment, though American authoritarians and nationalists point to it and say “Reagan didn’t promise Gorbachev that we wouldn’t expand NATO!” That’s … factual but wrong. Gorbachev was understandably concerned about a re-unified Germany becoming a bastion that the US could militarize and nuclearize. He wasn’t as concerned about NATO membership for Germany because he was more concerned with the things leading up to that. And, by the time it all happened, there was no USSR anymore, and the US was able to sort through the mountain of broken promises of state-craft and try to reset things with Boris Yeltsin.

We know a lot about what was said and negotiated with Yeltsin, back when Yeltsin was a CIA asset [independent] and the US government secretly helped him secure his power during the military counter-coup. If you remember back in those days there was a brief spasm of hopefulness on the part of the US oligarchy, in which they imagined that Russia would become a sort of fire-sale shopping spree for US capitalists who were eager to buy up Russian state assets as they privatized. Their disappointment was huge, when they discovered that the Russians were perfectly skilled at playing “corruption and privatization” and were maybe better at it than their American counterparts – Russia under Yeltsin became a parody of free market capitalism in which everything was for sale, setting up a situation ripe for a right-wing counter-reformation led by Putin. But before that happened, the US rushed in to make whatever deals it could make, including purchasing and spiriting away large amounts of weapons-grade plutonium and other nuclear weapons-related tech. Somewhere in all that chaos, there was a negotiation with Yeltsin: [nsarchive]

Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. 

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”

Don’t you just love that? “Led to believe” is, you know, not the same as “lied to.” While the phrasing “not one inch eastward” is hardly vague, and it came from the US Secretary of State, I guess it’s those stupid Europeans and Russians’ fault for believing that it was a statement of US government policy. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to walk back Baker’s pledge, turning it into “a comment” or something like that. But the Russians (and European powers, for that matter) are not stupid and asked for repeated assurances:

President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.

The whole story is deep and complex, and the initial “not one inch eastward” was followed by a whole lot of argument within NATO, because for some reason the Germans were beginning to realize they were being set up to be the first target in WWIII, and that the US’ desire to locate nuclear weapons throughout the country was probably not motivated by great love for Germany and all things German; they were just disposable pawns like everyone else. Things got complicated; as the European Union (EU) formed, the US tried (and mostly succeeded) in wedging a “track toward NATO membership” into the mix, so that any country wanting to join the eurozone was potentially going to be a US economic and nuclear bastion against Russia or anyone else. I don’t need to review the whole sordid history of how the US used EU and NATO membership to leverage a war on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And economic blockades against Iran and Yemen. [If most Americans didn’t notice the earthly location of Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq vis-a-vis former Soviet space, rest assured that the Russians did] At one time, before Turkey collapsed into a dictatorship, it was looking a lot like Turkey might join NATO and the eurozone, and the US already had nuclear bombs located in-country and was looking forward to expanding from there into stealth F-35s and cruise missiles, but Turkey did not go gentle along with the program. So, the CIA tried a coup against Erdogan and it failed. [nyt] Then various US administrations also tried to suck Turkey into a no-win situation in Syria, instead sucking the US into the same. Astute observers should not overlook the fingerprints of Russian military intelligence in that region – it looks pretty clear that the Russians were trying hard to peel the Turks away from the NATO/EU/US alliance, because of course they would. So far, it didn’t work so well, though the Russians managed (thanks to their goon, Trump) to pull the US secret invasion of Syria and Iraq into the lime-light, reveal it for stupid, and threaten it militarily with advanced anti-aircraft that might shoot down expensive US planes that were not officially there.

Complicated, right? It’s all the set-up for the current situation in Ukraine. Now, we can finally talk a bit about that.

First off, there are some people on Earth that are so naive that they refuse to see the involvement of US intelligence in the Maidan revolution against Yanukovich. That’s how that sort of revolution-influencing works: you need a few true believers to man the walls and throw rocks and by the time they’re done, they believe that they won a revolution single-handed. It’s necessary. [There are also naive people who believe that the US was not behind the ‘rebellion’ in Libya, how sweet] [cato]

The extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post‐​Yanukovych government. The U.S‑favored candidates included Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the man who became prime minister once Yanukovych was ousted from power. During the telephone call, Nuland stated enthusiastically that “Yats is the guy” who would do the best job.

Nuland and Pyatt were engaged in such planning at a time when Yanukovych was still Ukraine’s lawful president. It was startling to have diplomatic representatives of a foreign country – and a country that routinely touts the need to respect democratic processes and the sovereignty of other nations – to be scheming about removing an elected government and replacing it with officials meriting U.S. approval.

That’s just the recent stuff, of course. The CIA was all over Ukraine from around/about the same time that the US peeled Poland away from the USSR. The revolution that finally toppled Yanukovych was the tip of a great big iceberg. But, no matter how you slice that iceberg it spelled only one thing to Russia: they were going to lose their access to the Black Sea naval bases in Crimea, and if NATO/EU/USA were able to peel off Ukraine, Crimea would be just hanging there ripe for the picking. You don’t need to be a subtle politician like Putin to realize that once Ukraine was destabilized, Crimea was going to be next (cue: nationalist Crimean movement that wants Russians out and wants to join NATO!) – Putin took over Crimea and began sub-dividing Ukraine. All of this makes perfect sense.

Imagine if the Chinese decided to begin massively funding a Quebec ultra-nationalist movement, with an eye toward destabilizing them to declare independence and a long-term openly stated plan of inviting them to be part of a defensive alliance with China. That defensive alliance would obviously, in an under-stated way, include stationing Chinese nuclear weapons in the area, “for its protection.” The only way I can imagine what the US’ freakout would look like is to imagine Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Norman Stansfield in Leon the Professional after bumping 3 lines of meth, two huge huffs of nitrous oxide, and been fucked up the ass by Marilyn Manson dressed as Satan: that’s the kind of “over the top” freak-out you would see from the US if that happened.

So now we’re at the present, and the US is teasing the possibility of World War III if Russia doesn’t get its mitts off of Ukraine. Which is weird, because Russia having its mitts on Ukraine is like the US having its mitts on Nicaragua. Uh, what? This is how things are done, right? The US and NATO promised they’d keep their hands off Ukraine (and more than that!) and now they are doing exactly what they said they would not do. It has also not escaped Russian notice, though it damn sure wasn’t given much of a nod in the US press but the US has been engaging in joint military maneuvers with Poland, so the Polish can help the US defend itself if Mexico attacks, or something. See, the world is supposed to believe that because it’s all just a bunch of NATO friends, it’s not as though one nuclear superpower is practicing maneuvers that look to a Russian like a wee little bitty Operation Barbarossa. No, the Russians aren’t afraid of that puny force: they are, however, afraid of the stupid chucklefucks behind that brilliant idea.

In the broader context, in which the US ruthlessly messed with ‘democracy’ in Poland, Georgia, Ukraine (and Iran and Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and…) it makes sense that the Russians didn’t feel it was inappropriate to hand the US a dose of “election interference: how do you like it?” in 2016. In terms of what they did, to fuck the US elections up, it was like a kiss from a super-model compared to what the US had been doing in Ukraine (and elsewhere, if you want to go back) – Putin was probably clutching his temples and screaming, “at least I didn’t tell Donald to ask the US to join the Warsaw Pact!” – remember, Donald would have done pretty much anything that he was told to do, not because Russia really had a ton of stuff on him, but just because yes, they could easily demonstrate that they had thrown the election to him and his ego would not have been able to handle that. On that topic, it looks pretty apparent that Trump also tried to get China’s Xi to help with his election possibilities, which means that the Chinese also have phone calls they could leak that would reveal how stupid Trump was. What an omni-directional idiot: he tried to screw everyone at once, which violates the first law of screwing.

All of this ought to sound, to you, like Cuban Missile Crisis II, The Crisis-ing. Except there is no Doctor Manhattan or Marvel Comics Universe heroes ready to step in and save everyone from the stupidity. Biden appears to be, slowly, realizing that he’s actually got no cards to play except for a full-on military intervention and that turns into a shooting war between Russia and NATO and there is no way that ends well. Putin appears, to me, to be acting fairly judiciously: he’s not taking all of Ukraine but he’s going to demonstrate that no more of that fool talk about joining NATO is going to happen. The bear is not saying “we are going to do to you like we did to Georgia” (Not that Georgia, although … maybe Russia’d like to annex them?) they’re just making it clear that if the CIA wants to put together another riot to overthrow the government, it’s going to get stomped into paste. That’s all.

Let me be frank: Russia is concerned about the whole US/NATO/EU “we look like we are trying to be able to win a nuclear war” thing. Hey, I’m concerned about that, too, because I’m probably as impressed by our Washington leadership as Putin is. Putin is a hard-hearted nihilistic realist, and he’s got to deal with fucksticks who believe in Qanon, and who cannot even rig an election competently. Putin probably feels like the “grownup in the room” at a baptist revival meeting where people are rolling on the floor asking god to beat the snakes out of their hair. And those are the sensible ones. This maneuver looks like pretty much what it is: Russia is going to take over Ukraine with military/political influence, just like the US interferes with Central American “democracy” and they’re not going to annex the place – but they’re not going to allow NATO to station nukes down there, either. The Washington fantasists who thought that they would be able to station nukes in a NATO Ukraine are all butthurt and freaking out, because their simplistic geopolitics consist mostly of “we do whatever we want, and you suffer what you must.” I don’t think it makes sense to argue about “who is the most dangerous?” but stupidity is a tremendous danger in its own right, because it’s so unpredictable. Putin is trying to contain US-led hegemony and honestly, we should all be rooting for him to do it effectively and with a minimum of broken lives.

What else do I think is going to happen? I predict that the US will mollify Putin in return for Russia not stomping Ukraine flat, by backing off on turning Poland into a nuclear puppet. Russia has already (with help from the Turks) mooted Turkey, and the US is not going to build successful client-states in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan. I predict that the US will publicly back off on some of its eastward imperial expansion, and maybe there will be some off-the-books deals regarding destabilization operations targeted at various pseudo-democracies. If the US stops destabilizing Ukraine maybe we won’t have a QAnon president next election, which would be a fair exchange I think.

To the people of Ukraine: I’m sorry for some of you that you happen to be right next to Russia. Unfortunately, that’s a geopolitical reality and wishing that you were some sort of remote outpost of Americanism is just going to frustrate you. Besides, that’s not so great, anyhow. Sorry about the nationalism and, if I were you, I’d send hackers to fuck up the US’ pathetic attempts to pretend to be a democracy – just as a “thank you.” Don’t mess with the nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors and for all I care you can help elect a poke’mon as our next president.

Let’s just all survive this, OK? We have a date with climate change that we don’t want to miss.

Another whole topic I did not go into, because I don’t want to be writing this for a month: the US has been doing all kinds of nasty games manipulating oil and gas prices, to try to crater the Russian economy – which is highly dependent on selling gas to Germany and a whole bunch of other NATO countries. Naturally, the US realized that that’s a tremendous economic vulnerability, but they haven’t figured out an effective response to it, except to “fuck with Russia! Yeah! Let’s hurt them!” Uh. Uh. Remember, these are the people who decide whether the sun rises in small pinpoints all over the globe, and millions die in the heat. These are the ‘elected representatives’ – and in that I am gesturing airily toward Mitch McConnell, Putin, Macron, Boris Johnson, Biden, etc. The only thing these elected representatives have going for them is that they are sneaky and dishonest. They’re not even nihilists.

WSJ: [wsj] – US to consider changes to military maneuvers and missile deployments.

Most NATO countries don’t actually want a nuclear war, because – they slowly figured out – they’d be the ground zero where it’s fought out. Crazy Americans have to stop assuming Europeans are naive Melians.

It does look like NATO may want to start a nuclear war, but that’s not actually what they want. It’s simply an organization that is trying to expand and aggrandize itself and accrue budget and importance, as organizations do. The fact that their primary purpose is no longer relevant is also no longer relevant – NATO is a bureaucracy without a portfolio and it’s just a power-bloc looking for a reason to flex its muscles. It ought to have disbanded with the USSR collapsed except its member states are happy to get that US $$ to store those US weapons, and they can bask in the reflected sense of importance by being part of the US hegemony. (I’m looking at England, there)

Was my title too clickbaity?