Global Research
Eric Zuesse
Ukraine’s civil war started on 2 May 2014, when supporters of the February-coup-imposed (click on that link if you don’t know about that coup) Ukrainian central government firebombed Odessa’s Trade Unions Building, incinerating hundreds of Odessans who opposed the coup.
This civil war is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War,
this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an
ideological battle between “capitalism” versus “communism,” but instead
more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West
European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging
aristocracies of Russia and of China. Like had happened in World War I,
this global war is between two contending aristocratic alliances.
(That’s the standard thing, we historians know; it’s nothing unusual
there.) However, the documentation of the history is much clearer and
far faster for this new war, than for former global wars, regarding
which of the two sides had really initiated it, and why.
The “players” in “The Great
Game,” this time around, are, broadly speaking, West versus East; those
are the two contending “teams,” of aristocracies. USA is the leading
participant on the western side, and has the backing of Europe’s
aristocracies via the IMF; and Russia is the leading participant on the
eastern side, and has wrangled the backing of China’s aristocrats. The
West is far better-funded than the East, and, so, this is a war that the
East did not want, and had hoped to avoid, but that has been thrust
upon them, by the Obama-initiated coup that took place in Ukraine during late February 2014, and also by the Obama-initiated massacre that occurred in Odessa on May 2nd (the event that immediately sparked Ukraine’s civil war).
The only thing that’s
additionally needed, in order for a reader to be able to understand the
origin of Cold War II, is a 12-page article by Mary Elise Sarotte,
published in the January 2010 journal of The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations, Diplomatic History, which is titled, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990.”
Sarotte describes there how the
then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, desperate to end the Cold War so
that his nation could begin recovering from 70 years of Marxism that had
followed upon centuries of feudalism, tried his best to get U.S.
President George Herbert Walker Bush to not take advantage of the
economic and increasingly also military weakness of Russia — not to
expand NATO and U.S. missile-bases into the formerly Soviet nations
bordering Russia: Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia,
Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. He also didn’t want missiles in
nearby-but-not-adjoining Norway, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Germany.
However, he was especially
urgently concerned about Germany, because the Berlin Wall had just
fallen, on the evening of 9 November 1989; so, Russia was certainly
going to be losing its former control of Eastern Germany. Since
Gorbachev was the supplicant here, he left only till the very end of the
negotiations the broader, less-urgent, issue of non-expansion of NATO
and of NATO missiles into other former-Soviet states adjoining the ones
adjoining Russia.
Almost the entirety of the
negotiations until the very end concerned Germany, because the immediate
crisis was that. At first, West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl was
sympathetic to Gorbachev’s broader security concern; but, “in the course
of the Camp David meeting at the end of February he came to agree with
the Bush position: simply a special military status for the GDR [German
Democratic Republic -- East Germany -- no missiles there, but] not
general assurances about NATO’s territory [her euphemism for NATO's
enlargement to Russia's doorstep]. The chancellor agreed with the
president despite the fact that this was not what he had discussed with
Gorbachev two weeks earlier [her euphemism for the probability that Kohl
switched his position on that issue after further consultations with
his American master].” Kohl was directly dependent upon assistance from
the U.S. aristocracy (to be paid for by the U.S. taxpaying public, not
by the aristocrats who actually control the government), in order for
West Germany to be able to absorb the wrecked economy of East Germany
without enserfing the East Germans to such an extreme extent that a
German civil war would be the ultimate outcome. The senior Bush,
apparently, demanded that Kohl comply with his aim to expand NATO, up to
Russia’s doorstep.
President Obama’s coup in
Ukraine is an important part of that 1990-initiated program, and (as the
articles that I earlier linked to have documented), he’s being
supported crucially in this by the IMF, which represents not only
American aristocrats but also west European ones; and (as also was
linked there) the Bilderberg meeting, that was just completed, was very
much concerned with the civil war in Ukraine, for which reason the IMF’s
chief Christine Lagarde was there, and not only David Petraeus,
Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Eric Schmidt, oil-company presidents,
and other members and servants to the aristocracy, regardless of which
particular side of their respective revolving doors into and out of
government (AKA: international corporations and their “charities”) they
might happen to be at the moment. (National heads-of-state know better
than to come, and the organizing committee for these meetings knows
better than to invite them there. Their attendance would raise too many
uncomfortable questions in a “democracy.”)
Lots of people in southeastern
Ukraine, as the bombs are raining down on them from Blackwater (now
called ‘Academi’) mercenaries and the Kiev Government, are shocked and
enraged that Putin hasn’t sent in Russian tanks, but the Russian leader
knows that doing that would be exactly what the propagandists in the
West are hoping for, in order to provide a pretext for Western
governments overtly to provide troops and materiel to the Kiev central
government, and really expand this thing.
As I have formerly documented
(see those links), the reason for this operation against Russia is
basically to preserve the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If
Putin can hold out long enough, the dollar will collapse and so will the
U.S. economy; but it’s probably going to happen anyway, and so the
longer that Putin remains “weak” against the U.S. assault, the sooner
will come that likely U.S. collapse. This will thus be a war of nerves
between Obama and Putin: Obama, to hold off the U.S. collapse; and
Putin, to prevent a Russian collapse.
These sorts of wars don’t do
anybody any good except some bankers and war-profiteers, but Obama is
smart enough to have known at the start that he was rolling very big
dice here, and he seems to have thought that the bigger the stakes are,
the likelier it would be for the U.S. aristocracy to emerge on top.
Future historians will likely have a field day trying to figure out how
he came to these bold conclusions; but, if Obama wins, then probably
everybody will know how and why, and we historians will have other work
to do.
If Obama loses, then Putin might
remain quiet simply because of the difficulty he’ll have explaining to
the Russian people why he had held back for so long while the
Russian-speaking Ukrainians next door were being slaughtered. Even if
Putin wins, he’ll probably lose in public esteem. Like I had said: this
isn’t a war he wanted.
