With biting humor, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asked Western states to be more precise “so we can book our vacations”.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the wooden-like Pinocchio figure, is saying that heightened tensions in Europe with Russia are now the “new normal”.
You might think that after such a spectacular “intelligence” failure from falsely predicting a Russian invasion this week, the Western states and their news media might at least shut up in shame. Not a bit of it. They are doubling down with more fantasy claims that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is still a “distinct possibility”.
This is in spite of Moscow saying over and over that it has no intention of attacking Ukraine and in spite of video footage showing Russian troops moving out of Crimea after scheduled military exercises were completed.
The whole Western media narrative of “Russian aggression” is turned upside down. Moscow is seeking to establish a long-term security treaty with the US and NATO in Europe. Ukraine is only a small part of the bigger picture. Yet Washington and its European underlings have distorted Russia’s reasonable objectives as a threat.
Evidently, the US principally does not want security and peace in Europe. It wants tensions and confrontation with Russia. It wants to revive the Cold War that was supposed to have ended 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 because Cold War geopolitics is Washington’s way of exerting hegemonic control over Europe. European leaders are either too cowardly or stupid to realize that. They willingly peddle the US propaganda of “Russian aggression”.
President Joe Biden in a White House address this week claimed that the US has been engaged in “non-stop diplomacy”. More accurately, the US has been engaged in non-stop disinformation with its lurid and ludicrous claims of Russia about to imminently invade Ukraine. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is not using hyperbole when he labeled this frenzied media drive for tensions as “info-terrorism”.
The Biden administration launched the invasion narrative in November last year and has not relented in the media hype despite the embarrassing lack of invasion.
There are several intrinsic reasons why the US wants to revive the Cold War and stoke confrontation with Russian, reasons that really have little to do with Russia per se. As noted above, one reason is to give Washington a sense of purpose and authority over its European subordinates. That has to do with cutting off European economic integration from Eurasian partnerships with Russia, China and others. Scuttling the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia fits into that.
But another imperative reason is the desperate need for the US political establishment is to defuse the increasingly combustible divisions within American society.
A clue to this tacit concern was revealed in Biden’s speech this week on the crisis over Ukraine. Towards the end of his address to the nation, he said: “This is a cause that unites Republicans and Democrats… our most American principles.”
Come off it, Joe. What are you talking about?
The United States is in deep and dangerous internal turmoil. The bitterness between Republicans and Democrats, whether among politicians in Washington or among ordinary citizens, is turning into a frightening cauldron of mutual hatred. People in some parts are reportedly even too afraid to publicly acknowledge their party affiliation due to fears of being physically attacked or worse.
Barbara Walter, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, has warned that the US is on the brink of civil war. Walter has been an advisor to the Senate and the CIA on many international conflicts. In a book published last month, How Civil Wars Start, she assesses that the US has reached a threshold of widespread political violence erupting.
During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States political class managed to keep the nation in line by using “anti-Communist” fear-mongering. US overseas imperialism was also camouflaged with a sense of mission to “defend the free world” from the “evil Soviet empire”.
Without a Cold War, the US has gradually and fatally lost its international mission and presumed authority. At home that has manifested in growing political divisions that threaten to implode the entire country. American leaders have no longer any moral authority or legitimacy among swathes of the population. The country is like a huge sinkhole that’s about to crater.
Biden’s curious emphasis on “uniting” Americans behind a crusade to stand up to “Russian aggression” is key to understanding the recent madcap rush to wind up tensions with Russia.
The US political establishment is trying to fix internal divisions caused by inherent problems of inequality and rampant militarism by setting up a “new normal” of confrontation with Russia (and China). That’s why predictions of “Russian aggression” are going to keep being recycled. The danger is of course that this criminal info-terrorism will end up inciting a war.
That speaks of the pathology of the American rulers. They would rather risk a nuclear war in order to save their own rotten skin at home.