After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States never acknowledged Russia’s right to exist as a country or that it had legitimate national interests. NATO was focused on the Soviet Union for decades, when it collapsed, NATO turned its sights on Russia almost immediately, ignoring its calls for peace and cooperation and working towards its destruction.
“Now what I think [Ambassador Matlock] has done very well is to articulate the classical realist position, which is that we should be listening to our adversaries because if not, and we push them into a corner, then they will respond with violence,” explained Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island on Sputnik's The Critical Hour. “But to take that position seriously, we have to respect their right to exist. And that may be the greatest flaw in our post-Cold War foreign policy, that we never really decided whether Russia as a country has a right to exist and couldn’t acknowledge to ourselves any legitimate scope for its national interests.”
That is evidenced by NATO’s continual expansion east, despite pledges not to when the Soviet Union collapsed., all the way up to Russia’s borders and culminating in Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, which is an existential threat to Russia while merely a geopolitical game for the United States and the UK, who are driving the war through their financing and political pressure on the Kiev regime.
“I’ve always felt that wars end when people decide that it’s no longer advantageous to them to fight,” explained Petro. “Now, the disadvantages of warfare - destruction of property, deaths, killings, destroying the prospects for future generations – are most obvious [for] Ukraine itself. Then, maybe secondarily I would put the leading countries of Western Europe, who it seems to me at least, on a treadmill towards increasing international irrelevance.”
Noting that Russia is also suffering from the conflict, Petro said that left only the UK and the US as “beneficiaries” of the conflict, saying that they “are the ones who are currently suffering the least and able to continue the conflict, feeding it with money and weapons with, as they see it, minimal cost to themselves.”
Unfortunately for the American and British public, the benefits of the conflict do not go to them. Instead, it is the elites in those countries that benefit through the endless military contracts and what is sure to be the exploitation of the resources of whatever remains of Ukraine. That is why the media in the US has largely ignored Ukraine for more than a year, the glorious victory promised to the public is completely out of reach and so they hide the reality their policies created.
“What seems to also increasingly be the case, which did not used to be the case as much in the United States, is that this also involves the suppression of counter-narratives,” explained Petro. “And that’s why, unless I’m very much mistaken, we’ll see a very reduced scope for meaningful foreign policy discussion in the debate tonight. I expect sloganeering and nothing more.”
Instead of focusing on reality, pundits and politicians in the US distract the public with narratives they create, foremost among them the idea of American exceptionalism.
“The idea that when we act in the world, we act for the benefit of all, not for our craven interests. And what we do is therefore morally irreproachable and as a result we can feel good about ourselves while we are ignoring the untidy parts of our history,” Petro explained. “And we have a long experience of that kind of sugarcoating.”