According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
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In my opinion, John Mearsheimer neatly summarizes the gestation and birth of the Ukranian crisis and suggests a logical and principled solution to the matter.
The question however remains; exactly why would we be wrong for thinking that the people in Washington are so deluded as to believe that a stable planetary order with America as world hegemon is possible? How can the targetting of Russia, the worlds second largest nuclear power, as an enemy state, potentially frustrating the development of the BRIC group of nations, not be seen as an attempt to permanently install America in such a position?
To put that another way with apolgies to Tolkien; Is America Mordor? Is not the NSA providing a good imitation of the all seeing Eye of Sauron? Washington already contains dozens of Grima Wormtongues. Is fact folowing fiction?
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault
When you start wrapping your arms around liberal thought, you see how they arrive at the conclusions they do. Putin is evil because he doesn't support homos, so obviously everything is permitted because he is evil. No matter how many die, all that matters is being on "the right side of history".
"Liberty" to the progs in this country means freedom to watch whatever porno you want, but not being supportive of gays means the firing line. Its a schizophrenic death cult obsessed with pleasure at any cost.
Posted by: Tyler | 21 August 2014 at 06:27 PM