Given the ongoing, ludicrous, and mostly fictional coverage of Ukraine in the American media that relentlessly depicts Vladimir Putin as an evil, crazed, aggressive, megalomaniac, it’s refreshing—and surprising—to have Foreign Affairs, published by The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the conservative foreign policy institution of the elite, set the record straight.
Author John J. Mearshimer, debunks the media portrayal of Putin as a cartoon dictator, and explains, given the decades-long aggression of NATO and the West towards Russia, why Russia feels a need to defend itself. His article is aptly titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”
A more accurate title would be “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the United State’s Fault,” because it is the United States that employed Blackwater mercenaries to turn domestic unrest violent, orchestrated a coup in Kiev, and installed its puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk. 
In the same way Obama supporters made excuses for his Wall Street appointees, they have turned a blind eye to the Bush era Neoconservatives who continue to heavily influence his foreign policy agenda. State Department Neocon Victoria Nuland, an Obama appointee, was a prime architect of the Ukrainian coup. Warmonger John McCain was also actively involved. Both Nuland and McCain were central in overthrowing the legitimately elected president Yanukovych in Ukraine. Publically, McCain is critical of Obama, but, behind the scenes, he works closely with the CIA on Obama administration operations around the world.
John J. Mearsheimer, author of the Foreign Affairs article in question, is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He describes himself as a “realist,” and professes to be uninterested in ideals, or moral or ethical considerations in foreign policy. Mearsheimer’s realism brought him to the correct conclusion about the crisis in Ukraine, that Russia is not the aggressor. However, his article carefully avoids discussing the geopolitical motivations of the Obama administration in fomenting the coup in Kiev and backing the war against the separatists in Eastern Ukraine.
Although I don’t entirely agree with everything Mearsheimer says, he describes the events in Ukraine more accurately than you will read or hear to date in the mainstream media. My emphasis in bold.
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 pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.
Mearsheimer’s article continues with a history of NATO expansion after the Cold War and ends with a sensible prescription for defusing the crisis in Ukraine and repairing the damage to the country.
The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process—a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
I agree with Mearsheimer’s prescription. But, his libertarian/conservative appeal to “realism” fails to take into account the pathology of the United States’ corporate-controlled government and its unrelenting and deeply destructive drive for global economic and military hegemony. Repairing relations with Russia would undermine the U.S. goal of complete global domination. Contrary to Mearsheimer’s view, the United States government has proven again and again that it is not interested in supporting the rule of law, economic interdependence, or democracy. Even with countries the US considers its allies, US “trade agreements” are designed to gut national labor and environmental laws (at home and abroad) to increase profits of of banks and corporations.
As part of Obama’s “pivot to the East,” the U.S. government is supporting the killing of the people of Eastern Ukraine, and the destruction of a country in order to break up the growing economic relationship between the EU and Russia, and at the same time gain access to Ukrainian gas fields—all this, while feeding endless lies about Russia and Ukraine to a complicit and irresponsible media.
The main tactic has been to demonize Vladimir Putin, the same way Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were demonized in U.S. media to justify to the voting public the invasion and destruction of Iraq and Libya. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, if you are not a vassal state propping up the American dollar, you are a rogue state. Although Mearsheimer is helpful in setting the record straight, economist Michael Chossudovsky provides a more accurate analysis of US military involvement around the world.
Military action supports powerful economic and financial interests. A strategy of “Economic Warfare” under the neoliberal agenda is implemented in close coordination with military planning. The purpose of warfare is not conquest per se. The US lost the Vietnam War, but the ultimate objective was to destroy Vietnam as a sovereign country. Vietnam together with Cambodia today constitute a new impoverished frontier of the global cheap labor economy. The imperial project is predicated on economic conquest, implying the confiscation and appropriation of the wealth and resources of sovereign countries. In the Middle East, successive wars have been geared towards the confiscation of oil and gas reserves.
Chossudovsky describes accurately what has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and now in Ukraine.
Countries are destroyed, often transformed into territories, sovereignty is foregone, national institutions collapse, the national economy is destroyed through the imposition of “free market” reforms under the helm of the IMF, unemployment becomes rampant, social services are dismantled, wages collapse, and people are impoverished.
To date the Obama administration has shown no interest in a peaceful settlement of the Crisis in Ukraine and has thwarted Russia’s numerous attempts to achieve one through the UN and other means. The U.S. appears to be hell bent on achieving geopolitical advantage over Russia by expanding NATO to its borders and inflicting punishing economic sanctions, no matter what the human cost, even at the risk of nuclear war. Ukraine is being torn apart in order to make a few wealthy people even more wealthy.
Not content with destroying Ukraine, the U.S. is attempting to undermine Russia from within, setting it up for another “color revolution” like the one in Kiev, only this time the target might be St. Petersburg. I’m happy conservative Mearsheimer has injected some semblance of truth into the mainstream media about Ukraine, but, by carefully avoiding ethical and moral issues, he fails to expose the aggressive, destructive, reality of U.S. foreign policy.