The Republican-Party-oriented Project for a New American Century, which mustered American public opinion in 2002 and 2003 to favor invading Iraq, was prominently in accord with the view that was expressed in this article in Foreign Affairs. PNAC opposed "a more restrained foreign policy." (Thus, they favored invading Iraq.) Victoria Nuland, Obama's appointee to run Ukraine in 2013, had supported PNAC, and had served as Vice President Dick Cheney's advisor on foreign policy, and then she was President G.W. Bush's U.S. Ambassador to NATO.
However, there also were some actual Democrats who likewise favored the viewpoint that was stated in this Foreign Affairs article. On 15 March 2014, Chris Ernesto headlined "Brzezinski Mapped Out the Battle for Ukraine in 1997: It's all about maintaining the US position as the world's sole superpower." He quoted from Brzezinski in 1997, who said: "Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire." Ernesto also noted that Brzezinski was the first person to compare Russia's leader Putin to Hitler. And yet Brzezinski is a "Democrat." So, this supremacist view dominates on both sides of the aristocracy, both Republican and "Democratic."
President Obama's speech at West Point, on 28 May 2014, said: "Here's my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will." Obama alleged: "Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us." Our President said: "In Ukraine, Russia's recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe. But this isn't the Cold War [he said this after signaling his listeners that it really is but that he's a 'liberal' and so he doesn't say such hate-mongering things, but they naturally can come to the conclusion themselves]. Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia right away. Because of American leadership, the world immediately condemned Russian actions; Europe and the G7 joined us to impose sanctions; NATO reinforced our commitment to Eastern European allies; the IMF is helping to stabilize Ukraine's economy; OSCE monitors brought the eyes of the world to unstable parts of Ukraine." (He said this after having spent over five billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds to destabilize Ukraine and bring about the civil war there.)
The U.S. does not yet have missiles -- either ICBMs or ABMs -- in Ukraine, but Obama is clearly trying to firm-up the anti-Russian government that (via Nuland) he has succeeded at placing in Kiev to control this country that borders Russia.
Despite the hostile rhetoric from our President and from the stenographic "reporters" who transmit "news" to us, Russia is no actual military competitor to the United States; but, under Putin, it has become an economic competitor (which intensifies Obama's desire to cripple Russia).
The statements that Russia is a military competitor are pure propaganda, not news (except about the sources that transmit such propaganda to us).
As of the year 2013, the U.S. spent $640 billion per year on the military, whereas Russia spent $87.8 billion per year on its military. The U.S. spent 36.6% of the planet's military budget, and Russia spent 5.0%. There is no reason for the American public to fear Russia, though (because of the constant propaganda) they do.
For the people of the United States to fear Russia is a violation of basic logic, especially considering that the U.S. is actually pursuing military dominance of the world, whereas no other country in the world is, or even can. The U.S. percentage of 36.6% of the world's military budget dwarfs #2 China's percentage of 10.8%, and especially dwarfs #3 Russia's 5.0%. #4 Furthermore, Saudi Arabia's 3.8%, is allied with the U.S. So is #5 France's 3.5%. So is #6 U.K.'s 3.3%. So is #7 Germany's 2.8%. So is #8 Japan's 2.8%. So is #9 India's 2.7%. So is #10 South Korea's 1.9%. "We" spend collectively 57.6% of the world's total, whereas Russia spends only 5%.
If we assume that we are driving Russia to ally itself with China (a reasonable assumption to make, for Russia's protection), then both of those countries together are spending 15.8% on "their side," while the U.S. and its allies are spending 57.4% -- and that's just including the world's top ten spenders. "We" are then spending 3.6 times as much as "they" are. On a worldwide basis, including all nations, the U.S. and its allies are spending more than 80% of all of this planet's military expenditures. And yet "we" fear "them" (Russia and China). If our military planners are looking forward to a day when the U.S. can nuclear-destroy Russia with impunity, then creating this fear of Russia will help, not only in order to make America's public support destroying Russia, but in order to get us to accept some U.S. casualties in a nuclear war from a few Russian missiles that might slip through the ABM net.
The current conflict inside (the former) Ukraine has spiked this fear by the U.S. public, which can help prepare the U.S. public to support a nuclear invasion of Russia.
Although U.S. media have maintained that Russia's Vladimir Putin precipitated the Ukraine conflict when he backed the overwhelmingly popular movement in Crimea to separate itself from Ukraine, that view is likewise irrational. The actual situation is far more complex. A much stronger argument can be made that President Obama's actions caused this conflict. Paul Craig Roberts well summarized the actual history behind the Crimean matter recently, when he said (and this history should be publicized widely to the U.S. public, but is instead not publicized in our "news" media):
"Areas of southern and eastern Ukraine are former Russian territories added to Ukraine by Soviet leaders. Lenin added Russian areas to Ukraine in early years of the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev added Crimea in 1954. The people in these Russian areas, alarmed by the destruction of Soviet war memorials commemorating the Red Army's liberation of Ukraine from Hitler, by the banning of Russian as an official language, and by physical assaults on Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, broke out in protests. Crimea voted its independence and requested reunification with Russia, and so have the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Washington, its EU puppets, and the Western media have denied that the votes in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk are sincere and spontaneous. Instead, Washington alleges that the protests leading to the votes and the votes themselves were orchestrated by the Russian government with the use of bribes, threats, and coercion. Crimea was said to be a case of Russian invasion and annexation. These are blatant lies, and the foreign observers of the elections know it, but they have no voice in the Western media, which is a Ministry of Propaganda for Washington. Even the once proud BBC lies for Washington."
Furthermore, Russia's Black Sea fleet had been established in Crimea in 1783 and continued being based there till the present day, so that to allege, as Obama and his minions do, that kicking Russia's Black Sea fleet out of Crimea wouldn't constitute a highly aggressive move against Russia, is a lie that befits only a Hitler or a Stalin, not a leader of any democracy, such as Obama claims to be.
The counter-argument to this undeniable history has been the equally undeniable corruption of the democratically elected, pro-Russian, President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had used his political position in order to skim billions of dollars off government contracts, for himself and his son. That corruption is alleged to have justified the violation of the Ukrainian Constitution, by means of the violent February 2014 overthrow of him. This "justification" of the February 2014 coup is especially held to have been the case because Yanukovych's troops themselves had started the violence. However, they actually did not start the violence: that too was a lie. (Moreover all of the post-Soviet leaders of Ukraine have been corrupt. Yanukovych was like his predecessors in that regard.)
An excellent video presentation about that event (the violence that led to Yanukovych's violent overthrow) opens with a discussion between Urmas Paet and Cathy Ashton. Ashton is the EU's Foreign Policy chief. She had appointed Paet to investigate to determine how the violence at the Maidan demonstration on February 18th had started, which ended in Yanukovych's overthrow. Paet reported to her, in this phone conversation, what he found; and he concluded: "So ... there is now stronger and stronger understanding [among everyone who has examined the evidence] that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition" (in other words, it was by the group overthrowing Yanukovych). The video then shows the Obama Administration's Victoria Nuland telling the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine to get the far-right Arseniy Yatsenyuk appointed to lead the new interim post-Yanukovych government. That government then placed Hitler-admirers (followers of Stephan Bandera) into the country's leading positions. Yatsenyuk himself was a banker who had a clearly nationalist anti-Russian background, and was allied with neo-Nazi forces in Western Europe.
On May 1st, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, told Ukraine that if they didn't crush the coup's opponents and force them into being controlled by the new Kiev central government, then the IMF would pull the plug on any further loans to Ukraine. The next day, in the Trade Unions Building in Odessa in the south, occurred the event that sparked Ukraine's civil war, the massacre of 272 opponents to the coup-regime; most of them were incinerated to death after the regime's supporters, who had been bussed in from the north, threw Molotov cocktails into the building, and then firebombed it with larger incendiary bombs; and, when the building's occupants jumped from the burning building's windows, the people below immediately beat them to death and dragged the corpses off to waiting vans, from whence some reports allege they were taken to Odessa's outskirts for mass-burial. The official body-count of corpses that were incinerated and that still remained inside the building on the night of May 2nd was 46. Despite claims by the pro-Obama forces, that the people inside the building had been Russians and not Ukrainians, none of the 36 corpses who could be identified were: all of them had been local Odessans, with Ukrainian IDs in their wallets, etc.
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