Dear Friends + Interlocutors,

This is all so infuriating. A prime goal of America’s foreign policy should be to avoid wars, not provoke them. In the instant case of Ukraine, Washington provoked this war repeatedly, and I believe deliberately. It now stands on the sidelines with NATO as Ukraine gets hammered.

The above link is to an important article by Professor John Mearsheimer on the subject. Unfortunately, if you do not subscribe to The Economist, you can’t access it.

The U.S. and NATO have effectively declared war on Russia via sanctions, words, and the seizure of Russian assets both public and private, but they have not entered the shooting conflict. Why does this remind me of the situation with Poland in September 1939? Indulge me...

[Egged on by Franklin Roosevelt and his scheming ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, both London and Paris got pressured into issuing a “guarantee” to Warsaw of Poland’s boundaries as dictated by the 1920 Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler wanted a negotiated arrangement to link Danzig, a Germany city cut off from Germany, with Germany. The so-called Polish Corridor. He did not want war with Poland.

Once the Anglo-French “guarantee” was issued, the Poles slammed the door shut on negotiations with Germany. That precipitated the start of the Second World War. Germany invaded Poland. England and France did nothing.

When Stalin then invaded Poland’s eastern side, England and France still did nothing. They issued a declaration of war against Germany (but not Russia) and otherwise sat on their hands, expecting Roosevelt to bail them out… But that’s just history which no one cares about or learns from.]

Mearsheimer pointed out the dangers inherent in Washington’s provocative Ukraine policies in 2014, after Washington had engineered a coup in Kiev (February 2014) that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. See his article in Foreign Affairs of September 2014.

In The Economist article of March 11th, Mearsheimer calmly and thoroughly examines the present, inevitable blowup in light of his prior warnings.

Patrick

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