Washington Deepens Its Military Ties to Ukraine

Washington is sending more Pentagon military advisers and aid into Ukraine. On March 19, 2014, Obama promised no U.S. “military excursion” in Ukraine. Indeed, this is no mere brief outing or trip. It’s advertised as a long-term connection. At this rate, Ukraine doesn’t have to join NATO de jure. It will become a U.S. satellite de facto.

The U.S. claims it has an interest in Ukraine. Representative Duncan Miller explains “Clearly, we have an interest in what happens in Ukraine and it’s far better to have an idea of where we can maximize any support we are willing to provide.” Such support already includes the U.S. role in stimulating a coup d’etat, influencing who its new leaders are, sending in CIA and FBI agents, providing aid, demonizing Putin, and launching a propaganda campaign against Russia.

Specific bureaucracies, government figures, industries, lobbies and foreign nations have an interest in U.S. expansionism. NATO has an interest. The EU countries have varied interests. But I contend that Americans in general have no interest whatever in Ukraine that warrants the U.S. government’s actions in Ukraine. I contend that U.S. interests, whatever they are supposed to be, actually conflict with the interests of mainstream Americans. To most of us here going about our daily lives and contending with our problems, the extension of U.S. government military power and economic resources into Ukraine and many other foreign lands is pure foolishness that accomplishes nothing for us, uses our resources, diverts our government from its proper role and course, and typically greatly harms peoples abroad. The Iraqi people who survived the American onslaught can testify to that. It is inconceivable that the Palestinians living in Gaza are thankful for the U.S. standing 100% behind Israel.

What exactly is the American public’s interest in Ukraine, as distinguished from those special interests that support U.S. involvement? There isn’t any.

The human race faces an infinite number of challenges, but what are the proper ways for people to face these challenges? Is it the proper role of the U.S. government to inject itself and us into the politics, economics and problems of every other political entity on earth? These problems are infinite, here and abroad, and the U.S. government simply doesn’t have the answers to them. It thinks it does, but it doesn’t. Is it the proper role of the U.S. government to remake the entire world in its image or according to its lights? Does the U.S. possess a God-given political gospel to spread everywhere? It thinks it has, but it hasn’t.

Remaking the world, which is a contributing rationale for U.S. expansionism, is, generally speaking, an exercise in foolishness and futility. The application of U.S. government power and aid again and again produces foreign policy failures, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan only being recent examples. U.S. foreign aid has been a failure, and this has been known since at least 1986. However, it has served the interest of narrow interest groups, which is why it continues.

The world is structured at present in a multi-polar way politically and religiously. There is a fairly high degree of unity on ideas of justice, even as there is strong disagreement on this basic matter. But this consensus, such as it is and such as it is embodied in institutions of law in various countries, has not arisen by any one nation or state imposing its ideas or will on others. The U.S. government has access to certain technological advantages that many less wealthy nations do not have. It has more bombs and missiles and greater armed forces. This is one reason why its leaders think of themselves as comprising a superpower. They have wrongly extended this thinking into the false inference that they also have a moral superiority, or that they wouldn’t have this material abundance unless they had a moral superiority. This mistaken thinking leads to hubris and to the false inference that the U.S. government has a proper role of remaking the world in ways it deems right.

There are times that I think a simpler hypothesis explains the foolishness of this generation of U.S. leaders. It is that they want to show how moral they are so that they can show they can fight battles as well as their parents and grandparents did. They are basically jealous of their forefathers and wish to show that they can be just as heroic as they were in fighting Nazism or Japanese imperialism or poverty or racism. But since the world’s challenges and battles are different today than in yesteryear and no large enemies stand in bold relief against which to contend, they find they have to manufacture new battlegrounds on the world stage, against terror, against Russia, against China, against jihadism, and on a variety of social and environmental issues.

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11:27 am on July 24, 2014