Flirting with Nuclear War

by Stephen Baskerville

Stephen Baskerville contends that the Ukraine war, provoked by American policies and driven by radical ideology, is one of the most reckless US foreign policy acts, causing immense suffering and risking the decline of the West.

This is an excerpt from Stephen Baskerville’s Who Lost America?: Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It.

Remember that these are also ideologues. They really believe that we are over there fighting to extend LGBTQRS, or whatever it’s called, to everyone else in the world.

— Col. Douglas Macgregor

Washington’s failure in Ukraine is a major blow to the…moral principles promoted by the ruling class of the United States. … Most of the world loathes the rainbow flag and all it stands for and now knows it will not prevail.

— Srdja Trifkovic

Anyone with the most rudimentary, common-sense understanding of international politics is perplexed and appalled by the needless carnage in Ukraine. This war will go down in history (if a posterity survives to write it) as perhaps the most reckless act of foreign policy ever undertaken by the United States (far exceeding in consequences even the Vietnam War), when a cabal of adolescent know-it-alls simply discarded time-tested principles of diplomacy and statecraft and provoked an utterly unnecessary war with staggering levels of pointless suffering. In doing so, they have almost certainly precipitated the decline of the United States as a military and economic power, if not the entire West.

The essential facts are clear, and I have only a few points to add that will connect this debacle with the others described in this book. For here too, we will see the hand of radical or “woke” ideology, not only on the Left, but permeating our entire society. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor says of the Biden administration:

This is an ideologically pure organization that has decided that it is winning a war or must win a war against Russia in order to extend an LGBTQRS and everything else to the rest of the world. And that our way is the only way…. There can be no compromise. We are right. We are morally superior. The Russians are evil and deserve to be destroyed.

And as elsewhere, there is more here than meets the eye.

First, the clear truths that sensible people understand but few say openly: The war was engineered from the start by the Biden administration and previous American administrations, and permitted by weak and obsequious European leaders. Experienced statesmen and respected scholars warned for years that the American policy of pushing countries like Ukraine and Georgia into the NATO alliance was foolish, and the resulting war was predictable and predicted.

Experienced diplomats and leaders like George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Jack Matlock, and many others voiced fierce opposition. Scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen warned us precisely what would and did happen. They could hardly be more clearly vindicated by events. Even once the predicted war began, American policymakers appeared to learn nothing from their recklessness and instead intensified their belligerence. They sabotaged peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and in an act of breathtaking perfidy they then literally sabotaged the economies of their own allies by intentionally damaging the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to ensure that Europeans could not conclude peace with Russia.

They have shown themselves willing to sacrifice Ukrainians’ lives on an unlimited scale, and they demonstrate equal disregard for the economic survival of their most loyal allies. For their part, European leaders have proven themselves spineless toadies for American warmongers. German and Swedish governments, among others, with astounding servility, willingly sacrificed their own countries’ interests and the welfare of their own people rather than tell the truth about the Americans’ betrayal in the Baltic Sea. Even Eastern Europeans, often more independent than the effete of Western Europe, seem (with some exceptions) so habituated to resenting Russia that they endanger their own citizens and remain mute as their survival is threatened by American adventurism far more than Russian.

The Western world has now locked itself into a suicidal course of not only military but also economic warfare with Russia, in circumstances where Russia holds all the cards and generally plays them skillfully. Yet the slightest suggestion that not only the wisest but the only way to peace and prosperity is simply to go to the negotiating table is off limits and unutterable. Hardly a politician or political party in any Western democracy — left, right, or center — now dares to breathe such a suggestion. Nor do the media (again, left or right), who generally refuse to air any views other than belligerent ones. Even more than in its acts of domestic self-destruction, no formal opposition exists to the West’s hubris. This information and opinion blackout is what connects Ukraine to the West’s other self-inflicted crises: the Covid epidemic and measures, inflation, electoral fraud, global energy and food shortages. Yet here too we find less obvious precedents submerged in the internal politics of the United States.

Buy Stephen Baskerville’s Who Lost America?: Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It here.