[Salon] "Provoked" by Scott Horton reviewed by Bruce Fein - Guest Post

PROVOKED by Scott Horton Book Review by Bruce Fein Scott Horton has labored to produce a hefty tome. It unveils the stupendous, cynical lies the United States has peddled to justify keeping Ukraine on life support to weaken Russia by providing billions of dollars of weapons and real time intelligence to head off defeat. Contrary to President Joe Biden, our co-belligerency is not to make Ukraine safe for democracy. Ukraine has never embraced democracy or the rule of law. Corruption is ubiquitous. Free speech and association are strangled. Minorities enjoy little breathing space. Ukraine’s George Washington, Stepan Bandera, was a Nazi collaborator or semi-collaborator The United States uses money and advisors to influence Ukrainian politics that we find intolerable when a foreign country interferes in our elections. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland played impresario in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Neither is the United States a co-belligerent with Ukraine to protect the sanctity of international borders. We readily accepted new borders in post-Tito Yugoslavia and employed force to secure Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. The truth about our involvement in Ukraine to oppose Russia is obscene. We are involved not to defeat Russia and bring Ukraine into NATO. Indeed, the United States is adamantly opposed to the latter. Our goal is to bleed Russia dry with Ukrainian soldiers and sacrifices heedless of the industrial scale suffering inflicted on the Ukrainian people. We do not wish Ukraine to approach victory because that might provoke Russian President Vladmir Putin to unleash nuclear weapons. That explains our handcuffs on Ukraine’s use of American weapons. But we also do not want Ukraine to lose the war because the hemorrhaging of Russia would cease. Ponder this moronic contradiction. We are assisting Ukraine militarily to defend its right to seek NATO admission. At the same time, we are blocking Ukraine’s admission for fear it would precipitate Russian adventurism. But none of what Horton chronicles is surprising. Reflect on a false dawn more than three decades ago. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The victory of the United States in the Cold War. The end of history, according to professed savant and clairvoyant Francis Fukuyama. Heaven on earth had arrived with the fulfillment of the Book of Isiaih, "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." These hopes and expectations betrayed the innocence of ingenues. They defied the depravity of human nature that finds expression in the iron law of international relations: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” as Thucydides related in The History of the Peloponnesian War. This unstarry-eyed chronicler of human affairs wrote not for the moment, but for the ages. He elaborated: “I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time…Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” The species is fueled by hormonal, not cerebral gratifications. By far the strongest is the insatiable craving for power for its own sake. Power confers a juvenile sense of self-esteem to fill philosophically empty souls. It is intoxicating and self-ruinous. Think of Napoleon’s blunder in marching to Moscow in winter, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Sermon on the Mount, with all its grandeur and divine nobility of heart, has proved futile in diminishing the lust and gratification of raw power. The ending of the Cold War predictably proved an intermezzo before the United States embarked on Cold War 2.0. In mindlessly seeking to rule wherever it can, the United States orchestrated the expansion of NATO to 32 members cheek by jowl with Russia as it was reduced to a shadow of the Soviet Empire. The expansion was not to strengthen the security of the United States from attack. Who believes that Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland, or Sweden (the latest NATO members) are in the calculus of any would-be aggressor against the United Sates? The expansion was in contemplation of overthrowing Russian President Vladimir Putin, by force and violence, if necessary, in the fantasy that we could make peace and democracy bloom there if only given a chance. The United States is racing towards self-ruination like all prior 50-70 empires. There is only one guardrail: restoring the Constitution’s separation of powers which entrusts the war power exclusively in Congress with no incentive to exercise it except in self-defense. The wise words of Senator Henry Clay in opposing United States intervention in Hungary against the Russian Bear, 1848-49, would become our gospel: “Far better is it for ourselves and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our wise pacific system, and avoiding distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.” *Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and is author of American Empire Before The Fall. @brucefeinesq. www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com --