The world may have dodged an immediate bullet when the U.S. intelligence agencies warned, this week, that by giving in to Ukraine’s pleading for long range missiles that could attack targets deep into Russia, we would be poking the Russian bear beyond its patience without even influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine’s favor.
There had been a sense of waiting with bated breath in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that he would lower the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, as the U.S. and its NATO allies broadcasted their plans to ignore a repeated “red line” articulated by U.S. President Joe Biden not to provide arms to Ukraine which could be launched deep inside Russia.
Britain is playing its usual provocative role by sending clear messages that it would welcome U.S. approval to let Ukraine use its “Storm Shadow” long-range missiles. We just got a short breather, in light of this recently issued public U.S. intelligence evaluation.
Mother Earth grows impatient with the folly of humankind.
Despite repeated requests to the U.S. from Putin to honor U.S. promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that the U.S. would not expand NATO east of a unified Germany, when the wall came down and Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe without a shot, the U.S., driven by visions of Empire, steadily expanded NATO eastward.
It began with former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s annexation of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999; followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2017. At one point Putin was so dismayed at this expansion, he asked the Clinton administration if Russia could join NATO, but he was denied membership.
Putin made it very clear to the U.S. and NATO that Russia, which shares a long border with Ukraine, would not tolerate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. After the U.S. supported a 2014 coup d’état replacing the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with Petro Poroshenko who immediately announced that only the Ukrainian language would be recognized in Ukraine, a civil war broke out in the eastern part of the country where the majority of the people were Russian and Russian speaking. More than 14,000 people were killed in that war before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Putin provided a draft agreement in 2021 to the U.S. proposing that Ukraine remain neutral and that the Donbass region, undergoing the civil war, remain in Ukraine as a federation and have the right to speak Russian. The U.S. completely ignored the proposal, and Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Putin was negotiating for a cease-fire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy six months after the invasion, but Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister came to Ukraine and told Zelenskyy not to make the deal! And the slaughter continues, with more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 soldiers killed.
Thanks to the brief respite we just received from imminent nuclear annihilation, thanks to the sensible U.S. intelligence services who took Putin’s recent warnings as a reason for caution in pursuing a headlong and heedless expansion of military aid to Ukraine, it is time to change the conversation with bold new proposals.
Proposals that are guaranteed to bring us a respite from the growing terror. Proposals that will bring a shift in planetary consciousness allowing us to respond cooperatively to the impending cataclysmic climate disaster down the road! Mother Earth grows impatient with the folly of humankind.
Here are a series of steps that are guaranteed to bring us peace on Earth if the U.S. is ready to mobilize against the MICIMATT (Military Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank complex) and work for peace!
- Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the United Nations and in frequent speeches for a treaty to ban weapons in space;
- Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the U.N. to negotiate a cyberwar ban treaty;
- Reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and get U.S. missiles placed by former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump out of Poland and Romania;
- Remove U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in five NATO states—Turkey, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium—as a deal for Russia removing its recently placed weapons from Belarus;
- Take all nuclear weapons off high alert, and separate the warheads from their delivery system as China does—the wisdom of the East; and
- Dismantle NATO and pull it back from Russia’s border immediately
The ball, as they say, is in the U.S. court. Or as Pogo Possum, a character in Walt Kelly’s 1950s comic strip was known to say, “We met the enemy, and he is us!”
There is no doubt that Russia and China would be willing partners in these new initiatives. They have been proposing them to the United States for more than 10 years!!
