Invisible History Blog

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

“For the first time in my very long life… we are, and I don’t want to sound alarmist but I am alarmed, closer to the actual possibility of war with Russia than we have ever been since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s how bad it’s been.”  Stephen Cohen on the Tom Hartman show April 2, 2015

Retired Russia historian Stephen Cohen along with a small handful of academics, journalists and former government officials (who believed the Cold War had ended and would never return) point their fingers at the Western Neocon establishment for America’s latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late stage imperial dementia. Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done their share of the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what increasingly appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. As columnist William Pfaff wrote in one of his final articles (April 1, 2015 Putin and the Neo-Conservatives) “The energy behind the coup in Ukraine and the proposals to deploy Western arms and re-launch the crisis is generally and I think correctly, recognized as the work of the neoconservative alliance in Washington to which President Obama seems to have sub-leased his European policy.” But whatever the determination of the neocon plot to forge ahead with a further destabilization of Russia’s borders, they are only the barking dogs of the master imperialist whose grand design has been slowly creeping over the globe since he stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Love him or hate him, Zbigniew Brzezinski stands apart as the inspiration for the Ukraine crisis. His 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives lays out the blueprint for how American primacists should feel towards drawing Ukraine away from Russia. (p. 46) “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” He writes. “Without Ukraine, Russia… would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south.” Full text continues here