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conflict

Energy Security in a Turbulent World: Canada’s Moment to Lead

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19 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Terry Etam

Autos are different than maple syrup, which is different than oil, which is different than natural gas…Ottawa, get out of that freaking UN playpen, we have issues here.

Want an example of how upside down the whole world is? Consider these two quotes, retrieved from the web this past weekend, about whatever the hell is going on in Syria:

“There are posts on X discussing this event, with some suggesting that Assad might have fled to Moscow, though these should be treated with caution as social media can spread unverified information. Official state responses or confirmations from the Syrian government were not detailed in the provided sources… This situation reflects the ongoing instability in Syria, where despite years of conflict, the dynamics can still shift dramatically. However, without more concrete details or official statements, the full implications and the veracity of the breach into Assad’s palace remain to be fully assessed.”

“The Assad regime’s ongoing refusal to engage in the political process outlined in UNSCR 2254, and its reliance on Russia and Iran, created the conditions now unfolding, including the collapse of Assad regime lines in northwest Syria. At the same time, the United States has nothing to do with this offensive…”

Now isn’t that interesting, hey? The best and the worst of social media – a voice of calmness and reason, and an inflammatory one of accusations and denial. One statement urging caution and suspicion of social media; the other hurling accusations and the sort of militant and overly simplified claims that sadly seem to be the hallmark of extremism.

Here’s the funny part: the first calm comment originated from…  X’s AI machine Grok, which collates mass data from X, formerly Twitter, the “unhinged right wing platform” which many decry it as. The second inflammatory one originated from – the White House. In whom shall we trust…?

Chaos reigns supreme around the world, and there simply isn’t enough reliable information to leap to significant conclusions. Trump’s recent tariff announcements fit squarely into this mayhem, where the right answer to what will happen is: “No one has any idea where these will lead, including most certainly not Trump.”

It’s hard to catalogue it all, but here goes an attempt to capture some of the most pertinent brick-in-a-washing-machine situations, to possibly guide toward a plausible outlook for the energy industry. If that – a plausible outlook – sounds like a wet-noodle conclusion, well, it is. It should be quite evident that any sort of dead certainty is the realm of fools

Consider all this mayhem unfolding, particularly in comparison to the dreamy world of the 1990s when the Berlin Wall had fallen, and we were all flitting about with flowers in our hair discussing the “peace dividend”.

Today we have:

A global movement to advance the BRICS initiative (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), a more-than-significant group of nations that is, for the first time in centuries, looking to carve a future for its mostly ‘developing-nation-status’ participants that is, as India says, not anti-western but non-western. The aligned BRICS nations contain over 3 billion people, which is climbing as more nations seek to join, with a combined GDP of over $30 trillion. These nations do not share the West’s devotion to moralistic causes; they are hungry and want to eat, they want refrigerators and cars, and they want to stop burning dung in their kitchens.

Multiple, simultaneous wars have ensnared the weirdest alignment of countries that may lead to unpredictable outcomes. Let’s start with the poster child for bang-bang bingo, the Middle East. We have…Israel not just fending off but looking to wipe out terrorist organizations that operate in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Qatar (until just a few weeks ago, apparently), and Lord knows where else. All those terrorist organizations trace back to a central head in Iran, who is no doubt in Israel’s crosshairs. Based on this conflict, nations have been forced to align with the Israeli side, or the Iranian side if said nation is close to any one of the tentacles of the Iranian complex.

Now at the same time, Iran is supplying weapons to Russia, which is waging another war that multiplies the minefield of geopolitical relations. China is supporting Russia and, thereby, a de facto supporter of Iran, or kind of, and both support North Korea for some crazy reason. So, by way of association, anyone looking to join the BRICS group is in some way sanctioning what Iran and Russia are doing, including, as Trump called him one upon a time, Little Rocket Man. But Orange Man Bad and Little Rocket Man get along very well, even though this is structurally impossible based on history, and on last year’s ‘rock solid’ alliances.

Now consider that countries like Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam have either expressed interest in joining BRICS, or are on their way to membership (the United Arab Emirates has now actually joined). These are significant entities because they are significant trading partners with the US (and the US/west is fully dependent on China anyway for metals/minerals processing, a situation that seems to have yet to fall into the West’s consciousness. What is the West to do when valuable trading partners decide they’d rather join Satan and the Communists’ trading block, rather than the open-if-hectoring arms of the wealthy West?

In a new development, Trump announced 100 percent tariffs on BRICS if they did not make efforts to trade in a manner that would challenge the USD’s status as the global reserve currency. This is even though the US economy is deeply entwined with many countries in BRICS, and these tariffs would rock the US and its voters to the core (with more elections coming up in two years, all this must resolve quickly or boom, there goes the balance of power again).

Now, let’s look at how the madness has permeated the world of energy.  We have a new US president who announced tariffs of 25% on any goods from Canada (oil? Who knows?) and who also said he would prefer to see Keystone XL built, thereby increasing the volume of the product he is seeking to keep out via tariffs…? He has pledged to cut American energy prices in half and promote ‘drill baby drill” while cutting oil prices in half will decimate any producer’s desire to “drill baby drill”.

That’s just in the US. Look at what happened at COP29, where the host country’s president apparently used the conference as a networking event to cement more oil and gas production deals. Later in the conference, an OPEC minister took the stage – mere days after the UN Secretary General’s tiresome wailing about the mortal danger we are all in due to the combustion of fossil fuels – to declare that oil was “a gift from God.” Throw all that into a pot, and surprise, surprise, the final conference statement of progress read like a kid’s soliloquy on why his bedroom was such a disaster –but don’t worry, it will never happen again. In other words, just a bunch of jibber jabber, if for no other reason than to cloak that 70,000 freaking people jetted around the world to a remote location to study the suicidal impact of people flying around the world to remote locations. (And climate conferences manage, if nothing else, to land tens of thousands of people in every exotic destination in every corner of the world, all flown in, to shout vigorously about among other things, the ecological horror that is flying. It’s all too funny for words.)

We have Europe on its industrial knees, Germany in particular, because it shut down all its clean baseload energy sources (nuclear) and stopped buying its life blood fuel – natural gas – from Russia because, and here we go again right back into the swamp, of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. German industrial output is in freefall, auto manufacturers are bleeding red ink because they are forced to limit sales of the cars people want – internal combustion engine ones – because German policy dictates that electric vehicles must make up a specific percentage of sales. Despite Germany’s formidable engineering prowess, the simple observation that if no one buys EVs, no automaker will sell any ICEs – that’s how a forced EV proportion of sales works – and everything crumbles as a result. Volkswagen is looking to shut down German manufacturing plants for the first time ever. It is a crazy industrial policy.

We are now seeing a pushback against the rushed energy transition/net-zero-whenever agenda that is far beyond my imagination (and my imagination is big) because the inevitable has happened – it is hitting people’s pocketbooks. In the latest very big news on that front, the state of Texas is suing BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard for illegally conspiring to manipulate energy markets and drive-up costs for consumers. Texas Attorney General’s office issued a news release stating: “Over several years, the three asset managers acquired substantial stockholdings in every significant publicly held coal producer in the United States, thereby gaining the power to control the policies of the coal companies. Using their combined influence over the coal market, the investment cartel collectively announced in 2021 their commitment to weaponize their shares to pressure the coal companies to accommodate “green energy” goals. To achieve this, the investment companies pushed to reduce coal output by more than half by 2030.” The Attorney General argues that efforts to restrict coal power have led to increased electricity costs across the United States, resulting in significant revenue gains for the investment companies that hold shares in these firms. Additionally, the news release claims that these companies misled thousands of investors who chose to invest in non-ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) funds, aiming to maximize their profits. Despite their claims to the contrary, these funds implemented ESG strategies. Notably, ten other states have joined the lawsuit.

While that is all unfolding, Trump’s threat of a 25 percent tariff on imports of Canadian and Mexican goods could include oil and natural gas. Given that the North American energy market is hugely intertwined, and that natural gas is quite different than oil (gas is to a certain extent a two-way street – for every 3 GJ of natural gas that Canada exports to the US, the US exports 1 to Canada), there is much complexity here to unpack, and I’m not sure anyone is able to… There are many levels of analysis here – economic, political, geopolitical, retaliatory, defense (Are NATO commitments met? Silence from the Canucks), and there isn’t any indication that either Canada or the US grasps the full nationwide repercussions. Autos are different than maple syrup, which is different than oil, which is different than natural gas…Ottawa, get out of that freaking UN playpen, we have issues here.

The most recent feedback out of Canada’s tariff situation, the reports of the conversations between the two leaders, indicate that in the short term, the tariffs are unavoidable until “the US balances its budget.” No one knows what that means, and assuming the worst isn’t a bad idea because nothing is very stable these days. Having said that, tariffs on oil and gas are going to be chaotic, to put it mildly, if for no other reason than the US needs Canadian crude grades that it cannot produce in the short term, and because the US exports natural gas to Canada in significant quantities.

And that’s just the North American perspective. Globally, we are in severe turmoil as well. We have policymakers who cannot comprehend the very basic math involved in the quantities of energy the developing world will want, and at the very same time those Western policymakers are overseeing the maddest race ever to thrive in the AI and crypto mining spaces, both of which are power hogs of unimaginable proportions because each embeds an unusual feedback loop whereby the more power is consumed, the better these things perform, and the more profitable they are, so guess what happens.

Back here in Canada, some excellent thinkers are pointing out that this country needs to start thinking at a somewhat higher level on the energy file at least, such as Heather Exner-Pirot pointing out in the Calgary Herald that Canada should be looking at reviving Keystone XL and Northern Gateway. The article also discusses how we should be accelerating LNG export development. These are excellent points – we need to take control of our energy destiny to the extent possible. Trudeau’s rushed visit to Florida to plead Canada’s case was a stark and somewhat embarrassing display of exactly what the power relationship is here.

Maybe the US election will also be sufficiently jarring in Canada to cause a thunderclap in the hallways in Ottawa on the energy file. Canada is an energy powerhouse – oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, renewables where they work, it is a minerals powerhouse, it has world-class agricultural and manufacturing prowess…the list goes on and on.

The world is demonstrably uncertain, but in the chaos is opportunity. Nationally we have become preoccupied with trivialities and attempting to solve the world’s problems – from a point of view that doesn’t even understand them in the first place.

The US election is a wake-up call to Canada, and many other countries as well – stop playing games, stop acting as though elected officials and an army of bureaucrats are our moral compass, and get back to governance; put your thinking hats on like hasn’t been done for a while; focus on strengths; get our own house in order before lecturing the world. Do right by the people that voted for you, not your perceived legacy.

Few countries are as blessed as Canada with pretty much everything. Time to get off our back foot.

Terry Etam is a columnist with the BOE Report, a leading energy industry newsletter based in Calgary.  He is the author of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity.  You can watch his Policy on the Frontier session from May 5, 2022 here.

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conflict

RFK Jr. blames US government for Russia-Ukraine conflict: ‘We wanted the war’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Giving an account which completely contradicts the narrative of Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine a brave defender of democracy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. states bluntly, ‘The Ukraine war should never have happened.’

In a brief interview released on January 10, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the reasons behind the Ukraine war are not those which have been supplied to the American people. 

Giving an account which completely contradicts the narrative of Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine a brave defender of democracy, Kennedy states bluntly that “The Ukraine war should never have happened” – and it was effectively planned by the U.S. Deep State.  

“We wanted the war,” said Kennedy, explaining how the U.S. government has acted to provoke and prolong the Ukraine war for years.  

“Now six hundred thousand kids are dead. We have spent 200 billion dollars – which we need in this country. We can’t afford to be engaged in wars that are this close to nuclear engagement,” Kennedy concluded. 

Kennedy’s brief and stunning rundown of the truth behind the case for war in Ukraine exposes decades of deep state corruption. In this report, LifeSiteNews tests Kennedy’s claims against a historical record rich with evidence seldom seen in the news today.  

A diet of deception

Western news consumers have been fed a diet of war propaganda which has seen these facts framed as “Putin’s talking points” – and people who talk like Kennedy smeared as traitors. Yet Kennedy also points out,  

“My son Connor went over to Ukraine and fought in the Kharkiv Offensive because he looked at Putin as a bully who had invaded this country,” Kennedy stated.

Kennedy’s own son was radicalized to risk his own life, being prepared to die for this narrative. Yet his father says he was fighting an imaginary war. 

“What this war was about was really about security.” Against years of propaganda painting Putin as an expansionist dictator hell bent on conquering Ukraine – and then Europe – Kennedy says, “It was never about territory”.  

Everything Kennedy says about this war has been predicted and noted for over three decades. The people who have said what he is saying include George Kennan – one of the most celebrated postwar U.S. diplomats, and President Putin himself. As Kennedy explains that the Ukraine war is the result of years of broken promises made to Russia by the West, his charge that the U.S. government “wanted the war” appears not only credible, but the only rational explanation for the “fatal error” of NATO expansion which predictably led to this conflict.  

To the brink of nuclear war

The result of this reckless grand strategy – to bring the borders of NATO to those of Russia – created a security crisis which has rekindled the terrible prospect of all-out nuclear war.   

Yet Kennedy says there is a realistic hope of peace promised by the coming Trump administration. 

“Whatever you say about President Trump he’s a real estate guy – and he’d rather do a deal than have a war.”

Kennedy, however, warns it is “harder to do a deal now.” Why? 

“Everything the Russians were saying about this [war] from the beginning has turned out to be true.” What does Kennedy mean? His explanation shows the evidence leading to the crime scene of the proxy war in Ukraine today.  

It began, for the Russians, with the creation of a security threat on its borders.   

“Putin was scared that Ukraine would attack Russia.” As Kennedy explains, “Zelensky has confirmed that by a NATO-supported invasion of Russia… in Kursk.”

The invasion of Kursk, undertaken over the summer of 2024, was only one of a long series of reckless actions backed by NATO against Russia. Terrorist and drone attacks have struck deep into Russian territory, and long-range U.S. and NATO supplied cruise missiles have been fired into Russia in a dangerous step up the escalation ladder. This ladder, of course, leads to nuclear war.  

Kennedy believes, however, that Trump means to stop it. The question is then, if Trump can get the U.S. out – how should it go? 

A warning from recent history is given by Kennedy. 

“The Afghan withdrawal was a horrible calamity,” said Kennedy. He argues that the deadline was set for withdrawal for political reasons – setting a goal which was militarily unrealistic.  

“It was politically driven by a date that was impossible for the army to comply with.”

The same argument could be made about all the regime change wars from Afghanistan to Ukraine: driven by a political ideology, they demanded the impossible and delivered chaos and destruction in place of the promise of democracy and freedom. All these wars since 2001 have been lost, of course, though some have harvested vast profits from them. 

War without reason

They have all been fought for non-military reasons, as Colonel Douglas Macgregor has frequently noted. In 2019 he said Trump’s move to “break with the past” and “climb out of the Afghan and Middle Eastern money pits” were “anathema to the Washington Beltway.” 

“The quality of a great leader is the courage to break with the past when the facts change,” said Macgregor, as he explained, “For President Trump, facing facts means change. But real change—ending the Korean War, disengaging forces from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—is anathema to just about everyone inside the Washington Beltway.” 

What Macgregor was saying was that the political class benefits from these “money pits,” at the expense of the Americans whose money – and lives – are being poured into them. 

Striking a hopeful note, Macgregor said of Donald Trump five years ago:  

Washington hates him for doing these things, but most Americans and future generations of Americans will love him for it.

Can Americans expect this sort of strength – and leadership, from the new administration? A break with the past would hopefully mean a break with the sorry tradition of excluding wise men and their wisdom from American grand strategy. 

Macgregor spoke truth to power 

A strong critic of the “forever wars,” it has been said that it was his wise opposition to continuing any of them which finished his career.  

As Responsible Statecraft said of him in 2020, “Senior military officers quietly admit that in terms of sheer intellect, no one quite matches Macgregor.”

This peerless intelligence had no place in the neoconservative grand strategy of forever war. The same article records that Macgregor told U.S. war planners to “[t]urn the governing of Iraq over to the Iraqis, then… get out.”

The report quotes a former West Point colleague of Macgregor who said, “I think it was at that point that Doug’s career ended.”

“Macgregor’s outspoken and often too-public critique of his own service hurt his chances for promotion. Macgregor questioned everything: why are we staying in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria? Why are we prosecuting these endless wars?”  

With little chance of Macgregor being present in person to shape policy, it is encouraging to see his vision of an alternative to forever war is shared by Kennedy. 

The price of principle

Set for a significant role in the coming Trump administration, Kennedy echoes a position made so courageously by Macgregor over twenty years ago: that the U.S. has been waging war endlessly for no good reason. At least, no good reason from the point of view of the American people and their national interest. 

A man as wise as Macgregor must have known that speaking truth to power could very well be fatal to any ambition.  

He put country before career, and in trying to stop the needless killing his chances of promotion were buried instead. Macgregor reminds us there is a difference between a job and a vocation. His calling was to the truth, and he told it regardless of the cost to himself. 

With Kennedy and Trump comes the hope of a deal in place of the business of death. The new administration seems to speak here for the cause of life, of the truth, and of a new vision for America.  

Another break with the past?

Kennedy’s consistent position on the war in Ukraine is a direct contradiction of the “boomer neocon” foreign policy of the last four decades. 

Heavily influenced by Zionism, it has resulted in the routine “genocide of Christians,” as JD Vance pointed out last May.   

“Why can’t we stop genociding Christians?” he asked, noting the Iraq war alone resulted in “the slaughter of over a million historic Christians.” 

He said it was “weird” that in a so-called Christian and “conservative” Republican Party that, “No one makes this argument that traditional neoconservative foreign policy keeps on leading to the genocide of Christians. But it does, which is one of many reasons why neoconservative foreign policy is strategically and morally stupid.” 

Vance, soon to be Vice President, said this in a speech, “Towards a Foreign Policy for the American Middle Class”. Like Kennedy, he chose his words to count the cost in human blood and American treasure of  “the last 40 years of American foreign policy.” 

He said the “fruits” of these four decades was disaster. 

“Disaster in Iraq…disaster in Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, it’s on issue after issue after issue.”  

Vance appears to be serious about change, and a break with the broken “slogans” of the past forty years of the “endless wars” which Trump has long vowed to end – a view apparently shared by those he has chosen to staff his new government.  

Yet a troubling precedent was set in the previous Trump administration – in which Macgregor said Trump was trying to break with this awful past. 

To help make this break, the man who was promoted instead of Macgregor to National Security Chief under Trump was General H.R. McMaster.   

McMaster was “ousted” after only one year in post, following a lobbying campaign to remove him by the Zionist Organization of America.  

Though no wars were started under Trump, the struggle for control over U.S. foreign policy appears to have been decided in favor of the Israel lobby if the picks for the incoming admin are any indication. 

This lobby has a powerful partner in keeping neoconservative war policies on track: the mainstream media.  

Kennedy himself is now under attack from the pro-war press. A report from January 7 in The Atlantic compares “populists” like Kennedy and Trump to Rasputin – the mystical priest of the household of the murdered Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Author Anne Applebaum sees in the promise of peace a sort of madness, which she says is a sign of “The End of Enlightenment Rationality.”

In the bizarro world of the permanent war faction celebrated by “defense industry propagandist” Anne Applebaum, people who “promote ‘peace’ – a vague goal” – as she styles it – are crooks and cranks peddling “conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas.”

The enemies of peace  

It was arch neocon and co-founder of the Zionist Project for a New American Century who said people who want the forever wars to stop are unAmerican – and “intolerant.” Writing for Foreign Affairs in 2021, Robert Kagan instructed Americans that it was their duty to support, pay for and even die in the wars he and his wife Victoria Nuland have devoted their careers to starting.  

Nuland herself gave credence to Kennedy’s claim, again made in the video, that the U.S. had compelled Ukraine’s Zelensky to abandon a peace agreement with Putin.  

“Biden sent [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson to force Zelensky to tear up that deal,” said Kennedy. 

That deal would have seen the 2022 war come to an end only weeks after the Russian invasion.  Responsible Statecraft said of her comments in September 2024, “Victoria Nuland’s comments lend further credence to the proposition that a settlement between Russia and Ukraine was on the table in Istanbul, that the West played a role in shaping Ukrainian thinking on the desirability of pursuing negotiations, and that Western leaders apparently conveyed the view that it was a bad deal.”  

Nuland masterminded the coup which began the longer war in Ukraine in 2014. Though she is no longer at the U.S. State Department, her husband continues the family business of promoting war to this day. 

Kagan’s latest piece in last week’s Atlantic warns that “Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine” – by seeking to stop the killing.  

In her report Applebaum sneers at the notion that the populist “right” can be serious about peace. She charges that Donald Trump is in league with Viktor Orban, who she frames as a thieving “autocrat.” Her view of Trump is of a criminal who “harasses women.” Of the new administration and its vision for the world, she says: “When conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.”  

It is breathtaking that a woman who has made a career out of defense industry-funded war propaganda should accuse anyone of what she has done herself.  

The evidence, as Kennedy points out, points to the fact that the U.S. “wanted this war, and now 600,000 kids are dead” – at a cost of 200 billion dollars to Americans. Is that not evidence of a crime? Who is guilty of this crime? Surely people like Applebaum, who has been well paid for years to sell this and other wars to Americans would feature on that charge sheet. 

In a curious twist, she is married to disgraced former foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski. He briefly attained fame at the scene of another crime – the detonation of Germany’s NordStream gas pipeline. Here is an image of his now-deleted tweet thanking the U.S. government for bombing a vital part of Europe’s strategic energy supply. 

 

Spotlight on Russia war hysteria

As far back as 2017, the Ron Paul Institute warned that “Neocon Anne Applebaum has never seen a bed she did not expect to find an evil Russian lurking beneath.” In it, Daniel McAdams reveals her One Great Trick to keep the money rolling in. 

“Applebaum is, like most neocons, a one trick pony: the U.S. government needs to spend more money to counter the threat of the month. Usually it’s Russia or Putin. But it can also be China, Iran, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam, etc.”  

This trick relies on countering evidence against the case for permanent war by smearing anyone who presents it – as Applebaum does. McAdam describes her type, common in the mass production of pro-war talking points.  

“She has apparently made a tidy fortune warning us that the Russians are coming, but she wants even more. She is buried in defense industry funded think tanks and she does the bidding of her masters. Every intelligent American reader should ridicule her as the propagandist she is.”  

The GrayZone’s Dan Cohen reported in 2021 how leading “U.S. national security reporters serve at [a] pro-war Pentagon-funded think tank.” Called the Center for a New American Century, it promotes the neoconservative Zionist worldview of the Project for a New American Century – founded by Robert Kagan and William Kristol in 1997. Its members directed the United States to remilitarize after the Cold War – and launch the “war on terror.” What followed were decades of regime change wars which produced, among others, the crisis in Ukraine.   

In addition to selling wars by demonizing alleged enemies and smearing sanity, neocon propagandists like Applebaum frame legitimate concerns as fantasies, and the dangerous dreams of neocons as the only rational point of view. They completely disregard the God-given sacred value of every human life, from innocent babies to the elderly, cruelly destroyed in each of their profitable wars. 

An earlier report by McAdam from 2014 recalled how Applebaum had written of “The Myth of Russian Humiliation” for the Washington Post – in which she describes the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders not as a threat to Russian security – but as a “success.”

This of course runs counter to the evidence presented by Kennedy. Following George Kennan, who predicted in 1997 that NATO enlargement would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”, Kennedy pointed out in his video interview with Christian channel Daystar that, “In 1992 when Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union” U.S. and U.K. leaders promised “we would not move NATO one inch to the east. Since then we have moved it a thousand miles to the east.”

Kennedy says former U.S. Foreign Secretary James Baker, then-President H.W. Bush and former U.K. Prime Minister John Major “all said we will not move it one inch to the east.”

This promise has been repeatedly framed as a lie, as Russian propaganda, with “fact checkers” calling it “Putin’s Myth.”  

According to the National Security Archives of the U.S. government, however, “Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion [made] to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.”

Documents from the meetings between President Bush, Gorbachev – and a range of Western leaders, show that these promises were indeed made to the Russians – and broken.  

Nothing gets the fact checkers busier than an outbreak of the truth – of course. 

The “debunkers” escalated their efforts after Putin himself raised this point in his annual news conference of December 2021.  

Replying to a question from the U.K.’s Sky News about Russian negotiations, Putin said the question was about whether Russia could trust any security guarantees given by the U.S.-led West, “We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see?”  

Most people in the West cannot see, of course, because the mainstream media never show them. What is there in reality is too controversial to be seen by the public, because it would lead them to realize they have been misled in the march to war with Russia. 

Putin made an additional point – who is threatening whom? 

“We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached U.S. borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements. This is the point.” 

This is the point that Kennedy is trying to make to Americans. There are reasons for this war we are not being told by a media whose main function today seems to be to sell them all to us – and silence the voices of sanity. Some of these voices warned us almost thirty years ago against creating the crisis we now inhabit.  

Kennan’s warning of a fatal error 

In his 1997 piece warning of the “fatal error” of NATO expansion, George Kennan asked, “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?”  

Kennan was the U.S. national security chief who is credited with decades of steering U.S.-Soviet relations away from the brink of nuclear war.  

His grand strategy of Soviet “containment” saw him mobilize the production of Western culture in tandem with the CIA in what he called “Organized Political Warfare.”   

An architect of Deep State propaganda and a master of diplomacy, his prescient warning of a “fanciful military conflict” was discarded. Why? As with Macgregor, speaking the truth about this new neocon power was simply inconvenient, and so it was dismissed.  

In the video, Kennedy stresses the urgent danger of this reckless strategy of escalation in place of sane diplomacy. 

“We walked away from two strategic missile treaties [with Russia] – which would have prevented us from putting missiles in Ukraine that can [now] hit Moscow.” 

Why else do the Russians have a “legitimate security concern” over Ukraine, as Kennedy claimed? He explained, “The last time the Russians were invaded through Ukraine Hitler killed one in seven Russians” – about 27 million people, a number vastly exceeding the lives lost by any allied nation, including the United States. It was the Soviet Union, above all, that defeated the Nazi regime.  

The simple truth of the war in Ukraine is explained in five minutes by Kennedy. His brief account of the facts of the case opens up a decades-long legacy of disaster by design, directed by a political and media class captive to a lucrative war machine. 

It is to be hoped his presence in the new administration – and his championing of the wisdom discarded by a corrupt political class – will finally see America make a break with the awful past of permanent war and death by design. 

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Sending arms to Ukraine is unnecessarily placing American lives in danger

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U.S. President Joe Biden signs the guest book during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Ukrainian presidential palace on February 20, 2023, in Kyiv, Ukraine

From LifeSiteNews

By Bob Marshall

Joe Biden’s direct military support, coupled with ignoring peace efforts and sidelining containment principles, could spark global conflict.

To understand why a congressional budget fight over continuing or possibly expanding the Ukraine-Russia war is so fraught with dangers, some background of the relevant history and politics must be considered.

Ukraine-Russian hostilities

On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated what he designated as his “special military operation.” He undertook this action in Ukraine which was an extension of the hostile acts that started in February 2014 with a U.S.-supported coup of the Ukraine government. But, recall that Putin approached Biden in late December 2021 through mid-February 2022 with proposals to forestall or avoid Russian military action mainly centering around assurances that Ukraine and other countries would not join NATO, an expansion policy which had its proximate beginnings at the end of the Cold War right after the reunification of Germany.

Putin did not approach Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with such proposals because the United States, and specifically President Biden, was the sine qua non for making such a decision regarding Ukraine’s entrance into NATO both for the U.S. and NATO. Basically, Biden told Putin there was nothing to talk about, especially with regard to reaching any agreement on Ukraine not entering NATO.

Biden rejects Ukraine-Russia peace agreement

Biden and British Prime Minister Johnson refused to accept bona fide peace agreements reached and worked out between Ukraine and Russia during the first weeks of this unnecessary conflict achieved  with the assistance of Israel’s 13th prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Former Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote that Biden and Johnson urged Zelensky to reject a more than 100-page peace treaty, “each page of which had been initialed by both sides, and its essence accepted by the Kremlin and by Kyiv,” and that by trusting the U.S. and Britain for military assistance, eastern Ukraine could be protected and Ukraine would not have to make concessions to Putin.

For these reasons, Biden and Great Britain own this war and bear partial responsibility for the Ukraine, Russian, and other lives lost as well as other war costs incurred after the treaty’s rejection.

So, American, Russian, and Ukrainian citizens now suffer the political, economic, and military consequences of the myopic and imprudent judgments of Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and perhaps much less so by Volodymyr Zelensky who apparently believed promises of continued economic and military support from Biden and Johnson.

Biden trashes Kennan Containment Doctrine

Containment worked! America avoided nuclear war.

Direct U.S./NATO Attacks on Russia

The headlines, of course, say that “Ukraine fires UK-made missiles” and that “Russia says Ukraine attacked it using U.S. long-range missiles.” Not so fast. Zelensky may have given the order to fire, or maybe even pushed the buttons, but the White House needs to explain to the American voters who paid for these weapons, who guided the missiles to their targets in the Russian homeland, and why it is not constitutionally and morally irresponsible for Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to risk a much wider or even a worldwide nuclear holocaust to call Vladimir Putin’s bluff.

On November 24, Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official, told Fox News that “we are now on the escalation ladder inching towards a nuclear war. Those ATACMS do not fire by themselves.”

Even if Ukrainian soldiers technically pushed the button, “the targeting of the weapons systems, ensuring that there is a proper flight trajectory of the missile, that it destroys the right target, and the actual battle damage it achieved that we wanted it to achieve, all requires U.S. personnel and U.S. satellites. This is why the Russians have stated that the United States and European targets are now in the crosshairs. In every wargame that we conducted back in the intelligence community ended up in a nuclear war.”

This is direct engagement.

In September, Vladimir Putin explained why a decision like Biden’s is radically different from all other “redlines.”

[T]his is not a question of whether the Kiev regime is allowed or not allowed to strike targets on Russian territory. It is already carrying out strikes … using Western-made long-range precision weapons. … This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or U.S. satellites. … [O]nly NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. … Therefore … It is about deciding whether NATO countries become directly involved in the military conflict or not. If this decision is made … this will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia.

Biden finesses radical policy change

Biden has still refused to take public ownership of his radical departure from George Kennan’s Cold War containment policy of communist powers when he committed the one cardinal sin of American diplomacy: authorizing the direct military attack of a nuclear opponent, however “small.”

The initial press coverage from the Associated Press on November 17 announced that President Biden had authorized Ukraine, for the first time, to use U.S.-made long-range missiles for use by Ukraine inside Russia, “according to a U.S. official and three people familiar with the matter…. The official and the people familiar with the matter were not authorized to discuss the decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.”

The stark refusal of even one Biden official to put their name to this monumentally dangerous and radical policy change is astonishing. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) noted on X that, “Joe Biden just set the stage for World War III[.] Let’s all pray it doesn’t come to that[.] Otherwise, we may never forget where we were [t]he moment we received this news.”

AP also noted that “Biden did not mention the decision during a speech at a stop to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil on his way to the Group of 20 summit.”

Press disguises Biden policy switch

Biden’s “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to not acknowledging the political-military consequences of his own actions was received with favorable “silent” coverage from the nation’s compliant mainstream media.

Indeed, none of the following news organizations told readers that Biden has converted American military personnel and civilian employees into warfighters who are directly engaging Russian troops, equipment, buildings, and territory by his direction: Associated PressNew York TimesNBC-WashingtonLos Angeles TimesBloomberg NewsABC-NewsPublic BroadcastingSeattle TimesMinnesota Star TribuneMiami Herald, and The Hill.

Checking the White House, the State Department, and the Defense Department websites for this period reveals no press releases, fact sheets, or acknowledgments about the unprecedented and radical missile policy change with Ukraine or any of its particulars. However, Biden’s White House website posted a note on November 20 expressing sympathy with the Transgender Day of Remembrance but is silent on the possible escalation toward World War III.

Even a week later, National Security Advisor John Kirby still did not acknowledge that Biden has authorized direct attacks on Russia in obvious disregard of Kennan’s successful policy of avoiding nuclear war by avoiding direct military to military conflict with nuclear powers. Below is an exchange between National Security Advisor John Kirby and a reporter at an “on the record” press gaggle:

QUESTION: In the past, you kind of downplayed [the] potential impact of the ATACMS on the battlefield and warned that allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia could lead to escalation by the Kremlin. How do you see it now?

KIRBY: Right now, they are able to use ATACMS to defend themselves, you know, in an immediate-need basis. And right now, you know, understandably, that’s taking place in and around Kursk, in the Kursk Oblast. I’d let the Ukrainians speak to their use of ATACMS and their targeting procedures and what they’re using them for and how well they’re doing. But nothing has changed about the – well, obviously we did change the guidance and gave them guidance that they could use them, you know, to strike these particular types of targets.

Biden’s war escalation ladder

At this point, in light of the grim statistics about a completely avoidable war killing and maiming young men and women, Americans are entitled to the truth, not to a rehash of tired legalisms about Ukraine’s right to defend itself.

On November 25, Judge Andrew Napolitano cited 27-year veteran former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a frequent guest on Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” podcast, as confirming that Biden made the decision to let Ukraine use the ATACMS missiles without any input from his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, which is highly unusual.

Biden and weakening Russia

Previously, Austin admitted on April 25, 2022 that the point of the war is “to see Russia weakened,” and Zelensky told The Economist on March 27, 2022, that “there are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.” As Leonid Ragozin wrote in May 2024:

The West has crossed many red lines and is willing to try even more, but it is impossible to predict how the close-knit group of criminally inclined individuals which rules Russia will act if their country begins losing. It has always been a tough proposition to play chess with a guy who is holding a hand grenade. And it makes no sense, as Biden’s predecessors knew very well during the Cold War.

Biden initiated direct but “lower level” hostilities with Russia on November 19, and Biden ally, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, followed suit with similar hostile bombardments of Russia on November 20, partially fulfilling the goal of British and American war hawks attempting to push Russia into larger hostilities under Biden’s lead, or that of his “handlers,” to turn the second cold war with Russia – the aspirations of Washington and London’s armchair generals – into a conflict more likely in their minds of bringing Putin into a more contentious and uncontrollable situation that would relieve Putin of power.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council, publishers of The Washington Stand at washingtonstand.com.

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