Acknowledging The U.S. Regime-Change Operation Against Russia is not Propaganda
That Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator does not mean that the United States is justified in sacrificing the people of Ukraine to achieve their goal of ousting Putin and weakening Russia
I have not yet read Scott Horton’s new book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, but I have written for his Libertarian Institute and have followed him for years. I got into some pointless arguments on X with some random people criticizing Horton’s recent appearance on Piers Morgan’s show where he was making points from his book and his detractors on the panel could only respond with “Russian propaganda!” or “How much are you being paid by Putin?” What was Scott Horton factually wrong about, I inquired to no avail.
The best argument made was that Horton leaves out context about how Russia/Putin has violated the sovereignty of countries like Ukraine and Georgia for decades prior to wars breaking out between them. It is undeniably true that Putin has done that, but I am not convinced that Horton leaves out this context. Neither I nor the people criticizing him have read his book as of yet, I intend to do so in the hopefully near future but they likely never will, so whether or not this context is left out is something we don’t know, and simply relying on a soundbite from what Horton is able to get out with limited time on a panel show is not exactly fair to Horton.
In the case of the United States and European Union assisting in the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government under Viktor Yanukovych, I have pointed out many times that the Yanukovych government was very likely a puppet of the Putin regime. Vladimir Putin certainly has no right to a puppet government in the sovereign nation of Ukraine, but that does not mean that it is not a provocation to Vladimir Putin for the United States and European Union to assist in a coup to overthrow his puppet government in Ukraine to help install their own puppet government in Ukraine. I wrote this in 2015:
Now it's not unreasonable to criticize Putin, but to do so exclusively is to completely ignore the fact that everything he did was in reaction to the U.S. and E.U. trying to enact a new policy of containment against Russia by overthrowing his elected puppet government and installing their own.
Note that it cost me nothing in 2015 to point out that the government that was overthrown in Ukraine was a puppet of the Putin regime in Russia, and it costs me nothing now nearly a decade later. It is important context that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government seek to dominate their region of the world and have no regard for the sovereignty of other Eastern-European countries like Ukraine, but my and, I think, Scott Horton’s point is that Putin’s attempted domination of the region is not a justification for American or NATO domination of the region. I wrote this in 2014 after Putin annexed Crimea in response to the Western-backed coup in Ukraine:
It doesn’t matter if Putin is completely at fault for the situation in the Ukraine, because the United States has no business interfering. No American lives are at stake, nor is any American territory. The United States has nothing at stake in this conflict, regardless of how it turns out, other than the perceived prestige of politicians and the money to be made from a conflict with Russia for those in the “defense” industry. That is not enough incentive to provoke the world into another cold war or worse.
The people simply trying to say that the issue can be boiled down to Vladimir Putin being a bad person who does bad things, while true, ironically leaves out important context, exactly what they claim Horton has done without reading his book. Putin can be a villain and a dictator who violates the sovereignty of other countries surrounding Russia and still have legitimate security concerns about a regime-change happy NATO led by the United States having an armed puppet government so close to his borders. You might even logically conclude that a reason he has sought to dominate his neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia is specifically to deter NATO expansion to these countries, which has been a priority of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Again, not that Putin has the right to dominate sovereign countries, but merely that you can understand why he might make that choice.
The point is not to omit context that shows Vladimir Putin or the Russian government in a negative light, but to add the context that the U.S. and NATO have constantly escalated their provocations toward Russia and Putin over the decades, and that he has responded in kind by escalating his policies of trying to dominate the region around Russia. The U.S. government and NATO’s goal since the fall of the Soviet Union has been to increasingly isolate and contain Russia because the United States cannot abide any challenge to its domination of the entire world. There is no humanitarian concern from the United States toward Ukraine, merely power-politics using Ukraine to weaken the Russian government generally and to get Putin out of power specifically as I wrote previously.
That the United States has no right to dominate Russia anymore than Russia has a right to dominate Ukraine is second only to the concern that there is no reason to expect the current Russian dictator who controls the second-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth to allow the United States trying to remove him from power, and probably having him personally killed which was the result of their regime-change operations in Libya and Iraq, without putting up any resistance. And it is the deliberate policy of provoking Putin and backing him into a corner and making him increasingly desperate by the United States that people like Scott Horton, if I may presume to speak for him for a moment, and I are opposed to because it can only lead to ever-more avoidable death and destruction.