President Biden provoked Russia’s attack on Ukraine by proposing to bring the former Soviet republic into NATO, former President Trump Donald Trump told the popular “All In” podcast June 21, a bombshell statement unreported by mainstream US news media.
“Biden was saying all the wrong things,” Trump told venture capitalist David Sacks. “And one of the worst things he was saying was, no, Ukraine will go into NATO.” The Republican presidential candidate added, “When I listened to him speak, I said, this guy’s going to start a war. As you know, for years there was never even talk of Russia going into Ukraine. That would have never happened. Russia was never going to attack Ukraine….
“Then all of a sudden, they attack. I said, ‘What’s going on here?’ But if you look at the rhetoric from Biden … he’s still saying it,” Trump added.
The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican candidate blew up the black legend of an “unprovoked” Russian attack on Ukraine, repeated endlessly in the mainstream media’s echo chamber. The US Establishment now suffers the double humiliation of having provoked a war with Russia and then having lost it. “Worse than a crime,” Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand quipped, “it’s a blunder.”
A day later, British Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, a Trump friend, repeated Trump’s accusation. “The ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war. We’ve provoked this war,” Farage told a BBC interviewer. “Of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.”
In contrast to the stony silence of their American counterparts, the whole of the British media excoriated Farage, the Brexit leader whose Reform Party is now polling ahead of the incumbent British Conservatives as the July 4 general election approaches. The American media ignored Trump’s earlier remarks completely. The only report available on the Google News site was a link to a report by the Kyiv Independent.
Trump’s unreported remarks are worth quoting at length here, because no American media will print them.
“This would have never happened if I were president, Trump continued. “Ukraine would have never happened. The Israeli attack would have never happened. And inflation would have never happened. Those are three big things. Look, I read the other day, Ukraine is now, where they don’t have the soldiers, they don’t have the manpower, they want to use old people.”
“The average age of their soldiers is 43, so they’re running out of people,” Sacks responded, and asked: “Mr. President, I appreciate your comment that you want to bring a peace deal to Ukraine so that people stop dying, and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. To make a peace deal there, would you be willing to take NATO expansion off the table, if that’s what it took to get the Russians and Ukrainians to make a deal? Would you be willing to do that?”
Trump replied: “So, for twenty years, I heard that if Ukraine goes into NATO it’s a real problem for Russia. I’ve heard that for a long time. And I think that’s really why this war started…. Biden was saying all of the wrong things, and one of the wrong things he was saying was, no, Ukraine will go into NATO…. When I listened to him speak I said, ‘This guy’s going to start a war.’ As you know, for four years there was never even talk of Russia going into Ukraine. That would have never happened. Russia was never going to attack Ukraine.”
Sacks added, “The month before the Russians invaded, [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken told [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov that the administration not only was going to bring Ukraine into NATO, but they thought it was ok for the US … to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine. No wonder the Russians hit the roof. You talk about provocation.”
Trump replied: “Let’s say you were running Russia. You wouldn’t be too happy. That’s always been off the table. That’s a border…They don’t want to have soldiers right on their border. It’s always been understood, and that’s even before Putin. You can go against their wishes, and it doesn’t mean it’s right when they say that, but it’s very provocative.”
Biden played coy about Ukraine’s prospective membership in NATO, but he told Ukraine’s President Zelensky in December 2021 that it was up to Ukraine whether to join or not, a de facto endorsement of Ukraine’s NATO membership. There was no lack of clarity about Biden’s position. Sen. Josh Hawley (R.-MO), a Trump ally, called on the Biden Administration to drop its support for Ukraine’s NATO membership in February 2022, just before the Russian invasion.
In his February 23, 2022 address on the eve of the Russian invasion, Putin spelled out why Russia wouldn’t tolerate Ukraine’s NATO membership. It would allow the United States to place short-range missiles within a few minutes’ flight time to Moscow. “The Alliance, its military infrastructure, has reached Russia’s borders,” Putin said, adding:
This is one of the key causes of the European security crisis; it has had the most negative impact on the entire system of international relations and led to the loss of mutual trust….
The United States is developing its all-purpose Standard Missile-6, which can provide air and missile defense, as well as strike ground and surface targets. In other words, the allegedly defensive US missile defense system is developing and expanding its new offensive capabilities….
The Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons, including ballistic missiles that are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 5,500 km. If deployed in Ukraine, such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes.
It is like a knife to the throat. I have no doubt that they hope to carry out these plans, as they did many times in the past, expanding NATO eastward, moving their military infrastructure to Russian borders and fully ignoring our concerns, protests, and warnings.
The issues are the same as in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States had placed medium-range nuclear missiles on the Turkish border with Russia, and Russia responded by sending missiles to Cuba. Russia agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba after the US agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey, a deal kept secret for years for face-saving reasons.
Members of the Washington establishment knew how Russia would respond, because Russia told them in detail and at length how it would respond. But the establishment saw this as an opportunity to draw Russia out and crush it with economic sanctions.
Biden tweeted on March 22, 2022, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble. The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half. It was ranked the 11th biggest economy in the world before this invasion — and soon, it will not even rank among the top 20.”
In 2023, Russia overtook Japan to take fourth place in world economic rankings, according to the World Bank.
More than the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Ukraine disaster has the potential to undermine American hegemony for good. America’s allies (or soon-to-be-former allies) have no illusions about this.
“Ukraine and the collapse of the West” was the headline June 23 of Germany’s largest-circulation daily newsletter, the Pioneer Briefing. “Ukraine is exhausted, the conservative camp is split and business would like to normalize relations with Russia, wrote editor Gabor Steingart. He cited six reasons why the war was lost:
- Ukraine is an “exhausted country;”
- the West’s strategy of isolating Russia has failed;
- America is tired of exporting democracy;
- Germany is backing off support for a continued war:
- the conservative camp is split, with prominent Christian Democrat Armin Laschet endorsing the Social-Democratic government’s caution towards Ukraine; and
- business is already looking ahead towards reconstruction.
Laschet, the 2021 Christian Democratic candidate for Chancellor, endorsed Olaf Scholz’s policy of “prudence and caution” with respect to Ukraine, upending the hawkish position of CDU leader Friedrich Merz.
In the June 9 European Parliament elections, antiwar parties, most prominently the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), gained sharply at the expense of the Social Democrats and Greens. Even more remarkably, a plurality of members of the Christian Democrats, Germany’s largest party, told Die Welt in a recent poll that they would prefer a coalition with the AfD over any other party.
Internal AfD polling data show that the Ukraine war was the top issue among German voters. Twenty-six percent of respondents said that “securing peace” was their number one concern, followed by social security (at 23 percent) and immigration at 17 percent.
Having failed to isolate, much less defeat, Russia, the establishment is calling for desperate measures, including attacks on military infrastructure with Western weapons from Ukrainian territory. Putin responded by offering high-tech Russian weaponry, as yet unspecified, to North Korea, a nuclear power considered a wild card by its neighbors.
Putin’s visit to North Korea last week sent a chill through the Establishment. The New York Times wrote:
In one of the starkest back-to-the-Cold War moments yet, Mr Putin’s visit Wednesday to Pyongyang — and the announcement of a pact to provide “mutual assistance in the event of aggression” — underscored that efforts by the world’s three biggest nuclear powers to halt nuclear proliferation by North Korea had been dying for some time….
Putin did far more than drop any semblance of a desire to ensure nuclear restraint. He promised unspecified technological help that — if it includes the few critical technologies Mr. Kim has sought to perfect — could help the North design a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten its many adversaries, starting with the United States.
Americans play Monopoly; Russians play chess. Putin opened a geopolitical flank that could hurt the West, with the aim of forcing the West to accept Russian territorial gains in Ukraine as well as Ukrainian neutrality.
Trump just blurred out the truth, and the mainstream media hate him for it.
Another excellent article by David P. Goldman. Trump who has been maligned by most western media seems to understand the situation better than Biden.
Top marks to the Asia Times for revealing this important story. We are living in dangerous times, WWIII a distinct possibility. The Western Hegemony has been wagered and possibly lost. After the Iraq debacle, I thought surely America had learned the lesson, that there are limits to imperial power, but no. This was what Rome learned when Varus lost the battle of Teutoburger Wald.
The danger now is encapsulated in a quote from JK Galbraith:—“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
The solution to the Ukraine War is painless, except to reputations. Close it down, before it closes us down. Let Russia have the Crimea and the four frontier oblasts it claims. That still leaves four-fifths of Ukraine for us to exploit. Better four-fifths of a pie certain than risk everything.
Trump is onto something. There is ample information which shows the US started a campaign in 2014 by overthrowing the Ukraine president who was pro Russia, and replacing him with US selected officials. Ultimately, Russia was forced to take action.