It has long been the mantra of the left in Western Europe that
most of the ills of the world have been caused by some ramification
of ineptness or simply outright power hunger of the United States.
These days of the rebirth of Russian hegemonic ambition is no
exception.
The current anti-American thought process goes as follows: U.S.
intelligence that Iran will have the capability to launch a
ballistic missile well over a thousand miles in the next several
years is unsupported speculation. This American incompetence is
responsible for placing a fearful Russia in the position of having
to defend itself by threatening to obliterate Poland, where the
American anti-missile batteries will be based. The brilliant
Russians naturally think these limited American counter-missile
batteries are really aimed at them.
Once again the “stupid” Americans, led by a “stupid” president
(as has been the leftist characterization since the days of Truman)
have provoked the peace-loving democrats of Russia into announcing
they will defend themselves against the U.S. and their gullible
allies. It’s hard to believe this out-dated line is still being
published in major European media, but it occurs daily.
The invasion of Georgia by hundreds of Russian tanks and armored
vehicles supported by air and artillery assets obviously built up
and organized weeks before was implied in the British newspaper,
the Guardian, to be at least partially a result of
American encouragement of Georgia to exert its authority over the
breakaway regions of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The Russians say they only began moving their units when the
Georgians launched an attack in force on the South Ossetian capital
after a minor hit and run mortaring of Georgian positions by a
small Ossetian militia unit. The European left-wing media accept
this justification for the Russian invasion and add that the
Georgian president. Mikheil Saakashvili wanted to show off to his
hoped-for future colleagues in NATO that Georgia had “the right
stuff.”
Ukraine’s desire also to become a member of NATO has been loudly
proclaimed by the Kremlin to be a direct threat to the security of
Russia. Once again is heard the old Cold War theme that the poor
Russians are being surrounded by the power hungry Americans. As a
result, Putin and his crowd of revived totalitarians need to invest
billions of their newly accumulated petro-cash in vast defense
expenditures.
Europe’s anti-U.S. left holds that if the American people get
this argument correct, they will recognize that they have been
duped by their current leadership — as they were by previous
leaders — to believe Russia wants to expand its power. In
actuality Moscow is simply reacting to Washington’s provocative
acts, the Putin/Medvedev apologists righteously proclaim.
Similarly the government in Iran defends its need for nuclear
power to provide an alternative national energy grid. This claim
comes despite the fact that its immense oil and gas resources and
total lack of environmental angst clearly prove Iran does not need
nuclear power projects that produce weapons grade uranium. Russia
wants to ignore Tehran’s own boast of the development of
longer-range missiles which it has said it must have in order to
ward off the American and Israeli ambition of destroying Iran.
In a recent column in the Guardian the fashionably
anti-American left-wing journalist, George Monbiot, wrote, “To keep the pudding [defense contracts]
flowing, the [U.S.] administration must exaggerate the threats from
nations that have no means of nuking it — and ignore the likely
responses of those that do.” Presumably this is in reference to
American worries over eventual nuclear weapons in Iranian hands as
opposed to existing Russian capabilities and insecurities.
The point of that whole column is that the U.S. anti-missile
system is an ineffectual and overly expensive program that can and
will be countered — justifiably — by Putin’s Russia in a
relatively inexpensive manner. More stupidity from Washington that
edges the world toward perpetual insecurity in the brinkmanship of
capitalistic profit seeking…. If that isn’t straight out of the
old Comintern agitprop, Joseph Stalin wasn’t a communist.
The underlying problem is not in the rather obvious effort to
tie an image of an insatiably money-hungry capitalist defense
industry to a foreign policy aimed at keeping the world in a
profitable turmoil. Many otherwise reasonable people, not only in
Europe and Asia, but also in the U.S., have rushed to accept such
absurdity because it satisfies their need to have an
all-encompassing explanation of world affairs.
The envy of the United States will not go away nor will the Free
World’s dependence on the U.S. to be its ultimate protector. That
statement alone is the key to anti-American perceptions. One
wonders, however, what would happen if the American people ever
became so weary of their country being blamed for the world’s ills
that they sought to withdraw from the global responsibility of
defending democracy — or would that also be considered stupid?
