WingedKagouti on 26/12/2022 at 16:01

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Looking into the writer, it does seem like he has at least some anti-US bias despite being an American himself. This includes blaming COVID on US laboratories trying to manufacture a bioweapon. He very much knows his stuff when it comes to economics, but is seemingly a neophyte on the topic of geopolitics.

Starker on 26/12/2022 at 21:43

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Since the closest relative has been found in Laos, some ways along the river from the place the outbreak happened, the whole "theory" is bunk anyway.

monk on 27/12/2022 at 01:04

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His arguments are the same as those of Kennan, who came up with the policy of containing Russia using NATO, and then warning the U.S. that if it tried to encircle Russia using the same, then war would take place. That's exactly what happened.

If you're looking for geopolitical experts in light of Ukraine, try Mearsheimer:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4)

There are more to consider, but their views are the same as those of Sachs.

Here's my synthesis of the matter:

The U.S. has been dominating the global economy through Bretton Woods, and later the petrodollar: the world economy uses the dollar as a reserve currency, and this has made the U.S. immensely powerful. At the same time, it has also been weakened for the same reason: it earns less because the value of the dollar is too high.

That's why the country began to experience low economic growth starting in the early 1960s, then trade deficits plus a drop in real wages starting in the early 1970s, then heavy borrowing and spending starting in the early 1980s.

Meanwhile, more conservatives reacted strongly to challenges to values, prompting neoconservatism. This was coupled with liberals who were disillusioned by the lack of freedom in other countries, leading to the rise of liberal hawks.

At the same time, both liberals and conservatives pushed for more "freedoms" (liberal democracy for the first and free markets for the second), leading to the rise of neoliberalism.

It was during those 1980s that Reagan put the two ideologies together, and they've been followed by every U.S. President since. From there, the U.S. continued two sets of policies that it had been employing earlier on:

- neoconservatism leading to using the military, onerous foreign policies, and covert actions to coerce, weaken, destabilize, and intervene in other countries in order to have regime change: governments that are friendly to the U.S.; and

- neoliberalism through onerous economic policies like structural adjustment, if not military and financial aid with strings attached, for the same reason, and to pry open economies for exploitation of cheap resources (like oil) and labor.

This was not difficult to consider given the fact that the U.S. has been engaged in warfare throughout much of its existence, and is considered even by some of its former Presidents as so. For example, Carter argued that the U.S. is the most warlike in modern history, and it was Eisenhower who warned about the military industrial complex, or collusion between business and the military.

Besides multiple attacks on various countries, and in several cases including NATO, the U.S. through Bush embarked on an empire-building scheme consisting of NATO expansion, with thirteen countries joining, and with the intent of transforming NATO from a shield into a sword, and start encircling Russia. The U.S. did this on a grander scale, with over 700 military bases and installations worldwide, including 400 used to encircle countries like China.

Why did it have to do this? That's where Sachs and other economists come in: in order to continue the borrowing and spending binge (the latter now leading to over $70 trillion in total debts and $170 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and debts that are impossible to pay back) the U.S. has to make sure that other countries remain in its orbit of dominance. And that includes taking down countries like Russia and China.

That's why the U.S. had to manipulate Ukraine for more than a decade, to ensure regime change and install corrupt Ukraine politicians, with the EU getting more access to cheap resources: the same neoliberal policies foisted on countries to ensure greater "freedoms" also makes them vulnerable to exploitation by more powerful countries, including the U.S. and members of the EU.

But because most Americans who are decent would have not accepted such, media (also controlled by the rich, which controls 70 percent of the U.S. economy, funds both political parties, and owns the defense industry) had to continue the narrative stemming all the way from Reagan's "evil empire" speech on to Bush's "either you are with us, or you're with the terrorists", and argue that Russians, the Chinese, Iranians, etc., are all barbarians and savage, and that regime change must take place so that they will become civilized (i.e., promote U.S. ideals of liberal democracy and free markets), that the U.S. is the sole power that can achieve this (and with the help of its European lieutenants), and that if it does anything wrong, it's excused for the same reason (hence, American exceptionalism).

And the public bought it. The result is what we see today: "I stand with Ukraine" but complete silence about Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, billions given to Ukraine (and likely with corrupt Ukraine and U.S. officials getting their cut) while the defense industry has a great time with higher sales, Zelensky dreaming of turning Ukraine into a bigger Israel, and the bewildering alliance of liberal hawks and MAGA supporters who unwittingly accept the public debt from military aid foisted upon them.

Of course, this is all neophyte stuff, as reality is much simpler: the U.S. is good and Russia is bad. End of story.

Cipheron on 27/12/2022 at 04:16

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That's literally their post 1 / 1, so yeah it would seem to be the only reason the account was made is to have "aged" accounts all over the place for camouflage reasons.

Mearsheimer should be taken with a grain of salt for promoting that stuff too, since his main hobbyhorse on the matter is that Ukraine was wrong to give up their nukes, because if they'd had nukes they could threaten the Russians with them. So here's a nuclear proliferation / deterrent promoter. His main takeaway from Crimea for example was to say (paraphrase) "See? That's what happens because they gave up the nukes".

One of the central bits of that essay above is the idea that the US somehow orchestrated the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine. If that didn't actually happen then a lot of the rest actually falls apart.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych)

Don't forget this gem of a human put his political rival and predescessor in prison based on a gas deal that she was basically forced to sign with Putin, after Putin shut off all gas supplies to Ukraine. Locking her up over that was a clearly corrupt and politically-targeted prosecution. So is she, the pre-Yanukovych leader, supposedly the corrupt pro-Western puppet? So what's she doing being forced into a corner and signing sweetheart deals for the Putin regime then?

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As for the Euromaidan, the idea that it was a foreign-backed coup doesn't hold water when you look at the sequence of events. Usually there's some pre-planned trigger event for the coup-plotters to take power, and even if protestors are involved, that's as the public spectacle, but the real moves have been made in the background: securing the support of military leaders to take action at the right moment to "protect the public" and overthrow the "bad guy".

The problem is that none of those things happened in the Euromaidan. There was no pre-orchestrated event. It was an event of Yanukovych's own making.

On 21 November 2013 A small street protest started - the same day that he announced he was throwing out the planned Association Agreement with the European Union. So the trigger event was basically caused by Yanukovych, not by some external actors.

After a protest starts, well you have some choices on how to deal with it. The administration decided to have the police physically attack the protest, and that triggered more protests to spring up around the country.

This simmered for a few months, then on 16 January 2014, Yanukovych signed the Bondarenko-Oliynyk laws, also known as Anti-Protest Laws. Due to the widespread attacks on free speech and public assembly in these laws, instead of simmering down, the protests absolutely exploded. Again, this isn't an event some foreign actor did, it was a direct consequence of mistakes made by Viktor Yanukovych.

So if it was a coup plan, it wasn't much of a plan: start some small protests then just hope the government botches the response so bad that a full scale street revolution eventually breaks out, months later. What's missing in any of this is a trigger event that the coup leaders would have set up or expected, then had already bribed some military leaders to enact the actual coup and install an interim government.

So you have to imagine a foreign coup where the *only* steps they did was to foment street protests, and didn't actually conspire with any of the military or security agencies in the nation on how a leadership change was going to happen. This is not how planned coups work.

So basically the Euromaidan simply *lacks the DNA* of an orchestrated or planned coup.

demagogue on 27/12/2022 at 07:32

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Not only puppets of powerful nations, but puppets of individual leaders or policymakers. It's a worldview for people that can't imagine systems that require them to think about more than 4 or 5 nodes in a network in their mind at the same time. I'm glad my people here jumped on that point immediately.

The legacy of neoliberalism is still an interesting thing to consider of course. I think there's been a big sea change in int'l relations thinking since the Cold War that's been so radical we don't even have the concepts fully crystallized to talk about it yet, and both the West and as we see here "our old adversary" are still compelled to fall back into old tropes.

I guess the post-truth political culture is one way to see it. There's this practice that both Trump and Putin have become poster children for... Timothy Snyder put it well recently. Whatever is in their interest (and for both of them, for different reasons, downgrading Ukraine was at the top of their list): If you're talking to the Left the problem is their Fascist Right. If you're talking to the Right the problem is their Woke Left. If you're talking to Jews and globalists the problem is their nazis, in the form of (neo)liberal warhawks. If you're talking to nazis the problem is their Jews, globalists, and LGBT people, in the form of the woke liberal establishment. It's to the point you just have to say the world "liberal" and every group across the whole damn spectrum fills that in with their existential bogeyman of choice. But the point is that it's none of the above; it's their personal crusade of fundamental misunderstanding.

But for Ukraine especially, yes the Kremlin line completely erases the Euromaidan movement and the possibility that Ukrainians could have a mind of their own, never mind something like an independent four centuries or whatever it was of history it had much closer to European Poland-Lithuania than Asian Muscovite, with things like "written laws" and "people other than the Czar can have independent rights". And nobody even mentions that the land their actually fighting over, whether it's Russian or Ukrainian, historically belonged to the Turkish Tatars, they've been so erased.