Thomas Palley has written some fine stuff on the NATO/Russia/Ukraine. He had predicted a Russian invasion while at the same time identifying NATO expansionism as the root cause of the crisis, a totally rare combination!
In his latest blog post Ukraine: What Will Be Done And What Should Be Done? he is straight and accurate:
The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means.
In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion of NATO, combined with military upgrading by the US of its Eastern European NATO proxies.
Accompanying that militarization was the prospect of a ramped-up propaganda war in which western media fanned the flames of public animus against Russia. Side-by-side, US government financed entities (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund) would seek to influence European and Russian politics with the goal of regime change.
At this stage, there are two questions. What will be done? And what should be done?
Thomas Palley had predicted all this in two previous posts:
- A Crisis Made In The USA: Why Russia Will Likely Invade Ukraine, written Jan 16th,
- American Exceptionalism And The Liberal Menace: The US And Ukraine, written Feb 13th.
In Brazil, Lula’s Worker Party had initially blamed NATO expansionism but soon withdrew the statement. It’s not easy saying such things. And the sort of culture also discourages independent thought. Hence it’s important to denounce NATO expansionism if you really are anti-imperialist.