How Russiagate Was Used To Launch A New Cold War.

With Russia gate Back In The News, It Is A Good Time To Look At The Geopoltical Implications Of The Hoax.

Russiagate is now back in the news, with newly declassified documents largely debunking the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect Donald Trump.

Documents now show that the NSA and FBI had “low confidence” that Russia stole the DNC emails and released them to Wikileaks, despite the fact that they claimed they had solid proof at the time.

They also show that the intelligence assessment was “based on the forensic evidence identified by a private cyber-firm,” referring to the Hillary Clinton campaign contracted private security firm “Crowdstrike,” whose CEO Shawn Henry admitted had “no evidence” that Russia exfiltrated data from the DNC server.

For many, Russiagate is seen as a partisan scandal, with Trump supporters arguing the hoax was simply a Democratic plot to take down Donald Trump.

However, there is an often-ignored geopolitical implication behind Russiagate. It was a neo-con Psy-Op designed to launch a new cold war with Russia, and eventually lead to the proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia, which has resulted in one million people being killed or wounded.

In this article, I will get into the hidden geopolitical implications behind Russiagate.

The Pre-2016 New Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War, neo-conservative elements in the West have wanted to continue hostilities with Russia.

In 1999, NATO, led by Bill Clinton, bombed Serbia and Kosovo for 78 days.

While the intervention was done in the name of saving Albanians in Kosovo from the Yugoslav government, James Bisette, the former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, noted that, “long before the bombing it was NATO countries themselves that were inciting violence in Kosovo and attempting to destabilize that Serbian province.”

Bisette revealed that NATO was intentionally trying to incite violence in Kosovo to justify military intervention, writing:

As early as 1998, the central intelligence agency assisted by the British Special Armed Services were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo. The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene and in so doing, not only overthrow Slobodan Milosevic the Serbian strong man, but more importantly, provide the aging and increasingly irrelevant military organization with a reason for its continued existence.

Despite the fact that the intervention was billed as “humanitarian,” it was actually done for economic and geopolitical reasons. As Noam Chomsky noted :

Actually, we have for the first time a very authoritative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted. This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the…he ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that’s very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level.

As Economist Jeffery Sachs put it, “NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans”.

This intervention, leading to the breakup of the Russian-aligned state Yugoslavia, was the first major blow between U.S. and Russia relations.

As Noam Chomsky noted, “High U.S. officials confirm that it was primarily the bombing of Russian ally Serbia — without even informing them in advance — that reversed Russian efforts to work together with the U.S. somehow to construct a post-Cold War European security order”.

At the same time , the veteran diplomat George F. Kennan warned in 1997 that NATO expansion towards Russia “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”.

He wrote that “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry”.

He noted that this view “is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters.”

Despite this prophetic warning, NATO expanded into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999.

Following this, as Jeffrey Sachs noted, “In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections” and “In 2004, the U.S. continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic states and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.”

In 2008, then ambassador to Russia, William Burns, warned in a memo that :

Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Despite this, as Jeffrey Sachs notes, “In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the U.S. pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine”.

By 2013, the neo-cons took things a step further, actively calling for regime change in Russia.

In a 2013 op-ed for the Washington Post, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, Carl Gershman, called to overthrow governments surrounding Russia because it would “accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents”.

He wrote that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.

Indeed, the United States started working on the “biggest prize” by overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installing a puppet government in 2014.

The point of this was to create a Ukraine that was more hostile towards Russia. As the Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko wrote, “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”

After this coup, American intelligence began ingraining itself in Ukrainian intelligence. The New York Times reported that after the coup, “C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems” and “helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence”.

At the same time, because of the coup, a proxy war erupted in Eastern Ukraine where NATO backed the new Ukrainian government and Russia backed separatists opposed to the coup.

The United States and Russia were also directly fighting in another conflict, Syria.

The United States since 2011 had been running a covert regime change program attempting to overthrow the former Russian allied Syrian government first by supporting a “rat line” “used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition” and then spending billions of dollars directly arming and training jihadist aligned rebels in Syria.

In 2015, as David Ignatius noted in the Washington Post the CIA program “helped trigger the Russian military intervention in 2015 that rescued [then Syrian] President Bashar al-Assad — achieving the opposite of what the program intended”.

This is the context of the growing new cold war between the U.S. and Russia pre-2016 that helped shape the Russiagate narrative.

Increasing Neo-Con Propaganda Against Russia.

Years before the Russiagate hoax, there was already a series of claims coming from Neo-Cons designed to stir up hostilities towards Russia and launch a new Cold War mindset.

In 2012, neo-cons bolstered the story from the American billionaire, previously working in Russia, Bill Browder, who claimed that Russia had killed his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who he claimed blew the whistle on Russian government corruption.

This led to the passing of the “Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act” sanctions on Russia in 2012.

However, the story was a complete fabrication.

As the German Magazine Der Spiegel reported, Browder claimed that Magnitsky “courageously reported the tax fraud of $230 million after discovering it” but a look at his actual testimony shows that “at no point does he make a concrete accusation” and that “Magnitsky did not make his statements entirely of his own free will, but as a witness in an ongoing investigation”.

In reality, Magnitsky, who was an accountant for Browder, not a lawyer, “had been sent as a stand-in for the CEO of a letterbox company who investigators in Moscow had actually wanted to speak to”.

Magnitsky went to prison for Browder’s tax fraud, not for blowing the whistle.

Furthermore, while he did die in prison, a commission on his death found that while he was a victim of “the sadistic, cold-hearted nature of Russia's prison system”, “it contained no evidence of a targeted murder.”

Despite the fact that Browder’s story falls under minimal scrutiny, it was used by neo-cons to ramp up tensions with Russia.

Furthermore, the narrative of “Russian interference”was being promoted by neo-cons long before 2016.

Going back to 2014, neo-cons were cooking up a narrative that Russia was using information warfare to weaken the United States.

On the now defunct Russian network RT America, an apolitical anchor named Liz Wahl resigned live on air, saying, “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin. I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth, and that is why after this newscast, I am resigning”.

It turned out, as journalists Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek revealed, that this resignation was staged by influential neo-cons, hungry for a new Cold War with Russia.

They noted “a full 19 minutes before Wahl resigned,” the neocon think tank Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) tweeted “Word On The Street says that something big might happen on RT in about 20-25 minutes”.

They noted that “Up until two minutes before Wahl’s resignation, FPI took to Twitter again to urge its followers to tune in to RT.”

It turned out that Wahl was secretly meeting with James Kirchick, a senior fellow at the FPI.

As Khalek and Blumenthal noted the FPI, was “Launched by Weekly Standard founder William Kristol and two former foreign policy aides to Mitt Romney, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan (the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland), FPI grew directly out of the Project for a New American Century that led the public pressure campaign for a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq after the Bin Laden-orchestrated 9/11 attacks”.

They noted that the neo-cons behind the Iraq war after creating the FPI, “pivoted away from Iraq toward ‘rising resurgent powers, including China and Russia,’ according to its mission statement” and they noted that “Through a series of letters and manifestos urging President Barack Obama to take a more confrontational stance toward Russia, FPI has assiduously sought to establish the groundwork for a new Cold War.”

As filmmaker Robbie Martin noted in his documentary “A Very Heavy Agenda”, Liz Wahl later spoke to a Congressional panel where she “repeated the same neo-con talking point she had been fed earlier”.

In 2015, the neocon Michael Weiss who previously worked for “the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a London-based bastion of neoconservatism”, and Peter Pomerantsev who previously “visited the British Parliament in 2013 to make the case for ‘why Europe needs a Magnitsky Act’” wrote a report fearmongering about Russian disinformation attacking the United States, titled “The Menace of Unreality”.

As Journalist Max Blumenthal noted, “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-backed entity dedicated to encouraging regime change across the globe through the semi-covert backing of political opposition groups and media fronts, also provided a forum for Weiss and Pomarantsev’s white paper on Russian subversion.”

Journalist James Carden in the Nation noted that the report “called for the creation of an ‘internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation’” and wrote that “media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community” .

Carden noted that “organizations that do not share the authors’ enthusiasm for regime change in Syria or war with Russia over Ukraine would almost certainly be ‘excluded from the community.’”

As Robbie Martin showed, Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev were invited to speak about this at the aforementioned Foreign Policy Initiative.

James Carden predicted the danger of this campaign, writing:

In the end, apart from being a frontal attack on the core tenets of free speech, the Weiss-Pomerantsev crusade lets Western pundits and policy-makers off the hook for their complicity in the Ukraine crisis by discouraging any kind of critical thinking or reconsideration of US policy. The incessant focus in ‘The Menace of Unreality’ on the Kremlin’s media apparatus obscures the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine, as well as the growing danger of a larger US-Russia war. The policy of belligerence toward Russia that Weiss and Pomerantsev so staunchly support has been one of the primary culprits in the Ukraine crisis. The fact that they now seek to silence, smear, and even blacklist critics of that policy makes their project all the more egregious.

Indeed, the same neo-cons who sold the Iraq war were now selling the idea that Russia is attacking America through “information warfare” in order to drum up a new cold war with Russia.

Enter 2016.

By the time 2016 came around, the new Cold War was in a pivotal stage. The CIA was fighting Russia on two fronts in Syria and Ukraine, while neo-cons were cooking up narratives about RT American attacking American Democracy and running psy-ops to justify sanctions on Russia.

Candidate Donald Trump, however, got in the way of this. While the deep state wanted to use Ukraine to fight Russia and wanted intervention in Syria, Donald Trump was rhetorically promising warmer relations with Russia and opposed regime change in Syria.

Compared to his hawkish rival Hillary Clinton, she seemed more in line - at least rhetorically- with the neo-cons.

This is why neo-cons, including Robert Kagan- whose think tank was leading the push for hostilities with Russia- supported Hillary Clinton.

Journalist Rania Khalek reported on a 2016 event called Foreign Policy Professionals for Hillary,” where Kagan stated, “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump.”

Khalek reported that the neo-cons at the event gloated that Clinton would be “more interventionist and forward-leaning than Obama’s been in Syria ” and “understands the importance of deterring Russian aggression”.

However, these neo-cons needed a way to get liberals to be on board with their new Cold War agenda.

Previously, Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney were the bigger Russia hawks compared to Democrats.

In the 2012 presidential debate, for example, Obama said, “Gov. Romney, I’m glad you recognize al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida, And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”

Even Rachel Maddow, the chief Russiagate propagandist did a 2014 segment where she said “The neo-con armchair generals like Bill Kristol and the John McCain Hawks of Washington, have not gone anywhere … Right now he (Kristol) is still a pundit …looking for some political advantage specifically on the issue of Russia and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine … There is Bill Kristol trying to sharpen up by suggesting that it might be a good time now for another war”.

MSNBC would even report on the U.S. backing Neo-Nazis during the Maidan coup in 2014. For example, in a segment, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said :

When Senator John McCain and Senator Chris Murphy went to stand with these protesters (in Ukraine) in December, they stood next to this guy, who is an opposition leader and who also happens to lead Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, Svoboda. They were also first registered as a neo-Nazi party, and they're in the streets right now shooting at police.

You know what arguably could be called naive? Going on stage at a Ukrainian opposition rally and not realizing you're standing next to a man who heads Ukraine's right-wing nationalist party, a party that was first registered as a neo-Nazi party, which is exactly what John McCain did back in December when he stood next to Oleh Tiahnybok, the leader of Ukraine's Svoboda Party, which according to 'The New York Times' traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany.

However, when the narrative of “Russian interference” was laundered in 2016, liberals and Democrats flipped and became major Russia hawks, falsely believing that Russian interference - not decades of failed neo-liberal policies- led to Trump’s victory in 2016.

Furthermore, the even more outlandish Russiagate claim that Trump was a secret Russian asset was used to effectively blackmail his foreign policy, forcing him to follow the neo-con playbook against Russia.

When Trump first bombed the Syrian government in 2017, his son Eric Trump came out and boasted that “If there was anything that (the) Syria (bombing) did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie”.

And this was the fundamental point of the Russiagate hoax: to force Trump to carry out the neo-cons’ Russia policy to “prove” he was not a Russian asset.

And because of this, he carried out the neo-cons policy towards Russia to a tee. Trump’s actual Russia policy included:

• Bombing the Syrian government twice, imposed starvation sanctions on the country, and occupied the country’s oil-rich North-East, destroying the Syrian economy.

• Sent lethal arms to the Ukrainian government, which ramped up the proxy war in Eastern Ukraine.

• Helped sabotage the Minsk 2 peace agreement, which would have ended the war in Eastern Ukraine.

• Pulled out of the INF Nuclear treaty with Russia, against Russia’s wishes.

• Sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany.

• And backed a coup against the government in Venezuela, an ally of Russia.

Anytime Trump did something that was against the neo-con agenda on Russia, liberals and Democrats would say it’s proof that he was in cahoots with the Kremlin.

Rachel Maddow, previously a critic of the neo-cons’ Russia views, now claimed that Trump negotiating with North Korea and not doing a military intervention in Venezuela means he is a Russian agent.

Meanwhile, liberals would cheer when he did something hawkish, when he first bombed Syria, MSNBC host Brian Williams said , “were guided by the beauty of weapons” while CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said , “Trump became President of the United States”.

Russiagate effectively turned liberals into neo-con stooges, going after Trump when he engaged in diplomacy and supporting him when he did something hawkish.

This was also true of Trump’s impeachment trial of 2019, which helped ramp up the Ukraine war.

Trump was impeached because he supposedly temporarily paused weapons sales to Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden.

The entire impeachment inquiry was used to sell war with Russia, with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff even saying, “The United States aids Ukraine and her people, so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here”.

A Brainwashing Campaign.

By the time the Ukraine proxy war came around in 2022, an entire swath of Democratic politicians, pundits, and voters now adopted the neo-con view that Russia was an enemy, largely due to a mass propaganda campaign that made them believe that Trump was elected because of Russia and that he was Putin’s puppet.

This is the large reason why so many liberals and democrats, even supposedly progressive ones voted for every arms package to Ukraine and never pushed for diplomacy, even when there was a real chance for the war to end at the Istanbul talks in April of 2022, which the West prevented from culminating in a peace deal.

Now a million people are dead or wounded, many of them young people who were forcibly drafted into the war, all to fulfill the neo-cons' dream of weakening Russia, something the Russiagate hoax paved the way for.

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