New White House National Security Strategy Paper Officially Ends The New Cold War With Russia.

A Newley Published White House National Security Strategy Document Officially Ends America's New Cold War Policy Towards Russia.

The Trump White House has just released a new official “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” document which writes:

American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

The document calls for an economic war with China, while moving away from Africa and the Middle East, and focusing American foreign policy towards South America and “reasserting and enforcing the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”.

The most drastic shift in American foreign policy in the document, however, is its announcement of an official end to Washington’s new Cold War policy towards Russia.

The document writes, “It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.”

The document notes that, “The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies” and adds, “The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”

The “broad policy for Europe” laid out in the document calls for “Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia” and “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance”.

This strategy- if actually followed through on- marks an end to America’s new cold war policy towards Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The policy began in the late 1990s with the expansion of NATO membership eastwards.

George F. Kennan, one of the lead U.S. diplomats during the Cold War, warned that NATO expansion Eastwards, “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” adding that it would “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 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”.

Kennan warned that NATO expansion was “the beginning of a new cold war” adding, “the Russians will gradually react quite adversely,and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves”.

Kennan accurately predicted, “Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong”.

Despite this warning, NATO expanded to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.

U.S. tensions with Russia got far worse in 1999 after the Bill Clinton led NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, leading to the balkanization of the former Yugoslavia.

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,” adding that the “reversal accelerated with the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Libya after Russia agreed not to veto a UN Security Council Resolution that NATO at once violated”.

The New Cold War ratcheted up even more after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where NATO officially announced that, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”.

As William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, who later became director of the CIA under Biden noted at the time, “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.”

William Burns’ prediction came true when in 2014, the U.S. backed a coup against Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a puppet government more hostile to Russia, which included members of formerly fringe far-right parties and groups.

Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko noted , “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” noting that, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan (coup against Yanukovych) as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”.

As Burns predicted, the coup led to a civil war in Eastern Ukraine, between Russian-backed separatist rebels and the new anti-Russia, Western-installed government.

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy ran on and was elected on a platform of implementing the Minsk Accords, a peace plan that would end the fighting in Eastern Ukraine.

But once elected, he faced pressure- including threats of violence from the far right- to not end the war, which was backed by the U.S. in order to continue the proxy war with Russia.

As Ukrainian-Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski noted, “The Western governments and foundations, such as Soros foundation, funded all but one of about two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, which initially issued in 2019 a collective statement that any talks with Donbas separatists were impermissible after the head of the Zelenskyy’s presidential administration supported creation of a consulting group with representatives of the separatist-controlled Donbas during the Minsk negotiations.”

All of this eventually led to the bloody and disastrous proxy war in Ukraine, which - as has been well documented - could have ended in April of 2022, had the then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson not blocked a peace deal at the behest of the “Collective West”, in order to use Ukraine to weaken Russia.

U.S policy during the proxy war in Ukraine did not only include fueling the war to weaken Russia, but also involved interfering in the domestic politics of any country that did not want to go along with it.

A leaked cable shows that the U.S. pressured for the removal of Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Imran Khan, because “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position on Ukraine”.

Similarly, CIA cutouts USAID and NED, funded NGOs that got Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu kicked off the ballot over bogus accusations he was supported by Russia- because he opposed the Ukraine proxy war and was skeptical of NATO.

While much of the damage has already been done, the new “National Security Strategy” suggests- at least on paper- that the American new cold war strategy towards Russia has come to an end.

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