How close are we to World War III? Newsweek reported last Sunday that Igor Korotchenko, a Russian journalist (which essentially means a spokesman for the Russian government), “has claimed on state TV that the U.S. has declared war on the country following reports of the White House’s approval of targeted strikes on Crimea.”
What? The United States declared war on Russia? Korotchenko was basing his statement on “a previous statement made by the U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.” Then on Wednesday, Elon Musk tweeted: “Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland.” The UK’s far-Left Independent ridiculed Musk for this on Thursday with an article entitled, “Elon Musk mocked for claiming ‘no one’ pushing Ukraine war more than US diplomat: ‘Putin for example?’” Yet there is good reason to believe that Musk is right.
Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2023
Newsweek quoted Nuland saying that “Washington supports Ukrainian attacks on military targets on the peninsula and has called for it to be demilitarized. Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.” Crimea’s population is largely Russian, and the Kremlin believes it to be rightly theirs. Consequently, attacks on Crimea could be the flashpoint that make the Russia-Ukraine war into World War III.
That was why Korotchenko declared, “After the U.S. crossed every imaginable and unimaginable red line, today the U.S. State Department actually announced that it was going to war with Russia. I assume that this is how we should interpret Nuland’s statement. There is no need for halftones. The U.S. is an enemy of Russia, a military adversary.” He added: “If it expects massive missile strikes on Russian territory to be carried out with their help, but as if by someone else’s hands, then perhaps we can regard this as a casus belli (cause for war) and react accordingly.”
However, numerous Western analysts think this is all just bluster. One of them, Michael Clarke, a professor in the War Studies department at King’s College London, dismissed Korotchenko’s statements: “This is just more bluster and repeats things being said on the channel at regular intervals.”
Maybe so. But is it just more bluster from the Biden regime? Victoria Nuland is a longtime Washington insider who oversaw the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that led to the installation of the current regime, which has so many questionable ties to the Leftist establishment in the U.S., including suspicions of money-laundering. Would Nuland, therefore, have an interest in preserving and protecting that Ukrainian regime, even to the point of sparking a war between Russia and the United States?
Would an American official advocate for going to war on such a flimsy pretext? Well, there are precedents. On Friday, the investigative journalist who goes by the name “Kanekoa” tweeted: “Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, wrote an open letter to George W. Bush nine days after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, urging him to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein ‘even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack.’”
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The letter to Bush, of which the chief signer was the infamous Trump-hating neo-Democrat William Kristol, states: “We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein ‘is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth….’ It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
The Iraqi government hadn’t aided in the 9/11 attacks, and Saddam wasn’t among the chief sponsors of international terrorism. But the invasion went ahead anyway, with disastrous results both for Iraq and for the U.S. Now, Kagan and Nuland might be the George and Kellyanne Conway of the foreign policy establishment; they might not see eye-to-eye on Iraq, or Ukraine, or anything else. But there is certainly good reason to believe that Nuland, at the very least, is part of a coterie of foreign policy “experts” who are happy to see war come, for the benefits they perceive it would bring.
These people have learned no lessons from the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have been casting around now for a new source of income for the military-industrial complex, now that the catastrophe in Afghanistan has ended what was once a profitable cash cow. Are they hoping to get us into World War III? The possibility cannot be ruled out.
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