The neocons look like they may drag us into nuclear war rather than admit they've been wrong in their vision of global community. I am in favor of global community. Modern civilizations are interconnected to a high degree, and we have to learn to live with one another, or perish.
Perhaps singling out "neocons" is less useful than the older binary concepts of hawks and doves. Hawks is a broader term than neocons, and we can see that there is broad bipartisan support for our current hawkish policy with regard to Russia. For example, the new executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board is a progressive Democrat, and a hawk on Russia.
My view is that the hawks have bitten off more than they can chew in Russia. Russia is gaining ground in Ukraine and will achieve their objectives. This seems to be clear to the Western leadership which seems to be in panic mode -- almost every day promising to give more military aid to Ukraine. The latest $33 billion aid package was proposed just a couple of days ago by the White House.
I have no trouble with government spending in general, including spending to maintain peace and enforce laws. The problem I've seen with the US military intelligence spending is corruption. In much the same way that the West's rich have been accumulating capital but not finding productive ways to invest the capital, our military intelligence sector is glutted with money. Enormous sums are available for think tanks and media operations that seek to further the propaganda war against Russia. Likewise, the US political system is awash with lobbyists with vested interests in promoting increased military and intelligence spending.
Thus, the Democratic chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Trump impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, was either taken in or corrupted by the false Steele Dossier on Trump - Russian collusion. His campaign contributors include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Harris Corporation, and Raytheon. Long before Russia invaded Ukraine, Schiff approvingly quoted State Department official George Kent who said:
"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."
My view is that the US resumed the cold war against Russia in 2014, and that truth has been subservient to our war aims ever since. Truth is the first casualty of war, and the US government has not hidden its hostility toward Russia and its indifference to the truth with regard to Russia. Greenwald, Taibbi, and others tried to warn us that this association of Trump and Putin followers as hated outgroups could lead to a hot war, so it should not be shocking that this has happened. Schiff and company were making the same argument and identifying Ukraine in particular as the location. Constructive discussion of how to get along with Russia has been off the table.
Stepping back, I find it illuminating to compare the Ukraine war with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US was determined to go to war in Cuba if Russia did not back down in supplying weapons to Cuba. Fortunately, Kennedy and Khrushchev desperately wanted to avoid war and were able to negotiate an agreement that successfully achieved this objective. However, Kennedy was assassinated within a couple of years, not coincidentally in my understanding, and Khrushchev was also deposed, probably for the same reason.
At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Russia is supplying weapons and whipping up anti-US hatred in a country on our border, where the US does not intervene militarily. This is all the more unimaginable given that large sections of Ukrainian are Russian speaking and voted for pro-Russian politicians as opposed to pro-Western politicians before 2014 coup/revolution. Imagine if the Trump/Republican states were to break off and then Russia was to start supplying them with weapons and anti-US cultural assistance. The US would not hesitate to intervene militarily.
Such discussion is well outside the mainstream in the West. We have such confidence in our anti-Russian world view that we cannot imagine that Russia could actually win in Ukraine. Thus, when the evidence comes in, we try to ignore it by devoting even more resources to "fighting Russia over there so that we don’t have to fight Russia here." We're going to go down fighting, it seems.
But how deep is our resolve? Will we actually continue to escalate until such time that the physical war reaches the West as well as the Russian homeland? Will there be (another) electoral revolt in November 2022 that will lead again to divided government and an ability to focus on the common enemy (Putin)? Will the US go down fighting with one another rather than fighting the great enemy on the other side of the earth? Or we will start to deal with our problems constructively rather than looking for scapegoats?
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