Washington’s Plan to Break Up Russia

—Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, Foreign Affairs, 1997

The “loosely confederated Russia”, that Brzezinski imagines, would be a toothless, dependent nation that could not defend its own borders or sovereignty. It would not be able to prevent more powerful countries from invading, occupying and establishing military bases on its soil. Nor would it be able to unify its disparate people beneath a single banner or pursue a positive “unified” vision for the future of the country. A confederal Russia –fragmented into a myriad of smaller parts– would allow the US to maintain its dominant role in the region without threat of challenge or interference. And that appears to be Brzezinski’s real goal as he pointed out in this passage in his magnum opus The Grand Chessboard. Here’s what he said:

“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (“THE GRAND CHESSBOARD – American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives”, Zbigniew Brzezinski, page 30, Basic Books, 1997)

Brzezinski sums up US imperial ambitions succinctly. Washington plans to establish its primacy in the world’s most prosperous and populous region, Eurasia. And–in order to do so– Russia must be decimated and partitioned, its leaders must be toppled and replaced, and its vast resources must be transferred to the iron grip of global transnationals who will use them to perpetuate the flow of wealth from east to west. In other words, Moscow must accept its humble role in the new order as America’s de-facto Gas and Mining Company.

Washington has never really veered from its aim of obliterating the Russian state, in fact, the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) along with a congressional report titled “Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress”, confirm much of what we have said here, that the US plans to crush any emerging opposition to its expansion into Central Asia in order to become the dominant player in that region. Here’s an excerpt from the congressional report:

The U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia, though long-standing, is not written in stone—it is a policy choice reflecting two judgments: (1) that given the amount of people, resources, and economic activity in Eurasia, a regional hegemon in Eurasia would represent a concentration of power large enough to be able to threaten vital U.S. interests; and (2) that Eurasia is not dependably self-regulating in terms of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons, meaning that the countries of Eurasia cannot be counted on to be able to prevent, though their own actions, the emergence of regional hegemons, and may need assistance from one or more countries outside Eurasia to be able to do this dependably.” (“Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress”, US Congress)

How different is this new iteration of official US foreign policy than the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine that was delivered prior to the War in Iraq. Here it is:

As you can see, there has been no meaningful change in the policy since Wolfowitz articulated his doctrine nearly 2 decades ago. The US foreign policy establishment still resolutely asserts Washington’s right to dominate Central Asia and to regard any competitor in the region as national security threat. This is further underscored by the fact that both Russia and China have been identified in the latest National Security Strategy as “strategic competitors” which is a deep-state euphemism for mortal enemies. Check out this excerpt from an article titled “Partitioning Russia After World War III?”:

Washington’s relations with Russia have always been contentious but that has more to do with Washington’s geostrategic ambitions than any disruptive behavior on Moscow’s part. Russia’s only crime is that happens to occupy real estate in a part of the world the US wants to control by any means necessary. When Hillary Clinton first announced US plans to “pivot to Asia” most people thought it sounded like a reasonable scheme for shifting resources from the Middle East to Asia in order to increase US participation in the world’s fastest growing market. They didn’t realize at the time, that policymakers intended to goad Russia into a bloody ground-war in Ukraine to “weaken” Russia so that Washington could spread its military bases across the Eurasian landmass unopposed. Nor did anyone foresee the lengths to which Washington would go to provoke, isolate and demonize Russia for the express purpose of removing its political leaders and splitting the country into multiple statlets. Here’s Hillary making the case back in 2011:

A careful reading of Clinton’s speech along with a review of the Wolfowitz Doctrine will help even the most obtuse reader to draw some obvious conclusions about the current conflict in Ukraine which has almost nothing to do with so-called “Russian aggression”, but everything to do with Washington’s plan to project power across Asia , control Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves, encircle China with military bases, and establish American domination at the epicenter of this century’s most prosperous market. Here’s Putin again:

US foreign policy experts are shameless in their promotion of theories that threaten to trigger a direct military confrontation with Russia that could result in a nuclear exchange. In a recent “webinar for congressmen and women hosted on June 23 under the title “Decolonizing Russia.” The webinar, staffed by CIA operatives and right-wing nationalists from Ukraine and the Caucasus, effectively argued that Russia was a colonial empire that had to be broken up with the support of Washington.” (WSWS) The author explores the reasons why some experts want to brand Russia as “imperialist”? An article at the WSWS explains why:

Editor's Note: The above quote, from WSWS, a leading Trotskyist site, bears the stamp of their factionalist analysis, condemning both the US imperialist regime and President Putin's government as almost equal evils, a typical Trotskyist deformation, which we do not accept for clear strategic reasons. The important thing here is that Putin's Russia is currently a bourgeois, firmly sovereignist/nationalist system moving gradually toward socialism. In fact, it already has two major economic areas completely controlled by the state, the weapons industries (the Russian MIC), and energy production, along with a series of other important industrial sub-sectors. The Communist Party is also the country's second largest  political formation.

As you can see, elite members of the foreign policy establishment are doggedly searching for new and more convincing justifications for a confrontation with Russia the ultimate purpose of which is to fragment the country paving the way for Washington’s strategic rebalancing or “pivot”. 20 years ago, during the Bush administration, politicians were not nearly as circumspect in their views about Russia. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, made no attempt to conceal his utter contempt for Russia and was surprisingly candid about the policy he supported. Check out this excerpt from an article by Ben Norton:

Cheney: as vicious and dangerous as he looks, is the perfect henchman for a depraved oligarchy bent on conquering the world at any cost.

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a lead architect of the Iraq War, not only wanted to dismantle the Soviet Union; he also wanted to break up Russia itself, to prevent it from rising again as a significant political power…. Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote that, “When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat.”…

The fact that a figure at the helm of the US government not-so-secretly sought the permanent dissolution of Russia as a country, and straightforwardly communicated this to colleagues like Robert Gates, partially explains the aggressive posturing Washington has taken toward the Russian Federation since the overthrow of the USSR.

The reality is that the US empire will simply never allow Russia to challenge its unilateral domination of Eurasia, despite the fact that the government in Moscow restored capitalism. This is why it is not surprising that Washington has utterly ignored Russia’s security concerns, breaking its promise not to expand NATO “once inch eastward” after German reunification, surrounding Moscow with militarized adversaries hell bent on destabilizing it. Russian security services have published evidence that the United States supported Chechen separatists in their wars on the central Russian government. British academic John Laughland stressed in a 2004 article in The Guardian, titled “The Chechens’ American friends,” that several Chechen secessionist leaders were living in the West, and were even given grant money by the US government. Laughland noted that the most important US-based pro-Chechen secessionist group, the deceptively named American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), listed as its members “a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror’”.

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The fact that far-right Salafi-jihadists made up a significant percentage of the Chechen insurgency didn’t bother these anti-Muslim neocons – just as Islamophobic “War on Terror” veterans had no problem supporting extremist head-chopping Takfiri Islamists in the subsequent US wars on Syria and Libya….

…. Victoria Nuland, the third-most powerful official in the Joe Biden administration’s State Department, served as Vice President Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser from 2003 to 2005. (She also helped to sponsor the violent coup in Ukraine in 2014 that toppled the democratically-elected government.) Like her mentor Cheney, Nuland is a hard-line neoconservative. The fact that he is a Republican and she works primarily in Democratic administrations is irrelevant; this hawkish foreign-policy consensus is completely bipartisan.

Nuland (a former member of the bipartisan board of directors of the NED) is also married to Robert Kagan, a patron saint of neoconservatism, and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century – the cozy home of the neocons in Washington, where he worked alongside Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other top Bush administration officials. Kagan was a longtime Republican, but in 2016 he joined the Democrats and openly campaigned for Hillary Clinton for president.” (“Ex VP Dick Cheney confirmed US goal is to break up Russia, not just USSR”, Ben Norton, Multipolarista)

US foreign policy is now exclusively in the hands of a small group of neocon extremists who reject diplomacy outright and who genuinely believe that America’s strategic interests can only be achieved through a military conflict with Russia. That said, we can say with some degree of certainty, that things are going to get alot worse before they get better.