The U.S. Congress is working towards a bill which would fund Ukraine into 2025. This, of course, is into the next presidential term. As Senator JD Vance recently explained to Tucker Carlson, the idea behind this is that if Donald Trump is again elected it will obligate him to continue supporting Ukraine and bring about an opportunity to impeach him if he does not.
Many have wondered why the U.S. political class is so obsessed with Ukraine, but I believe the answer is simple: money. I used to have a relatively elegant theory of NATO’s grand strategy, developed over a long period of observation, regarding the geopolitics of containing Russia’s sea access. However, since the outlandish and forgotten “Hunter Biden funded biolabs in Ukraine” story of early 2022, something different has become clear: our political class has been driven mad by the wages of corruption in Ukraine. When you look at the way that one ramshackle country has driven our politics both foreign and domestic, it is perhaps a defining feature of our era.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet states, already poor from the collapse of communism, became what many have described as a sort of neoliberal hell, with state resources looted by newly wealthy oligarchs and sold to the West for pennies on the dollar. It is generally considered that Russia began to emerge from this as the time Putin took power and confronted some of the oligarchs who then fled the country—seemingly his original sin with the Western powers.
Though Russia remained corrupt, it has still shown a lot of economic growth, whereas corruption has absolutely crippled post-Soviet Ukraine. It was fake concerns about corruption that led the United States to support the so-called “Orange Revolution” of 2004 in Ukraine. However, more cynical observers know such actions are thin excuses for Western governments and financial interests to send hordes of attendants described as employees of “NGOs” to pick a country apart, prevent independent government, and ensure the enormous flow of funds in both directions. Though many genuine experts as well as the conventional wisdom knew it was treacherous for the United States to get involved in Ukraine because of the country’s historic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia, the opportunities for graft were too great to be resisted.
When the United States promoted the “Maidan Revolution” in 2014, they were able to remove a corrupt, pro-Russian president and replace him with a genuine oligarch willing to sell the country to the West. At this point, any sense of caution had completely gone out the window. There was a determination to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit despite Barack Obama’s later admission that Ukraine would always be a core interest to Russia but not the United States.
The late Justin Raimondo wrote a 2017 article entitled, “Adam Schiff: Grifter, Racketeer, Warmonger” which gives unique insight into what has consumed our political class. In a feat of blatant corruption, Congressman Schiff of California had a fundraiser hosted at the house of a Ukrainian-born arms dealer, and then proceeded to call everyone who didn’t want the U.S. taxpayer to buy that guy’s equipment and send it to Ukraine a traitor. This didn’t even become a scandal: as far as I know, only Raimondo even noticed.
The Russiagate hoax which defined much of Trump’s term was when things became even more egregious. Many remember that long-time Trump associate Paul Manafort ultimately went to prison, in part relating to his lobbying for a Ukrainian political party. Fewer remember that the Podesta Group, those reliable Democrat courtiers, also had to shut down over the same thing. In both instances, those men were lobbying for groups seen as “Pro-Russian,” which is to say, both Republicans and Democrats have been profiting off of both factions in Ukraine. Then, of course, there was Trump’s phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, where he asked him to investigate Hunter Biden’s activities in the country. Trump was impeached over the premise that he threatened to shut off the aid bonanza; even if it was untoward to bring it up regarding the son of a political rival, cooperating on international corruption cases is the sort of thing which governments commonly do.
The broader Hunter Biden scandal is what really showcases the extent to which corruption associated with Ukraine has poisoned our domestic politics for at least ten years. Note that Hunter’s business partner was John Kerry’s stepson, and that family members of the political class and retired politicians commonly do these things. We just learned about Hunter’s activities because he happens to be a whoremongering crackhead. Joe Biden, of course, bragged about getting an anti-corruption prosecutor in Ukraine fired, directly tying this to their receipt of foreign aid, something much more blatant than Trump’s phone call.
What is more notable is the Hunter Biden biolabs story, which I called “The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories” at the time. Everything was wrong with what was going on there, perhaps most of all that these lunatics couldn’t help but to fund biolabs right near the Russian border while constantly convincing us the whole region was under threat. What else have we still not learned about what our political class has done in this impoverished and deeply corrupt country which has now haunted three consecutive presidencies?
The journalist Lily Lynch recently highlighted an incredible passage that Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most important architects of American power, wrote in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard. He warned that the biggest fear of the United States should be that Russia, China, and perhaps Iran, form a sort of “antihegemonic” grand coalition based on “complementary grievances” against the United States. He said that no matter how remote this possibility is, our country must display geostrategic skill in Eastern Europe to prevent this from happening. Of course, through extraordinary efforts, our foreign policy class has managed to bring about the exact scenario which Brzenziski feared, despite viewing it as “remote.”
Incompetence doesn’t cover the series of decisions which brought us here, and neither does some grand strategy which is not working out. What has happened is that our rulers saw the perfect morass of corruption in Ukraine and waded in. Ukraine proved an incredible racket where they got paid in Ukraine to lobby for U.S. funding and profit off of the acquisitions in the United States, and then profit off of the corrupt misdirection of the funds and materials when the “aid” arrived in Ukraine. By racketeering, they have burnt the candle at both ends, and it seems that in no time it shall run out of wax and burn everything to the ground.
But damn has it been a good grift, if you were able to get in on it.
