As Pat Buchanan, a former ardent Cold Warrior in the bad old days, likes to point out, the U.S. used to draw the line at the Elbe river half-way across Germany. The threat was that if the Soviets invaded West Germany, threatening France, Belgium, Denmark and the other Western democracies, we would go to war to stop them. Now America has moved that line 1200 miles to the east to Russia’s very western border with the Baltic states. There’s no real reason to fear it, but if Russia did decide to reconquer Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, our politicians have signed us up to fight a war to defend them from a power that could in fact destroy our entire civilization permanently in a single afternoon if it came down to it…
…But imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, in, say, Canada: What if the Russians, after having won the Cold War, had begun incorporating all of Latin America into their Warsaw Pact military alliance, and then even used neo-Nazis to do a street putsch against the government in Ottawa, overthrowing it, threatened to kick the United States out of its naval bases in Alaska, and then helped the new regime launch a war against the people of Vancouver, B.C. for refusing to recognize the new coup junta, and all while threatening to overthrow the government in Washington D.C. next?
– Scott Horton, The History Behind the Russia-Ukraine War (AntiWar.com, March 3rd, 2022) https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2022/03/02/the-history-behind-the-russia-ukraine-war/
Scott Horton is the Director of the Libertarian Institute.
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