{"id":159757,"date":"2015-06-18T18:36:49","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T18:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/explaining-the-ukraine-crisis\/"},"modified":"2015-06-18T18:36:49","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T18:36:49","slug":"explaining-the-ukraine-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/explaining-the-ukraine-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining the Ukraine Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Spurred on by neocons and liberal war hawks, the Obama administration lurches toward a dangerous escalation of tensions with nuclear-armed Russia, while the American people are again fed a steady diet of propaganda \u2014 that is challenged by a new book on the Ukraine crisis, reviewed by David Swanson.<\/p>\n

By David Swanson<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure if there\u2019s been a better written book published yet this year than Ukraine: Zbig\u2019s Grand Chessboard and How the West Was Checkmated<\/em>, but I\u2019m confident there\u2019s not been a more important one. With some 17,000 nuclear bombs in the world, the United States and Russia have about 16,000 of them. The United States is aggressively flirting with World War III, the people of the United States have not the foggiest notion of how or why, and authors Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong explain it all quite clearly. Go ahead and tell me there\u2019s nothing you\u2019re now spending your time on that\u2019s less important than this.<\/p>\n

This book puts all the relevant facts \u2013 those I knew and many I didn\u2019t \u2013 together concisely and with perfect organization. It does it with an informed worldview. It leaves me nothing to complain about at all, which is almost unheard of in my book reviews. I find it refreshing to encounter writers so well-informed who also grasp the significance of their information.<\/p>\n

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Nearly half the book is used to set the context for recent events in Ukraine. It\u2019s useful to understand the end of the cold war, the irrational hatred of Russia that pervades elite U.S. thinking, and the patterns of behavior that are replaying themselves now at higher volume. Stirring up fanatical fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya and Georgia, and targeting Ukraine for similar use: this is a context CNN won\u2019t provide. The partnership of the neocons (in arming and provoking violence in Libya) with the humanitarian warriors (in riding to the rescue for regime change): this is a precedent and a model that NPR won\u2019t mention. The U.S. promise not to expand NATO, the U.S. expansion of NATO to 12 new countries right up to the border of Russia, the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and pursuit of \u201cmissile defense\u201d \u2013 this is background that Fox…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Spurred on by neocons and liberal war hawks, the Obama administration lurches toward a dangerous escalation of tensions with nuclear-armed Russia, while the American people are again fed a steady diet of propaganda \u2014 that is challenged by a new book on the Ukraine crisis, reviewed by David Swanson. By David Swanson I\u2019m not sure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-159757","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}