Daniel McAdams, the Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute of Peace and Prosperity, has been making the rounds on Indian media to talk about the current war in Ukraine.
However, he’s not engaging in the typical analysis that focuses on immediate causes of this conflict. McAdams went on Citti Media to chat with host Sharan Setty to discuss some of the structural flaws of United States foreign policy that has created this foreign policy disaster.
McAdams stressed that we need to “understand the antecedents” that led to the present crisis in Ukraine.
The RPI Executive Director observed that Republicans and Democrats are “two wings of the same evil bird of prey” when it comes to foreign policy.
He cited how the Obama administration, especially individuals like Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, helped launch a coup against the government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. This sparked a series of controversial events such as Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the separatist war in the Donbas.
Despite the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who ran on a rather restrained foreign policy and hinted at mending fences with Russia, the Trump administration still sent lethal military aid to Ukraine, a move that McAdams described as a “green light” to continue escalating its military actions in areas like Eastern Ukraine.
McAdams took a big picture view by noting that the U.S. has been interfering in Russian affairs since the Cold War ended. He called attention to the fact that the U.S. helped get Russia President Boris Yeltsin — a de facto Western puppet — re-elected.
Sadly, most people will ignore such analysis. They prefer to parrot banal talking points about democracy and human rights, instead of analyzing foreign affairs through a realpolitik and geopolitical lens. This requires people to become introspective and admit that the U.S. government has messed up on the international stage on multiple occasions.
All told, the U.S. will need to retrench its foreign policy and only focus on the southern border and the Western Hemisphere. Policing the entire globe is not sustainable.
