80 years demonizing Russia long enough…time for détente

 80 years demonizing Russia long enough…time for détente

Last time US and Russia were buddies was 80 years ago at the end of WWII. Russia coughed up over 25 million dead in defeating Nazism in the East. In return for shedding that blood, the US coughed up several billion in military aid that kept the Russian war machine functioning in a Russian economy largely destroyed by Germany.

 That friendship was blown up, literally, on August 6, 1945, when the US dropped the first of 2 atomic bombs on Japan. One of several reasons was to inform Russia (than USSR) that as new boss of the world America would brook no interference from a Russia we falsely assumed was bent on expanding communism everywhere on earth.

Had FDR lived there may not have been a Cold War. FDR recognized a prostrate Russia needed a buffer from a third German invasion from the west in the 20th century. He wisely surmised Stalin had no agenda whatsoever to conquer the world. So, he acquiesced in Stalin’s authoritarian control of his neighbors.

Alas, FDR’s death ushered in profoundly inexperienced Harry Truman. Woefully uninformed on foreign affairs, Truman was easy pickings for Russophobes Jimmy Burns, James Forestall, Dean Atchison and others who not only wanted to vanquish communist Russia, but desired a permanent war economy to prevent another Great Depression.

That wasn’t needed as pent-up domestic demand began the fabulous growth of the post WWII middle class. But Truman’s foreign policy handlers convinced him to promulgate the Truman Doctrine in February 1947, opposing communist expansion everywhere on earth even if meant demonizing as ‘communist’ any progressive movement that might make life better for downtrodden peoples.

But Russia never, for a single day between 1945 and the USSR’s implosion 46 years later, represented a serious existential threat to America. That’s because Russia had neither the desire nor the capability to attack America without suffering its utter destruction from an overwhelming American nuclear capability.

Instead, imaginary US obsession with Russia promoting communism in every corner of the earth including America, led to millions of deaths from hot wars such as Korea and Vietnam, and from US support for dictators killing dissidents threatening their regimes in over 20 countries. The million leftists Indonesia’s General Suharto killed with America’s help gave the grisly name to this murderous foreign policy…The Jakarta Method.

So, the Cold War was on till l1991 when the USSR went poof. Time to disband a now obsolete NATO? ‘Ha ha’, said the US national security state. ’We’re just getting started.’ Between 1999 and 2020 NATO expanded from 16 to 30 members, including 2 on Russia’s borders.

Beginning in 2007 Russia, requested, pleaded, begged the US and NATO to cease expansion. A year later the US response was to pledge NATO membership to the one country Russia would never allow in…neighboring and partially Russian cultured Ukraine. It took 14 years for an astonishingly patient Russia to say ‘enough’ and launch its ‘special military operation.’  That will not only prevent Ukraine NATO membership, it will effectively destroy Ukraine as a functioning state. All thanks to deranged anti-Russian US policy.

But America’s clearly lost proxy war against Russia sacrificing Ukraine is not the worst of what should be termed Cold War II. In 2019 and 2020 the US withdrew from two critical nuclear treaties with Russia: INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) and Open Skies. The third and last, New Start, expires in 4 months with no substantive ongoing negotiations. Why? Because America has abandoned negotiations extending New Start and reinstituting the others during its senseless, failed proxy war to weaken, isolate Russia from the European political economy. The US has put peoplekind at increased risk of nuclear confrontation due to refusal to negotiate nuclear disarmament.

Eighty years of America’s Russian Derangement Syndrome is 80 years too long. Time to shut down the lost proxy war against Russia by ceasing all aid to Ukraine till they negotiate the war’s end. Time to begin disengagement from European security including NATO. Time to embrace diplomatic relations with Russia to end all sanctions, explore mutually beneficial trade relations, and most importantly, reinstitute and renew nuclear agreements to prevent our collective annihilation rom nuclear war. We can’t wait another 80 years, 80 months, 80 weeks…even another 80 days.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL