The US has wanted to Balkanize Russia ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, as laid out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard. It especially wants to now that, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has kicked the Western neocolonial/noeliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country.

The US used Ukraine as a pawn to engineer this confrontation, with the hopes of Russian regime change, or better still Russian Balkanization. The US wanted this war. It worked for decades to create this war, much like it worked to create the Soviet-Afghanistan war decades before, to weaken the Soviet Union. The US does this kind of thing all the time.

Imagine if Russia (or say China) were expanding its “defensive alliance”* into south & central America, and making plans to expand it further, right up to the California–Texas border, which would likely lead to “defensive” nuclear weapons right on our back porch. Maybe they’re in talks with Canada as well, in an effort to “contain” the US. And imagine also if there were a large American-speaking population in northern Mexico, which were being ethnically cleansed with tacit assistance by the Mexican government. Realistically—regardless of what is internationally legal (which the US usually ignores anyway)—what would the US do?

*NATO, BTW, is not a defensive alliance.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Counterpunch, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It