The Gun
But in history, what’s the first act is a matter of judgement. Here, I date the first act to the breakup of the Soviet Union. I could as easily have dated it to 1979 (Zbigniew Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998):
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
I wonder if anyone asked him that after 9/11. He died in 2017. Did anyone ask him whether it was worth it?
Moving along, post Soviet-Russia was in rotten shape. The US played an active role in its despoliation.
The Harvard Boys Do Russia (The Nation, June 1, 1998):
After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.
The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.”
Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development.
Yasha Levine, no fan of Putin, writes:
But the core of the story would have focused on the 1990s, when the United States — and particularly the Clinton Administration — intervened in Russia’s domestic affairs to such a profound degree that the word “meddling” doesn’t begin to describe it, at least in the way that people like Rachel Maddow think of “meddling.” It was more of a top-down, colonial relationship between a conquering superpower, and a weak, defeated vassal state. And that’s exactly what Russia was back then: a colonized state.
E. Wayne Merry, Chief Political Analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1990-1994:
but the broader question of the nature of economic reform in that country was one in which the United States played an important role and we created a virtual open shop for thievery at a national level and for capital flight in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the raping of natural resources and industries on a scale which I doubt has ever taken place in human history.
It’s complicated, but “shock therapy” contributed to the deaths of millions:
In effect, mass privatisation was mass murder. Had Russia adopted more gradual reforms, those lives would have been saved.
(“More gradual reforms” - i.e., kicked the Americans out and done it their way, which they eventually did do.)
In 2002, the US felt emboldened enough to break treaties without consequences.
“The United States withdrew from the landmark 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty on June 13. Little pageantry or protest marked the U.S. move abrogating the treaty and its prohibition against nationwide missile defenses, despite often fierce debate on the accord within Washington and around the world.
By 2019, the Rand Corp. one of the top think tanks of the military-industrial complex, was salivating at the prospect of Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.
And now, A Rand functionary admits defeat in the proxy war:
In the last few days there’s been a sea-change in the triumphalist rhetoric. Everyone’s talking about diplomacy and negotiations. It all dates from Biden’s Op-Ed in the Times.