Here is a quote from the new book provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine by Scott Horton, Director of the Libertarian Institute. The Pentagon's post Iraq War One Defense Planning Guidance DPG from 1992 defined foreign policy and military doctrine for the new decade and into the new Millennium. The US must remain the single global hegemon with enough strength to prevent any possible
strategic rivals such as Germany, Japan, Russia or China from even considering a challenge to US dominance or access to natural resources. Aside from America's great triumph over global communism and its apparent success in the first Iraq War, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his staff wrote that the US had also succeeded in the integration of the leading democracies into AUS LED system of collective security and the creation of a democratic
zone of peace. They proposed expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO military alliance into Eastern Europe, saying that a substantial American presence in Europe will provide reassurance and stability as the new democracies of Eastern Europe and possibly some states of the former Soviet Union, seek to be integrated into a larger and evolving security architecture, an enthusiastic Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told Wolfowitz aide Zalami Khalilzad. You've discovered a new
rationale for our role in the world. Cheney officially published the document as America's Defense Strategy for the 1990s. Beyond their practical implementation, these documents were much more important politically, setting the boundaries of debate regarding America's place in the post Cold War world, including an emphasis on continued dominance in the Middle East and expansion into Eastern Europe, as Wolfowitz told author James Mann.
What we were afraid of was people who would say, let's bring all the troops home and let's abandoned our position in Europe. It's hard to imagine just how uncertain the world looked at the end of the Cold War. By 2000, Wolfowitz boasted that his doctrine had become the mainstream consensus Penack after it was leaked to the New York Times, causing a small controversy. The DPG draft was rewritten to include more multilateralism, but remained essentially unchanged.
And those same neoconservatives wrote in their 1998 Project for a New American Century Penac study. Rebuilding America's defenses, expanding the US presence in the Middle East and the NATO alliance in Europe was at the core of their doctrine. The region is stable, they wrote. But a continued American presence helps to assure the major European powers, especially Germany, that the United States retains its long standing security interests in the continent, they added.
This is especially important in light of the nation European moves toward an independent defense identity and policy. It is important that NATO not be replaced by the European Union, leaving the United States without a voice in European
security affairs. Anders Ausland is a Swedish anti Russia hawk and at that time Director of the Russian and EUR Asian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He had been a part of the Harvard Institute for International Development HID group who helped to wreck the Russian economy in the Bill Clinton years and aided George Soros as he rigged the 1994 election for Lenoid Kochma. Oustling would later hysterically demand that President Biden bomb Russia
after an errant Ukrainian missile killed 2 Polish farmers. And The Associated Press reported a false claim by a single American intelligence source asserting Russia had deliberately fired it. This would have been November 15th of 2022. Vladimir Zelinsky. The Associated Press explicitly fabricated a story which almost got nuclear armed America and nuclear armed Russia into a conflict. This is what's at stake. This is why books like this are so vitally important.
Check the description below for a link to this book section titled Afghan Bounties Hoax. In the summer of 2020, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage wrote a trash article reporting an obviously fake rumor that the Russians were paying the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The story caused a huge outcry in Washington and on cable TV news. President Trump had refused to do anything about it. The truth is there was no truth
to this at all. The Russians paid the Taliban for the same reason the US spent the last years of the war flying as their Air Force. As the Washington Post admitted, they the Taliban had won the war and were a far better bet for fighting ISIS terrorists than the phony Afghan government the US had created in Kabul, whose intelligence agencies had obviously made-up the bounty lie or beat it out of some poor guy in a desperate attempt to get America to stay and support them
in power. Ultimately, the general in charge of the war, the Chief of CENTCOM, the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the DIA, the National Security Agency, and even other analysts at the CIA debunked these claims, as Savage himself was forced to admit. In the end, all he had were claims from unknown Afghan interrogators who had used unknown methods to obtain this intelligence from unknown
captives. Savage's co-author told MSNBC that the funds were being sent from Russia regardless of whether the Taliban followed through with killing soldiers or not. There was no report back to the Gu about casualties. The money continued to flow. So then even if this money existed at all, it still had nothing to do with bounties for murdering U.S. troops.
I think you have over learned the lessons of the pre Iraq war reporting failures almost 20 years now and see that dynamic as the norm rather than the aberration that it was, Savage insisted. But in a series of articles, the Times itself walked back the story nearly to the point of complete retraction. In April of 2021, President Joe Biden's White House admitted the story was fake.
Even the CIA had given the story only low to moderate confidence, leaving the extremely partisan Daily Beast to acknowledge that those who call the story a hoax might have been right after all. This is why books like Provoked are so vitally important. The New York Times almost got America with its nuclear arsenal into a conflict with Russia and its nuclear arsenal over a
completely phony story. If there's a nuclear exchange between these countries, it will make the crimes of the Third Reich look look like minuscule in comparison. Section titled The Ghost of Kiev, the war party's public relations machine, went into OverDrive immediately after
Russia's invasion. For example, it pushed the story of the great Ukrainian fighter ace, the Ghost of Kiev, who through his great patriotic valor had destroyed at least six Russian fighters and Top Gun style dogfights in just a day, more than 40 in all. Fox News insisted the Ghost of Kiev is real. Who is this legend we have no reason to believe exists as Newsweek? While Representative Adam Kinzinger fell for it in an instant, the claims were later debunked by the Ukrainian Air
Force itself. The public relations men had literally just recycled some old cutscene footage from a video game Snake Island. The Ukrainians came up with a fantastic story about how a few of their soldiers stationed at the tiny Snake Island had bravely taken on the Russian Navy, telling them Russian warship go fuck yourself and fighting until the bitter end. The men died heroically. President Zelensky said the story was a hoax. Never happened, they just surrendered.
But what Great War propaganda? The papers and cable TV news loved it and reported it to their credulous audiences. Truth is the first casualty in war, as they say. But nobody believes in the word of the boy who cried wolf for very long. Almost every single war is based on a lie. In order to get people to risk getting their limbs blown off, sending their sons off to die, they have to constantly sensationalize and amplify the reality of potential threats out there.
That's why books like Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and The Catastrophe in Ukraine by Scott
Horton are so vitally important. This is a conversation between Victoria Newland, the Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian and European Affairs, and Jeffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine. On February 7th, 2014, someone leaked an intercepted phone call between Newland and Ambassador Pyatt. They were simply caught red handed deciding which major protest leaders would fill what positions in Ukraine's new government.
Vitali Klitschko, the Boxer, UDAR Party, Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform leader and later member of parliament and mayor of Kiev was to be kept out of leadership but in the public spotlight. Ole Tayanjebuk, the Hitler saluting former member of the Rada, former presidential candidate and leader of the Svoboda Party, formerly the Social Nationalist Party, if you can believe it.
In 2005, as a member of parliament, Tahanyabuk wrote several open letters to President Yukashenko demanding he stop the criminal activity of organized jewelry. One of his party's demands was for Ukrainian citizens to have their ethnicity printed on their passports. He told his group in 2004, it's time to give Ukraine back to the Ukrainians. You are the ones that the Moscow Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most.
This led to his expulsion from Viktor Yukashenko's party, Our Ukraine. I hope I'm saying that last name right, but quote, yachts is the guy. End Quote, Newland declared, referring to Arseny Yachtsenyuk of Yulia Tommyakashenko's party Fatherland, whom she wanted to be Prime Minister. A State Department cable by Ambassador William Taylor identified Yatsenyuk as being closely tied to oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who is the son-in-law of former President Lenoid Kumcha and close to the West.
His foundation gave at least $8.6 million to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State in Obama's first term, for example. Presumably it was the Russians who intercepted and posted the audio on YouTube, where everyone could hear it two weeks before the overthrow. They just went through with it anyway. The State Department did not deny the audio was authentic or claim it was edited. Instead, they simply apologize for the foul language. Fuck the EU, Nuland had said.
A limited hangout if there ever was one. It was clear U.S. officials had been plotting a coup weeks before they finally carried it out. Hawks often claim that in fact Nuland and Pyatt were talking about compromising in a new deal with Yanukovych.
Under pressure from the Americans and Europeans, Yanukovych dismissed his Prime Minister and cabinet in late January. But the US, EU and UN forcing the president to accept their hand picked Prime Minister and hold early elections is still a coup. Even if the worst was still to come. It was major foreign powers who were midwifing, gluing and sticking the transition making its sale as Newland and Pyatt
said on the calls. Besides, Yanukovych had already offered to make Yatsenyuk the new Prime Minister, but his deal had been rejected out of hand by the leaders of the Maidan. They were still holding out for the president's resignation while the US continued to support them.
And though Newland and Pyatt are recorded discussing why they did not want Tahanibuk in the new government, he had not been offered a position in Yanukovich's proposal, another indication that they were not considering that deal but planning to force through their own. Tahanibuk did, however, credit the role of these Fubota party ultras on the side of Maidan for Yanukovych's willingness to compromise, boasting we put the squeeze on him.
The Christian Science monitors Dan Murphy, certainly no Putin apologist, explain the context of the intercepted Newland phone call. Her strong statement of preference for how Ukraine's government should be formed and apparent confidence that the US has major influence over that, is a reminder of the disconnect between U.S. government assurances that it doesn't meddle a nation's internal politics and it's actual behavior, he added.
This was not a conversation analyzing unfolding events and how to respond to what comes next. This was about molding a situation according to US interests, journalists Keith Gessen wrote. What was remarkable about the episode was the utter confidence with which Nuland seemed to speak for the United States and
its policy, he added. From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on rising China. He had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post Soviet periphery, but he noted the neocons do whatever they want. Yet in the middle of the uprising in Kiev, there was Newland encouraging protesters and insulting European allies.
And after the call leaked, it was Newland as much as Obama who came to personify American policy for everyday Russians. That was written in 2018, but at the time the Times went along with the rest of the major media in crafting a meaningless narrative to explain away the important truth that had been revealed. Newland said a bad word on a
phone call. CN NS Christine Amanpour and other leaders of the news narrative had their hook top US diplomat launches F bomb on EU leaked recorded conversation and that was that. But why was she cursing the EU anyway? Aren't they our friends? Was not the whole point to force Ukraine into an association agreement with them? Nuland's complaint was that the Germans were moving too slowly and speaking compromise.
She decided to get Robert Surrey, a former Dutch ambassador to Kiev who was Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon's new representative at the UN, and the men in the Vice President Biden's office to glue the deal.
Instead, Nuland told Piatt she'd just heard from Biden, then and later national security adviser Jake Sullivan that the vice president was willing and said she would arrange a conference call between him and the new pending regime so that Biden could give an attaboy and get the deets details to stick. The Post confirmed Biden and that Yanukovych had spoken several times in January and February 2014 as well.
But once Yanukovych was forced to accept the deal in negotiations with the UN and EU overseen by the United States, he was quickly deposed by local actors. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don't have to fight Russia here. Ukraine, people of Ukraine, this is your moment, your. Fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Good.
SO I don't think cleats should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, I guess you think in terms of him not going into the government, just let him sort of stay out and do his political homework and stuff.
To Ukraine for my third visit in five weeks last Tuesday in support of these very goals, this time conducting parallel, coordinated high level diplomacy with EU High Representative Kathy Ashton. Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they remote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European
aspirations. We've invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine. We're going to go back and tell our colleagues what Russia's up to and the and the Baltics, what they're doing in the Ukraine. We're going to get briefed about Georgia. We hope to make 2017 a year of offense.
We believe that Putin has hacked into our elections in America, that he's trying to undermine democracy all over the world, and it's time for new sanctions to hit him hard as an individual, his energy sector, his banking sector. It is time to push back against Putin, but be a better friend to our allies over here, including Georgia.
This is a very important trip. We just left Ukraine where we've seen first hand what happens when Russia crosses over into a country's independence and we saw it in our own election with the attempt to influence our election. We will be working for much tougher sanctions against Russia. They attacked the United States of America. The hacking was an attack and we should be treated as such. And we think they're financial institutions and other aspects of the Russian economy should be
addressed. And we always strongly urge our colleagues to enact more meaningful and stronger sanctions against Russia because of their attack on the United States of America. President Putin declared in the ultimate 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what what he sent us and that was that that was a pre condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that the opposite happened.
He wanted us to sign the promise never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in in all allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe. We should remove NATO from from that of of our alliance. Introducing some kind of E&B or second class membership, We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO close to his borders. He has he, he, he has got the exact opposite.
He's got more NATO presence in the eastern part of the alliance, and he has also seen that Finland has already joined the alliance and Sweden will soon be a full member. This is this is good for the Nordic countries, is good for Finland and Sweden, and it's also good for NATO. And it demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact.