Photograph Source: Donetsk Regional Military Civil Administration – CC BY 4.0

Before I get going, let’s get it out of the way: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a clearly illegal and evil and it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Throughout the conflict, there has been a kind of open secret inside Washington, one that has been reiterated to me by people at the State Department and the Pentagon for years: this was not an unexpected result, and Washington was aware that the Russians would invade well before the Ukrainians. The conflict pretty well exemplifies a standard American imperial strategy and helps to show how Washington maintains a world hegemonic position through the calculated destabilization of rival powers while sacrificing peripheral countries, basically as expendable chess pieces. The terrible tragedy in Ukraine represents the planned, deliberate implementation of a containment policy that treats sovereign countries as tools in the American plan to preserve permanent unipolar dominance.

As most interested people know, the strategic approach to Ukraine goes back decades, as........

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