American imperialism may be absolutely lawless and perfectly immoral but it does have its favorite and predictable routines. One of them is what can be called the Washington Three-Step of ‘blockade, blackmail, invade’.

The Three-Step is by no means foolproof. Witness, for instance, the recent de facto defeat of the US (and its occasional overlord Israel) at the hands of Iran, which even arch neocon warmonger Robert Kagan has as good as admitted in, of all places, The Atlantic. But failure has never deterred America’s best and brightest. Indeed, the combination of slow, sadistic strangulation of whole nations and taking the military baseball bat to them is a virtual fixation, as central to American foreign policy as permanent bad faith.

Don’t believe it? Here’s a preliminary, most likely incomplete list (in alphabetical order) of countries that have two things in common: In the post-World War II period, they have been the victims of both economic warfare – via sanctions, embargoes, and blockades – and direct military attack, including bombing (directly and by proxy), land invasion (also including by proxy), and Venezuela-type terror raids: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Panama, Syria, and Yugoslavia.

It may be counter-intuitive, but if you are realistic about the nature of the Ukraine War and all the things Kiev would not be able to do on its own (from ‘survive’ to ‘target deep strikes into Russia’), then – as insanely risky as this strategy has been – the US has already applied the scheme to Russia as well. Which goes to show that the Washington Three-Step is simply irresistible to American elites. Even the serious risk of escalating to World War III against Moscow, which has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, has deterred them only imperfectly.

Against this backdrop,........

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