Benjamin Braddock;

It didn’t have to be this way. I am reminded of a quote from Condoleezza Rice about the morning of 9/11. She knew that U.S. forces going to DEFCON-3 would trigger a similar escalation by Russia so she called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.” But the choices made in the aftermath of that day by people like her unleashed a destructive zeitgeist in Washington foreign policy that has led us to this point where the specter of nuclear war now hangs in the air as it did during the tensest moments of the Cold War. […]

Throughout Vladimir Putin’s political career he has watched as American foreign policy has run amuck in the world like a bull in a china shop. He has learned how our leaders operate and understands the treachery of which they are capable. Libya is a good example. Colonel Gaddafi had been cooperating with the United States. He shut down his nuclear program, gave up his weapons of mass destruction, and began opening his country and economy to the world. By 2008, U.S. military leaders were calling Libya a top U.S. ally in combating transnational terrorism. Gaddafi allowed an American embassy to open, and before the paint had even dried the diplomats and spooks posted there were already working on his overthrow. They worked with U.S. and transnational NGOs and foundations to train “pro-democracy” activists and seed an opposition movement.

When the Arab Spring dawned in 2011, violent protests broke out in Libya, spearheaded by radical groups covertly armed by the United States and its allies, and the government tried to quell the rebellion and restore order. The restoration of order was deemed heavy-handed by the United States and NATO and thus the pretext for intervention was established. NATO began intervention by establishing a no-fly zone over Libya, which quickly turned into a bombing and cruise missile campaign against military installations and civilian infrastructure.

Gaddafi’s reward for cooperating with the American government was to be sodomized with a bayonet on the way to his mob execution. Rather than expressing regret or even responding with a modicum of discretion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crowed, “We came, we saw, he died.” Vice President Joe Biden echoed her sentiments, “Whether he’s alive or dead, he’s gone. The people of Libya have gotten rid of a dictator. NATO got it right.” In the wake of Gaddafi’s murder, Libya devolved into utter anarchy with slave markets where you could buy a human being for $40 and a civil war that lasted until 2020. The country became a seedbed of terrorists. Gaddafi’s regime had stood between Italy and Subsaharan Africa. With him out of the picture, Italy and the rest of the EU quickly became overrun with illegal immigrants.

The message the Libya episode sent to governments around the world was clear: You can do everything the Americans ask but there is still an excellent chance that they will put a knife in your back. It became painfully obvious that American foreign policy had become completely divorced from any rational aims. From that point on, Putin began actively working against American interventionism, most notably in Syria with his support for the government of President Assad in its fight against rebels and terrorist groups like ISIS, many of whom were trained and armed by the U.S. government. As Russia drifted further from the West, the U.S. government’s antagonism towards Russia further increased. The next target for a color revolution would be Ukraine.