2025 started off with many a bang. A new premier in France and soon in Canada, a new coalition in Austria, new presidents in Georgia and Moldova despite protest rallies, a re-elected president in Belarus (with no protest rallies), a resigned premier in Serbia and a deposed president in South Korea, amidst giant rallies. Most welcome of all, a limited, wobbly cease-fire in Gaza, bringing freedom to some female Thai and Israeli hostages after 15 months in captivity, and 300 male and female Palestinians, aged 16 to 67, after up to 39 years in prison, including extreme overcrowding, constant humiliation, and frequent torture. Accompanying the pictures of joy on all sides were heart-wrenching videos of thousands returning to the wreckage of their homes in northern Gaza, pictures recalling (despite taboos on even thinking such connections) the Warsaw ghetto after its final courageous, futile struggle. But more later on Israel, and on Germany, now also facing a noteworthy change at the top.

Most prominently featured was the change of residents in the White House. Its new tenant immediately set out to change both his country and the world map. Although possibly unable to distinguish Siberia from Liberia, he personally renamed the Gulf of Mexico and vowed to change the map of Greenland, Panama, possibly even Canada. He proved that he meant business by threatening to wreck the economy of Colombia if it continued to reject landings of US planes full of shackled, handcuffed human beings being deported from homes in the USA. (That has now been changed.)

Trump’s outlook and treatment have long traditions, like the massacre of 400-700 Pequot men, women and children by the Puritans in 1637 or the displacement of 60,000 members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” from 1830 to 1850 – the Trail of Tears. After such “manifest destiny” defeated Mexico in 1848 and reached the Pacific it looked southward and subdued the weak young countries of Central America, including Puerto Rico, Cuba and, further afield, Hawai’i, Guam, and the Philippines.

In 1917 a new barrier arose against unlimited further expansion. The basic aim of US foreign policy, in addition to expanse of its economic, military and political influence, was to create a cordon sanitaire of small, right-wing states surrounding the newly-created Soviet Union and repel its world-wide encouragement for freedom from colonial rule. This policy embraced tolerance, even support, for fascist conquests in Ethiopia, Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia. 1941 brought a forty-month break when it was found necessary to join in an alliance against Hitler. Then, after the predominantly Red Army defeat of the Nazis’ attempted conquest, the main US policy against the USSR was resumed. Any moves anywhere in a socialist direction were met by a carefully-designed, heavily financed attack, above all against a reversed defense cordon, protecting the USSR in Eastern Europe.

By 1993 this counter cordon was broken, the Soviet-led, socialist challenge reduced to a few remnants. But this triumph was not sufficient. USA billionaires sought basic control of the vast Russian territory, such as undertaken and often achieved from Chile and Congo to Kosovo. They were succeeding with Yeltsin, a drunken marionette, but were halted by Vladimir Putin, whose rise to power saved the Russian economy in the last minute and aimed at regaining lost first-class status in the world. Against this no effort was spared to revive the old cordon sanitaire and then, under the aegis of NATO, to advance, to surround and suffocate what had become one of two major barriers to world hegemony. The next goals were Georgia, and even more the Ukraine. A flock of heavily-financed NGOs spent 5 billion dollars to organize a putsch there, ousting a corrupt yet democratically-elected government, open to Russia and the West, and installing one headed by a man who led enthusiastic cheering in the Canadian Parliament for a former volunteer in Nazi killer units which murdered thousands of Jews, Russians, Poles, pro-Soviet Ukrainians and, indirectly, US and Canadian soldiers fighting Nazis in World War II. Support for such Bandera-worshipers could only mean trouble!

As early as 2008 William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow, and until now CIA boss, warned in a secret memo exposed by Assange’s Wikileaks:

“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.“

And so it happened in 202 – necessarily or criminally, as you judge – but quite predictably, for the Ukraine war was clearly provoked by people who ignored Burns’ warning and all peaceful approaches. And Putin’s attack, however one may condemn it, was aimed at defending Russia from strangulation, a refusal to accept Yeltsin-style subjugation and degradation to domestic poverty and third-grade world status, either by means of an engineered uprising as in Maidan Square, a splintering of national groups like that organized against Yugoslavia, or a military clash unleashed by some provocation like the false mining of........

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