The Mentality of Our Opponents

I suggest we begin with a metaphor.

The United States resembles a chess player playing on multiple chessboards simultaneously. One of the chessboards is Afghanistan, another, Iraq, one more chessboard is Serbia, the next one is Syria, and another here is the Ukrainian chessboard.

The buff chess player comes up to one of the chessboards, thinks for a moment, and strikes a blow with cruise missiles. The player comes up to another chessboard and strikes again. The United States is at war with the entire world simultaneously.

Here is another metaphor about United States (because one metaphor is not enough to understand such an undoubtedly powerful country).

The United States has a mentality of a prison guard.

What are this country’s motives?

If you are tall and strong (such as the United States), you want to remain tall and strong forever. You also closely watch the physical shape of the others, in our context, countries.

The United States’ usual reason for aggression is the other country’s good shape and its confident attitude. Every prison guard on the planet cannot stand bold characters, in this case bold countries.

It is worth remembering how the United States’ claim to being the world’s only prison guard began. It is August 1990. The Soviet Union still exists, but it is already clear that no one is left to seize the United States by the arm or by the lapels to stop it. We were eliminated.

Iraq, which has become a rather powerful regional country in the Middle East, makes a bold move: Saddam brings the troops to Kuwait and reunites Kuwait with Iraq. (Kuwait was a part of Iraq until 1961; they share the same language. However, the West got interested in Kuwait because of its oil supply and the country was separated.)

Instantly, the U.S. lights up with the opportunity to put its power on display. It is the first time in the officially still bipolar world.

To justify the invasion, the U.S. hires public relations agency Hill and Knowlton. The agency finds an allegedly Kuwaiti nurse, a 15-year-old girl, who testifies before Congress. She testifies that she allegedly saw Iraqi soldiers detaching newborns from oxygen tanks in a Kuwaiti birthing center. Supposedly, tens of babies died. It is a blatant lie. The 15-year-old bogus witness is the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.N. and has not been to her home country for many years. Later, CBS news exposes the lie.

But what is done is done.

George H.W. Bush cites the false testimony eight times and sends troops to Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam is defeated during the first invasion. In the second war, as you remember, the United States lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was destroyed, Saddam was hanged, and weapons of mass destruction were never found.

Since 1991 (the year of the USSR’s suicide), the U.S. had been treating Russia encouragingly, because our country showed the global prison guard the respect it craved. Occasionally, Russia would behave like an admiring fan and do anything she was asked to do.

This type of relationship—vassal-like for Russia and pleasant for the U.S.—ended in the spring of 2014, when Russia, guided by national interests, reunited with Crimea.

The affectionate relationship immediately came to an end. The United States began bullying us, so to speak, acting unfriendly. You know what they are doing along our borders in Ukraine and in the Baltics.

Europe is also on the map. Europe is different.

There is old world Europe – France, Germany, Italy, Spain. There are smaller countries, such as Austria, which are also part of the old world. For centuries, they have been engaging in relations with Russia, at various times becoming our allies or opponents.

This explains why Europe’s mentality toward Russia is that of a neighbor – not a prison guard – who is wary of us but who realizes that they have to somehow coexist with us. We are wary of them as well. The attitude of Germany is understandably harsher. After all, we defeated their country and occupied it for a long time. With such a background, love is out of the question. Generally speaking, love between countries is impossible and unnecessary.

I purposefully omitted the United Kingdom.

While undoubtedly a part of old world Europe, Britain’s mentality is unlike Europe and Britain belongs to a group of Anglo-Saxon countries, relatives of the United States. Such countries include Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom itself, all of which have turned into satellites of the United States. Their support for their buff leader is unconditional. The United Kingdom stands out in this group as the most aggressive one. It brings to mind the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982, fought over rock islands near the Argentine shore, not British shores. The British participate in all U.S. wars.

At the beginning, countries of old world Europe, together with the U.S. and its relatives, enthusiastically supported Ukraine in its conflict with us, but currently the situation has been changing.

Suddenly, the countries of old world Europe want to double check their position.

Recently, Crimea received a visit from a delegation of French parliamentarians, led by Thierry Mariani. Italians are going to Crimea, deputies from the Five Star Movement, as are senators from the Northern League. Even Germans from the Left Party are going in October.

PACE* is active. Crimea will receive a visit from the deputy chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Marton Dёndёshi, and from the head of the socialist group in PACE, Andrea Gross.

But there is a new Europe.

It is Eastern Europe, which consists of small territories size-wise and population-wise, (considering the scale of Russia, they are region-like states) the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as well as countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

There is no need to list all of them, but Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland (the biggest), Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Albania, Kosovo come to mind.

With their historical inferiority complex toward Russia, which one way or another has been dominating relations for the last 300 years, the new Europeans have created an unpleasant and high-pitched unbalance in European policy leaning toward Russophobia. For its part, the U.S., obsessed with superiority and preoccupied with maintaining its superiority, gladly uses Eastern European countries to justify attacks on Russia and the cold war against us, which is supposedly on the brink of becoming an actual conflict.

The U.S. sends the small-timers to bully us, to provoke a fight, and the small-timers are doing just that.

Eastern European countries are exaggerating their fear of Russian aggression, which lets the United States flex its muscles and pretend to be preparing for a war against us.

Being the brutal prison guard that it is, the U.S. is sensible. For more than 60 years it has not had any particular desire to engage in a war, even against a small North Korea.

This was a brief outline of the mentality of our opponents.

*Editor’s note: PACE is an acronym for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.