The Right justly advocates against intervention in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, not because of liberal’s claims of “strong man” Putin, but because of heritage-fueled bloodsport.
The desires began with the corporate revered first woman secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.
She was born to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia that fled from the Nazis and the Soviets. Her parents thought it would be wise for her to convert to Roman Catholicism, so she did upon immigrating to the States. Three of Albright’s grandparents died in the Holocaust, which she held close to her decision-making on foreign policy.
In the late 90s, Bosnia and Kosovo were being torn apart by social and ethnic tension under Serbian and later Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević. Under the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, he encouraged Serbian nationalism, restoring complete control and autonomy to Serbia over Vojvodina and Kosovo while erecting an ethnic wedge between the various Slavs.
Albright, reminded of her family’s past, commanded a forceful NATO “humanitarian” operation through the Rambouillet Accords. 30,000 NATO troops were stationed in Kosovo with unimpeded right of passage on Yugoslav territory, complete immunity to its laws and the right to use public systems free of cost.
This was forced upon the Yugoslav people.
Russia was primed through NATO’s tyrannical flex, an organization essentially the diametric opposite of the USSR’s Warsaw Pact and seemingly to Russia’s existence.
Ultimately, Albright necessitated the bombing of Serbia for 78 days without UN authorization via the Kosovo Liberation Army, later classified as a terrorist organization.
These attacks on non-military targets ultimately provided cover for Russian President Vladimir Putin, laying waste to Chechnya just a few months later.
Albright's endorsement of Kosovo’s secession through a vote eventually laid the foundation for Putin to annex Crimea through a subsequent poll in 2014.
After Albright died in 2022, the Biden Deputy Secretary of State and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland reignited the hawkish policies.
Nuland is the granddaughter of Meyer Nudelman, a Jew who fled to New York from modern-day Ukraine.
As assistant secretary for Europe, Nuland left the Trump administration in 2017 over policy disagreements on American isolationism, possibly at the behest of her husband, Robert Kagan,
Kagan co-founded the neoconservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a driving force behind the Iraq War. His wife, Nuland, has been known to carve up his commentaries as his “unofficial editor,” too.
Kagan has always been outspoken on American foreign policy, pushing for interventionism. After former President Barack Obama spoke of reevaluating the war on terror, he wrote the 2014 op-ed “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” reiterating the neocon sentiment of global policing.
In it, he touts foreign conflicts and wars as outstanding American achievements without acknowledging the debt paid—just the glory of global imperialism.
In 2022, Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs that interventionism was not a dying creed and that supporters could unite the center-left and the center-right, particularly around the Ukraine conflict. Biden administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken co-authored the op-ed.
The Washington Post recently called the Ukraine war Blinken’s “defining moment.” He, too, has a backstory similar to Albright and Nuland.
Blinkin’s stepfather was a Polish-born lawyer named Samuel Pisar. Pisar was a survivor of the Holocaust. However, Pisar was saved by Russians, conflicting with Blinkin’s ethnic grudge reinforced by his great-grandfather Meir Blinkin and stepmother Vera Blinkin’s experiences as a Jew in Communist Hungary.
The historical grievances of these officials are further emboldened by the history of antisemitism in Russia and against Ukrainians during the course of two centuries.
In the late 1800s, pogroms erupted across Russia against Jews following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Historically, pogroms were violence usually directed by authorities against the Jewish people.
These pogroms carried over to Ukraine. In 1918, during the Polish-Ukrainian War, 150 Jews were killed by citizens of Lviv. Attacks by the Red Army followed in northeast Ukraine.
In 1919 during the Ukraine Civil War, 1,500 Jews were murdered by Cossacks in Proskurov. The Polish also executed Jews suspected of being Bolsheviks during the Polish-Soviet War. The Russian Revolution of that same year continued the pogroms, with a division of the White Army massacring 1,500 Jews in Fastov, Poland.
There’s much more history of these pogroms, but personal legacy hurt should not carry over to US foreign policy decision-making. This is just another opportunity for those like Kagan to push Iraq War 2.0.
Warhawks and neocons know that their ideology is coming to an inevitable end. Americans don’t desire intervention; they focus on domestic issues and want their investments here, not for military contractors.
Involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is merely based upon righteous vengeance propped up by the dying breed of neoconservatism and globalism.
America First policy avoids this by not pushing Russia into the arms of China. The CCP needs Russia to counter a weakened US.
America’s priority right now needs to be America. Its so-called “allies” are no match for a Russo-Chinese alliance.