Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking with Chris Hayes on MSNBC this week, details steps the United States government can take to avoid war over Ukraine. Wilkerson suggests:
Ukraine needs to be a buffer state between what is now an alliance that Russia hates — NATO — and a country that NATO has a problem with — Russia… Crimea needs to be exactly where it is — with Russia where it has been for over 350 years. And we need to stop the passionate statements and get down to business and work this out. We don’t need a war.
Earlier this month Wilkerson, an RPI Academic Board member, explained on the same show how Russian actions relative to Ukraine and Crimea were in response to the fact that US government affiliated entities “effectively pulled off a coup” in Ukraine. In the new interview Wilkerson elaborates that removing these entities from Ukraine is part of the process to lessen problems in Ukraine:
Ukraine’s got to work out a lot of its own problems — its fundamental problems — itself. And the best way to do that, in my view, and to not excite this great power rivalry that might suck us all in, is to… recognize Crimea as being gone; create a buffer state in Ukraine; get the CIA out of Kiev; get its equivalent in Russia out of Kiev; get the NDI, the NED, and all the rest out of Kiev; and let the Ukrainians take care of that part of Ukraine and bring it back to some kind of prosperity and stability.
Watch the complete interview here:
Beyond the steps Wilkerson offers to prevent a war from arising out of the situation in Ukraine, Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation suggests that Americans also consider the additional step of disbanding NATO and the larger “Cold War apparatus known as the national-security state.” Hornberger makes his case here for dismantling the US government’s “Cold War dinosaurs.”
