‘Foot-in-Mouth’ Kerry’s Nixonian Blunder

by | Apr 9, 2014

Kerryhand

The US and EU appear incapable of distinguishing between action and reaction. The coup they backed in Kiev against the elected government has thrown off the delicate balance in Ukraine and left the pro-Russia eastern portion of the country feeling threatened.

In this situation, the secession of Crimea was a reaction to US and EU action, as is the ongoing unrest in eastern Ukraine, where over the weekend three cities in the Russian-oriented eastern Ukraine declared their desire to break out from under Kiev’s thumb.

Having lit the fuse of unrest by encouraging and supporting the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government, these US and EU meddlers now demand that no explosion take place. They demand no protest take place against the government they helped install. They demand that none of the eastern parts of Ukraine break away from Kiev’s rule and that Ukraine’s current borders be unmovable, regardless of the will of the people.

It is more than a little ironic that the US and EU demands Ukraine’s current territorial configuration remain sacrosanct, as these borders were drawn at the time by Lenin in a manner that transferred lands populated by mostly ethnic Russians into Ukraine.

The fact remains that Crimea would still be part of Ukraine had the US and EU not participated in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the first place.

It is not difficult to understand why parts of Ukraine heavily populated by Russians want nothing to do with the radically anti-Russian junta installed in Kiev, but to the US government the unrest has nothing at all to do with US intervention and in fact is all a Russian plot. The mainstream media happily plays on this theme, as the full extent of their presentation of the rest of the world to American viewers consists of breathlessly uncovering the next Hitler to be vanquished by US bombs.

The tortured rhetoric and logic of the US government on Ukraine is so painful it is almost unbearable. After the US and its secret services had directly supported those who overthrew the elected government in Kiev — forces who used violence to occupy government buildings in Kiev until the elected government fled — Kerry now finds that any protest against this coup-installed government is totally illegitimate and illegal!

It is yet another comical blunder by US Secretary of State John Kerry, to hear him, as the Telegraph puts it:

…describe a series of pro-Russian building seizures in eastern cities as an “illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilise a sovereign state”, funded by the Russian special services.

It was, after all, Kerry’s own government, including his infamous neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who had been caught red-handed destabilizing the sovereign state in the first place starting at least last November (although Nuland bragged that this US operation had lasted 20 years and cost $5 billion).

John Kerry’s foreign policy can thus be summed up: “do as we say, not as we do.” Or to play a variation on an old Nixon maxim, “when the US does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Author

  • Daniel McAdams

    Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

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