Last Friday an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail was again parroting the Atlanticist West's narrative on "poor little Ukraine." This by Nina L. Khrushcheva, grand-daughter of the former president of the USSR. Remember that the Khrushchev family was from Ukraine, and to never base policy on the musings of diaspora. The title in the print version, July 17, p. A11, was "Peace in Ukraine requires a different Russia" while in the online version it was "Peace in Ukraine would require an entirely different Russia to emerge" by Nina L. Khrushcheva, Moscow | Special to The Globe and Mail | Published July 17, 2026
Unfortunately, this drivel represents the full editorial
position of this NATO-ist publication as well as the entire
foreign policy of this neo-conservative government in Canada. I
sent the Globe a reply to that column, with subject line: "Let's
see if you allow balance on your opinion page." Of course they
don't. And certainly only from "respected opinion-makers."
Here is that reply:
Peace in Ukraine requires a different Europe
We arrive at this point in history not from respect of others but via fear and loathing. European "fear" of Russia, Russophobia, in place for almost two centuries, has under Atlanticist doctrine, morphed into outright hate over the past eighty years. The result is the conviction that Russia should cease to exist and be broken into smaller parts and captured for exploitation as per Hitler's Lebensraum. If Russia has no right to exist, ergo it has no need for a zone of security - going so far as to say that it cannot object to hostile forces up against its borders. Going back to the reunification of Germany, the 2+4 Treaty, the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany" (Sept 1990) was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. That treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the GDR and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation's security should come at the expense of another's.
In her memoirs, Angela Merkel writes that she understood at the time of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia. But she gave in to American pressure, accepting the compromise communiqué that Ukraine and Georgia "will become" NATO members. This directly set in motion the events of 2014 and 2022, by violating the 21 February 2014 agreement in Kyiv signed by Germany, Poland and France, and violating the Minsk II "Declaration of Support" of February 2015, personally negotiated by Chancellor Merkel, with the key provision of autonomy for the Donbas region within a sovereign Ukraine, yet Merkel later acknowledged that this agreement had been used to buy time for Ukraine to rearm. Rearm for what? For the Atlanticist West's goal of attacking Russia via Ukraine, as spelled out in Zbigniew Brzeziński's Grand Chessboard program, with the ultimate goal of conquering all of Asia. Note that Ukraine doesn't sit along the west of Russia like Poland, it lies directly under Moscow. Note that from 2014 to 2022, the Donbas Oblast was continuously bombed and then shelled, its native Russian language and Orthodox religion banned and was never granted the agreed upon autonomy. But most history lies unread, while the unread lie about history.
In a better world, in a better Europe, the nations along Russia's borders would be genuinely neutral in the manner of Switzerland in former years. Actually, a condition of Ukraine's separation agreement from Russia was for Ukraine to remain non-aligned, but The West had other plans. That 2014 agreement in Kyiv was violated in the Maidan coup set up under Hilary Clinton and Victoria Nuland which installed the present Ukrainian government, which began attacking the eastern oblasts. To get these attacks stopped and allow the agreed upon autonomy of Donbas, the Russians began their Special Military Operation, mislabeled "All-Out Invasion" by the West. In the following month, April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators converged in Istanbul on the terms of a peace agreement: Ukrainian neutrality outside NATO, multilateral security guarantees, agreed troop limits, and the political resolution of the Donbas and Crimea questions over time. The agreement was within days of signature. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, one of the mediators, has confirmed publicly that the deal was close and that the West – the United States and the United Kingdom in particular – moved to block it. So here we are today, locked into unnecessary escalation by NATO against Russia, which could all end at any minute of any day.
Reference: Jeffrey Sachs: Open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz
Here's a transcript that I've copied out from Judge
Napolitano's podcast, with some good background history on U.S.
hegemony. It's a difficult job generating a transcript from a
YouTube video - try it sometime. But this one is worth the
effort, please read it and you'll learn 6 or 7 things at
least.
Prof.
Jeffrey Sachs: Is the Greater Israel Project Collapsing?
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom - July 20, 2026
JUDGE: You've written something very recently that tantalized me. So before we get to the collapsing [Israel] project and before we get to Prime Minister Netanyahu's fears of what's coming his way at election time in Israel, why have the last six US presidents from George HW Bush to Donald Trump, the last of them after promising he would never do it, been using NATO or Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.
SACHS: Yeah, the point is our presidents don't really determine foreign policy.
Our public opinion, what you and I believe and what the American people believe has very little influence, at least over a period of many years, people are absolutely against the wars that the United States is waging. Trump won an election on that basis, but it didn't change anything. In fact, he just launched more wars. What the American state, the American government runs just as your opening each segment tells us, undeclared wars, unconstitutional, but based on a system of a deep state guided very heavily by the intelligence agencies because they have the "advantage" that they operate in secret. They're not accountable to anybody. They do what they want. The presidents by and large are part of this machine. They don't really change much. And my point in in my writing about this is that from Clinton onward, we've been engaged in particular series of nearly perpetual wars that Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II have all pursued. The American people are not really told anything about the true objectives of these wars, but the purposes have been spelled out if you know where to look rather clearly. One of my go-to places is a quite remarkable book, awful in a sense, but remarkable written by Zbigniew Brzeziński.
JUDGE: The major demonstrative word "chessboard" is in the title. Am I right?
SACHS: His book in 1997's called The Grand Chessboard. And the idea is riffing on the great game that Britain and Russia supposedly played in Central Asia in the 19th century. But the idea is the world's a game. It's like a video game. You bomb here, you slap there, you send your drones here. None of these leaders is at risk. They don't tell the public what all of this is about. They don't actually ask us to pay any taxes to fund these wars because the public's completely against them. And so, no one asks. It all goes into the debt. But Brzeziński in 1997, in a kind of didactic textbook, that he says he wrote for his students, explains what this grand chessboard looks like from the point of view of Washington.
And the idea of the book is very simple, little crazy except, you know, if you're playing a board game, it would make sense, but it's about American primacy. So the idea is that the United States has to be the biggest and baddest and toughest and can beat anybody in the world anywhere. And that's the idea that there should be no resistance to American demands anywhere and that the United States should basically be intervening everywhere in order to prevent any other countries from getting powerful enough or aligning so that they can resist American demands. America as number one bully of the world. And Brzeziński lays out how this should be done. Remember in the 1990s the Soviet Union had just collapsed and the idea was everywhere in Clinton's mouth and in Madeline Albright, Secretary of State's words that the US is the indispensable nation that looks farther than any other nation in the world. And we had the project for the New American Century which is basically will beat the &#@% out of anyone that opposes the United States. We had it called the "end of history." We had it called the unipolar moment. And what Brzeziński explains is how we're going to play this chessboard, this worldwide chessboard. And the most fascinating aspect of Brzeziński's analysis is he's like a chess teacher explaining how to move the pieces and he has a concept which is very important for everybody to understand how crazy our government is and the concept is a geopolitical pivot state. What is a geopolitical pivot state? Brzeziński tells us it's a place we don't care about except that it can annoy the hell out of another major power. In other words, it's a place we can use.
And Brzeziński's core idea in this book is the United States needs to achieve its primacy and maintain its primacy being the biggest and the baddest in Eurasia, the great land mass of Europe and Asia that it joins together into really one super continent, where about 70% of the world's population lives and about 70% of the world economy and of course it includes China it includes Russia it includes India and includes Europe and the United States needs to dominate all of this and Brzeziński nicely tells us that Europe, well they're vassal states, we're the empire they're vassals they'll do what we say - pretty much true and then there are the pivot states - the geopolitical pivots.
Number one geopolitical pivot, he tells us in 1997, is Ukraine. If we control Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a major power because Russia's blocked from its entry into the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia can't project its power. And so Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot state. And in 1997 in this book and in another article, Brzeziński writes [what's] called a grand strategy for Eurasia for foreign affairs. And Brzeziński is not just some run-of-the-mill guy. He's one of the major strategists of our country telling us how it works and how Washington thinks. He says we need to control Ukraine. So we need to push NATO to Ukraine and push American power to the Russian border.
Incidentally, Mark Rutte, who is the Secretary General of NATO, and a really despicable character, by the way, and maybe that just goes with the turf of being Secretary General of NATO, said a few days ago that NATO's purpose, is it's not defense against the Soviet Union. It's the projection of American power, basically or I should say exactly what Brzeziński was telling us in 1997 and what Brzeziński says is we need to take Ukraine, we need to take the other geopolitical pivots. Ah, what's number two on his list? Iran. Oh, fancy that. What a coincidence.
We need to bother China in East Asia by bulking up the military in Korea where we have been for 80 years, for God's sake. 80 years stationed there since the Korean War and bulking up the military in Japan and bothering China in every other possible way because these are the geopolitical pivots. We need to use these places to annoy, to weaken, to divide, to subvert, maybe even to overthrow the governments of our big adversaries. And Brzeziński writes it all out in a long tome. And basically everything he says is wrong except that it explains everything that we have done and continue to do until now. Because until today, whether it's Clinton or Bush or Obama or Trump I or Biden or Trump II, doesn't matter. The name of the game in Washington is we're number one.
The military-industrial-complex will be fed fully gluttonously to the maximum extent to keep that dominant power, that primacy, and will fight anyone, will subvert any government will use any geopolitical pivot to do that and we get all these countries into horrific trouble. We prove the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, his famous quip, which is a tragic truth, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. And so in Ukraine, we pushed, we pushed, we backed a coup that would bring in a government that didn't want neutrality, but agreed with the American idea of NATO membership because Ukraine was deeply divided. The president back in 2010 to 2014, Victor Yanukovich, said, "We should be neutral. This is very dangerous. Look where we are geographically. We're right next to Russia. We're between Russia and Europe. We got the United States meddling. We just want to be neutral."
But of course, the United States doesn't believe in that. This is a geopolitical pivot. We need to take Ukraine. So, we sent all of these minions, my current colleague Victoria Nuland at Columbia University, to hand out cookies in the demonstrations, but she handed out vast sums of money to the Ukrainian backers of a coup which took place on February 22nd, 2014. And the idea is we, okay, we're going to bring Ukraine into the American power projection.
That's what Brzeziński tells us. And he tells us that Russia can't resist this. America's all powerful. We have the technological dominance. No one can resist us. We have the biggest economy in the world. We have the biggest financial system in the world. We are so powerful that Russia will have no choice but to give in to these American demands. He writes that in a whole chapter. And what he also says is we're going to annoy the hell out of Russia, out of Iran, out of China, but no American is going to be, no American president, no American government's going to be so stupid to allow those three to get together. Okay, Brzeziński was wrong on every single thing he wrote. Of course, Russia has resisted and it resisted to the extent of war. Same with Iran. It doesn't just give in in one day because the United States bombs it and kills its leadership.
And China did not collapse and succumb to all the trade wars of Trump I and Biden and now Trump II and all the threats and so many things that were on a checklist that was written 10 years ago by another former colleague of mine, Robert Blackwell, in an article also for the Council on Foreign Relations who explained, "Here's how we bother China, how we weaken China, how we contain China." Well, none of it has worked. But in the process, of course, the United States has created enemies everywhere and none of it's going to work. But what is the point that I'm making is that this is so deeply seated.
Our government is so corrupt top to bottom. the money making from the wars, the involvement of big tech Palantir and all the rest in all of the drone warfare of Ukraine and in Gaza and the AI systems that Silicon Valley is selling to the Pentagon and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent in our name that we have no say about and that's adding to this massive debt. This is all continuing. Doesn't really matter who is president. Every president I've said, in the last decades, God, they're the worst. And then the next one along, they're the worst, then the next one comes along.
JUDGE: And all of this will be paid for by generations yet unborn because [it's] borrowed money.
SACHS: Not only is it debt stacked up on debt, stacked up on debt, but what we've done in this kind of info war is we've also created probably the biggest financial bubble in history.
Our stock market is so inflated right now in value. These big tech companies, all of which, you know, drink from the trough of the Pentagon, among other things, are so wildly overvalued. Our exaggeration of American dominance is so weird. You know, I'm, as you know, on a long trip through Europe and Asia in recent weeks. Today, I was at a major Chinese company at one of their advanced factories that is really unbelievable. We have no sense of how the rest of the world is moving on, building things, deepening their infrastructure, improving their technologies while we're fighting these wars and bragging how great we are, and how this stock market boom proves everything. What we're setting up is a phenomenal financial crisis in the future. I don't know when.
Nobody can predict such things, but we're way out on a limb in all these wars that we can't win. Trump doesn't know how to stop anyway. It would take an extraordinary president of a great capacity to actually end these wars. And Trump is obviously not a person of any capacity. He is, as I say, he's the perfect channeling of the greed and corruption of the military-industrial-complex. So, he's in a way the perfect emblem of all of this. And we're just building up a massive bubble, a massive amount of debt, unwinable wars, and no sense and truth about what's happening because exactly as your opening says, these are undeclared wars. We are not told anything about the motivations that have contributed to this for 30 years and this is where we are Judge, it's quite declared.
JUDGE: The undeclared war on Iran which the Secretary of State himself in an unguarded moment said was initiated because we have to protect Israel. Will this bring about the demise of the Netanyahu government?
SACHS: If the Netanyahu government falls, nothing better is going to replace it. I think Netanyahu one way or another is probably reaching his end. He's one of the great disasters of politics of the last 30 years. He's done what Trump actually said about him a few weeks ago, which is, "Everybody hates you." Trump told Netanyahu, "And everybody hates Israel." That's pretty accurate, Israel behaves despicably.
It's the worst of the worst around the world. Netanyahu is a thug leading a thuggish regime that has multiple in arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, which of course the United States then sanctions the court rather than respecting the fact that Israel is led by genocidal people who commit genocide with our complete complicity.
Will Netanyahu finally fall? Yeah, probably. Will the replacement be any better? It doesn't look like it. I don't hear anything in Israeli politics that says, "Hey, we shouldn't commit genocide. Hey, there are 8 million Palestinian people. We should live together in peace with them. Hey, maybe it isn't the right idea to go assassinate the leader of Iran."
No, I don't hear a word like that anywhere. nor do I hear anything much in Washington either about - I mean we have opposition in Washington to some of this so I don't want to denigrate people who are speaking out but basically the war machine continues in the United States because, as has been true for decades, our politics are controlled by the military-industrial-complex, The presidents come and go, but the underlying idea that we need to feed the war machine so that America can kick the ass of any country in the world and thereby enrich and I should have emphasized this, the ultimate goal is the enrichment of Wall Street, the enrichment of big oil, the enrichment of Silicon Valley, the enrichment of our billionaire class. It's pretty straightforward and pretty basic, but the point is it's so deep-seated that you know, we had Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic Party Senator from New Hampshire. I saw a clip, I hope I'm not misquoting her, but she was complaining that Zelenskyy fired particular defense minister Fedorov. First of all, what is an American Senator doing intervening in the choice of the defense minister? Well, it's obvious, sits on the Armed Services Committee.
She's deeply funded by the military-industrial-complex. That's American corruption up the wazoo. And that's how this whole system works. It's just too big a business. And Wall Street depends on these prerogatives. Big Oil depends on these prerogatives. The military industry itself depends on these prerogatives. Silicon Valley and its financial bubble that it is living on depends on the image of America being able to take on anybody and defeat anybody. And it's a complete hubristic delusion that we're living in right now. And it just gets more and more murderous and more and more dangerous because it's so mistaken and wrongheaded. And maybe I'll stop the rant by just saying none of these wars has any deep reason. None of them involves American security in the least.
None of them is impervious to solution through straightforward diplomacy. We don't want peace or Washington doesn't want peace. It wants dominance that it can't have, but it could have peace and the American people could have security and we could actually save some trillions of dollars that we have squandered and continue to waste if we had just a modicum of understanding and transparency and accountability of our rogue government.
JUDGE: Last question. Is the Greater Israel Project collapsing?
SACHS: Yes, in the sense that the American Primacy Project is collapsing. Israel claims that it controls 8 million Palestinians, that it can kill them with impunity, that it can ethnically cleanse them. Right now these absolute murderers in the West Bank in Israel are going in and they're burning down Palestinian homes. They're killing flocks of animals of Palestinian farmers. They're acting with complete impunity. And the United States is Yeah, Israel! That's great. What a democracy. So forth. And Israel thinks that it can get away with operating the world's most fascistic government right now, the most murderous and blatantly illegal from the point of view of every international standard of any government. But it depends entirely on the United States. Entirely. Israel can't do this one day on its own. And Israel has had the stalwart support of the American public for decades, but it's lost that. Now the American public is sick of what Israel is doing, that's both Jewish public and non-Jewish public. It's across the board, especially the young people in America.
They're really disgusted with American support for this kind of murderous state.
And the United States can't back Israel in this. That's proved by the complete failure and debacle of this war on Iran, which Trump will continue because he's weak to the pressures imposed upon him by the by the oligarchs who fund him.
That is the point. The oligarchs and this deep state. He's inconsequential. He loves to dominate, but he doesn't dominate anything. He goes along and he fights the wars of the geopolitical pivots that have been set in train decades ago and he doesn't know how to stop any of this. But none of it's working. None of it can work. You know, when does it end? Well, unfortunately, and we just have to acknowledge this in a world of nuclear weapons, it's just always possible that this imbecility ends up with something far more catastrophic and horrific than we can really fathom in our normal conversations and normal life. Any of this could escalate by accident, by mistake, by depravity to something completely catastrophic for humanity. That's the main reason why we should stop it all today. But even aside from the catastrophic possibilities, none of this works. Israel is not going to be "Greater Israel." Israel is not going to rule over millions of Palestinian people in some kind of genocidal state. This is coming to an end because the publics in the United States hate this. The European publics where their leaders are complicit as well.
They're disgusted. You look at what's happening in politics in Germany right now, the so-called far-right AfD, they're saying every day, we need to stop the war. Now, that's the far right where, you know, this is what is happening all through Europe. It's what's happening in American politics. The military-industrial-complex calls the shots. The intelligence agencies continue the wars. The presidents and the prime ministers continue their theatrics, but the publics are completely disgusted with all of this. And so, to my mind, I don't know how and when and who's going to come and change this, but this is not sustainable. The bubble's going to burst. I hope not through catastrophe but through somehow normal decency and understanding finally prevailing on this corrupted political system of ours and stopping these undeclared wars. [end]
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