I have encountered many people who have strong opinions about the Ukraine War. Their opinions go something like this:

Putin is Bad.
He is Evil Like Hitler.
Putin invaded Ukraine.
He must be pushed back out.
Or else he will invade other countries, just like Hitler did.

No, these are not 8-year olds. They are middle aged adults. They proudly admit to me that they know next to nothing about pre-2022 Ukraine.

Now consider this succinct history of the conflict offered by comedian Dave Smith during an discussion with Joe Rogan:

[T]he list of people with in the government within the national security apparatus, who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There’s a lot of really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s. When it first started, at least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton, Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time. They all opposed [NATO expansion] in the strongest possible language, and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.

They were like George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior. There’s this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times, you can find it online. And it’s in the 90s when they’re doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is furious. His anger comes through the page when you’re reading it, because he’s like, What are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you’re picking a fight with Russia?. And this isn’t Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was Boris Yeltsin and these aren’t the Soviets. These aren’t the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? [Kennan] was a cold warrior. He was like, You’re throwing away my life’s work. And he said, and this was a really a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding and expanding it, and then there will be a Russian reaction. And then when there’s the Russian reaction, they’re going to say, see, that’s proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn’t right. If he wasn’t right about that.

And one more little detail on this: In February of 2008, there was a private cable that the current CIA head, Bill Burns, who’s currently the head of the CIA. At the time, he was the ambassador to Russia. He sent a private message to Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time. The only reason we know about this is because the heroic, Julian Assange dumped this. So this was not for the public. [T]his memo was titled “Nyet means Nyet.” And it was about Ukrainian entry into NATO, because this had been floated out for a while. . . Basically, the whole piece, is the current CIA director, telling Condoleezza Rice . . . He says Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence or at worst Civil War. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

There is another memo that comes out later that year, where he says, and it’s a really interesting thing where he said Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines and Burns says to Condoleezza Rice–not to the American public, just to let the Secretary of State–I’ve spoken to everyone over here from the craziest right wingers to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics and it is unanimous to a man: they all agree that Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of red lines, that this is a dirty direct threat to Russia. You cannot do this in the same way Jack Kennedy was saying you cannot put missiles in Cuba. You cannot bring Ukraine into your military alliance. That was what they were telling them. And three months after that memo that we were just reading they had the Bucharest Summit, where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO. Our ambassador to Russia told our Secretary of State do not do this. And then they were announcing that we’re gonna do it. And three months after that was the war in Georgia, because they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming in.

And then Georgia got ballsy, because they felt like they had the backing of the West. And they attacked a breakaway province, South Ossetia. They had Russian peacekeepers there. And Vladimir Putin responded, that was like the first like real response. And he went to war with Georgia over that. And then . . . in 2014, there was the coup, backed by the West, in Ukraine, you know, it’s what I like about these segments, too, is like people can argue with like this, because I know that people arguing with me, the last time I was here, if you remember, we played the video of Gideon Rose, just bragging about this. And he’s like, Dude, it’s not me. These are the CIA directors words. He’s the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine saying this. This is what people in the government were saying.

One more note . . . Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense (William Perry) wrote about this in 2015. So this is after the coup in Ukraine, the Maidan revolution, and after Putin took Crimea. He basically said this is all my fault. And his biggest regret was that he didn’t resign over NATO expansion. And he said, I think he said, his biggest regret was that he didn’t do everything he could to stop it, and that he didn’t ultimately resign over it. . . .

I know people will argue with me on this, and they’ll say NATO is just a defensive alliance. So why should Vladimir Putin care if we expand this defensive alliance? And yeah, it’s a defensive alliance, except for all the times it’s not. Except for all the times it fights aggressive wars, like in Serbia, or Libya or Afghanistan. Other than that, I guess, they claim it’s a defensive alliance.

But from Vladimir Putin’s perspective, this isn’t a defensive voluntary Alliance. This is the European wing of the American empire, the most war-hungry country in the world, who started seven wars in the last 20 years and slaughtered millions of people. From his perspective, when you put dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, the official reason is we’re just trying to make sure that Iran can’t nuke Europe, with the nukes that they don’t have. But from Putin’s perspective, he’s like, No, you’re trying to cut down on the time it would take for a nuclear weapon to hit Moscow.

And again, it’s not that Putin is a good guy. He’s not it’s not that he’s justified in invading Ukraine. He’s not and all the stories of horrible shit that you’ve heard that he’s done there. He’s probably done a lot of them. But these [are the] same dumb Neo cons who have this policy to remake the Middle East. They’re the same ones who also had the policy to expand NATO all the way to Russia’s border. [This] was just this just the dumbest, most reckless policy ever that’s now put us in a position where we are closer to a risk of world war three and nuclear war than we’ve ever been in my life. And for what? To make sure that the Donbass region is ruled by Kyiv rather than Moscow. Is that really worth it?

The awesome thing about Dave Smith’s version is that you need not trust him. Just track down the documents on the internet. They will completely corroborate his story (I inserted some of the links above).  Also consider the many promises made to Russia by the West that were broken with impunity.  That we broke promises is not even relevant in the current media environment, where every war is cheered on.

Oh, and don’t forget that the U.S. assisted with the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. Here’s the video of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt speaking on the phone about US strategy for a political transition in Ukraine and includes a crude swipe at the European Union. They were deciding who was going to lead Ukraine, a stunning amount of hubris for leaders of a country that went crazy with the (false) belief that Russia colluded with Trump.

As this recent full page ad in the NYT argue, “The U.S. Should be a Force for Peace in the World.”

In the meantime, most of us are watching the Ukraine in horror, lead by a president who needlessly dragged us into an extremely dangerous situation. As Joe Biden Himself said back in October: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”