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William Burns, the former US Ambassador to Russia and now director of the CIA, captured the Russian sentiment in a February 2009 memorandum: “Nyet me… - Scott Ritter
" "William Burns, the former US Ambassador to Russia and now director of the CIA, captured the Russian sentiment in a February 2009 memorandum: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s Nato enlargement red lines.” Russia, Burns noted, viewed “farther eastward expansion as a potential military threat,” giving rise to Russian fears that “the issue could potentially split the country [Ukraine] in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.” One need only to look at what has transpired in Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia’s current military operation in Ukraine, to understand how prescient Burns’ cable was. Burns, however, was ignored. So, too, was Putin, who had been lecturing the West ever since his landmark speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, where he famously called out the US for having “overstepped its national borders in every way.” Putin declared, “This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?” He was greeted by silence.
...The major takeaway from this unfolding situation should be that Russia’s president does not bluff, and that the West would do well to listen closely to what he has to say.
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About Scott Ritter
William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served with the United Nations implementing arms control treaties, with General Norman Schwarzkopf in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq, overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and as a United Nations weapons inspector, from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction." A registered sex offender, Ritter was arrested in 2001 in connection with police stings in which officers posed as under-aged girls to arrange meetings of a sexual nature and later convicted of sex offenses in 2011. He served 30 months of his prison sentence. He has defended Russia during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and written opinion pieces for various state media outlets.
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William Scott Ritter, Jr.
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William Scott Ritter
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Here we are, 2022, and we have a bunch of people running around as if they’ve invented the concept of nuclear security and nuclear-based muscle flexing. No, we’ve tried it before in the 1960s, we did the whole arms race thing. And we realized at that point in time that we’ll quickly bankrupt ourselves and get nothing from it if we continue to try to build bigger and better missiles, more warheads, all this stuff. One of the first things we had to teach ourselves back then is that you can’t win a nuclear war. You can’t win it. It should never be fought. And that’s when we embraced something that one would normally say shouldn’t be embraced: the notion of mutually assured destruction. That is, if I use a nuclear weapon against you, not only will I kill you, but you’re going to use a nuclear weapon against me and you’re going to kill me.
The American people have allowed themselves to be dumbed down to the point that their opinions are easily manipulated by corporate-owned and controlled mainstream media. The inability to function as a viable component of government has resulted in the “people” fracturing into competing ideological and socio-economic fiefdoms. American democracy is little more than feudalistic plutocracy. It’s an unsustainable model doomed to collapse in on itself.
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From Xi’s perspective, the US is saying one thing, and doing another. According to Xinhua, Xi informed Biden that, in his view, the “direct cause” of the current strain on China-US relations is that “some people on the US side have not followed through on the important common understanding reached by us, neither have they acted on President Biden’s positive statements. The US has misperceived and miscalculated China’s strategic intention.” America, Xi added, has failed to deliver on virtually all of its promises to China regarding the avoidance of conflict, while simultaneously promulgating deep-seated notions of China as an “imagined enemy.” The US, Xi added, is sending the wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces, which is “very dangerous.” Continuation of this would “exert a disruptive impact on China-US relations.” Xi’s remarks, made in the context of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, should not be seen as anything less than a clear warning that the US needs to start taking China’s security concerns seriously and exercise greater caution over its words and actions — lest it find that it has, again, tied a bell onto a tiger.
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