F. William Engdahl --The Deeper Agenda Behind the Washington Coup in Ukraine

Dear Readers,

In this installment of my free geopolitical newsletter I would like to share something I wrote on the first anniversary of the February 2014 Ukraine coup d’etat. Much of the fabricated attack on Russia today can be traced back to that failed coup and the fact that Russia not in her blood-strewn history has bent her knee to foreign intimidation.

On one level it is a contest that goes back 1000 years or more to the Great Schism between the Eastern Church of Orthodox Christianity and the Church in Rome. Orthodox Christianity refused in 1054 to endorse Rome’s demand to accept St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin and split from the Church of Rome. That Orthodox branch of Christianity was comprised by Russia, parts of Ukraine, Greece, Serbia and Srpska Republic and then Constantinople. Four decades later, Catholic Pope Urban II declared a Holy Crusade to destroy Orthodox Constantinople with European peasant armies whipped into a murder frenzy by St Bernard of Clairvaux and the Knights Templar, with intent to unite Eastern Orthodox with Rome under his Roman Papacy. Urban II declared it was a war against Muslim invaders threatening the Holy Lands and Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In fact 1095 was the beginning of two centuries of such crusades and lay at the heart of most European wars since, including the Thirty Years War. I mention this as an undeniable component of today’s western antipathy for Russia has its roots in that theological power dispute of 1000 years past. In 2014 NATO created a coup that split Ukraine from Russia politically and militarily. The result was that a predominantly Orthodox ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine, to avoid reprisals from Kiev, declared secession. The western Ukraine, predominantly Roman Catholic declared a de facto war against Russia. There is a geopolitical, military and economic element to the present hostility between Russia and the west that has deep roots most are unaware of. For those readers interested in such history, you might find my book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods Would Destroy, of interest.

Thank you for your support and feel free to share this, 

F. William Engdahl

www.williamengdahl.com

You can find this great and informative book on amazon.com : 

11.02.2015 Author: F. William Engdahl

NATO: Atlantic Bridge is Falling Down…

Column: Politics

Region: Europe

Washington created something called NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 to weld Western Europe firmly to the future foreign policies of Washington, however destructive that might prove to the genuine interests of Germany, France, Italy and the other nations of Europe. In 1986 the twelve nations of the then-European Economic Community modified the 1957 Treaty of Rome and signed the Single European Act. That mandated the creation of a single EEC market by end of 1992, and set forth rules for European Political Cooperation, the forerunner of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.

Then on November 9, 1989, an event of historic dimension intervened to disrupt the EEC strategy for a single market. Gorbachev’s USSR surrendered the German Democratic Republic to the West. The Cold War was de facto over. Germany would be reunited. The West had apparently won. Most Europeans were jubilant. Many believed the decades of living on the brink of possible nuclear war were over. The emerging Europe seemed proud, confident of the future. NATO was an entity created by Washington, in the words of its first General Secretary, Lord Ismay, to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

European Defense Pillar or US NATO?

The Maastricht Treaty, a document with fatal flaws, was introduced at a meeting of the EEC in December 1991. A shocked Helmut Kohl was told by France’s Mitterrand and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher that Germany must agree to creation of a single currency to control the Bundesbank. That became today’s Euro and an independent supranational European Central Bank. It was blackmail as precondition for their accepting German unification. The Germans swallowed hard and signed.

What was little discussed at the time was that the Maastricht Treaty also included a section mandating establishment for the first time of a Common Foreign and Security Policy. The twelve nations signed the treaty and intense discussions were underway of establishing a European defense pillar independent of NATO. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the raison d’être for NATO was gone. The Warsaw Pact had dissolved. Washington had assured Gorbachev that NATO would never extend to the east.

Bush Destroys EU Defense Pillar

US President George H.W. Bush was a man who left a blood-soaked legacy, from his early years in Washington that likely included playing a key role as CIA agent in Dallas Texas in November 22, 1963 in the assassination of JFK. He went on to head the CIA in the 1970’s and to lure Saddam Hussein to occupy Kuwait in 1990 to provide the excuse for a bloody war Operation Desert Storm against Iraq.

As President, Bush also set in motion the events that would result in the destruction of Yugoslavia beginning the 1990’s, much as Washington is destroying Ukraine today. The central purpose behind that US-incited war that ravaged the Balkans for a decade, was to make clear to the EU nations that NATO, under US Pentagon control, would remain and, in fact, would go east. In effect, he used the Yugoslav war to destroy the emerging threat of an independent EU defense capacity, the EU defense pillar. As US Presidential adviser and Trilateral Commission former founder, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly described Washington’s view of Germany, she was a “vassal” of US imperial power, not a sovereign nation.

In 1999 Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were officially invited in Washington to join NATO as the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was capped by President Bill Clinton’s shameful and illegal bombing of Serbia in the so-called Kosovo War that year, with the even more shameful participation of German Foreign Minister, the Hungarian butcher’s son, Joschka Fischer.

By 2004 Washington was gleefully bringing NATO to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia. It was also secretly preparing its now infamous Color Revolution coups in Georgia and Ukraine that would being in US-chosen candidates, the corrupt Viktor Yushchenko in Kiev’s so-called Orange revolution and Mikhail Saakashvili in the Georgia Rose Revolution. Both presidents pledged to join NATO as part of their campaign. Little wonder that by 2007, as Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld announced the Pentagon would install ballistic missile devices in Poland and the Czech Republic aimed de facto at Russia, Moscow was becoming more than a little uneasy about being choked on its strategic perimeter by NATO and a military alliance that ultimately brought the world’s sole superpower to the gates of Moscow.

A German French Ukraine intervention

When the foreign ministers of Germany and France intervened in a desperate last-minute effort to broker a compromise in Kiev on February 21, 2014 to avoid civil war there they explicitly excluded one interested party from the talks—the US Government. They won a compromise that lasted less than 48 hours before CIA-backed snipers in Kiev ignited riot and panic causing the democratically-elected (a forgotten point in the slavish German media version of events) President, Viktor Yanukovich to flee for his life.

The next day, the Obama Administration, led by State Department hawk Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, and legions of CIA operatives inside the Maidan Square protests openly installed their hand-picked puppets, using overt neo-nazis of Pravy Sektor and Svoboda Party to do so. George Friedman, head of Stratfor, a US strategic consultancy whose clients include the Pentagon and CIA, as well as Israeli agencies, told the Russian Kommersant in a December interview, the US-organized coup d’etat in Ukraine was “the most blatant coup in history.”

When Washington spat in the face not only of Germany and France and the EU, but in the face of Russia and of Ukraine itself, by dictating the persons to run the new Kiev coup regime, headed by their choice of Prime Minister, reputed high-ranking Scientologst, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Germany and France swallowed hard. They groveled behind the lead of the Washington warhawks in the Obama Administration. The EU unanimously voted US-dictated sanctions repeatedly against Russia after the March, 2014 referendum on Crimea. German industry protested openly. Merkel’s government bowed before NATO and Washington, and the German economy began to go into recession along with the rest of the EU.

Now something highly unusual is taking place. France and Germany are openly again defying Obama’s Washington. On the night of February 4, Merkel and French President Hollande quickly decided to fly together to Moscow to meet Russia’s Putin. The purpose, as Putin spokesman stated was that the, “leaders of the three states will discuss what specifically the countries can do to contribute to speedy end of the civil war in the southeast of Ukraine, which has escalated in recent days and resulted in many casualties.”

The most interesting part of the quick trip is that the “vassal” heads, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande did not ask permission from Washington first according to a French government source. Announcing the spontaneous Moscow trip, Hollande told the press, “Together with Angela Merkel we have decided to take a new initiative.”

More interesting, their “new initiative” comes as US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Kiev meeting President Poroschenko to discuss possible US weapons deliveries to Kiev, Washington’s preferred brand of “diplomacy” at the moment. The Moscow talks between Putin, Merkel and Hollande reportedly followed “secret” talks between Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

In early December, Hollande made a surprise visit to Moscow to meet with Putin on Ukraine. At that time the French President declared, “I believe that we have to avoid having more ‘walls’ that separate us. At this moment we have to be able to overpass the obstacles and find solutions.” Washington was not at all happy with that. There is strong suspicion in certain circles that the January 7 false flag attack on the Paris Satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo was the reply of the Washington-Tel Aviv war faction to the Hollande diplomacy.

The latest joint German-French diplomatic moves as John Kerry was in Kiev discussing US weapons for Ukraine. Le Nouvel Observateur journalist Vincent Jauvert says Hollande and Merkel’s suddent decision to talk with Putin in Moscow came as an attempt “to get ahead of the Americans who are trying to impose their solution to the problem on Westerners: a transfer of weapons to Ukraine.” He said the two leaders went to Kiev straight after Kerry, as they “distrust the American administration,” and want to “present their diplomatic solutions just before US Vice President Joe Biden presents the US plan of sending lethal weapons to Kiev at the Munich security conference on Saturday.”

The coming weeks will clearly be decisive for world peace. To parody an old children’s song I sang as a kid, Atlantic Bridge is Falling Down, Falling Down, Falling Down…(To be sung to the melody of London Bridge is falling down). It is time for a new, stable bridge in its place, but that won’t come from the Munich Security Conference message of Joe Biden.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
https://journal-neo.org/2015/02/11/nato-atlantic-bridge-is-falling-down/