How Elites Destroyed a Possible U.S.-Russia Alliance

Russia is the nation that the U.S. should have tried to court. That’s because China is the greatest geopolitical threat to the U.S. because of its economic and technological advances and its ambition to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific sphere. Russia is far less of a threat to U.S. strategic interests. Trump understood that China was the main enemy and therefore a closer union between the U.S. and Russia was essential. But the elites’ never wanted and seized on this to concoct a story of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. So it became politically toxic for Trump to reach out to the Russians. It represents an enormous lost opportunity.

- Jim Rickards

There’s no need to rehash the sordid politics of the U.S.-Russia relationship since 2014. That relationship became collateral damage to gross corruption in Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies, especially the U.K. under globalists like David Cameron, wanted to peel off Ukraine from the Russian orbit and make it part of the EU and eventually NATO.

From Russia’s perspective, this was unacceptable. It may be true that most Americans cannot find Ukraine on a map, but a simple glance at a map reveals that much of Ukraine lies east of Moscow.

Putting Ukraine in a Western alliance such as NATO would create a crescent stretching from Luhansk in the south through Poland in the west and back around to Estonia in the north. There are almost no natural obstacles between that arc and Moscow; it’s mostly open steppe. Completion of this “NATO Crescent” would leave Moscow open to invasion in ways that Napoleon and Hitler could only dream. Of course, this situation was and is unacceptable to Moscow.

Ukraine itself is culturally divided along geographic lines. The eastern and southern provinces (Luhansk, Donetsk, Crimea and Dnipro) are ethnically Russian, follow the Orthodox Church and the Patriarch of Moscow and welcome commercial relations with Russia. The western provinces (Kiev, Lviv) are Slavic, adhere to the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope and look to the EU and U.S. for investment and aid.