subscribe Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Subscribe now
US President Joe Biden. Picture: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST
US President Joe Biden. Picture: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST

In the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Washington, US President Joe Biden has finally said he is “prepared to speak with” Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine if Russia’s president shows an interest in bringing the nine-month conflict to an end (“US expects less intense Ukraine fighting to continue for months”, December 4).

So let us all pray for peace, not only in Ukraine but also for the world. However, the reality is that it was Biden who in December 2021 refused to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, which Putin had proposed. This senseless war would never have happened but for then vice-president Biden and his notorious undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who in 2013/2014 deliberately orchestrated the Maidan “regime change” uprising in Ukraine, and the violence that followed.

The CIA, in conjunction with neo-Nazis affiliated with the late Stepan Bandera, has maintained a highly active station in Ukraine since 1948. Its purpose was to destabilise the Soviet Union, and since 1991 Russia. Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, just happens to be the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). As such, he instigated the past 20 years of America’s “forever wars” against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the resultant devastations in these and other countries.

The US war business doesn’t care what miseries it inflicts around the world as long as the profits flow back to what president Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 described as the “military-industrial-congressional complex”, of which Biden has been a key player in Congress for many years.

It was Biden and the equally crazy but now former British prime minister Boris Johnson who in April 2022 pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to abort peace negotiations with Russia, which then were being mediated through Turkey. As Zelensky himself has declared, the war began eight years ago after the Maidan coup d’etat, not in February as portrayed in the media.

Biden’s obsessions and reckless attempts to destroy Russia both militarily and economically have backfired, but have had disastrous consequences for Ukraine plus the EU and the world. An estimated 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 20,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since February. The Ukrainian economy has collapsed. Millions of Ukrainians face freezing to death this winter. By February or March 2023 Zelensky will have no option but to surrender to whatever Russia demands. The US now faces an even greater humiliation than last year’s fiasco in Afghanistan.

There are more than 850 US military bases in Europe, Asia and Africa targeting Russia and China. Their objective is to implement the PNAC’s delusions of America’s “manifest destiny” of global financial and military hegemony. These bases must be closed down and Nato disbanded. In combination with the UN and International Court of Justice, Africa must insist on the urgent closure of the US Air Force base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands, plus the abolition of the US Command for Africa (Africom), whose function is to destabilise this continent.

Terry Crawford-Browne, World Beyond War SA

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.​

subscribe Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Subscribe now

Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.

Speech Bubbles

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.