My Political Journey Part 6: Pax Americana Runs Rampant
Regime Change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Mass Migration, the Erosion of the Middle Classes, Multipolarity as Enabling Maximization of National Sovereignty
Previous Entry: Vladimir Putin and the Application of State Power 1999-2008
In June of 2009, a ray of light appeared from the heavens when Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi visited Libyan Dicator Muammar Gaddafi. This visit was to celebrate the Italian-Libyan ‘Friendship Pact’ that the two of them struck. Italy would apologize for its colonial history in Libya and would invest hundreds of millions of Euros in infrastructure projects in that country, while Gaddafi would turn off the migrant spigot and accept the return of Africans who tried to illegally enter Italy with assistance from human smugglers backed by NGOs, such as those financed by billionaires like George Soros. This was a big win-win and provided an excellent template as to how Europe could protect its nations, its borders, and its cultures, while helping develop Africa economically at the same time.
This kind of win-win situation could not stand for the simple reason that the wrong type of wins were being racked up.
Only a short two years later would we see a Libya bombed and torn apart, with Gaddafi sodomized and assassinated, while Hillary Clinton cheered “we came, we saw, he died”. “Leading from behind”, the USA used its air power to support a Franco-British face on regime change. This was little more than resource theft on the part of this alliance that France chose to join when Sarkozy moved his country from Gaullism towards Atlanticism. For the Brits, this type of piracy was par for the course. Silvio Berlusconi would also pay for this, being removed from power less than a month later in a ‘soft coup’ orchestrated by the EU.
And with this regime change came the usual arming of Salafi militants by the CIA and MI6, just like the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. With it too came civil war, a broken state, plummeting living standards for Libyans, open slave trading markets in Tripoli, and worst of all for Europeans, the release of millions of more migrants into the Mediterranean with no one to stop them from landing on Italian shores. New conditions enforced by international treaties that would make it illegal to push them back into the sea were instituted. State and billionaire-financed NGOs sent their fleets to the shallows of the waters off of Libya’s coast to act as water taxis for these migrants, with the human smuggling industry flourishing like never before.
Putin and Russia in Light of Pax Americana
Both Russia and China were taken aback by the savagery meted out to Gaddafi, and conceded the point that they gave the West too much slack in allowing them to remove him from power. This was one of the major reasons why Russia would directly involve itself in stopping a repeat of Libya in Syria, albeit not immediately (indicating that there was some agonizing over the decision to come to the aid of its ally).
I am not asking any of you to like Putin or Russia. If you are Finnish, or Estonian, or Latvian, or Lithuanian, or Polish, or Ukrainian, or Romanian, or Georgian, etc., I fully expect you to hate Russia and Russians, and with good reason. I get it and it makes perfect sense. Historical grievances are a powerful emotion.
What I am asking you (as you read this) is to objectively assess Putin’s rule over a country that experienced a disastrous decade in the 1990s, and that is targeted for regime change by the world’s hyperpower, the USA. One will often hear westerners opposed to Putin describing him as ‘having played a poor hand very well’. I think that this is a fair assessment in light of what I described in the previous entry in this series. The application of state power shored up Russia internally. Its proper application has also allowed it to defend its own security interests and reassert itself on the global stage.