Kermit Heartsong - Ukraine - ZBIG's Grand Chess Board & How The West Was Checkmated

Part I

The opening repertoire & beyond

Conditions in the Soviet Union

Reagan and Gorbachev

The Failure of the Peace Dividend

Zbigniew Brzeziński’s Grand Chess Board

The Neoconservatives

The Philosophy

Military Strategy

The Wolfowitz Doctrine

A Clean Break

Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland

Responsibility to Protect

Origins of R2P

Libya — An Abuse of R2P

NATO: From Cold War to Global War

NATO in the 1990s

1996 — The Turning Point

NATO in the 2000s

The EU — NATO Dance

Ukraine

Gorbachev’s Economic Vision

Yeltsin: The Russian Pinochet

The Economic Reforms of Putin and Medvedev

Financial Crisis of 2008

Economy still a work in progress

Criticisms of Putin's Policies

Part II

The west checkmated

color revolutions

How They Work — The Details

Ukraine I — The Orange Revolution

Georgia, The Dress Rehearsal

Ukraine II

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

Nazis In The House

Crimea

Odessa

War by any other name: Eastern Ukraine

The End Game

Military

Economic

planned Chaos

Propaganda IN UKRAINE

Peaceful Violence on The Maidan

The Maidan Snipers

Russian Aggression?

RUSSIA INVADES (AGAIN)

Putin is Mad, Channeling Hitler…

Western Propaganda and the crimea

Malaysian Airline Flight MH17

the flight

the lay of the land

the Russian position

the Kiev and US position

The Truth Outs

Cui Bono

Crimea

Sanctions Backfire

Eastern Pivot — Bear & Dragon

Multi-Poles

The SCO

The BRICS

no gas for the eu

The Dollar Falls

CONCLUSIONS

The Church of the Grand Chessboard

Imperial Wars & Planned Chaos — TILT!

World War III

appendix I

Phone Transcript Nuland and Pyatt

appendix II

Phone Transcript paet and ashton

Bibliography

biographies

Footnotes

An imprint of

Tayen lane

Publishing

San Francisco

Montreal

www.tayenlane.com

copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13 (hardcover): 978-0-9906614-6-7

ISBN-13 (softcover): 978-0-9961740-7-7

In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except for excerpts used for reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover Photographs: Courtesy Shutterstock

Cover Design: Tayen Lane Design

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

— General Omar Bradley

introduction

At the end of the Cold War, the Russian people had a tremendous amount of goodwill toward Americans. They loved American music and movies and hoped to be accepted into the Western world on equitable terms. A decisive opportunity had presented itself for a more cooperative international framework to emerge through a good faith effort.

On February 9, 1990, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker negotiated a gentleman's agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that, in exchange for allowing a reunified Germany as a NATO member, NATO would not be expanded any farther east. The stage was thus set for global cooperation and the establishment of realpolitik as the operative canon of geostrategic and geopolitical relations. The fruit of such a relationship, many believed, would be a peace dividend.

Tragically, this opportunity was squandered, mostly due to the American political class's triumphalist attitude and a desire to maintain the power and wealth they had established based on an adversarial framework. Thus the march eastward, converting former Soviet satellites to NATO forward operating bases, began a few short years after Baker’s promise to Gorbachev.

On September 17, 1997 Zbigniew Brzeziński’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives was published. It spoke clearly to US financial elites and their political courtesans in regards to maintaining US primacy. Its thesis, as stated by Brzeziński, “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger should emerge capable of dominating Eurasia and thus challenging America’s global pre-eminence.” Since the fall of the Soviet Union the implementation of Zbig’s Grand Chessboard strategy has continued unabated and Washington has moved at a feverish pace to bring the endgame, a checkmate, for Russian and ostensibly Chinese power projection in Eurasia.

By 2009, NATO expansion, initiated by Washington, had increased by twelve new nations in central and eastern Europe. To date, NATO stands at the gates of the Russian Federation with provocative actions having taken place in the Ukraine in 2004, Georgia in 2008 and now once again in the Ukraine in 2014. Washington’s geostrategic goals — checkmate of Russian and European integration, Russian power projection and suppression of Russian economic viability — collectively represent the final gambit by the West for a checkmate of Russia, so as to render Russia a permanent vassal state.

However, it now appears, a US /NATO checkmate will not be forthcoming as deft economic, political, and tactical countermoves by Russian president Vladimir Putin have turned the tables on the US and NATO. As a result, Russia now stands ready to checkmate the West via its own gambit — the Grand Chessboard strategy.

The potential ramifications are the displacement of the petrodollar, the near-term demise of the US empire, the potential dissolution of NATO, and severe (continuing) Western economic recessions and depressions for decades to come.

Ukraine: ZBIG’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated speaks to the historical and geostrategic moves undertaken by the US and NATO, since the fall of the Soviet Union, to control the Eurasian landmass. Further, it details the broken promises of the US and NATO, their geostrategic steps and missteps, and, finally, how the US and NATO, proverbially snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and catalyzed Russia’s near-term reemergence as a global power while shifting power eastward.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Col. Lawrence Wilkerson for taking the time to talk about Ukraine and US foreign policy, as well as Sharon Tennison for her friendship and insight gleaned from over 30 years working in Russia. We’d like to thank Dmitry Orlov for his time and valuable feedback. We would, of course, also like to thank Graham Phillips, George Eliason, and Patrick Lancaster for their courageous and independent reporting from eastern Ukraine. And we’d like to thank Professor Stephen Cohen for his insight, courage, dedication, and truth telling. For whether Orwell is, indeed, the originator or not, the saying—”In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” proves truer today than at any prior time in history.