30/10/2025
The US invaded, bombed, and sanctioned nations worldwide. It armed militias and launched regime change operations.
Prior to 9-11 the US fought proxy wars and launched coups throughout Latin America, supporting autocratic regimes. In Indonesia it helped kill about a million leftists. During the Vietnam War, it killed several million.
Since just 9-11 the US invaded or bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Serbia, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, and Niger. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, US wars since 9-11 killed 4.5 million people and cost over $8 trillion.
The US aided war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. The US has occupied one-third of Syria, the parts with oil, since about 2015, with help from a proxy army, the SDF. The US allied with al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups in Syria, as reported here, here, and here (see source link in comments for all citations).
It killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians through brutal sanctions. The Trump administration is now bombing Venezuelan boats and is preparing for a land invasion.
The US lied about almost all these wars and other interventions, which caused mass migrations that destabilized politics in America and the EU.
The US even lied about the war in Yugoslavia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine, here, and here.
In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the US supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA. Likewise, The US backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia. US propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the US intervention.
The US has over 750 overseas military bases. It withdrew from multiple nuclear arms treaties (ABM, INF, START II, JCPOA, and Open Skies Treaty).
According to the US Government, Russia’s and China’s Spheres of Influence Don’t Even Include Their Own Borderlands
The US is preparing for war with China over Taiwan, with massive arms buildups near China. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, violating multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders.
The CIA and its sister organization, the NED, sponsored color revolutions in multiple former Soviet bloc countries.
The CIA “engineered” the 2014 coup in Ukraine, according to former US Ambassador Chas W. Freeman. The US armed the Azov battalion that was killing Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine. (See also this and this.)
In 2019, the RAND Corporation recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia; RAND predicted the actions would result in a war in which Russia would have the advantage.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported on extensive CIA meddling in Ukraine since at least 2014. The New Yorker reported on CIA and National Security Agency efforts to hide what they had done in Ukraine.
Jack Matlock, former US ambassador to the USSR, said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?”
Matlock said the US backed the 2014 coup, and, “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.”
Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-N***s—we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.”
And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
See this (https://theukrainepapers.org/Compendium-on-how-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html ) for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence of N***s in Ukraine and US support for them.
The US stymied peace deals both before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Would the US allow Russia to expand a military alliance to include Cuba and Mexico and then overthrow the government of Canada, install the new prime minister, arm anti-US militias, ban the official use of English, and station missiles and bases near US borders?
See "The Ukraine Papers" for more information about the war in Ukraine.
In short, the US shares responsibility for the war in Ukraine, and it’s a grotesque lie to say that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked.” Senior US diplomats, secretaries of defense, and others warned that NATO expansion was unnecessary and provocative.
Even neocon Robert Kagan says it’s wrong to call the invasion unprovoked. The neocons who run US foreign policy used the poor Ukrainians as pawns in a nasty geopolitical chess game. US policies killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, devastated Ukraine’s infrastructure, damaged European economies, and diverted trillions of dollars toward military buildups.
The war in Ukraine raises the very real risk of nuclear war. As JFK warned, it’s suicidal to push a nuclear-armed adversary into the corner.
It’s time for Americans to wise up to the lies told about this war; to oppose the trillion-dollar budget for the Department of War; to demand the closing of overseas bases; to oppose the trillion-dollar expansion of the US nuclear arsenal; and to demand a stop to endless wars, proxy wars, regime change operations, and provocations.
Our country is $38 trillion in debt, and we have numerous pressing needs to address domestically. We can no longer afford to be the world hegemon.
We lost disastrous wars against third world countries in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet our leaders are picking fights with both Russia and China, which is technologically advanced and which has four times our population.
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Donald A. Smith is a writer, a peace activist working with CodePink, a Democratic Precinct Committee officer, the editor of https://waliberals.org, and the creator of https://progressivememes.org. He lives in Bellevue, Washington, and has a PhD in Computer Science.
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