The rhetorical posturing and one-upmanship of Realpolitik and statecraft is the definitive banality. It is reality TV writ large. A theatre of narcissists and psychopaths playing a real game of Risk, with millions of petty, jingoistic, flag-waving nationalists on all sides getting emotionally involved and taking sides in the Machiavellian schemes of power mad fools—the diplomats, the statesmen, the “intelligence” services.
No one has a moral high ground here. The governments and the mechanisms of state are replete with the most venal, most hypocritical, and most mendacious and manipulative people on the planet. They’re the antithesis of anything one may call democratic. They are anti-human. They care only for their egos, their personal ambitions, glory, and being historically relevant as “great” men.
That so few people even question why the US should be involved in the affairs of a country thousands of miles away, with absolutely no historical or cultural ties to the US, is far more worrying than any “sobering” or “painful” cuts in military spending.
What is becoming abundantly clear—if one doesn’t accept some of the specious assumptions and propagandistic framing found in the corporate media—is that the US never abandoned the Cold War – the institutions and geopolitical strategies from that era.
I think that the double standards over the Crimea to be ironic too. Imagine if the Crimea were somewhere like Kosovo, or Chechnya—the proposed referendum certainly wouldn’t be being called “unconstitutional”, but rather an expression of democratic will that must be listened to!
But since the pro-Russian guy has been ousted, the US can maintain the pretence that Crimea—an autonomous region with an overwhelmingly Russian majority—should adhere to some imagined principles, and not try to redraw the borders ”. . . over the heads of democratic leaders”. “Democratic leaders” being anyone favourable to the US, no matter how actually illegitimate their status may be.