Assertions now being made that the Russian military incursion into Ukraine is illegitimate are motivated by ignorance of American history toward the Russians, ignorance of American history in Ukraine, and ignorance of the long history of the Americans invading, overthrowing, undermining, and subverting other nations using the flimsiest of pretexts. The American political leadership accepts this jingoistic, know-nothing, response because it supports its own. The problem for the Americans is that this epoch of imperial arrogance is coming unmoored.

The U.S. spent the post-WWII period hemming the Soviets, now the Russians, in militarily. The stated reason from 1946 through 1991 was to ‘contain communism.’ With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was brief discussion of a peace dividend, the reallocation of national resources away from the military to domestic uses. However, the weapons industry and military-dependent towns and cities rebelled, and so a new enemy was invented--- international terrorism. Soon enough, the historically convenient foe of the Russians was revived.

The plausibility of the terrorist threat lay in expected blowback for U.S. military operations in the Middle East to sustain U.S. control of oil and gas distribution. National sovereignty was treated as a fiction except where American interests were found. The fantasy sold was that peace would prevail if the Americans controlled the world. As if to illustrate the folly of this conceit, for the brief period that the U.S. had military dominance, it launched serial wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and launched a coup in Ukraine.