The Second Crimean War like the first is an attempt to contain Russia

In this podcast on George Galloway’s MOATS (The Mother of All Talk Shows) Professor Jeffrey Sachs described the war in Ukraine as "the Crimean War version 2" and said that dating back to the 1990s it has been US policy to encircle Russia via Nato expansion in the Black Sea.  

America wanted  to contain Russia as England and France did in 1852.

The first Crimean war could easily have been triggered by events in what is now Romania rather than in Jerusalem. It was the result of mistakes and inept diplomacy just like this one.

 

Professor Sachs makes the pretty obvious point that the U.S. is the main driver of global conflict and has become a force for ill in the world. Who can deny that?

He admires Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy and thinks America was a force for good led by them. He thinks the latter was almost certainly killed by the American "security state".

He often says it was the CIA.

Until recently I dismissed this and most conspiracy theories but security states exist to conspire and the US and British ones are exceptionally ruthless. 

I think the whole of American history shows the country to be expansionist -- even the revolution was fought partly because London restrained Americans from warring against Indians - but Kennedy was much better in foreign policy than his successors or the baleful Eisenhower who spurned unrepeated opportunities to end the cold war.

After seeing the failed US-Israeli attempt to regime change Iran this year it is very hard to doubt that 2014 Kiev was a US regime change operation that succeeded.  

For many including Professor Sachs (but not me) it was always obvious. But senior British diplomats and a senior US diplomat I spoke to denied it and I think were sincere.  The American even worked close to Victoria Nuland. 

Why can't America become isolationist again and Nato be disbanded? 

Because it is easy to start wars but hard to end them. 

We all know that by now. 

By hunting the world looking for Hitlers to fight, the Americans have come to resemble their greatest foe.

Is România therefore reprising a role she played before? 

Key quotations from Jeffrey Sachs in the podcast: 

"Every major war has the United States as the main cause behind it... The war in Ukraine, though it's unfortunately not obvious to many people, is a war that was provoked by the United States by a plan dating back to the 1990s to weaken Russia, to encircle Russia by expanding NATO around the Black Sea and surrounding Russia—a kind of a Crimean War version 2, 160 years after the first Crimean War."

"This war, first of all, never would have happened had the U.S. not conspired to overthrow the Yanukovych government in 2014.

"It was a game plan that followed that of Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III in the Crimean War (1853–56)... designed by the U.S. to encircle and weaken Russia."