What happened in Ukraine last week was an obvious consequence of The West’s ambitions and goals in the last thirty years. It is also a direct consequence of Obama’s and Merkel’s disastrous foreign policy. This should have been obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about foreign policy and history. A war has been fought in Ukraine for eight years now, anyone who was surprised about WAR IN EUROPE last week hasn’t been paying attention. The people who wrote those headlines and the politicians who claimed something “unthinkable” or “unforeseen” just happened are idiots and should be fired immediately.

The West forced regime change in Ukraine in 2014, the Russians responded, both sides escalated again and again over the last few years and now Russia invaded. This is a tragedy. It is a failure of diplomacy that is as much the fault of Vladimir Putin as it is the fault of us in Germany and the US who elected warmongers and people who know more about gender policy than they know about foreign policy.

Ted Galen Carpenter wrote a great opinion piece in 1945, which was also republished in The Guardian, and which explains exactly what went wrong very concisely:

→ Ignored Warnings: How NATO Expansion Led to the Current Ukraine Tragedy

History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.