"The Georgia and Ukraine trip are highly symbolic. It’s meant to send a message to Russia, obviously, and also to send a message to the NATO allies that this is the real agenda. It’s all about Russia, it’s all about the Russian threat," McAdams, of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, tells Loud & Clear.
"It’s a very symbolic measure," McAdams warns, "and I think it’s the opening bell to what will be a lot of saber rattling…"
Despite Washington’s role in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, many US lawmakers lack the expertise to correctly implement the policies they are pursuing.
"If you were to actually corner a member of the [US] House of Representatives without his staff and ask him anything even vaguely specific about what Russia has specifically done, they would not be able to answer. They probably wouldn’t even get the dates of the coup, or even the year of the coup in Ukraine right," McAdams says.
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) July 7, 2016
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) July 7, 2016
"It’s this small coterie; it’s the ‘Victoria Nulands’ of Washington who are driving this policy."
Kerry’s trip coincides with an upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw. The military alliance has been rapidly expanding eastward, citing "Russian aggression," even as many point out that the bloc is no longer relevant following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Instead, NATO is widely considered to have become a tool of US hegemony.
"The US pays three quarters of the entire NATO budget. This really is a US operation in Europe, and it really puts the truth to the lie that the countries of Europe, the NATO countries of Europe, feel threatened by Russia, because if Russia were truly an existential threat to Europe they would be spending more than 1% of their GDP on defense," McAdams says. "They don’t. They refuse to."
"Very clearly," he says, "this is the US subsidizing these countries to provoke Russia."
While the coup in Ukraine was branded in the Western media as an attempt to get rid of corruption, McAdams explains that this has not been the case.
"Even in the pro-coup press…they talk about how the disbursement of the money that’s been promised Ukraine by the IMF and the US government has been delayed because they said the economy’s been plagued by corruption," he says. "Wasn’t that the whole reason that the coup was taken, to get rid of the corruption of the Yanukovych government?
"They obviously have not achieved that,” he says, “and they’ve gotten nothing out of this coup except a bunch of Nazis running around harassing people."
