Chomsky on the other hand.
The Chomsky video is terribly frightening but he was focused on how the West has utilized the Ukraine war for political ends. It is true that a moderately stable global commerce has been shattered and rearranged to the benefit (mostly) of the US and China - but at a colossal cost to the entire human race, including us.
But I disagree that Putin was pushed or coerced into starting the war. He was generally recognized as the richest man in the world, by far, and his country was easily selling everything that it produced, primarily to Europe but worldwide. His military has used the internet to dramatically warp the political and social fabric of the US to the detriment of democracy and freedom. There was absolutely no reason for him to start a war in Ukraine beyond incalculable hubris, and in doing it he has lost everything. He will spend the rest of his life as a pariah and a laughingstock.
Chomsky's claim that we deliberately goaded Putin into it to "degrade the capability of our main military enemy" is pretty far-fetched in my opinion. Besides, our main military enemy is China and has been for decades. Sure, the Russians are sitting on a big pile of nukes, but would they have ever used them in a stable world? How would attacking any other country with nuclear weapons benefit Russia?
I keep going back to Stephen Pinker's observation in
The Better Angels of Our Nature, written before the rise of Trumpism, that wars are in decline because they are simply bad for business. The decline of democracies and the rise of plutocracies has profoundly perverted that principle since 2016.
