President Biden’s 11th hour decision to escalate the war in Ukraine is the kind of quixotic, unilateral exercise of power that we have been told to expect from Donald Trump. Nothing has disappointed me more about the Biden administration than their appetite for war and indifference to the human suffering caused by it. Blood thirstiness, however, is not the sole province of the Democratic Party. Instead, it is a symptom of a larger and more malignant rot that set into American foreign policy after 9/11.
In January 2022, I received a call from retired British commando Nug Benham. He told me that he was departing for Kiev the next morning to reconnect with his defense contractor colleagues “before things kicked off.” On January 27, 2022, one month before the Russian invasion, I published, “Ukraine 1: Anomalies, Collapsing Paradigms, and the Courage To Draw Conclusions.” While this essay was partially about the coming war in Ukraine, it was also the collapse of America’s post 9/11 foreign policy paradigms.
By 2022, Bush’s “full-spectrum” global military dominance had given way to the false benevolence of the Obama/Biden administrations’ “soft power.” After Trump’s election in 2016, neoconservatives and humanitarian hawks closed ranks, ignored their failures—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Niger—and searched for new monsters to destroy abroad. America’s greatest success during the post 9/11 era was the financial exploitation of conflict. By the time the war in Ukraine began, the retail corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq had matured into wholesale monopoly capitalism. Win, lose, or draw, BlackRock, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics and many others would extract huge profits from this war.
To me, America’s retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 was a metaphor for the collective failures of two decades of U.S. statecraft. However, the humiliating, tail-between-legs withdrawal did prevent our leaders from making embarrassing assertions of exceptionalism, virtue and entitlement to rule the world.
This made perfect sense. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the greatest resistance to change comes before and during the collapse of a reigning paradigm. Its defenders, in this case the neoliberal elite, “devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, almost to the day that Nug Benham had predicted, my small, nonprofit organization, Fainting Robin Foundation (FRF), hired Benham as our field director.
Benham would remain in Ukraine, often near or on the front lines, for most of the war. Initially, FRF’s humanitarian efforts were aimed at mitigating human suffering. In the first weeks of the war, Benham evacuated civilians, delivered supplies to civilians in harm’s way, and helped Ukrainian associates ferry supplies in from bordering nations.
Six weeks into the war, I learned that Ukrainian and Russian leaders were meeting in Belarus and Turkey to negotiate an end to the conflict and thought that cooler heads would prevail.
My hope quickly turned to disgust. After Russia and Ukraine outlined the basic terms of a peace agreement in the Istanbul Communique, the American-led West torpedoed the proposed peace treaty. “When we returned from Istanbul,” said Davyd Arakhamia, head of the Ukrainian negotiating team, “Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we [the West] won’t sign anything at all with [the Russians]—and let’s just keep fighting.” Anonymous sources close to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrayinska Pravda,“Johnson's position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. Moreover, there is a chance to ‘press’ him. And the West wants to use it.”
As the war in the Ukraine dragged on and turned into a bloody stalemate, it grew increasingly surreal to me. While press trumpeted the coming Ukrainian offensive and my American associates from the military industrial complex bragged about their lucrative new contracts, the U.S., UK, and French defense contractors in Ukraine complained bitterly about the military hardware they were not getting and the lives that this was costing. “It’s clear to me that NATO’s politicians plan to let Ukraine burn, but they won’t give up. The Ukrainians are pretty die hard. They stand and fight, I’ll give them that,” wrote Benham in March 2022.
Between January and June of 2022, I wrote seven essays about the war in Ukraine: Ukraine 1: Anomalies, Collapsing Paradigms, and the Courage To Draw Conclusions; Ukraine 2: False Flags and “Crisis Actors;” Ukraine 3: The Hypocritical Tradition in American Foreign Policy; Ukraine 4: Putin’s Gambit; Ukraine 5: The Bully With the Bloody Nose; Ukraine 6: Putin in the Defendants’ Dock?; Ukraine 7: Here’s Johnny! and published them on my Substack page, Sour Milk.
Throughout my career I have experienced and accepted criticism and government pushback as the price for speaking truth to power. However, it now felt very different. More often than not, the critiques were ad hominem attacks. One effete New York City writer who had no interest in foreign affairs prior to this conflict, called me “a Putin Stooge.” The same people who told me that Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler now told me that Putin was the next Hitler and that if he was not stopped in Ukraine, he would take Europe. However, when an associate with ties to the U.S. government asked me, “What are your motives for criticizing this war?” I felt like I had time traveled back to the McCarthy era. Even the words used to attack critics of the war— “apologist,” “stooge,” “sympathizer,” “Russian asset,” “treasonous,” “toadie,” “apologist”—were stale, Cold War cliches.
In early June 2022, I received a message from Facebook informing me that because my posts “violated community standards,” my accounts were now suspended. A few days later, Facebook told me that not only had I violated community standards, I had also posted “sexually inappropriate images of minors.” Shortly thereafter, I received similar messages from Instagram.
Because charges of posting Kiddie Porn on social media cannot go unanswered, I asked my lawyer to send a registered letter to Meta’s (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) chief legal officer challenging these claims. I was stunned, but not surprised, to learn that Meta’s top lawyer was none other than Jennifer Newstead.
The Harvard, Yale, and Davis, Polk, Wardell alumnus was one of the authors and enforcers of the Patriot Act and had spent most of her career in senior U.S. government positions. She, like many other intelligence and government officials, had migrated to Silicon Valley, and sold her services to the highest bidder: Mark Zuckerberg.
“It's too easy to connect the dots and say, well, she did surveillance for the federal government. Now she's taking over surveillance at Facebook,” said privacy expert and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu.
Department of Justice whistleblowers, at the time of my deplatforming, said that Meta was reporting the private messages and the data of American citizens to the FBI for expressing what they defined as “anti-government” or “anti-authority sentiments.” According to Meta’s own records, between January and June of that year, Facebook received 69,363 government requests for data and delivered it to the U.S. government 87.97% of the time. Did my criticism of U.S. foreign policy now constitute “anti-government” and “anti-authority sentiments”? Was I no longer protected by the 1st Amendment?
Newstead and Meta never responded to my lawyer’s queries and all of my social media platforms remained locked down. Without Facebook and Instagram, I was unable to publicize Sour Milk, and my growth and subscriber revenue began to shrink. I did not waste time and energy on a battle that I could not win. Instead, I focused on the larger war, said good riddance to the social media cesspool, stopped charging Sour Milk readers, and took a day job in construction management to buy me the time and freedom to write. In 2023 and 2024, I wrote Ukraine 8: The Only Thing that Now Fills up are the Trenches and Graves; Ukraine 9: The Bitter Harvest; Ukraine 10: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose; and Ukraine 11: We Are the Ones Shedding Blood, and America Needs A Truth and Reconciliation Commission and published two guest essays (How to Win the War in Ukraine and Vyshyvanka Day 2023).
Also during this time, Fainting Robin Foundation continued our humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. Nug Benham investigated and confirmed the deaths of American MIAs serving in the Ukrainian Legion, attempted to locate Ukrainian children/teens who had been relocated to Russia, and delivered humanitarian supplies (food and winter clothing) to elderly civilians trapped near the front lines.
While my heart is with the brave and outnumbered Ukrainians, my brain is not. Now, almost three years and 175 billion dollars later, it is clear that this war will not end with a decisive Ukrainian victory. Not only have their NATO-backed forces failed to halt Russian aggression, but they are not recapturing lost ground. 75,000‑100,000 Ukrainians are dead, 8 million citizens have fled, and the country has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.
Rather than end his presidency on a high note by bringing both sides to the negotiating table and attempting to end the conflict, the Biden administration has decided to escalate the conflict. Last week, The New York Times quoted “anonymous American and European officials” who “suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent.” The response from Russian senior security official Dmitry Medvedev was immediate. “Looks like my sad joke about crazy senile Biden, who’s eager to go out with a bang and take a substantial part of humanity with him, is becoming dangerously real.”
This week, the powerful podcaster Joe Rogan became America’s Neo McCarthyites’ latest targets. After he called for a pause in long range missile attacks on Russia because they could “potentially start World War III,” America’s mainstream press accused him of spreading “Russian propaganda.” The great Ukrainian boxing champion, Wladimir Klitschko, whose brother Vitali is the mayor of Kiev, also took offense to Rogan’s comments. “Putin’s Russia wants to destroy Ukraine quietly, they want America to stay quiet—not great,” he said. “A great America is not an America that abandons countries that defend freedom with their lives.” Sadly, as valiant as the Klitschko brothers and Ukrainians who have fought the Russians are, he is wrong.
Abandoning allies is as American as apple pie. As South Vietnamese, Cambodians, Kurds, Iraqis, and Afghanis can attest, it is one of the few constants in modern U.S. international relations. Henry Kissinger put it best, “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
The Biden administration’s attempt to escalate the proxy war in Ukraine is symptomatic of a much larger and more malignant problem that afflicts U.S. foreign policy. Since 2001, our leaders have not lacked geopolitical vision or a grand strategy. However, their vision and strategy was fatally flawed. Our ruling elites lost sight of a fundamental precept of international politics: policy is the brain and military might is only the fist. If the brain and the fist are not in sync, you will punch yourself in the face as we have done over and over during the past 23 years. No nation, no matter how powerful their military, can effectively use force without intellectually honest and obtainable policy objectives. Nothing has changed since Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War in 1827, “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”
PS. Jennifer Newstead remains Meta’s chief legal officer and today her net worth is estimated to be between 40 and 89 million dollars. Meta has still not responded to my lawyer’s letters, restored my accounts, or returned my intellectual property. The Meta Archipelago: One Day in the Life of Peter Maguire