The Western mass media must be the envy of doddering news editors, formerly in charge in the extinct Soviet Union, for not only obsequiously echoing their governments but for ginning it up. One cannot help but marvel at the voluntary lockstep complicity, considering that the Ukraine crisis they are doing their best to enflame involves touchy nuclear powers. any one of which can incinerate half the planet and make the rest a hell hole.

During the Second World War the Allies (which, lest we forget, included the Soviets) referred to different regional spheres of military activity as “theatres of operations.” Theatre is quite the right word when witnessing shamelessly stage-managed events such as the Vietnam war and the Iraq invasion with their fabricated pretexts, respectively, of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and WMD, and what is now transpiring in and around Ukraine. Given all the blustering one hears about Russian violation of Ukrainian sovereignty innocent onlookers might surmise that the US strived to be stringent in its observance of other countries’ sacred sovereignty, and they’d be woefully and spectacularly wrong.

A mere list of the long sorry record of the alacrity of US interventions abroad would exceed the space of this entire article. Cuba in 1962 possessed the sovereign right to defend itself from US assaults, which were plentiful, but the gringo superpower didn’t see it that way and the whole world came within a jittery nerve ending or two of going up in radioactive smoke. Although the US galloped to the apocalyptic brink to prevent missiles installed 90 miles off its shores, foreign policy experts today cannot imagine why Russia would be upset about similar NATO schemes along their border.

The US in 1824, before it deployed a strong Navy, issued the Monroe Doctrine claiming the Southern hemisphere for itself with no outside meddling allowed whether or not Latin American nations welcomed it. Russia, though, is not allowed to insist upon, let alone, impose, a buffer zone of any kind.

The Soviet Union lost 25 to 30 million souls after the Nazi invasion in the Second World War. What are they whining about now, US and EU officials scratch their heads and profess to wonder? Would the US stand idly by while Russians covertly backed a coup in Canada or Mexico, as the US did in Ukraine in 2014, and then acquiesce to a Russian military buildup along its frontier? Mexico and Canada would be transformed in a trice into US protectorates before that scenario ever came off.

When the US needed a canal across Central America it concocted a separatist force so as to carve off Panama from Columbia. Russia, however, is not permitted to aid Russian-speaking Southeastern regions in Ukraine whose language was banned by an ultranationalist (laced with genuine fascists) government after a coup that US officials bragged they assisted. Moreover, in the early 1990s, the US via then President George H. W. Bush verbally promised not to pry NATO into former Soviet bloc countries. Once the Russians departed such oral agreements, as film studio mogul Sam Goldwyn remarked, became not worth the paper they are printed on.

Likely not, but the instant ditching of the promise by a nakedly opportunistic US hardly gave the wary Russians any reason to trust the West. When US politicians serenely avow that the only thing Putin’s Russia understands is force it is because that is the only thing they understand and by which they have ever been stopped. When US leaders assert that Russia is a compulsively expansionist state it is because they themselves exhibit exactly the same rude compulsion, if in the holy name of self-defense.

Measure NATO expansion against Russian terrain since 1991 and see who has been getting the better of the great game lately. If Russia calls a halt to NATO recruitment in and around Ukraine, indignant expansionists accordingly cry foul. A ritualized dancelike element suffuses these familiar geopolitical manoeuvres, which savvy diplomats comprehend and, if allowed, can work out. The highly combustible ingredient is the hysterical media chorus of “imminent invasion,” sedulously stoked by Western states.

Austrian wit Karl Krauss long ago observed that statesmen typically tell lies and then believe them after they read them in the newspapers. That is the supreme danger ~ a stray spark generating a conflagration ~ and not the objective situation, which can be remedied by old-fashioned diplomacy. A return to implementing the Minsk Protocols of 2014-2015 is a good place to start.

The rich benefits of the crisis for Western elites are easy to discern: redirect public attention to foreign monsters rather than the task of readjusting an untenable unceasing concentration of wealth at home, multiply sanctions on Moscow until there are none left, justify high military budgets, and test how far a fearful citizenry will go along with media narratives. Then pretend after a mutual disengagement that the virtuous West again has fended off the ravenous Russian bear. How can elites resist brinksmanship under these advantageous conditions?

In this grim geopolitical game Ukraine itself is almost beside the point, and is suffering severely from the economic and psychological effects of an unnecessarily hair-trigger environment. Consider who benefits most from false flag operations that President Biden alleges are a-foot in the area ~ the Russians or the ultra-right wing Ukrainian paramilitaries? In this roiling theatrical morass lurks the slim possibility of triggering war through myopic miscalculation. The Donbass does not deserve to become the next Sarajevo.

(The writers are well-known political commentators and the authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and many other books)