The second paragraph of the introduction to Stephen Kinser’s (All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror) new book on Ukraine titled Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine ends with the sentence: “Russia was the aggressor.”  The previous sentence acknowledges the Russian invasion of February 2022.  The rest of the text describes the decades long manipulation of Ukraine’s people and geographical position by the US foreign policy establishment, from the State Department to the White House and Pentagon and, finally, to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), especially its department involved with covert operations.

It is certainly a long history with a clear intent—utilize Ukraine’s ultra-right nationalists to antagonize the government in Moscow.  Whether that government was led by Stalin, Khruschev, Kosygin, Putin or any of the other rulers in between, Washington’s goal was both long-range and immediate.  The long-range goal remains a splintered and weakened Russia; this was the case during the days of the Soviet Union as much as it is the case today more than thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR.  As Kinzer makes clear, the Ukrainian nationalists leading the charge are driven by a hatred of Russia perhaps best described as pathological.  In the first half of the twentieth century many of the nationalists were actual Nazis; most of the rest had worked in tandem with the Nazis during World War Two, killing thousands of Jews, leftists and others on the Nazis list of untermenschen.  In today’s Ukraine, many of those killers’ descendants are now integrated into the Ukrainian military and many have kept the hatreds of their predecessors intact.  Similarly, many of those in Europe and the US who support the Ukrainian war against Russia have carried their grandparents’ hatred of Moscow into the twenty-first century.  Indeed, as Kinzer notes throughout his text, many of the key architects of US policy regarding Ukraine—from Brzezinski to Albright to Blinken—grew up hearing tales of how the big bad Soviets/Russians stole their great grandparents land and wealth and killed the Tsar.  When one takes these personal tales and adds them to the centuries long European fear of Russia and the Slavs, the response on how to respond to Moscow is often one that turns all to quickly to subversion and ultimately war.

Boiling Point is dense with historical fact and equanimous in its narrative.  The author lays out the facts of US interest and intervention in Ukraine, describing covert operations undertaken in the late 1940s and 1950s that often resulted in the participants being captured by Soviet forces and never being heard from again.  As Kinzer reveals, this most likely happened as often as it did because the CIA’s assets in Ukraine were either double agents, Soviet spies or nationalists who revealed the operations under duress.  As is often the case in the world of espionage, the cynical nature of the US spymasters that sent the Ukrainian volunteers to their death was as cynical as their Soviet counterparts if not more so.

It wasn’t until January 10, 1975 that the CIA operations in Ukraine were made legal by Congress.  Prior to that date, when US president Gerald Ford signed the law legalizing the ops, the men in the CIA running them were not merely engaging in criminal acts, they were actual criminals according to the law.  Of course, since they were CIA, their crimes went unpunished in court and usually unmentioned in the media.  Later in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president, his rabidly anti-Soviet/anti-communist National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski began arming the mujaheddin in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviet-friendly government in Kabul at the time.  This was accompanied by an intensification of covert activity in Ukraine, mostly in the propaganda field. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the reshaping of Ukraine into a battering ram of the west against Moscow began to take its current form.  As Kinzer describes those years, he makes it clear that the White House under Clinton and both Bushes was not necessarily rabidly anti-Russian, with the elder Bush even calling the right-wing nationalists leading the CIA’s work inside the country ” suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred,” the men and women in Washington running the campaign to get Kyiv into the US sphere were almost as Russophobic as their Eastern European counterparts.  It was during this period that, together with various US politicians, from John McCain to Madeleine Albright, liberal foundations like the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the numerous CIA front organizations set up after Reagan semi-privatized certain covert operations of the CIA by creating the National Endowment for Democracy, the US decided it would expand NATO with the hope that it could finally get US forces on the border with Russia—by making Ukraine its neocolony/client state.

Of course, as the current situation reminds us, this would not be an easy task.  Moscow had little reason to trust Washington’s motives in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.  After Washington made it clear that it had no intention to abide by its verbal “promise” not to expand NATO and that it would never consider NATO membership for Moscow, Russia clearly had no reason to believe Washington.   The final chapters of Kinzer’s text frame the events of the twenty-first century with this understanding.  It becomes clear in Kinzer’s telling that Washington had concluded that it could turn Ukraine into its front line in a conflict that only an economy based on war profiteering would consider beneficial.  This decision created some unusual bedfellows: the Clintons, Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama, John McCain, the Bushes, George Soros and many others across the US political establishment, not to mention various European regimes eager to capture some kind of long-faded imperial glory.  Kinzer notes that the most aggressive champions of US intervention into Ukraine have been members of the Democratic party. It was their adventurism, cheerleading and funding that midwifed the coup in 2014 and it has been their support for war with Moscow that convinced Zelensky’s government to reject the peace agreement in Spring of 2022.  It is also why there is still no resolution of the conflict.

Kinzer’s history describes a US policy driven by US obstinacy, arrogance and dreams of empire. Its policy in Ukraine, which is similar to Washington’s policy regarding Cuba, is fueled by personal grudges so far off the mark to be considered reasonable, while the Ukrainian people are mere pawns in Washington’s game.  The Boiling Point reveals a policy based in an imperial arrogance, lies and falsehoods, an unwarranted belief in the exceptionalism of the United States and its supposed destiny, and an immature Russophobia, all driven by the need of US capital to expand by any means necessary, while simultaneously blocking its perceived enemies attempting to do the same.