How Stephen Kinzer’s new bestseller saying Washington started the Ukraine war is topical, readable, and wrong
A new book by a prominent American author argues that the US provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. Catalogue it under “fiction”, writes Edward Lucas.
Since the late 1940s, a clique of influential Americans has hijacked their country’s foreign policy to settle personal and family grudges, using Ukraine as a weapon. The result, as avoidable as it was predictable, has been the disaster of Russia’s invasion.
That is the argument put forward by Stephen Kinzer in Boiling Point: How America brought war to Ukraine .
He opens with the disastrous clandestine operations that started in 1949, aimed at supporting the underground anti-communist resistance in Ukraine and other countries.
They were the work of Frank Wisner , a CIA boss traumatised by witnessing the communist seizure of power in Romania. Other villains include Zbigniew Brzezinski (the son of a Polish diplomat), Madelaine Albright (daughter of a Czechoslovak one) and Victoria Nuland , who has family roots in Moldova and (by marriage) Lithuania.
Like the others, Kinzer argues, “she imbibed anti-Russian passion with her mother’s milk”.
These sentiments fuelled what Kinzer calls “the inter-agency”, a self-selecting, powerful group of US government officials, fixated on using their country’s foreign policy as a “cudgel” against the Kremlin.
Edward Lucas is a former senior editor at The Economist, founder and director of the Baltic International Security Centre think-tank, and a regular writer on defence, security and espionage for The Times and Foreign Policy. He is the author of The New Cold War (2008) and Deception (2011).
