The White House announced late Tuesday that President Obama will sign into a law a provocative, yet largely ignored, bill passed by both chambers of Congress last week that critics say increases the chances of a future military confrontation with Russia.
Despite some reservations voiced by the president, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said Obama will sign the bill by the end of the week, making law a bill that calls for new economic sanctions against Russia while also authorizing the sale of military equipment to the Kiev government in Ukraine and hundreds of millions of dollars in other support.
As The Hill reports:
Critics, including former congressman from Ohio Dennis Kucinich, have raised serious objections to both the contents of the bill and how it was rushed through Congress with little debate. In a scathing op-ed warning that his former colleauges may be recklessly laying the groundwork for a new and deeper Cold War between the U.S./NATO alliance and Russia, Kucinich called the sanctions bill “a hydra-headed incubator of poisonous conflict.”
In his argument against the bill, Kucinich enumerated its contents as he pointed out, based on his own experience in the House, that few members of Congress likely read its content nor fully understand the implications of what they have approved. According to his summary the new law will include:
The law received wide bipartisan support, but as Kucinich indicates, the dangers of further isolating and provoking Russia could result in serious future backlash.
Though Russia has been consistently characterized in the western media as the aggressor throughout this year’s crisis in Ukraine, many experts on the situation point out that the U.S. and NATO played an essential role in fomenting the uprising that resulted in a coup and that ongoing support for the new government in Kiev, alongside persistent demonization of Putin’s role, has placed eastern Europe back on the verge of a conflated military conflict.
“Under the guise of democratizing,” Kucinich argues, “the West stripped Ukraine of its sovereignty with a U.S.-backed coup, employed it as a foil to advance NATO to the Russian border and reignited the Cold War, complete with another nuclear showdown.”
Now, he continued, the new sanctions and shipment of new weapons to Ukraine will have predictable results. “Each Western incitement creates a Russian response,” he continued, “which is then given as further proof that the West must prepare for the very conflict it has created.”
The result, he warns, is obvious. “War as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”