From the Monroe Doctrine to the ongoing blockade of Cuba, the United States has repeatedly exerted and exercised its prerogative to invade any country in its immediate region, up to and including the entire Western hemisphere, if it perceives a threat of any kind, whether real or imagined. So it’s a bit baffling that so many Americans violently deplore Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is right along its border, after Ukraine threatened to join NATO, an anti-Russian military alliance.
Invasions Are Only Bad When Russia Does Them
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Not to put too fine a point on it … bit I’d say Ukraine and Russia SHARE a border and that Ukraine was formerly one of the republics of the USSR until the US convinced Gorbachev to dismantle the USSR … on the verbal (yet readily traceable) US “promise” that, in return, NATO would not expand beyond the eastern border of reunited Germany. This promise has been violated some 14 times since.
If Russia engineered a coup in Mexico City to install a puppet government and that government began artillery shelling of various, well-established locations of American ex-patriots, would the US wait eight years to retaliate? (Yeah, I know, the US probably would react against said government, as a projection of Russia, directly and let its besieged citizens be damned.)
Re first panel: the more pertinent issue with Cuba occurred a year after the Bay of Pigs invasion when evidence of Russian ballistic missiles was found in Cuba … in response to “American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Here’s an interesting article on US projection of its inadequacies onto others with regard to the current situation in Ukraine: tinyurl.com/yuv8rwe5
Finally, let us not forget the myriad wars of the US … on the other side of the world, thousands of miles from its borders, since WWII … and that the US has some 800 military bases in 2/3 of the world’s countries.
Your fourth panel needs about six pages of additional provocations to be fully accurate, including supporting a coup, threatening to do the same to Russia, then training, equipping and funding Nazi forces within Ukraine.