“America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time” — Jimmy Carter, July 16, 2013

“The government in Washington represents powerful interest groups, not American citizens.” — former Reagan assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, February 6, 2016

The statements above, remember, were made BEFORE the ensuing (first?) Trump and Biden presidencies. In fact, since the U.S Supreme Court in 2000 appointed (by one vote) the loser of that year’s presidential election to occupy the Oval Office, democracy at death’s door had been the most salient feature of the U.S government for all the world to observe.

The ongoing Gaza Genocide, perpetrated by Israel but funded by U.S taxpayers, is the most current glaring example. MICMAC (Military Industrial Congressional Media Academic Complex) media also takes care to hide from Americans the long running debacle in Ukraine. The two disasters, as we shall see, are not unrelated.

The Cold War ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Prior to that, in 1990 U.S Secretary of State James Baker, President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl all assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not move “one inch eastward” if Gorbachev did not object to German reunification. Gorby agreed. However, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic all joined NATO. The sixteen-member bloc of NATO of 1991 has doubled in the last twenty-five years, with long neutral Sweden joining just this March 7.

Forwarding to late 2013, after nearly five-years of decent relations with Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama promoted a former Dick Cheney advisor and George W. Bush ambassador to NATO named Victoria Nuland to the position of assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. If she was told to destroy all diplomatic relations with Russia, she succeeded. To this day in fact.

Nuland became (briefly in the U.S.) infamous for her “blank the E.U” statement during a February 2014 phone conversation she had with U.S Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The European Union leaders preferred a different prime minister to the U.S choice; the U.S. man won out, and so we overthrew yet another democratically elected president of a foreign county, in this case Victor Yanukovich.

The blowback in Western Europe was huge; German Chancellor Angela Merkel was one of many who professed outrage. MICMAC media naturally barely mentioned it. Nuland was later promoted by President Biden to be deputy secretary of state for political affairs under Anthony Blinken.

The fact that we helped make Ukraine the poorest country in Europe caused no shame to Nuland and her allies — as long as we can use the country’s population to be our proxies against Putin — all is well. Russia of course invaded Ukraine in February 2022. No less an authority than NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted the following year that NATO “provoked” Putin into invading; if NATO were to expand once again this time up to Russia’s borders, Putin would respond. The fact that a civil war in Ukraine was going on for eight years between the Ukrainian western part and the Russian dominated eastern part is also somewhat relevant.

Nuland, whose retirement was just announced March 5, is married to neoconservative guru Robert Kagan, the co-author of 1996’s Project for the New American Century. PNAC is a think tank calling for a strong American military in the post-Cold War era, acknowledging that without some catastrophic event “like a new Pearl Harbor”, America would likely turn inward, no longer having a communist opposition to worry about. PNAC of course got its “new Pearl Harbor” with 9/11, delighting all Israeli leaders and their allies, who could argue now that the U.S should attack all “terrorist” governments who “coincidentally” happened to be enemies of Israel.

The PNAC signers tried to get President Clinton to attack Iraq, but he ignored them and subsequently faced impeachment. A much more receptive administration was found (after 9/11) in that of George W. Bush, who led the Iraq invasion on the nonexistent pretext of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. His Secretary of State Colin Powell knew better, but went ahead and gave a farcical 2003 presentation to the United Nations, making the case anyway. Powell later regretted making the speech, calling it a permanent “blot” on his record.

The 2024 presidential election looks increasingly likely to be a rematch of 2020. The Republican candidate faces 91 criminal counts in four separate indictments; the Democratic one is unabashedly having the U.S citizenry pay for a genocide/ethnic clearing of an entire Middle Eastern people. As a locally prominent attorney friend recently put it, “If this is democracy — you can have it.”

— Mark J. Plawecki is chief Judge of the 20th District Court in Dearborn Heights. His book Notes from the Outside the Truman Show explains in greater detail the sacrificial crisis now tearing apart American democracy.

This article has been edited for style.