Scott Horton's Aptly Named "Provoked"

Just posted my Amazon customer review of Scott Horton’s outstanding Provoked, the definitive guide to what really caused and continues to prolong the war in Ukraine:

Among so many other things, “Provoked” is a standout expression of Brandolini’s Law, AKA the “BS Asymmetry Principle” (I’d prefer not to use demure abbreviation, but I don’t know if Amazon would approve the word itself).

Brandolini’s Law posits that “The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” And for decades, the western establishment has been working nonstop to obscure the real causes and consequences of NATO metastasis—metastasis that follow the end of the USSR, the country NATO was ostensibly created to defend against—metastasis which finally provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. So it’s understandable that Scott Horton had to invest two and a half years and 7,000 footnotes to refute this deluge of propaganda.

In another sense, though, it’s bewildering that the refutation was necessary in the first place, given that NATO expansion is so obviously the cause of America’s and NATO’s current proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. And if you think NATO expansion is “Kremlin Talking Points” or whatever, you must also believe that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is a Kremlin agent, because Stoltenberg himself acknowledged that Russia invaded Ukraine to stop NATO from expanding. You can look it up (it’s also footnoted in the book). Similarly, if you think “proxy war” is “Kremlin Talking Points,” look up “Boris Johnson Ukraine proxy war.”

Back to the book:

Humans are far more alike than they are different. So the first resort of any sensible person trying to understand another person’s behavior should be to ask some version of, “What would I do under similar circumstances?”

In the case of America’s and NATO’s war with Russia in Ukraine, that question would be, “What would I do if a foreign military alliance relentlessly expanded over the course of decades—eventually doubling in size, incorporating almost all my former allies, and ultimately attempting to incorporate nations along my most vulnerable borders?”

Ask that question honestly, and the rest, as they say, is commentary.

But note that we don’t even have to pose the question theoretically. Why does the US government have a Monroe Doctrine? Precisely because the US government feels threatened by foreign influence in our near abroad. Or consider the Cuban Missile Crisis. America provoked the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey, which bordered the USSR. The USSR provoked America back by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, off the coast of Florida. It was only the dumbest luck that prevented those provocations from leading to a war that would have exterminated humanity.

So while in once sense it’s dispiriting that this book even needed to be written, the reality is that propaganda is a powerful force and requires a powerful corrective. The entire western establishment wants the world to believe the war in Ukraine was forced on NATO because Putin is the latest New Hitler, who “unprovoked” started the war out of an insane desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, to undermine the “Rules Based Order,” etc. The more you believe those sorts of NATO talking points, the more you would benefit from testing your beliefs with the extraordinarily well told story documented in this book.