My Take | Ukraine has become a proxy war for the United States
- Russia’s outright defeat is now paramount to Washington, rather than peace in Ukraine. Trouncing Putin will remove an old foe, undermine the alliance between Moscow and Beijing, and allow the US to refocus total hostility on China
It seems increasingly clear that, so far as the United States is concerned, there is a big difference in goal and method when it comes to “saving Ukraine” and “defeating Russia”. The two goals are not the same and may even be incompatible. Is Russia’s defeat now the unstated end game that the US is seeking?
It’s worth observing that war cries are coincidentally reaching a fever pitch as to drown out alternative voices in the US while its mainstream media offer non-stop coverage on a foreign war that involves no US troops on the ground.
According to a study by the Tyndall Report, an authoritative journalism newsletter which has been tracking and analysing nightly newscasts since 1987, the three major TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have spent more time together in their reporting on the Ukraine war than all other wars in the last 31 years, including those started by the US.
Combined, they devoted 562 minutes to covering the first full month of the war in Ukraine, compared with the first month of the US invasion of Panama in December 1989 (240 mins), its intervention in Somalia in 1992 (423 mins), and the first month of its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 (306 minutes).
Quite extraordinarily, the two peak months of coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion each saw less saturated coverage – 414 minutes in March of 2003 and 455 minutes in April – than last month in Ukraine.
Of course, these are just three TV networks. Practically all other major news outlets in the US – and also in Europe – have been offering non-stop news coverage. For Europeans, though, it’s understandable because the war is right in their own backyard.