U.S.-Russia Relations: Bill Perry’s Lies — Versus the Truth 

Eric Zuesse

William J. Perry, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during Bill Clinton’s first term (ending 20 January 1997), issued an article on September 5th, “How the U.S. Lost Russia”, whose concluding paragraph opened with “There is no organic reason why Russia should be our enemy. Putin is the enemy, not Russia.” In other words, he’s advocating for regime-change in Russia, like America did with regards to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and also leaders in many other countries — leaders virtually all of whom had had good relations with Russia’s or the prior Soviet Government, even if not outright favorable toward Russia. (Perhaps their refusals to join the U.S. regime’s organizations against Russia constituted actually the main reason why the U.S. regime sought to overthrow and replace each one of these rulers.)

However, Bill Perry himself, while he was in power, as the SecDef, was working to lay foundations for America’s ultimate conquest of Russia that were already building upon the foundation that Clinton’s immediate predecessor, GHW Bush, had started laying when, on 24 February 1990, Bush secretly informed German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that after the Soviet Union would break up and its communism end, and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact that had been established in response to Truman’s having created America’s military Alliance NATO would likewise end, America and its NATO allies would continue forward with the objective now being ultimately to conquer Russia itself. Shortly thereafter, Bush communicated essentially this same message, likewise privately, to the heads of the other key nations that were in NATO. As regards those leaders’ objections that they all, like GHW Bush’s own Administration, had already promised to Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union would break up, then NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia’s border), Bush told the leader, in response, that he had given this instruction to them all only in order to fool Gorbachev, but that, in fact, as regards actually delivering on that promise, they wouldn’t do that: “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.” In other words, he was instructing each of them that America continues actually with much the same objective that Hitler had had toward Russia in WW II: to conquer that nation, which had (and, even after the U.S.S.R’s breakup, still has) by far the largest landmass (and thus the most natural resources) of any nation on Earth. This was his instruction to them, and they all followed through on it: all of them, now under Bill Clinton, and subsequently under other U.S. Presidents, would and did vote in favor of admitting into NATO all of the former Warsaw Pact countries that they could (via bribe or otherwise) get to apply for membership into America’s anti-Russian military alliance. They all did it.

However, the perfidy of Perry’s lies didn’t stop there. His entire article ignores that when Perry was in power (and afterward) the Harvard Economics Department, and USAID, and the entirety of the U.S. Government, and World Bank, carried-out a program, as welcomed economic advisors to Yeltsin’s Russian Government, to mire the new Russia so deeply in corruption and looting from its Government, so as to set the stage for the U.S. ultimately to swallow it all up, with U.S. billionaires in partnerships with their newly created Russian ones, so as to bleed the Russian people economically to death and so grab direct control of their government. Furthermore, the IMF, which is, essentialy, a U.S. Government front, was also part of this government-heisting operation. Though Yeltsin objected to Clinton’s anti-Russia actions, such as Clinton’s bringing into NATO the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, it was already too late; and, then, in 2004, Bush Junior brought in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; and, in 2009, Obama brought in Albania and Croatia — all being violations of the verbal condition by the U.S., under which Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union (i.e., that the U.S. would NOT expand NATO towards Russia).

The U.S. National Security Archives has an article, “The Clinton-Yeltsin Relationship in Their Own Words”, and it opens: “President Bill Clinton saw Russian leader Boris Yeltsin as indispensable for promoting American interests following the collapse of the Soviet Union, often prompting him to take controversial steps to ensure Yeltsin’s political survival, according to top-level memoranda of conversation[s] just released from the Clinton presidential library.” Of course, Putin was the immediate successor to Yeltsin, and as unwelcomed as Yeltsin was welcomed. Instead of trying to overthrow Yeltsin, the U.S. Government helped to keep Yeltsin in power there.

As regards whether Putin has been better for the Russian people than Yeltsin was: Putin became Russia’s leader in 2000, and here is the answer: Russia’s economy sunk under Yeltsin and soared under Putin; and, starting in 2005 — when regulations against alcohol kicked in — male life-expectancies also soared in Russia. Putin’s job approval-ratings amongst Russians have almost always been far higher than that of America’s Presidents’ since 2000 have been at the comparable time. This fact greatly disturbs America’s ‘news’-media, so that, for example, on 6 March 2016, the Washington Post headlined “How to understand Putin’s jaw-droppingly high approval ratings” and closed by saying, “‘Switch off the television, and this popularity would go away in two months,’ said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now a leading opposition politician.” In other words: Russian propaganda does it. On 22 March 2022, CNN bannered “Former Russian TV host explains surprising Putin poll”, and presented a former Russian journalist who described Russia as a dictatorship, but who might have left Russia for the U.S. in order to make more money trashing his home-country in its main enemy nation than continuing to be a journalist in his home-country. However that may be (and I won’t speculate about that), these U.S. propaganda-agencies against Russia haven’t yet succeeded in providing any other reason to explain Putin’s job-performance-approval among his fellow-Russians than to insinuate that, somehow, it provides yet further evidence against (and so might help to ‘justify’ the U.S. regime’s constant efforts to overthrow and replace) Putin, while they also allege, like the liar Bill Perry does, that “There is no organic reason why Russia should be our enemy. Putin is the enemy, not Russia.” No, it’s not true: the fact is that the U.S. regime is Russia’s enemy, not merely Putin’s enemy. The U.S. regime demands nothing less than to take over Russia. Putin fights against that; and that fact could be the best possible single explanation why his job-approval ratings are, and have been, vastly higher than those of his American counterparts have been. It’s a possibility that America’s propaganda-agencies (alias ‘news’-media) never even so much as consider.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.