Sober Belizeans have to be alarmed by the public blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine which the new U.S. President, Donald Trump, has cast upon the Ukrainians.

There are some who say that President Trump’s very friendly attitude towards the Russians derives from the fact that some years ago when he was broke, his businesses were bailed out by Russian banks. 

Be that as it may, those of us Belizeans who live in The Jewel under the threat of invasion from the aggressive republic west and south of us, really have to sit up and take notice of what’s going on here.

Russia used to be known as the U.S.S.R., which stands for “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” It was a giant feudal monarchy in Eastern Europe/Asia until 1917 when the world’s first real communist (workers) revolution overthrew the czarist royal family and Russia began to become an economic power.

Of the 40 million who were killed in Nazi Germany’s World War II, roughly 26 million of these were Russians. In a real sense, it was Josef Stalin’s U.S.S.R. which stopped Adolf Hitler’s Germany from taking over the world.

When World War II ended, Stalin’s Russia, Winston Churchill’s Great Britain, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s United States were a victorious troika. They posed together at Yalta for the photographers. Churchill, however, was afraid of the totalitarian Russian state, which he referred to as an “Iron Curtain,” and soon the communist Russia and the capitalist United States began to fight for world dominance — the British Empire, which had ruled the planet after defeating France’s Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century, having begun to fade somewhat.

Just four years after the end of World War II, China, which had been one of the world’s poorest countries, became the second huge population (after Russia in 1917) to declare a Communist Revolution. The speed at which China then began to develop was such that the U.S., locked in its “Cold War” with the Russians, reached out to the Chinese in the early 1970s for friendship, the Chinese having begun to compete and quarrel with the Russians.

By 1989, communism was struggling as an economic system in the U.S.S.R., and so it was that in the early 1990s the U.S.S.R. split up, with mother Russia losing control of several of its so-called republics, such as Ukraine, Crimea, Belarus, and so on. 

Many knowledgeable observers feel that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, having taken back Crimea some years before, was a prelude to an attempt to reconstruct the U.S.S.R.

Trump’s decision to partner with Putin against the Ukraine represents a stunning reversal of American foreign policy since World War II, absolutely stunning.

Before Trump made his essentially anti-Ukrainian announcement, he had threatened to take over Canada, invade Greenland, and grab back the Panama Canal. This kind of rhetoric has to be frightening for those of us Belizeans who have remained in The Jewel. Such rhetoric suggests that Trump would not be bothered in the least if the Guatemalan generals decided to invade Belize. In fact, he might well blame Belize.