Consortium News has the article The Case for Pragmatism by Robert Parry.

There is always a fixation about getting rid of some designated “bad guy” even if the result is some “far-worse guys.” This has been a pattern repeated over and over again, from Libya to Sudan/South Sudan to Ukraine/Russia to Venezuela (just to name a few). In such cases, we see the neocons/liberal hawks release a flood of propaganda against some unpleasant target (Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi/Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir/Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych/Russia’s Vladimir Putin/Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro) followed by demands for “regime change” or at least punishing economic sanctions.

There is an awful tendency of the opposition party in this country to look at a bad situation, and demand that the party in power “do something”. As long as the party in power does not “do something”, they are under constant pressure from the other party. I think this is what leads to the driving force for “doing something” even if it is worse than “doing nothing”. Until a better idea is presented, sometimes “doing nothing” is exactly the something that needs to be done.

Parry also brings up some information that seems to have been neatly wiped from people’s minds in this country.

Toss into this volatile mix of a Europe seemingly close to explosion the Obama administration’s “neocon/liberal interventionist” policies toward Ukraine, where neocon holdover Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland helped orchestrate a 2014 coup to remove democratically elected President Yanukovych after he was demonized in the U.S. mainstream media as corrupt.

In sum total, Robert Parry makes the case against what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoted, and he doesn’t even mention her by name or by office. He also makes the case for a foreign policy that Bernie Sanders might get behind if it weren’t so politically dangerous to do so. Even Bernie Sanders has his limits on how much he dares tell the American public that has been infected by the oligarchs propaganda for so long.

I shouldn’t leave you hanging without at least a little taste for what Robert Parry sees as solutions.

So what can be done? As dark as the gathering economic storm may be, one silver lining could be that Americans and other Westerners will finally begin pushing back against the powerful neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist fellow-travelers.

Perhaps, instead of President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal being a one-off affair that may barely survive a determined neocon assault in the U.S. Congress, it could become a model for pragmatic approaches to other international crises. The core of this pragmatism would be that one doesn’t have to love or even like the leadership of another country to cooperate on global concerns, whether they are economic, geopolitical or environmental.