Robert J Kennedy Jr has dropped out of the US presidential election race and endorsed Donald Trump. Image: X Screengrab

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the last living torch-bearer of his family’s political dynasty, endorsed Donald Trump in a scorched-earth August 23 speech denouncing the American foreign policy establishment for provoking and perpetuating the Ukraine war.

In particular, he blamed the American Neocons for the Ukraine conflict and declared that Trump’s promise to reopen negotiations with Russia and end the war as soon as he took office were reason enough to endorse the former president’s campaign.

According to the most recent NBC poll, Kennedy Jr, son of the former attorney general and senator Robert F Kennedy, would have received 10% of the vote in the presidential election. In a tight election, Kennedy Jr’s support might decide the outcome for Trump over rival Kamala Harris.

Kennedy Jr’s address was a bill of indictment of the US foreign policy elite for deliberately drawing Russia into the Ukraine war with the object of regime change.

No politician of standing has taken on the establishment so comprehensively. Trump told a podcast last June that NATO’s expansion plans provoked the war. Kennedy Jr’s denunciation was thorough, sweeping and ruthless.

“The military-industrial complex has provided us with a familiar comic-book justification as they do with every war. This one is a noble effort to stop a super-villain named Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. In fact,” Kennedy Jr said, “tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US Neocons for American global hegemony.”

The corporate media will ignore or distort Kennedy Jr’s detailed indictment of the foreign policy elites. Below is my transcription of highlights of his address.

“The war is the predictable response of Russia to the neocon project to expand NATO and encircle Russia. We unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear weapons systems in Romania and Poland. This is a hostile, hostile act. And the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offers to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy Jr said.

“The Ukraine war,” he continued, “began in 2014 when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk Agreement, that had been negotiated between Ukraine and Russia and the European nations. In April 2022, we wanted the war. President Biden sent [then UK prime minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were already withdrawing troops.”

“That peace agreement,” Kennedy added, “would have brought peace to the region and allowed Donbass to remain part of Ukraine.”

Biden’s “objective in the war is regime change in Russia,” Kennedy said. “His Defense Secretary [Lloyd] Austin…explained that the purpose of the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight  fighting anywhere else in the world.”

“These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war and it’s a victim of the West…We’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth, as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids, and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning.… Ukraine’s infrastructure has been destroyed…The war has been a disaster for our country, too. We’ve squandered nearly US$200 billion already that was badly needed in our communities.”

Referring to widespread reports that US intelligence agencies were responsible for destroying the main conduit of Russian gas to Germany, Kennedy said, “The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of American national security. A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much stronger deterrent to Russia than a Germany that is deindustrialized and is just an extension of a US military base.”

“President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign.”

Kennedy Jr’s intervention might well decide the outcome of the presidential election. If it does, the implications for American politics will transcend the personalities and ambitions of the candidates.

He has turned a spotlight onto the dark recesses of American politics and shown things to American voters that they cannot unsee. The corporate media will ask voters to believe what they are told rather than their own eyes. This time, the trick may not succeed.

Follow David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman