Will the West’s Paranoia of Russia Destroy the World?
Will the West’s Paranoia of Russia Destroy the World?
Paul Craig Roberts
Do you remember the James Bond film in which a deranged Soviet General wanted to launch a nuclear war, or Dr. Strangelove, an American deranged general who wanted to do the same? Well, Dr. Strangelove is still with us, but he is no longer considered insane.
In today’s Pentagon spreading nuclear weapons among allies who lack them in order to conduct an even larger nuclear war is just good war planning. On April 1, and unfortunately it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, the nominee as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, said that the United States was ready to consider entering into nuclear sharing agreements with more of the country’s NATO allies. “From a military perspective, expanding NATO allies’ participation in the nuclear deterrence mission in some capacity would enhance flexibility, survivability, and military capability. If confirmed, I will work… to evaluate the cost/benefit of such a decision.” https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/next-pentagon-chief-confirms-willingness-provide-more-allies-nuclear-attack
The nominee said that another benefit of providing nuclear weapons to NATO members who don’t have them is to prevent nuclear proliferation resulting from acquiring them on their own. If too many of our allies have the weapons, the US would not be able to manage the escalation risk.
What Caine said makes sense. We do not want Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, or Poland launching a nuclear war.
But what this common sense hides is the absurdity of “managing nuclear war.”
There is a consensus, or close to one, that nuclear war would be lethal to life on the planet. It calls to mind the novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the spaceship loading with human, animal, and plant life for a distant planet in a short period of time remaining prior to nuclear armageddon on earth.
It is, of course, the Pentagon’s job to be prepared for war. But as the war the Pentagon is preparing for is unwinnable, why not attempt to prepare for peace? What cause is worth fighting for it if results in the death of planet Earth?
These thoughts entered the mind of President John F. Kennedy. JFK had campaigned as a Cold Warrior proclaiming a “missile gap.” Somehow President Eisenhower, World War II hero and 5-star general had let the Soviets get ahead of us. Kennedy was rescued from his delusion by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. He refused the request to allow the US Air Force to support the CIA’s Cuban refugee army’s invasion of Cuba. He refused the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Northwoods Project” ( https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf ), which called for the US Air Force to shoot down US passenger airliners, staff boats of refugees from Cuba to Florida, and kill Americans on the streets of Miami and Washington, D.C., and blame Castro as justification for a US invasion of Cuba. He rejected the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan for nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. All of this information is publicly available, but few are aware of it.
Kennedy worked behind the scenes with Soviet leader Khrushchev to defuse the dangerous situation. Instead of recognizing Kennedy’s leadership, the US military/security complex saw Kennedy as “soft on communism,” a traitor-in-the-making to America who had to be removed from office. As Kennedy was popular, assassination was the solution.
I agree with James Douglas, Oliver Stone, and all the rest that Kennedy was murdered by the US Security State. Where I depart from them is over whether it should have been revealed or covered up. Here facts are not the issue, just judgment, and judgment is not infallible.
I do not believe that anyone on the Warren Commission believed the report. The entire purpose of the report was to protect the American public from losing confidence in their own government in the midst of a dangerous Cold War with a nuclear-armed opponent in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs. With the balance of power in the world at stake, the United States would have been harmed by official admission that the security agencies of the US government had assassinated its own president.
I agree that today six decades after JFK’s assassination, the truth, long proven by independent investigators, could be officially recognized, and perhaps it will be.
What I will address instead is how the truth could have presented in 1963 if only the American government were up to the task.
Once sworn in, Lyndon Johnson could have said something along the following lines:
“Dear fellow Americans, Our inordinate paranoia, our fear, of the Soviet Union has resulted in our President’s death at the hands of the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service, because President Kennedy’s efforts to reduce the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that very recently brought the world close to nuclear war were misperceived by our protective agencies as a sign of dangerous and unwarranted trust in our enemy that left us exposed to nuclear attack. President Kennedy was seen as soft on Communism and possibly a traitor.
“The fault is not in the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. The fault is in the Cold War and the deployment of immensely destructive nuclear weapons. This threat is real, and it must be eliminated. Our most urgent task is not to prosecute our protective agencies for their misjudgment but to terminate the Cold War and ban the existence of nuclear weapons. Our challenge is to learn how to get along, not how to kill one another. The tragedy and our grief over our President’s assassination is the fruit of our own paranoia. Our job is to substitute mutual understaffing and trust for fear and mistrust. If not, sooner or later the disastrous weapons will be used.”
Nothing like this could happen, because too many people and interests had a stake in an ongoing conflict. The assassination of JFK put Johnson in the presidency. It benefitted the power and budget of the military/security complex by blaming the assassination on Oswald, a Soviet agent. For the Joint Chiefs and the CIA that was a wonderful outcome. What did they have to gain from Johnson telling the truth and continuing Kennedy’s efforts to reduce hysteria and threats? When vision was needed, it wasn’t there.
Most disasters in history result from people being incapable of making the right decisions. Today it is Trump and Putin who are being tested. How much confidence can we have in either?
TRUMP: An Assessment After the First Quarter
TRUMP: An Assessment After the First Quarter
Paul Craig Roberts
It is not a full quarter as his inauguration was 20 days into it, but it is the first quarter of 2025. How does it look?
Perhaps I can put it this way: a lot of good initiatives undertaken in a haphazard way that could limit their effectiveness or even result in failure. I will use a few of Trump’s initiatives to illustrate my concern. I will begin with Trump’s approach to ending the conflict in Ukraine. Next I will examine Trump’s use of DOGE’s revelations about waste, fraud, and grift in the federal budget. Then I will examine Trump’s approach to tariffs.
President Trump has no stake in the conflict with Russia. He is on record as stating that the conflict would not have occurred if his 2020 reelection had not been stolen by the Democrats, RINO Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, and the whore American media. Trump’s ability to extract the US from the conflict is greatly helped by the NY Times very long article, in my view written by the CIA as a confession, that from day one the conflict was one initiated by the United States against Russia with Russian defeat as its goal, with Ukrainian military action decided by Washington, including targets, weapons to be used, and targeting guidance of missile and drone attacks. In other words, the conflict has been Washington’s attack on Russia, not Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The CIA’s confession in the NY Times is a statement that the CIA has admitted a failure and has withdrawn from the conflict.
This paves the way for Trump to withdraw. The conflict will end the minute that Trump tells Putin that he hasn’t a dog in the fight and is withdrawing the US from participation. No more US weapons, money, US targeting information. Total military and diplomatic withdrawal and removal of all sanctions, as they are conflict related and Washington is responsible for the conflict.
This will leave the conflict where it belongs, not with Washington and NATO, but with Putin and whoever the Ukrainians elect to the office now in the hands of a person whose term has expired and who has no negotiating authority under the Ukrainian constitution.
But Trump has not taken advantage this obvious way of ending the conflict. Instead, he has introduced extraneous elements into the negotiations such as Washington’s claim to Ukrainian rare earths as payment for the war aid given by the Biden regime. Trump has also complicated the negotiations by denouncing Putin, who has kept the agreement, while defending Zelensky who has violated it 12 times according to news reports. But according to the NY Times, as the war is conducted by Washington and NATO, not by Zelensky, how is Zelensky sending missiles into Russia without US or UK targeting services? Is the Pentagon and NATO carrying on a war that the US president opposes? If so, who is in charge?
The Kremlin is also an obstacle to ending the conflict. I have come to the conclusion, perhaps mistakenly, that Putin had no intention of winning the conflict, only of continuing it while expressing willingness to negotiate. With who? With the West. What Putin and the Russian Establishment want is a new Yalta agreement. I learned this some years ago when I was invited to speak at a conference at the Russian Academy of Sciences about a Yalta agreement for our time. I pointed out that the Zionist neoconservative policy as presented by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was a policy of American hegemony, which is clearly prohibitive of a new Yalta agreement. This was unwelcome information to the conference, and I was cut off. The conference monitor protected the Russian Academy of Sciences from reality. Today as I read it, Russian analysis is largely self-deception. Russian intellectuals are writing articles promoting a new Yalta agreement. They are entertaining these hopes despite Britain and Europe preparing for war with Russia.
DOGE was a great Trump/Musk invention. But its contribution to Trump’s program of American renewal has been largely squandered. Trump should have held his horses and let DOGE provide more and more detailed evidence of the US budget used to promote ideological agendas and enrichment of insiders and favored people and groups. With accumulated evidence, Trump should have addressed on national television the House and Senate and presented the evidence that Democrats and Democrat-sponsored NGOs created fake entities to which grants were given by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy and other federal budgetary entities. The fake foundations then passed on the grants to legitimate foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, et. al., and were then passed to the intended receivers, such as “news oganizations” that enforce the official narratives, NGOs that work to overthrow democratically elected governments, and into the personal accounts of Democrats, such as allegedly Chelsea Clinton to the tune of $84 million.
In his address Trump should have asked Congress what are we to do about this? Shall we ignore and perpetuate the exploitation of the American taxpayer and their trust in their government, or shall we cease to use the budget in this way?
This would have given Trump the high ground. Instead, his piecemeal attacks have given the high ground to the “victims” of his budget cuts.
If Trump had proceeded in a thoughtful organized way, the corrupt Democrat judges, not Trump, would be on the defensive.
Trump’s position on tariffs is problematical for many reasons. First, let me say that historically tariffs were a legislative issue. The Morrill Tariff was voted by Congress. The Smith-Hawley Tariff was voted by Congress. How is it that the executive is imposing tariffs?
Assuming the president has this authority and assuming that we don’t have tariffs on others but others have tariffs on the US, the way to success is for Trump to sit down with the offenders and explain that the situation is not working for us. How do they propose to rectify the inequality? This would have given Trump the upper hand. Instead, he is portrayed as issuing threats not only to China but also to American allies. Retaliation has become the game, and this itself raises another serious consideration.
With Wall Street predicting a recession caused by Trump’s tariffs, not by the tariffs of other countries, the Federal Reserve has cover to cause the predicted recession, and thereby, to restore Democrat majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections and terminate Trump’s renewal of America.
The first time the American people tried to put Trump into the presidency, the chosen one did not know what he was doing and appointed his enemies to his government. The second time, his election was stolen. The third time he behaves instinctively without thought and design and undermines his opportunity to succeed.
Possibly the higher courts will overrule the lower courts which seem to be populated with an assembly of non-Americans recruited by Democrat DEI. America now has federal district judges who are Japanese, Chinese, Arab, African, Hispanic, and LBGT+. Once a country becomes a tower of babel, the country is lost.
Can a lost country really be renewed? Perhaps, but not by a haphazard approach to the task.
For the Morrill Tariff see: https://www.timesexaminer.com/mike-scruggs/8856-the-morrill-tariff
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