“The Train Has Left the Station and No One Can Stop It”
Paul Craig Roberts

These are the words of Serbia’s President Aleksander Vucic. He ought to know. He is in the middle of it. He thinks Europe will be at war with Russia in “not more than three or four months,” if that long. 

President Vucic says “no one is attempting to stop the war. Nobody is speaking about peace. Peace is almost a forbidden word.” https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/world-news/president-of-serbia-we-will-have-world-war-within-3-to-4-months Scroll down to the 5 minute video.

Hungarian leader Viktor Orban has a similar view as does Slovakian president Robert Fico, who survived a recent assassination attempt. 

In Western Europe, UK, and Washington everyone is talking about wider war with long range missiles used for attacks deep into Russia. Such attacks cannot revive the defeated Ukrainian military. Their purpose seems to be to provoke Russia into a retaliation that Washington can use to widen the war. 

President Vucic is correct. The West is making no effort–indeed, is avoiding all effort–to defuse the dangerous situation. Instead, the West is throwing oil on fire with long range missile attacks and French troops sent into Ukraine.

It has been completely clear from day one that Putin’s limited drawn-out war enabled the West to get more and more involved into the conflict to the point that the conflict now is really between the West and Russia. As President Vucic says, the West’s prestige is now involved and the West cannot permit Russia to prevail.

It seems that Putin might have finally realized that the war is no longer limited to Donbas and has become a wider threat that is not subject to negotiation on terms that Russia can accept.

Now that Putin is backed into a corner with the prospect of NATO missiles striking deep into Russia, President Vucic’s expectation that war is close at hand is understandable. The way matters are shaping up, the avoidance of war depends on how many provocations the Kremlin will accept and for how long. Putin needs to quickly knock Ukraine out of the war before Ukraine fills up with NATO military personnel. 

Zelensky’s term has expired, making him illegitimate. Russian forces should quickly take Kiev, install a new government agreeable to Ukraine as a neutral country and to the reunification of Donbas with Russia. 

I don’t know if Putin still has time to avoid a larger war by quickly winning the current conflict or whether Putin has been fighting on the cheap and lacks the force size to take Kiev and control the country. 

If Putin has been too limited in his goal and too parsimonious with his means, he has bought himself a wider war.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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