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July
01
2022

The Road to Armageddon Is Being Set in Stone
Paul Craig Roberts

I seem to be the only prescient person on the foreign policy scene. But not Washington, not Europe, and not Russia are interested in what I have to say. 

I said that it was a strategic mistake for the Kremlin to limit its military operation in Ukraine and to impose restraints on the military action that would drag out the process of Russian victory.  I said this would wrongly convince the West that the Russian military wasn’t as formidable as it is and give the West plenty of time to widen the war by becoming more and more involved.  With the cold shoulder the West gave to Russia’s security concerns, I said nothing less than a lightening conquest of all of Ukraine and replacement of the US puppet government with a Russian puppet government would convince the West that Russia’s red lines were real and that Russia’s security concerns had to be addressed.

It has happened as I predicted. The US and NATO have become combatants in the conflict over Donbass, formerly part of Russia, by supplying weapon systems, military intelligence, volunteers, diplomatic support and money to Ukraine. The US and NATO have clearly stated that they intend to keep the war going and that they support Ukraine’s reconquest of Donbass and Crimea.

Washington arranged for Lithuania, a NATO member, to block Russian access to part of Russia, Kaliningrad.  With Turkey suitably paid to withdraw objection, NATO has invited two historically neutral countries, Finland and Sweden, to align with Washington against Russia and to join NATO.  If Finland accepts, NATO will be positioned on another 832 miles of Russia’s border.  As preventing Ukraine’s NATO membership and less NATO presence on Russia’s border was one reason for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the intervention, despite Russia’s victory in Donbass, was a loss for Russia’s overall goal.

As I predicted would be the case, the limited and time-consuming Russian intervention in Ukraine is leading to a massive increase in Western military forces deployed against Russia. The NATO rapid response force is being expanded from 40,000 to 300,000.  More squadrons of US fighter aircraft are being sent to England. Moldova, Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are being prepped for NATO membership.  I could add more to this story, but it is clear enough that I was exactly correct that the limited, go-slow Russian intervention was a strategic blunder which is encouraging the West to violate more Russian red lines.  Considering Washington’s commitment to hegemony and the obedience of Washington’s European puppet states, surrender or a wider war that likely would turn nuclear are Russia’s remaining alternatives.

As I have said, the Russians are babes in the woods. They do not understand the evil that they face. Apparently, they neither take the Wolfowitz Doctrine seriously nor the US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s plan to break Russia up into a collection of independent small states, thereby removing Russia as a constraint on US hegemony over a unipolar world.

The complete cold shoulder the West gave Russia’s effort to achieve mutual security should have told the Kremlin something.  But didn’t. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Kremlin still believes that reason can prevail and negotiation and good will can succeed. https://sputniknews.com/20220630/mod-russian-military-withdraws-forces-from-zmeiny-island-as-gesture-of-good-will-1096826022.html 

It is this delusion, together with the neoconservative pursuit of hegemony, that is leading to nuclear Armageddon.

 


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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