2022: A Challenging Year

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Man Smoking With A Rifle Near Tree

by Paul Craig Roberts via Institute for Political Economy

I remember when 1984 was in the distant future. We wondered if our destiny was going to be Big Brother’s police state. But 1984 turned out to be the middle of the Reagan years. Liberals didn’t like Reagan’s rhetoric, but his policies worked. Supply-side economics cured stagflation, and we were working to end the cold war. It was difficult not to like a president who could quip in response to an assassination attempt on his life, “I forgot to duck.”

New ideas reinvigorated US economic and foreign policy. Our future had brightened.

Soviet President Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of Germany on the assurance from the George H.W. Bush administration that in exchange NATO would not move one inch to the East.

But the Clinton regime, with Republican Bob Dole egging them on, dishonored the word of the United States government and moved NATO to Russia’s borders, thus restarting the Cold War that Reagan and Gorbachev had ended.

In a series of lawless actions–the bombing of Yugoslavia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombings of Pakistan territory–together with dismissive treatment of Russia, Washington, lost in its arrogant hubris as “the world’s only superpower,” awoke and aroused Russia and brought her out of her docility.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2007 Putin said that the lawless behavior of the US was undermining peaceful relations based in international law. He said Washington’s monopolistic dominance in global relations left no room for the interests and concerns of other countries and he criticized Washington for unbridled hyper use of force in international relations.

Washington and its vassals were astonished at Putin having the gall to annoy the superpower, but wrapped up in remaking the Middle East in Israel’s interest, paid no attention to him.

Washington and its vassals were again astonished in 2015 when Putin blocked the Obama regime’s invasion of Syria and, together with the Syrian Army, defeated the mercenaries Washington sent to overthrow Assad.

Faced with Washington’s destruction of the arms control agreements reached over decades, in 2018 Putin announced a stunning array of new weapons systems such as hypersonic and random trajectory nuclear missiles that made it apparent to independent experts that the US was suddenly a second-rate military power. No one has listened to us, Putin said. “You listen to us now.”

But no one did. Washington is too comfortable snug in its arrogance and hubris and holds firmly to what is now a delusion of its omnipotence. Washington even thinks it can bring Ukraine and the former Russian province of Georgia into NATO.

The Kremlin’s response to Washington’s madness has sharpened the issue: “Get off our doorstep, or we will drive you off.” This is a demand, and it is not negotiable.

Given the total uselessness of the US media that serves only the elite interest groups that control America, Americans themselves are unaware that their idiot government has brazenly provoked a situation in which Russia has told Washington to get your bases and military maneuvers away from our borders or suffer the consequences. Americans are so totally uninformed that they could be incinerated before they knew there was a problem.

2022 opens with two unprecedented crises. One is the attempt by governments in the “Free West” to use Covid to turn crumbling democracies into police states.

The other is the prospect of Armageddon, given the lack of intelligent and reasonable leadership everywhere in the Western World.

Can you identify any intelligent leader anywhere in the Western world? No? Neither can I.

The West’s leaders are nothing but whores for the controlling interest groups. They have probably never had an independent thought in their entire lives and are incapable of thinking. How are such useless beings going to deal with a serious crisis? Look at the people in the Biden regime. They are a collection of jokes. There is nothing there.

Where is a secretary of state capable of reassuring the Kremlin and easing Washington out of its commitment to American hegemony?

He is nowhere to be found.

The situation is extremely serious, because Russia is facing an aggressor whose leaders are disconnected from reality. Biden, who is only there part of the time, has advisors from the Russian-hating neoconservatives at the Center for New American Security funded by the US military/security complex and oil companies. The state department official who oversaw the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine is now the Undersecretary of State. The warmongers responsible for Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and for all of Washington’s illegal wars in the 21st century are ensconced in the Biden regime.

US Senators from both parties are demanding that Biden stand up to Putin. Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel berated Biden for even accepting a phone call from Putin! Republican US Senator Roger Wicker, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called for raining destruction on Russia’s military capability from our Navy in the Black Sea and refuses to rule out a first strike on Russia with nuclear weapons.

Michael McFaul, the Russophobe Obama sent as US Ambassador to Russia, dismissed Putin’s demand that the US respect Russia’s security concern as “Russian paranoia.”

With Democrats and Republicans united in stupidity, with Stephen Cohen dead, and with no one to say Whoa! how is the Biden regime, burdened by fools and idiots, going to realize that the Kremlin has had enough?

Patriotic Americans have always wrapped themselves in the flag. USA! USA! USA! The neoconservatives have told them that they are exceptional and indispensable with the right to rule the world. Americans are not even aware that Washington has created a crisis.

The Russian government has reached the conclusion that its years of accepting provocations and insults, relying instead on diplomatic efforts to reach a peaceful and reasonable accommodation, did not succeed. As Putin said, we retreated and retreated in the interest of peace, and now they are on our doorstep and we have nowhere left to which to retreat.

And still Washington does not hear.


Permission to reprint Dr. Roberts’ columns does not imply that Dr. Roberts endorses the websites or media organizations that republish his columns or that he approves of the content of the websites, media outlets or books that republish his columns.

Reprinted with permission of Institute for Political Economy.