Guest Post by David Stockman
America’s Brobdingnagian $1.3 trillion national security budget thrives on manufactured threats and falsely demonized foes. And nothing could be more demonstrative of that proposition than the utter villainy which emanated from the NATO summit in Vilnius.
For crying out loud. Since the Munich Security Conference in 2007, the man (Putin) has said over and over, and then over again, that Ukraine’s ascension to NATO is an absolute red line. And anyone with their head screwed on right would have no trouble accepting that declaration by answering one simple question.
To wit, how would Washington react if Russia put missiles and nukes in Mexico, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Granada or Venezuela or even Tierra Del Fuego?
Of course, President John F. Kennedy resolved that matter 61 years ago. Yet the whole Vilnius confab amounts to a wink and nod pageant telling the world that exactly what JFK said could not stand on our own doorstep back then, in fact, must stand on Russia’s now. One day soon the Great Hegemon on the Potomac will plant US/NATO missiles 40 minutes from the Kremlin and the purported “aggressor” domiciled there needs to shut-up and eat his geopolitical spinach.
Holy moly. The very idea is an affront to rationality and is a reckless invitation to permanent friction between two nations holding upwards of 12,000 nukes between them. Yet the miscreants gathered in Vilnius left no room for doubt in their declaration:
Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.
So the question recurs. How in the whole fricking big wide world would adding the parts and pieces of Novorossiya, Poland, Lithuania, Rumania, the Cossack Hetmanates, the Crimean Khanate, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and many other historical footnotes that were slapped together by the Soviet Tyrants after 1920 to form the current unnatural borders of Ukraine contribute to the Homeland Security of America, way over here on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific moats?
The answer of course is that it contributes nothing, as in nichts, nada and nugatory. NATO isn’t about security, collective or otherwise, anyway. It’s an utterly vestigial relic of the Cold War that was stood-up to contain a totalitarian Soviet Empire which was armed to the teeth, but which has long since disappeared into the dustbin of history. So George Bush the Elder should have parachuted into the Ramstein Germany air base in 1991, declared victory and dismantled NATO then and there.
As it has transpired, however, the bloated now 31-nation NATO of today has actually become an enemy of peace and security. That’s because it exists mainly as a marketing forum for western arms manufacturers and a think tank for generating phony threats and scary stories designed to keep military budgets amply stocked with fiscal wherewithal and vastly over-sized military establishments well provisioned with missions, mandates, war games and busy work.
There is no need for Washington’s gigantic military establishment or its extensions in NATO because there are no true threats to the liberty and security of the American homeland anywhere on the planet today that even remotely justify it.
The cold war style mega-threat ended with the Soviet Union. Today, Russia’s $1.8 trillion GDP is a veritable joke when arrayed against the $45 trillion of GDP resources embedded in the US and the balance of NATO; and its $85 billion defense budget amounts to not even 7% of the $1.25 trillion combined NATO defense budgets.
Stated differently, serious military threats in today’s world of advanced weaponry require either an overwhelming nuclear first strike checkmate capacity or the vast industrial might and $50 trillion of GDP that would be necessary to breach the great ocean moats and deliver an invasionary armada of massive conventional forces to the New Jersey shores—backed-up with vast air- and sea-lift capacity and gigantic logistics arrangements that have scarcely been imagined by even the most fervent writers of futuristic war fiction.
As it happens, of course, Russia has no nuclear checkmate capacity at all, and has now thoroughly demonstrated that it doesn’t have the industrial and conventional military capacity to conquer and occupy even what has been its own borderlands and vassals—lands with a pre-February 2022 GDP of, well, barely $200 billion.
So what is percolating out of Vilnius, therefore, is not a rational calculation about tangible security threats posed by Russia. Instead, what we have is a witches brew of the standard lies, rationalizations, excuses and hypocrisies which keep the Washington Hegemon busy on a 24/7 basis all around the planet. These groupthink bromides and ideological nostrums include such favorites as the Rule of Law, the Post-War International Order, the Sanctity of Borders, the Responsibility to Protect and Collective Security.
But all are just cover stories for what amounts to the Washington Imperium, and in the current case the alleged sanctity of borders and requirements for “collective security” are especially egregious.
Editor’s Note: The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing.
It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s.
Most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video with all the details. Click here to watch it now.
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why did you post this drivel?
stockman is delusional about Russia today – so apparently, he’s compromised as well
Lose him
He is just a Jew. You have to work really hard to catch them in a truth.
” . . . now thoroughly demonstrated that it doesn’t have the industrial and conventional military capacity to conquer and occupy even what has been its own borderlands . . .”
Somebody has been sniffing the company glue.
“serious military threats in today’s world of advanced weaponry require either an overwhelming nuclear first strike checkmate capacity or the vast industrial might and $50 trillion of GDP that would be necessary to breach the great ocean moats…”
Or you might try destroying the economy. Takes a lot of money* (at least in the west) to run a war, and a lot of production. We don’t have money, we have currency. There is no difference between the two until you really need the money, then you find that currency is paper. We also have no production, we sent it all overseas for better profits for industry titans and better kickbacks for politicians.
What would that look like? China selling off US securities and not buying more. Causing interest rates to go up destabilizing banks from top to bottom. Subsidizing crazy social ideologies like green energy, nitrogen reduction, DEI, feminism, migrant waves, LBGTQ+pedo has been very successful at destroying America.
Next up would be sabotage/kill teams, already across the border and equipped with America’s finest toys. Dams, power stations critical bridges, pipelines, a compressed natural gas ship will go BOOM as big as Nagasaki, in a totally organic style.
*Funny how at just 7% of western expenditures the Russians are whipping our butts. Makes you think about that “10% for the big guy” thing and wonder. Are our weapons made for war or for profits and kickbacks.
A GDP of 40 trillion, or whatever number they want to pull out of a hat, is meaningless when it is nothing but debt.
If it were nothing but debt it wouldn’t be so bad, but the definition of “GDP” has been run through the Orwellian mill, so the debt is acquired to destroy wealth, rather than create it.
The more we borrow, the more we spend, the higher the GDP, but the less we have.
the wonders of limitless inflation and media control to obscure the truth
The Truth will NOT remain obscured for long. All the false loyalties disappear with the currency’s demise.
The clock is ticking on the western bankster scam.
GDP is meaningless when here in the US the preponderance is made up of legal, medical and accounting fees, most of which are ballooned by government interference and intervention. Then there is the military industrial complex which does nothing for Americans except provide hundreds of thousands of paper pushing jobs. It’s just another stat to manipulate and use to spread propaganda.
BINGO!
The west is devaluing its currencies at a very rapid rate to prevent debt deflation, the GDP is used with false inflation numbers (Chapwood or Shadowstats) to falsely inflate it to the masses. A dead currency ain’t worth shit. The Praetorian Guards knew it, and the empire fell.
History does rhyme.
Even though they’d have us believe that the Russian ruble is “declining in value”, you can still buy much more for a ruble in Russia than you can in the USA for a US dollar.
50/50
“As it happens, of course, Russia has no nuclear checkmate capacity at all, and has now thoroughly demonstrated that it doesn’t have the industrial and conventional military capacity to conquer and occupy even what has been its own borderlands and vassals—lands with a pre-February 2022 GDP of, well, barely $200 billion.”
WTF?? How does this nonsense even get written, much less posted here?
Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of leftist idiots and/or warmongers in the USA.
Mish is a lying establishment liberal. The fact is that NATO is the US, and a few feckless European vassals, who are no longer in control of the rest of the world.
Mish’s GDP figures are complete garbage because neither the US nor Europe are able to even produce enough goods to survive by themselves. The vast majority of the GDP of the US and Europe consists of worthless financial and other types of services that produce nothing. Germany who used to be the manufacturing giant of Europe is now being deindustrialized because they can no longer exploit cheap Russian energy.
For centuries, the UK survived on the exploitation of its world wide slave empire to provide its wealth and to pay for its military. As most empires do, the UK became paranoid, weak, and incompetent in its leadership, and when Germany began to threaten their dominance in the late 1800’s the UK oligarchs decided that Germany must be destroyed.
Of course this paranoia resulted in the UK destroying itself in the process of destroying Germany, and allowed the US to take over as the dominant world power. The UK being masters of manipulation, then latched on to the US and became the voice behind US imperialism influencing the US foreign policy right up to today.
Russia is now outproducing both the US and NATO and is not only winning the war, it is doing so with one hand tied behind its back.
Russia has from the beginning of this conflict, assumed at some point NATO would become directly involved and that it would have everything NATO has thrown into the war. Russia has prepared for that contingency by holding back the vast majority of its troops and equipment while at the same time ratcheting up both military production and enlistment.
The US and Europe are now sinking into economic recession that will only continue to get worse going forward. The formation of the BRICS trading block and the financial by pass of the dollar and SWIFT system will eviscerate the US / European financial industries by simply removing them from the position of middle men in the worlds resource transactions. That is why the US is panicking. That is why the US is threatening nuclear war.
The fact is, despite the US having nuclear weapons surrounding Russia, it cannot “win” a nuclear war. Russia still has more that enough time to react to any launch, and has incorporated a dead man system into their nuclear arsenal that will ensure the US is destroyed even if successful in a first strike.
The demise of the US is now unstoppable, the only thing we do not know is if our leaders are such complete psychopaths that they are willing to destroy the entire planet if they cannot be the ones in charge…..
I agree with the author’s claim about NATO. Nevertheless he shows his American flawed way of looking at the world by his analysis of Russia. The globalist IMF recently admitted that , despite sanctions, Russia has now surpassed Germany as the largest economy in Europe. In regards to Ukraine the Russians have taken on a nation which NATO has been arming to the teeth since 2014. Despite these armaments the Russians are slaughtering the Ukraine forces. In a similar position, against a similarly armed enemy the western alliance would fail. We can win battles, not wars, against developing countries but not against other, similarly armed nations. NATO is a war mongering institution. It is also a paper tiger. A very dangerous situation.