The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust.
NATO and its parent, the United States government, has no purpose other than to attack and destroy anything that is perceived as threatening to the U.S. government, and nearly everything is perceived as a threat by the paranoid rulers in Washington and Langley. Billions of dollars into the pockets of weapons manufacturers. Billions of dollars sent to Ukraine into the hands of Nazis. All this while the people of the United States are suffering from lack of jobs, lack of health care, privitization of education, lack of a living wage, abysmal and deadly working conditions, homelessness, deaths of despair and no support or protection from the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. The filth and corruption of the government and its revolving door to and from think tanks of the ruling class are devouring the planet for profit and an almost sexual satisfaction of wielding power for the sake of it.
But this is the last gasp of a doomed society. Unfortunately, before the capitalist hegemons are brought down, many milions of people will die, whether from war, starvation, or environmental destruction.
Facts on the ground and the academic work of Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen, and Sachs (as well as many other Russian scholars and military and geo-political experts) can't penetrate the incredible propaganda machine that's been ginned up and sent into overdrive.
Pro-War Liberals and progressives are flying the Ukrainian flag.
Even Chomsky is baffled by all this - only a Freudian analysis seems capable of explaining the collective suicide.
Sadly, your analysis is correct. Following this current war and the forces at work can be self mortifying and definitely the results are unknown, but perhaps very predictable given the history of the 20th century. The war is looking grim and the Ukraine is being destroyed day by day and so many people already killed. I can only conclude that we are in need of mature leaders who understand the consequences and they are not there. Thank you for your clear voice Chris. I do pray for true leadership in yet another dark time.
It's no fun reading Hedges' assessment that we're closer to all-out nuclear war than the Cuban Missile Crisis. There's nothing of comparable gravity in the media, just political sniping-as-usual. I suppose informing people that the world could end so capitalism can make a those last few bucks would dampen profits.
That the greatest minds in charge of our nuclear arsenal can only think to replay the plot of 1984's "Threads", a cinema-verite British movie that gave me years of middle- and high-school nightmares of what nuclear war really meant, is beyond absurd. There is no off-world sanctuary, no bunkers that will protect the Croesuses of today from nuclear war. They will die out here with us and the rest of the biosphere.
Yes China has been working ruthlessly to grow economically. But the same Blob/MIC voices now desperate to stir up hysterical fears were the exact same people who surrendered the West's industrial advantage to China (and enormous middle class wealth) so that banks could earn outsized fees from globalization deals and so that the stock prices (and executive compensation) of the companies moving production to China could be hugely inflated and so the direct competition from Chinese (and similar places) would massively surpress the wages of domestic workers (further inflating stock prices and executive compensation).
Anyone in Washington and Brussels who thinks that China's Belt and Road initiative presents a major economic threat is braindead or cynically dishonest. Upgrading a few China-Europe rail links is useful for everyone but not a big deal. These links have existed for decades and remain totally uncompetitive with ocean shipping. Most BRI projects are make work projects for Chinese companies; few of the ports and freight terminals make any sense, and the process of client governments who cannot possibly pay for projects that don't produce any revenue turning against Beijing angrily has already begun.
Everyone has understood for decades that the autonomy of Taiwan was never going to be sustainable forever. No one has done more to to hasten the inevitable end of Taiwanese independence that NATO, who have shown Chinese military hawks that the people running the Western military are paper tigers incapable of doing anything more than pounding tables in order to maintain taxpayer funding that can't accomplish anything in Afghanistan, much less Ukraine or the South China Sea.
A quibble or two, Chris. The US government debt and the debt service are not actually a problem for reasons that would take too long to explain and belong in a different forum. It's also possible that the loss of reserve currency status may not be a bad thing.
Actually, the level of private debt, including mortgages, student debt, car loans, credit card debt, etc., is the real problem. People are spending so much of their income on debt service, their discretionary income for consumption is dropping and wages aren't rising enough to make a difference. As we move into a recession, private spending will fall causing more problems for the economy.
That being said, the rest of your analysis is spot on. The sanctions we have imposed on Russia have backfired tremendously and that, plus any specific retaliation by Russia and/or China (if we start sanctioning them) is what will sink the American economy. There is no substantial amount of manufacturing in the US anymore, we exported it all to China and other Asian countries, except for armaments. You can't eat armaments.
Otherwise, all that is left in the US is the predatory elite of multi-national corporations and Wall Street who control our economy and politics and the financialization that has been part and parcel of the neoliberal project for the past 50 years.
I'm in my 70's, so I don't expect to live to see the Jackpot (if readers aren't familiar, Google it), but I grieve for my children and grandchildren. We are well and truly fucked.
Support and stand with Russia which fights for all of us against corrupt and criminal US “elite” and its bipartisan War party (Biden, Pompeo, Obama, Pelosi, Cotton, Blinken, Nuland, McConnell, Schumer, etc…).
We live in choreographed and constructed endless lies starting with Russia-gate immense hoax. We are totally controlled by a criminal and immensely corrupt “elite”. Ukraine was their bottomless goldmine since even before 2014. They provoked Russia’s special military operation to protect its goldmine -- hence immense hatred of CAPITALIST Russia which has infinitely higher moral values than US ruling “elite” gangsters.
Thank you for this, Chris. It's not going to make you any more popular with TPTB and their gullible mass-media adherents, but it is a truth that must be told. With the end of the Cold War, NATO's purpose was clearly over, but the militaristic hegemons who run the USA and her allies decided to pump the organization up into a global bully serving a new goal: beating down any nation that dares to stand between U.S. allies and full global hegemony. NATO has become an ugly and monstrous presence on this planet, an excuse for avoiding diplomacy, cooperation, and mutual respect among nations. NATO does not by any means represent the interests of the citizens of the nations who comprise it; it is utterly non-democratic and dishonorable in methods and objectives.
I dearly hope the American people will wake up to the fact that NATO does not represent who we are as a people and what we want for our future.
The points made about China's economy are well-taken, but I'd argue that there' s persuasive evidence (from the IMF, and probably other sources) that it has already surpassed the USA's. It of course depends on how you measure, but in the article by Dean Baker that I've linked here, he argues that China passed us in 2017. This is what really has American elites desperate to hose things up for them. https://cepr.net/china-has-the-worlds-largest-economy-get-over-it/
Very good, Chris but I have a few issues. One, NATO is not an entity unto itself like, say, France or Germany. It is, in reality, the US foreign legion. Officially speaking it is made up of forces belonging a variety of NATO member states but as Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria have demonstrated, it has much less of a bite unless the US is leading the charge (i.e. by providing weapons and manpower). NATO today is really just a collection of US vassal states; kill the master and the vassals will start wandering around aimlessly. By attacking Russia the US has made a strategic mistake. Your description of the plan is spot on. Destroy Russia financially with sanctions and isolate it diplomatically which should all lead to the ousting of Vladimir Putin so another drunken incompetent like Boris Yeltsin can be put in office and we can go back to plundering the country. Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The US and our vassals have been unable to destroy Russia financially (the latest effort to impose a price cap on Russian oil is a hilarious response to the failure of that destruction attempt) and Vladimir Putin has an approval rating over 80%. This is not going well and it will destroy our vassals in Europe if Russia decides to play hard ball. At the same time, we've piss everybody else on the planet off and the only countries trying to isolate Russia are the US and our vassal states. As a side note, Crimea in the hundreds of years that it was in the Russian empire was never a part of the Ukraine. Khrushchev no more made Crimea a part of Ukraine than East St. Louis was made a part of Missouri when it was put in the St. Louis Statistical Metropolitan Area.
You are correct that China is the main course and this is yet another strategic mistake. The chances of our success in the Asia Pacific region is smaller than in the Ukraine. We can pump weapons into the Ukraine for Russia to destroy through useful idiots like Poland, Germany, and France but no such arrangement is possible in the vicinity of Taiwan (or, if you prefer, Formosa). The US has no place to mount an attack from.
I see this playing out as either the financial collapse of "The West" or nuclear holocaust.
All one needs to do is read the speeches and interviews of Lavrov, Putin and Xi to understand what is taking place now. They are very clear in stating that the U.S./NATO are doing everything in their power to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, which seeks balanced economic prosperity while respecting the rights of individual countries to practice their own forms of government free of outside interference. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. has been systematically engaged in establishing full spectrum, unipolar domination under the guise of promoting “Western values”. Ukraine and Taiwan have become staging points for the U.S. to try and obtain this dominance. Putin and Xi are well aware of this and have decided that the time is now for them to form a new Eurasian Empire outside the control of the U.S. and NATO. The outcome of this struggle will probably determine humanities future on earth.
This OP is Bullshit… I am sickened by this ideology that Russia is a Nobel protector. You people are crazy! You fret about NATO as American fascism explodes. Get a life take off your John Lennon glasses. Signed, Red Neck Liberal
Chris, I usually enjoy your reporting because I get what seems like an objective perspective. As a previous commenter pointed out, and I agree, Wray’s warning about China isn’t hyperbole or inflammatory- it’s overdue. And to say -
“ NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.”
- is to really let Putin off the hook for his aggression. I don’t think there’s any doubt the military/industrial complex is out of control- but I see their response as exploitive more than manufactured. W think George Carlin said? “Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you!”
"Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
"This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future."
Inflammatory rhetoric? This is absolutely true and has been going on for several decades and has already presaged an ominous future for the western middle class... but not the elites expecting to profit from the Chinese connection.
From my perspective, anyone that criticizes these criticisms of China are on the take, or love communism... or both.
How can people be so gullible as to believe they are fighting a noble war. At its very core you have one person consciously deciding to end the life of a person they have never met. The profiteers are well known and no where to be found.
Thank you for this article. It speaks to me of truth and sadness
NATO and its parent, the United States government, has no purpose other than to attack and destroy anything that is perceived as threatening to the U.S. government, and nearly everything is perceived as a threat by the paranoid rulers in Washington and Langley. Billions of dollars into the pockets of weapons manufacturers. Billions of dollars sent to Ukraine into the hands of Nazis. All this while the people of the United States are suffering from lack of jobs, lack of health care, privitization of education, lack of a living wage, abysmal and deadly working conditions, homelessness, deaths of despair and no support or protection from the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. The filth and corruption of the government and its revolving door to and from think tanks of the ruling class are devouring the planet for profit and an almost sexual satisfaction of wielding power for the sake of it.
But this is the last gasp of a doomed society. Unfortunately, before the capitalist hegemons are brought down, many milions of people will die, whether from war, starvation, or environmental destruction.
Facts on the ground and the academic work of Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen, and Sachs (as well as many other Russian scholars and military and geo-political experts) can't penetrate the incredible propaganda machine that's been ginned up and sent into overdrive.
Pro-War Liberals and progressives are flying the Ukrainian flag.
Even Chomsky is baffled by all this - only a Freudian analysis seems capable of explaining the collective suicide.
Sadly, your analysis is correct. Following this current war and the forces at work can be self mortifying and definitely the results are unknown, but perhaps very predictable given the history of the 20th century. The war is looking grim and the Ukraine is being destroyed day by day and so many people already killed. I can only conclude that we are in need of mature leaders who understand the consequences and they are not there. Thank you for your clear voice Chris. I do pray for true leadership in yet another dark time.
It's no fun reading Hedges' assessment that we're closer to all-out nuclear war than the Cuban Missile Crisis. There's nothing of comparable gravity in the media, just political sniping-as-usual. I suppose informing people that the world could end so capitalism can make a those last few bucks would dampen profits.
That the greatest minds in charge of our nuclear arsenal can only think to replay the plot of 1984's "Threads", a cinema-verite British movie that gave me years of middle- and high-school nightmares of what nuclear war really meant, is beyond absurd. There is no off-world sanctuary, no bunkers that will protect the Croesuses of today from nuclear war. They will die out here with us and the rest of the biosphere.
Yes China has been working ruthlessly to grow economically. But the same Blob/MIC voices now desperate to stir up hysterical fears were the exact same people who surrendered the West's industrial advantage to China (and enormous middle class wealth) so that banks could earn outsized fees from globalization deals and so that the stock prices (and executive compensation) of the companies moving production to China could be hugely inflated and so the direct competition from Chinese (and similar places) would massively surpress the wages of domestic workers (further inflating stock prices and executive compensation).
Anyone in Washington and Brussels who thinks that China's Belt and Road initiative presents a major economic threat is braindead or cynically dishonest. Upgrading a few China-Europe rail links is useful for everyone but not a big deal. These links have existed for decades and remain totally uncompetitive with ocean shipping. Most BRI projects are make work projects for Chinese companies; few of the ports and freight terminals make any sense, and the process of client governments who cannot possibly pay for projects that don't produce any revenue turning against Beijing angrily has already begun.
Everyone has understood for decades that the autonomy of Taiwan was never going to be sustainable forever. No one has done more to to hasten the inevitable end of Taiwanese independence that NATO, who have shown Chinese military hawks that the people running the Western military are paper tigers incapable of doing anything more than pounding tables in order to maintain taxpayer funding that can't accomplish anything in Afghanistan, much less Ukraine or the South China Sea.
A quibble or two, Chris. The US government debt and the debt service are not actually a problem for reasons that would take too long to explain and belong in a different forum. It's also possible that the loss of reserve currency status may not be a bad thing.
Actually, the level of private debt, including mortgages, student debt, car loans, credit card debt, etc., is the real problem. People are spending so much of their income on debt service, their discretionary income for consumption is dropping and wages aren't rising enough to make a difference. As we move into a recession, private spending will fall causing more problems for the economy.
That being said, the rest of your analysis is spot on. The sanctions we have imposed on Russia have backfired tremendously and that, plus any specific retaliation by Russia and/or China (if we start sanctioning them) is what will sink the American economy. There is no substantial amount of manufacturing in the US anymore, we exported it all to China and other Asian countries, except for armaments. You can't eat armaments.
Otherwise, all that is left in the US is the predatory elite of multi-national corporations and Wall Street who control our economy and politics and the financialization that has been part and parcel of the neoliberal project for the past 50 years.
I'm in my 70's, so I don't expect to live to see the Jackpot (if readers aren't familiar, Google it), but I grieve for my children and grandchildren. We are well and truly fucked.
Support and stand with Russia which fights for all of us against corrupt and criminal US “elite” and its bipartisan War party (Biden, Pompeo, Obama, Pelosi, Cotton, Blinken, Nuland, McConnell, Schumer, etc…).
We live in choreographed and constructed endless lies starting with Russia-gate immense hoax. We are totally controlled by a criminal and immensely corrupt “elite”. Ukraine was their bottomless goldmine since even before 2014. They provoked Russia’s special military operation to protect its goldmine -- hence immense hatred of CAPITALIST Russia which has infinitely higher moral values than US ruling “elite” gangsters.
Thank you for this, Chris. It's not going to make you any more popular with TPTB and their gullible mass-media adherents, but it is a truth that must be told. With the end of the Cold War, NATO's purpose was clearly over, but the militaristic hegemons who run the USA and her allies decided to pump the organization up into a global bully serving a new goal: beating down any nation that dares to stand between U.S. allies and full global hegemony. NATO has become an ugly and monstrous presence on this planet, an excuse for avoiding diplomacy, cooperation, and mutual respect among nations. NATO does not by any means represent the interests of the citizens of the nations who comprise it; it is utterly non-democratic and dishonorable in methods and objectives.
I dearly hope the American people will wake up to the fact that NATO does not represent who we are as a people and what we want for our future.
The points made about China's economy are well-taken, but I'd argue that there' s persuasive evidence (from the IMF, and probably other sources) that it has already surpassed the USA's. It of course depends on how you measure, but in the article by Dean Baker that I've linked here, he argues that China passed us in 2017. This is what really has American elites desperate to hose things up for them. https://cepr.net/china-has-the-worlds-largest-economy-get-over-it/
Very good, Chris but I have a few issues. One, NATO is not an entity unto itself like, say, France or Germany. It is, in reality, the US foreign legion. Officially speaking it is made up of forces belonging a variety of NATO member states but as Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria have demonstrated, it has much less of a bite unless the US is leading the charge (i.e. by providing weapons and manpower). NATO today is really just a collection of US vassal states; kill the master and the vassals will start wandering around aimlessly. By attacking Russia the US has made a strategic mistake. Your description of the plan is spot on. Destroy Russia financially with sanctions and isolate it diplomatically which should all lead to the ousting of Vladimir Putin so another drunken incompetent like Boris Yeltsin can be put in office and we can go back to plundering the country. Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The US and our vassals have been unable to destroy Russia financially (the latest effort to impose a price cap on Russian oil is a hilarious response to the failure of that destruction attempt) and Vladimir Putin has an approval rating over 80%. This is not going well and it will destroy our vassals in Europe if Russia decides to play hard ball. At the same time, we've piss everybody else on the planet off and the only countries trying to isolate Russia are the US and our vassal states. As a side note, Crimea in the hundreds of years that it was in the Russian empire was never a part of the Ukraine. Khrushchev no more made Crimea a part of Ukraine than East St. Louis was made a part of Missouri when it was put in the St. Louis Statistical Metropolitan Area.
You are correct that China is the main course and this is yet another strategic mistake. The chances of our success in the Asia Pacific region is smaller than in the Ukraine. We can pump weapons into the Ukraine for Russia to destroy through useful idiots like Poland, Germany, and France but no such arrangement is possible in the vicinity of Taiwan (or, if you prefer, Formosa). The US has no place to mount an attack from.
I see this playing out as either the financial collapse of "The West" or nuclear holocaust.
All one needs to do is read the speeches and interviews of Lavrov, Putin and Xi to understand what is taking place now. They are very clear in stating that the U.S./NATO are doing everything in their power to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, which seeks balanced economic prosperity while respecting the rights of individual countries to practice their own forms of government free of outside interference. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. has been systematically engaged in establishing full spectrum, unipolar domination under the guise of promoting “Western values”. Ukraine and Taiwan have become staging points for the U.S. to try and obtain this dominance. Putin and Xi are well aware of this and have decided that the time is now for them to form a new Eurasian Empire outside the control of the U.S. and NATO. The outcome of this struggle will probably determine humanities future on earth.
This OP is Bullshit… I am sickened by this ideology that Russia is a Nobel protector. You people are crazy! You fret about NATO as American fascism explodes. Get a life take off your John Lennon glasses. Signed, Red Neck Liberal
Chris, I usually enjoy your reporting because I get what seems like an objective perspective. As a previous commenter pointed out, and I agree, Wray’s warning about China isn’t hyperbole or inflammatory- it’s overdue. And to say -
“ NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.”
- is to really let Putin off the hook for his aggression. I don’t think there’s any doubt the military/industrial complex is out of control- but I see their response as exploitive more than manufactured. W think George Carlin said? “Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you!”
"Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
"This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future."
Inflammatory rhetoric? This is absolutely true and has been going on for several decades and has already presaged an ominous future for the western middle class... but not the elites expecting to profit from the Chinese connection.
From my perspective, anyone that criticizes these criticisms of China are on the take, or love communism... or both.
Oh, Chris, can't we ever win?
How can people be so gullible as to believe they are fighting a noble war. At its very core you have one person consciously deciding to end the life of a person they have never met. The profiteers are well known and no where to be found.
Thank you for this article. It speaks to me of truth and sadness