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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
War Is Upon Us or Will Putin Blink Again
Dear Readers, I am posting Friday’s website material today, because I have early morning interviews and other intrusions that prevent my usual morning postings.
I regret publishing such important material on a Friday when normally insouciant Americans are even less attentive. Perhaps the few who count will realize the precipices, yes plural, on which we sit leaderless.
The world is coming close to its end. It is an end that has nothing to do with alleged global warming, Cows farting, orchestrated pandemics, or racism. Washington’s refusal to release its power of hegemony over a world that is no longer accepting of it is bringing about our destruction.
How can we understand such an extraordinary act of selfishness?
War Is Upon Us or Will Putin Blink Again
Paul Craig Roberts, September 13, 2004
Gilbert Doctorow, a cautious commentator, has arrived at a position similar to my own. On September 10, Doctorow wrote in his article, “The insane recklessness of Collective Biden,” that “I cannot say how close we are to midnight on the nuclear war watch. But a Third World War fought at least initially with conventional weapons is now just days, at most weeks away.”
https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/the-insane-recklessness-of-collective?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1203055&post_id=148745560&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=dx5km&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
What has pushed the cautious Dr. Doctorow to my position “is the near certainty that the United States and Britain have just agreed to give the Zelensky regime permission to use the long-range missiles which have been delivered to Ukraine, certainly including Storm Shadow and likely also the 1500 km range stealth missile known as JASSM to strike deep into the Russian heartland, and so ‘to bring the war to Russia’ as the Zelensky gang put it.”
Doctorow reasons that Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s army has prompted the neoconned Biden regime into one last desperate and reckless act of trying to deprive Russia of its victory “by escalating the conflict to a world war.”
Simultaneously with this US idiocy of underwriting missile attacks deep into Russia, Doctorow believes that “the United States has given Israel the go-ahead to launch a full-blown war on Lebanon.” This despite the fact that Lebanon has Iran’s protection, and Iran has Russia’s protection.
So, we have at hand two prospects for the outbreak of major wars that will go nuclear.
Extraordinary, isn’t it, that there is no discussion whatsoever of this duel crisis in the Western media or in the “debate” between Trump and Kamala. It is as if the US has no foreign policy experts and no Russian experts, but only supporters of the official narrative. The controlled narrative world in which we live makes us blind to reality.
Indeed, it does seem that we do live in The Matrix in which there are no explanations other than the fraudulent ones protected by “fact checkers” in the official narratives.
Doctorow concludes that “a presently localized conflict in the Middle East can in a flash become a regional war that in a further flash becomes a second front to the war between the United States and Russia which I foretold above when speaking about Ukraine.”
Doctorow is a person with whom I can agree.
But I have a doubt. Just as for eight years Putin was lost in his delusion about the Minsk Agreement and failed to prepare for the coming conflict, and just as Putin seems yet to realize that he is at war with NATO, not conducting a “limited military operation in Donbas,” and just as Putin has refused to realize that by conducting a never-ending war he has permitted the West to become totally involved, thus changing the character of the conflict and vastly expanding it, can it be that Putin is still in denial of reality and does not see the war that is unfolding, partly because of his own inaction?
With the Russian media itself reporting that the Chinese are cooperating with Washington’s sanctions against Russia and refusing to handle Russian/Chinese financial transactions, thus accepting Washington’s wedge into the purported Chinese-Russian alliance, perhaps Washington will prevail over those who challenged the American hegemonic order but were unwilling to move forward with their challenge.
Putin’s problem is that he is a mid-20th century American liberal who believes in good will. His Western opponent is operating on the Marxist principle that violence is the only effective force in history.