The US government has a long history of fun and interesting advice when it comes to imminent death…Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has issued updated guidance to its “Nuclear Explosion” readiness public awareness website, which includes tips to avoid Covid!
“A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning,” reads the page, which was updated on Friday. “Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones.FEMA recommends the following steps to prevent ‘significant radiation exposure,’ which include “Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household,” and “If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not part of your household.”
In case of a nuclear explosion, FEMA warns to try to keep 6 ft social distance and wear a mask for covid. You can’t make this up pic.twitter.com/LfxFX1dZoS
What’s more, “If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 9-1-1 and let the operator know if you have, or think you might have, Covid-19. If you can, put on a mask before help arrives.””Many people already feel fear and anxiety about the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). The threat of nuclear explosion can add additional stress.”
Bright FLASH can cause temporary blindness for less than a minute.BLAST WAVE can cause death, injury, and damage to structures several miles out from the blast.RADIATION can damage cells of the body. Large exposures can cause radiation sickness.FIRE AND HEAT can cause death, burn injuries, and damage to structures several miles out.
ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (EMP) can damage electrical power equipment and electronics several miles out from the detonation and cause temporary disruptions further out.
FALLOUT is radioactive, visible dirt and debris raining down from several miles up that can cause sickness to those who are outside.
FEMA also says you have 10 minutes after the shock wave passes to find the “nearest, best shelter location” if you’re outdoors when a nuke goes off, as radiation levels are the highest immediately after the fallout arrives.But whatever you do, remember to wear your mask and practice social distancing while you hopefully avoid a painful cancerous death.
The media and the war machine (or do I repeat myself?) want us to take sides in the two-day old deadly clashes in Ukraine. To those of us with long histories in military conflicts in which the US foreign policy establishment, media, and military have an interest, the terms are always framed as white hats and black hats – and you had better choose a side!
“Are you on the side of FREEDOM or are you a puppet of [insert Hitler proxy here]?”
You must take a side. (In fact you must choose the side the US elites want you to choose).
The US government never fights in the self-interest of the elites. It only fights (directly and by proxy) for the freedom and liberation of others. If you doubt that you are un-American, they scream.
The Iraqis would greet us as liberators, we were told. They will love our bombs. Likewise the Libyans once their leader is knife-raped to death. And then of course the Syrians once our al-Qaeda “moderate” head-choppers are put in charge. The rest of the world is so so grateful that the omniscient Washington foreign policy elites can choose their fate for them. Surely they are too foolish to decide for themselves!
Ironically, as the US government and its obedient media were hysterically telling us we must demand Russian blood for their attack on a Ukraine that had not attacked them first, the US government today bombed a Somalia that had not attacked it first. And let’s not even talk about the horrific Saudi genocide (with full US support) in Yemen.
This is not a WHATABOUT column, however. It’s just to point out how manipulated Americans are by the unholy partnership between government, Washington parasitical elites, and the media.
Perhaps the only thing worse are the third-tier flunkies who do their bidding in international organizations.
Today NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO countries were going to send more weapons to Ukraine. Brilliant! Bureaucrats, especially stupid ones, always double down then their policies are shown to be failures.
As one report quoted the failed Swedish politico/NATO chief: ‘We see rhetoric, the messages, which is strongly indicating that the aim is to remove the democratically-elected government in Kiev,’ he announced after a meeting with NATO leaders. What? NATO must send weapons to Ukraine because Russia is attempting to remove its democratically-elected government? How dare they! Don’t they know that’s OUR job?
Here’s the side we should be on in Ukraine and everywhere else: non-intervention in the affairs of others. Today’s Ukraine nightmare is the product of a US foreign policy that overthrew not one, but two elected Ukrainian governments because the people chose a president that Washington’s pampered elites didn’t like.
As I wrote in an article today, one thing we can take with us from Russia actually doing what it long said it would do if Ukraine was armed by hostile governments and pulled toward NATO membership is that:Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others. Yes, this is a good thing and it should be celebrated. Don’t worry – it’s not un-patriotic to applaud an authenticly pro-America foreign policy! Now is the time to demand a change in how things are done. It does not weaken the US to decide to not meddle in the affairs of others. On the contrary, we are strengthened by shrugging off the burden of (very badly) running the rest of the globe.
Unless anyone believes we are stronger by burning one trillion dollars for the US military empire each and every year.
Let’s ask the truckers and the waiters and the welders of America how they like billions of their hard-earned dollars laundered to the ultra-rich Beltway elites through corrupt regimes abroad. Foreign aid is falsely perceived as a plate of rice and beans to a motherless child in a war-torn hellhole. The reality is that foreign aid is that which re-models all the bathrooms in million dollars mansions in McLean VA and its evil environs.
Gold plated Beltway toilets. The ignoble flotsam of the corrupt US empire.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel McAdams Executive Director Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
Joe Biden’s perverse legacy, if that term even applies anymore, may well be determined in the coming weeks by his handling of events in Ukraine. He can improve it by showing restraint against the relentless neoconservative chorus. One wonders what the results of a pure popular vote on the question of going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be, versus a vote solely within the DC beltway.
Note: Biden was silent on the recent imposition of emergency martial law by the Trudeau government in Ottawa (a few hundred miles from Washington, DC), but has plenty to say about Kiev (4,881 distant miles). This is not coincidental. As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, we are required by Western propaganda to denounce actions by Vladimir Putin (such as freezing the bank assets of political opponent Alexei Navalny) while cheering the same actions taken by the Canadian government against money donated to truckers. Crackdowns in “democracies” are subject to a more enlightened standard:
[W]hen these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.1
Much of today’s Western rhetoric about the former USSR employs this language of treason, accusing war skeptics of siding with Putin. American politicians and media often veer into outright Russophobia, sometimes with a not-subtle racial animus. This flows in large part from the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which somehow had to be the result of Russian interference and not Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings. It was remarkable to see so many politicians and pundits risk resurrecting a Cold War with a nuclear power simply to hurt Trump politically. But it worked: they got rid of Trump, and now the Cold War is back.
At this writing, Putin has declared the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and autonomous from Ukraine. Russian forces have entered Ukraine and launched missiles; deaths and injuries are reported. Those troops reportedly have control over the Chernobyl power plant. Ludwig von Mises’s birthplace, today called Lviv, is threatened.
In response, Biden today announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia and promised severe economic consequences for Putin’s actions. Military and aerospace technology will be blocked, while Russian banks will be shut off from international markets. US and EU officials also have considered the more severe option of removing the country from the SWIFT system of international payments, which would cut off foreign-currency purchases of oil, gas, and other Russian exports.
Still, Biden has shown restraint. Let’s hope he keeps to this commitment made earlier today:
“Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict,” he said. “Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but defend [sic] our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.”
There will be plenty of voices in Biden’s ear demanding more, much more. The subcurrent to Biden’s election in 2020 was the return of neoconservatism with a vengeance. Many of the worst foreign policy hawks, from David Frum to Max Boot to Bill Kristol, have found their home in the Democratic Party. The GOP, for its part, is scrambling to outdo the Democrats in their bellicosity for Putin in a nauseatingly transparent effort to make Biden look weak for the upcoming midterm elections. Hence the sorry spectacle of former Trump national security advisor John Bolton—among the worst war promoters in modern history—solemnly lecturing us on MSNBC about Biden’s failure to have placed US troops in Ukraine weeks ago. Unless Putin’s foray is short lived, rest assured that Congress, the Pentagon, the spy agencies, Biden’s cabinet, and his own party leaders (mindful of polls) will call for US military strikes. Some will call for American troops to defend Ukraine on the ground.
President John F. Kennedy faced similar pressures in his brief years as president. Regardless of one’s views on Camelot, Kennedy was a New England liberal and idealist—not a neoconservative. He sincerely abhorred the possible use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviets. He communicated clandestinely with Nikita Khrushchev to avoid just such a conflict and managed to bring the US back from the brink of an ugly tank standoff in Berlin during 1961—stating, to the chagrin of the Cold Warriors, that the Berlin Wall was “a hell of a lot better than a war.”
Kennedy similarly resisted calls by the Pentagon, CIA, and Joint Chiefs for the US to back a puppet government in Laos. He was reasonably firm in his opposition to escalations in Vietnam, denying repeated Pentagon requests for thousands of ground troops. Time and again he imagined his reelection in 1964 would free him politically to remove America completely from Southeast Asia.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the pressure on Kennedy to use nuclear missiles against that tiny, impoverished country was intense. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA deputy Richard Helms, the Joint Chiefs, and one particularly bloodthirsty general named Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay all pressed hard for action. They considered JFK’s Cuban blockade disastrously weak. One CIA operative called his failure to launch a nuclear strike “treasonous.” LeMay compared it to appeasement in Munich. And of course his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was never an ally when it counted. Kennedy’s only firm and trusted confidant throughout all of it was his own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Like Trump, JFK faced almost mutinous attacks and subterfuge from within: by his own cabinet, administrative agencies, military commanders, and especially the CIA.
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
1. Glenn Greenwald, “The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West,” Glenn Greenwald, Feb. 21, 2022, https://greenwald.substack.com.
The US shouldn’t have poked the Russian Bear. Now it is fully awake: after Ukraine, the Russians are likely to do a clean sweep of foreign belligerents poking around the East Med and the Black Sea.
Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.
This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.
From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.
The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.
That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon.
Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American construct invented to launch wars was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.
First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since inserting Russian jets into Syria’s airspace in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation…aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” as Putin defined it.
Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandoning any plans to join NATO; negotiating directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarizing and declaring Ukraine as neutral.
Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters, which is the Russian demand for “indivisible security.”
The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian military forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were re-framed as an occupying army in Russian-allied territories that Moscow had just sworn to protect.
Get Out – Or Else
The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air force, navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.
And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) artillery that hit the Armed Forces of Ukraine headquarters in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.
This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse: not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat – in one hour.
The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established. Humanitarian corridors were set up for the deserters. Ukrainian forces remnants now include mostly surviving Azov batallion Nazis, mercenaries trained by the usual Blackwater/Academi suspects, and a bunch of Salafi-jihadis.
Predictably, western corporate media has already gone totally berserk, branding it as the much-awaited Russian ‘invasion.’ A reminder: when Israel routinely bombs Syria and when the House of One Saudi routinely bombs Yemeni civilians, there is never any peep in NATO’s media.
As it stands, realpolitik spells out a possible endgame, as voiced by Donetsk’s head, Denis Pushilin: “The special operation in Donbass will soon be over and all the cities will be liberated.”
We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now it would be totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria.
Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a ‘gift’ to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.
It’s creative destruction time
It will be fascinating to watch what Prof. Sergey Karaganov masterfully described, in detail, as the new Putin doctrine of constructive destruction, and how it will interconnect with West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and further on down the Global South road.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ceremonial NATO Sultan, denounced the recognition of the Baby Twins as “unacceptable.” No wonder: that shift smashed all his elaborate plans to pose as privileged mediator between Moscow and Kiev during Putin’s upcoming visit to Ankara. The Kremlin – as well as the Foreign Ministry – don’t waste time talking to NATO minions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, had a recent, very productive entente with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. Russia, this past weekend, has staged a spectacular strategic missile display, hypersonic and otherwise, featuring Khinzal, Zircon, Kalibr, Yars ICBMs, Iskander and Sineva – irony of ironies, in synch with the Russophobia-fest in Munich. In parallel, Russian Navy ships of the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea fleets performed a series of submarine search drills in the Mediterranean.
The Putin doctrine privileges the asymmetrical – and that applies to the near abroad and beyond. Putin’s body language, in his last two crucial interventions, spell out nearly maximum exasperation. As in realizing, not auspiciously, but rather in resignation, that the only language Beltway Neo-conservatives and ‘humanitarian imperialists’ understand is heavy metal thunder. They are definitely deaf, dumb and blind to history, geography and diplomacy.
So, one can always game the Russian military – for instance, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria to conduct a series of visits by Mr. Khinzal not only to the Turk-protected shady jihadist umbrella in Idlib but also the jihadists protected by the Americans in Al-Tanf base, near the Syria-Jordan border. After all, these specimens are all NATO proxies.
The US government barks non-stop about “territorial sovereignty.” So let’s game the Kremlin asking the White House for a road map on getting out of Syria: after all the Americans are illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and adding extra disaster to the Syrian economy by stealing their oil.
NATO’s stultifying leader, Jens Stoltenberg, has announced the alliance is dusting off its “defense plans.” That may include little more than hiding behind their expensive Brussels desks. They are as inconsequential in the Black Sea as in the East Med – as the US remains quite vulnerable in Syria.
There are now four Russian TU-22M3 strategic bombers in Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria, each capable of carrying three S-32 anti-ship missiles that fly at supersonic Mach 4.3 with a range of 1,000 km. No Aegis system is able to handle them.
Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.
So the rules have changed. Drastically. The Hegemon is naked. The new deal starts with turning the post-Cold War set-up in Eastern Europe completely upside down. The East Med will be next. The Bear is back, hear him roar.
In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.
Good luck with “answer for it” part.
by James Howard Kunstler
The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was….
It is fair to say that the “Joe Biden” government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the “Joe Biden” government’s war on its own people in the United States. The table was nicely laid for it over many years, including, by the way, Mr. Trump’s vaunted gift of weaponry to Ukraine, which enabled and emboldened the Kiev regime to harass the Russian-speaking population of Donbas without relent. And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of “Joe Biden” and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia’s border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.
You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry’s State Department and John Brennan’s CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully. If you bother to read the recent statements of both “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin, you will see exactly why and how the situation developed. You will also see an appalling difference in the quality of public utterance — as, say, the difference between Zippy the Pinhead and a Metternich.
I’ll get back to all that presently, but first let’s be clear about what “Joe Biden” & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the “Joe Biden” regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America’s own Deep State.
The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA “vaccines” were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA “vaccines” turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus. That last bit of news is now coming out in reports from the life insurance and funeral industries, which are showing an alarming increase in all-causes death, especially in people under 60 years of age.
The left wing of Western polities has embraced authoritarianism as its ethos. Concern for personal liberty and society’s fabric are now condemned as hateful and seditious and likely the product of sinister foreign agents. Liberal ideas about free and open debate and honest disagreement are rejected, replaced by the clenched fist of the state. The CIA’s “Deep Dive” program has been collecting information on U.S. citizens for years.
In 2018, U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) made headlines when he casually referred to “nukes” as a reasonable way to arbitrate a dispute with millions of Americans who might resist enforcement of a federal ban on the private ownership of semiautomatic rifles. “It’s not the 18th century,” he snarked, dismissing the notion that armed citizens were in any position to oppose his agenda. President Joe Biden, the “uniter,” needed less than six months in the White House before he was telling reporters that resistance to tyranny is a chimera among gun owners because “if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”
Biden and Swalwell, and plenty of other politicians, speak like Roman emperors these days, as if they were destined to bring fire and sword, to rule or ruin. They falsely pledge fidelity to a Constitution they consider well beneath their loftier ambitions. Bigger and more powerful government has led inevitably to more interference in the lives of the people, who see their freedom and living standards slipping away. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the country is “off on the wrong track,” according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey. Events in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the Western world reveal a universal contempt held by “progressive” politicians for the people they claim to serve.
While the US began throwing its weight around overtly and covertly in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Russia gradually reconstituted itself, much to the surprise of American foreign policy wonks. The US sponsored Rose Revolution and Orange Revolution in Georgia and Ukraine respectively on top of attempts to add these countries into NATO’s security umbrella served as wake up calls to the Russian national security establishment. The US’s outwardly benign image then looked more and more like that of a hostile external actor trying to sneak its way into Russia’s historical sphere of influence. Conflict between the two powers would soon become inevitable.
Russia’s concerns are understandable when viewed from a geopolitical lens.
With Russia launching a military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the corporate press has grown shrill in its calls for punishing Russia with draconian sanctions, supplying Ukraine with increased military aid, and diplomatically isolating the Eurasian power as much as possible. The two-minutes hate against Russia has been cranked up to 11, thereby making any nuanced analysis of why the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has reached such a point almost impossible.
The failure of policy wonks to understand why Russia took decisive action against Ukraine is emblematic of a flawed grand strategy that has dominated DC foreign policy circles since the end of the Cold War. Once the dust settled from the Soviet Union’s collapse, international relations specialists were convinced that the US had entered an “end of history” moment where liberal democracy would become the governing standard worldwide. Former Soviet Union states would be the preliminary trial ground for this new liberal democratic project.Through expanding the reach of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into FSU states and the use of color revolutions in this region, Washington believed that it could reshape this part of the world in its image. From dealing with violent insurgencies in the Caucasus to confronting precipitous declines in life expectancy and other social ills such as rising criminal activity, the Soviet Union’s successor in the Russian Federation was in no shape to resist American influence let alone project power within its backyard during the 1990s.It’s small wonder why NATO was able to easily intervene in the Balkans, a region featuring ethnic groups like Serbians who have traditionally been allies of the Russians, at a time when Russia was in a wobbly state. Nevertheless, avid students of Russian history such as George Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and America’s containment policy towards the Soviet Union, recognized that the Russian bear was down but not out. During the 1990s, the renowned diplomat warned about the dangers of NATO expansion following the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Despite Kennan’s admonitions, the DC political class was drunk on the notion that the US would remain unipolar and be able to impose its universalist vision across the globe at will.While the US began throwing its weight around overtly and covertly in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Russia gradually reconstituted itself, much to the surprise of American foreign policy wonks. The US sponsored Rose Revolution and Orange Revolution in Georgia and Ukraine respectively on top of attempts to add these countries into NATO’s security umbrella served as wake up calls to the Russian national security establishment. The US’s outwardly benign image then looked more and more like that of a hostile external actor trying to sneak its way into Russia’s historical sphere of influence. Conflict between the two powers would soon become inevitable. Russia’s concerns are understandable when viewed from a geopolitical lens. The US has its own Monroe Doctrine to keep external actors out of the Western Hemisphere. Exercising such policies are not the exclusive domain of the US, however. Once other civilization states grow stronger and revert to their historical levels of prominence, they proceed to reassert themselves in their respective domains. These powers’ principal aim is to expel any undue influence from foreign powers that try to encroach in their traditional sphere of influence.However, the US has applied the Monroe Doctrine at a global scale treating the whole world as its sphere of influence. American policymakers have done so in complete disregard for the potential costs and blowback that could result from overzealous incursions into great powers’ backyards.No one here is saying Russia is an angel. In fairness, the Poles and Baltic states have legitimate historical grievances with Russia due to the latter’s previous imperial dominion over the former. However, there’s little to suggest that Russia is seconds away from launching a blitzkrieg against Eastern Europe. If the Baltic states and Poland were so worried about Russian aggression, they would consider setting up their own security architecture independent of NATO and even consider building a minimum viable nuclear deterrent.But tropes of Russia being the second coming of Nazi Germany, with all the attendant tropes of appeasement, are simply lazy analogies with scant historical nuance. There are qualitative differences between those regimes. Moreover, for some in the DC blob, the Cold War has not ended. For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz called out Vladimir Putin for being “a communist” last May.However, this characterization of Russia as a home of Soviet-style socialism is an outmoded and inaccurate description of what contemporary Russia looks like. Bryan MacDonald, a journalist whose primary focus is on Russia affairs, pointed out that “Russia has a flat 13% income tax rate” and “tiny social welfare payments” to demonstrate that the Russian economy is not necessarily a full-blown command economy like its Soviet predecessor.
Reality check: – The KGB disbanded 30 years ago & Putin was later director of its successor, the FSB, for 13 months. – Under Putin, Russia has a flat 13% income tax rate, tiny social welfare payments & the most extreme financial inequality of any G8 economy. Communist? No. https://t.co/wMu9B6Zk7e
In addition, international relations scholar Artyom Lukin observed that Russia under Putin’s tutelage is “a conservative autocracy resembling the czarist Russian Empire” in how it manages its internal affairs. He cited one instance of a Communist Party activist being hauled before a court for engaging in so-called “hate speech” to demonstrate the Russian government’s unique strain of authoritarianism that is not necessarily a spitting image of the Soviet Union. In a hysteria-filled environment of political discourse, these kinds of nuances fall by the wayside.Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of thoughtful geopolitical analysis occurring these days. It’s going to take a new generation of leaders who are not encumbered by tired political assumptions to change the course of American foreign policy.The first step is for foreign policy leaders to admit that the 20th century international relations landscape is over and that US primary threats are more internal than external in nature.Sticking to Cold War era assumptions is a recipe for a sub-optimal foreign policy, which could increase the probability of the US stumbling into a disastrous war of choice. If the initial responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have told us anything, it’s that DC still hasn’t learned the error of its ways.
The early 19th-century French classical liberal economists understood that government by its very nature as the taxing authority is a dispenser of privileges and the source of class conflict. The conflict, obviously, is between what the liberals called the tax-payers and the tax-eaters. In the liberals’ eyes, all industrious people, including unsubsidized organizers of business firms, were in the tax-paying class, while those who lived off of them rather than working were tax-eaters. The latter class did not consist of the poor by and large, but rather the cronies of government officials or the king.
One of the most abused words in English is privilege. Observe how indiscriminately this word is spoken and written. For example, in some quarters, all straight white men — without exception — are said to be privileged, which seems absurd.
Practically all we hear about these days is privilege, who has it and who doesn’t. Well, not exactly — because those who are said not to have it are often called “underprivileged.” I think it was the late P. T. Bauer, the great free-market development economist, who pointed out how peculiar a word that is. Underprivileged? Wouldn’t that mean insufficiently privileged? An insufficiently privileged person is nevertheless privileged, no? Apart from the problem of measuring and comparing privileges among people, is that what people really mean by the word? I think not.
Semantics aside, we face a more serious matter with the concept, namely, that vastly disparate things are tossed into that bin. Some alleged privileges are not privileges at all. Rather, they indicate the absence of unjust impediments, mostly imposed by the state. In those cases we should focus not on the unimpeded but on those who are unjustly burdened. The unimpeded are not privileged; they are just free (at least in that one respect). Those whom the state burdens are unfree.
For example, if black people and other members of minorities are more likely than white people to be harassed by the police for trifles or nothing at all, that is an outrageous injustice against the victims. But the unharassed white people are not thereby privileged, not even in a relative sense. In that respect, they are as they should be. The problem is that everyone else is not in the same position. The lack of equal treatment, as unjust as it is, does not necessarily indicate the presence of privilege.
Again, if a privilege is something granted that the recipient has no inherent right to, then not being harassed by the police is in no way a privilege. No one deserves to be harassed by the cops. On the contrary, one has a right not to be harassed. (Not every contact with the police counts as harassment, of course. If one is stopped from accosting an innocent person, the aggressor cannot be said to have been harassed.)
This doesn’t mean privilege does not exist. Our society is rife with it. But it behooves us to be clear on its nature. As I said, a privilege is something bestowed to which the recipient has no inherent right. Privileges, then, come in two forms: legitimate and illegitimate. If parents give their child an allowance that he or she can use freely, we might call that a privilege. But it is legitimate because the money is the parents to give as they wish. On the other hand, if the government grants a cash subsidy to a firm or industry, it is illegitimate because the politicians give away other people’s money to which they have no right. Using the threat of force, they transfer wealth from its producers to nonproducers. This is true of all government transfers, no matter how elevated the politicians’ motives might be.
For a long time, state governments and the federal government provided low-interest loans and mortgage insurance to white homebuyers only. Those governments not only treated the two groups unequally, but they also positively subsidized the whites. Whites unjustly got a leg up, while blacks were ignored or worse. That was scandalous race-based government privilege with long-term consequences.
Not all subsidies are outright cash grants. If the government does a crony industry or firm a favor by imposing a tax (tariff) on imports, that too is a privilege. Ultimately, the unjust burden is imposed on consumers, who will pay higher prices, which is the purpose of the tariff, Foreign firms will also be unjustly harmed. The domestic recipients of the privilege have no right to the loot.
Another form of privilege is a government regulation of peaceful commerce that is more easily borne by large companies than small ones.
The early 19th-century French classical liberal economists understood that government by its very nature as the taxing authority is a dispenser of privileges and the source of class conflict. The conflict, obviously, is between what the liberals called the tax-payers and the tax-eaters. In the liberals’ eyes, all industrious people, including unsubsidized organizers of business firms, were in the tax-paying class, while those who lived off of them rather than working were tax-eaters. The latter class did not consist of the poor by and large, but rather the cronies of government officials or the king. (Marx acknowledged his debt to these bourgeois liberals for originating class theory, but he either misunderstood it or intentionally twisted it to put all business owners, not just the cronies, in the parasitic class.)
Without reservation, we should favor the repeal of all actual state privileges, while also calling for an end to all the burdens that the state imposes on anyone. We can do all this without regarding the unburdened as privileged.
As Russia’s population has declined, the Chinese side of the border looks increasingly like a source of political instability and ethnic incursion into Russian territory. Beyond the near term, this is likely to lead to more conflict over the exact location of the border and who dominates the region.
In the wake of mounting tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine, one now finds countless media stories on the “China-Russia axis” and the “bond between Russia and China.” The ideological benefit of connecting Russia to China is undoubtedly clear to anti-Russia hawks. Russia is a relatively weak state with a small economy. China, on the other hand, tends to look more formidable. By connecting Russia to China in a new version of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” it becomes easier to downplay calmer voices noting the many limitations Russia faces in terms of its geopolitical ambitions.
But just how secure is this supposed Sino-Russian friendship? While the two states may broadly agree on the need to limit US hegemonic power, the two are likely to also find many reasons to view each other as more immediate sources of conflict.
In his book Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, China scholar Michael Beckley notes there are many issues mitigating China-Russia “unity”:
Russia and China currently maintain a strategic partnership, but this relationship is unlikely to become a genuine alliance…. In parts of the world that matter most to them, Russia and China are more rivals than allies…. For every example of Sino-Russian cooperation, there is a counterexample of competition. For instance, Russia sells weapons to China, but it recently reduced sales to China while increasing sales to China’s rivals, most notably India and Vietnam. Russia and China conduct joint military exercises, but they also train with each other’s enemies and conduct unilateral exercises simulating a Sino-Russian war. The two countries share an interest in developing Central Asia, but Russia wants to tether the region to Moscow via the Eurasian Economic Union whereas China wants to reconstitute the Silk Road and link China to the Middle East and Europe while bypassing Russia.
The potential for an ongoing border dispute between Russia and China remains as well. For its part, China has as many as eighteen border disputes going on right now, and Russia continues to deal with several border issues with both Ukraine and Georgia. In Siberia, however, Russia and China face a low-intensity conflict over their border that is an ongoing source of division between the two states. While unlikely to lead to violent conflict in the near future, this border situation does provide an informative example of one of many ways that the Russia-China “partnership” faces many pitfalls.
What Is Russia’s Far East Problem?
As Russia’s population has declined, the Chinese side of the border looks increasingly like a source of political instability and ethnic incursion into Russian territory. Beyond the near term, this is likely to lead to more conflict over the exact location of the border and who dominates the region.
Many have noted this. In 2008, for example, the Hudson Institute’s Laurent Murawiec published “The Great Siberian War of 2030,” which explored the possibility for rising tensions along the Russia-China border. Murawiec notes that as Russia’s population continues to decline and withdraw from Siberia—a term in this context meaning everything east of the Ural Mountains—relative Chinese geopolitical strength in the region will continue to decline:
A hollowed out Siberia will be similar to a vacuum hole sucking in outside forces to make up for the vanishing Russian presence. Conflict is neither inexorable nor prescribed by some mechanical inevitability, but the likelihood that disequilibrium may lead to turmoil must be taken into account as a realistic possibility.
A similar thesis appeared inthe New York Times in 2015 in an article titled “Why China Will Reclaim Siberia.” The author, Frank Jacobs, lays out the basic dynamics:
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