The desire of the US to dominate and its refusal to see other countries as equals, willing and able to assume equal responsibility for peace and stability, is the short answer to the question of why Moscow-Washington relations cannot get out of the current state of crisis. This attitude also leads the US to the same difficulties in its relations with China, India and even some of its own allies, such as Turkey.

The Russian and Chinese position is buttressed by the principle that peace is the result of compromise between the major centers of power, and that without their mutual agreement – without equality, mutual respect, a willingness to recognize each other’s interests, and adherence to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs – a stable order is impossible. The US believes, however, that peace is a deterministic given, and that no special effort is needed to maintain it. This leads to paradoxical solutions: the more weapons, the more peace. The West is not yet ready to become just one of the Atlanteans holding up the sky. It still believes it should be in charge. ...

$1.5 trillion each year on its military (half of which is funded outside of the U.S. Defense Deprtment so as to fool the world to think that it’s instead only around $900 billion per year), while its federal Government’s debt has risen by $5 trillion in the past four years, which is only $1.25T per year, which is only 83% as much as the nation’s annual military expenses are, which means that all other expenses by the U.S. federal Government will inevitably soon be reduced each year by around $250 billion per year. Those non-military annual expenses constitute $5T ($6.5T minus $1.5T), so that from now on, the non-military part will be reduced by 5% ($.25T/$5T) each year, or else the growth in the federal debt will be $1.5T per year instead of $1.25T per year, or else the current $1.5T U.S. annual spending on its military will be cut down to $1.25T per year, which would mean that the very top priority of the almost 100% neoconservative U.S. Government, which is its military spending, will have to become annually reduced at least by 5%, by that almost 100% neoconservative Government, which won’t happen unless there is a Second American Revolution, which replaces all of these officials by Government officials who will be like what professor Shushentsov says will be needed in order to prevent yet further build-up to a WW3 global nuclear annihilation. 

the billionaires who control the U.S. elected officials by means of their political donations, lobbyists, news-media, think tanks, etc., will see their net worths decline because foreign investors will be withdrawing. So, that path forward will be even less acceptable to them than the other paths will be.

Perhaps the neoconservatives will say that this is Russian propaganda, or Chinese propaganda, or Iranian propaganda, or by some other country that neoconservatives hope to conquer, but they won’t be able to contest any of this by the numbers, because all of these numbers come from the U.S. Government itself. The actual propagandists are the neocons themselves, and they are funded by U.S. billionaires, who have been profiting from all of this. By contrast, nobody has paid me anything in order to research and write this. I always write only what the data display. In the case of my own country, the U.S., what the data display is why the U.S. is increasingly unfit for world leadership. The neoconservatives (including all U.S.-and-allied billionaires) are that reason why. They, themselves, are the reason. And they have enough money to be able to destroy America — and maybe the world.

Of course, those youths aren’t aware that this is what the war in Ukraine is actually about — they’ve instead been deceived to think that it’s an imperial war started by Putin in 2022, rather than an imperial war started by Obama in 2014 when Obama’s Administration engineered a very bloody coup which removed the democratically elected neutralist President there and replaced him with a rabidly anti-Russian U.S.-selected leader who immediately started an ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of enough of the former President’s voters so that when future elections would he held in Ukraine, only rabidly anti-Russian rulers would be elected, and that this ethnic-cleansing campaign to solidify Obama’s coup started the war in Ukraine — Putin did not. The goal of Obama (and of the billionaires who had funded his political campaigns) was to get Ukraine into NATO so that America could place a nuclear missile there only 317 miles, or five minutes of missile-flying time, away from The Kremlin — checkmate against Russia. Those French youths don’t know anything about any of that, because their nation’s ‘news’-media hide it from them.

Their nation’s ‘news’-media had similarly hidden from their parents the unassailable fact that in 2003 when the U.S. invaded and destroyed (that video had been quickly removed by youtube) Iraq, it was 100% on the basis of lies to the American people (just as the U.S.-and-allied war in Ukraine against Russia is), and that America is no democracy but instead a profoundly corrupt country whose Government is controlled by its billionaires, who are determined to extend their empire throughout the entire world. And these youngsters also don’t know that France’s billionaires, like the billionaires in all other U.S. colonies, are part of the American international gang and are likewise determined to take over Russia for the American empire.

any dictatorship, even today. This American dictatorship is a collective dictatorship, it’s an aristocracy instead of a monarchy, but it’s really no better than a one-person dictatorship, such as Hitler wanted to impose.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. 

“restricting Moscow’s access to the Baltic Sea, which ignores the inevitable response to threats to Kaliningrad.”; or 3 (in a poorly written passage): anything that would threaten Russia’s most important naval base, which is in the Black Sea (at Sevastopol in Crimea).

Publishing in The West this article, as coming from Professor Istomin instead of from Putin or even Lavrov (the Foreign Minister), is unofficially giving notice to all heads-of-state and legislatures in the U.S. empire, that in any of those three conditions, Russia will immediately eliminate them. However, elsewhere in the article, Istomin says that within NATO itself, the belief is instead that NATO “still needs to work to prepare for a protracted confrontation that could lead to a clash with Russia” rather than to prepare for that sudden “clash with Russia.” He is, in other words, saying that NATO is falsely assuming that in terms of the nuclear phase of WW3, NATO instead of Russia will be the first to strike. However, Istomin makes clear that “Moscow doesn’t countenance losing in any way” the war in Ukraine. If it will need to resort to the nuclear phase in order to eliminate the threat that NATO is posing to Russia’s inviolable national security — Russia’s sovereignty over its own land — it will do so (and it will do so promptly — without any “protracted confrontation”).

So: in Russia’s priorities, the worst possible outcome would be if Russia’s central command becomes beheaded (such as by a blitz nuclear U.S. missile-strike from Ukraine only 317 miles away from The Kremlin, or by one from Finland only 507 miles away) and so Russia loses its sovereignty over its own territory. The second-worst is if Russia is forced to strike first in order to prevent that. And the best is if the U.S. and its colonies halt and permanently end their effort ever since 1945 [or earlier, when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917—Ed.] to conquer Russia. 

Russia has zero interest in conquering the American empire (or any part of it) unless the rulers of America will never halt their goal of adding Russia to their empire. The imperialist nation here is America, NOT Russia — and ALSO not China.

ONLY America poses a threat to the entire world.

We are actually now in year ten of this war. The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said. It was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist President with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President (who had been democratically elected). Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet. That is the threat which Ukraine was posing to Russia — the same threat that Cuba posed to America during the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful, it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Eric Zuesse
It’s a fact that gets no attention from ‘historians’ and from America’s ‘news’-media, but a consistently established fact nonetheless. As always, for a recent example, the New York Times left it hidden, when they headlined on June 10th “How the Federal Election Commission Went From Deadlock to Deregulation”, as they mentioned only in passing, that “At the center of the shift [to allow unlimited corruption] is Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum, a Democrat who has repeatedly crossed the aisle to vote with her Republican colleagues since President Biden appointed her and she was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-38 vote in 2022.” In other words: on the topic of corruption, Biden supports traditional Republican-Party views that have previously been pushed for by Republican politicians, who get a bigger proportion of their campaign-funding from the rich and their corporations than Democrats do. 

On two issues, Joe Biden has, in fact throughout his career, followed through to implement Republican-Party views, instead of Democratic-Party views: the issues on which he does this are his pushing and leading (though only behind the scenes) for more legalized political corruption, and for legal protection of continuing racial segregation — and each of these two issues is a major ‘libertarian’ (for the super-rich) part of Republican-Party viewpoints (which might be called “hyper-capitalism” — and which the Democrtic Party has only in recent decades come to support also).

On 25 October 2019, Lee Fang at The Intercept headlined “JOE BIDEN’S SUPER PAC IS BEING ORGANIZED BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS FOR HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY, WEAPONS MAKERS, FINANCE”, and he reported that among the billionaires who were planning a PAC to support Joe Biden’s campaign was Bernard Schwartz. On that same day, I headlined "Biden Backer — Former Lockheed Leader — Convinces Biden to Sell-Out”, and I reported that the “Former Lockheed leader” who was leading this effort, was Schwartz, himself, formerly a Chairman of Lockheed Martin, the company that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other — it’s by far (p. 8) the largest federal ‘defense’ (actually aggression) contractor. 

In other words: if Biden does become re-elected the U.S. President, then he will be (as he has been) heavily in debt to the world’s biggest weapons-maker, a corporation whose profits are totally dependent upon selling to the U.S. Government and to its allied governments such as in NATO, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel. This is exactly the opposite of what America’s Founding Fathers urged subsequent generations of Americans to do. They were very wise. Joe Biden is not. But he’s cunning about how to serve his megadonors.

Only an uninformed person would expect such a President to be seeking Mid-East peace. Biden would instead be seeking the standard neoconservative’s objective, “Peace Through Strength” — in other words, fear-mongering the public against ‘America’s enemies’, and ‘love’-mongering for ‘America’s allies’ (such as NATO, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.). That’s the opposite of what, for example, George Washington urged the American people to do. 

Biden’s relying upon people such as Bernard Schwartz to place him into the White House is the worst possible form of selling himself out — selling-out to America’s “Military Industrial Complex” or “MIC.”

But the reason why such people as Schwartz want Biden to become and remain the President is that, consistently, Biden has been precisely such a war-monger or “neoconservative” as they are, have always been wanting — such as when Biden helped to lead Democrats in the U.S. Senate who backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That wasn’t a ‘mistake’ by him as he now claims — it was the way Joe Biden has always been. And, the former Chairman of Lockheed Martin knew that Biden still remains that way.

On 23 October 2019, Luke Darby at GQ magazine, had headlined “How Biden Helped Strip Bankruptcy Protection From Millions Just Before a Recession”. Joe Biden was the leading Democrat in Congress backing and pushing for the George W. Bush and Republican-backed ‘bankruptcy reform’ bill which passed, in the Senate, with 18 Senate Democrats for the 'bankruptcy reform' bill, while 25 Democrats were against it. All 55 Republicans were for it.

In the U.S. House, the Independent Bernie Sanders voted against. All 229 Republicans were for. 73 Democrats there were for, 125 were against. Biden led that minority of Democrats who helped to pass this Republican bill.

A lot of Biden supporters said that Biden was “a real Democrat” and that Sanders was no Democrat at all (since he’s an Independent who merely caucuses with the Senate’s Democrats). But Sanders voted like most Democrats did, and Biden voted like all Republicans did. 

Back when the ‘bankruptcy reform’ bill first was first being drafted in 1999, the Washington Post headlined “Creditors' Money Talks Louder in Bankruptcy Debate”  and reported that,

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a key Judiciary Committee member who hails from the home base of credit card issuers MBNA Corp. and First USA, opposes the liberal faction's bill. "I'm not the senator from MBNA," he said.

Luke Darby’s article noted that,

MBNA hired Joe Biden's son Hunter in 1996. Even after Hunter became a federal lobbyist in 2001, he stayed on at MBNA as a consultant at a fee of $100,000 per year, meaning he was pulling in a six-figure salary at the same time his father was pushing for the industry's top priorities. Biden's interests were so aligned with MBNA's that in 1999 he was forced to defend himself by declaring, “I am not the senator from MBNA.”

donated over twice as much to his campaign as did his #2 donor during that cycle, and he delivered the goods so well that they owed him now even more.

And, like Lee Fang said, it’s not only credit-card companies, but, “JOE BIDEN’S SUPER PAC IS BEING ORGANIZED BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS FOR HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY, WEAPONS MAKERS, FINANCE”.

“User Clip: Joe Biden 2007, Money in Politics”, and here’s my transcription from what I consider to be the most revealing (about Biden’s values) part of it: 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4817532/user-clip-joe-biden-2007-money-politics&start=3322

“User Clip: Joe Biden 2007, Money in Politics”

27 November 2007, Iowa Town Hall

(0:40-) People who accept money [from lobbyists] aren't bad people. But it’s human nature. You go out and bundle $250,000 for me, all legal, and then you call me after I am elected, and say “I would like to come and talk about something.” You didn't buy me, but it’s human nature, you helped me. I’m going to say, “Sure, come on in.” … What it does mean, it means that the front of the line is always filled by people whose pockets are filled, people who are special interests. Most of you are no part of any special interest.

Furthermore: the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) design and run the primaries, and don’t at all represent their voters but instead their mega-donors, who contribute over half of their campaigns’ funding and also control their ‘news’-media so as to put on the show that will fool the voters to think that if they choose between a candidate who represents one group of billionaires, against another candidate who represents a different group of billionaires, then that constitutes a “democracy” — but it doesn’t. Each of the Parties is a closed self-appointing club of members each of whom represents a group of billionaires, and the show that the club puts on for its voters is only to fool them, and all of the winners will follow-through only on the promises to their megadonors, not to their mere voters. (This fact has even been proven empirically by massive quantitative data.) They call that “democracy.” They lie.

As the People’s Party (which seeks a real revolution for democracy in America) reported on 28 September 2023,

An incumbent president has never lost a party primary [no matter how bad the incumbent happens to be]. In 2017, the DNC stated in court that its presidential primaries are a charade and that it picks the nominees. It stated that, as a private corporation, it is under no obligation to be impartial or follow its own rules. The court upheld this argument.

Furthermore, the DNC and the Biden campaign are essentially the same entity. Biden appointed DNC Chair Jamie Harrison, who is shutting down debates and rearranging the primary schedule according to Biden’s wishes. In February, the entire DNC unanimously endorsed Biden. The president’s campaign dictates the rules of the primary and can change them at will. At the convention, the party can even choose a nominee who didn’t run in the primary, as it did in 1968. This means that even if Biden dropped out, the DNC would still install someone like Gavin Newsom.

The Biden campaign is also the biggest donor to the DNC. Donations to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the DNC, financially sustain the party. It brings in hundreds of millions of dollars from big donors that flow to the DNC, all fifty state party organizations, and their vast array of staff, consulting firms, and vendors. The entire party ecosystem and everyone who profits from it would collapse if the party nominated Kennedy. This is why the party rigged the election against Bernie twice and why it will never choose RFK Jr. The party would rather lose with an establishment candidate who keeps the corporate money flowing than win with a populist.

Each of the Parties campaigns against the other Parties, each of which represents its respective mega-donors, all of whom together control the public (with the help of their ‘news’-media), so that the Government will never represent the public, but will instead represent some coalition of all of the billionaires — regardless of what the public needs. And this has even been repeatedly confirmed by scientific empirical studies in political science. So, this is the type of dictatorship that the U.S. Government actually is.

The result is that a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with their Government, regardless of which Party is in power. On 4 October 2023, Gallup headlined “Support for Third U.S. Political Party Up to 63%”, and reported “Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do ‘such a poor job’ of representing the American people that ‘a third major party is needed.’” (Gallup said nothing there about the people whom the U.S. Government doesrepresent: its billionaires.)

On 22 January 2020, the Washington Post headlined a 6,000-word article about the day in politics “The Daily 202: Joe Biden talks Ukraine, but not impeachment, in Iowa”, and reported that “The centerpiece of Biden’s pitch is that he can bridge the partisan divides and work with Republican senators to get big things done.” It was actually true: Biden was clearly aiming to become the ‘Democratic’ President who could be ‘bipartisan’ with congressional Republicans, and sign into law legislation that until his occupancy of the White House had been only decades-long Republican and billionaires’ dreams, but under a Biden Presidency would now become his proud “bipartisan achievements.” He could turn out to be the most effective Republican (but of the Democrat-in-name-only, hyper-hypocritical, type of) President ever — a truly bipartisan-fascist President. It would be a fitting culmination to his career. And it has been. He never dealt with an American coup, or sanction, or invasion, that he didn’t support — and each of them was bipartisan, even though on domestic policies he has often been blocked by the Party of Republican billionaires, whose members of Congress agree with Biden only on his foreign policies, since virtually all of America’s congresspeople are likewise neoconservatives (that being the billionaires’ foreign policy, on which they are all united).

And Biden has a long record of lying to voters, even about his own personal record, and winning ‘elections’ on that basis. Of course, the most-publicized example of this has been about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which revealed astounding evidences that the U.S. President has been receiving 10% kick-backs from international-corporate deals that are done with the participation of his son Hunter Biden, but which America’s Democratic Party ‘news’-media allege (without any proof at all) are ‘Russian disinformation’. On 21 July 2023, I headlined about this “The Significance of the Congressional Probes into FBI-Biden Corruption”, but even the Republican Senators and Representatives who have done impressive investigations into this have failed to gain any support for prosecution of the President on bribery and conspiracy charges, and treason — all of which charges are supported by the massive evidence — in order to bring these federal crimes to a jury trial, because only a few of the Republican billionaires support that, because exposing it to a broad segment of the public would bring the entire corrupt house-of-cards crashing down — and much of their fortunes with it.

Although Warren Harding has been considered by historians to have been the most corrupt of America’s Presidents, his corruptness has been dwarfed by Biden’s. Furthermore, even Clinton’s, Bush’s, Obama’s, and Trump’s, have been strong competitors (though not nearly as strong as Biden’s) for that title.

After all: even in most of the “Third World” countries, very few of the heads-of-state have nearly as much evidence against them of bribery, conspiracy, and treason, as America’s President Biden does.

like Nader in 2000 threw it to Bush). Back in the year 2000, there was a real and large difference between Bush and Gore; but since then, that hasn’t really been so in the Presidential contests: the differences have been only theatrical. This clearly is the case between Trump vs. Biden. However bad one of those two is, the other is at least nearly as bad; and neither of them has had better than a poor record during his four-year term; so, the question is: Do those approximately 63% of Americans who reject both Parties find such a choice acceptable? What are their options? Either they could vote for Kennedy, who really would be a change, or else they would vote for either the Democrat or the Republican. If they vote for either Trump or Biden, they don’t REALLY reject both of the Parties. Any such person was then merely engaging in theater to answer Gallup’s question there in that way. But any of them who was SERIOUS about it, would be voting for Kennedy, simply BECAUSE there exists no clear evidence that he would be a rotten President, as all have been during recent decades, going back at least to the time of JFK who was assassinated in 1963.

To any of my fellow-Americans who still are concerned not to vote for a candidate who might possibly (like Nader did in 2000) throw the ‘election’ one way or the other (as opposed to being an authentic possibility to win the U.S. Presidency), I ask: Would you prefer a violent revolution in this country? Have you even thought about that possibility? Because things are heading in that direction. Would you really prefer the change to happen violently? I wouldn’t. I therefore thank RFK Jr. for giving me, at long last, a possible alternative to that outcome.

• Editor's Note:
  Essentially the US political system is not a democracy because both parties in the duopoly, and even some of the minor parties (i.e., Libertarian), all represent ONLY the interests of the oligarchy, or just one class interest, the super rich, thereby offering by definition no real choice. Originally (as in old Rome) parties were created to represent ideological interests, factions, within a ruling class. Later, in class-divided societies, such as capitalist America, parties must be understood as organisations created to represent an specific class interest. At this point in America, except perhaps for the (still) very marginal Green Party and People's Party, the US has no party representing the working class, which is the overwhelming majority of Americans. This is an enormous defect, disqualifying the country to call itself a democracy.  In fact, as shown even by bourgeois political scientists, the lack of choice in the system and its incurable corruption is not a bug but a feature. The BBC, no less, headlined in 2014, Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy, adding, "The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study, by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin Page." —PG