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October
23
2018

It Is Like A Western Movie: A Showdown Is In The Making
Paul Craig Roberts

It has taken the US military/security complex 31 years to get rid of President Reagan’s last nuclear disarmament achievement—the INF Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev achieved in 1987.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified by the US Senate on May 27, 1988 and became effective a few days later on June 1. Behind the scenes, I had some role in this, and as I remember what the treaty achieved was to make Europe safe from nuclear attack by Soviet short and intermediate range missiles, and to make the Soviet Union safe from US attack from short and intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Europe. By restricting nuclear weapons to ICBMs, which allowed some warning time, thus guaranteeing retaliation and non-use of nucular weapons, the INF Treaty was regarded as reducing the risk of an American first-strike on Russia and a Russian first-strike on Europe, strikes that could be delivered by low-flying cruise missiles with next to zero warning time.

When President Reagan appointed me to a secret Presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA, he told the members of the secret committee that his aim was to bring the Cold War to an end, with the result that, in his words, “those God-awful nuclear weapons would be dismantled.” President Reagan, unlike the crazed neoconservatives, who he fired and prosecuted, saw no point in nuclear war that would destroy all life on earth. The INF Treaty was the beginning, in Reagan’s mind, of the elimination of nuclear weapons from military arsenals. The INF Treaty was chosen as the first start because it did not substantially threaten the budget of the US military/security complex, and actually increased the security of the Soviet military. In other words, it was something that Reagan and Gorbachev could get past their own military establishments. Reagan hoped that as trust built, more nuclear disarmament would proceed. 

Now that President Reagan’s remaining achievement has been destroyed, what are the consequences of the Trump administration’s concession to the profits of the US military/security complex? 

There are many, none good.

The massive US military/security complex profits will increase as more increasingly scarce American resources flow into the production of intermediate range missiles in order to counter “the Russian threat.” The Republicans will want to pay for this by cutting Social Security and Medicare. I am unsure that the Democrats would be any different.

The Zionist neoconservatives now have their hope rekindled of re-establishing American and Israeli hegemony with an undetected first strike nuclear cruise missile attack on Russia. 

More pressure will be on Putin’s government from Alexei Kudrin, the Jewish Lobby, and the billionaire oligarchs put in place by Washington and Israel during the Yeltsin years when Russia was degraded to an American vassal state. These Russian traitors are so powerful that Putin has to tolerate them. With neoconized Washington doing everything it can possibly do to damage the Russian economy and to draw Russian resources off from economic and infrastructure needs to military spending, Kudrin and the Western-supported elements of the Russian media will, with their demands to accommodate Washington, encourage Washington to put yet more pressure on Russia with the intention of forcing Russia into a vassal status with the Germans, British, French, and the rest of Europe, along with Canada, Australia, and Japan.

The Russian government, by its meek response to extraordinary provocations, continues to encourage more provocations, as the provocations cost the US and its vassals nothing. The Russian government’s toleration of traitors, such as Kudrin, does not convince Western peoples that Russia is an open, free speech society. Instead, they believe Kudrin, not Putin. Americans believe that Putin is a thug who stole $50 billion and is one of the world’s richest men. I heard this yesterday from my own cousin. The Western media never paints a correct picture of life in Russia. The only achievement of the Russian government’s non-confrontational response to the West and toleration of treason within its own government is to convince Washington that Putin can be overthrown, just like the pro-Russian president of Ukraine and the presidents of Honduras, Brazil, Argentina. 

In the 20th century Americans, or that small percentage that is sentient, were influenced by dystopic novels such as Kafka’s The Trial, Orwell’s 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World. We identified these novels with life in the Soviet Union, and we feared being conquered and subjectged to such life. It was a long time before I realized that the “Soviet threat” was a hoax, like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” like “Iranian nukes,” like “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” like . . . you can provide the examples. 

The vast majority of the peoples in the world have no idea what is happening. They are trying to find or to keep jobs, to provide housing and food, to find the money for a mortgage or car or credit card payment in the US, and in much of the world water to drink and a bit of food to eat. They are stressed out. They have no energy to confront bad news or to figure out what is happening. They are abandoned by governments everywhere. Outside of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, where is there a government that represents the people?

Even in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, are there governments that actually believe in themselves instead of in Western propaganda?




Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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