Amb. Marie Yovanovitch attends a joint exercise by National Police Special Force Unit KORD and Ukraine State Border Service Special Tactics Unit DOZOR, Nov. 3, 2016. Photo courtesy of U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine.
At LewRockwell.com, David Stockman warns Democrats that their “utterly preposterous testimony about the Russkie threat and Ukrainian ‘front line'” could alert Americans to the “absurdity of the entire Cold War 2.0 campaign.” He writes:
But in their frenzied pursuit of the Donald’s political scalp, the Dems may be inadvertently sabotaging their Deep State masters. That’s because the neocon knuckleheads they are dragging out of the NSC and State Department woodwork are such bellicose simpletons – just maybe their utterly preposterous testimony about the Russkie threat and Ukrainian “front line” will wake up the somnolent American public to the absurdity of the entire Cold War 2.0 campaign.
Russia is actually an economic and industrial midget transformed beyond recognition by relentless Warfare State propaganda. It is actually no more threatening to America’s homeland security than the Siberian land mass that Sarah Palin once espied from her front porch in Alaska a decade ago.
After all, how could it be? The GDP of the New York City metro area alone is about $1.8 trillion, which is well more than Russia’s 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion. And that, in turn, is just 8% of America’s total GDP of $21.5 trillion.
Moreover, Russia’s dwarf economy is composed largely of a vast oil and gas patch; a multitude of nickel, copper, bauxite and vanadium mines; and some very large swatches of wheat fields. That’s not exactly the kind of high tech industrial platform on which a war machine capable of threatening the good folks in Lincoln NE or Worchester MA is likely to be erected.
Not surprisingly, Russia’s pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington’s current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.
Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.
Read more here.
Read the rest of my series on Stockman’s views on Russia and America here.
