Delirious With War Fever:

Stockman: Washington Is Delirious With War Fever (For No Reason To Do With Homeland Security)

 David Stockman’s Contra Corner

Economic, social and political dangers abound. That’s because Washington and its subservient mainstream media are delirious with war fever like at no time in the last seven decades.

The resulting reckless pursuit of an unhinged Sanctions War against Russia poses a dire threat to the global economy and domestic prosperity and does so for no good reason of homeland security whatsoever.

Yet a devastating war goes on there today – a war which is careening to the precipice of WWIII – because Washington encourages Kiev to insist on retention of “every inch” of a map put together by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

In fact, the latter did for the map of Ukraine what Wilson & Co. did to Germany after the Great War. That is to say, these long gone commie dictators extracted from Russian and Polish territories a combustible mongrel that begs to be partitioned and returned to the status quo ante, not defended to the last drop of Ukrainian blood and US/NATO treasure.

Needless to say, there is no Washington policy-maker familiar with the above map, nor Capitol Hill armchair warrior who has a clue. Most especially, by shrieking about “borders” being violated and the need for all out support to a heroic nation valiantly resisting the Russian ogre, the GOP’s bloodthirsty hawks and neocons have made it easy as pie for Biden and his national security minions to pivot to an all-out war footing against Russia, thereby distracting the American public from the abysmal failure of their domestic policies.

Indeed, red in tooth and claw the vast majority of Republicans are now demanding suicidal measures like a No Fly Zone and secondary sanctions, including against China. The latter are being proffered in the vain hope that it will weaken Russia enough to eventually cause it to quit its “invasion” and permit the map of Ukraine to revert to what Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev ordered it to be.

One of these war-loving Republicans is Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, who recently relieved himself of the following gem in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal.

“To cut off Mr. Putin’s oil and gas sales globally, the administration and Congress should impose secondary sanctions on the entirety of Russia’s financial sector.”

What he means is that any bank on the entire planet which should dare to defy Washington’s writ and finance a Russian oil trade to a third party, such as China, India or Brazil, should be slapped with sanctions for aiding and abetting what amounts to global commerce–now redefined as an act of war against the US and NATO.

So to repeat: The GOP has gone for full-scale “war socialism.” Suddenly, the rights of private property owners are not so sacred after all – if they are involved in exporting, importing or financial intermediation with anything Russian. In those instances, they are far game for Washington’s economic draft – and the consequent loss of markets, sales, profits and value on the say so of war-loving blowhards like Senator Toomey.

The worst thing, of course, is that all of this “war socialism” has nothing to do with defense of the homeland or anything rational at all. To the contrary, it’s the rotten spawn of an Imperial City populated by careerist politicians who get their jollies pretending to be the suzerains of mankind and Spanker-in-Chief of the planet’s malefactors.

“The war is really over for the Ukrainians. They have been ground into bits, there is no question about that despite what we hear from our mainstream media. So, the real question for us at this stage is, Tucker, are we going to live with the Russian people and their government or we going to continue to pursue this sort of regime change dressed up as a Ukrainian war? Are we going to stop using Ukraine as a battering ram against Moscow, which is effectively what we’ve done.”

I am shocked at the miscalculation in thinking economic sanctions on Russia would bring them to their knees. The opposite is true. Russia is self-sufficient and is not dependent on imports. Its exports are critical to the economic well-being of the West. If they withhold wheat, potash, gas, oil, palladium, finished nickel and other key minerals from the West, the European and US economies will be savaged. And this attempt to coerce Russia with sanctions has now made it very likely that the US dollar’s role as the international reserve currency will show up in the dustbin of history.

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