View from Washington: Reality, like facts, is no longer applicable to Western decision making

I have emphasized the extreme danger Western peoples face from empowering leaders or decision makers who do not exist in reality. Instead, they live in false narratives of their own construction, writes Paul Craig Roberts, a well-known international observer, the assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic policy at the President Reagan administration.

At a meeting of defense ministers of NATO countries, the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte presented a fantasy picture of overwhelming NATO military superiority over Russia. Rutte declared that “our military is infinitely superior to the Russian military.” He said the Russian air force cannot “even stand in the shadow” of NATO’s powerful force and that the Russians do not have “well trained fighter pilots.”

It is difficult to imagine a person as stupid as Rutte. The British Home Secretary says Britain cannot even defend her own borders, and neither can France, Germany, the Dutch, Italy, Spain, but they can defend Ukraine’s borders and Europe’s borders from Russia. How can these towers of babel defend against Russians when they are totally incapable of defending against immigrant-invaders?  There is no Europe, no NATO. There is a Muslim Caliphate.

Trump lives in the same make-believe world. He recently announced that the Russian economy is collapsing, that the Russian work day is lost to the work force standing in long gas lines due to successful Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, and that Ukraine has inflicted 1.5 million casualties on Russian military forces. 1.5 million casualties is the size of the Russian military. So why isn’t Ukraine in Moscow?

The statements by Rutte and Trump have no relationship to reality. The Russians have restricted their efforts to driving the Ukrainians out of the Russian province of Donbas and have made no effort to prevent Kiev from continuing its resistance. 

The fact that Putin has chosen not to conquer Ukraine, but only to evict them from the Russian areas, does not mean Russia lacks the means. Possibly, he did not want to lend confirmation to Western propaganda that he was on a path to restoring the Soviet Empire. Possibly he did not want the responsibility for restoring a destroyed Ukraine, whose existence except for the last 30 years was a province of Russia and the Soviet Union. Ukraine as an independent state is the artificial creation of the collapse of the Soviet government in 1991 when the Soviet Politburo placed Soviet President Gorbachev under house arrest. Washington rushed in, and created brand new independent countries out of former Russian and Soviet provinces. This was done in order to reduce Russia’s ability to defend itself. Russia’s population and resources were reduced. Russia lost its buffer zones, and the West went to work creating animosity toward Russia in the new countries Washington created out of former Russian provinces.

All of this should have told Putin what the score is. To again state what I see as the inevitable nuclear war: Rutte and Trump and all of Western foreign policy makers and war planners are misreading Putin and the situation. 

Sooner or later Putin’s illusions of Western good will, delusions of Western rationality, will desert him. And that is when SHTF.

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