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American interventionists undoubtedly finished the weekend in a deep depression over the fact that Russia did not devolve into a full-scale civil war. With Wagner Group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s decision to give up his short-lived plan to initiate such a war, the possibility of a deadly Russian civil war evaporated at the same time. Just think how much more Russia would have been degraded with the deaths and injuries of millions of Russian people. “Darn!” U.S. interventionists and the U.S. national-security establishment undoubtedly exclaimed.

And make no mistake about it: Degrading Russia has been one of the principal aims of the U.S. national-security establishment ever since the end of its old Cold War racket. 

That is how empires work. They look around the world until they find a foreign nation that appears to be rising in prosperity, power, and influence. That nation is then targeted as a rival, opponent, adversary, competitor, and enemy. To ensure that it doesn’t reach the same stature as the empire, the empire targets that nation with degradation. 

That’s what has happened with Russia. While the United States was mired down for decades in its forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia was slowly rising in terms of economic prosperity and influence. That infuriated the U.S. national-security establishment. 

Thus, the Pentagon and the CIA embarked on their course of action designed to give Russia its “own Afghanistan or Iraq,” just like they did in 1979 when they gave Russia its “own Vietnam” by manipulating Russia into invading Afghanistan. (See my article “Brzezinski’s Confession.”) By expanding NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders, Pentagon and CIA officials knew that they were slowly but inexorably boxing Russia into ultimately invading Ukraine.

Their plan worked brilliantly, just as it did back in 1979. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has lost an estimated 250,000 soldiers to deaths and injuries. That’s a lot of “degrading.”

To be sure, America has been degraded too. The weaponry furnished Ukraine to defend itself has to be replaced, which means American taxpayers will have to pay for the replacement weaponry. At the same time, American taxpayers have been required to fund the billions of dollars of largess being heaped on the crooked and corrupt Ukrainian regime. 

But that doesn’t matter to interventionists and the U.S. national-security establishment because when you have an extremely large and powerful empire and a much smaller rising empire, the degradation operates to place a much bigger relative burden on the smaller empire. 

Another aim has been to present Russia as a renewed Cold War threat to Europe and the United States, thereby justifying not only the continued existence of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure but, equally important, its ever-growing receipt of taxpayer-funded largess. That, of course, was what their old Cold War racket was all about.

One big downside of the Russia-Ukrainian war, however — from the standpoint of interventionists and the U.S national-security establishment — has been that it has exposed the fallacy of the other principal aim of the U.S. national-security establishment — its hope of reinvigorating the old Cold War fear that the Russians are coming to get us. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, if Russia’s military forces cannot conquer Ukraine, they can’t conquer Europe and the United States.

But that reality certainly did not stop the Pentagon from recently conducting a massive NATO exercise involving 250 military aircraft, including 100 from the United States, which the media is reporting as “the biggest defense exercise of its kind in the history of the Euro-Atlantic alliance.” Hey, when you’ve got a long-term plan to reinvigorate Russia as a renewed scary Cold War enemy, you go with the plan because you figure that people will fall for whatever you tell them. I just wonder how much that gigantically ridiculous military exercise cost American taxpayers. 

In any event, obviously 250,000 dead and injured Russian soldiers are still not sufficient degradation to satisfy the U.S. national-security establishment and American interventionists. I’m not even sure that millions of deaths or injuries in a Russian civil war would satisfy them. My hunch is these people are not going to be satisfied until Russia is fully degraded in an all-out nuclear war with the West, which, of course, would put the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA in permanent charge of what is left of the United States.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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