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The US and Israel have isolated themselves as the two most evil governments on earth. By complying with Washington’s foreign policy, the European puppet governments find themselves despised by their citizens.

Eleven months ago Russia’s president Vladimir Putin described the West to the Russian Federal Assembly:

“They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honor, trust, and decency are not for them. Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything. They grew accustomed to spitting on the whole world.

“It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. They cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. The Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.”

It took Russian politicians and journalists a long time to recover from their delusion that with the demise of communism the world was a community governed by agreed-upon rules. Many Russian intellectuals and journalists had an idealized picture of the United States which kept the Russian government off balance in understanding Washington’s intentions toward Russia. How else to explain Russia’s lack of preparedness when Washington overthrew the elected government of Ukraine and when Georgia invaded South Ossetia?

As Putin now understands, the consequences of the Russian government’s mistaken expectation of fair and honorable relations with the West have been severe. Unless the West’s degradation results in collapse, war is inevitable. American and European peoples have no impact on their governments who serve the agendas of the financially powerful. Now that the West has demonstrated for all to see that the West suffers no shame from participation in genocide, even the most westernized Russians are likely to keep a safe distance from Washington’s snares.

Now that the West has completely shattered the trust built during the Soviet era, the threat of nuclear Armageddon again holds sway over the Earth. In the face of this threat, all other threats recede into nothingness.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: The world’s first nuclear explosion – the U.S. ‘Trinity’ atomic test in New Mexico, July 16, 1945. If a nuclear war breaks out today, the devastation caused by modern nuclear weapons would make Trinity’s power look small by comparison. Most life on Earth would likely be wiped out. | U.S. Department of Energy