NEW COLUMN is “Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia.” It is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, The New American, and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

… Although Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who understood and feared nuclear weapons, thought they had ended the frightful Cold War, by the early 1990s, Bill Clinton had ignited it. It all began … with President Clinton expanding NATO and bombing a Russian ally, Serbia. Although Bush Sr. had cast Russia as a defeated power beholden to America; Clinton amplified this characterization. Russia to these leaders had become a “vassal state.” Bush II, for his part, had flooded Russia with waves of “Democracy promoting” agitators. In a word, it is the US that has meddled in Russia in an attempt to make it over in its image.

So, why is the new cold war so much more dangerous? As Stephen Cohen had explained in his voluminous work on the topic, we have been raised without nuclear war awareness. In swallowing up countries and pitting them up against Russia, NATO, moreover, has been has moved the epicenter of any putative conflict to Russian borders. Whereas proxy wars used to take pace in Africa (Angola, for instance); now these are ongoing closer to Russia—in Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, increasing the likelihood of conflict.

After the Cuban missile crisis, cooperation ensued, as the crisis awoke both sides to the dangers of a war to end all wars. Since then, however, nearly all cooperation with Russia has stopped. Talks have stalled, treaties have not been revived as they ought to have—although President Joe Biden’s administration must be commended for renewing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the US and Russia, lapsed under Trump. And both sides are developing “usable nuclear weapons,” which is Orwellian speak for working to make nuclear war more user-friendly, as though that were morally acceptable or practically possible.

Scurrilous catalysts of a Cold War redux are the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Department and the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, all proven to be malign, politicized forces in recent conflicts and wars, engaged in expedient myth-making. They cooked up the Russiagate libel, and actively crafted the “myth propagated by elements of the US intelligence community that Putin is attempting to subvert American democracy.”  “The reverence with which some liberals greet pronouncements made by today’s intelligence chiefs is in sharp contrast to their past critiques of the malevolence and misinformation spread by” the intelligence community, notes Irish historian Geoffrey Roberts.

A read through the fevered briefs produced by America’s once-venerable intelligence agencies reveals that these are artsy concoctions scribbled by girls like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, whose personal correspondence is a portmanteau of hysteria and hate: “F–k the cheating motherf—ing Russians. Bastards. I hate them.”

A not-so-silent Greek chorus are America’s media, ever tuned-out, turned-on and hot for war. Having shed all fidelity to fact and truth, media, the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, inch Russia and America ever closer to conflict by constantly lying about and libeling Russia. Rumors for which no evidence can possibly be adduced are regularly recounted as facts in newsrooms that now function as rumor mills. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia.” It is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, The New American, and Townhall.com.