February 21, 2025
President Donald Trump gets a lot of things wrong. Chief among them is his crazy plan to ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from the smoking ruins of Gaza.
But he also gets some very important things very right.
Trump managed to end the longest war in US history, Afghanistan, by cutting off the money that fueled this absurd conflict. Without Trump’s forceful intervention, this conflict could have dragged on for another decade and cost yet another $2 trillion. None of the generals or politicians involved had the guts or sense to end this pointless war.
Now, it appears that Trump may be doing it again in the other pointless war, Ukraine. The US has lavished at least $175 billion fueling the Ukraine War. Given that some of the US aid is hidden or obscured, the true figure may be over $200 billion – this by the US which is deep in hock with a monster debt of $36 trillion which it can’t pay back.
The fact is that CIA and State Department mounted a coup costing $5 billion (according to the senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland who organized it) that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Moscow regime. It’s worth recalling that Ukraine was an integral party of Russia for hundreds of years – longer than Virginia has been part of the USA. Many Ukrainians want full independence from Moscow – others, particularly Russian-speakers, do not. The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war fuelled by the western powers in an effort to fragment the Russian Federation and Balkanize its parts.
For Washington’s pro-war neoconservatives, further shattering the former Soviet Union is the ideal strategy. But the neocons and armchair amateurs who led the Biden administration were so blinded by their hatred of Russia and world power ambitions that they utterly failed to see how they were bringing Russia and the US to the edge of war. In fact, the US and some European allies were waging economic and military warfare against Russia that could have gone nuclear at any time.
Fortunately, Russian president Vlad Putin’s iron nerves kept the crisis mostly under control. By contrast, the addlepated Biden kept playing with matches instead of calming down this very dangerous crisis. The west’s mighty propaganda machine kept the war alive. Too many people believed Kiev’s propaganda that Ukraine was actually winning this war. Meanwhile, Ukraine was raking in huge sums of cash. I’ve done business in Ukraine and know how deeply corrupt it is – almost as bad as Detroit or Jersey City.
This foolish war not only brought us to the edge of nuclear war but also laid open the deep dementia of Washingtons war party and fanatical anti-communist fringes. Trump is right when he warns of the ‘deep state.’
We recall the heroic young man, Edward Snowden, who publicly revealed how much the National Security had been violating the law by bugging Americans.
During the long years of the Cold War, America’s eighteen national security agencies became choc-a-bloc with ardent anti-Soviet/Russian senior employees. This included CIA, National Security Agency, Pentagon agencies, offices at State, Treasury, new anti-terrorism outfits, and all across our vast security bureaucracy. They are waging a rear-guard action to thwart reforms and/or reductions. They have repeatedly claimed that Trump was somehow being compromised by Russia.
These deep state minions don’t want peace. They want sharp-edged confrontation with Russia and China, safeguarding the billions in Pentagon and intelligence budgets, and protecting their own careers. We saw how cabals of pro-war officials drove France and Britain into two world wars. This is why the idiotic war in Afghanistan lasted for two decades.
As the great Benjamin Franklin said, ‘no good war; no bad peace.’
Copyright. Eric S. Margolis 2025
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