This article was originally published by George Ford Smith at The Mises Institute. 

The more powerful a government, the more likely it is to engage in war and conquest. Case in point: US involvement in Ukraine.

In 2014 the US led a coup that displaced a “democratically elected” president, Viktor Yanukovych.

In November 2013, . . . Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months.

Instead of waiting around for the next election, Yanukovych fled to Russia on February 22, 2014.

The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists. . . .

[It was] clear that Washington backed the coup. [US assistant secretary of state Victoria] Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations . . . As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did.

In 2019, comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president with 73.23 percent of the vote. In spite of the media’s love affair with Zelensky, portraying him “as something equivalent to a reincarnation of Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa,” the Ukraine government remains one of the most corrupt on the planet.

But the power-hungry US regime will tolerate a corrupt Ukrainian regime as long as it helps get Ukraine into NATO and puts US nuclear missiles on Russia’s border.

Turns out Russia doesn’t like that idea so President Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago to put a stop to it. The US saw this as a great opportunity to blame Russia for what was obviously an act of war and rush to the defense of innocent Ukraine with massive taxpayer funding and military support.

All this is well known.

Also well known among the sentient is the US having a history of lying the country into war (also here.) When you’re a rich and powerful government, war can be a very lucrative undertaking—for some. It’s rarely that way for the ones doing the actual fighting or for the taxpayers who aren’t connected to the US war industry. But a thoroughly corrupt media ensures that such issues receive little or no light. We are the champions of the little guys, and a little guy is being picked on by perennially evil Russia.

People are beginning to wake up to the lies and censorship surrounding covid and its treatments, so why should they believe any government pronouncement, including the ones involving Ukraine and its enemy?

Because Ukraine hasn’t touched them like covid has—most can’t find Ukraine on a map—and that helps keep the media campaign running. Thus, we hear that Russia is so evil it likely blew up its own Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was built to deliver more natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe.

The Biden team said a Seymour Hersh report blaming the US for the sabotage is “utterly false and complete fiction,” despite Biden’s promise that the US would bring “an end to [the Nord Stream pipeline].” But it wasn’t just Biden’s promise—US commentators, including former President Trump, have long opposed the pipeline because it would make Germany a “hostage of Russia.”

You know, just like your iPhone makes you a hostage of Apple.

As Matt Taibbi wrote a month after the Nord Stream explosions, “American officials in both parties for years used the strongest possible language to condemn, cajole, and threaten Europeans. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings in 2017 led by Republican Ron Johnson and ranking member Chris Murphy of Connecticut blasting Europe for even considering the pipeline.”

Going Nuclear

Throughout the Ukraine war’s one-year history we’ve heard repeated speculations about the conflict going nuclear. Don’t worry, we’re told, even if Putin decided to launch nuclear weapons they would likely be tactical, not the big ones that turn cities into moonscapes and their populations into dust.

Yet today’s tactical weapons aren’t exactly toys. According to Dr. Rod Thornton, a security expert at King’s College London, “The largest tactical weapons can be as big as 100 kilotons (1 kiloton equals 1,000 tons of TNT)—the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.”

Furthermore, last May, Russian state TV presented a simulation of a nuclear attack on the UK and Ireland, using a “Poseidon nuclear underwater drone [that] could cause a tsunami that would ‘plunge the British Isles into the depths of the sea’ and turn them into a ‘radioactive desert.’”

“On many fronts, Putin is under pressure,” Thornton says.

The more desperate Putin becomes, the more he’s pushed on the back foot, the more likely it becomes that a nuclear weapon is used. . . .

He floated Snake Island, a Black Sea outpost taken by Russia early in the war that has since been retaken and become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, as [a target] Putin could have in mind.

In a feeble attempt to threaten Putin,

NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg warned of “severe consequences” for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine, echoing private warnings of “catastrophic consequences” from Washington.

Adding an exclamation point to the matter, Putin said he is not bluffing.

Conclusion

Amid the talk of Putin going nuclear is the absence of any talk of the US striking first—and blaming it on Putin.

Given US aggression so far and its belief it would come out on top in a nuclear war, plus Biden’s determination to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” such a scenario is more than a possibility.

And what’s to keep a tactical nuclear war from escalating into a full-blown ICBM exchange?

Nothing, of course. Certainly not the mindsets of US leaders.

It would be overtones of Nord Stream, with global annihilation added.

And the lies from all governments would finally be silenced.

[This article appeared earlier on Lewrockwell.com.]