SC253-2

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_rise_of_global_fascism_and_the_end_of_the_world_as_we_know_it

The Rise of Global Fascism and the End of the World as We Know It

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

— “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot

Barely three years into the 2020s, and we seem to be living out the prophesies of the Book of Revelation with its dire warnings about plague, poverty, hatred and war.

Just as the government hysteria over the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be dying down, new threats have arisen to occupy our attention and fuel our fears: food shortages, spiking inflation, rocketing gas prices, and a Ukraine-Russia conflict that threatens to bring about a world war.

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Or is this the beginning of the end of the world?

Will the world end with a bang or will it end, as T.S. Eliot concludes, with a whimper?

Robert Frost, torn between a vision of the world ending in fire (the hot flame of violence, anger and greed) or ice (the cold burn of hatred), suggests that either would suffice to do the job.

And then there’s the Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz, who envisioned the day the world ends as a day like any other: “Those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, as long as the bumblebee visits a rose, as long as rosy infants are born, no one believes it is happening now… There will be no other end of the world.”

In Milosz’ words can be found a distant echo of a warning issued by Bertram Gross in his book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America:

“Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. In any First World country of advanced capitalism, the new fascism will be colored by national and cultural heritage, ethnic and religious composition, formal political structure, and geopolitical environment... In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic-as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic facade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal. I am worried by those who fail to remember-or have never learned -that Big Business-Big Government partnerships, backed up by other elements, were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler, and the Japanese empire builders.”

Look beyond the drum-pounding distractions of war and the fear-inducing tactics of the Deep State, and consider the long-term ramifications of the so-called sanctions being levied against Russia right now: not just the governmental sanctions, but the corporate lockdowns.

As CBS News reports, “Car shipments were paused. Beer stopped flowing. McDonald's shut down sales of Big Macs. Cargo ships dropped port calls and oil companies cut their pipelines. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is leading some of the world's best known brands—from Apple to Disney and Ikea—to abruptly exit a country that's become a global outcast.”

This is shunning on a global scale.

Some companies, as Fortune reports, have gone above and beyond what was required by government sanctions. For instance, “major oil companies, including Exxon, BP, and Shell, ended joint investment projects with Russian oil companies. Major retailers, including H&M, Nike, Ikea, and TJX, have shut down Russian sales and closed stores. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express shut down global services in Russia… Boeing cut off support for Russian airlines and closed its offices in Moscow, while Delta ended its Russian code-sharing arrangement… FedEx and UPS shut services to Russia. Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft all have taken significant action to combat Russian aggression and disinformation.”

“You basically have Russia becoming a commercial pariah,” confirmed economist Mary Lovely. “Pretty much no company, no multinational, wants to be caught on the wrong side of U.S. and Western sanctions.”

Russia’s military aggression has paved the way for a show of force by a punitive Big Business-Big Government power alliance that, until recently, had been exerting itself on a smaller scale to sanction individuals whose behavior was deemed to be hateful, discriminatory, conspiratorial or anti-government.

There’s no going back from here.

This may well be the end of the world as we know it.

This particular apocalypse is the fallout from a silent coup that has given the Corporate State a taste for punitive power and an understanding of the ease with which it can use that power to manipulate, control and direct the world governments.

For good or bad, it will change the way we navigate the world, redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear.

Now, in the face of Russia’s aggression, fascism is about to become a global menace.

Given all that we know about the U.S. government—that it treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; that it repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; and that it wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad—it is not a stretch to suggest that the government has been overtaken by a power elite that do not have our best interests at heart.

Indeed, to anyone who’s been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we’re already under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

In its place is a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and is not only running the country but is about to take over the world.

Given the trajectory and dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country (or the rest of the world) 20 years from now.

It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the Global Deep State’s structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.

Yet mark my words: the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State.

The current or future occupant of the White House will not save us.

For that matter, anarchy, violence and incivility will not save us.

Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm.

Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences.

The real and manufactured events of recent years—the pandemic, invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other.

What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same.

When the government and its Global-Industrial Deep State partners in the New World Order crack down, we’ll all suffer.

If there is to be any hope of freeing ourselves, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with you and your fellow citizens taking part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level.

One of the most important contributions an individual citizen can make is to become actively involved in local community affairs, politics and legal battles. As the adage goes, “Think globally, act locally.”

America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.

Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.

And then, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of communities and local governments to invalidate governmental and corporate laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

....

http://endoftheamericandream.com/beef-is-now-a-luxury-meat-and-goldman-sachs-says-to-brace-for-one-of-the-largest-energy-supply-shocks-ever/

Beef Is Now A “Luxury Meat” And Goldman Sachs Says To Brace For “One Of The Largest Energy Supply Shocks Ever”

The new global economic crisis that we have entered into is starting to hit home with hard working American families in a major way.  I have been hearing from so many people that are absolutely horrified by how rapidly the price of gasoline is rising.  Especially for those that have to drive a lot, this is going to cause a tremendous amount of pain.  Food prices continue to surge as well, and this is particularly true when it comes to meat.  Unless you are a vegan or a vegetarian, you are probably accustomed to eating quite a bit of meat on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, now we are being told that Americans are going to have to cut back due to global supply problems.  In fact, a Yahoo Finance article that I came across earlier today actually referred to beef as a “luxury meat”…

Americans could be cutting steaks and burgers from their diets as inflation soars, if beef-packer profit margins are any indication.

Processors like Tyson Foods Inc. and JBS USA are making the least amount of money per head of cattle slaughtered in more than two years, according to data from HedgersEdge LLC. That’s a sign that demand for the luxury meat is flagging.

In my entire life, I have never heard beef called a “luxury meat” before.

Have you?

But with the way that the price of beef is rising, many Americans will soon only be able to eat it once in a while.

In normal times, those moving away from beef would be able to eat more chicken and more turkey, but thanks to a devastating new outbreak supplies of chicken and turkey are going to be getting a whole lot tighter.  For much more on this, please see an article that I just published entitled “Nearly 2.8 Million Birds (Mostly Chickens And Turkeys) Have Died In The First Month Of America’s Raging New Bird Flu Pandemic”.

Of course it isn’t just meat supplies that are going to be tightening.  Ukraine and Russia normally account for about 30 percent of all global wheat exports, but now the war is going to cause that number to drop precipitously.

As panic about global food supplies spreads, some countries are already placing restrictions on how much can be sent out of the country.

For example, on Wednesday Indonesia “tightened curbs on palm oil exports”.

And in eastern Europe, Serbia, Hungary and Bulgaria have all recently made moves to make sure that their people have enough to eat…

Serbia announced on Wednesday it will ban exports of wheat, corn, flour and cooking oil as of Thursday to counter price increases while Hungary banned all grain exports last week.

Bulgaria has also announced it will increase its grain reserves and might restrict exports until it has carried out planned purchases.

But of even greater concern is what Ukraine has decided to do.

Normally, Ukraine is one of the biggest exporters in the entire world, but now the Ukrainian government has issued an emergency order which essentially bans the export of most food…

Ukraine, known as the “breadbasket of Europe” given it’s long been among the world’s top ten wheat exporters and supplied over $6 billion in agricultural products to the European Union in 2020, has issued an emergency order Wednesday banning the export of grains and other products.

The ban includes the export of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat, sugar, live cattle, meat, and other products considered vital to the global economy. But amid wartime, and with Ukraine’s government saying many of its citizens are now starving under Russian siege, Ukraine’s minister of agrarian and food policy Roman Leshchenko said the drastic action was taken to avert a “humanitarian crisis in Ukraine,” stabilize the market and “meet the needs of the population in critical food products,” according to the AP.

I can understand why Ukraine has made this decision, but this is going to have a devastating domino effect.  Lebanon normally gets 60 percent of the wheat that it uses from Ukraine, and the fact that they have been cut off from Ukrainian wheat is already causing major problems…

Lebanon could face wheat shortages from July, forcing the government to reduce subsidized flat rounds of Arabic bread, which sustain the 80 percent of Lebanon’s population who live in poverty, according to a report by The Irish Times. Flour mills in Lebanon delivered supplies only to bread bakeries on Monday and Tuesday, forcing bakers who make pastries and thyme pizzas to close as a means of rationing wheat imported from Ukraine, which supplies 60 percent of the country’s wheat needs.

I am stunned when I read things like that.

If the war stretches on for an extended period of time, how bad will things be 6 months from now?

Here in the United States, fertilizer prices are causing havoc for farmers all over the country.

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you will believe a prominent farmer from Iowa that Tucker Carlson just interviewed…

Ben Riensche, the owner of Blue Diamond Farming Company in Iowa and a farmer of 16,000 acres in that state, told Carlson that the sanctions will have a far-reaching impact on our food supplies in the very near future.

“Soaring fertilizer prices are likely to bring spiked food prices,” Riensche said. “If you’re upset that gas is up a dollar or two a gallon, wait until your grocery bill is up $1,000 a month, and it might not just manifest itself in terms of price. It could be quantity as well. Empty-shelf syndrome may be starting.”

Weeks ago, I passed along what a farming insider shared with me.

He explained that some fertilizer prices had doubled or even tripled in price, and he warned that this would make growing corn unprofitable for farmers all over America this year.

And that was before the war in Ukraine started.

Speaking of the war, Goldman Sachs is now telling us that it could result in “one of the largest energy supply shocks ever”…

“Given Russia’s key role in global energy supply, the global economy could soon be faced with one of the largest energy supply shocks ever,” Goldman Sachs said in the Monday night report, adding that the scale of the shock is “potentially enormous.”

I have been writing a lot about the price of oil lately, because it affects just about all of us on a daily basis.

We all have to fill up our vehicles with gasoline, and that is going to become a lot more expensive.  For example, gas prices in Washington D.C. have been shooting up dramatically…

The trajectory of gas prices at the Mobil station four miles north of the White House has been brutal, clocking in at $3.85 a week ago, $4.17 on Friday, then $4.43 Tuesday, leaving Elizabeth Lopez, a mother of three and employer of six, feeling trapped.

“I don’t know how we can do it,” Lopez said, filling up a Chrysler minivan across from a shuttered tire shop in Northwest Washington.

Needless to say, this is just the beginning.

If people think that things are bad now, how are they going to feel when the price of gasoline is six or seven dollars a gallon?

And as the price of gasoline rises, so does gasoline theft.  In fact, it is being reported that thieves are already drilling holes in fuel tanks so that they can siphon off the gasoline inside…

A FOX 11 viewer shared photos of what happened to a vehicle — a thief drilled a hole in the fuel tank, draining all the gas. AAA is seeing a rise in gas siphoning and theft across the country, and now they’re warning car owners about how to keep their vehicles safe.

“This is a sign of the times you know,” AAA’s Doug Shupe said. “It’s thieves looking for ways that they can make money by stealing what is becoming an increasingly more expensive and valuable commodity, gasoline.”

At one time, I never would have imagined that anyone would ever drill a hole in my fuel tank so that they could steal my gasoline.

But times have completely changed, and the worse things get the more desperate people are going to become.

I know that this article is getting quite long, but I wanted to squeeze as much in as I could.

Global events have really started to accelerate, and conditions are changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.

We really have entered a “perfect storm”, and things are only going to get crazier in the months ahead.

....

https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57033.htm

The American Empire self-destructs.

But nobody thought that it would happen this fast.

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike.

For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.

American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate. During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world’s central banks have operated on the Dollar Standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds. The resulting Treasury-bill Standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and investment takeover of other countries simply by creating dollar IOUs. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade.

This monetary privilege – dollar seignorage – has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Near Eastern oil

The recent escalation U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States. But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats have chosen to end international dollarization themselves, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years now, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT.

The same dynamic undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of making the Russian dollar, sterling and euro holdings hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free of political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump the Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.

The next showdown may come within Europe itself. Nationalist politicians could seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies, trying in vain to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics in subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.” Too many observers have pointed out exactly what would happen – headed by President Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov explaining just what their response would be if NATO insisted in backing them into a corner while attacking Eastern Ukrainian Russian-speakers and moving heavy weaponry to Russia’s Western border. The consequences were anticipated. The neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy simply didn’t care. Recognizing its concerns was deemed to make one a Putinversteher.

European officials did not feel uncomfortable in telling the world about their worries that Donald Trump was crazy and upsetting the apple cart of international diplomacy. But they seem to have been blindsided at the Biden Administration’s resurgence of visceral Russia-hatred by Secretary of State Blinken and Victoria Nuland-Kagan. Trump’s mode of expression and mannerisms may have been uncouth, but America’s neocon gang has much more globally threatening confrontation obsessions. For them, it was a question of whose reality would emerge victorious: the “reality” that they believed they could make, or economic reality outside of U.S. control.

What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China. More politicians are seeking voter support by asking whether they would be better served by new monetary arrangements to replace dollarized trade, investment and even foreign debt service.

The energy and food price squeeze is hitting Global South countries especially hard, coinciding with their own Covid-19 problems and the looming dollarized debt service coming due. Something must give. How long will these countries impose austerity to pay foreign bondholders?

How will the U.S. and European economies cope in the face of their sanctions against imports of Russian gas and oil, cobalt, aluminum, palladium and other basic materials? American diplomats have made a list of raw materials that their economy desperately needs and which therefore are exempt from the trade sanctions being imposed. This provides Mr. Putin a handy list of pressure points to use in reshaping world diplomacy, in the process helping European and other countries break away from the Iron Curtain that America has imposed to lock its satellites into dependence on high-priced U.S. supplies.

But the final breakaway from NATO’s adventurism must come from within the United States itself. As this year’s midterm elections approach, politicians will find a fertile ground in showing U.S. voters that the price inflation led by gasoline and energy is a policy byproduct of the Biden administration blocking Russian oil and gas exports. Gas is needed not only for heating and energy production, but to make fertilizer, of which there already is a world shortage. This is exacerbated by blocking Russian and Ukrainian grain exports, sending U.S. and European food prices soaring.

Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby looking bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at demonstrating Europe’s need to contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia.