May 3—Two projectiles hurtled through the air toward the Kremlin early this morning. The Kremlin states that security personnel onsite immediately moved to intercept and neutralize the threat, using electronic warfare equipment. One was apparently hit and did explode over the Senate Palace, holding a working residence of President Putin. The other ended up on the Kremlin’s grounds, close to Putin’s other working residence, the Great Kremlin Palace. Debris was scattered. The Kremlin stated that Russia reserves the right to retaliate in a manner, place and time of its choosing.
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, interviewed by Judge Napolitano today, properly sounded a wake up call: The reason that Kiev would attempt something so desperate is because they are truly desperate. They have drained precious manpower in Bakhmut, they are short of munitions, their allies in the West have been “post-industrial”-ing for so long, they have no capability to provide Kiev the critical munitions. So, Kiev attempts to provoke Moscow into lashing out—finally drawing the U.S. and the West into an all-out, direct military confrontation with Russia. But, Johnson was clear, Medvedev and others in Russia will verbally lash out, but Putin and his military will be cool and collected.
For weeks now, a hollowed-out Kiev has been running their real “counteroffensive.” It is their escalation of sabotage, drone attacks, and occasional assassinations. As Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleskiy Reznikov explained to The Atlantic, it is not a “military” counteroffensive, but a “military political” one, that will conquer Crimea without Ukraine having to fight.
Such fantasies are not the sole preserve of Kiev and its military prospects, but are close cousins to the fantasies in Washington, that hollowed-out, post-industrial societies can simply print up more money and buy our way out of any impasse. The ritual “kabuki theater” performed by Congress over raising the debt ceiling is once again upon the United States. But now, the U.S. has little or no credibility to lose any more. Countries are lining up to make trade deals, and employ local currencies amongst themselves, outside of the dollar system, as if the use of the medium of exchange was secondary to the products to be traded. Will your representative stop their dance of death and instead grab onto Marcy Kaptur’s “Glass-Steagall” legislation, as if their lives depended on it? Do you and your neighbors think it healthy to allow your representative to maintain their fantasies?
The games played to keep a couple of thousand trillion dollars of financial derivative bets going for even one more day mean having to try to break Russia and China into pieces—both nuclear powers. Until that game is smashed, every morning is a realistic chance for a nuclear conflagration. This morning, two projectiles hurtled towards the center of Russia’s government, sort of like the White House and Capitol Hill wrapped up into one.
Whatever you think you know about Vladimir Putin, you’d better be glad he has a cool head. Nuclear war did not happen this morning. And now you have another day to figure out how to turn your representative into a representative, proving that a republican form of government can work. We are, as our friend Abraham Lincoln put it, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
