When you boil down the essence of the alleged Russian military threat to America’s homeland security it amounts to just plain barking idiocy; it’s so out to lunch as to be offensive to even a modicum of human intelligence.
As we have seen in Parts 1 & 2, any conceivable threat of a Russian nuclear attack on the American homeland is already in deep checkmate.
That’s because America’s bought and paid for strategic nuclear triad, which bears a de minimis annual operating, maintenance and replacement cost of just $75 billion per year, has upwards of 900 warheads lined up to survive a first strike; and to then deliver a civilization-ending retaliatory strike to the Russian homeland that would be the equivalent of 13,000 Hiroshima’s. It would kill and injure 90 million Russians or 65% of its entire population of men, women and children within hours.
Accordingly, no Russian leader – whether as rational as Putin or a military putsch down the road – would ever give an unprovoked nuclear first strike attack on America a second thought. It’s not remotely in the cards of any future history, and therefore provides zero reason for Washington’s meddling in Ukraine on Russia’s doorstep.
Moreover, the alternative theoretical threat of a conventional military assault on the home territory of America is even more ludicrous. Russia does not remotely have the naval firepower and air-and sea-lift capacities to get even a 500 soldiers to the New Jersey shores, let alone the million-man lethally armed, supported and continuously re-supplied combatant units that would be needed for an invasion of the US that could make a difference.
Again, they have not a single serviceable aircraft carrier, no fully equipped carrier battle groups and a decrepit surface Navy of aging cruisers, destroyers, and frigates, many of Soviet-era design and dispersed across separated fleets. Altogether this remnant of the Soviet era Navy amounts to 1.4 million displacement tons or just 17% of the 8.0 million tons of state-of-the-art surface and attack submarine combatants fielded by the US Navy.
For want of doubt, just consider what would happen to a Russian invasionary armada owing to the 50 cruise-missile equipped US attack submarines that would be lying in wait at the choke points far from the US shores. To wit, this isn’t November 1941 one when six Japanese aircraft carriers – Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku – mbarked silently and unseen on the blue waters of the Western Pacific on the way to Pearl Harbor.
To the contrary, the only place in the world were Russia could assemble a expeditionary fleet of the requisite scale to attack America would be in Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. The latter has been its primary warm water port since it was purchased by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman’s in 1783, not stolen from Ukraine in 2014 as the Washington narrative falsely claims.
Here’s the thing. The US Navy usually has two to three carrier battle groups in the vicinity of the Mediterranean Sea and could mobilize more if needed to block the route from Sevastopol to Gibraltar shown below. And, even more lethally, it also has a double digit numbers of the current Los Angeles class, Seawolf-class and state of the art Virginia Class attack submarines that could conduct a shooting gallery exercise at all the choke points along the way. That is, at the Bosporus Strait in Turkey, the narrow passage around the boot of Italy and Sicily, and most especially at the mere 8-mile wide channel at the Pillar of Heracles (Gibraltar).
The truth is, no Russian military leaders would ever send their surface navy on this kind of suicide voyage from Sevastopol to Gibraltar. Unlike in 1941, Washington’s eye’s in the sky would know the minute that Russia began to assemble even a few boats for an armada to be launched from Sevastopol; and a president from either party, like JFK in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, would tell the Kremlin forthwith that the only purpose of such an naval armada would not be to rescue Russian fisherman stranded in Rio de Janeiro, but to attack the homeland of America.
Accordingly, Russia would be told that its Black Sea fleet would be sunk the minute it passed through the Bosporus or beyond, and that would be the end of the Russian invasion of America then and there. The Kremlin would either turn back the fleet in the Black Sea or find it incommunicado in the Davy Jones’ Locker, Mediterranean division.
Moreover, that ain’t the half of it. Even if it managed to get a partial badly battered fleet through Gibraltar, it would be barely halfway through its 5,000 miles/15 steaming day journey from Sevastopol to the shores of Florida, New Jersey, the Chesapeake Bay or New York Harbor. So whatever would be left of the armada would find a watery grave along the huge expanse of the Atlantic Ocean’s vasty deep during the second half of the route.
Stated differently, unlike the Spanish Armada in 1588, the putative Russian Armada would never get even a glimpse of the American coast line – other than on their iPhones on the way down to the bottom of the seas.
So that’s the sum and substance of the Russian military threat to the USA homeland: To wit, their ain’t none.
Again, therefore, the question recurs. Why are we in Ukraine or why even do we still maintain 100,000 military personnel in Europe in bases scattered all around the continent?
The answer is, of course, is not to protect our European NATO allies from an invasion by the Rooskies. For crying out loud, whatever Putin’s faults may be, he isn’t stupid.
Just look at the societal basket cases in Europe today – exemplified by the chaos on the streets of France and Italy, the self-imposed unraveling of the German industrial economy and the woke la la land called England. Why in the hell would Putin ever want to invade these socialist economic disasters – even if he had the military and fiscal wherewithal, which he most definitely does not.
And least we forget, the Russians actually know from bitter experience where socialism actually leads. So here’s where France is going – to fiscal hell in a hand basket. That is to say, France doesn’t need the US military to rescue it from Putin – the latter has long ago said no thanks. And and with respect to all of Europe in its waning days, too.
So the whole bloody $150 billion mess of the US regime change intervention in Ukraine since the CIA-led coup in February 2014 boils down to another hoary narrative from the War Capital of the World: Namely, the giant lie that Ukraine was a long-standing independent country minding its own business, and was then invaded by a land-hungry Putin on a totally unprovoked basis.
For want of doubt, here is a summary of why the very opposite is true. To wit, there never was a legitimate country throughout all of post-medieval history called “Ukraine”. The latter was an utterly capricious and subsequently blood soaked set of unnatural borders of an administrative unit within the Soviet Empire. As shown below, all the parts and pieces within the current allegedly sacrosanct borders of “Ukraine” were actually seconded from Czarist Russia or stolen from neighboring countries by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
Accordingly, there is no case whatsoever that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was “unprovoked” and unrelated to NATO’s own transparent provocations in the region. The very idea that this entire misbegotten Washington enterprise since February 2014 has been undertaken in the defense of the “rule of law” and the sanctity of borders is just plain insidious propaganda.
The details are arrayed below, but the larger issue needs be addressed first.
Namely, is there any reason to believe that Russia is an aggressive, expansionist power looking to gobble up neighboring countries which were not integral parts of its own historic evolution, as is the case with Ukraine per the amplification below?
After all, if Trump does manage to strike a Ukraine peace and partition deal in the near future, would that in any way, shape or form amount to the modern day Munich appeasement analogy that the neocons so loudly proclaim?
The answer to these questions, however, is a resounding no!
Our firm rebuke of the hoary Munich analogy as it has been falsely applied to Putin is based on what might be called the double-digit rule. To wit, the true expansionary hegemons of modern history have spent huge parts of their GDP on defense because that’s what it takes to support the military infrastructure and logistics required for invasion and occupation of foreign lands.
For instance, here are the figures for military spending by Nazi Germany from 1935–1944 expressed as a percent of GDP. This is what an aggressive hegemon looks like in the ramp-up to war: German military spending had already reached 23% of GDP, even before its invasion of Poland in September 1939 and its subsequent commencement of actual military campaigns of invasion and occupation.
Not surprisingly, the same kind of claim on resources occurred when the United States took it upon itself to counter the aggression of Germany and Japan on a global basis. By 1944 defense spending had reason from 3% of GDP in the 1930s to 40% of America’s GDP, and would have totaled more than $2 trillion per year in present day dollars of purchasing power.
Military Spending As A Percent Of GDP In Nazi Germany
- 1935: 8%.
- 1936: 13%.
- 1937: 13%.
- 1938: 17%.
- 1939: 23%.
- 1940: 38%.
- 1941: 47%.
- 1942: 55%.
- 1943: 61%.
- 1944: 75%
By contrast, during the final year before Washington/NATO triggered the Ukraine proxy war in February 2022, the Russian military budget was $65 billion, which amounted to just 3.5% of its GDP.
Moreover, the prior years showed no build-up of the kind that has always accompanied historic aggressors. For the period 1995 to 2022, for instance, the average military spending by Russia was 3.8% of GDP – with a minimum of 2.7% in 1998 and a maximum of 5.4% in 2016.
Needless to say, you don’t invade the Baltics or Poland – to say nothing of Germany, France, the Benelux and crossing the English Channel – on 3.5% of GDP! Not even remotely.
Since full scale war broke out in 2022 Russian military spending has increased significantly to 6% of GDP, but all of that is being consumed by the Demolition Derby in Ukraine – barely 100 miles from its own border.
That is, even at 6% of GDP Russia has not yet been able to subdue its own historic borderlands. So if Russia self-evidently does not have the economic and military capacity to conquer its own former borderlands, what is the war really about?
In short, it is rooted in the mess of peoples, borders, artifical polities and religious/ethnic/ language stew-pots left behind by the collapse or the Soviet Union in 1991. And the resulting territorial disputes and civil strife in these lands, which had been vassals or integral parts of greater Russia for several centuries, was no threat to the homeland security of America or anyone else.
At the end of the day, “Ukraine” actually means “borderlands” in the Russian language, connoting stateless areas that were first assembled into a coherent polity by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev by force of arms after 1920.
In fact, prior to the communist takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed. So what NATO’s proxy war actually amounts to is an insensible attempt to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet presidium, as we amplify below.
For avoidance of doubt here are sequential maps that tell the story, and which make mincemeat of the Washington/NATO sanctity of borders malarkey. The first of these is a 220-year-old map from 1800, where the yellow area depicts the approximate territory of the five regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia plus Crimea – that form the battle front of the war.
As it has happened, these regions have voted overwhelmingly during referendums in 2023 and 2014, respectively, to separate from Ukraine in favor of affiliation with Russia.
Collectively, the five regions were historically known as “Novorossiya” or “New Russia” and had been acquired by Russian rulers, including Catherine the Great between 1734 and 1791.
The red number markings within the yellow areas of the map designate the year of Russian acquisition. Self-evidently, therefore, the Russian Empire had gradually gained control over this vast area north of the Black Sea before the end of the 18th century. To that end, it had signed peace treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate (1734) and with the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the various Russo-Turkish Wars of that era.
Pursuant to this expansion drive – which included massive Russian investment and the in-migration of large Russian populations to the region – Russia established the “Novorossiysk Governaorate” in 1764. The latter was originally to be named after the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called “New Russia” instead.
The Provinces Of Ukraine Slated For Partition By The Trump Plan Were Part Of Russia Before The US Constitution Was Even Written
Map: © Роман Днепр, CC BY-SA 3.0
Completing the assemblage of New Russia, Catherine forcefully liquidated its aforementioned century-long Cossack ally known as the Zaporizhian Sich (present day Zaporizhia) in 1775 and annexed its territory to Novorossiya, thus eliminating the independent rule of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Later in 1783 she acquired Crimea from the Turks, which was also added to Novorossiya, as shown in yellow area of the map above.
During this formative period, the infamous shadow ruler under Catherine, Prince Grigori Potemkin, directed the sweeping settlement and Russification of these lands. Effectively, Catherine had granted him the powers of an absolute ruler over the area from 1774 onward.
The spirit and importance of “New Russia” at this time is aptly captured by the historian Willard Sunderland,
“The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was state-determined and claimed for European-Russian civilization.
The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently, it was all the more clear that Moscow believed that the Czarist Empire merited its own “New Russia” to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age.
In fact, the passage of time solidified the borders of Novorossiya even more completely. One century later the light-yellow area of the 1897 map below gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea: They were now part of the 125 years-old “New Russia”.
After the Russian Revolution, of course, the pieces and parts in this region of the old Czarist Empire were bundled-up into a convenient administrative entity by the new red rulers of Moscow, who christened it the “Ukrainian SSR” (Soviet Socialist Republic). In a like manner, they created similar administrative entities in Belorussia, Georgia, Moldavia, Turkmenistan etc. – ultimately confecting 15 such faux “republics”.
During the course of this communist state-building, here is how and when these brutal tyrants attached each piece of today’s Ukrainian map to the territories acquired or seized by the Russian Czars over 1654-1917 (yellow area):
- The old Novorossiya of the Donbas and Black Sea rim was added to the Ukraine SSR by Lenin in 1922.
- The western territory around Lviv that been known as Little Poland and Galicia were captured by Stalin in 1939 and thereafter when he and Hitler carved up Poland.
- Upon the death of the bloody Stalin in 1954, Khrushchev made a deal with his Presidium allies to transfer Crimea from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in return for their support in the battle for succession.
In a word, Ukraine is the bastard spawn of communist blood and iron. Yet during the last decade the Washington and the NATO warhawks have spent upwards of $300 billion to ensure that the handiwork of autocratic Czars and Commissars remains intact into the 21st century and presumably beyond.
It is ironic, therefore, that the historically illiterate Donald Trump has the good sense to now attempt to dispense with one of the stupidest crusades that the War Party on the Potomac has yet concocted. So doing, he might actually enable the failed handiwork of communist tyrants to be made right with history – an outcome that can now happen if and only if the Donald finally makes a partition deal with Putin.
Modern Ukraine: Born In Communist Blood and Iron
Of course, had the above-mentioned 20th century communist trio been noble benefactors of mankind, perhaps their subsequent map-making handiwork and reassignment of Novorossiya to Ukraine might have been justified. Under this benign counterfactual, they would have presumably combined peoples of like ethnic, linguistic, religious and politico-cultural history into a cohesive natural polity and state. That is, a nation worth perpetuating, defending and perhaps even dying for.
Alas, the reason that Trump is right to attempt to end this bloody catastrophe via partition is that the very opposite was true. From 1922 to 1991 modern Ukraine was held together by the monopoly on violence of its brutally totalitarian rulers. And that became more than evident when the Kremlin temporarily lost control of Ukraine during the military battles of World War II. During that especially bloody interlude, the communist administrative entity called Ukraine came apart at the seams.
That is, local Ukrainian nationalists joined Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its depredations against Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians when it first swept through the country from the west on its way to Stalingrad; and then, in turn, the Russian populations from the Donbas and south campaigned with the Red Army during its vengeance-wreaking return from the east after winning the bloody 1943 battle of Stalingrad that turned the course of WWII.
Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually from the minute it came out from under the communist yoke when the Soviet Union was swept into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine has been engulfed in political and actual civil war. The elections which did occur were essentially 50/50 at the national level but reflected dueling 80/20 vote breakouts within the regions. That is, the Ukrainian nationalist candidates tended to get vote margins of 80% + in the West/Central areas, while Russian-sympathizing candidates got similar pluralities in the mainly Russian-speaking East and South.
This pattern transpired because once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface.
Accordingly, so-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the fragile post-communist equilibrium.
That’s the true meaning of the Maidan coup. It ended the tenuous cohesion that kept the artificial state of Ukraine intact for barely two decades after the Soviet demise. So save for Washington’s destructive intervention, the partition of a communist-confected state that had never been built to last would have materialized all on its own – perhaps like in Czechoslovakia – and likely sooner than later.
At the end of the day, therefore, the necessary impending partition of the rogue state of Ukraine is not a case at all of legitimate sovereign borders being violated. Nor does it involve an assault on the hypocritical notion of a “rules-based international order” that has not actually ever existed and which, instead, has been a cover for Washington’s global hegemony all along.
But the lessons are nonetheless profound. History accumulates and eventually leads to destructive, but wholly unnecessary outcomes.
That is the case today with the utterly foolish action of Washington during the 1990s and 2000s to bring former Warsaw Pact Nations, and even breakaway Soviet Republics into a NATO alliance whose mission was over and done in 1991.
It should have been dismantled then and there. When the old Soviet monster with its 50,000 tanks and 7,000 nuclear warheads disappeared into the dustbin of history, there was no longer a threat to the east. There was no “front line” to defend.
At that point Washington should have and easily could have led the world to disarmament and to a revival of the lasting peace that had disappeared in the “Guns of August” in 1914.
But now the NATO section 5 mutual defense commitment to these 31 nations is equivalent to a stupid charity that the nearly bankrupt Federal government cannot afford in any case.
There is absolutely nothing in it for the enhancement of America’s homeland security, and huge incentives for the politicians of these nations to caterwaul against Russia rather than seek peaceful accommodation.
So here is the historic moment before us: The Donald now needs to tell the War Capital of the World on the Potomac in no uncertain terms to take a hike and then return to the essence of his old 28-point plan for peace and partition.
So doing, he would not only end the utter stupidity of NATO’s proxy war on Russia, but in the process accomplish something more of literally epic proportions: Namely, the defenestration of the neocons, official Washington, NATO, the rules based international order and all the other globalist humbug that has saddled America with $1.5 trillion per year Warfare State and Global Empire that it cannot afford and doesn’t need.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
