The US Proxy War in Russia is Escalating & Imperiling the World

The reckless gamble with the existence of the American people and the peoples of Western Europe appears to be getting more dangerous by the day.

In spring of 2008, I was living in Vienna, Austria and carefully followed the reporting on the NATO Bucharest Summit from April 2-4. For readers who don’t remember this momentous occasion: it was during this summit that the NATO issued a declaration stating that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO members.

What most people don’t remember about this summit was that the Bush administration pushed for the immediate granting of a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Ukraine and Georgia. Fortunately, German Chancellor Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully blocked this initiative but nevertheless appeased President Bush by agreeing to the vague promise that both nations "will become members of NATO.”

Russian President Putin, who attended the summit, stated in his address that NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and Georgia was “direct threat to Russian security.” A the time it occurred to me that US policy wonks welcomed this unequivocal statement by Putin—on the record at a NATO summit—because with this statement, Putin publicly stated his red line, the crossing of which would force his hand to take military action.

Make no mistake: The horrible people who run US foreign policy wanted Putin to take military action in Ukraine because they believed it would lead to an Afghan style quagmire for Russia in Ukraine. As I tell this story in my new book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions:

They apparently reasoned that, with the Ukrainian army equipped with sophisticated US weaponry and targeting assistance, the Russian army would suffer the same kind of humiliating defeat it had suffered in Afghanistan at the hands of the US-armed Mujahideen, who succeeded in getting the Soviet Army to withdrawal from in the country in February 1989. Hillary Clinton explicitly made this comparison in a February 28, 2022, MSNBC interview in which she said:

Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. It didn’t end well for the Russians . . . but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

Later in the interview, Clinton conceded that arming the Afghan Mujahideen had produced unintended consequences like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The actions of these groups resulted in the US government sending the American military to Afghanistan and occupying the country for twenty years. After getting thousands of American servicemen killed and maimed and spending $2.3 trillion, the US government made its own chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, leaving the country back in the hands of the Taliban that was supposed to have been vanquished twenty years earlier.

It didn’t seem to bother Clinton that an Afghan-style quagmire in Ukraine would likely kill hundreds of thousands of people and inflict great suffering on the Ukrainian people, just as the Afghan people had suffered during the Soviet Afghan War. Implied in Clinton’s statement was her apparent assumption that the Ukrainian people view the Russian people as enemies. In fact, most Ukrainians and Russians have long had close and affectionate relations, and many have extended family members in both countries. For decades, ordinary Ukrainians have—because of the country’s location, history, and rich natural resources—been caught in the middle of oligarchies in Kiev and Moscow who have much in common but also frequently squabble over natural gas deals. Washington, London, and Brussels have sought to bring Ukraine into the western sphere of influence. Most disturbing to Moscow has been the aggressive foreign policy clique in Washington that has aspired to make Ukraine a forward operating base against Russia in the same way it aspired to make Iraq a forward operating base against Syria and Iran.

I have seen ZERO evidence that an Austrian-style neutrality deal would not have worked for Ukraine and averted this senseless war. Here is former NATO Secretary General and US stooge Jens Stoltenberg stating that Russia’s neutrality proposal in the autumn of 2021 was rejected out of hand.

As with all of Washington’s wars since 2001, the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been a catastrophic failure, though it has certainly enriched the US military-industrial complex, the oligarchs who run Ukraine, and their US political cronies.

Currently I am seeing an increasingly number of indications that this war is escalating, with growing risk of direct clashes between Russian and NATO forces and even Russian strikes on munitions factories in Germany and Great Britain.

To be sure, President Putin knows what I already intuited in 2008—namely, the horrible people who run US foreign policy and their German puppet, Chancellor Friedrich Merz—want Russia to strike western targets so that it will trigger general war in Europe.

For some time it has been said that the US foreign policy clique running the proxy war have demonstrated a remarkably cold-blooded willingness “to fight till the last Ukrainian man,” and I know a young Ukrainian man who was recently abducted and sent to front line with minimal training. At the moment, I am not sure if he is still alive.

Even more disturbing was the August 24, 2026 statement of retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, who previously served as the US Special Envoy for Ukraine, in which he declared that the government in Kiev should expand military conscription to include women.

Here it is important to understand that Ukraine’s oligarchs and their children are not fighting the war. As was reported in the French newspaper Le Monde in 2023, many oligarchs have left Ukraine and retreated to their villas in the South of France.

Especially fascinating and disturbing to me is that most Americans seem to have no idea this is going on. It reminds me of carefree members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy in the summer of 1914, who had no idea that the reckless machinations of the Austrian court against the Kingdom of Serbia would, just four years later, result in the total destruction of the Austrian Habsburg state and empire that had existed for over 600 years.

Many of my friends in Vienna come from families lost ALL their ancestral property in Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and other parts of the empire. Some of their great grandparents retreated to their apartments in Vienna and burned family heirloom furniture in the winter of 1918-1919 to keep warm because their coal supply from Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) was cut off.

Unlike the Russian people—who suffered catastrophic death and suffering in the wake of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion and Hitler’s 1941 invasion—the American people alive today have little to no awareness of the horrors of war.

My great grandmother, who died almost forty years ago, once told my mother that not a single day went by that she didn’t feel the pain of losing her only son Bobby, who was killed in combat at the age of eighteen, fighting the Germans near Florence, Italy in 1944.

The dreadful old men who run this country seem to have no empathy for a mother’s pain—neither that of the mothers of Ukraine and Russia, nor of the mothers of ordinary Americans. I am increasingly drawn to the conclusion that the US government—in its reckless conduct in both domestic and foreign policy domains—is essentially a satanic entity.

This entity—whoever in hell is running it—doesn’t seem to understand that escalation can result in all kinds of unpredictable and undesirable outcomes. Such was theme of the darkly satiric Cold War song “99 Luftballons” by the German band NENA, in which the appearance of 99 hot air balloons on the horizon is mistaken for an attack, thereby triggering an escalation that leads to World War III and the end of the world.

The song may have been inspired by the so-called “Battle of Los Angeles” on February 25, 1942, when an errant weather balloon over Los Angeles triggered an air raid alert and blackout. This, in turn, triggered a massive anti-aircraft barrage of approximately 1,400 shells fired into the sky over Los Angeles at perceived enemy aircraft, even though none was clearly detected and identified. Five people died during the incident from stress-related heart attacks and traffic accidents caused by the panic. Later, the Army declared the incident to have been the result of “war nerves and imagination.”

Songwriter Carlo Karges wrote “99 Luftballon” in 1982. About a year later, on September 26, 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, stationed near Moscow, prevented a potential nuclear exchange by identifying a satellite warning system of incoming US ICBMs as more likely a system malfunction. Rather than following protocol to report the attack immediately, Petrov made the gut decision to classify the alert as a false alarm. His hunch was later confirmed to be a satellite malfunction that misinterpreted cloud reflections as missiles. For trusting his intuition and making his bold decision to err on the side of caution, Petrov was known as “the man who saved the world.”

Petrov was born in 1939 and lived through many of the most dangerous years of the 20th century before dying in 2017. As we head up the escalation ladder with Russia, I hope there are still men like him managing Russia’s nuclear weapons systems.