The string of unfounded accusations against Russia for its alleged interference in various elections across the world has been voiced by Western political and media figures for over a year now. In fact, we’re witnessing an unprecedented propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting a single country. Yet, with the next presidential election nearing in Russia, the West doesn’t seem to be ashamed to make an attempt to rig the election process in Russia. First of all, it has started publishing a series of publications aimed at discrediting the candidates that are not pedaling Western agenda. Then, there a string of Russian-language sites that are living off the money of American taxpayers provided by Washington speading anti-Putin propaganda, so it’s no wonder that those sites are officially recognized as foreign agents in Russia. It’s been reported that every second article on those websites is aimed at discrediting  Russia’s President Vladimir Putin or urges Russian citizens to boycott the election. What is especially striking to any objective pro-democracy observer is that no other opinion is being allowed to be featured in those peaces, even though those sites are owned by the self-proclaimed champion of democracy – Washington. The days when Western media sources even tried to pretend that they were aware that journalism as a profession is an art of various opinions are long gone now, alas.

As for English-speaking media platforms, those couldn’t care less about covering the upcoming election objectively, as they are just ignoring the statements made by Russian authorities, while claiming to be innocent in spites of their repeated violations of the fundamental principle of impartiality.

The all-out propaganda assault against Russia is led by the well-known CIA mouthpieces – the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Those are trying to show the White House that they can still be viable in its face-off with Russia by accusing various officials in of various abuses aimed at  illegally obtaining signatures in Putin’s support. At the same time, even the most die-hard Putin bashers recognize that he leads the presidential race in Russia, with more than 70% of Russia’s population being willing to vote for him, as polls show. This fact by itself excludes any need for any of Putin’s supporters to try to cut corners in assisting Putin in obtaining enough signatures to become a nominated candidate. However, those Western journalists prefer to ignore such facts all together, as they’ve been paid in advance to jump on the anti-Russian bandwagon early.

In order to explain to the American reader the differences between the Russian “undemocratic” election process and the American “ultra-democratic” one, The National Interest chose to publish a comparison in a bid to glorify the “US-style democracy.” However, this attempt was clearly not in favor of the US, showing that in the last year’s parliamentary election in Russia a total of fourteen parties was allowed to compete.

Against this backdrop things don’t look all that grand in the US, as only two parties are allowed to compete for power in the US. It’s true that in recent years certain representatives of libertarians and greens have been allowed to take part in televised debates in the US. However, those parties present no competition to the leading contenders whatsoever as they’ve been under harsh control of US intelligence agencies for decades, avoiding every chance to ask uncomfortable questions, choosing to advance such ideas as weapons bans and abortion rights.

There’s yet another joke that Western media sources are trying to present to their readers with a serious face that can be summed up in the notion that the all-powerful Kremlin is somehow afraid of a single pro-Western candidate – Alexei Navalny. However, Western states do not allow convicted criminals to contend in any officially recognized elections, but they still insist that Russia should try doing it for a change. Why not? Maybe then we will see all sorts of felons winning elections in the US, UK and other Western states.

Even a person that hasn’t been following Russia’s politics for a considerable period of time is able to spot that Western media sources have abandoned any attempts to analyze Navalny’s political views. Every single media source one can come across tells his about his allegedly brilliant idea of boycotting the presidential election, but that’s pretty much it. Yet, last year some Western media sources would be bold enough to criticize him for his racist views. As it’s been noted by the Salon magazine, any mention of Navalny’s links with neo-Nazi groups, xenophobic comments and extreme anti-immigrant views have miraculously disappeared from the Western media.

So, in spite of the media support Navalny receives in the West, the reasoning behind the decision of the Russian Constitutional Court to put an end to his attempts to compete in the presidential election is pretty much self-explanatory. So any further attempts to make Navalny look as the ultimate victim of the “repressive regime in Moscow” fail to hide the fact that he has been transformed into a “political tool” of the Western elites a long while ago. As it’s been noted, we should always be asking ourselves: what kind of freedom is absolute? Which right is inherent?

That is why one can’t help but agree with the Italian Secolo d’Italia that underlines the fact that the Western propaganda campaign against Putin is devoid of any sense, as it tries to support two liberal pseudo-candidates sponsored by the West: Ksenia Sobchak, known as the “Russian Paris Hilton”, and Alexei Navalny, known for a long list of crimes he committed in Russia. Those two are no match to Putin, a seasoned politician that is well-respected across the world. Both Sobchak and Navalny criticize Russia’s reunification of Crimea with Russia, that was supported by 97% of Crimeans back in 2014. They also criticize Russia’s participation in the Syrian conflict, while ignoring the fact that it was started after an official invitation of the legitimate Syrian government, while all of the Western states are still operating in Syria illegally. If one wants to know who are Putin’s competitors for real he should take a look at the Social Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and the charismatic ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

The America we once knew is gone forever. The 21st century has dawned just as the true light of liberty fades into shadow. The sooner the world recognizes this, the better off humankind will be. RussiaGate, Bill and Hillary Clinton revelations, Donald Trump’s quasi-populist misdirect, and a great nation turned amoral, this and much more forewarn of a cataclysm.

I’ll tell you about the instant I gave up on America ever being great again. When my oldest friend failed to reach me on Skype a few weeks back, a strange reconnect on his device put me in the position of a fly on the wall with he and two other high school friends. At first, I thought my old friend and I were connected as per usual, on a conference call. Then, when I realized I could hear them without the trio hearing me, the real American tragedy unfolded. The realization struck me hard, I’ll tell you. Listening to old pals discuss my new book that debunks many RussiaGate lies, “Putin’s Praetorians” met with nasty and harsh criticism without my chums having even read what is inside. Their obtuse and unfair criticism made me finally realized Vladimir Putin and the Russian people have no chance whatsoever – no chance of ever being friends with the United States of America. Three intelligence college graduates, professional men, demonstrated the utter ignorance of a people. Some of my closest friends shouted in my ears that day; “the propaganda worked – CNN has already won.”I know this is a harsh reality for many of you to accept. Losing hope is not something to take lightly. But get ready, the war will come eventually.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election the hopeful among us considered his victory a successful populist revolt against the Washington swamp of globalists. Trump swore to us he would take on the technocrats and the elites in favor of the “forgotten of America” – and the new president sold himself as a man of the people. However, billionaires are not ordinary people, and we should all have remembered this. Many of us voted Trump just to keep a certified psychopath from winning, but Trump and Clinton are nothing more than symptoms of a far more widespread contagion. Now let me describe the infectious host my country has become, and a bit on how Lady Liberty will finally succumb.

The United States of America is the modern and digitalized Rome. Just why we were not taught this in grade school, it escapes me. After all, we always believed our teachers and trusted them to tell us the truth. The unarguable fact that Americans have been the most privileged people on Earth since World War II. But we were told for decades that our privilege was due to our industriousness, our intelligence, and because God had blessed us. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s this may have really been true. For those who recall that we made stuff back then, and that we conformed more often to our religious convictions, my meaning here is clear to you. We Americans benefitted largely because of our hard work back then, and not sometimes because of brilliant industrialists too.  Then the two Kennedy brothers were shot and killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson and his boys carried us into Vietnam. In the meantime, those of us too young (or chicken) to fight in southeast Asia, we got our fill of Woodstock, a popular anti-war movement and the hippie revolution, and decades of drug culture that nobody talks about much these days. But this component of the American metamorphosis is far too important and massively deep to discuss here. It should suffice those from that era to know, that “I” know what you know. This was the moment the American people dipped themselves in the narcotic of too much self-love and when we began to exceed and excel in moral promiscuity. Today an entire nation is drowning in a sea of vanity that originated back then. We saw this moral lasciviousness when the last President, Barack Obama spat out our “exceptionalism” right in the world’s face. Let’s now take a candid look at this how collectively extraordinary we Americans have been.

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I’ll not even attempt to describe the rise of consumerism in America following WW II, nor can anyone explain in such limited space how the average American benefitted from our role in that war. As the only major nation untouched (literally) by the massive destructive force of the world war, the United States quickly became a nation blessed with a giant middle class. And with this burgeoning middle class came a youth culture that will absolutely melt down when the next big crisis comes. This foreboding moment can be understood if we look at American society’s rise to affluence in the 60’s, 70’s, and even the 1980’s, as compared to the disenfranchised in the country today. But I said I would not delve too deeply into this part of Americanism. What makes the United States even an unique country in modern times is how the world lost while America consumed. Make no mistake about it, the real American exceptionalism cost every man, woman, and child on Earth an incalculable price. Citizens of my country have used fully one-fourth of every resource utilized since World War II, and the ongoing wars and corporate shenanigans perpetuated the damage. Up until the 21st century, the curve of American gluttony rose sharply in between 1900 and 1995. A paper (PDF) entitled; “Consumption of Materials in the United States, 1900–1995”, from the USGS by Grecia Matos and Lorie Wagner discusses this in depth. Here is the short version from the paper on materials use:

“During this century, the quantity of materials consumed has grown, from 161 million metric tons in 1900 to 2.8 billion metric tons by 1995, an equivalent of 10 metric tons per person per year.”

The report details our consumption from many directions including environmental impacts, and so on. Nowhere is our “exceptional” appetite for world resources more prevalent than in our energy use. This report from 2011 shows how America went stark raving mad using coal, natural gas, petroleum ánd nuclear energy after WW II. For comparative purposes, Americans used about 10 quadrillion btu’s of petroleum in 1945, as compared to just over 40 quadrillion btu’s at the peak in 2005-2006. On energy, it’s fair to assert here that all those “energy wars” the so-called conspiracy theorists write about are real news stories, rather than fake concoctions. But let’s forget about American politicians opening up North America for a toxic fracking future for the moment. This Scientific American story points to Americans as the least sustainable society on Earth. From the article Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford tells us:

“The average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.”

The final take here is telling. The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses more than 25% of the world’s fossil fuel resources, by burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas. Another way of looking at our “exceptional” self-destructiveness is to think how many “worlds” it would take to support humanity, if everyone consumed like we do. But this my point is the fact that our addictive and suicidal behavior costs all of humanity. America’s unique exceptionalism will very soon lead to a horrific cataclysm for out sick culture. I’ll frame for you now.

“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

Drugged on the self-aggrandizing drugs of excess, lude and lascivious lifestyles, and utter godlessness, the United States is all set for an apocalypse few in my country see. Before I describe how this cataclysm will likely play out, let me introduce an economic surety. Debt and constricted growth are about to cause a gigantic bubble to burst.

Most readers may not know that the world’s central banks are about to be decimated. The balance sheets of most of these banks have gone from an indebtedness of $6 trillion in 2007 to over $21 trillion today. To make matters worse, the rate of debt expansion exceeds a pace of $200 billion every month. In the UK, the Bank of England prints money on a pace to equal that of the European Central Bank (ECB) and even the Bank of Japan in a hopeless effort of Quantitative Easing (QE) that involves buying the bonds – or debts – of governments and investment grade companies. Subsequently, bond prices have shot sky high, while yields are now at record lows. A further indication is contained in a rather innocentpress release about UBS Wealth Management’s UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2017. According to this news San Francisco and other real estate markets are ripe for a second devastating housing bubble catastrophe. Also included in the report are; Amsterdam, Stockholm, Munich, Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. I could go on and on presenting indicators such as the massive $750 billion dollar trade deficit America runs. But pointing out the reality of America’s $20 trillion dollar national debt is useless for swaying even one typical consumption addict to pay attention. Like my pals who refused to even crack open a book before condemning a friend, most Americans are simply too ignorant and self-involved to give facts a glance. When the lie of CNN or Bloomberg will do, as long as the cheap gas flows, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” slogan is a fairytale. America has not been great in a very long time, and she never will be great again. Now let me show you who knows this.

Like Rome, the heyday of America’s empire was been based on expansion and growth. Propped up with militarism and the legendary military industrial complex, Washington has played Wall Street’s gambit for many decades. The recent villainizing of Russia and her president Vladimir Putin is not about the spread of democracy, it’s about Putin standing in the way of privatizing like that which occurred under Yeltsin. Putin is in a fight against the American supported liberal world order bent on gobbling up Russia’s massive resources to fuel further American (plus EU & British) addictions. Without new markets and resources America will very soon be out of gas – literally. So, assuming I am correct here, what happens when a land of consumer zombies runs out of gas (or food)? This Fortune Magazine article speaks of an education economics bubble about to destroy lives and dreams on a scale never witnessed. The foreboding article touches on but one facet of a fractured American society – the society presidents, senators, and congresspersons swore would benefit from high tech jobs and new age technologies. Now that I’ve painted a small portrait of dread, insert all the twenty-something and thirty-something smart phones you saw in use yesterday in town! You forty-something and fifty-something readers, can you sense the domino effect when the entitled youth cannot get cell service or buy a cappuccino? For further reading on this catastrophe see Zero Hedge and read Ron Paul’s assessment of the imminent doomsday. My conclusion here is pretty short and sweet.

“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” ― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Vladimir Putin is the barometer everyone should watch. And Vladimir Putin has all but given up on reconciliation with the west. This report from World Socialist Web outlines reports that suggest Putin is ramping up in preparations for the coming war. At the recent Sochi meetup, the Russian president had this to offer on Russia’s economy being prepared:

“The ability of our economy to increase military production and services at a given time is one of the most important aspects of military security. To this end, all strategic and simply large-scale enterprise should be ready, regardless of ownership.”

Putin’s recent moves, his ongoing pragmatism during these new crises, and the “all or nothing” approaches of western governments toward Russia tell us all we need to know here. Putin is admittedly testing the capability of Russia’s economy to defend in an all-out war with the west. Read Alex Lantier’s article above, then correlate everything you can find on global defense in the last few months. Putin is only following suit after NATO recently discussed improving infrastructure for war-making. In Moscow the thinkers know once the petro-yuan replaces the dollar, that general chaos will rein in America. And the American globalists know this too. Now imagine a dollar being worth ten cents. Imagine store shelves empty and several million more foreclosures. Imagine Apple not selling iPhones for two months. Visualize what happens in America if another big recession hits now. The kid who was 12 when 2008 rolled around, is now 21 with a college degree and a mountain of student loan debt, working at McDonald’s to pay for an $800 dollar smart phone. Fox News just reported on the 5 dead and 20 wounded in Chicago over the Thanksgiving weekend, and Trump’s policies have been a shot in the arm for Wall Street. If the big bubble bursts the disenfranchised will turn to cannibalism. Putin and the Washington swamp knows this too.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”- John Adams

So, when America does finally succumb to the death throes we’ve seen happening the last thirty years or more… They’ll push the button, you bet they will. Zombies could care less about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Palestine, Syria and Yemen. You unplug the intravenous joy and it’s over. And this is the truth of an America since 1955. Find yourself a cave here on Crete, fort up and get ready. It’s coming.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

“When you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make bloody revolution inevitable.” ~ John F. Kennedy

The geo-political theater around the three-ring circus started by the Saudis yanking Prime Minister Saad Hariri out of Lebanon to get a Royal spanking and then put on his pitiful resignation show, has taken a pause. The Royals have gone quiet, while their own internal power struggle plays out.

Hariri is back in Beirut singing a different tune now, about how Lebanon has to remain united and not get involved in regional disputes, when two weeks ago he was point man on starting a war on Hezbollah as a way of getting to Iran.

Hezbollah’s Nasrallah was way ahead of him, with his MP delegation stating they were wide open to having a discussion on how best to maintain Lebanon’s stability, despite their having to drive a Saudi- and Israeli-backed ISIS out of Lebanon.

Walid Jumblatt, representing the Druze population, directly challenged Saudi Arabia to engage Iran to diffuse tensions in the region, saying that there has to be reconciliation and compromise. How wonderful to see little Lebanon standing up to the Saudi, Israeli and US bullies, despite all of its other problems.

No one is buying the Saudi new bogeyman story

It seems no one wanted buy the Saudi bait to be proxy cannon fodder in a Royals’ conflict with Iran. They have seen what happened to Syria and Iraq, and are not that stupid.

The Saudis’ bitterness at losing their terror war on Syria, and then trying to divert that failure into a new destabilization campaign against Hezbollah and Iran, did not play well in many capitals, including all those looking forward to doing a decade of big business with Iran. Frankly, everyone is getting tired of failed fake leaders trying to blame others for their self-created problems by starting new conflicts.

On the contrary, the world is much more aware of who the real threats to the Mideast are simply by looking at the team of gangsters who tried to carve up Syria, who thought their plan of attrition would bear fruit in time, while pretending that the carnage was all just the people’s will, a civil war among Syrians.

Hariri’s Saudi masters were exposed by Qatar’s Ex-Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim when he spilled the beans that the US Coalition, Turkey and the Gulf States had spent $137 billion trying to destroy Syria. Think of what that money could have done for the region if it had been invested in peaceful development.

That said, if the Saudis had given to Yemenis to develop what it has spent trying to conquer them, the Yemenis would be grateful Saudi allies. But the Warmongers do not choose the peace route, preferring to have everyone at each other’s throats, the divide-and-conquer routine.

Saudi Arabia and Israel attempt to replace ISIS with the Arab League

It has been a turbulent two weeks while the crisis built up. The Saudis and Israelis came out of the closet on their legacy relationship by announcing their decades of diplomatic relations and intelligence sharing. These two happening so close together, in the middle of the Hariri resignation fiasco, signaled that we were seeing the rollout of a new plan B to replace the failed Syria Balkanization project.

I had to pinch myself to make sure I was not dreaming when reading the news that, after a Saudi-called meeting, Arab League chief Ahmand Aboul-Giet announced moving forward with an anti-Iran resolution in the UN for destabilizing the Mideast.

Mind you, this is after the Arab League kicked Syria out while the other Gulf State Arabs were conducting an open terror war against Syria, with alleged arch enemy Israel helping them out in the Golan Heights by tying SAA forces down there and supplying ISIS.

Meanwhile Hezbollah, while designated a terrorist organization by the US, had found itself fighting ruthless terrorists in Syria, most of them just plain criminals there for the looting, and abusing women with permission from the Saudi Wahabbi imams, while riding around in Japanese Toyotas, using US and Gulf State supplied weapons, including US made TOW missiles, lots of them.

Back in Jerusalem, the Likud defense minister, Russian émigré Avigdor Lieberman, who has a seething hatred for all Arabs and Muslims, announced that he wanted to form an anti-Iran coalition with the Arab Nations. And at the same time, while Israel has been using settler extremists to defile the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Israeli minister of military affairs says he wants to buddy up with Arab countries in a new alliance against Iran.

When will we stand up to the real state-sponsored terrorists?

Do they really think that the UN Security Council is going to buy a new Iran boogeyman fairy tale? I don’t think so. It all looks like a weird Saturday Night Live comedy skit, especially after the Hariri stunt, and Macron hugging him like a long lost lover when he arrived in Paris.

A lot of the world has learned who the real terrorists are, and they aren’t Iranians or Yeminis. The chemical weapons that Saddam used on Iran were made in the USA, found by our troops, and at first thought to be the smoking-gun proof that Saddam had chemical weapons, until they saw the US manufacturer labels. The weapons were quickly removed from the country, never to be seen again.

The Iranians did not rain medium-range missiles down on Iraqi cities during their long war. It was the US ally, Iraq, that rained them down on Iranian cities; one of many details that few in the West remember, if they ever knew.

This new Fake War attempt puts the Russians in a tough position because, along with Iran and Hezbollah and the SAA, they saved Syria from being taken over by foreign-backed terrorists, and where Lebanon certainly would have been next.

Like Putin stating that it was better for Moscow to fight Russian citizen terrorists in Syria and kill them there so they could never return home, Hezbollah also knew it would be better to fight them in Syria. They all were fighting to save themselves and not get picked off one by one by the terror-sponsor proxies. The Russians had had a taste of the US doing that in the brutal Chechen war.

Billions for war or billions for peace?

Russia does not want to sell S-400s and nuclear plants to the Saudis, and build similar plants and LNG gas facilities for Iran just to see it all get blown up in a new war. Moscow wants stable, long term commercial customers to keep Russia’s technology brain-power base growing and increasing its own defensive power, as Iran is doing, and for the same reason as Iran does. They know they are in the crosshairs of the unipolar maniacs.

Every billion dollars that gets spent on stupid wars that destroy billions more in infrastructure impoverishes everyone but the warmongers. They don’t get killed or maimed, or carry the huge financial debt for the war and rebuilding afterwards.

The boiler room that is the main engine regional instability now is state-sponsored terrorism, not the online recruited cannon fodder variety, but the boardroom and officers’ club kind. Western nations and their intelligence agencies, including the US’ and Britain’s, have been involved in this up to their eyeballs.

As long as we have no recourse against them politically or legally, we are doomed, because time will be on their side. More false flag terror attacks will find us pleading for more protection, followed by having more of our rights taken away and rendering us incapable of reversing the situation. I pray that it is not already too late.

Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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Now that RT is no longer available on television in Philadelphia, I watch more France 24 than before, when I divided my TV-watching between those two and MSNBC. The difference in offerings never ceases to amaze me, but while ‘Putin’s bullhorn’ tended to focus on non-typical Russian subjects and America’s failings, France’s English language channel concentrates heavily on the Middle East and Africa.

Although many people are vaguely aware of China’s growing presence in Africa, without France 24, we wouldn’t know that it now welcomes African students. The Chinese have long been suspected of being allergic to Black people, but this report suggests that the government has made a decision in favor of color blindness – the students interviewed largely deny having encountered racism. Add to this that the One Belt One Road transportation project linking China and Russia to Europe will also have an African spur, and it becomes clear that in the post American era, Russians, Arabs, Orientals and Blacks are determined to work together.

This may seem like a contradiction with respect to President Vladimir Putin’s oft-heard criticism of multiculturalism, directed at Europe’s efforts to integrate Muslims. (Not to mention President Trump’s efforts to ‘whiten’ America, most recently by declaring that Haitians, who were welcomed on a ‘temporary’ basis after the 2010 earthquake, will have to leave by 2019…) President Putin’s position is that different ethnic groups should live in harmony with each other, each within their own borders. Today’s Russia, or rather the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) includes nine of the fifteen former member states of the Soviet Union, most of whose people are Muslims. (For reasons which are not entirely clear, Russia fought two wars to keep Chechnya under its control, and it has been a hotbed of terrorism. However its policies vis a vis the other Muslim states on its southern border as well as vis a vis a multi-racial world contrast with America’s.

While the US is mesmerized by ‘Russiagate’, Vladimir Putin draws to Moscow — or the Black Sea resort of Sochi — one national leader after another, offering Russia’s mediation in Africa and the Middle East.

Most recently he received Bashar al Assad, as well as the President of Sudan, while the Saudi King (with a 1500 person retinue) was in Moscow in October, Netanyahu having been there in March. Seven rounds of detailed Syrian peace talks involving the opposition have taken place in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, under President Putin’s leadership.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding criticism from readers about a recent article that reflects the current Russophobia, Harpers magazine’s forum on the nuclear clock, which is currently at two minutes to midnight, while evoking a possible nuclear attack by North Korea, informs us that “the Russians have rehearsed the use of nuclear weapons” without mentioning the buildup of NATO troops on its European border to which these preparations respond.

When Americans decry their choice of President, rather than blaming Russia, they should consider themselves lucky that there is at least one adult in the room, and that is Vladimir Putin. However, the Russian could be running a race against time, as he gathers around him the leaders of the majority of the planet.

Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.

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