Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

My warning that the neoconservatives have resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was removed by Reagan and Gorbachev, is also being given by Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of the neoconservatives’ aggressive policies toward Russia and China.

Daily we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington is pressuring Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the break-away Russian republics. Washington refuses to cooperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for the destruction of MH-17, while preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that the conflict in Ukraine was caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, not by Washington’s coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.

The list is long. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral, non-political world organization, has been suborned into the fight against Russia. Under Washington’s pressure, the IMF has abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of Ukraine’s debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF has announced that it will lend to Ukraine in order to pay the Ukraine’s Western creditors despite the fact that Ukraine has renounced repayment of loans from Russia.

Michael Hudson believes, correctly in my view, that this new IMF policy will also be applied to those countries to whom China has made loans. The IMF’s plan is to leave Russia and China as countries who lack the usual enforcement mechanism to collect from debtors, thus permitting debtors to default on the loans without penalty.

In other words, the IMF is presenting itself, although the financial media will not notice, as a tool of US foreign policy.

What this shows, and what should concern us, is that the institutions of Western civilization are in fact tools of American dominance. The institutions are not there for the noble reasons stated in their founding documents.

The bottom line is that Western Capitalism is simply a looting mechanism that has successfully suborned Western governments and all Western “do-good” institutions.

As in George Orwell’s 1984, the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions — the West vs. the BRICS.

To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives’ pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe.

In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these “Western values” are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists.

The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.

The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China—although misinformed by their “experts” educated abroad in the neoliberal tradition, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it—are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington’s vassal states, for the neoconservatives, who control Washington and, thereby, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war. As Washington is not a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war will be nuclear, and the result will be the end of life on earth.

Whether ironic or paradoxical, the US is pushing a policy that means the end of life. Yet, the majority of Western governments support it, and the insouciant Western peoples have no clue.

But Putin has caught on. Russia is not going to submit. Soon China will understand that US dependency on China’s workforce and imports is not a protection from Washington’s aggression. When China looks beyond its MIT and Harvard miseducated neoliberal economists to the writing on the wall, Washington is going to be in deep trouble.

What will Washington do? Confronted with two powerful nuclear forces, will the crazed neocons back off? Or will their confidence in their ideology bring us the final war?

This is a real question. The US government pays Internet trolls to ridicule such questions and their authors. To see the people who sell out humanity for money, all you have to do is to read the comments on the numerous websites that reproduce this column.

Nevertheless, the question remains, unanswered by the Western presstitute media and unanswered by the bought-and-paid-for stooges in the US Congress and all Western “democracies.”

Indications are that Russia has had enough of American arrogance. The Russian people have elevated a leader as they always do, and which Western countries seldom, if ever, do. The West has triumphed by technology, not by leadership. But Vladimir Putin is Russia’s choice of a leader, and he is one. Russia also has the technology and a sense of itself that no longer exists in the diversified West.

There is nothing like Putin anywhere in the West, over which presides a collection of bought-and-paid-for-puppets who report to private interest groups, such as Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber).

At the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations (September 28), Putin, backed by the President of China, announced that half of the world no longer accepts American unilateralism. Additionally, Putin said that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world that results from Washington’s pursuit of hegemony.

Two days later Putin took over the fight against ISIS in Syria.

Putin, still relying on agreements with Washington, relied on the agreement that Russia would announce beforehand its attacks on ISIS installations in order to prevent any NATO-Russian air encounters. Washington took advantage of this trust placed in Washington by Russia, and arranged for a Turkish jet fighter to ambush an unsuspecting Russian fighter-bomber.

This was an act of war, committed by Washington and Turkey, and thereby Washington’s European NATO vassal states against a nuclear power capable of exterminating all life in every one of the countries, including the “superpower US.”

This simple fact should make even the American super-patriots, who wear the flag on their sleeve, wonder about the trust they place in “their” government and in Fox “news,” CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes who continually lie every minute of every broadcast.

But it won’t. Americans and Europeans are too insouciant. They are locked tightly in The Matrix, where the impotent creatures are content to live without understanding reality.

Realizing that it is pointless to attempt to communicate to the Western sheeple, who have no input into their government’s policy, Putin now sends his message directly to Washington.

Putin’s message is loud and clear in his order directed against any US/NATO operations against Russia in its Syrian operations against ISIS:

Putin followed up this order with another order to the Russian Defense Ministry Board:

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported at the Defense Ministry meeting that 56 percent of Russia’s nuclear forces are new and that more than 95 percent are at a permanent state of readiness. The few Western news sources that report these developments pretend that Russia is ”saber-rattling” without cause.

To make it clear even for the insouciant Western populations, everything that Reagan and Gorbachev worked for has been overthrown by crazed, demented, evil American neoconservatives whose desire for hegemony over the world is driving the world to extinction.

These are the same bloodthirsty war criminals who have destroyed seven countries, murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of Muslim peoples, and sent millions of refugees from the neocon wars into Europe. None of these war criminals are protected from terrorist attack. If the alleged “Muslim threat” was real, every one of the war criminals would be dead by now, not the innocent people sitting in Paris cafes or attending parties in California.

Neocons are the unhumans who created on purpose the “war against terror” in order to gain a weapon against Russia and China. You can witness these unhumans every day on talk TV and read them in the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the British, German, Australian, Canadian, and endless Western newspapers.

In the West lies prevail, and the lies are driving the world to extinction. An expert reminds us that it only takes one mistake and 30 minutes to destroy life on earth.