If there was ever any doubt that the Russia-gate hoax is a scheme by the War Party to salvage their bankrupt foreign policy, and depose a democratically-elected President, then Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve alleged GRU agents for “interfering” in the 2016 election settles the matter once and for all. Are we supposed to believe it was just a coincidence that the indictment was made public just as Trump was about to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki?

An indictment of twelve individuals who will never contest the charges, and which will not have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law – to whom is it addressed? Not to any jury, but to the court of public opinion. It is, in short, pure propaganda, meant to sabotage Trump’s Helsinki peace initiative before it has even convened.

Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective. The American people aren’t stupid: to the extent that they’re paying attention to this Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller’s accusations without too much difficulty.

The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged “real time” transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC’s email system as well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller’s word for it.

What Mueller is counting on is that the defendants will never show up in court. If they did, following the example of representatives of the indicted Internet Research Agency – accused of running Facebook ads on Russia’s behalf – Mueller would have to provide real evidence of the defendant’s guilt. In that case, the indictment would have to be dropped, because the alleged evidence is classified.

Ominously, the indictment points to unnamed US individuals alleged to have collaborated with supposed Russian agents: Roger Stone has been identified as one of them, and no doubt others have been targeted by the special prosecutor’s office. Anyone who thought the anti-Russian inquisition would be content with mini-big fish Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, and the little tadpoles they’d managed to corral, is about to be proven dead wrong. This fishing expedition has barely begun.

The whole shoddy affair is meant to distract attention away from the President’s ambitious foreign policy initiatives, the twin diplomatic outreach campaigns to two of our old cold war enemies. These efforts demonstrate the overarching significance of the President’s “America First” foreign policy: Trump means to abandon the old cold war structures. In their place he means to build a new so-called international order, one that is not overseen by any one “superpower” but that is self-regulating, like the market order that has brought unparalleled prosperity to this country and to the world.

That’s the big picture. Focusing in on specifics, what is likely to come out of this summit is:

· A settlement of the Syrian conflict as a prelude to US withdrawal.

· An agreement to renew and revitalize the INF treaty, which is in danger of being nullified, and the initiation of new joint efforts to limit nuclear weapons.

· An acknowledgment of the need to normalize Russo-American relations in the interest of world peace.

I might add that efforts to trace and capture “rogue” nukes, perhaps left over from the immediate post-Soviet collapse, should also be on the agenda.

The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki summit has been a concerted campaign to … cancel it. Yes, that’s how myopic and in thrall to the Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares? Never mind that we’re still on hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting ours. The slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the extinction of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.

And yet — what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how and why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really!

The American people are not blaming Russia for their problems. They don’t want conflict with the Kremlin, they don’t care about Ukraine, and the question of sanctions never comes up at the dinner table of ordinary Americans. That’s why Russia-gate and the war propaganda coming out of the neocon and liberal thinktanks has had little effect on public opinion, in marked contrast to its dominance of elite discourse inside the Beltway bubble.

This latest effort to discredit the President’s peace project and sabotage a summit with a foreign leader underscores the battle lines in this country. On one side is the Deep State, with its self-interested globalist leadership so invested in our interventionist foreign policy that even Trump’s limited (albeit surprisingly radical) critique poses a deadly threat to their power. On the other side is Trump, the outsider, who often has to work against and around his own government in order to pursue his preferred policies.

Yet this isn’t about Trump, his personality, or his other policies. It’s about whether a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are going to be granted a veto power over who sits in that chair in the Oval Office. It’s as simple as that.

I know what side I’m on. Do you?

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.