YouTube link here.

Note that this presentation was given before the European Parliament in November of 2025. Approximate first half of the video is Mearsheimer’s presentation and second half is Q&A.

By Jeffrey Sachs & Sybil Fares, CommonDreams/Consortium News, 7/21/26

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations.

What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points.

The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States.

The instruments used for regime control include:

• the imposition or removal of trade barriers;
• the access to or denial of technologies;
• the introduction or removal of economic sanctions;
• the ownership and manipulation of foreign media;
• electoral interference of varying extent;
• political assassinations, color revolutions, C.I.A.-backed coups;
• the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit;
• the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets;
• the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping;
• and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war.

The U.S. wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots & American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor.

Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power.

Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power.

He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region.

It is no surprise that U.S. wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of five seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy.

Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object.

He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the U.S. to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later C.I.A. director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite.

Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO.

Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the U.S.-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas.

Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war.

And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises 

Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

That week proved two things.

First, this is an American war: Deprived of U.S. intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded.

Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The U.S. military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.”

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the U.S. supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself.

In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying.

By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow.

Through it all, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign.

The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the C.I.A. throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that U.S. policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason that the U.S. sustains the Ukraine war.

Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of C.I.A. seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 U.K. officials hired or contracted by the company.

Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine.

In January 2026 Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga.

Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot.

Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf.

Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the U.S. would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands.

Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues.

This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelensky dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem.

A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the U.S. in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect and indivisible security.

Yet the U.S. does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris.

Peace in Ukraine requires only that the U.S. relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia.

Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy: it defines it.

Until the American people reclaim their democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.

Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

This article is from Common Dreams

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 7/13/26

The “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their militant “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) wing, which genocided Poles and others in pursuit of an ethnically pure state, are the founding fathers of post-“Maidan” Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists thus assumed that their fight against Russia from 2014, and especially after the start of the special operation in 2022, would advance this goal. Kiev’s banning of the Russian language, elements of Russian culture, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave them hope.

This fantasy was just shattered by his Chief of Staff Kirill Budanov, who reaffirmed in late June what he said earlier in spring about the country’s need to attract more migrants since “There are significantly fewer of us now. I don’t want to scare anyone, but significantly fewer.” Around six weeks prior in early May, Minister of Social Policy Denis Uliutin revealed that only 22-25 million people still live in Ukraine. Of them, at least 10 million are pensioners per the Pension Fund of Ukraine’s estimate in early April.

To make matters even more concerning, UNICEF estimated last year that there are 6.6 million children under the age of 18, so taken together, that leaves just 6-9 million working-age adults left in the country. The World Bank’s latest data from 2024 estimates that males comprise 46% of the population, so that would roughly mean that Ukraine has only 2.76-4.14 million working-age males, a non-insignificant but unclear percentage of whom were either killed or permanently handicapped by the ongoing conflict.

If one accepts the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (likely lowball) early 2026 figure of 500,000-600,000 Ukrainian casualties, then this means that Ukraine only has between a little more than 2 million and 3.5 million working-age males at most. Budanov therefore wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “There are significantly fewer of us now.” Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians in the EU, only 26% are adult men, so slightly over 1 million, and not all of them will return even after the conflict ends.

Ukraine will correspondingly have to promote the mass migration of civilizationally dissimilar foreigners, whether for economic and/or population replacement purposes, and they’re not expected to assimilate if the Western European precedent is anything to go by. Moreover, Ukraine can’t realistically ban their languages since they don’t speak Ukrainian and might not be fluent in English, which a 2024 law incidentally mandated across the state bureaucracy in a move that must have flustered the nationalists.

Far from becoming the ethnically pure state that they fantasized would follow the end of the conflict, Ukraine is on pace to become as multicultural as the most extreme cases in Western Europe, with English also likely replacing Ukrainian in everyday life as the lingua franca among its diverse population. Just as bad from the nationalists’ perspective was Zelensky offering his Western partners “patronage over a particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” at May 2022’s World Economic Forum.

The end result is therefore that Ukraine lost both its identity and sovereignty throughout the conflict unlike how the nationalists expected it to preserve both through their “sacrifice”. A split between them and the state is thus likely, though given how predictable this is, the SBU is probably already monitoring them to preemptively avert any manifestations of dissent, especially those that could take violent forms. The irony is that Ukrainian nationalists ended up building a liberal dystopia instead of a “fascist utopia”.

***

Ukrainian Drone Attacks in Russia Target Wildberries, Oil Refineries, and Kill at Least Three People

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/29/26

Ukrainian drone attacks were launched against multiple Russian regions overnight, targeting the Russian online retailer Wildberries, oil refineries, and killing at least three people. The operations, which are supported by US intelligence, came after President Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington.

Photos from social media show a fire at a Wildberries warehouse in Russia’s Ryazan Oblast following a drone attack, and Russian officials said that the facility was evacuated. At least six people were wounded in the region, though it’s unclear if they were hurt during the attack on the Wildberries facility.

Wildberries, which has been compared to the US online retailer Amazon, has become a frequent target of Ukrainian drones in recent weeks. A July 18 attack on a Wildberries warehouse in Russia’s Tambov Oblast killed six people.

Ukrainian officials claimed that drone attacks on Wednesday hit an oil refinery in Ryazan and one in Russia’s Perm Oblast, more than 900 miles from Ukraine, but while attacks were reported in both regions, Russian officials haven’t confirmed that oil facilities were hit.

Local officials said that a woman was killed in Taganrog, southern Russia, by drone debris and that one man was injured. In Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, officials said that two civilians were killed by Ukrainian drone attacks.

As Ukraine has escalated its drone attacks in Russia, Russian forces have escalated missile and drone strikes on Ukraine, leading to a spike in civilian casualties on both sides. According to The Associated Press, Russian glide bombs targeted Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region on Wednesday, wounding at least 11 people.

By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 7/19/26

The US Geopolitical Strategy Since WW2

At the end of World War 2 the US emerged as the unrivaled global military and economic power. The war left US cities and manufacturing plants untouched while the war destroyed most of the developed world. The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency giving the US financial system de facto control over global finance including the global messaging payment system SWIFT, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In 1992 after the dissolution of the USSR, the Wolfowitz Doctrine emerged. The Wolfowitz Doctrine declared the US to be the world’s sole superpower, and established the strategic objective of preventing the emergence (or re-emergence) of any global or regional competitor. This strategic objective included preventing any hostile power from dominating any important region whose resources could generate global power.

A review of US foreign policy since 1992 clearly shows that the Wolfowitz Doctrine of maintaining US global hegemony and preventing the rise of a peer competitor, has remained the central US strategic objective. Examples include; NATO expansion under Clinton, the Balkan wars and the attack on Serbia under Clinton, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush, the wars on Libya and Syria under Obama, the drone campaigns under Bush Obama Biden and Trump, the propaganda campaign against the Russian Federation and President Putin under Obama and Biden, provoking the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia under Obama Biden and Trump, the blockade and takeover of Venezuela under Trump, and the war on Iran under Trump. The clear objective of these wars has been to confront, weaken and destroy any potential US (or Israeli) adversary, and to prevent the emergence of any potential competitor. The doctrine also seems to guide current actions against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, as well as threats against Greenland and Canada, as the US attempts to exercise control over the resources of these and other counties.

In an essay written on March 25^th this Substack discussed the potential geopolitical strategy of the Trump Administration as reflected in recent events including the war on Iran and concluded “a strategy of “full spectrum energy dominance” was in effect “… as part of an effort to maintain US global hegemony. The components of this strategy include: 1–global dominance over energy production including liquid natural gas (LNG); 2–controlling the energy and resources of Western Hemisphere, and excluding rival powers from having access to those resources; 3–controlling all the global pinch points critical to global trade; 4-insuring access to arctic resources; 5-working to encircle, weaken and dominate countries seen as potential rivals, including Russia, China and Iran.”

In an essay written on June 4, 2025, this Substack discussed the rise of Military Keynesianism i.e. the use of military spending and war to stimulate the domestic economy. The essay discussed how military spending had been used to end the Great Depression, and how the US economy continues to be highly dependent on military spending. From the essay: “World War 2 and the adoption of military Keynesianism is credited with ending the Great Depression and providing the economic stimulus for several decades of economic growth after WW2. Militarism and military Keynesianism is a powerful economic and political force in the US. The policy of militarism and war is supported by both political parties and has persisted, election after election, for decades…”

“Military Keynesianism has been used as an economic stimulus and a jobs program ever since. The production of weapons and equipment is one of the largest remaining manufacturing industries in the US. Congress has been careful to locate bases and production facilities in each district, spreading the funding and the jobs around the country. US militarism is an economic stimulus program, a jobs program, and a source of lobbying and campaign cash. This means that militarism, and the wars that support it, has enormous economic and political power in the USA, even though maintaining it requires perpetual war.”

“For military Keynesianism to work its economic and political magic, the United States needs to use up the military equipment it produces so the arms manufacturers can keep busy. This is why the US is the world’s largest seller of weapons, and why every US president is an arms dealer. Even with these arms sales, military Keynesianism requires the US to fight a war every two, or three years, or to be continuously at war.”

The Expansion of NATO reflects Military Keynesianism

Even the incentive to expand NATO can also be traced to the promotion of Military Keynesianism here in the US because every new country that joins NATO must purchase billions of weapons and other war material from the US.

This means that NATO expansion has been one of the most profitable foreign policy decisions in US corporate history. Every new NATO member must replace Soviet-era equipment with NATO standard weapons, primarily manufactured by US defense contractors. NATO has 32 member states, and everyone is required to achieve interoperability with US equipment, all 32 are buyers of US weapons.

Here are just a few recent examples: Poland: $3.5 billion for F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin; Romania: $4 billion for Patriot missile systems from Raytheon. The same is true for the Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria – each one a new market, locked in by treaty obligations.

NATO expansion was not debated as a market expansion strategy. It was debated as a security strategy. But the money told a different story. The New York Times noted that defense industry executives saw NATO expansion as “the ultimate market opportunity.” The Wall Street Journal described it as “a bonanza for Western arms merchants.”

As QINTELPRO noted: “The revolving door between NATO policy and defense industry profits was not subtle. Bruce Jackson: Lockheed Martin’s vice president for strategy and planning → chairman of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO → chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Dick Cheney: Secretary of Defense → CEO of Halliburton → Vice President of the United States. James Jones: NATO Supreme Allied Commander → board of Boeing and Chevron → Obama’s National Security Advisor. Wesley Clark: NATO Supreme Allied Commander → board of several defense companies. The same people who made the policy profited from it. The same people who profited from it then returned to make more policy. The revolving door doesn’t just create conflicts of interest. It creates a permanent class of people whose personal wealth depends on perpetual military expansion.”

Military Keynesianism and the Ukraine War

It should be very clear by now that wars do not happen by accident, most require decades of planning, propaganda campaigns and outright lies and disinformation to persuade the US public to go along. The Ukraine war is no exception. Several studies have discussed how the CIA seized the opportunity to penetrate the Soviet Union through Ukraine and began organizing covert activities at the end of World War 2, laying the ground work for future conflict.

More recently, the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon think tank, published a study in 2019 titled “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.” The study was very explicit in recommending that Ukraine be used as a tool to weaken Russia. Here’s QINTELPRO again: “Its recommendations read like a pre-war checklist: Provide lethal military aid to Ukraine. ✓ Done. Increase support for Syrian rebels to bleed Russia. ✓ Done. Promote regime change in Belarus. ✓ Attempted. Exploit ethnic tensions. ✓ Done. Undermine Russia’s energy exports. ✓ Nord Stream destroyed. Expand NATO. ✓ Finland and Sweden added. RAND published this on its website. It was not classified. The blueprint for the war was available to anyone who bothered to read it.”

The conclusion: “When the architects of a war publish their plans three years before the war begins, and then the war proceeds exactly as planned, the word ‘unprovoked’ becomes difficult to sustain.”

Although the war has continued for almost 5 years costing thousands of lives, billions in weapons, and more billions in damage to Ukraine and Russia, the Ukraine war has been very profitable for the US defense industry. Here’s QINTELPRO again: “Lockheed Martin’s stock price rose 37% in the first year of the war. Raytheon’s rose 17%. Northrop Grumman’s rose 41%. General Dynamics rose 19%. Total U.S. military aid to Ukraine exceeded $50 billion by mid-2024. But the money doesn’t go to Ukraine. It goes to American defense contractors who manufacture the weapons that are shipped to Ukraine. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes explained this on CNBC with remarkable transparency: ‘We don’t actually write a check to Ukraine. We write a check to the United States defense industry.’ The aid packages are essentially transfer payments from American taxpayers to American defense corporations, laundered through a foreign war. Ukraine gets the weapons. The shareholders get the profits. The taxpayers get the bill. The Ukrainians get the casualties.”

“In January 2023, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors the company was ramping up production to meet demand created by the Ukraine war. He said the conflict had created ‘long-term tailwinds’ for the defense industry. Tailwinds. A sailing metaphor. The war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people is wind in the sails of Lockheed Martin’s revenue projections.”

“This is an observation about incentive structures. When the most powerful corporations in America profit from war, and those corporations fund the think tanks that recommend war, and those think tanks staff the administrations that start wars, the result is a system that produces war as reliably as an assembly line produces missiles. You don’t need a conspiracy when you have an incentive structure. The machine runs itself.”

How will the Quest for US Global Hegemony End?

These wars by the US along with disruptive covert activities by the CIA and US Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) have been going on for 80 years leaving a trail of carnage and destruction across the globe. The Church Committee exposed some of this, but US wars and meddling continue unabated. Meanwhile, the US goes deeper in debt and conditions in the US continue to deteriorate for most people.

The impact of these policies can be seen not only in the current war on Iran and the vast support provided to Ukraine by the US and the EU to fight Russia, but in US policy towards Venezuela, Cuba, and Iraq. Cuba is under a complete US embargo–Venezuela does not have control over her funds from the sale of oil and gas, which have been placed in an account under the control of the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio– See this astonishing article: “How Marco Rubio is Running Venezuela From Afar”–Iraqi funds are in the custody of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, giving the US the leverage to select who runs Iraq and, recently, to force Iraq to distance herself from Iran and to invest in a new pipeline to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. extraterritorial claims to Greenland, Canada, Cuba, and the Panama Canal also express the strategic aim of US foreign policy. In the past 24 months, the U.S. has directly attacked or materially supported bombings in Ecuador, Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Caribbean–including a full blockade of Cuba. Meanwhile, the Gaza genocide and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon continues unabated with full US support.

This is even though the US public continues to vote for peace and an end to these foreign wars. The fact that US public opinion has little impact of US foreign policy shows why net approvals of “U.S. leadership” are at a record low (-15 percent) while most Americans (59 percent) reported in April 2026 that “America’s best days have passed.”

Meanwhile, the proxy war on Russia is also at a boil. The US supports Ukraine by providing intelligence and guidance instructions for drone attacks on Russian energy facilities and grain exports. According to Glenn Diesen; “Moscow considers itself to be fighting a defensive war against a NATO determined to use Ukrainians to destroy Russia. …Sadly, our freedom of speech is in free fall, and our populations have been indoctrinated to squeal ‘Russian propaganda’ whenever an argument deviates from NATO-approved narratives.”

According to Ian Pound there is no functional way to end the war in Ukraine. This is based on the observation that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peace-making. He concludes: “Only a popular uprising against globalist leaders in Europe and their proxy in Ukraine” will change this reality.

As Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism recently pointed out situation in the Middle East (and elsewhere) continues to spiral out of control. Here’s Yves: “The world is moving into a major and potentially catastrophic change in our geopolitical and economic order. Yet normalcy bias reigns supreme. Too few are taking seriously the risk of a global depression due to the US refusing to make concessions to Iran and Iran continuing to choke in the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz to a close to zero level for a protracted period. And the global economy gets there faster if the US and Israel hits critical Iran infrastructure like energy production and Iran starts destroying Gulf State petrochemical assets or desalination plants.”

So long as the Wolfowitz doctrine of global domination continues to form strategic basis for US foreign policy, the following outcomes are possible; 1) Countries like Iran, Russia and China capitulate and, like Venezuela and Iraq, the US assumes control over their economies and resources; 2) A serious economic collapse or a catastrophic defeat renders the US unable to continue the policy of global domination; or 3) Countries refuse to be dominated and the US quest for global domination results in a global war. Obviously, something must be done to change the outcome.

The Global Cost of Militarism

As the last Substack discussed the current NDAA for the US military requests $ 1.1 trillion for DOD operations in 2027. In addition, the DOD has requested an additional $65 billion for the US war on Iran, along with an additional $350 trillion for unspecified activities. The current DOD budget is $921 billion. The cost of militarism and war is a major reason why the US budget deficit is almost $40 trillion.

In 2025, NATO countries collectively spent approximately $1.63 trillion on defense. This figure reflects a significant increase in defense spending among member nations, with all allies exceeding the previous target of 2% of GDP. NATO budget is Eu 5.3 billion

The US and NATO countries have funded the Ukraine government and the Ukraine war — the US as of 12/31, $188 billion; NATO countries as of 12/24 EU 132 billion; Total 320 billion. An additional EU 90 billion was promised at the recent NATO meeting in Turkey for the rest of 2026 and for 2027

Meanwhile Russia spends $186 billion, and China spends $251 billion.

Excluding the US NATO Russia and China the rest of the world spends around $1.2 trillion

This is madness!!

Adendum:

Here are a few charts for your consideration. I will publish another essays on the global economic situation.

US Dollar share of global foreign currency reserves have fallen to its lowest level this century

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The crack spread

Inventories of refined products are very low compared to oil. With refineries in Persian Gulf and Russia down, 16% of world total, the shortage is in refined products.

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Araghchi Says Ukraine’s Attack on an Iranian Ship in the Caspian Sea ‘Cannot Go Unanswered’

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/26/26

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Sunday said that Ukraine’s attack on an Iranian commercial ship in the Caspian Sea “cannot go unanswered,” comments that came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took credit for the strike, which killed an Iranian crew member.

Zelensky claimed that the ship that was struck was carrying military cargo. “We also achieved very strong results with long‑range strikes in the Caspian Sea – including vessels used in military cargo shipments involving Iran, as well as a warship,” he wrote on X on Saturday, the day of the attack.

In his statement on Sunday, Araghchi said that Zelensky “has attacked an Iranian commercial vessel, killing a sailor. A blatant UN Charter violation done at Israel’s behest to drag Europe into its war.”

The Iranian diplomat added that in calls with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top foreign policy official, he “made clear that what the freeloader in Kyiv did CANNOT GO UNANSWERED.”

The attack on the Iranian ship comes as Ukraine continues escalating its long-range drone attacks against Russia, which are carried out using intelligence provided by the US, and have been targeting Russian oil tankers and refineries, and have also been killing a significant number of civilians.

***

Size Matters: Russian and Ukrainian Armies

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/28/26

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree raising the army’s authorized size to 2,426,130 personnel, with service members now numbering 1,535,000, up from 1,510,000.

The decree takes effect August 1 and ties the change to the creation of military construction units within the Russian Armed Forces.

A little more than a month earlier, Putin had signed the previous decree, which raised the army’s authorized size to 2,399,130 personnel. The reason for that increase was not specified.

It is the third change to the army’s size in the past six months, following two earlier decrees signed in March and June 2026.

Putin has now increased the army’s size six times since the start of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine.

Russia is increasing its armed forces through official personnel cap increases, force restructuring, and high-financial-incentive recruitment. Key steps include raising authorized end-strength numbers via presidential decrees, expanding regional military districts and commands, and relying heavily on lucrative contract enlistment bonuses.

As we have seen, Putin yesterday signed a decree on July 27, 2026, raising total authorized armed forces strength to 2,426,130 personnel – including 1,535,000 active service members – effective August 1, 2026. He has expanded specific force allocations to incorporate specialized military construction and infrastructure units.

In addition, recent measures have divided the traditional Western Military District into two distinct regional commands: the Moscow Military District and the Leningrad Military District; formed new combined-arms and army corps units (such as the 44th Army Corps) alongside upgrading existing motorized rifle brigades directly into divisions; developed new military bases and infrastructure near northern and eastern NATO borders to permanently station newly raised formations.

Moscow is offering large federal and regional sign-on cash bonuses alongside monthly salaries that significantly exceed standard national civilian wages, maintaining a continuous influx of monthly contract volunteers (averaging roughly 30,000 to 40,000 new recruits per month) to offset frontline combat losses; enforcing legal and administrative restrictions that bar active contract soldiers from resigning or leaving service.

Russia has also benefitted from the assistance of tens of thousands of troops from its allies, notably North Korea.

In brief, Russia has far many more active troops at its disposal than does Ukraine.

Sources from the United Kingdom assess the total size of the Ukrainian armed forces as between 800,000 and 1 million active personnel, reflecting the mass mobilization and expansion required during the ongoing war. Specific components include the ground branch and overall defense structure.

So, Ukraine’s army is estimated at roughly around 800,000 to 1,000,000 active service members and mobilized personnel. The Ukrainian Ground Forces account for approximately 450,000 active personnel.