Lew Rockwell Institute

While Russia is confidently prosecuting the war in Ukraine towards its inevitable end.

Meanwhile the ‘West’ is still negotiating with itself about the conditions under which it will have to capitulate.

Discussions continue about ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine even as the only serious ones are those that Russia is willing to give.

The confused arguments about ‘guarantees’ are reflected in the reports of them. Consider this nonsense:

A security guarantee could encompass a wide range of issues. In return for Russia ending its invasion, a security pact could include a pledge of U.S. air support for any European-led operations should Russian troops resume their assault.

If Russia ends the war NATO like ‘security guarantees’ are to be given to Ukraine as a reward?

How is that supposed to compute? Russia started this war to prevent a further extension of NATO into Ukraine. Why should it end the fighting if, in consequence, Ukraine would end up as a quasi-member of that pact?

All the ‘security guarantees’ talk is just obfuscation of the attempt by some European leaders to prolong the war by further dragging the U.S. into it:

Days before the [sanctions] deadline expired, Putin invited Witkoff to Moscow and offered a proposal, seen by the White House as sufficient grounds to set up last week’s Alaska summit meeting. There, Putin succeeded in convincing Trump that an immediate ceasefire to allow for complex peace negotiations was not required, allowing Russia to continue its attacks on Ukraine, without the risk of new U.S. sanctions.

The move alarmed European leaders, who raced to Washington on Monday to back up Zelensky during a meeting at the White House. After the meeting, they appeared satisfied by Trump’s openness to security guarantees. If Putin does not accept the terms, that could make the Kremlin the obstacle to Trump’s peace deal, insulating Ukraine from having to choose between untenable concessions of territory and inviting Trump’s ire.

Russia is not going to allow any of this:

[O]n Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov struck a blow at another major part of Trump’s peace effort, downplaying expectations for a swift bilateral meeting with the Ukrainian president, and further blocking the prospects for any deal on security guarantees for Ukraine. He said Russia would only agree to the measures if it had an effective veto over future efforts to defend Kyiv.

Russia will simply stick to its plan:

Russia’s conditions to end its war would essentially subvert Ukraine’s sovereignty, neuter its military and seize territory in eastern Ukraine that it has not captured in battle. Moscow wants to also permanently bar Ukraine from NATO and other international groupings and prevent it from hosting foreign troops — terms that would force Ukraine into a close, unwanted economic and political partnership with Russia.

A close economic and political partnership with Russia, unwanted or not, is indeed the most likely future for whatever is by then left of Ukraine.

Some Ukrainians, like the former presidential advisor Alexander Arestovich, do understand that:

The key task for Ukraine today in all these Alaskan tales is to preserve political independence in the long term.
…
Ukraine has only one way to preserve it: acknowledging the shared symbolic capital with Russia and Belarus, adopting a neutral status, and building good-neighborly relations with Russia and Belarus while maintaining political independence and the unique role of a “crossroads of worlds”- between Russia and Europe.

Economically, the most promising role is that of a “steppe corridor” – between Russia, Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and the EU.
In short, this is about a fundamental shift in project orientation – from a narrow, nationalist one to a broad, transit-oriented one.

In a sense, this could be called a “Great Return” – to Ukraine’s natural historical and cultural role.

By way of analogy – modern Kazakhstan.
…
In conclusion, the fundamental challenge for Ukraine lies not in tactical maneuvers but in recognizing the strategic perspective: the necessity of reimagining its role as a neutral, transit-oriented state in order to preserve independence in the emerging geopolitical order.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine’s Future – A ‘Steppe Corridor’ – A Neutral, Transit-oriented State appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Empire of Chaos is at war, hybrid and otherwise, not only against BRICS, but against Eurasia integration.

It took just one pic to imprint on posterity the utter humiliation of the EUrotrash political elites in Year 2025: the Coalition of the Twats, in the Oval Office, lining up like a bunch of frightened schoolkids, severely reprimanded by His Master’s Voice – the Headmaster cum Circus Ringmaster.

That was also neatly described as Trump breaks Europe over his knee.

Of course, President Putin had already predicted it, over six months before the fact:

“I assure you, Trump, with his character and persistence, will restore order quite quickly. And all of them, you’ll see, soon all of them will stand at the master’s feet and gently wag their tails.”

The White House humiliation sealed the deal, and reconfirmed an obsession: for the EUrotrash “leadership”, at all levels when it comes to relations with Russia, Peace is War.

Brandishing their warped logic, they cannot possibly understand that if Ukraine is instrumentalized – actually since before Maidan in 2014 – to harass and destabilize Russia in its western borders, Russia will forcefully counter-attack.

That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of “underlying causes” of the Ukraine tragedy, which must be thoroughly addressed if there is any real shot at Trumpian or not Trumpian “peace”.

In the Big Picture, that translates as the Empire of Chaos and Russia sitting down to set up a new “indivisibility of security” arrangement – just like Moscow proposed in December 2021: then, it was met by a non-response response.

EUrotrash Inc.’s new delirium is to attribute to itself the design of the future borders between a re-weaponized Europe and a Russia that will inevitably inflict on it a massive strategic defeat.

It’s a very long shot to imagine that Trump is capable, by himself, of imposing a new strategic reality on the warmongering yet penniless Coalition of the Twats. Whatever happens to rump Ukraine, Trump, based on his own twist and turn vociferations, actually wants Europe to “contain” Russia from now on, using an arsenal of ridiculous expensive American weapons.

So what changes is the character of this particular chapter of the Forever Wars: it will be fought by the Coalition of the Twats, and not by Americans.

In the short term, that also unveils the only strategy available for the EUrotrash/Kiev combo: outlast Trump until the 2026 mid-terms, destroy the remainder of his presidency, and be secure with the return of the mega-Russophobe gang in 2028.

Which Dead Hand will prevail?

And old school Deep State hand, who had privileged access to all Cold War era honchos, sums up the pitfalls ahead for Russia:

“Russia is taking too long to neutralize Ukraine, allowing time for NATO to reignite diversions. While the snail offensive in Ukraine does save lives, NATO seeks to weaken Russia’s strategic position in the Balkans and elsewhere that can cost far more lives in the future. If the Slavs in the Balkans are crushed that can strategically weaken Russia’s overall position, and that is far more costly than a major lightning offensive a la Stalin in Russian Ukraine. Russia must finish this war now and turn to its southern problems in the Balkans and the intrigues in Baku.”

Trump of course is oblivious to these Big Picture niceties. At best he admits, to Fox News, that “Ukraine will not regain Crimea” and “Ukraine will not join NATO.” But he does not seem to mind that “France, Germany and the UK want to deploy troops in Ukraine” as part of the new kabuki: “security guarantees”. That is an inter-galactic red line for Moscow.

In parallel, it’s wishful thinking to believe that Putin is now finally ready to negotiate “peace”. This is not about peace; it’s always about coming up with incontrovertible facts on the battle field, because Moscow knows this war will only be won in the battle field.

Russian forces have reached the final Ukraine defensive line in Donbass: Slavyansk-Kramatorsk. And is fast encircling key strongholds near Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka. Talk about a strategic/psychological turning point. From there, the – steppe – sky is the limit.

Compound it with the combined hacking of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – which revealed that Kiev’s losses, in terms of dead and missing, amount to a staggering 1.7 million.

All of the above means that we are fast approaching the fateful moment when the victor dictates the full terms of the enemy’s capitulation. No need to march to Bankova in Kiev and plant the Russian flag.

To indulge in a tawdry Trump-spun “peace” agreement carries an overlapping amount of serious strategic defeats for Russia. For example: leaving Odessa and Kharkov to MI6 and Brit machinations. At the same time Moscow needs to start paying much closer attention to its underbelly in the South Caucasus front, where the mellifluous Turkish drive is to establish a pan-Turanic belt/corridor.

The Empire of Chaos is at war, hybrid and otherwise, not only against BRICS, but against Eurasia integration. Some of its implications will certainly be discussed in the upcoming SCO summit in Tianjin, on August 31/September 1st. Putin, Xi, Modi, Pezeshkian will all be at the table.

And that should impress on all players the imperative of BRICS and SCO, sooner rather than later, representing Eurasia, getting their act increasingly together, turbo-charging not only their economic but also geostrategic cooperation. There’s only one way to go: negotiate with the increasingly out of control Empire of Chaos as a group. Putin and Xi already now it. Lula and Modi are starting to get the picture.

Meanwhile, the temptation is irresistible to frame Putin as granting Trump a magnanimous exit: to get out of the imperial strategic defeat in Ukraine while saving face.

The problem is the massive Peace is War front will never accept it. And that goes way beyond EUrotrash Inc., including Atlanticist old money, key players in international finance, and the walking dead but not really dead neo-cons.

Russia, China, BRICS/SCO need to be on red alert 24/7. The Peace is War front is already in the process of converting themselves into the NBT front: nuclear threats, bioweapons and terror attacks. Russia may have the Dead Hand – which will exterminate any attacker. The NBT front at best has the scrawny dead hand of a dead man walking.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Even After the Headmaster’s Humiliation, Europe Insists that Peace Is War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Intellectuals and politicians often try to verbally summarize or justify conventional thinking in pithy ways. Milton Friedman (in 1965) and Richard Nixon (in 1971) both said different versions of the phrase “we are all Keynesians now.”  . . . . Friedman and Nixon were describing the thoughts behind the implementation of Great Society redistribution programs and an inflationary monetary policy designed to offset the cost of those programs. — We Are All Keynesians Now, Brian Wesbury, Robert Stein of First Trust Advisors, 4/4/22

If there is one central myth supporting the folly that passes for monetary policy and by extension fiscal policy, it would have to be the unchallenged assumption that money should be defined and controlled by government.

Given the role of money in the economy – that it is it serves as a trade intermediary, one-half of virtually every transaction – nothing has been more destructive than the government’s commandeering money from the market.

Money was once the most marketable commodity, wrote Ludwig von Mises in 1912, albeit a special commodity.  Since the Nixon Shock of 1971 making money a pure fiat, the absence of any commodity connection means that for government money is never an object.  Sounds like a drunk’s fantasy.  But there’s a downside: Fiat money increases amount to an exchange of nothing for something, a slick form of theft.  Thus, unlike gold mining and coin minting, increases in the fiat money supply “set economic impoverishment in motion.”

But if a monetary system “works” why not let it be?  Whatever our current problems might be we’ve survived without a commodity standard for a long time.  What’s wrong with the government or its agent, the central bank, defining money and regulating its supply and distribution?

First, the money is not theirs – it doesn’t belong to the government or the central bank.  Banks legitimately get their funds from depositors or investors.  Anything they create on their own through fractional-reserve lending is fraudulent, because they’re guaranteeing the same dollar to both a borrower and a depositor.

Property rights violations notwithstanding, government and the Fed are trying to make a counterfeiting racket support a prosperous economy.  The Fed’s money created “out of thin air” does not represent goods or services produced.  The subsequent increase in the supply of money puts downward pressure on the purchasing power of the dollar, so that holders of previously existing money are in effect paying for the counterfeiter’s purchases.  As Richard Cantillon explained in his famous essay (c. 1730), newly created money enters the economy unevenly, benefiting some groups at the expense of others.

Murray Rothbard discusses the counterfeiting process in What has government done to our money?:

Counterfeiting is evidently but another name for inflation — both creating new “money” that is not standard gold or silver, and both functioning similarly. And now we see why governments are inherently inflationary: because inflation is a powerful and subtle means for government acquisition of the public’s resources, a painless and all the more dangerous form of taxation. (Emphasis added)

And according to Keynes, not “one man in a million” is able to detect the theft — which apparently includes economists who believe “inflationary monetary policy . . . offsets the cost of those [Great Society] programs.”

As Keynes wrote during a brief period of clarity:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Kings of old could debase their coins and pass them off as the real thing but it was a slow, tedious process that didn’t yield much revenue.  Not only that, people grew wise to it and found ways to tell a cheat from a genuine article, giving rise to Gresham’s Law.  And they saw it as a cheat, not as a way of increasing GDP, or making the price of exports more competitive, or stabilizing the price level.

Paper money changed all that.

Today, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer not because of “capitalism,” but because of a government-supported monetary system that enriches designated counterfeiters and their beneficiaries at the expense of other dollar holders.

Milton Friedman, in my view, penned the most important statement ever on monetary policy:

If a domestic money consists of a commodity, a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself.

Free markets tend to simply things.  Given that monetary policy today consists of varying degrees of counterfeiting, involving arcane meetings held in billion-dollar buildings, we need to get government out of the way and let the free market take care of itself.  And in so doing, take care of us as well.

Final Word

According to Mises there are two aspects to the sound-money principle:

It is affirmative in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government’s propensity to meddle with the currency system.

In my lifetime the greatest defender of sound money is Ron Paul — Keynes’s one man in a million — who in his 2009 book End the Fed explains how the Federal Reserve and its co-conspirator are the enemy of our future:

Bad economic policy can destroy a civilization—no policy is more dangerous than bad monetary policy. . . .

We need to take away the government’s money power. The banking industry needs its welfare check ended. The dollar’s soundness depends on its being untied from the machine that can make an infinite number of copies of dollars and reduce their value to zero.

The Fed and its powerful allies survive on the ignorance of the public.  Let’s not go down with that ship.

The post ‘We Are Still All Counterfeiters Now’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jerome Barber wrote:

Peggy Hall lays out the bait and switch.

Never trust ANY of them…

See here.

The post RFK Jr, Health Care Fraud appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Alt-Market.us

The post Globalists Are Rebranding Their “Woke Capitalism” Agenda After Crushing Setbacks appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Eric Zuesse

The post A Top Ukrainian Journalist is Forced Out of Ukraine by Zelensky Regime appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Transportphenomena:

From Ragnar and Rollo the Conquerers to randy and his little pom-poms.

Breitbart

The post Tommy Tuberville Blasts NFL, Vikings Over Male Cheerleaders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

Ghost of the Niles Hotel

Now that is a picture frame.

The post California’s Hwy 395 in the Remote NE Corner of the State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

John Leake

The post Michelangelo’s Message to Mankind appeared first on LewRockwell.

He defends the atomic bombing of Japan. It was a “terrible decision, but the alternatives were even worse.” There is one alternative that was not worse: Not dropping the bombs at all. David Henderson takes down Hanson here.

The post Victor Davis Hanson: Apologist for Mass Murder appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Today, August 21, 2025, is the 54th anniversary of the day. Oh, it was a big day. It was the usual hot and humid August afternoon in Lincoln, Nebraska. We hippies, all boys born in 1952, had come together at our communal house, the Garfield House at 14th and Garfield Streets.

The Garfield House was a big two-story white frame house. It had a full basement that we’d insulated with egg cartons and blankets so our band could play loud music. The house had a large yard and a two-car garage that no one used. No one had a car. 

August 21, 1971, was the day that a military poobah would pull our birthdates out of a lottery drum to see if we won a free, all expenses paid, trip to the Vietnam War. 

The old black & white TV was in the bay window. We all had beers, joints, and/or cigarettes in our hands. If our birthdate was one of the first 100 drawn, we were fucked. There was laughter covering up the tension in the room.

My best friend, Mark, was sitting in his big leather chair. I was sitting on the couch next to his chair. I was drinking cheap Schmidt animal beer. Mark was drinking a can of Olde English 800 Malt Liquor in one hand and the usual Old Gold cigarette in the other.

Mark’s birthdate came up as #28. His face went white. His hands shook. He was fucked. 

I got #279. My Irish luck came through.

Mark went on the lam to a farmhouse in South Dakota. He eventually was caught, arrested, and did two years of community service in Lincoln. When Mark received his pardon from Jimmy Carter, he had it framed and hung it over his toilet so that he could look at it every time he peed.

Yeah, August 21, 1971; helluva day.

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The post Why Rep. Thomas Massie prefers living off grid appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vicki Marzullo wrote:

People aren’t “surprised,” they’re pissed because favored government employees, including teachers, had their loans forgiven and everybody else has to pay.

Zero Hedge

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Eric Zuesse

The post How Ukraine Is Collapsing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Global Research

The post EU Preparing Regime Change in Hungary? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

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The post Tulsi Cleans House appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

See here.

The post Special Report: Larry Fink Ascends to WEF Throne appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

John Leake

The post Are Self-Inflicted Disasters Inevitable? appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was in Belem, Brazil, in the Amazon for six months in the summer of 1990, this was one of the top three songs played in the dance clubs of Belem. They played the English version by Bonnie Tyler. The Brazilians are the most romantic people I’ve ever met. They don’t just listen to romantic music, watch romantic TV shows, and read romantic novels; they live them.

Belem is an amazing place. You won’t find people like the Belemese anywhere else on Earth.

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