Sunday, January 30, 2022 - 00:45
OPINION: Ryan McMaken - The Usual Suspects Are Pushing War with Russia

Here we go again.

Since the original Gulf War in 1991, a certain pattern has emerged. Every few years, the regime in Washington attempts to whip the American people into a frenzy so as to support the latest American invasion “necessary” for regime change, “spreading democracy,” or some other agenda item.

It worked with Iraq in 1991, with Serbia in the late 1990s, and with Iraq again in 2003. It worked in Libya in 2011. They tried it again in 2013, but Americans showed so little interest in the floated Syria invasion that the move was eventually rejected by the White House. The American regime was forced to resort to small-scale under-the-radar mini-wars designed to keep the military spending going while avoiding any large-scale mobilizations.

But they keep on trying. This time, with conflict ongoing between Russia and Ukraine, the enemy is Russia. The latter has increasingly been a bogeyman for American neoconservatives and paranoid anti-Trump neo-McCarthyites for a growing number of years. Yet war with Russia is hardly a crusade of righteousness, and it brings with it the risk of catastrophe. Calls for an American military "response" to the Ukraine-Russia conflict must be fully rejected. 

Read more at Mises Wire. 

 

An economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014, Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.