Sleepwalking into a NATO War with RussiaThe Russian war against Ukraine is now halfway through its fifth year, rapidly approaching the length of World War II. The European NATO countries have become more and more heavily drawn into that conflict, which many observers believe has already cost more than a million lives.Although the NATO leaders had initially been quite cautious about fighting a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border, lack of any significant Russian pushback has dangerously swollen their confidence, and many red-lines once assumed to exist have already long since been crossed.As I put it in June of last year:What was originally intended as a very limited punitive attack against Ukraine lasting just a few weeks has now gone on for well over three years, producing huge casualties on both sides, and it must be brought to an end. Meanwhile, the lack of any sufficiently strong Russian retaliation against NATO has merely emboldened the Western leaders to take more and more reckless and provocative actions, actions that at some point might result in a catastrophe for the world.One strange aspect of this current conflict is that Russia has essentially been fighting NATO with both hands tied behind its back. NATO missiles using NATO targeting intelligence and key NATO personnel—legally laundered through the fig-leaf of its Ukrainian proxy—have regularly struck deep inside Russia, inflicting many serious blows, including sinking the flagship and other vessels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but Russia has refused to respond in kind. So in effect, the NATO countries have constituted a safe haven for producing and assembling the military hardware and systems used to equip Ukraine’s forces without suffering any risk of Russian retaliation. Russian cities have been struck by NATO missiles but NATO cities and their populations have not faced any similar threat.A Forceful Russian Response to NATO RecklessnessHow a Deft Strategic Blow Could Shatter the Western AllianceRon Unz • The Unz Review • June 30, 2025 • 5,300 WordsSince I wrote those sentences, NATO has continued to escalate its military involvement.Ukraine has regularly launched huge waves of powerful NATO-supplied drones deep into the Russian heartland, severely damaging many of Russia’s largest oil refineries. Serious attempts were recently made to disrupt the Russian parliamentary elections by bombarding the capital city of Moscow with hundreds of such drones, though Russian air-defenses successfully downed nearly all of them.These actions seem to be taken with such little consideration that the angry Russians might eventually decide to strike back, targeting Britain itself.Andy Burnham became Britain’s new prime minister in July, and the following month he traveled to Ukraine and announced that he would supply that country with long-range missiles, capable of hitting deep within Russian territory. Russia quickly responded by declaring that Britain was “playing with fire,” with reports that it might strike British territory in retaliation.At the beginning of this month, Ukraine fired its first ballistic missiles into Russia, weapons that are much more difficult for the Russians to successfully intercept.Matters have now reached such a point that when a salvo of nearly 900 NATO-supplied drones was fired deep into Russian territory the story was buried as a tiny AP wire item of a few sentences in the print edition of my daily Wall Street Journal. Just consider the enormous banner-headlines if any NATO country had been attacked with 9 Russian drones let alone 90 or 900.Last month, the BBC and other British media outlets warned of the growing likelihood of war with Russia, with many European leaders taking that same position. At the end of that month, the British Defense Minister urged the people of his country to keep small emergency stockpiles of bottled water and food at home for use during war or other emergencies.NATO leaders have regularly said that they are preparing for a full war with Russia by 2030.Alastair Crooke spent his career first as a senior MI6 officer and more recently as a British diplomat and peace negotiator. In an interview a couple of days ago, he described the utter madness of the NATO leaders who were sleepwalking their countries into such a disastrous war.Video LinkFrom the perspective of European self-interest, the sheer irrationality of the current conflict is really quite remarkable. Russia is the natural trading partner of Germany and the rest of Europe, possessing the enormous energy supplies and other natural resources that perfectly complement the larger industrial base of the European Union.The lands now known as Ukraine and its capital city of Kiev constituted the birthplace of Russian civilization more than a thousand years ago, with Ukraine then spending centuries as an integral part of Czarist Russia.The 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union left Ukraine as an independent state for the first time in its entire national history, with a population that was evenly balanced between its pro-Russian and pro-West elements. Thus, its appropriate role should have been that of a neutral buffer state separating Russia and NATO, and for a time this was the path that it roughly followed.However, in 2014 Ukraine’s democratically elected Russian-leaning government was overthrown in a NATO-orchestrated coup, immediately prompting a secessionist movement in the pro-Russian Donbas region. The resulting fighting was ended by the Minsk peace agreements, promising autonomy to the Donbas and various other provisions. But the NATO-installed Ukraine government failed to honor those commitments, thereby lighting the fuse that eventually caused the outbreak of the current war less than eight years later.As a great power, Russia had long made it absolutely clear that it regarded NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat since that would potentially place nuclear-tipped NATO missiles within a short flight time of Moscow. Would America tolerate a heavily armed Mexico becoming part of a Chinese military alliance and hosting missiles aimed at major American cities?Prof. John Mearsheimer is one of our most distinguished political scientists, and a year after those fateful 2014 events, he gave a lecture describing what had happened and warning that a future Ukraine war might ultimately result. When that predicted war indeed broke out in February 2022, his prescient presentation went super-viral on YouTube, eventually accumulating some 30 million views, perhaps more than any other academic lecture in the history of the Internet.Video LinkProf. Jeffrey Sachs had spent decades serving as a top economic advisor to the USSR and then to both its Russian and Ukrainian successor states. As a result, he was personally on the scene during those momentous developments, and in his interviews over the years he has repeatedly confirmed those same facts.During the eight years prior to early 2022, NATO had built up the Ukrainian army into a very formidable fighting force, the largest in Europe and trained to NATO standards.At that point, there were discussions of Ukraine possibly joining NATO, while the Ukrainian government began preparing a massive attack upon the Russian separatist enclaves of the Donbas, with the combination of those two factors prompting Russia’s punitive invasion.There are many who strongly suspect that provoking the Russian attack was actually the intended outcome, with the Neocons of the Biden administration believing that the Russian economy was sufficiently weak and fragile that the unprecedented wave of Western economic sanctions they had prepared in response would cause its collapse. That in turn would bring down the government of President Vladimir Putin and perhaps return Russia to its subservient political status of the 1990s, operating under Western economic domination and allowing full foreign exploitation of its enormous treasure chest of natural resources.But instead Russia’s economy actually held up quite well, while the loss of cheap Russian energy caused severe economic hardship in Germany and the rest of Europe.American concerns that Germany might begin to waver in its anti-Russian stance led the Biden Administration to destroy the Russian-German Nord Stream energy pipelines, constituting the greatest act of industrial sabotage in world history, an attack that the outrageously dishonest Western media absurdly blamed on the Russians themselves.So the war in Ukraine has turned out to be a total disaster for Europe. Not only have at least a million Europeans probably died, with millions more wounded or displaced, but the loss of Russian energy has severely damaged many of the EU economies. And instead of being economically crushed, Russia has successfully surmounted the Western sanctions placed upon it and in many respects its economy is stronger than before, while it now possesses the world’s most battle-hardened large army. Meanwhile, NATO weapons stockpiles have been severely depleted by continual transfers to Ukraine, while hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted propping up one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt governments.But one of the West’s most powerful strategic weapons has been its control of the global media, a force able to transform up into down and black into white.From the very beginning, that awesome media power was deployed to demonize Russia and its President Putin in the most extreme terms, far more so than any other world leader since Adolf Hitler more than eighty years ago. Indeed, just after the invasion I’d published an article noting the remarkable parallels between those two historic figures and the wars that they had initiated.American Pravda: Putin as Hitler?Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 7, 2022 • 7,900 WordsThe Russian invasion of Ukraine came after many years of warnings and by any reasonable standard was one of the most thoroughly provoked such military attacks in modern world history. Yet the endless media drumbeat use of the phrase “unprovoked invasion” soon convinced most Westerners to the contrary, and over the long term, this powerful media mind-control has had a similar impact on European elites as well.The European NATO countries have lost their proxy war aimed at crippling or even dismembering Russia, instead severely damaging their own economies and wasting hundred of billions of dollars in the process. But the leaders of those countries and the mainstream political parties who had supported this failed bipartisan policy cannot easily acknowledge their disastrous mistake lest they suffer severe political punishment at the hands of their outraged voters.Read the Whole ArticleThe post Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg and the Dangerous NATO Propaganda-Bubble appeared first on LewRockwell.