World Affairs Brief, April 1, 2022 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

Why David Stockman is Wrong About Russia and Ukraine

The pro-Putin wing of US conservatives is talking up David Stockman’s latest analysis that tries to explain why Putin is not a threat and why we should not be concerned with the loss of Ukraine. Stockman’s piece at the libertarian site, LewRockwell.com is entitled, “Washington Is Delirious With War Fever – For No Reason of Homeland Security.”

In other words, he is saying that Putin and Russia are no threat to us, so let’s worry more about the neocons ginning up another war. David Stockman and Paul Craig Roberts share a common background with the Reagan administration. Stockman was Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Roberts was Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.

Both are libertarians on economic policy, and because they are associated with Reagan, their opinions are readily accepted by conservatives. However, both also harbor the common libertarian weakness on foreign policy—being so anti-foreign intervention that they assume all nations the globalists/neocons are opposed to must not be real enemies—in the same way neocons created enemies in Iraq, Syria and Iran by antagonizing them.

Both Stockman and Roberts have been defensive about Russia and China, and write for and get good reviews from left-wing publications and websites like, CounterPunch, Russia Today, Global Research and the Unz Review, which also defend Russia and China.

As my long-term subscribers know, I view all three of the major global powers—Western Globalists, Russia and China—as equally dangerous predators, each out to control their own version of a future all-controlling global government or NWO. But Russia and China are the more deadly because they plan on striking the West with nuclear weapons. The globalists, on the other hand want to use that future strike to drive us into a militarized global government, which will use a milder appearing form of tyranny, but which will be just as dangerous to liberty in the long run.

Because of my attacks on Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, some conservatives and even recent subscribers have ignorantly accused me of being “on the globalist side.” They don’t understand how illogical that is because they obviously don’t understand the bigger picture I have outlined over the years about all three of these global predators in light of the fake demise of the Soviet Union. This is not a new and reformed Russia; these are still the same Soviets and communists, just in new garb, playing a major deceptive game with people in the West.

Stockman, like most who regard Reagan as the reason the iron curtain fell, shows his improper starting basis for this argument when he compares the GDP and military spending of the US and the EU versus “puny Russia,” therefore concluding that economically weak little Russia can’t possibly be a threat. Stockman writes,

The economic might of NATO is 29X that of Russia and its combined defense budgets are 18X greater, which tells you all you need to know about the “Russian threat”:

NATO: $42.78 trillion of GDP; 945 million population; $45,130 per capita income; $1,200 billion defense budget;

RUSSIA: $1.46 trillion of GDP; 144 million population; $10,300 per capita income; $67 billion defense budget.

This is beyond naive. He fails to mention that Russia has been saving up its military capacity, and investing in weapons of mass destruction far more than NATO and in military technologies. Worse, he fails to factor in Russia’s vast superiority in nuclear weapons. Russia now has far more ICBM’s and nuclear warheads than the US, and can obliterate much of the US military in a pre-emptive nuclear strike. As she is planning to strike in league with China, both nations together have enough nuclear warheads to decapitate all our major military bases and silos. How can a writer like Stockman miss such an obvious military “equalizer” like nuclear weapons? -Because his bias clouds his judgment. …

Stockman does begrudgingly point out that the current boundaries of Ukraine were dictated by Russian tyrannical leaders: Lenin and Stalin:

As it happened, they became “Ukrainian” only by writ of two of history’s greatest evil monsters – Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin – who placed them in the administrative unit of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for reasons that have no historic validity whatsoever.

But what he fails to realize (once again, because he doesn’t understand Soviet conspiracy facts) is that Russian leaders did this on purpose, just like they moved in thousands of Russians to the Baltic states, so they could use the resulting ethnic tension to someday re-invade these countries and reform the Soviet Union. You see how not knowing the history of real conspiracy clouds your ability to analyze what is really going on in the world! …

Remember too, that there is a lot of residual corruption in Ukraine left over from Soviet days. The communist bureaucracy was never purged after the phony fall—in any of the former Soviet states. That’s one of the reasons why Ukrainians are mostly dissatisfied with any government they elect, especially those that promise to remove corruption and don’t.

What about the internet stories about torture of Russian prisoners? It hard to tell what is true and false anymore in this war as both sides are exaggerating or minimizing the results to make themselves look good, or the other side bad. I have watched the videos and since there is no definitive identification of the perpetrators, it is hard to know which side they are on, or whether it is army condoned or a rogue individual—which happens in any army, sadly.

I am skeptical of the stories coming out of the pro-Russia individuals in Ukraine, that Pastor Chuck Baldwin has relied on, saying that members of the Ukrainian Azov battalion are shelling their own cities and blaming the Russians, who are “good guys” handing out money to citizens.

First of all the Azov battalion, which everyone labels “Neo Nazi,” isn’t an artillery unit, and even if they were Neo-Nazi with artillery, what possible motivation could they have for shelling their own people? How is that going to help the war effort? What does being a Neo Nazi have to do with killing civilians who aren’t Jews? No one is thinking logically about these wild claims.

And no one is asking the question, how does a single citizen witness know who is doing the shelling? Artillery units are miles away from the damage, and civilians who may witness an artillery unit close up, can’t possibly know what the target is so many miles away. Someone seems to be feeding Baldwin fake claims. Sadly, he wants to believe them without question.

There are no good guys leading either side in this battle, only a percentage of innocent civilians that never have had any real control of their government, who long for the appearance of liberty we have in the West, which is fast diminishing.