Tuesday 10th of March 2026
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

america has vowed to destroy russia, since 1917.......

They like the bedtime story: Europe was peacefully humming along in its post-history spa — open borders, cheap energy, NATO as a charity, Russia as a gas station with a flag… and then, one day, the barbarian kicked the door in for no reason at all.

That story is not just dishonest. It’s operational. It’s the propaganda you tell yourself so you can keep the addiction going without ever admitting how self-destructive it is.

 

They like to pretend it came out of nowhere.

 

By 

 

Because the truth is uglier and far more incriminating:

In Munich, on February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin stood on the most flattering stage the Atlantic system owns — the Security Conference where Western officials applaud themselves for maintaining “order” and he laid out, to their faces, the skeleton of the coming disaster. He didn’t whisper it in a back channel. He used the microphone to deliver some much needed medicine, however hard it would be for the Empire to swallow.

He even signaled he wasn’t going to play the usual polite theatre — the kind where everyone agrees in public and stabs each other in classified annexes. He said the format allowed him to avoid “pleasant, yet empty diplomatic platitudes.”

And then he did the unforgivable thing, (gasp!) he described the empire as an empire.

He named the unipolar intoxication — that post–Cold War hallucination that history had ended, that power had found its final owner, that NATO could expand forever without consequences, that international law was optional for the enforcer class and compulsory for everyone else.

Putin’s core argument was brutally simple: a unipolar model is not only unacceptable, it’s impossible.

Not “unfair.” Not rude. Impossible.

(Because in a world with) “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making” is a world where security becomes privatized — where the strong reserve the right to interpret rules (with exemptions for themselves), and the weak are told to accept it as morality. (And yes, he put it in exactly those terms — one center, one force, one decision — the architecture of domination.)

And when you build that kind of world, everyone else does the only rational thing left: they stop trusting the wall of law to protect them, and they start arming for survival.

Putin said it outright: when force becomes the default language, it “stimulates an arms race.”

This is where the Western client media — professionally disengious as ever, clipped one or two spicy lines and missed the larger point: Munich 2007 wasn’t “Putin raging.” It was Russia publishing its redlines in front of the class.

And then came the part that should have frozen the room. Putin named it – NATO expansion.

Putin didn’t argue it as nostalgia. He argued it as provocation — a deliberate reduction of trust. He asked the question no Western leader ever answers honestly:

“Against whom is this expansion intended?”

And then he drove the blade in: what happened to the assurances made after the Warsaw Pact dissolved? “No one even remembers them.”

That line matters because it goes well beyond grievance — it’s a window into how Russia saw the post–Cold War settlement: not as a partnership, but as a rolling deception. Expand NATO, move offensive infrastructure, then call it “defensive.” Build bases, run exercises, integrate weapons systems, and insist the other side is paranoid for noticing.

Putin’s formulation was clean: NATO expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

Now pause and look at the psychology of the West in that room. They didn’t hear a warning. They heard audacity. They didn’t hear “security dilemma.” They heard “how dare you speak like an equal.”

That’s the cultural glitch at the heart of the Atlantic project: it believes its own core lie and cannot process sovereignty in others without treating it as aggression.

So Munich 2007 became, in Western memory, not the moment Russia told the truth — but the moment Russia “showed its hand.” The implication: Russia’s “hand” was evil, and therefore any response to it was justified. Which is exactly how you sleepwalk into catastrophe.

The real prophecy: not mysticism — mechanics

What was prophetic about Putin’s speech isn’t that he had a crystal ball.

It’s that he understood the West’s incentive structure:

  • A security system that expands by definition (NATO) needs threats by definition.
  • A unipolar ideology needs disobedience to punish, otherwise the myth collapses.
  • A rules-based order that breaks its own rules must constantly produce narrative cover.
  • An economic model that offshore-outs its industry and imports “cheap stability” must secure energy routes, supply chains, and obedience — by finance, by sanctions, by force.

Putin was saying: you can’t build a global security architecture on humiliation and expect it to be stable. Russia had lived through the wreckage of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and that this playbook would be used again and again, with Georgia, with Syria, Libya, Iran and Russia itself if Putin did nothing.

He was also saying and this is where the Russophobic mass hysteria accelerates — that Russia would not accept a subordinate role in its own neighborhood, on its own borders, under a wannabe hegemon’s military umbrella.

This is where the Western catechism kicks in: “neighborhood” is called “sphere of influence” when Russia says it, and “security guarantees” when Washington says it. And so the hysteria machine warmed up.

You saw it in the immediate reception: Western elites, including Merkel and McCain treating the speech as an insult rather than a negotiation offer. You saw it in the years that followed — the steady normalization of the idea that Russia’s security concerns were illegitimate, and therefore could be ignored with moralistic lectures, free of consequences..

Ignore, expand, accuse, repeat.

That loop is your road to 2022 and to today, in Munich 2026. Groundhog day without learning the vital lessons to end the loop of utter madness.

Munich, Feb 13 (2026): Merz admits the order is dead — and calls it “uncertainty”

Fast forward. Same city. Same conference. Same Western liturgy, just with more panic in the eyes and the nucleus of a terrifying realization.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz using his best perfomative courage, murmured that the world order we relied on is no longer there. Framing the post–Cold War “rules-based order” as effectively crumbled and almost begging for a reset in transatlantic relations.

He goes further: he talks up a stronger European defence posture, and pointed to discussions with France about a European nuclear deterrent concept, a “European nuclear shield.”

And then comes the line that should be carved into the marble of the Munich conference hall as Exhibit A: Merz argues that in this era, even the United States “will not be powerful enough to go alone.”

Read that again.

The BlackRock chancellor on NATO’s spiritual home turf is effectively saying: the empire is overstretched, the illusion of old certainties are gone, and Europe will be left hung out to dry. Talk about strategic vertigo!

And it is exactly what Putin was talking about in 2007: when one axis tries to act as the planet’s owner, the cost accumulates — wars, blowback, arms races, fractured trust, until the system starts to wobble under its own contradictions.

Merz also reported begged the U.S. and Europe to “repair and revive” transatlantic trust. Repair trust with what currency?

Because trust isn’t repaired by speeches. Trust is repaired by reversing the toxic and suicidal behaviors that destroyed it.

And those behaviors were precisely what Putin named in 2007:

  • expanding military blocs toward another power’s borders,
  • treating international law as a menu,
  • using economic coercion as a weapon,
  • and then pretending the consequences are “unprovoked.”

Europe is now gasping at the invoice for that policy set: industrial stress, energy insecurity, strategic dependency, and a political class that can’t admit how it got here without indicting itself.

So instead of confession, you get moral performance. Instead of strategy, you get hysteria and cartoon slogans.

Instead of peace architecture, you get escalation management — the art of walking toward the cliff while calling it deterrence.

Merz’s remarks underscore that Europe is being forced to contemplate a harsher security environment and greater responsibility, all of its own suicidal making — but it still frames the Russia question in the familiar moralizing register.

Which is the whole tragedy: they can feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath them, yet they keep reciting the same old prayers that summoned the earthquake.

Why we’re here: the Western addiction to expansion — and the manufactured Russophobia that lubricated it

Russophobia is more than just bloodthirsty prejudice. It’s the (failed) policy tool of choice of the last few empires against Russia.

It’s what you pump into the Mockingbird media bloodstream to make escalation feel like virtue and compromise feel like treason.

You don’t have to love everything Russia does to see the mechanism: a permanent narrative of Russian menace makes every NATO move sound defensive, every EU economic self-harm sound righteous, and every diplomatic off-ramp sound like appeasement.

It creates a psychological environment where:

  • NATO expansion becomes “freedom,”
  • coups become “democratic awakenings,”
  • sanctions become “values,”
  • censorship becomes “information integrity,”
  • and war becomes “support.”

And once you install that operating system, you can torch your own industry and still call it moral leadership.

That’s the dark comedy of Europe since 2014 — accelerating post 2022: self-sanctioning, deindustrializing pressure, energy price shocks, and strategic submission to Washington’s delusion of carving up Russia, sold as “defending democracy.”

Meanwhile, Moscow reads the West’s behavior the same way it read it in 2007: as a hostile architecture closing in, dressed up as virtue.

Putin’s Munich speech — again, not mysticism — warned that when the strong monopolize decision-making and normalize force, the world becomes less safe, not more.

So what did the West do?

It made the “rules-based order” a brand — while breaking rules (international law) whenever convenient. Exceptionalism at almost biblical levels, God’s chosen people.

It expanded NATO while insisting the expansion was harmless.

It treated Russian objections as evidence of Russian guilt — which is circular logic worthy of an inquisitor.

And it nurtured a media culture that could not imagine Russia as a rational actor responding to a pattern of ugly regime change behavior — only as a cartoon villain driven by pathology. Not analysis but theological warfare.

The punchline Munich won’t say out loud

Here’s the line Munich still cannot speak, even in 2026, even with Merz admitting the old order is gone:

The West didn’t misread Putin’s warning. It rejected it because accepting it would have meant limiting itself.

Munich 2007 was a chance — maybe the last clean one — to build a European security architecture that wasn’t just NATO with better PR. A chance to treat Russia as a Great Power with legitimate interests, not a defeated adversary to be regime changed and broken apart.

And now, in Munich 2026, they stand amid the wreckage and call it “uncertainty,” as if the storm blew in from nowhere. The BlackRock Chancellor calls for resets, for revived trust, for Europe to become stronger, for new deterrence ideas.

But the reset Munich needs is the one it refuses:

  • reset the premise that NATO will remain a viable alliance beyond the war in Ukraine,
  • reset the premise that Russia must absorb strategic humiliation and accept the inverse, the reality as it is – where it’s in fact Western Europe that is wearing the humiliation.
  • reset the premise that international law is a tool of the powerful,
  • reset the premise that Europe’s role is to be the forward operating base and European sovereignty sacrificed to buy the Empire time .

Until that happens, Munich will keep happening — every year, more anxious, more militarized, more rhetorical, more detached from the material reality its own disastrous policies created.

And Putin’s “prophecy” will keep looking prophetic — not because he conjured the future, but because he correctly described the machine.

https://islanderreports.substack.com/p/munich-2007-the-day-the-west-was

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT (WW3) HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA TO BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

RESTORE THE RIGHTS OF THE RUSSIAN SPEAKING PEOPLE OF "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

RESTITUTE THE ORTHODOX CHURCH PROPERTIES AND RIGHTS

RELEASE THE OPPOSITION MEMBERS FROM PRISON

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU.....

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

SEE ALSO: 

war council.....

 

Munich War Council and the escalation of imperialist rivalry


The 62nd Munich Security Conference was not a diplomatic gathering.

It was a war council–a gathering of the general staff of world imperialism, assembled not to resolve conflicts but to coordinate the next phase of aggression on a global scale.

The conference’s own annual report provides the clearest self-indictment. Its theme, “Under Destruction,” describes an era of what it terms “wrecking-ball politics”–the deliberate demolition of the post-1945 international framework. What the authors of this report do not say is that this destruction is not an aberration. It flows from the deepening crisis of capitalism, which can no longer sustain even the fiction of a peaceful order.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that the world has crossed a “threshold” back into great power competition. But rivalry among the imperialist powers never ended. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was channeled through U.S. dominance–sanctions, financial coercion and proxy wars–rather than direct confrontation among major states. What has collapsed is not competition itself, but the illusion that it had been resolved.

What is emerging now is not a new system, but a more open and dangerous phase of that rivalry. As competition over markets, resources and strategic positions intensifies, the arrangements that once managed those rivalries are breaking down. When rival capitalist states can no longer secure their interests through economic pressure alone, they turn to military force.

The fusion of the military and the monopolies

The scale of military spending shows what is being prioritized. Congress has approved an $839 billion Pentagon budget–$8 billion more than the Pentagon requested. When supplemental and reconciliation funds are included, total spending approaches $1 trillion. At the same time, tens of millions lack reliable access to health care. Federal workers are being purged, and social programs are slashed.

The question is not “defense” but who controls the single largest share of the money Congress spends each year.

Deputy Secretary of War Stephen Feinberg is not a career military officer. He is a billionaire financier and co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm built on acquiring and restructuring companies for profit. He now oversees the Pentagon’s day-to-day operations.

In other words, a Wall Street financier is helping decide how nearly a trillion dollars is allocated. That money comes from wealth workers produce and the state collects. It is being directed toward the arms monopolies.

This is what Lenin described in the age of imperialism: the merger of banking and industrial capital into finance capital, and the growing subordination of the state to its interests. The financial interests that profit from war now help administer the state apparatus that wages it.

Under the banner of “strengthening the industrial base,” the administration has proposed cuts to education and social programs while steering contracts to high-tech weapons systems–artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and drone warfare. Companies such as Palantir and Anduril, backed by private equity and venture capital, stand to benefit directly.

Feinberg’s appointment is not about one individual. It reflects the consolidated power of the arms trusts–Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Boeing and Rheinmetall–along with the financial conglomerates that hold major stakes in them.

The same process is visible in Germany, where Berlin has approved a record €108 billion ($128 billion) defense budget for 2026. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who served as chairman of the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German subsidiary from 2016 to 2020, now presides over a rearmament drive whose primary beneficiaries are the same financial and industrial interests he represented in the private sector.

There is no money for social needs. The rearmament drive is being financed through debt and austerity–and the beneficiaries are the arms monopolies and the financial institutions tied to them.

The ideological preparation for war

Large-scale rearmament does not advance on budgets alone. It requires a political narrative that neutralizes resistance before it can organize–one that declares civilization under threat and brands opposition to war as betrayal.

At Munich, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio supplied that narrative.

Unlike Vice President JD Vance, who the previous year had bluntly demanded greater European militarization, Rubio delivered the same demands in smoother language. He called for higher European military spending, tighter borders and reduced reliance on multilateral institutions. The substance did not change. Only the tone did.

The crucial point was how Rubio justified the alliance. He did not frame it primarily in terms of trade, security agreements or strategic interests. Instead, he described the United States and Europe as bound together by “Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” He grounded the alliance in a shared civilizational identity.

He told the assembled leaders that “armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation.”

He went further, celebrating five centuries in which “the West had been expanding” to “settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”–a romanticized history that erases the dispossession and slaughter of Indigenous peoples entirely. He lamented that after 1945 these “great Western empires” had entered terminal decline, accelerated by communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings. In this telling, the dismantling of colonial rule was not a victory for self-determination but a civilizational loss.

And Rubio made clear this was not merely nostalgia. “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he declared. This is a statement of intent: The independence won by colonized nations in the 20th century is something this administration intends to roll back.

This is the ideological shift now under way. The language of “human rights” and “democracy promotion” that accompanied earlier wars is giving way to something more direct: the defense of “Western civilization” against perceived external and internal enemies.

This rhetoric carries familiar hierarchies–racial, religious and cultural–and elevates a vision of strength and authority tied to patriarchal power. Rubio’s language at Munich was the language of restoration and dominance: strong armies, sovereign nations, a civilization that refuses decline. The defense of “civilization” has always meant the defense of patriarchal power.

When a leading diplomat grounds military alliance in “Christian faith” and “ancestry,” the appeal is not merely cultural. It mirrors themes long associated with white supremacist ideology: the defense of a supposedly unified Western civilization against internal and external “others.” In this way, racist mythology becomes part of the ideological preparation for war.

Civilizational rhetoric is not ornamental. It prepares populations for war. When rivalry is framed as survival, escalation follows. The fronts discussed at Munich show where that escalation is headed.

The European bourgeoisie, desperate for reassurance after months of Trump’s tariff threats and open contempt, received Rubio’s ultimatum–fall in line or be abandoned–with a standing ovation. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said it was “reassuring.” A speech that openly mourned the end of colonial empires and promised to reverse their decline was met not with protest but applause. This is the posture of a vassal class, grateful for the master’s softer tone even as the demands grow more extreme.

The fronts of imperialist aggression

The concrete lines of military confrontation mapped out at Munich confirm the global character of the crisis.

On Iran, the conference dispensed entirely with the pretense of diplomacy. Organizers withdrew invitations to Iranian government officials and instead elevated exiled former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who used the platform to call for U.S. military intervention to overthrow the Islamic Republic. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for regime change.

The conference unfolded while approximately 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed in West Asia–the largest such concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iranian officials, their invitations revoked, described the conference as the “Munich Circus.”

On Ukraine, a sharp tactical division was exposed within the imperialist camp. European leaders–Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer–demanded the intensification of the war against Russia, fearing that any negotiated settlement would be reached by Washington over their heads and at their expense. The Trump administration, conversely, views the Ukraine front as a drain on resources better deployed elsewhere and is pressing Europeans to assume the full financial burden of continued weapons shipments.

Washington has also made clear what it expects in return for aid already given. In February 2025, the administration demanded major ownership stakes–reportedly up to 100%–along with revenues from Ukrainian ports and infrastructure. The deal, signed in April, grants Washington preferential rights to mineral extraction.

This is not a disagreement about peace. It is a disagreement between imperialist powers about the allocation of costs and the distribution of spoils–and Ukraine’s resources are the spoils. No faction of the ruling class, on either side of the Atlantic, represents a force for peace. They differ only on the question of which front of imperialist aggression should receive priority and who gets to loot the country they claim to be defending.

The domestic front: rearmament and the class struggle

Every war abroad is simultaneously a war at home. The social consequences of the rearmament now underway make this truth unmistakable.

In the United States, the $839 billion Pentagon appropriation exists alongside the decimation of the federal workforce, the crumbling of public housing, and a health care system that remains inaccessible to millions. The same Congress that could not find funds for housing or health care approved $8 billion more than the Pentagon requested.

The same class war is playing out across the Atlantic. In Germany, the constitutional “debt brake”–treated as unassailable when it came to funding education or public transit–has been suspended to permit unlimited military borrowing, driving total federal debt to over €174 billion ($206.2 billion) in 2026 alone–more than triple the level two years prior.

The bourgeoisie claims there is no money for social safety nets, yet has found unlimited credit for tanks and missiles. Chancellor Merz tells German workers they must “work more and longer” to stabilize the economy while funneling their future labor into the coffers of the arms monopolies.

This is not a mistake or a policy error. It is how capitalism functions in its imperialist stage.

The largest arms corporations and the financial firms behind them sit at the center of the system. Their profits depend on military expansion.

And that expansion is paid for by squeezing workers harder–through layoffs, longer hours and cuts to social spending.

Every billion funneled into tanks and missiles is extracted from the wealth created by labor–the same wealth nurses, teachers and public workers are fighting to defend. The battle over war spending is not abstract. It is already being fought in contract negotiations, on picket lines and in the streets.

What Munich reveals

The 62nd Munich Security Conference must be understood in the context of what has already occurred. This is a ruling class that, in January of this year, bombed a sovereign nation and kidnapped its sitting head of state–President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela–along with First Revolutionary Combatant Cilia Flores, transporting both in shackles to a federal prison in New York.

Not a single Latin American government was represented at Munich–at a conference that bills itself as the world’s leading forum for international security. This absence is not incidental. It is a statement of whose security is under discussion and on whose terms. The hemisphere where Washington just carried out a military kidnapping was simply excluded from the conversation.

In its first year back in power, the Trump administration has used military force against Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen–and has threatened force against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Panama. This is not a single act of aggression. It is a global pattern, spanning four continents.

The Christmas Day bombing of Nigeria–justified by Trump as a defense of Christians, timed as what he called a “Christmas present”–shows the civilizational rhetoric at work as military doctrine. What Rubio articulated at Munich as shared “Christian faith” and “ancestry” had already been operationalized as Tomahawk missiles.

It seizes foreign assets at will. It imposes unilateral sanctions that amount to economic warfare against entire populations. It has withdrawn from dozens of international organizations since January 2026 alone. And it does all of this while lecturing the world about civilization and values.

The “rules-based order” was never a universal system. It was the legal and diplomatic framework of U.S. supremacy. It disciplined other states. It did not discipline Washington.

Now that supremacy is contested, Washington is dismantling the very framework it once demanded others obey.

What emerges is not disorder but a more naked form of imperialist rule–domination enforced by military power. Rubio’s speech reflected that shift.

Rubio dispensed with the liberal vocabulary of human rights and international law. He spoke openly of “civilizational” survival and armies defending a Western way of life–language that mirrors white supremacist mythology.

The working class must draw its own conclusions from this clarity. The opposition to war, to rearmament, to the cannibalization of social spending for the benefit of the arms monopolies–this opposition will not come from any faction of the bourgeoisie. It will not come from the Democratic Party, whose leading figures attended Munich to argue for a more effectively managed imperialism. It will not come from the European establishments that are racing to build the most powerful armies on the continent.

This process does not unfold without resistance. Across the United States, workers have begun to link bread-and-butter demands to opposition to repression and militarization–insisting that hospitals, schools and workplaces serve human need, not the war drive. These struggles remain uneven and incomplete, but they point in the only direction capable of halting the slide toward catastrophe.

It will come from the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system that produces war–and will continue to produce it–until it is overthrown.

https://mronline.org/2026/02/19/munich-war-council-and-the-escalation-of-imperialist-rivalry/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.