The Russian leader revealed to the world the true state of his country's advanced research into hypersonic and drone weaponry that he said was in response to the US pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, a move that President Putin decried as jeopardizing the strategic parity between the world's two most powerful nuclear-armed states. He famously mused that Russia's Western counterparts didn't want to listen to Moscow's objections back then, but that now they'll have no choice other than to listen and pay attention to what his country thinks about this issue, which will hopefully compel them into a new round of negotiations and deal-making aimed at securing peace.
Regrettably but not unexpectedly, President Putin's full message was never delivered to his Western audience because their Mainstream Media outlets decided instead to decontextualize certain remarks and "report" on his speech as though it announced a New Cold War and attendant arms race, an interpretation that the Russian leader slammed as "propaganda" in an interview the day afterwards with Megyn Kelly. It's unlikely to have been a coincidence that so many mass media platforms all had the same incorrect understanding of President Putin's words, strongly suggesting that there's an uncertain degree of narrative coordination going on between them behind the scenes, the intent of which can only be speculated as seeking to fan the flames of discord between the US and Russia in order to reversely "justify" the Trump Administration's massive military budget and alliance with the military-industrial complex.
The problem with arms races, however, is that they have a tendency of spiraling out of control, with the initiator oftentimes provoking what they expect to be "low-level proxy conflicts" in order to keep the so-called "threat" in the public eye and thus provide a reason to indefinitely continue public funding of the arms industry. The numerous flashpoints in the Old Cold War testify to this fact, as does the Trump Administration's latest decision to arm Ukraine with anti-tank weaponry. Russia, though, has proven itself deft at asymmetrically responding to America's moves in a more cost-effective and optimal way, such as through its latest hypersonic weapons systems, so it can be expected to keep employing this strategy going forward.
Political commentator, Marcus Godwyn, and veteran grassroots activist and self-taught Marxist economist, David Hungerford, join the discussion.
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