US deep state and financial interests openly schemed for years to provoke the conflict in Ukraine, says a media commentator.
Webcast host Steve Poikonen told Sputnik he was gratified that NATO leaders were "finally saying that it's a proxy war now."
That was "delightfully refreshing" after more than a year of "being called a tinfoil hat or Putin apologist for merely suggesting that what we are engaged in is a proxy war," he said.
The media commentator characterized the "permanent unelected state, the neocons and the military industrial complex" in the US as a "death cult."
"It operates like one, against all reason and against their own best interests even," Poikonen said. "They pursue endless war, and they don't even bother to care about the people on the ground. It's all about moving the self-perpetuating money laundering machine, and they do it with impunity... because they're 100 percent amoral."
US strategic think-tank the RAND Corporation published a paper in 2019 entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia — a blueprint for a campaign of hybrid warfare, including "providing lethal aid to Ukraine" in order to "exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability."
"For every international conflict in which the U.S. is now overextended, there is a supporting RAND document that outlines exactly how we're going to get into this mess," Poikonen said. "This is their sole purpose. The reason the Rand Corporation gets together to figure out how to destabilize nations and how a handful of people in the United States, in the international business community can profit from it."
The RAND report also recommended disrupting Russia's overseas oil and gas markets.
"Of course, they're going to go after the oil and gas," the pundit argued. "And when they see that and the RAND argument, the first thing I think of is the Nord Stream pipeline."
"The RAND Corporation is nothing if not fantastic salesman," Poikonen observed. "They've been able to exist for the last 60, 70 years based solely on their ability to convince at least a handful of Congresscritters that all of our money should go to the military budget."
He argued US politics was nothing but theatre that concealed those pulling the strings behind the scenes.
"We're consistently attacking the wrong people in this country. We're consistently pointing the finger at the wrong people," he said. "We point our fingers at Congress like they're not just rented mules for the same people who sit on the board for the Rand Corporation."
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