Caitlin Johnstone: “CNN And WaPo Demand That Trump Further Escalate Tensions With Russia”

Written by Caitlin Johnstone; Originally appeared at her blog

CNN has aired a segment in which pundit Fareed Zakaria tells the network’s audience that the US president has “been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue” and asks “will Venezuela be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?”

The segment is a near-verbatim reading of Zakaria’s Washington Post columnfrom a couple of days prior, so that’s two massive prongs through which this false and pernicious narrative is being driven into mainstream consciousness claiming that the Trump administration has been far too dovish toward Moscow, rather than dangerously hawkish as is actually the case.

Zakaria begins his segment by describing the Trump administration’s (completely illegitimate) efforts to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, then describing Russian efforts to counter this agenda as an attempt to “taunt the United States.” He then spends the rest of the segment asking if Trump will be brave and patriotic enough to further escalate tensions against a nuclear superpower. Zakaria concludes by implying that if Trump fails to increase world-threatening nuclear tensions to effect yet another US regime change intervention in yet another oil-rich country, it will be because he is a Kremlin agent.

“The big question for Washington is: Will it allow Moscow to make a mockery of another U.S. red line?” Zakaria said. “The United States and Russia have taken opposing, incompatible stands on this issue. And as with Syria, there is a danger that, if Washington does not back its words with deeds, a year from now, we will be watching the consolidation of the Maduro regime, supported with Russian arms and money.”

Yes Fareed, there is a real “danger” that if the Trump administration you liberal pundits claim to oppose doesn’t act like the reckless madman you claim he is and tempt hot war with a nuclear superpower in order to effect regime change in a sovereign nation, that regime change agenda will fail. Very, very dangerous to not flirt with nuclear war over US resource control agendas.

“The administration has been tough on Russian involvement in Venezuela,” said Zakaria. “Trump himself has even declared, ‘Russia has to get out.’ But that is an unusual statement from Trump, who has almost never criticized Putin and often sided with Russia on matters big and small.”

Zakaria goes on to cite the Obama administration’s ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, who claimed in a Washington Post article that, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of being hawkish toward Russia, “Even on small issues of little relevance to American national interests, Trump sides with Putin.”

“I have never alleged collusion or conspiracy between Russia and Trump, writing merely that we should wait to see what evidence special counsel Robert S. Mueller III presented,” Zakaria concludes, trying to shelter himself from the ridicule that is being directed at the debunked Russiagate conspiracy while simultaneously promoting it. “But the real puzzle remains: Why has Trump been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue? And will Venezuela be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?”

War obsessed CNN pushing Trump to destroy Venezuela to prove he’s not Putin’s bitch.

My god, this is pure war propaganda. https://t.co/RUQiRHvcYv

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) April 1, 2019

You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of just how dangerous and toxic this years-long Russiagate psyop has been. Even after the Mueller investigation concluded with no mass arrests, no sealed indictments, no further indictments and no evidence of Russian collusion, the mass media war propagandists are attempting to use the Russia hysteria they’ve already manufactured via the collusion narrative to create demand for more escalations against Russia. Fragmenting and undermining Russia and shoving it off the world stage has been an agenda of opaque US government agencies since the fall of the Soviet Union, and steps have been taken into a new cold war to effect this agenda for more than five years now, long before liberals in America spent any part of their day thinking or caring about Vladimir Putin. Mass media outlets like CNN and WaPo have been actively facilitating this agenda by promulgating these false narratives, and they are playing an instrumental role in convincing the US populace to keep their foot off the brake pedal in an accelerating and world-threatening new cold war.

Trump has already greatly escalated tensions with Russia by implementing a Nuclear Posture Review with a much more aggressive stance against Russia, withdrawing from the INF treaty, bombing and illegally occupying Syria, arming Ukraine, staging a coup in Venezuela, and many, many other hawkish actions taken against the interests of Russia’s geostrategic and economic interests. It is an indisputable fact that Trump has been more aggressive toward Russia than any other president since the fall of the Berlin wall. But the Russiagate narrative enables the war propagandists to not only ignore these escalations and the danger they pose to all life on earth, but to demand more and more of them.

Stephen Cohen, one of the foremost experts on US-Russia relations in America, made the following observation way back in April of 2017 in an interview with Democracy Now:

I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis. And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.

Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. And for the viewers who are not of a certain age, the Kennedy administration was presented — and the evidence, by the way, was presented to us; they showed us the surveillance photos. There was no doubt what the Soviets had done, putting missile silos in Cuba. No evidence has been presented today of anything. Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.

To be clear, we came within a hair’s breadth of total nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody likes to think about how close we all came to losing literally everything, and we didn’t find out exactly how close we came until years later, but armageddon came *this* close to happening. The primary risk of nuclear war isn’t that one will be planned and carried out in the hope of one side emerging victorious, it’s that something can go cataclysmically wrong as a result of miscommunication or misunderstanding in the midst of complex and confusing escalating tensions. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Due to his extensive knowledge of the dynamics in play, Cohen saw all this coming long before anyone else, and accurately predicted the waves of cold war escalations we’ve seen since. Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently confirmed his prediction, tweeting, “Short-sighted politicians and media pundits who’ve spent last two years accusing Trump as a Putin puppet have brought us the expensive new Cold War and arms race. How? Because Trump now does everything he can to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet — even if it brings us closer to nuclear war.”

This is how depraved the mass media are. They’re willing to lull the populace into complacency with the formation of a new cold war that threatens everyone they love, even get them demanding direct confrontation, all to please their plutocratic owners, their military-industrial complex sponsors, and the intelligence agencies with which they are aligned. They’re willing to risk getting us all killed for money and crude oil.

If we’re going to begin bringing our society and ecosystem into health, we’re going to have to find a way to extricate the influence of these toxic manipulators from the minds of the greater populace. As long as they’re able to propagandize the majority into consenting to even the most insane omnicidal agendas, we’ll never be able to use our superior numbers against the malignant manipulations of the few who would rule us. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and right now it’s the evil fingers that are pulling the strings of empire lackeys like Fareed Zakaria.