Aletho News

Does Biden’s Degraded Mental State Matter?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 28, 2024

Most everyone, especially Democrats, is expressing alarm over President Biden’s mental state after his debate performance last night. Biden, who later said that he was suffering from a cold, displayed attributes of severe mental decline. Many Democrats are even saying that Biden needs to drop out of the presidential race now so that the Democrats have plenty of time to promote a new candidate before the November election.

While critics are focusing on the political ramifications of Biden’s apparent mental decline, the real issue is the fact that he will still be president for the next five months. This is especially important given the proxy war that the U.S. is waging against Russia in Ukraine. That’s a war that could easily turn nuclear, especially if Biden inadvertently engages in actions that trigger a severe Russian response.

However, it isn’t Biden who is in charge of running the U.S. proxy war against Russia. That’s the good news. As I have long argued, the people who are in charge of that operation are the ones inside the U.S. national-security establishment — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. That’s the bad news.

Longtime readers of my work know that I have long recommended an excellent book by a man named Michael J. Glennon entitled National Security and Double Government. Glennon’s thesis, to which I subscribe, is that it is the U.S. national-security part of the federal government that is actually running the show, especially in foreign affairs. They permit the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to maintain the veneer of being in charge, so as to keep people tranquil and pacified. What matters is that they wield the real power over the federal government.

Glennon is not some sort of crackpot. He is a professor of law at Tufts University and a former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Read his bio here. His thesis deserves to be taken seriously. If every American were to read Glennon’s book, I have no doubts that most of them would end up agreeing with his thesis.

The big problem we have with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA is that we are dealing with people with military mindsets. It’s all black and white with these people. Russia, bad. China, bad. Iran, bad. North Korea, bad. Syria, bad. Gaza, bad. Cuba, bad. Vietnam, bad, now good. In their minds, the purpose of a massive military establishment is to put bad regimes down by whatever means possible.

As most everyone now realizes, the national-security establishment’s goal since 1945 has been to bring Russia to heel — and make it a full-fledged loyal lapdog of the U.S. Empire, much like Great Britain is. That necessarily means regime change, just like the regime changes that the Pentagon and the CIA have brought to so many other nations.

For a while, it appeared that the quest to bring down Russia ended with the end of the Cold War. Not so. That was just a temporary interlude. Almost immediately the Pentagon and the CIA embarked on a quest to use NATO, an old Cold War bureaucratic dinosaur, to begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, with the ultimate aim of absorbing Ukraine, which would enable U.S. officials to place their nuclear missiles, troops, armaments, planes, and tanks right on Russia’s border, all of which, it was hoped, would end up bringing the goal of regime change in Russia closer to fruition.

Throughout this process, and knowing that Russia would never permit Ukraine to join NATO, U.S. officials were training the Ukrainian military to fight a defensive war, once NATO succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine. The idea was that a Ukrainian victory would almost certainly result in the ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin, at which point he would, it was hoped, be replaced with a loyal U.S. lapdog.

The scheme has not worked, and it has become painfully clear that the United States cannot win this war. The only real question is what a Russian victory will ultimately look like.

And that’s where the danger of the military mindset comes into play. The national-security establishment cannot bear the thought of the U.S. losing to Russia, even if it’s a proxy war with Russia rather than a direct war.

Rather than simply acknowledging that they should never have started this war and simply withdraw from the conflict, the military and the CIA are doubling down. The risk is that they will do whatever is necessary to prevent a Russian defeat of the United States in Ukraine. That’s why they are now talking about putting NATO troops and armaments into Ukraine in the hopes of staving off defeat. And that’s where the very real prospect of nuclear war comes into play.

Would the United States be better off with a president who suffers from a severe downgrade in mental faculties being in charge rather than with generals and CIA officials being in charge? The question is irrelevant because the reality is that it’s the military-intelligence establishment that is actually in charge. And that’s why we are getting ever closer to the prospect of a life-ending nuclear war.

June 28, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Militarism | CIA, United States