King Midas turned everything he touched to gold. The neocons who manage the American empire have the reverse touch. Everything they touch turns to shit.

Ukraine is the latest example but the way they have managed Russia since the end of the first Cold War is a case study in their particular brand of maladroitness. What’s hilarious is that there’s ample historical evidence demonstrating that Russia was its own worse enemy absent US meddling.

Russian author Dmitry Orlov, in a satirical article entitled: The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again, explains:

“Ostensibly, the plan was to weaken and destroy Russia; but then, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was weakening and destroying itself very well all by itself, no intervention needed. What’s more, every US effort to weaken and destroy Russia has made it stronger; had there existed even a most rudimentary feedback mechanism, so vast a discrepancy between policy goals and policy results would have been detected and adjustments would have been made. But that’s pure conspiracy theory and we shouldn’t want to go anywhere near that. Suffice to say, there is at present no adequate explanation for what happened. After the Soviet collapse, very little was needed to speed along the collapse of Russia itself. But none of these steps have been taken, and the steps that were taken (with the ostensible goal of weakening and destroying Russia) have done the exact opposite.”

The delusion of US policy makers seems to be one explanation, They have no idea how the real world works but think that they can create their own realities. Well, that and the fact that all of the failure has been vastly profitable for the corporations that comprise the military/industrial/complex (MIC), as well as the banks and hedge funds that finance them, along with the Congressional sock-puppets who Hoover up the accompanying campaign donations.

So, there’s that.

But you can’t underestimate the neocons “We’re an empire now”, arrogance, where in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, they saw military force as the only hammer in their toolkit. Diplomacy and negotiation in good faith was for wimps, whereas they could dictate to vassal’s and enemies alike from “Full Spectrum Dominance”. And, as far as Russia goes, the neocons goal has always been to remove Putin from power and install a Yeltsin-like clone in his stead. Russia stopped being a national security problem to be managed through effective diplomacy, but instead a domestic political issue which American politicians from both sides of the aisle used to scare the American people into supporting a new Cold War.

Then there’s the anti-communism hysteria that carried straight through to relations with Russia. US diplomatic, intelligence and university bureaucracy has reproduced two, maybe even three, generations of, first, anti Soviet and then anti-Russian exiles and then children and grandchildren of these exiles, as evidenced by the many foreign affairs experts in the United States and Canada – the Vindmans, Victoria Nuland, Christina Freeland, all with a nearly visceral hatred of all things Slavic and Russian.

This intellectual hothouse has had a deleterious effect. After observing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, I’ve come to believe that the neocons really do believe their own propaganda about the state of Russian military; that they were a bunch of drunks, who were poorly led, with inferior weapons. Which is quite insane as any student of military history can attest. Ironically, much of this nonsense is the result of the wholesale rehabilitation of the German military and intelligence agencies at the end of WWII, when the US pivoted to the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Still, it’s quite remarkable that after the Cold War ended, Russia was eager to join the West, absent the enmity, sanctions and eastward expansion of NATO, that taught the Kremlin that it was not Communism but Russia itself that engendered the hatred. The endless and ongoing sanctions were especially illuminating and valuable. Perhaps the clueless neocons missed the memo but Russia is an autarchy, where they posses all of the resources along with a sophisticated and educated populace to be self-sufficient. All of the aggression and color revolutions on Russia’s periphery had the added bonus of jump starting their defense base and spurring the development of new high-tech weapons systems that were far superior to US and NATO’s as Russia’s ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine is demonstrating.

Not just Russia, but the neocons along with their neoliberal soulmates have managed to make China great again too, with their oh-so cunning plan to decimate American labor unions by off-shoring US industry to China. The whole concept of “we will off shore the manufacturing, but retain the technology” has been a flawed approach for the last forty years. It allowed American CEOs to take advantage of cheaper labor, but losing the technological edge is almost inevitable, and losing your factories, and labor force is a given. This is not some sort of mysterious outcome, it was predicted in classified studies done for the DOD. Lately they have doubled down by imposing a ban on computer chips, spurring Chinese development of domestic chips to power the latest generation of Huawei smart phones.

All of this is a long winded explanation of the “Blob’s” antipathy towards Trump, who just wants to make America great again.

I’ve come too believe that all of the “lawfare” aimed at the ex-president, with the Colorado Supreme court case being the latest example, is the latest scheme to stymie Trump’s return. There’s a “little old lady who swallowed a fly”, aspect to the neocons behavior, where when one of their cockamamie plans goes off the rails they simply double down and move on to a more audacious one.

The neocons remind me of the French Bourbons, who as Talleyrand observed–“They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”