Trump Finds Out! Washington Is
the War Capital of the World
David Stockman / Antiwar.com

 

Part 1

(October 22, 2026) — In case you are ever tempted to feel sorry for Trumpy – now might be the time. We are referring, of course, to the current shrill crescendo of attacks from the mainstream media and UniParty pols upon Trump over his spat with Zelensky and his sensible decision to ix-nay the barking idiocy of the Lindsay O. Graham Sanctioning Russia And Iran Act of 2026.

For crying out loud. On the (very) rare occasion when Trump gets something right – that is, on the urgent need for Washington to cut loose of the no-count cesspool of corruption in Kiev – the aforementioned chorus hoovers up the tired (and groundless) old canard about Putin allegedly having salacious pictures of the Donald with his pants off.

So we sincerely ask: Is it not possible that there is a damn good reason why Trump is stumbling around attempting to disengage from the Washington-made disaster in Ukraine?

Is it also not conceivable that the pathetic crooks in Kiev should be severed from the US arms and treasury pipeline forthwith? After all, these are the good folks who steal their allies in Europe and Washington blind and who are so desperately hanging on by a thread in their misbegotten war against Russia that they are gang-pressing 60-years olds right off the streets of their crumbling cities into paddy wagons in order to do what?

Why, to be rushed off to the human hamburger factories at the hellish front lines in eastern Ukraine after hardly a few weeks of pro forma “training”. And while that particular form of self-genocide may be their prerogative as the rulers of the so-called nation of Ukraine, Zelensky and his den of thugs should not be getting a single dime from US taxpayers. That’s because their pointless lost cause way over there is utterly, completely and terminally irrelevant to America’s homeland liberty and security way over here.

Likewise, is it not possible that the end of the Cold War in 1991, which likely never should have happened in the first pace, left in the old Soviet Union a vestigial mess of scrambled up borders, peoples, languages, cultures and misbegotten polities?

Moreover, these Soviet era arrangements had precious little historical legitimacy but, instead, had been confabulated by communist ruffians and tyrants over the prior 74 years of their horrid rule. Accordingly, they needed to be sorted out by the locals involved, not by the subsequently unemployed Cold Warriors in Washington, London, Brussels and lesser places in the West, as we will amplify further in Part 2.

So as they used to say in the smoke filled room of Washington, it’s now time to get down to the lick log on the matter. To wit, there is no point in a proxy war against Russia because this shrunken remnant of the fallen Soviet Empire is no military threat to the American Homeland whatsoever. And that’s as in none, nada, nichts and nugatory.

On the one hand, Russia’s limited arsenal of nuclear weapons is checkmated by the 70-year old truth of strategic nuclear deterrence. That is, the knowledge of its eminently “rational” leaders that a first strike against America would bring a second strike retaliation so ferocious as to end civilized life in Russia in a bloody nuclear fireball.

At the same time, they also have virtually zero sealift and airlift capacity to launch a conventional invasion of the New Jersey shores or to disembark troops on the banks of the Potomac. So the long and short of it is this: Russia with a GDP of $2.2 trillion is not remotely a military threat whatsoever to America’s $32 trillion GDP and its overwhelming capabilities for nuclear deterrence and conventional defense.

So why are we even in the Ukraine theater on the doorstep of a country which has no intention, capability or prospect of harming the US homeland militarily?

Alas, the answer is that during the 80 years after the end of WWII, Washington DC has become the War Capital of the World. Accordingly, it world historic scale war machine needs to be exercised in the pursuit of forever wars; its vast assemblage of arms merchants need continuous orders for weaponry and ammo; and its house-trained politicians and national security apparatchiks need scary-narratives about threats and bad people abroad in order to justify the hideously unnecessary taxes they impose on the American public to fund a Brobdingnagian Warfare State at a level of $1.5 trillion per year – when even $500 billion would be more than adequate.

We will elaborate on all these points further in Part 2, but first let us run aground the specious Russophobic threat inflation which hangs over Washington thicker than a California forest fire. To wit, the one and only possible military threat from Russia lies in its 1,796 deployed nuclear warheads, but here’s why Moscow will never use them to launch a first attack on the American homeland.

Its called the terrible logic of strategic nuclear deterrence. It is the knowledge of Russian leaders that in the event that they should ever launch a nuclear first strike against America, current U.S. strategic nuclear deterrence doctrine calls for a retaliatory second strike capable of imposing civilization-ending mayhem on their own territories, cities and peoples.

Open-source assessments from the Federation of American Scientists put the currently deployed U.S. strategic arsenal at roughly 1,770 warheads. These include 400 Minuteman III ICBMs (each typically carrying a single 300–335 kiloton warhead), approximately 970 warheads on Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and roughly 300 associated with bombers (B-52s armed with air-launched cruise missiles and B-2s carrying gravity bombs).

A full-on second strike would almost certainly begin with counter-force targeting of Russian nuclear forces, command nodes, and related military infrastructure, then escalate to what lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence: Namely, counter-city strikes on economic and urban targets.

Simulations such as Princeton’s Science & Global Security “Plan A,” which models an escalatory exchange using realistic force postures, project that the city-targeting phase alone could employ five to ten warheads against each of Russia’s 30 most populated cities and economic centers. Russia’s largest urban areas – Moscow (over 13 million), St. Petersburg (roughly 5.7 million), Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, and others – would rank among the highest-priority targets.

If just half of the above described US nuclear arsenal (900 warheads) were unleashed in the counter-city phase of the second strike, and if based on proportionate distribution of the triad force, the result would be 200,000 kilotons of explosive release. That compares to the Little Boy release on Hiroshima in August 1945, which carried just 15 kilotons, yet turned the this great Japanese city into the wasteland photographed below in August 1945.

That’s right. Any Russian leader launching a first nuclear strike on America would be guaranteeing the annihilation of his country in a fiery apocalypse equal to 13,000 Hiroshima’s. 

It hardly seems necessary to total the casualties, but were 900 US warheads to be dropped on the major Russian cities in retailiation for a first strike, the immediate number of dead would be in the range of 40 million, and total dead and injured would likely reach 90 million.

For crying out loud. That’s 65% of the entire Russian population—men, women and children.

Moreover, on the ground the physical and functional destruction would be near-total in targeted cities. Blast and thermal effects would flatten large portions of the built environment, rendering central districts uninhabitable for months or years due to rubble, residual radiation, and the absence of shelter.

Electrical grids would fail regionally or nationally as generation plants, high-voltage transformers, and transmission lines were destroyed or disabled. Transportation networks – rail hubs, airports, major highways, and ports – would be severed, isolating surviving populations. Internet and telecommunications infrastructure, dependent on power, fiber optic nodes, and data centers concentrated in urban areas, would go dark.

Likewise, water treatment, fuel distribution, and medical systems would collapse. The result would be the functional erasure of Russia’s largest cities as organized urban centers and the crippling of the national economy: industrial output, logistics, and administrative capacity would be reduced to a fraction of pre-attack levels.

So here’s the thing. Nuclear deterrence has worked for a reason from the very dawn of the nuclear age after 1949 when the Soviet Union first got the bomb as well. Russian leaders – even Stalin, Brezhnev and now Putin – have fully understood that nuclear war is not an option. Full stop.

That fact is, Russia is not going to start a nuclear war, and given the decrepit state of its conventional forces, as we will essay in Part 2, they very idea of an attempted Russian invasion of the USA across the great ocean moats amounts to risible joke.

So why, again, are we at war in Ukraine and why, again, are the pols and journos on the banks of the Potomac cackling at the Donald for stumbling toward a halt to the madness there?

The great dissident Randolph Bourne gave the answer in a famous 1918 essay as he looked into the jaws of the similar madness then extant along the trenches of WWI. Update his felicitous phrase to today’s reality, and he would surely be saying to the mumblers now braying at the Donald:

“War is indeed the health of the War Capital of the World”.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.