Brian Berletic: As Russia HAMMERS Ukraine, NATO’s HUMILIATION Explodes
The latest NATO summit just revealed how Russia has effectively defeated Ukraine as the Trump administration goes silent. In this must-watch video, Brian Berletic of The New Atlas breaks down the results of the latest summit and the shocking truth they expose about NATO and the future of the conflict.
I wasn’t going to post this week because I haven’t been feeling well and I’ve been feeling depressed. But I just watched Alex Krainer again – this time on the YouTube channel Counter Currents, hosted by Larry Johnson – and I got so frustrated that I felt the need to post something.
I could write about so many things. Honestly, I could write entire books on topics ranging from geopolitics and economics to psychology, and connect all of them together. But my problem is that not many people are like me – spending so much time analyzing what’s really going on.
The issue isn’t that I have nothing to say. On the contrary, I have too much to say. My struggle is deciding what to focus on out of the thousands of things I’d like to write about. I know that if I write too much, most people won’t read it. So the real challenge is choosing what’s most important and keeping it as short as possible – because, as Michael Parenti once said:
…people have those gripes and they have a semi awareness of it but the thing of putting it together and directing it toward actual issues and describing it and being able to detect the lies, that they’re telling us and how they manipulate what are called cultural issues or identity issues to get you not to look at your own straight bread-and-butter economic issues. That’s a job that I try to do, which I don’t do very well because I write books about it. Well who the hell in America reads books, right it’s ridiculous.
― Michael Parenti
A Theater Full of Clowns – My Frustration and Exhaustion
I’m really getting frustrated by how people don’t understand what’s actually happening – by how easily they get manipulated or fall for hopium. This same frustration is evident in Brian Berletic as well.
6:51
I’m genuinely exhausted, physically and mentally, from trying to warn people about this. Even before President Trump took office, his nominee for vice president, J.D. Vance, was saying we’re dumping the war in Ukraine on Europe. We’re not ending it because we need our weapons to go fight China. That is literally what’s unfolding right now. They—not me—warned you, but people just heard what they wanted to hear and often imagined things that were never even said.
I know people who genuinely believed President Trump would possibly even dismantle NATO or walk away from it. That was just theater, meant to panic people into doubling down on supporting NATO and creating public support for it. That’s all it was. It was theater. People need to remember, go to YouTube and type in “Donald Trump WWE”—he’s a performer; he does theatrics. He’s done it for years. He had his own reality TV show, which had nothing to do with reality; it was all scripted. That’s how he does business. He made his living in real estate and casinos. Why do people believe this is a man who was going to change anything? At face value, it was an absurd proposition from the beginning.
This is not how the U.S. government works. Even if he genuinely wanted to change everything, there’s no real power in the White House or in Congress. These are people who sign off on things just to make it official, and they are the ones who sell it to the public. The policies are devised by corporations in think tanks. That’s where people need to focus if they want to change anything; they need to change that aspect of it.
I feel the same physical and mental exhaustion as Brian, and I saw the same thing expressed by John Helmer in another video on the YouTube channel Dialogue Works.
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58:59
There was a very big difference between the 2024 NATO communiqué and the 2025 one. But it’s very clear, since we last spoke about it, what happened. The entire NATO meeting was done to pacify, look after, and compliment President Trump. So, they gave him the so-called 5%, which is a fake, and we don’t want to bother the audience with trying to analyze that. They came up with a very short communiqué, designed to minimize any form of friction with any of the NATO allies, to pacify the President of the United States. It was a “let’s take care of daddy” approach, which is what the Dutch former Prime Minister Rutte referred to when he was referring to Trump.
There is a particular reason why it was short. There’s a particular reason why it left out anything that would trigger significant differences among the allies. So, that’s why Ukraine’s membership was left out compared to the previous year under Blinken and President Biden. It doesn’t mean very much. You interpret it differently; I interpret it this way. The evidence comes not from us, but from Spain, from Hungary, from all of the states that were willing to sign on to this 10-paragraph, 400-word communiqué so that they could avoid the 5,000-word communiqué of the previous year. It was to pacify Trump and maintain the appearance of an agreement on the shortest possible piece of verbiage.
You can see the same frustration and exhaustion in John Helmer as in Brian Berletic, and I feel the same way they do. John Helmer also said something important during that video.
48:06
There was never any difference in Putin’s approach to President Biden. This is not a compliment to Trump as a person; it’s a respect for the office of the presidency of the United States—something that President Trump himself, as a person, doesn’t seem to understand. Respect for the presidency is something peculiarly Russian, but it’s being demonstrated characteristically by Putin.
When Putin was asked about President Biden at their last meeting—not their last, but their second-to-last meeting in Geneva in 2021—he said, and I’m quoting roughly speaking, “What is being depicted about President Biden in the U.S. press is not the reality. What I saw was an alert, cheerful man suffering, as we all do, from jet lag, and he’s on top of his brief,” etc., etc.
Now, we all know that wasn’t true. We all know that what President Putin would have seen were the unmistakable symptoms of Lewy body dementia associated with Parkinson’s disease and many other things. But he was showing respect for the presidency of the United States because that’s the basis on which civilized countries can negotiate short of war.
I often hear people saying that Putin spoke kindly about Trump, but here’s an example that shows it’s all just for appearances. He met with Biden – who we all know was clearly not mentally fit – and Putin had to see that for himself. Yet he lied, saying Biden was fine and just suffering from “jet lag,” and that he was “on top of his brief.” The same applies to Trump. Putin says nice things about Trump because he can’t say the truth – that he’s dealing with someone whose intellect and understanding of the world is comparable to a kindergartner’s. Just like he couldn’t say Biden was braindead, that doesn’t mean he actually believes what he’s saying.
Does anyone seriously believe Putin actually thought Biden was just dealing with “jet lag” and was “on top of his brief” when he met him and saw firsthand that he was already mentally declining?
As I wrote earlier – quoting John Helmer about clowns and elephants:
The remark just given about Marco Rubio as a clown, but let’s remember that clowns perform their function in a circus after the elephants. And the elephants in this particular circus are serious. So, let’s go back to what elephants are.
This means we need to stop focusing on the fact that Putin said something nice about Trump – because he also said something nice (and false) about Biden. Using a compliment from Putin about Trump to analyze current events is no different than taking seriously what Putin said about Biden’s mental state and using that as a basis for evaluating Biden’s mental capacity.
Do you really believe Biden wasn’t mentally gone during his meeting with Putin – just because Putin said he was fine and merely suffering from “jet lag” and was “on top of his brief”?
I agree with Brian Berletic’s analysis in the main video, which, in my opinion, John Helmer also supports:
1:45
I’ve been talking about this for seven months. Before President Trump stepped foot into office, I said this was going to happen because this is exactly what’s in the policy papers, and that’s where policy comes from. It doesn’t come from President Trump’s brain or the neocon warmongers that he surrounds himself with; these are all just facilitators of this policy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat, or if they’re senile or conscious of what they’re doing. There’s one policy. It’s produced by corporations and financial institutions in these think tanks. They put these plans on paper that are almost always public, and then they implement them chapter by chapter, line by line.
If you go to the table of contents of “Which Path to Persia,” you can see that every single president from Bush Jr. all the way until today has exercised every single one of these options exactly as they were written down. It’s not as if this specific paper was the blueprint; it’s a reflection of consensus among these special interests on what is to be done. The policy papers are turned into bills or policies by teams of lawyers and brought to Washington to be signed off on by lobbyists. That is how it works, and if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how any of this works. That is why people are constantly surprised, because they’re trying to track political rhetoric, and they’re looking at political divides that don’t actually exist, that are actually all theater meant to distract you and divide you.
So, back in, I think it was 2022 or 2023, they produced a series of papers titled “Project 2025,” and in that paper, it says Europe is going to spend 5% of their GDP on NATO defense. And that is exactly what happened. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in February of this year, told Europe in Brussels, “You’re going to take over this war against Russia because we have to pivot to China.” I had mentioned this earlier in the program. “And you’re going to spend 5% of your GDP on defense. You’re going to buy weapons from us because the U.S. is overstretched.” And Secretary Hegseth literally said there needs to be a division of labor. “We cannot just do it all on our own. We need our proxies to start diverting public money from programs that actually benefit the people living in their countries, and we need to start spending it on our proxy war, just like we in the United States have been doing, depriving the American people of any sort of decent life or future.” That’s what Europe needs to do.
And people ask why. Why does Europe do this? Because it’s been politically captured, just like Ukraine has been politically captured. They have captured the institutions through big money interests. They control them through various institutions, as well as the EU itself, which is a layer of bureaucracy thrown over the European nations as a blanket smothering national sovereignty across the region. And all of these nations, obviously and demonstrably, are working against their own best interests to facilitate U.S. foreign policy, not just in Europe regarding Ukraine and Russia, but also everything else: China, Iran, the continent of Africa, absolutely everything the U.S. is interested in doing. They get their proxies to pay the price for them. That’s how empires have always worked. Today is a modern-day empire.
So when they talk about the Europeans being children, well, they’re imperial subjects. They’re vassals, as we have been warning. And the scary thing is, though, it’s all accelerating very quickly, very recklessly, because again, I’ve been on your program, Danny, we’ve talked about this: they’re out of time. They see multipolarism rising, they see China exponentially rising, and they know the window of opportunity to do this, to reassert themselves, is closing. Once it’s closed, it’s irreversible. So that’s why they’re rushing through this. Whether it’s going to work or not, they don’t care. It’s better to try it. Everyone else is going to pay the price for it. They will be the last ones to pay the price for it. Their proxies will pay. American soldiers will pay. The American public will pay. They will be the very last people to pay. So there’s no reason for them not to try.
Europe’s Situation
First of all, I am European – I’m from Poland – so you could say I’m a little biased toward Europe. But in my opinion, many people, including The Duran, tend to underestimate Europe.
Europe’s main problem is energy, and this issue has existed since World War II. Even the Nazis struggled with it. That’s why Hitler redirected a huge portion of his forces from the attack on Moscow to the south to secure oil fields – something many consider a massive mistake, possibly one that could have changed the outcome of the war. (Whether the Soviet Union would have fallen after the fall of Moscow is debatable, but it’s an interesting discussion.) In any case, this highlights Europe’s long-standing dependency on imported energy.
People often say, “Energy is the lifeblood of the economy,” and I agree. But if energy is the lifeblood, then population and infrastructure are the muscles of the economy. In that regard, Europe has an advantage over the U.S.: we have a healthier, smarter, and happier population, as well as better infrastructure – our roads, rail systems, airports, and internet networks are generally superior.
To use a biological analogy: it’s easier to do a blood transfusion than to rebuild atrophied muscles. That analogy also works economically. It’s easier for Europe to find new sources of energy than it is for the U.S. to fix its failing healthcare, education, transportation, and infrastructure systems.
Europe still represents something. The U.S., on the other hand, is increasingly looking like a corpse kept alive only by the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. The only things America is currently producing at scale are overpriced, low-quality military equipment, software, and harmful financial instruments.
Just yesterday, I found out that the U.S. now has to import enriched uranium from Russia – and recently from France – because it no longer has functioning centrifuge infrastructure (except maybe one). In 2023, imports accounted for 99% of the U₃O₈ used by U.S. nuclear generators.
Look at chip production: the most advanced lithography machines are made in the Netherlands, using optics from Germany – the only country with optics manufacturing advanced enough for this task. These machines are then used in Taiwan to produce the actual chips.
Or consider Boeing and Ford. Boeing is struggling, and Ford hasn’t been a global leader for years. Thanks to Trump’s tariffs, I discovered that since 1964, the U.S. has had a 25% import tariff on light trucks – known as the “chicken tax” – implemented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to French and West German tariffs on American chicken. That explains why pickup trucks are so common in the U.S.: it’s one of the few vehicle categories where American companies can compete with European and Japanese brands – only because of protectionist tariffs.
Some people might bring up Tesla, but in my view, it’s the biggest scam and bubble in world history. Tesla is chasing full self-driving capability, but BMW is already ahead in that department.
Now let’s look at what the U.S. still claims as a stronghold: military equipment. How’s that working out in Ukraine? According to Ukrainian sources, the best-performing armored vehicle in their army is the Swedish CV90 – not the American Bradley. The best tank? The German Leopard 2 – not the Abrams. There are also increasing claims that the best fighter aircraft today is not the F-35, but the Swedish Saab JAS 39 Gripen – cheaper, easier to maintain, and capable of taking off from highways.
So the U.S. is falling behind in nuclear energy, automotive manufacturing, chip production, and even in its strongest area – military technology. What it’s still leading in are software development, media production, and toxic financial products.
While Europe is slowly destroying itself under American control, I still believe it’s in far better shape than the U.S – a country that now resembles a walking corpse, surviving only due to the privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency.
How We Are Controlled – The Theater of Narrative
This post is already getting too long, so I’ll stop here for now, though I have much more to say. I went off on a tangent about Europe, and it ended up longer than I planned.
The divide between Europe and America is just kabuki theater – a staged performance meant to control the population. In a democratic society, you can’t simply force people to do something; you have to make them want to do what you want done.
For example, how could you imagine getting people in Europe to give up healthcare, education, and the social welfare systems that make their lives better? First, you have to convince them that they are in danger – and that’s where the “Russian threat” comes in. Then, you have to make them feel that their only protector, America, is abandoning them.
If the “division of labor” theory that Brian Berletic talks about is accurate, then there was a plan: increase military spending in Europe at the expense of social welfare. But they couldn’t force Europeans to accept this. They had to make Europeans want it.
To quote B.F. Skinner:
Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.
Or to quote Aldous Huxley.
If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think…uh, sooner or later, you have to bring in an element of persuasion, and element of getting people to consent to what is happening.
You need to scare people and make them feel unsafe so they become willing to give everything up in order to protect themselves. This so-called division between Europe and America is just a performance – a kabuki theater for the population.
I often hear The Duran express concern that America is going to abandon Europe, and that Europeans are afraid of Russia. But first of all, no one who understands the real world believes that Russia will attack Europe. If Europe were truly in conflict with the U.S. and genuinely afraid of Russia, it wouldn’t be going against China – it would be trying to cooperate with China to push back against American pressure.
The fact that Europe has aligned itself against China only proves one thing: Europe is captured by the United States. This is also evident in their willingness to increase military spending, even though they all know there’s no real external threat. That decision only makes sense if Europe is acting on behalf of American interests.
So, the so-called “conflict” between Europe and the U.S. is just a narrative – a staged fight to convince the European public that they must act. If America wants Europe to engage with Russia – not to defeat it, but simply to tie down its resources – then the public must first be made to feel threatened. That’s what this theater is about: scaring the European population into accepting the U.S. agenda as if it were their own will.
The Push Toward Fascism
There’s another battle happening – within both Europe and the U.S. – to turn these societies into increasingly authoritarian or even outright fascist states. And once again, the population must be manipulated to accept this shift voluntarily.
Let me briefly touch on history.
When Hitler wanted to remove citizen rights, he burned his own parliament, blamed it on a communist Jew, and told the German people that the man responsible was a German citizen protected by civil rights. Because of those rights, Hitler claimed, the Gestapo couldn’t protect the population. Therefore, the people needed to give up their rights by passing the Enabling Act – so that the Gestapo could act freely in the name of security.
Fast forward to 9/11: Bush told Americans that the perpetrators were U.S. citizens protected by civil rights. And because of that, the CIA supposedly couldn’t prevent the attacks. The solution? The USA PATRIOT Act, which asked Americans to give up their rights in exchange for safety – an almost identical pattern.
I bring this up because something similar is happening now in the U.S., and soon in Europe.
Like before, internal threats are being manufactured – just as Nazis used communists and Jews, and the Bush administration used Arabs and Islamists. Now we are seeing this with the migrant crisis in the U.S., which will soon spread more aggressively to Europe.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying the migrant crisis is fake. It’s real. But I believe it was intentionally created or allowed to escalate to justify a crackdown on rights. This way, people will be so afraid and desperate that they’ll demand exactly what the state wanted all along: more control, less freedom.
Just look at the U.S. right now – masked officers in unmarked cars are grabbing people off the streets, refusing to identify themselves, and denying citizens their rights. Would people tolerate this without a crisis to justify it? Unlikely. So if these policies were the goal all along, why assume the crisis wasn’t engineered to enable them?
As B.F. Skinner and Aldous Huxley have pointed out:
You can’t force people to do things. You have to make them want to do it.
So what do they do? They create fear. They create crises. And those crises make people willing to give up their rights in exchange for safety. They make people beg for the very measures that were planned from the beginning.
This is best illustrated by the images they show us: for example, an immigrant standing on a burning car, waving a Mexican flag. Does that seem like the natural behavior of someone who fears deportation? Or does it look like a carefully crafted image designed to make you feel invaded, enraged, and afraid—so afraid you’ll give up your rights voluntarily?
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Does this look like the natural behavior of an immigrant who doesn’t want to be deported, or like a psyop designed to scare you into giving up your rights?
After all, if those in power want to take away people’s rights, they can’t just force them. Instead, they need to make people feel that giving up their rights is necessary for their safety. They need to create the illusion that surrendering freedoms is a voluntary choice made for protection.
I suspect similar tactics are coming to Europe. Soon, we may be asked to give up our rights to protect ourselves from “Arab Islamists” or “Putin’s saboteurs.” If they manage to scare the population enough, people will willingly ask to be enslaved. They’ll gladly trade their rights for the false promise of security.
That’s why these conditions are deliberately created—so that people themselves will demand the very oppression that was planned all along.
Don’t believe what they tell you.
Instead, ask yourself:
What do they want you to think through what they say?
Thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end of my post. And, as always…
“Knowledge will make you be free.”
― Socrates
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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”
― Richard P. Feynman
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“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”
― Grzegorz Ochman
“The greatest weapon is not a gun or a bomb. It is the control of information. To control the world’s information is to manipulate all the minds that consume it.”
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