The United States has presented Russia as a threat to American national security to justify spending half of the country’s budget on military spending and "maintaining a war economy," an activist in Maryland says.
“The US foreign policy establishment needs to create enemies to justify spending more than half of all US taxes for the military,” Myles Hoenig told Press TV on Saturday.
“Now that the plans to destroy countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. have been accomplished, and the American people are getting fed up with our foreign entanglements, what the establishment needs is a return to the days of the Cold War, where we have an enemy that can actually do harm to our security and Russia fits the scenario perfectly,” Hoenig said.
Washington “has been poking Russia with a hot iron since the days of President Bill Clinton by enlarging NATO and bringing in Russia’s immediate neighbors under its military umbrella,” he added.
“With the most recent neo-Nazi coup engineered by the US State Department in Ukraine, the US now has a dagger at the throat of the Russian people,” the activist said.
“This is a direct threat to the security of, not just Russia, but the European continent as well. It certainly does nothing healthy for world peace, but it enhances the profits of the military contractors who supply weapons to new markets to levels that President Eisenhower could never imagine,” Hoenig stated.
“In 1961, days before relinquishing his authority as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned America of a ‘military industrial complex’. He feared that the ties between the military, military contractors and legislators were getting so strong that perpetual war would be inevitable just to maintain a war economy,” he continued.
Hoenig said former American presidential candidate and congressman Ron Paul is correct in his assessment of US foreign and military policy.
On Friday, Paul said the US is conducting a propaganda campaign aimed at spreading disinformation about issues like the crisis in Ukraine to show Russia as an enemy.
"The people have to have the propaganda convert them into someone they hate, so they can hate," Paul said during the 2015 YAL National Convention in Washington, DC.