RUSSIA THREATENS TO SEIZE FOREIGN ASSETS TO RETALIATE AGAINST WEST SEIZING RUSSIAN ASSETS

 One reason that Western banks and their lawyers lobbied Western governments not to engage in seizure of Russia assets is precisely because there is a great deal of Western capital in Russia and there is no end to this merry-go-round nonsense that the US has started in order to 'punish Russia' whose GDP this year will actually be at least half-a-percent higher than that of the US, according to the latest IMF projections.

Russia's entire economy is well integrated with the capitalist world economy and playing idiotic games with seizure of assets is a downward spiral. I am amazed that US lawyers at the Justice Department did not prevail in an administration whose foreign policy, as judged by results, so far is the worst of any president in postwar history, dragging down the US and world economy, as the latest US report shows on the new stagflation projections.

The US needs to focus on using the State Department to conduct diplomacy, as its mandate calls for, not as an extension of the Defense Department and the small circle of billionaire-supported neoconservative ideologues whose policy advice has sunk the country into domestic and international chaos without any prospect for resolving conflict through diplomacy.

The time has come to hire some professional foreign service people able to make clear-eyed rational and realistic decisions about the US role in the world, as current US economic and military power permit, and in relationship to both allies and rivals alike. The cowboy mentality that has prevailed in the White House and the halls of Congress has resulted in a $35 trillion public debt, rising social inequality, political polarization, and alienation from the vast majority of the world. Even if America's worst enemy were giving advice, this sort of chaotic mess would not take place, but the geniuses surrounding Biden have indeed managed to accomplish some nightmare scenarios in American foreign policy with very serious consequences at home.