While the US presidential campaign continues to rage on with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton struggling for the White House, the end of the fiscal year 2016 nears and the US national debt is expected to reach $19.3 trillion, American conservative commentator and syndicated columnist Patrick J. Buchanan notes.
"With spending on the four biggest budget items-Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense-rising, and GDP growing at 1 percent, future deficits will exceed this year's projected $600 billion. National bankruptcy, then, is among the existential threats to the republic, the prospect that we will find ourselves in the not-too-distant future in the same boat with Greece, Puerto Rico, and Illinois," Buchanan warns in his recent article for The American Conservative.
"Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists," Buchanan remarks, citing American novelist Ernest Hemingway.
Although the second solution is likely to turn into a complete disaster for the US, American war hawks are seemingly regarding it as the way out. Meanwhile they are exacerbating tensions with Russia and championing NATO's eastward expansion.
"What our Cold War leaders kept ever in mind, and our War Party scribblers never learned, is the lesson British historian A.J.P. Taylor discovered from studying the Thirty Years War of 1914-1945: 'Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one'," Buchanan writes.
According to recent polls, as of yet Hillary Clinton leads her main opponent Donald Trump, by 9 percent.
Furthermore, the Clinton camp has recently launched a wide-scale smear campaign against its GOP competitor paving the way for Hillary Clinton's victory.
While the Third World War is one of the real existential threats the world may face, the other threat is "the Third-Worldization of the West," according to Buchanan.
He points to the fact that the European refugee crisis may result in the crisis of the Western civilization as a whole. At the same time the EU globalist elites continue to brand those who try to defend a nation-state as "racists" and "xenophobes," he notes.
Buchanan notes that the US shouldn't neglect its own domestic issues, referring to shooting incidents in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee.
Instead of depicting Russia as a threat and diverting the public opinion from burning domestic issues, the US establishment should deal with the real "existential threats," according to the columnist.
