The first thing that jumped out at me as I listened to the Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interview is that Putin is 100 times more intellectually capable than President Joe Biden. No wonder Biden won't take his call.

It says a lot that the terrible people who run the United States wanted to prevent Carlson from conducting the interview, and then to hinder it from being made available to the American public.

Many, including Carlson himself, expressed frustration that the Russian President began with a history lesson, going back to the founding of the Kievan Rus state in 882. I suspect this was Putin's sly way of expressing a salient point that has long struck me about we Americans—namely, while our government is ever keen to send weapons and armies all over the world to police mankind, we find it onerous to sit through a 30-minute history lesson about the people and places we wish to control.

Russia is, in Churchill's formulation, "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," and it has always been governed by an authoritarian state. Nevertheless, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is plenty of evidence that Russia wished to cease living in a state of enmity with the United States.

To me, it seems clear it was the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, and NOT Russia, that wished to maintain this state of enmity, for without it, there would be little justification for the U.S. government to spend hundreds of billions on weapons goodies such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II—a program that started in 1995 and (if DoD accountants are to be believed) has cost U.S. taxpayers about 500 billion.