A REVIEW BY RICHARD C. COOK OF ANDREI MARTYANOV’S NEW CLASSIC: AMERICA’S FINAL WAR (CLARITY PRESS 2024)

September 25, 2024

FROM THE CLARITY PRESS WEBSITE:

ANDREI MARTYANOV is an expert on Russian military and naval issues. He was born in Baku, USSR, in 1963. He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer on the ships and staff of the Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. In the mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he worked as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group. He blogs at Reminiscence of the Future and is author of Losing Military Supremacy, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, and Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse.

ON THE BOOK:

Warfare is a geopolitical tool of the first order; only wars of scale can measure the real strength of nations. For decades American claims of hegemony, and by extension that of the West, have been based on what has now proved to be a carefully constructed mythology of economic and military supremacy. This is Andrei Martyanov’s fourth book addressing this issue, now as it concerns the war in Ukraine. In America’s Final War, he lays out in detail the underpinning causes and extent of its self-deception.

Washington’s eight years of preparing Ukraine and its armed forces for war with Russia was a mistake of historic proportions, due to its misperception of American military power based on its 1991 Gulf War victory against a minor military player. Washington believed its own propaganda about crippling sanctions on Russia, about the viability of its Ukrainian proxy army, and the economic and military weakness of Russia, spelling doom for the American empire and its “rules-based order.”

Martyanov lays out Washington’s utter incompetence and shocking military amateurism. But then, he claims, the U.S. doesn’t do strategy; it does business plans. Through 2022-2023, Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) exposed U.S. and NATO forces as legacy armies stuck in the 1990s, still viewing the world from that vantage point. The massive destruction of the West’s high-cost weaponry ensued, annulling their vaunted superiority. Western armaments, from anti-tank Javelins to APC Bradleys to air defense complexes such as the Patriot PAC3 or NASAMS, performed dismally and proved unready for what has become the largest military conflict in Europe since WWII. By 2023 the Kiev regime could no longer exist without the West’s support, both financial and in war materiel. By 2024 Russia will have not just exhausted Ukraine, but also demilitarized NATO as a whole, exposing the industrial and military impotence of the U.S. and its European vassals.

The finance and tech-based economy is not a real economy; expeditionary warfare and doctrine is not real war. The global balance of power has shifted to Eurasia. Western Europe has become a collection of weak and fast deindustrializing economies which will increasingly become irrelevant against the background of the explosive economic, technologic, scientific and military development in Eurasia

The world has noticed what has been exposed, and because of that, life as we knew it is no more. The rule of the West of the last half-millennium is over.

Review by Richard C. Cook

Anyone who follows the accounts in the “alternative media” on the West’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is bound to be familiar to some extent with Andrei Martyanov. Any American who has worked in either the civilian or military side of government is bound to be “stung” by at least some of what he is saying. For he gives America’s so-called elites a rigorous tongue-lashing almost every time he speaks or writes.

But, “no pain, no gain.” So let’s move on.

Andrei Martyanov’s background is unique. Educated at a Soviet military academy, he spent a career as an officer with the Soviet Coast Guard. Here in the U.S., we tend to look at the Coast Guard as namby-pamby, not real hard-core military. But not in the Soviet Union, where Coast Guard members may easily find themselves in a war zone, particularly in the Black Sea region. Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Andrei Martyanov relocated to the U.S. to work in commercial aerospace and became an American citizen.

But as an American, he did not like what he was seeing through the decade of the 1990s and into the 2000s. He saw not only the decline of America as a civilization but also the failure of its military establishment to maintain a level of competence, maturity, and responsibility befitting a great power. In particular, he saw that the U.S. had not fought a real war against an equal opponent since World War II. And even then, he reminds us that it was the Soviets that took the brunt of the fighting against Germany in Europe.

So Andrei Martyanov began to speak up about what he saw on his blog and YouTube channel, a regular video broadcast he calls Reminiscence of the Future. Of course, he witnessed the U.S.-instigated coup in Ukraine that took place in 2014, as we all did, followed by a series of missteps, or provocations, on the part of the U.S. and its NATO allies that resulted in the reaction by Russia in invading Ukraine in its February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO).

We know that the West triggered the conflict by pushing Russia to the wall in order to defend Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas region against repression and aggression by the NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian military. We know that President Joe Biden lied when he said Russia’s actions were “unprovoked.” We know that the sanctions imposed by the West against Russia were intended to bring down the Putin government and lead to regime change. But we also know that these attempts to break the power of Russia once and for all have failed miserably. Thus Martyanov speaks of “the Americans’ catastrophic miscalculation in regard to Ukraine and consequently Russia….”

Russia is winning the war. Russia’s economy is stronger than ever. And in a new arms race featuring drones, air power, air defense, battlefield surveillance, heavy armor, and harnessing of an industrial economy to support troops on the ground, Russia is far ahead of anything the West has been able to project. Russia also has a General Staff that can manage a war on this scale. The U.S., says Martyanov, does not.

And with the West now threatening to authorize Ukraine to attack Russian soil with long-range missiles, we see ominous developments that could lead to World War III.

Many are saying that the U.S. and its allies, especially the U.K., badly miscalculated in their zeal to “prod the Russian bear.” But is there much more to it than that? Are we perhaps seeing 500 years of Western imperialism bite the dust?

Andrei Martyanov believes we are, and that is why his new book is so important. Could this really be “America’s Final War,” or a major step in that direction? Is talk about the U.S. confronting China after facing off against Russia just bluster? Is a future war against China even conceivable, given the failure of U.S. weapons, strategy, and military infrastructure which the conflict in Ukraine has put display for all the world to see?

The paragraphs you are now reading, following the summaries on the Clarity website, carry my own short analysis of what Andrei Martyanov is telling us. But to get the full impact, America’s Final War really is a “must-read.” In fact, in giving us an unvarnished view of the reality behind the façade, I would rank his work with the classics, including, for instance, Alexis de Tocqueville’s monumental 1835 Democracy in America.

I don’t say this lightly. In my own writing I am continually shocked and amazed at the level of ignorance and arrogance belonging to America’s elites and their near-total inability to look at themselves impartially and adapt to what they see. This applies especially to the denizens of the mainstream media, for whom Andrei Martyanov has only contempt. He also rightly says that the infantile level of thinking and discourse among the U.S. elite is a laughing stock in other countries, especially Russia.

Strangely, it has taken a naturalized U.S. citizen, albeit a former Russian military officer, to speak the truth about the collapse of American hegemony, while institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, etc., remain in geopolitical blind alleys of their own making.

I would now like to cite a few quotations from America’s Final War, and I believe you will see what I mean. If any members of the elite—media, political, economic, military, or intelligence—should read and assimilate these quotes, followed by the book itself, they may be in for a bitter shock. It is to be hoped that it will also be a shock of self-recognition added to the realization that the U.S.—and the Collective West—are in deep trouble.   

Quotations from the Book

From the Preface

“…Russia cannot talk to anyone in the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned [the] European states into its lapdogs and, possibly, into cannon fodder…the United States and combined West have resorted to terrorism—the weapon of the weak.” (p. viii-ix)

From Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Echo Chamber

“In all, in the United States the decisions which are vital for the existence of not only the United States, but the world, are made by people who by and large have zero serious academic and life experiences related to issues of war and peace, geopolitics, and statesmanship. These are precisely the types of people who in the combined West are in charge of narratives and, in the end, of erecting this very echo chamber whose existence threatens all life on Earth.” (p. 6)

From Chapter 3: The Disastrous U.S. Prewar Calculations

“…most of what the U.S. public and political class know about war is primarily from the utterly incompetent and malicious media and entertainment industry.” (p. 41)

“…the events of the Maidan Coup of 2014 in Kiev, organized and financed by the U.S., and Russia’s reacquiring Crimea in 2014 as a consequence of it, gave birth to the absolute domination in the American media of ‘Russia experts,’ who are primarily, albeit non-exclusively, of Russian Jewish descent having a strong Russophobic streak and of neoconservative leaning.” (p. 43)

“America’s oligarchy…, realistically, is not very bright, despite being rich, with many of them having Ivy League degrees. They have proved this beyond the shadow of a doubt….American politics was always tawdry; now the whole American political system, with its allegedly ‘free’ media and establishment academe, have been paraded around the world as one huge tawdry blob, whose functionaries continue to perceive it as a global superpower, which it no longer is.” (p. 57)

From Chapter 4: Russia’s Special Military Operation: The Opening Phase

[Speaking of a meeting between British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden on April 12, 2022, three days after Johnson visited Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev, persuading the latter  to abandon peace negotiations taking place between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul]: “This date can be marked as the official start of the slip of the combined West, headed by the U.S., from its 500-year-long supremacy towards a long descent into global obscurity….The level of malice, military and political incompetence, economic backwardness and degeneracy of its political and military class which the Special Military Operation revealed, would astonish the world and will preclude the combined West and its captain, the United States, from continuing to order the world around. The shift in the power balance provided by the Special Military Operation would become so dramatic that it has already changed history.” (p. 70)

From Chapter 5: Critical Issues I: The Technology of War I—Missiles

“The U.S. operational views and procurement practices are measured against the most favorable conditions of weak, if not defenseless enemies, which bring us to the second point, which is the logical consequence of the first: The United States has lost the arms race to Russia. American weapons are made for sale. They are made for profit as commercial items. This was inevitable in a nation which never fought a foreign invader in its history nor, by dint of geography, had much to fear.” (p. 79)

From Chapter 7: Critical Issues III: The VSU “Counteroffensive”

“With the power of hindsight it is easy today to conclude that the AFU counter-offensive [of 2023] was driven not by sound military judgement and professional operational planning but strictly by U.S. internal political dynamics and Kiev’s desperate desire to show any success, even if it was merely a propaganda one, with a complete disregard of the tactical, operational, and strategic experience, and, of course, the lives of the personnel of the AFU.”

From Chapter 9: Systemic Military Differences

[Regarding U.S.-Russian conflict]: “The U.S. military…fights imperial wars of conquest and doesn’t address the concept of defense of a Mother- or Fatherland in its strategic and operational documents. Thus, it cannot fight a real conventional combined war of scale against peer or better-then-peer opponents who fight in defense of their own country…The U.S. military doesn’t fight in defense of America. It fights for imperial conquests only. Russian soldiers fight in defense of their homeland.” (p. 143)

From Conclusion:

“Once the poison of American exceptionalism was added to the mix of the neocons’ fully corrupted American foreign policy and American insecurity—the clash with Russia became inevitable….What societies cannot survive is moral degeneracy, and the signs of that degeneracy are everywhere.” (p. 190)

Final Thoughts

These quotations give an idea of the topics in Andrei Martyanov’s book, his writing style, and the broad range of his discourse. But this is only a small sample of what readers need to study and ponder in gaining a realistic understanding of how serious the hour is and what a perilous course the U.S. is on.

My own sense is that U.S. failure to think and operate realistically stems from advocacy by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1939-1941 for permanent U.S. global military supremacy after entry into World War II. These studies were paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and were intended to ensure U.S. global economic control. In other words, the entire world was intended to become a U.S. colony. That has been the central U.S. doctrine ever since.

This outlook has never changed. Today it is being challenged successfully by Russia through its Special Military Operation in Ukraine which Russia is winning. Looming in the shadows is China, the next big U.S. adversary. Of course, the U.S. set itself up for the Chinese conflict by outsourcing most of its manufacturing capability, first to Germany and Japan following World War II, then to China and other countries starting with the “Opening to China” in the 1970s.

The U.S. thought it could rule the world via finance and stock market ownership aided by dollar hegemony and military might. The keystone was worldwide control of oil.

All this finally began to collapse, probably terminally, by the time of the Great Recession in 2007-2009, leaving only “quantitative easing” to float the economy; i.e., the Federal Reserve adding U.S. Treasury debt to its balance sheet.

As this was going on, the long-time goal of world military dominance made the U.S. military a fire-fighting operation which worked against the weaker nations of the Middle East, along with Yugoslavia, until the Ukraine conflict, when the fire got out of control.

In America’s Final War, Andrei Martyanov gives an insightful explanation of U.S. defeat. What the U.S. military lacks now is a reverse gear. Our diplomatic corps, habituated to bullying the world, also lacks the ability to wind things down to a level of stability that would have to be similar to the concept of “peaceful coexistence” that made a brief appearance in the 1960s.

Otherwise, the U.S. will doubtless be left to the false strategy of incrementally escalating the conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere until we are decisively slapped down. This may happen soon, as Zelensky’s ground forces are being crushed, which is why he is screaming for U.S. long-range missiles to attack the Russian homeland. His biggest cheerleader is Keir Starmer, Britain’s out-of-control prime minister who seems to want to use the crisis in Ukraine to boost his domestic political support the way Margaret Thatcher used the Falklands crisis.

Many consider all this to be suicidal for Ukraine, the U.S., and the West. It resembles Israel’s “Samson Option,” but it may be all that is left to a country like the U.S. that is bankrupt—financially, morally, and spiritually. I certainly hope a resolution is found before it’s too late.  

One last point—through what we may hope has been a rogue element within the military, DARPA and other DoD units have been cooperating with U.S. billionaires like Gates, Soros, et.al., in engineering a wave of pandemics, starting with COVID. These people evidently believe they can engage in genocide against their own citizens while expecting those citizens to fight their wars for them. This might be a good topic for Andrei Martyanov’s next book.

Richard C. Cook is co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute.  Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack at

and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.