The New York Times as a Propaganda Agency for America’s Armaments Firms

25 December 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Back when U.S. President George W. Bush deceived Americans into invading Iraq entirely on the basis of lies in 2002 and 2003, it ultimately became clear that the only beneficiaries from those lies and resulting invasion were the U.S.-and-allied oil companies that then got billions of profits added from the U.S. Government’s forced privatizations of Iraq’s large oil resources, and also added to Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation, and also added to America’s ‘defense’ (aggression) contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corporation. The New York Times and other propaganda agencies for billionaires-controlled corporations (called ‘news’-media), reported stenographically to the American public the U.S. Government’s lies about “WMD in Iraq” etc.; and, so, when Bush on 20 March 2003 started the U.S. invasion, his approval rating suddenly shot UP 14% (to 71%) — instead of plunged down (as it should) — from his invasion and destruction of Iraq on the basis purely of lies. By the end of his Presidency (after his lies had become somewhat known — at least by non-Republicans), and after his global financial crash in 2008, which resulted from his economic and regulatory policies and the resulting flood of corrupt mortgages and their corrupt securitizations, which greatly enriched the banksters at the public’s expense), his approval-rating was down to only 34%. However, that didn’t last: on 11 February 2025, Gallup reported that 52% of Americans had a favorable impression of GW Bush and only 34% had an unfavorable impression of that man who had destroyed Iraq on the basis of his lies, and who had led the nation into the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression. So: quite obviously, the public learn NOTHING from history, but everything from the propaganda-media, which didn’t report the truth as news, and don’t report the truth as history either. They’re in the propaganda-business, far more than in the news-business or education-business. It’s the way that the billionaires control the public, so that their ‘democracy’ (as they call it) s’elects’ such liars to be the nation’s leaders — the ‘democracy’ that ‘represents’ the (deceived) voters.Eric’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On 25 December 2025, the New York Times, which has been lying consistently about the war in Ukraine and ‘documenting’ that Putin had started it instead of the documented truth (which is that Obama started it), headlined a ‘news’-story “Why Russia Is Likely to Reject the New U.S.-Ukrainian Peace Plan: The first draft essentially called for Ukraine’s surrender. The revised version includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression.”, and reported:

On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine presented a 20-point peace plan formulated by Ukrainian and American officials that was a significant departure from a plan drawn up in October that would have essentially forced Ukraine to cede territory and rule out NATO membership.

Mr. Zelensky presented the new proposal as a reasonable compromise to the plan drawn up by Kirill Dmitriev, the special envoy of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and unveiled in November. The new blueprint [created by Zelensky and now approved by Trump as being his proposal] includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression, as well as plans to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

But a Kremlin emboldened by Moscow’s advances on the battlefield and restrained by the difficulty of selling the new plan to the Russian public as a victory is unlikely to accept it. …

Why Can Russia Afford to Reject the Plan?

Even though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been costly for both the Russian economy and Moscow’s army, the Kremlin appears to still believe it can gain more by fighting.

The Russian economy is at its weakest point since 2022, with interest rates at record highs and growth rates dipping toward recession. But despite sanctions imposed by the West because of the war, analysts say the country is still far removed from the kind of economic crisis that would force the Kremlin to change course. …

Why Is Russia Still Negotiating?

Russia is interested in negotiating a possible peace deal to maintain a working relationship with Washington and to avoid taking the full blame for the ongoing conflict, experts say. …

The diplomatic back and forth over peace terms is likely to continue as the war trudges on, commentators said.

“Putin has no intention of ending the war against Ukraine nor is he ready to make even minor compromises at this stage,” Volodymyr Fesenko, an analyst based in Kyiv, said in a post on Facebook.

“For the Kremlin, discussing the Trump peace plan is purely a tactical game played with the U.S. to maintain constructive relations with the current American president while simultaneously provoking friction and contradictions between the United States and Ukraine.”

None of the Trump-endorsed ‘peace’ plans has accepted ANY of Putin’s 3 minimal requirements that Putin had stated (with incompetent verbosity: he was incredibly verbose) in his speech to the Russian people on the day of his invasion, on 24 February 2022, the 3 objectives that must and will be achieved in order to protect Russia’s national security against U.S.-and-allied aggression: As I summarized those, linking to that (typically) incompetent rambling speech as the source:

1. Permanent commitment by the U.S. empire to never accept Ukraine into NATO (because Ukraine is the only country that’s a mere 300 miles or 5 minutes of missile-flying-time away from blitz-nuking The Kremlin and thus decapitating Russia’s Government).

2. Permanent commitment of NATO to a accept no new members.

3 De-nazification of Ukraine (permanent exclusion from Ukraine’s Government of all persons who had ever been members of either of Ukraine’s two racist-fascist-imperialist, or “nazi,” political Parties, the Right Sector, and the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, or else a member of Ukraine’s equally nazi Azov Battalion).

If Putin were to fail on even just ONE of those three, then he would probably lose the approximately 75% job-approval he has had ever since he entered into office in the year 2000. But NONE of Trump’s offers has included EVEN ONE OF THEM.

When the New York Times propagandist (‘journalist’) says that “The new blueprint includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression, as well as plans to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.” that is “security guarantees” by NATO or its member-nations, which would be equivalent to Ukraine being a NATO member, which woud mean continuation of there being in Ukraine, U.S. and other NATO weapons and personnel manning them, which would be exactly a violation of the first of those three minimal requirements from Russia. In other words: after all of this ‘negotiating,’ Trump has given up on NONE of the aggressive NATO/U.S. positions that had caused Russia to invade Ukraine oon 24 February 2022.

That statement’s usage of the phrase “Russian aggression” is alleging that Russia has no national-defense need to prevent a U.S. nuclear missile from becoming positioned in Ukraine a mere 300 miles away from blitz-decapitating Russia’s central command in the Kremlin. Only fools can believe that Russia has no national defense need to prevent a U.S. nuclear missile from being positioned so near to the Kremlin. It’s NOT “Russian aggression” that is the reality here; it is U.S.-and-allied aggression that is.

The NYT’s “the Kremlin appears to still believe it can gain more by fighting” is true, but for the exact opposite reason than that lying-machine propaganda agency alleges: the reason it’s true is simply that the aggressor is the U.S. empire, and that “The Kremlin” needs, for Russia’s national security, to defeat the U.S. empire in the battlefields of Ukraine, especially because Trump, just like Biden, won’t accept ANY of the three minimal requirements that Putin has consistently stated to be absolutely necessary. The U.S. and its allies will accept nothing less than Russia’s defeat and replacement by a U.S. stooge-regime there.

As for the lying-machine’s reporting that “The Russian economy is at its weakest point since 2022, with interest rates at record highs and growth rates dipping toward recession.”: Bloomberg News on 25 December 2025 headlined “Ruble’s World-Beating Rally Poses New Risk for Russian Economy”, and opened: “Russia’s ruble has outpaced every major currency against the dollar this year, a rally that caught policymakers off guard and threatens to undermine the nation’s wartime economy.

The ruble has strengthened 45% since the start of the year.” As regards the Bloomberg headline’s and story’s emphasis that the “Ruble’s World-Beating Rally Poses New Risk for Russian Economy,” so does EVERY change “pose new risk,” but the reality is that Russia’s economy is booming; and on 1 July 2024, the World Bank opened a news-report by “The World Bank Group assigns the world’s economies[1] to four income groups: low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high. The classifications are updated each year on July 1, based on the GNI per capita of the previous calendar year,” and then buried in that news-report “This year, three countries — Bulgaria, Palau, and Russia — moved from the upper-middle-income to the high-income category”; so, Russia’s economic performance was, even then, one of the world’s three best-performing. All of this was despite the U.S. empire’s anti-Russia sanctions, which have been causing the EU’s economies to be now steeply declining, as I had, on 28 September 2022, predicted they would, under the headline “How America Is Crushing Europe”, which explained how the imperial country, America, was already in the process of cannibalizing its European colonies, in order to prop up its own economic growth (which has been way below Russia’s for the entire period during which Putin has been leading Russia).

An empire that’s in decline needs to do a whole lot of lying in order to hide that fact from its public.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.