Americans have some sense of how close the world came to a large-scale nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But today’s lapdog press has failed to tell the public how close the deep state dragged us to the jagged edge of conflagration through its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Only after Joe Biden — and the autopen — left the White House last year did the New York Times tell some of the story. That account, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” drawn from hundreds of interviews with military and intelligence officials, revealed what the deep state tried to conceal: just how perilous the global American military empire’s proxy war with Russia became.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness.

The escalation of the empire’s provocations and Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine turned into a deadly pas de deux. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times reported. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”

Now the Times has provided another look — fresh evidence long withheld — of the deep state’s efforts to subvert the Nixon White House. The essay, “Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now,” by reporter James Rosen, details a 13-month Pentagon spying operation against Nixon’s National Security Council.

Bristling at “policies they abhorred” — including détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnamization, Nixon’s China opening, and a reduced military share of federal spending — the deep state went straight to work.

Under orders from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer and others, a Navy enlisted man spied on the National Security Council, rifling through Henry Kissinger’s and Alexander Haig’s briefcases and desks, copying and stealing classified documents. “Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into NSC wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized.”

In all, an estimated 5,000 documents were delivered to the top brass.

Nixon learned of the Joint Chiefs’ espionage. The newly revealed material is evidence that, as Rosen writes, “Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum.”

Many informed people know that the deep state panicked when John F. Kennedy tapped the brakes on the Cold War. Among some, it remains an article of faith that his peace initiatives led to his assassination. In the Nixon case, Rosen writes, the lead federal investigator said what he was uncovering felt like “Seven Days in May,” the novel and film about a coup to stop a president pursuing détente.

It’s a mistake to think the deep state belongs only to history — to figures like Allen Dulles, the CIA chief who helped lead the subversion of Kennedy, or the Pentagon brass in this new Nixon account, or, even more recently, to John Brennan at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom lied to Congress about deep-state activities.

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Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Without number are the lesser officials and petty bureaucrats who serve the deep state. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer in Trump’s first term, is one such. Instrumental in the effort to impeach Trump, Vindman testified before Congress that he was alarmed that the president was “promoting a false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

The “views of the interagency”? What is an interagency? By what constitutional means and process of deliberation does it arrive at its consensus? Who are its members? Whom do they represent, and how are they selected? Is there a vote — secret or otherwise? By whom? Does it require a plurality or a majority? Who profits from its decisions? Where can citizens find the rules by which it must abide?

By any other name, Vindman was talking about the deep state — which I detail in my new book, “Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole” — as the executive arm of the global American military empire. Operating without rules, it is, as Arthur Schlesinger described the CIA to Kennedy, “a state within a state.” Its only consensus is the growth of the empire.

Like the mythical Augean stable, the deep state is a foul mess of illegality, waste, and corruption that has lingered for decades. Tasked with cleaning it as one of his 12 labors, Hercules knew better than to try to clean it bit by bit, shovelful by shovelful. Instead, he diverted rivers to wash away the overwhelming mess in a day.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness. The renewal of our free and prosperous republic awaits a diversion from our imperial trajectory. It awaits America coming home — and ending its global military empire of lies.