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Remember last year when the NATO nations had a road-to-Damascus moment? It seemed that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had awakened the West from its “new world order” dogmatic slumbers, with scenes of death and devastation from a past we thought we had exorcised with the end of the Cold War.
In response to Russia’s attack, last year the air was filled with pledges of military support for Ukraine and blustering denunciations of Putin. Skimpy defense budgets and “postmodern” foreign policy idealism were over. Columnist Michael Barone announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine.” And according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.”
Lately the “turning point” seems to have stopped turning, as the conflict in Ukraine heads for a long, bloody slog, with no resolution in sight. What many thought would be a triumphal confirmation of the “rules-based international order” has instead seen the return of the repressed foreign policy realism dominated by national self-interest.
French president Emmanuel Macron, for example, besieged by riots and protests over a proposal to raise the retirement age, recently visited China’s autocrat Xi Jinping, in a failed attempt to distance Xi from Putin, though he successfully secured a contract worth billions of Euros. He also called for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. regarding China’s threats to Taiwan, and to avoid the “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours” and ends up “taking our cue from the U.S. agenda.”
The diplomatic confusion and bluster about Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy” raised questions about NATO “unity.” It seems calm with China is more important than upholding the “rules-based international order.” In that case, as Senator Marco Rubio said, if Europe doesn’t “‘pick sides’ between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either [on Ukraine].”
A more significant blow to the renewed martial vigor of NATO was the Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by a recently arrested intelligence operative serving with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. If the intelligence is accurate, our public confidence that Ukraine can stop Russia and recover some of its occupied territory is shaky. That “explains the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Moreover, the Journal continues, Ukraine in a few months will deplete its stock of Buk and S-300 air defense missiles along with similarly dwindling ammunition stocks. As a result, according to the leaked intel, “most of Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure outside the Kyiv region and two other areas in southwestern Ukraine will no longer have air-defense cover. The number of unprotected critical sites will soar from six to more than 40.” In that case, it’s hard to see a Ukrainian counter-offensive that can push the Russians back, let alone liberate occupied territory.
Obviously, such facts, again if accurate, challenge the exuberant optimism we’ve heard from some politicians and foreign policy mavens over the last 14 months. This also means we the people haven’t been getting a fully accurate picture of the conflict on which we’ve spent multiple billions in cash and materiel.
These recent developments, however, merely expose the fissures and problems within the West that have long vitiated its foreign policy idealism. From the start of Russia’s invasion, much of the rhetoric and new-found martial spirit was less consequential than it sounded. Last month the Washington Post highlighted the gap between feel-good rhetoric and promises, and the sober facts.
According to the Post, those facts show “that for all its wealth, industrial might and sophistication, the [NATO] bloc remains benumbed, oblivious to its sclerotic arms production incapacity and content to continue outsourcing its mounting security needs to the United States. Together they reflect Europe’s cognitive dissonance on security and should amplify the alarm bells set ringing” by Russia’s invasion. . . . “Yet Europe has left unaddressed the corrosive, longer-term problem of defense industries in most E.U. countries that were left to atrophy after the Soviet Union’s collapse more than three decades ago, and today remain supine.”
Typical is Germany’s performance, despite its pledges and talk of a “turning point” from its virtual pacifism and failure to spend enough on its military, despite being the fourth richest economy in the world and pledging to spend $100 billion in defense spending over four years. But Germany, the Post writes, “has been incapable of jump-starting military industrial production on a timeline suited to Ukraine’s dire needs. Although a third of the funding promised by Mr. Scholz has been earmarked, none has so far been spent. That reflects assembly lines that have withered for more than 30 years and a bloated bureaucracy that has contributed to procurement bottlenecks and thwarted years of attempted reforms meant to speed reviews and approvals.”
The NATO nations’ failure to carry their weight on defense has been a problem long before Donald Trump called them out, to the consternation of the bipartisan “rules-based order” champions. But even the Post highlights Europe’s decades of free-riding: “The United States represents about 54 percent of the combined gross domestic product of NATO’s 30 member countries, but accounts for 70 percent of its total defense spending. Besides the United States, whose defense spending is roughly 3.5 percent of GDP, only the United Kingdom, Poland, Greece and the Baltic states exceed the 2 percent threshold, which all the members agreed they would reach by next year.”
Finally, the challenge of Russia’s invasion reflects the decades of idealistic foreign policy, one of the center-pieces of which has been the assumption that the whole world, with its complex diversity of ethnicities, customs, cultures, histories, and faiths want to be just like us: liberal-democratic, secular, consumerist, peaceful, personally free, tolerant of minorities, egalitarian, and believers in human rights for all.
That assumption has been challenged over and over for a century, and is today exposing the weakness of our arrogance. The non-Western world has not rallied around the West to confront and roll back Russia’s adventurism. Most nations in the world are not sending weapons to Ukraine, nor have joined in sanctions against Russia, or stopped trading with it. Like India and Brazil, the 7th and 9th largest economies in the world, many nations have for a while been moving closer to autocratic Russia and China, rather than bandwagoning with the West.
There are several reasons for this shift, but one of the most critical is the West’s “zero-carbon” energy policies that threaten the developing world’s efforts to raise their peoples’ standards of living. That improvement depends on the cheap fossil fuels that the West developed and exploited to become rich and powerful. Nor do these nations appreciate scolding lectures about “climate change” or genetically modified organism or synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that have made the West so well fed that it has turned obesity, once the affliction of kings and nobles, into a disease of poverty.
Such Western “green” sermons, along with our hypocrisy, are alienating some of our allies like India. This January, its Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar suggested that many non-Western nations are looking for an alternative partner. Pointing out that Europe has imported six times the fossil fuel energy from Russia that India has done, he said, “So if a $60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take a hit.”
Such friction among allies and friendly nations are normal. Our foreign policy weaknesses come from bad ideas, especially the idealism that drives our de facto assertions that the West’s political order is the default one for the whole world. There’s no doubt that millions of people from all over the world have voted for the West with their feet, and continue to do so. Yes, they come for a better life, but also political freedom and equality which are attractive to people of every ethnicity. But that doesn’t mean everybody wants to live that way, no matter how much they want the prosperity and material abundance the West enjoys.
Our failure of imagination that makes us think that what we consider illiberal or authoritarian governments cannot be legitimate, obscures the fact that millions of people believe it can, and that they don’t want Western freedoms and rights that give scope to behaviors and actions that many in the world find corrupt and destructive of their identities. Yet we sometimes don’t accept that truth, and dismiss it as an ethnocentric or racist slur.
But as New York Times’ columnist Ross Douthat recently pointed out, “Some liberal hawks might like to believe that the challenge of illiberalism is primarily a challenge of regimes imposed on unwilling populations — that Middle Eastern, African and Central Asian elites are favorable to Russia and China because they want to imitate their ruthless mode of rule but that the inhabitants of these countries would be in the liberal camp if only the boot came off their neck.”
Yet data Douthat references from the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy report on “trends in global public opinion,” suggest this is not the case. “It doesn’t just show,” Douthat writes, “that non-Western mass opinion is favorable to China and Russia. It also shows an index of socially liberal values (measuring secularism, individualism, progressive ideas about sex and drugs and personal freedom) worldwide across the past 30 years. What you see in the chart are high-income democracies becoming steadily more liberal since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there is hardly any change in the values of the rest of the world, no sign that social liberalism is taking hold outside of countries where in 1990 it was powerful already.”
This failure to acknowledge the diversity of the world’s peoples and their fundamental beliefs about government, social mores, religion, and political violence, has led to the “rules-based international order” based on Western ideals assumed to be the default destiny of the whole human race. So rather than determine our foreign policy on what contributes to our national security and interests, we go off searching for monsters to destroy.
We don’t know how the Russian invasion will turn out, but all the “new world order” cheerleading will not make a material difference, especially if the leaked intel is accurate and we haven’t been told the truth about where the conflict stands. But we should never forget that, as George Washington said, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.”
Thanks Bruce, nice article.
C’mon man, he’s asking questions not giving answers or blaming Trump. What’s good about that?
Mr. President! Mr, president!
I just wanted to thank you for your courage in targeting parents at schoolboard meetings!
I was so frightened by that father making such a big deal over his daughter getting raped.
(I had scuttled the rapist off to a different school! What more did that right-winger want!!??)
Our policy is for protecting the right of male perverts to enter girls bathrooms, and parents are interfering!
We had that uppity father arrested, and with the FBI having our backs, we can now target & harass other parents that get in our way!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
It was obvious from day one that Ukraine couldn’t win this war and repulse the Russian invasion and without the West’s ludicrous support then the war would have been over within about six weeks with a pragmatic partition and those areas in Donbass with a pro Russian majority annexed to Russia . The Russians also needed a corridor to the Crimea
But now our idiotic leaders have turned a regional war into a proxy war between Russia and the West , and for no good reason as we lack a single vital national interest at stake in the most corrupt country in Europe
Russia is a ”Great Power” and Great Powers have spheres of influence . As such they don’t want NATO camped out on their borders in a similar way the US would never tolerate Mexico joining a hostile military alliance . Russia is not Serbia, or Irak or Libya FFS .. it’s a super power with over 5K Nukes
The West are collapsing and the war in Ukraine is acting as a catalyst and speeding it up , insomuch, they have driven Russia and CHina into an alliance of sorts and it’s only a matter of time before they develop their own trading bloc with an alternative currency to the petro dollar . THEN WHAT ?
100% correct. Because of Biden’s catastrophic foreign policy blunders, we now have the worst possible consequence for us and the rest of the free world; Xi Jinping allied with Putin to remove the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Now Russia will sell all the oil it wants to China (and India) and they will trade in rubles and the Yuan. Then China made deals with the Saudis and Brazil who will also trade in the Yuan. Biden also pissed off the French and Germans by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline (even though they won’t dare say anything) and so now France is even cozying up to Xi and NATO is fractured. If enough countries stop trading in the dollar we will collapse and become defunct and nobody seems to be paying attention.
And so now we just learn in classified documents (what most of us knew already) that Ukraine is badly losing the U.S. proxy war against Russia in spite of the 120 Billion totally unaccountable taxpayer dollars and weapons we have sent to the corrupt Ukrainian government and its dictator, Zelenskyy. And we also learned that there ARE U.S. troops and/or special forces in Ukraine and when one of them is killed we will launch into a “hot war” with Russia.
So now the only question is which will come first. Economic collapse or war with Russia?
Yep, I came to the same conclusion, insomuch, what comes first ? economic collapse or war with Russia that will mean they Nuke us
When Ukraine collapses , IF, the idiotic West convince themselves to intervene to avoid a ”humanitarian disaster” then Russia will simply put a nuke on Ramstein AFB and the concentration of US troops in southern Rumania …THEN they will simply dare us to respond while pointing out that the next nukes go onto New York and London
Our leaders will simply dissolve in a puddle of self pity , leaving Putin to dictate terms ; and that’s how Russia wins WW3 in about three days !
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 1
“It was obvious from day one that Ukraine couldn’t win this war and repulse the Russian invasion ”
I disagree, and in particular it’s worth determining how we define “win this war.”
If we’re talking about forcibly ejecting the Russian military from everywhere in Ukraine and driving them back to Russian territory, then yes that probably was never in the cards (though I do think people shouldn’t write it off quite as heavily as they do, given the Russian Military’s missteps in Chechnya and similar situations with Serbian forces in Croatia).
But if we’re talking about maintaining control of most of the country and slowly whittling down Russian capacity and war to resist until they eventually withdraw and leave their local proxies to their fates like we saw with both the Soviets and ourselves in Afghanistan, then that is quite a realistic possibility. After all, the Afghan guerillas were far less powerful than the Ukrainian military and generally more dysfunctional, and even Pakistan was less conventionally powerful than Ukraine.
Strategically, Ukraine is quite similar to Poland in the years after WWI, and Poland was indeed capable of weathering the storm of Bolshevik invasion (as well as a host of other problems including border wars with Germany and Czechoslovakia) and emerging victorious with Western support.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 2
“and without the West’s ludicrous support then the war would have been over within about six weeks ”
What part of history or recent events made you think that? Because even when I thought there was a middling chance the Russian military would take Kyiv in the first days and weeks I was never naive enough to think the war “would have been over within about six weeks.” It had been going on for nearly a decade, after all.
The reason why Bandera and “Banderistas” loom so large in Russian nationalist mythology and propaganda has less to do with Bandera’s toxic ideology or his atrocities (Though both are evident) and still less to do with his being a Nazi Collaborator (which he was up until 1941, at which point the Nazis betrayed him and tried to wipe his followers out, at which point they took to the underground again). It has to do with the fact that he ran a Ukrainian Nationalist guerilla movement cum terrorist organization limited mostly to Galicia that fought the Soviet Empire and later its new puppet dictatorships (with the Nazis and Polish Home Army) for a full decade. In SPITE of Bandera and his movement’s many crimes, the destructive civil war he had with his rival Melnyk’s supporters, his alienation of the public by atrocities against civilians, and inability to make much inroads into public opinion outside of Galicia.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 3
Before Bandera, Petliura was the main Ukrainian Devil of both Bolshevik and Russian Nationalist myth, and he lead an anarchic, decentralized warlord state fighting on multiple sides and with no solid allies, but still fought for about two years.
And before him there was Mazepa, who led many of the Cossack Sichs in revolt against Pyotr the Great and whose quick defeat would not have been conceivable had he not faced one of the most brilliant and ruthless leaders Russia has ever produced (and even then it took a couple years with the “Southern Wrath”).
What part of these stories made you think that Russia was in a position to win this fight in a matter of weeks, especially against an enemy that was more powerful and united than any of the aforementioned were?
And moreover, a look over at post-Soviet Space shows there was little reason to believe it. By far the most “successful” and “peaceful” of Russia’s conflicts in post-Soviet Space was Transnistria/Moldova, with active fighting limited to a few horrible months in 1992 ended by the Russian Army wading in openly, defeating the Moldovans, and threatening to bombard their capital. And even then “peace” has consisted of tense, bitter staring and negotiations, with the Russian government’s mouthpieces like Kadyrov talking about further partitioning Moldova.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 4
But that’s the very best track record. Every other one is bloodier and worse. Georgia has been in an ugly state of communal balkanization and civil war since 1992, and while the pro-Russian factions have won every major conflict in it that has done little to actually cement peace or end skirmishing on the frontiers.
Chechnya broke away in the early/mid 1990s and was reabsorbed with heroic and horrifying effort in the late 1990s, and terrorist actions and guerilla movements fighting the Russian government and its loyalists (some of them are even volunteers fighting in Ukraine). And even that was only possible as a result of a devil’s bargain where Putin vassalized the Kadyrovites and gave them vast power and impunity in Chechnya, to the point where they have turned the place into a semi-independent Islamist dictatorship that does things like persecute Christians, in essence becoming much like Dudayev’s dictatorship but with thin lip service towards loyalty to Moscow.
And then there was Crimea and the Donbas itself, where the Russian military launched limited invasions of Ukraine with some unknown level of local support, and while they quickly took over Crimea due to the element of surprise they faced stiff resistance in the Donbas, leading to them being stopped and pushed back, resulting in an ugly 8 year stalemate.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 5
In short, there really was no reason to believe that without Western support the war in Ukraine would have ended within about six weeks, especially when comparing it to the track record. And while I have boundless loathing for Brandon, it’s telling that much of the early aid he sent was geared towards Partisan war, because apparently even the cloying leftist ideologues in his cabinet could look at a basic history of the region and war and realize that even in the event of a conventional Russian military victory, this was going to result in a nasty, long guerilla war.
“with a pragmatic partition and those areas in Donbass with a pro Russian majority annexed to Russia .”
You seem to have an interesting fixation with “pragmatic partition” as a panacea to crisis, given how often you have proposed it for the US. There’s a big problem with this though. Zelenskyy was on the record offering a pragmatic partition through plebiscites in the Donbas (the exact same metrics used to resolve or at least settle many similar disputes). And while he took significant domestic flak from his domestic opponents for that, the Kremlin didn’t even deign to reply.
Moreover, a cursory look at similar cases in the “Near abroad” like Georgia indicates such partitions are unlikely to lead to a lasting or stable peace.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 6
” The Russians also needed a corridor to the Crimea”
No, no they did not. Indeed, they did not even need Crimea at all when they had a chance to negotiate for it in the 1990s. They do however badly want Crimea, in spite of their legal obligations and agreements (such as they were) signed through the 1990s and the interests of many of those there (such as the Crimean Tatars, who have their own issues but are still the set of colonists on the peninsula that have been there the longest).
The problem is that such demands were never likely to be popular. They weren’t in 2014-2015 when Putin etc. al.’s attempt to float a second version of the Novorossiyan concept pioneered by Yakaterina the Great collapsed under the weight of staunch loyalist resistance and lack of public sentiment even among ethnic Russians and Russophones in Ukraine, and made worse after seeing years of misrule by the distant bureaucrats in Moscow managing Crimea, to say nothing of the assorted warlords ruling the Donbas like Girkin.
And even the open deployment of the Russian military to carve a path there has not helped consolidate Russian control or sympathy there, as shown by the ongoing guerilla war and the Kherson offensive.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 7
I’ll also note how the last two “Pragmatic Partitions” of Ukraine Proper ended up. The first being the tentative settlement caused y the Union of Pereyaslav between the Cossacks and Moscow in the 1650s and the Treaty of Andrusovo between Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanians in 1667, where Russia and Poland split the region almost down the center along the Dnieper.
This led to an era charmingly nicknamed “The Ruin” in which proxy wars, violent anarchy, and changing allegiances turned the large scale but previously somewhat orderly conflicts into the region into a bloody, irregular quagmire that only really “ended” with an “Eternal Peace Treaty” in Moscow in 1686 that lasted half a century.
In contrast, the traumas and horrors of the second “pragmatic partition” between Poland and the Bolshevik government in Moscow at the Treaty of Riga “merely” resulted in large scale dislocation and a decade and a half of border wars culminating in Stalin annexing the rest of the region in alliance with Hitler, but it set the stage for the Ukrainian Holodomor and massive ethnic cleansing of both Poles and Ukrainians, chiefly by Soviet central planners focused on creating a new border with blood.
In short, what we might label as “pragmatic partitions” are often much, much less pragmatic to the people that actually have to live with them. They also tend to be much less enduring and lasting, as the failures of Minsk I and Minsk II attest.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 8
“But now our idiotic leaders have turned a regional war into a proxy war between Russia and the West , ”
This is inverting reality on its head. While both the West and Russia had been competing for influence and power in Ukraine pretty much since independence, However, it was Putin who doubled down by first strongarming Yanukovych out of even negotiations for an EU Association Agreement (in spite of how relatively popular this was even with his own base in the Donbas Rust Belt; I don’t like the EU but politics are supposed to be responsive, especially to common workers struggling to make ends meet in a depression) and then encouraging his worst instincts against the resulting protests (and later riots) by jamming through the Dictatorship Laws and employing lawless thugs like Berkut.
And when this blew up and saw Yanukovych’s own coalition members in the legislature turn on him, it was Putin who decided to start the war by invading. We can wax poetic about US policy and globalist scum like Obama, Soros, Nuland, and so on, and that’s worthy, but it was not they who turned this into a war.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 9
“and for no good reason as we lack a single vital national interest at stake in the most corrupt country in Europe”
Budapest 1994 begs to differ, and it’s easy to see why. Turns out that one of the world’s largest breadbaskets and an important maritime hub on the gets of Europe was always going to be rather important. And in any case, the US has an incentive to avoid authoritarian, anti-Western goon squads from rewriting borders with blood and seizing that which belongs to their neighbors by force (which is exactly what we saw here). We can and I think should disagree on how committed the US should be to that (and in particular the deranged demonization from the likes of Biden and co contrast handily with DeSantis recognizing the limits of our interests and Trump keeping the peace economically with limited support to Ukraine and pointed threats to – and occasional actions on – Putin). But that doesn’t mean the West should have bene happy with Putin publicly snubbing and humiliating them by starting the largest war in Europe since at least Yugoslavia, and on blatantly false premises.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 10
“Russia is a ”Great Power” and Great Powers have spheres of influence .”
But successful management of spheres of influence requires a hell of a lot more than raw brutality and arrogant demands. And it certainly doesn’t work when you can’t even sort out tariff disputes with your closest ally for *decades*, as has been the case between Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus. And if Russia keeps acting in this thuggish, brutal, and incompetent fashion while suffering from a decayed economy, demographic base that is even more rotted and hollowed than most nations in the decadent West, and creeping Islamist influence, it’s not going to be a Great Power for much longer, in the same way that the brutality and overreach of Ivan Groznoi led to Russia collapsing into civil war, foreign invasion, and balkanization while the indecisive follies of Nikolai II and Alix ended the Romanovs and helped usher in revolution.
“As such they don’t want NATO camped out on their borders”
As the Helsinki Final Accord and Astana underline, what they WANT only matters so much. It does not give them the justification to invade and partition their neighbors. If they don’t want nations to join NATO, they should try to diplomacy harder.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 11
Ironically, Ukraine was one of the cases where they had successfully done this up to 2014, with even the pre-invasion “Orange” Caretaker Government after Yanukovych having majority opposition to EU Membership and NATO membership. Ditto Armenia, which had aligned with Russia to protect it against Azeri and Turkish oppression. Notably, Putin’s invasion flipped Ukraine on its head and abuse and neglect have led to Kazakhstan and Armenia considering a flip away. Which goes back to how maintaining a Sphere of Influence isn’t a one way street and it isn’t something Great Powers can possess and maintain just by stomping their feet loudly.
” in a similar way the US would never tolerate Mexico joining a hostile military alliance .”
Why is it that those trying to justify or whitewash the Russian government’s actions in Ukraine always use the example of Mexico joining an anti-US alliance?
Cuba ACTUALLY HAS BEEN in a hostile military alliance for a half century, and as Humberto Fontova has pointed out in his articles here the Castros nearly plunged us into a nuclear world war. And yet the US response to that has been much more muted than it has been. And has any Russian government accepted the other side of the premise you foist and allow the Castros to be deposed by the US? Hahahah No.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 12
Likewise is the case for Chavista Venezuela and Sandinista Nicaragua, where the domestic American left has often cheered on leftist tyrants joining with the West. The idea that the US would react exactly as Putin has doesn’t work. It is easy to contradict by simply studying history.
You’d be hard pressed to see anything of this scale in even the high points of US Imperialism in its own “Near Abroad” under the Monroe Doctrine. And even in the cases that come closest to it such as the US invasion that helped secure Panama’s secession from Colombia, the US never formally the independent existence of Colombia or the Colombian people.
” Russia is not Serbia, or Irak or Libya FFS .. it’s a super power with over 5K Nukes”
And a rotting economy and demographics that are actually less healthy than Iraq and Libya were.
And threats to use nukes ad infinitum start running dry when you realize that A: It’s hard to pacify and rule by nuking everything, and B: The US is also a superpower and has nukes, and is generally in a better position. It has LGBTQ+ derangement but it doesn’t have terminally broken birth rates. It has Islamist local governments but it doesn’t have an Islamist State-within-a-State openly ruling over a constituent state of the Federation. Can you imagine how ecstatic the Omars would be to have Kadyrov’s power?
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 13
In any case, the US should hardly let itself be treated worse than Russia is, and shouldn’t take kindly to Putin’s lieutenants openly threatening invasion or nukes not just on Ukraine but even on some of the US’s most trustworthy allies like Poland.
“The West are collapsing ”
Sure, but most of it is collapsing it at a rate less than that Russia is.
“and the war in Ukraine is acting as a catalyst and speeding it up ,”
See above. Which just makes it more egregious that Putin has started it.
” insomuch, they have driven Russia and CHina into an alliance of sorts ”
Oh please. This is no news. Mark Steyn and others were pointing out the CCP-Kremlin Alliance in the early 2000s, and doing so accurately. Indeed, the meetings they held in and around Sochi and elsewhere in the winter of 2013-2014 helped cement the alliance and saw them both pledge to greater cooperation. It also is probably safe to assume it helped pave the war for the invasion of Ukraine months later.
In the end, blaming the Kremlin-CCP marriage on the war in Ukraine is reading history backwards and trying to blame US policy (which under the left has PLENTY to blame) for something that Putin preferred to do all along.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 14
“and it’s only a matter of time before they develop their own trading bloc”
They already have. Turns out that it’s starting to break down, since even the other BRICS members have hesitation.
” with an alternative currency to the petro dollar ”
Firstly: The “Petro Dollar’ is overhyped hot air that’s trying to ignore the desirability of the USD (even in its current state) compared to nakedly manipulated zombie currencies like the Ruble and Yuan for trade. It is a symptom of US success, not its cause (as showing the evolution of the oil markets show).
Secondly: They already have “an alternate currency to the Patro Dollar.”
And they’ve continued to sizzle and pop. The CCP Courted the Saudis but even with Biden’s follies alienating them further the Saudis hmmed and hawed and said “No thanks” about pricing oil in Yuan. The Kremlin’s attempts to force people to do business with them in Rubles have been mediocre, especially outside their larger existing business partners like India.
A lot of people don’t realize it given the antics with the Federal Reserve and Modern Monetary Theory and the egregious inflation, but the USD is *still* one of the stabler and better managed major currencies, not just now but in world history. Which says less about it than how weak most of the competitors are.
@Banastre Tarleton
Part 15
As for “What Then”? I don’t know. Chief focus needs to be on reclaiming the West, starting by trying to reclaim and purge the halls of power, or at least establishing STABLE fallback positions (“Covadongas” if you will, after where the Spanish Christians that would not be Dhimmis fled in the face of the Caliphate’s invasions) to ride out the collapse and pick up the pieces. Strange as it may seem for someone who proudly identifies as a Cold Warrior and has vast contempt and hatred for the Kremlin and the CCP, but America must come first and we need to prize our own interests above those. If those interests come at the expense of Ukraine, so be it.
But that doesn’t mean that determining how far we on the right are willing to support Ukraine (preferably covertly) and then doing so to punish and humiliates Putin and the other Pro-Beijing Kremlin Hawks and their Islamist allies like the Kadyrovites won’t help. it might even help deter the Kremlin or Beijing from trying any other funny business as they struggle through Bakhmut, or – even under the best of circumstances – struggle to deal with the host of partisans that’d pop up even if they actually won the conventional war.
The US is a superpower and should act like that. Part of that involves not suffering nonsense from hostile rivals readily.
At least four peace treaties has been agreed regarding Donbass. Ukraine fled from them all. November 2019 Zelenski initiated talks with Putin, ending in signing the Steinmeyer Formula, which would have solved the underlying problem in Donbass. It was stopped by violent uprisings in Ukraine, initiated by “veterans” and militias.
in 2022 Russia invited to talks ending the conflict at least four times, all of them refused by the US and Zelinskij. And what is the US doing in central Europe? Haven’t the US enough problems to solve at home?
I conjecture that by “idealism” Bruce Thornton probably means not decades but more than a century of American Judeo-Christian altruism and self-sacrifice. Onward altruistic, self-sacrificing, Christian soldiers we must make the world safe for democracy. The roots of collectivism, socialism, and globalism are to be found in Judaism and Christianity.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” – Richard M. Salsman
“Holy Scripture and the Welfare State” – Richard M. Salsman
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=44d99aac24f2
Part 1
“I conjecture that by “idealism” Bruce Thornton probably means not decades but more than a century of American Judeo-Christian altruism and self-sacrifice.”
Once again THX responds to arguments and concepts they do not like addressing by jamming them in to familiar Strawman.
Sorry but no. While Thornton doubtless IS Partially drawing on Judeo-Christian altruism, that is obviously not all or even the primary concept he was drawing on. Even a cursory look at the concept of a “Common Peace” dating back to the Pagan, Pre-Christian Classical Greeks (who you claim to admire and study so much) should demonstrate that diplomatic idealism and multilateralism well predates the mortal birth of a certain Galilean Carpenter.
” The roots of collectivism, socialism, and globalism are to be found in Judaism and Christianity.”
I’ve already thoroughly destroyed this incoherent, bigoted gibberish before. I don’t need to do it again. But any idiot trying to claim that “the roots of collectivism, socialism, and globalism are to be found in Judaism and Christianity” has VERY OBVIOUSLY not studied pre-Jewish antiquity and the assorted Proto-Socialist “Palace Economies” and Universal Empires of the Bronze Age.
Anybody on Earth who thinks that the roots of collectivism, socialism, and globalism lie with Judaism and Christianity would be corrected by even a cursory examination of the administrations of the Akkadian Empire and Qin China.
@THX 1138
Part 2
Take for instance this
“I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, on whom the gods have bestowed intelligence, who has acquired penetrating acumen for the most recondite details of scholarly erudition, none of my predecessors having any comprehension of such matters, I have placed these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh for my life and for the well-being of my soul, to sustain the foundations of my royal name.”
Does this sound familiar to anybody? If you modified the language slightly and changed the names, would this really be so out of character for the likes of Barack Obama or Klaus Schwab in their proclamations that “they”/”The science” have “acquired consensus for the most pressing concerns and fine details of the natural world”? Does this not sound like it could be a precursor to the Kyoto Agreement or some dedication of the Joe Biden Presidential Library?
No? really?
And all this at a time when the Jews did exist, but were one tribal confederation among many clinging to the “edges of the world” and of little concern to Ashurbanipal.
@THX 1138
Part 3
So the collectivist, globalist impulses are very, VERY deeply woven into history, and Christianity and Judaism did not cause them. Indeed, they often stood against them by contradicting the power of mortal rulers to be “King of the Universe” and Dante’s blathering about Universal Monarchy and how the Holy Roman Emperor would be the “Lamb of God” made him look like a learned fool even to said Emperor..
But all of that would go well beyond Peikoff’s often-inaccurate Cliffs Notes, so you simply don’t pay attention to it.
Altruism and self-sacrifice are considered “idealistic” by secular socialists, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Altruism and self-sacrifice are considered the highest moral ideal by almost every American and almost every person in the world.
Selfishness, self-interest, and self-preservation are considered, evil, immoral, cowardly, at the very least un-ideal and inferior to altruism and self-sacrifice by almost every American and person on the planet.
“Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code….
The socialists had a certain kind of logic on their side: if the collective sacrifice of all to all is the moral ideal, then they wanted to establish this ideal in practice, here and on this earth.” – Ayn Rand
February 24, 2022. Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh. Emphasized U.S. foreign policy would be driven by who could ” tell a better story”. Ultimately, the goal of our sanctions is to make this a strategic failure for Russia; and let’s define a little bit of what that means. Strategic success in the 21st century is not about a physical land grab of territory that’s what Putin has done. In this century, strategic power is increasingly measured and exercised by economic strength, by technological sophistication and Your Story – who you are, what your values are; can you attract ideas and talent and goodwill? And on each of those measures, this will be a failure for Russia. This is the strategy leading our foreign policy. The majority of the strategic geopolitical world doesn’t operate on these western constructs of feelings and sensitive values. The world is a construct of individual nations looking out for their own self-interest. A NATO alliance strategy based on fiction, women defense ministers, fictitious images, wokeism as a military priority, diversity, equity,feelings and a worldview that is transparently silly. As Mike Tyson said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” This is from Sundance at the conservative treehouse. He calls it World War Reddit.
No nation needs to be trusted further than its interests but what are the interests?
Long, bloody slog you haven’t done since Vietnam without Walter Cronkite deciding it was so over for you. Long, bloody slog you aren’t bleeding for but the concern is you might.
I mean there was Iraq but the media already decided that farce before you departed,
And that’s how to understand the complete phoniness of the phoney right. Completely unable to divorce themselves from the media which they constantly echo and amplify in opposition. Never able to find a leader that doesn’t amplify the same. No direction. No path.
Ukraine is looking like a serious liability people, and we already spent gazzillions which is all we know how to do lately.
Let’s just get Ukraine over. We’ll really fight China with Trump dump.
We’re looking at a potential WWIII people.
We don’t countenance things that could actually swing the conflict like expertise, equipment, resolve or material. What we countenance are things we relate to like massive expenditure, media moralising and corruption. All dollars spent are cheap to promote those ends.
There are only outcomes in Ukraine. China will not care how clever Americans think they are by avoiding even the outside possibility of involvement. Just like they don’t care how America rationalises their acquisition of Afghanistan after over 2000 US casualties.
2000 casualties and all there is to show for it is Biden in the Oval Office with a stupid grin.
Ukraine is a Western war. The West has been feebly hiding behind the backs of the fighting Ukrainians avoiding properly fighting and fully, timely supplying the war effort.
If and when Ukraine loses, the West loses too and Russian goals include Poland, the Baltic states and eventually Ireland. Since Peter the Great it is said the Russians spent 300 years conquering and absorbing their neighbors at a rate of 50 square miles per day – a land area exceeding the 48 states.
The Russians have been exposed as a paper tiger. If Ukraine loses the West will have been exposed as a paper tiger too.
Then what?
“It is the MINKS ACCORDS, of 2014 and 2015 which were guaranteed by Germany,France,Russia and approved of by………………the UNITED NATIONS. Peace accords,that is idealism.
The Donbass militia agreed to it,it promised respect for the Russian language,that is idealism.And autonomy,idealism.”
And as quickly became clear, the various Donbas Militias proceeded to violate the agreement systematically, especially in terms of heavy artillery presence in the area and respect for the Ukrainian language. So unsurprisingly what officially claims to be idealism often is a mask for cynicism and “realism.”
Which is fair enough.
“You forgot to say that recently POROSEHKO,then president of Ukraine, and MERKEL,then ruler of Germany,and also HOLLANDE,then president of France,has publicly, themselves said their signing of the Minsk Accords was a sham,not intended to be kept.”
Got any evidence for that? Because I’ve seen them admit it was meant to buy time (which it obviously was) but not that it was a “sham” or “not intended to be kept.”
Especially if you study the contemporary chatter around the time, which labeled the Minsk Accords as “Stillborn” (which they were) with great disappointment.
But even if true, the mapping of “Separatist” artillery shows that lack of conviction or intent in Minsk was not limited to the Kremlin’s enemies.