Dear polymaths, I can’t comprehend what I’m hearing:
The Right is being blamed for letting Russia roll into Ukraine?
Do I have that right?
I don’t watch Tucker Carlson, too early—but I keep hearing how he is being castigated on the Left because he does not advocate military intervention. Therefore he’s an ally of Putin!! Democracy’s #1 enemy!
Here’s de kicker:
Surely it’s BIDEN who is responsible for the US armed forces, who has decided on NO boots on the ground, economic sanctions only. Right?
Really, can anybody make sense of this? The party in power dithers, and the OTHER party gets blamed?
The left is like a black coworker (biden obama voter, trump hater) who’s life goes from one calamity to the next . Most all originating from some decision he has made. Every calamity is SOMEBODY ELS’S FAULT .
This is how the left has always functioned. The media reinforces my coworkers world view .
I missed the huge demonstration in my city today demanding Biden start a draft and send a million US conscripts to the Ukraine to fight to the death to protect the Ukrainian border. I drove around for ages, looking for this massive demonstration, but could not find it.
Then I woke up and looked outside. The city was quiet. Birds chirped. People shopped. Children giggled.
What neither side wants to admit is that the United States are completely irrelevant in this conflict. Nobody believes a country which cannot even manage a withdrawal after humiliating defeat in a twenty-year war is going to be able to project power into a ground conflict in Eastern Europe. But if the U.S. is irrelevant, then all sides in the U.S. advocating this or that policy are also irrelevant, and admitting that is an affront to their self-importance.
Here is a Gedankenexperiment to illustrate the irrelevance. Suppose everything was exactly as it is today except Ukraine had been admitted to NATO in September 2020. Then, the U.S. left would be blaming Russia’s invasion on provocation by the reckless, war mongering, Trump administration (probably, dragging out one of their favorite tropes, in order to provide puppet-master Putin a pretext to invade), and both sides would be arguing their own pretexts for defaulting upon NATO’s security guarantees, just as they have defaulted on the explicit guarantees made by the U.S. and U.K. in the Budapest Memorandum. Do you think Germany, Poland, or any of the Baltic states would start rolling their tanks and marching their troops to enter the conflict on their ally’s side?
Second Gedankenexperiment: what do you think will happen when Russia moves next on one of the NATO-member Baltic states? I’m sure there will the same outrage and crickets when it comes to concrete action.
What is most concerning about this situation is that Western politicians don’t seem to realize they are playing with fire.
Instead of the usual “International Community” reaction to a conflict of sending in negotiators and trying to broker some kind of cease-fire, our politicians are beating their chests, taking all kinds of financial/commercial aggressive actions again Russia, and planning to send weaponry into the Ukraine.
This is a situation which could so easily spin out of control. Western Europe is making itself Laos with respect to Vietnam. Bombs follow. Then maybe nukes.
The tough question we all need to be asking: Is getting the Ukraine into NATO the hill we are all prepared (quite literally) to die on?