Martin van Creveld published a short piece recently (link)
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Indeed! Things end up usually not as bad as we feared – nor as good as we hoped. Even so, I don’t like the prospect of something midway between global thermonuclear war and business as usual.
Notice that in an unusual display of bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicrats in the Federal House joined hands to vote down a motion to pull US forces out of the long-running war in Syria. (How many Americans even know we have been paying for a war in Syria for years?). Our “representatives” love war. That is the kind of straw in the wind which does not give us pessimists much room for hope.
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Thanks for that link gms. I should have gone looking for what MVC had to say as he’s one of the few “adults in the room” when it comes to geopolitics – which is to say he actually understand that politics is the continuation of war by other means aka advanced generations of warfare that – truth be told – revist ancient Chinese wisdom in The Art of War.
MVC writes: “Second, in the case of Europe in particular, because allowing Putin to retain at least some of his conquests would mean the end of the post-1945 world order which was based, if on anything at all, on the non-use of force in order to change borders.”
Too bad the West couldn’t have learned from the history of The Thirty Year: That its end required permitting people to assortatively migrate to provide border exclusion of ideological contamination under Cuius regio, eius religio to reduce religious pluralism. But then that might have required giving The Hitler His Due regarding The Transfer Agreement and by the end of WW II there were no adults in the room to craft a reasonable treaty. Given that reality, Patton was right and he was assassinated for it.
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The Western unipolar regime seems to be firmly planted on a trajectory of doubling down on conflicts of choice that are unencumbered by the thought process. Other than maximizing MIC profits… there was no upside for Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc… Now Ukraine. Cui bono?
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My guess remains that everyone involved has miscalculated.
US citizens thought they lived in a democracy, where the government has the best interests of the people at heart.
DC Swamp Creatures thought they could use the Ukraine to frighten Russia into a highly profitable (for Swamp Creatures) color revolution.
The hapless Ukrainians thought they could run an extended civil war against ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens without triggering a Russian intervention.
Russia thought that a token demonstration of force would cause the Zelensky regime to cry uncle, forgetting that the Zelensky regime is a mere puppet of the DC Swamp Creatures.
And now here we are, stuck in a morass with no clear way out.
Cui bono? – No-one, really.
What the world needs is for some European leader to emerge and cry “stop”. But it is hard to put “European” and “leader” in the same sentence.
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You miss a huge one. Dems sought to use the war to mask their destruction of the US economy.
How many times have you heard them blame inflation on “Putin’s illegal war”?
They reverse cause and effect. Oil was $36 before the 2020 election and essentially continuously increased for the more than 15 months until the war. Also natural gas. That run up gave Putin the financial reserve to go to war.
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Gm & CTLaw provided the best explanation yet that I’ve heard for what’s happening between Ukraine and Russia. Thanks for your expertise.
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While that is largely true, there are other important factors at work, completely ignored in the “news”. First, Russia - and by that I mean most of that nation, not just Putin - regards Ukraine as historically part of itself (if you are unfamiliar with the history, search “Kievan Rus”) going back a millennium; NATO ensconced on that particular border - after it already repeatedly broke its promise to move no further eastward after the collapse of the USSR - would be, to an objective observer, the equivalent of Soviet Missiles in Cuba: an existential threat.
Secondly, if you read Putin’s speeches, it is clear there is a civilizational aspect to this war, also seen as an existential threat (hell, it is an existential threat here!) and I believe Putin speaks not only for himself. He describes the moral decay and insanity in the west - amply documented here in “The Crazy Years” thread - and says, paraphrasing, “bless your hearts, do whatever you want, confuse men and women, etc. but we are not going there”. This suggests Russia will not go ‘woke’ any time soon. How pitiful that this woke insanity has actually captured all formerly trusted institutions, including the swamp in firm control of the US, hence NATO and Western Europe. If Americans were actually exposed to Russia’s point of view (and perhaps some of them can still think critically, despite public “education”), they might find this fight understandable and even in their long-term interest.
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“Blame my name on my raisin’
Blame my raisin’ on my name
Blame my lack of common sense
On a public education”
from It Ain’t My Fault by the Osmond Brothers.
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That’s the old saw: “Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.”
My rejoinder has always been: “Never attribute to sheer stupidity that which can be attributed to unenlightened self interest.”
Another way of saying this is to analyze the structure of evil in high places by understanding the way they use words like “hate” and “conspiracy theory”:
Hate the the reaction to insular power’s contempt for the powerless. This situation arises when insular power decries “conspiracy theorizing” when, in fact, people are merely noticing that malincentives result in self-organization of wide-spread patterns of behavior selecting for and thereby cultivating mere power seekers for positions of power – power seekers who then, because they lack the requisite ethics, fail to correct the malincentives that brought them to power.
This, my friends, is why I differ with Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran in their “10,000 year explosion”. I agree agriculture has cause dramatic changes in human evolution – but they fail to recognize just how malignant certain “civil” characteristics are.
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How deep is the Black Sea?
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He drives pretty well at night for an old guy with Parkinson’s disease.
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Mystery solved:
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February: shirt collar to hold in turkey neck; makeup; sleep.
The odd thing about the “body double” photos one sees is either they are basically too perfect or there is a huge gap. Nothing in between.
In the non-conspiracy theory world, the latter are the type often used to set up cameras. You don’t want to set up the camera and have it aimed three inches high and have the exposure set to make Putin look like a ghost. Or the type you put in the decoy limos when the motorcade has three limos.
This looks like the latter type:
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Isn’t there an old joke about the body doubles finding out about the assassination attempt on Stalin?
Yuri: “Grigoriy, did you hear about the assassination attempt on Comrade Stalin?”
Grigoriy: “Was he killed?”
Yuriy: “No. Worse. He was maimed.”
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It takes one to know one?
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He was there for a purpose.
If Biden fell backward, the double could catch him. Then they just digitally remove the real Zelensky from the footage. That kind of PR is at least worth 50 ATACMS.
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Seems like Putin should demand Switzerland declare war on Germany and offer to help.
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