You might not agree with an adversary, but you are a fool to dismiss his concerns.
Posted on 02/26/2022 5:15:07 AM PST by Kaslin
Let's begin with the obvious: Ukraine is toast. There is little or no chance that the country will be able to endure, given Russian military superiority. Thus, the Western “strategy,” such as it was, to tempt Ukraine progressively closer to NATO and the EU, all while shielding Ukraine against potential Russian aggression with (mostly idle) threats of “severe economic sanctions,” has failed, and spectacularly so!
The key question now is: what penalty will Russia pay for its impertinence, as the West sees it? And how long will it pay? Will sanctions be mild or severe? Will they last weeks, months, years, decades?
The U.S. and the West hesitated initially to place sanctions on Vladimir Putin personally. Moreover, Russia's access to the SWIFT banking system has not been curtailed. To me, though, the really important question is whether there will be any significant disruption to Russian oil and gas sales to the West. If there isn't – and early signs indicate that Russian sales of oil and natural gas will continue unabated – then Russia is likely to weather this storm just fine.
This (lily-livered) approach will minimize economic pain in the West, of course, by keeping energy costs down, but it will simultaneously send a clear message to Russia (and China) that the West's bark is worse than its bite. Simply put, we may pity those poor struggling Ukrainians, but we won't sacrifice our own material comforts to ease their plight. Not a chance.
It all makes you wonder what precisely we'd be willing to do if Putin marched into Warsaw or Riga (the capitals of NATO members Poland and Latvia, respectively)... The answer could well be: not much of anything! A sobering thought.
The fate of Ukraine, however, or even Poland or the Baltic states, is not, and never has been, of paramount importance to the U.S. and its key Western European allies. In the midst of the carnage in Ukraine, we should at least try to see the forest for the trees. Small, weak, impoverished nations are but playthings in the hands of the great powers. What's far more important than events in Kiev, therefore, is the long-term arc of relations between the U.S., Russia, and China – the world's three biggest powers, by far.
What we appear to be witnessing on that score is the rejuvenation of Cold War tensions between Russia and NATO, on the one hand, and increasing signs of an alliance between Russia and China, on the other – and both of these developments are highly troubling and hugely consequential.
Russia's intense jealousy of Western dominance has been evident at least since Vladimir Putin took the helm of state. China, though, seems recently to be no less aggrieved by U.S. and Western hegemony, as its peevish communiques about U.S. policy and even domestic affairs prove.
It's important to recognize, though, that Russia's estrangement from the West, and its marriage of convenience to Red China, are the result of a long series of high-handed and harebrained moves on the part of a succession of U.S. and European leaders. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, we treated Russia like a pariah and like a threat. During the Trump presidency, the Left went as far as to make Russophobia a fashionable trend, and it became de rigueur among the woke.
Russia, over many years, got the message: it would never be respected by the West or welcomed into NATO, the EU, or the global establishment. Simultaneously, Russia got clear signals from both the Trump and Biden administrations that, while the U.S. applauded Ukraine's shift towards the West, we would under no circumstances actively commit ourselves to the country's defense. The Western shield over Ukraine, in other words, was 80% rhetorical, 15% economic, and maybe 5% military – consisting of desultory shipments of armaments and supplies that would never come close to altering the balance of forces in the region.
The predictable consequence? Russia has seen these Western protestations and “guarantees” for what they are: a farce. It has thus invaded Ukraine, and, in the long run, it will reorient its economy and its military away from the West and towards a pact of some kind with communist China.
And China may, as some have suggested, learn a thing or two from this crisis about the rewards for military aggression, especially strategic and reputational, and about the pusillanimity of the West, that will make the world going forward a far more dangerous place. After all, if the West's response to a Russian invasion of “sovereign” Ukraine is this timid, how much more feeble would be our collective opposition to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which virtually the entire world recognizes as the rightful territory of the PRC?
All in all, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the events of the last days and weeks are highly injurious to U.S. national security and to the strategic posture of the West -- and that is doubly unfortunate, because almost everything that has happened in and around Ukraine, and between the swooning lovers Russia and China, is the result of U.S. and Western blunders.
There is, in the end, a strong argument to be made that, despite Russia's proprietorial attitude to its “near abroad,” the West and Russia ought not to be enemies at all. On the contrary, we are natural allies, based on our cultural and historic ties, against China, which promises to be the single greatest threat to the current, Western-dominated global order. Instead of circling our wagons and preparing to meet this unprecedented challenge, the West is reprising the essentially tribal rivalries and bloodletting that beset us, and our Russian cousins, during two world wars, and throughout the Cold War. A more congenial environment for the rise of communist China as a nascent superpower would be difficult to imagine!
A tantalizing opportunity has thus been lost – or, more accurately, squandered. Now, we and the Russians face a grim, uncertain future.
I am not convinced it was a mutually beneficial friendship given the corruption and connections to the Biden clown show and the Shillary cabal.
I see this way more as bad and bad and other than economic impacts pretty much a distraction, head fake to hide the other miseries the world globalists are thrusting on us.
You might not agree with an adversary, but you are a fool to dismiss his concerns.
bmp
Yea yea
NATO is an Imperialist organization. And it was convinced to be that by non other than Barrack Hussein Obama, the magic negro.
The NATO of old is dead. And it died in Libya. From that poin onward, Putin saw NATO as an aggressor power. And he is right about that but his response is dead wrong.
Because they do not understand history nor do they understand who Gadaffi was, he was the buffoon of the Arab world, an outcast, and he was a client of the USA, a peaceful one. Gadaffi’s sin was to offend the liberal fascist ideology on the treatment of women and his singular success at bringing his Arab culture and tribes into the modern era,The Great Man MAde River of the Desert was an 8th wonder of the worldm a miricle of hyrology, yet you hear nothing of its destruction nor the end of the greening of Libya’s Southern desert, ironically a demonstrative boon to Green New Deal advocates who lauded the destruction of something worthwhile to their cause, illustrating just how stupid greenies truly are. The Democrat Shadenfreude is overwhelming. You also do not hear of the fact that the entire Gold and Silver depository of Libya simply disaappeared into private hands, including Obama’s.
All of this is hidden by the fact that Gadaffi was a lose cannon radical in his earlier years, but he changed, and he was indeed a loyal supporter oif he USA who killed Muslim Brotherhood migratory jihadhists by the tens of thousands in Eastern Libya.He was so successful at countering the Muslim Brotherhod and Obama’s Arab spring that Obama had to get rid of Gadaffi, and Obama grifted NATO to get that done. That was essentially the end of NATO.
And now we see the result of a NATO in disarray, with the Germans going one way and the French the other.
Freepers who supported the invasion of Libya and still celebrate it today do not really understand the truth of what happened.They just see an Arab leader in extremis, sodomized with a stick and then executed with a pistol shot to the head. These freepers like that, the imagery exites them. Obama got his gold, destroyed the worlds foremost hydrology project resulting in starvation of thousands, deep thirst, and ending the Arab tribes of Libya back into the dark age, and clearing a path for the Muslim Brotherhood of Huma Abedin to descend into the heart of Africa and start killing and mainimg Christian people all the way from Nigeria to the Sudan and Egypt.
Thank you very much NATO.
Now that ass kicking of Libya is boomeranging right back on NATO. And Obama is sitting cool on his estate in Hawaii purchased with laundered Libyan gold, while pulling the strings of his Biden puppet in order to finish the Obama punishment of the Imperialist Powers of Europe for enslaving people of color around the world.How do you like that? Even Putin fell for the loong slow Obama grift, but he is also ending it.
Obama and his black nationalists socialists , true fascist BTW, want Russia and NATO to destroy themselves , so Obama and the Globalists can build their Brave New World. Soon China will come on board and control the entre Western Pacific Rim while we lose outr allies of Japan and South Korea, as well as Taiwan.
Biden is a Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.And America sits back watching without really knowing what is going on altogether.
We should be establishing a no fly zone over Western Ukraine from the Dneiper River to Ukraines Western border. But the NATO of old is gone. Killed in the shadow war created by Obama in Libya. NATO stands shivering in the anticipated dark of the loss of their winters heating gas and oil.No sanctions there , Buahahahahahaha!
Idiots.
Yup.
But this story begs the question:
“Friendship?????”
Holy cow, they’re desperate.
Yup.
But this story begs the question:
“Friendship?????”
Holy cow, they’re desperate.
Stolen elections have consequences.
FJB..FVP.
A great piece of Russian propaganda, care of our own Travis McGee. “Proletarians of the world, unite”, right, Travvie?
Which part is false?
Sure they are outmatched in terms of number of military in all the standard categories. But Ukraine is fighting for their homeland. If only 2 million Ukrainan men step up to fight in addition to their existing military, Ukraine will have more fighting men than the Russian military. If 8 million step up, they will dwarf them 3 to 1.
I don't think Ukraine really has to establish air superiority or naval superiority or win tank vs tank battles in which they are outnumbered. They can keep aircraft out of the air for fear of being shot down by missiles. And they can take out the tanks and armored vehicles by ground forces carrying missles. They can make it unsafe for any Russian soldier to leave his armored vehicle and make it unsafe for him to remain in his vehicle.
I think if the US and NATO keep supplying them with anti-tank missles, anti-aircraft missles and guns, they can destroy the Russian forces.
Russian forces are going to be spread thin in Ukraine. Ukraine can pick off tanks and aircraft for months. They may not be able to stop Russia from capturing any specific target, such as Kyiv.
But Ukraine can win this war. They can destroy much of the Russian army and send a remnant home to a much weakened and demoralized Russia.
Oil & Gas
Warm water port
Also as a safe space?
A safety cushion?
OK, fine.
Let all of the corrupt bastards fight it out.
The invading Mooselimbs will populate it all anyway.
“Europe” has always been just land divided by cleptocrats,
Not our fight.
Not our war.
No US lives.
Not my kids.
Not yours.
Sick of this shiite.
Freepers who supported the invasion of Libya and still celebrate it today do not really understand the truth of what happened.They just see an Arab leader in extremis, sodomized with a stick and then executed with a pistol shot to the head. These freepers like that, the imagery exites them. Obama got his gold, destroyed the worlds foremost hydrology project resulting in starvation of thousands, deep thirst, and ending the Arab tribes of Libya back into the dark age, and clearing a path for the Muslim Brotherhood of Huma Abedin to descend into the heart of Africa and start killing and mainimg Christian people all the way from Nigeria to the Sudan and Egypt.
—
Lets not omit the destruction in Libya of what would have been one of the Wonders of the World: the destruction of the Great Man-Made River.
No more wars for the globalists until we’ve cleared them from our Government and institutions. Singular focus on that. I’m not buying the need for another war. No way.
Actually, I think the only loss will be for the Biden Family. They lose that source of income. Ah, but they still have China.
We need to stop all foreign adventurism until we can save our Republic. It would be the height of insanity to go to war with Russia to save “Democracy” in the Ukraine when our own country is figuratively burning. Let’s go spend blood and treasure for the globalists, right Chainie?
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