“Russia will have won a Pyrrhic victory, and will forever be despised and vilified and condemned. And that is one thing Russians fear above all else: National humiliation. And they will have it.”
Certainly that will be true for many in the west.
But a significant minority in the west, and most everyone in the rest of the world will see:
- The US is not the exclusive hegemon
- NATO is fragile, feckless, hyperbolic and ineffective
- A powerful, willful nation can force them to back off
- There will be no external security arrangement for Ukraine except Russia, and they will forever be a Russian protectorate
- Politics via other means still works
- The US is the world’s most dominant, effective information warfare entity in the history of mankind
Realpolitik will be a difficult adjustment for the perfumed princes of the west. So they’ll continue to moralize while ignoring their real, essential interests:
- Energy independence
- Free development and flow of energy worldwide
- Free development and flow of all commodities worldwide
- Controlled, beneficial (to us) flows of finished products worldwide
- Advanced, capable and dominant defense
- All corners of the Pacific ocean
- Abrogation of the NATO treaty
It is very clear from your posting history that you are very pro-Russia, and you have pretty much nothing but contempt for the United States. Is it the country itself you so despise? Or is it just its current government?
Yet, on the other hand you call for the US to develop a dominant defense, including all areas of the Pacific Ocean. But you say nothing about the Atlantic, and even call for the abrogation of NATO. So, are we to abandon the defense of our eastern exposure, which is far more fragile than the western exposure because the Atlantic is nowhere near as vast as the Pacific, and there are vastly more nations to our east that can pose a threat, than there are to the west?