Posted on 02/22/2022 8:29:55 AM PST by Rummyfan
Fears over over Vladimir Putin’s threatened invasion of Ukraine continue to grow despite the fact that the effort would burst both Russia’s military and economy, not to mention ruining its foreign relations. Swallowing a poison pawn makes so little sense that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says Russia’s Putin may be “irrational,” unable to act in his own best interests. Yet it is not only the Kremlin’s behavior that has a bizarre feel to it. Despite decrying the seriousness of the situation, Western governments aren’t obviously readying for a European conflict. Instead they are focusing on masks, mandates and invoking war powers to force truckers to comply with soon to be abolished Covid vaccine requirements. One would think the southern border would be secured, oil stockpiled, and STEM not CRT taught in reopened schools. But none of this is happening.
Perhaps as in so many cases in history the bite is in the bark; and in this case the bark is quite real. Putin has created an “invasion-in-being.” In naval warfare, the analogous concept of a “fleet in being” is a force that projects menace without ever leaving port. Were it to fight it might lose and no longer influence but while it remains in port, one is forced to guard against it. “The German battleship Tirpitz served her entire career as a ‘fleet in being’ in her own right. Although she never fired a shot at an enemy ship, her mere presence in the Norwegian fiords forced the Royal Navy and their allies to allocate powerful warships in defending Arctic convoys, and caused a major convoy [PQ 17] to scatter, suffering huge losses, mainly to U-boats and aircraft.”
Putin has been doing the same thing on land. His armies are essentially “in port” ...
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
This was the same strategy the USSR used in the Cold War. Look for weaknesses and exploit them to try to expand communism.
Our response was the Truman Doctrine. Money and arms for any nation threatened by communism. It took time but it worked. Communism was bottled up in the Warsaw Pact. Cut of from the resources it needed to survive it collapsed in on itself.
But what doctrine is Russia trying to spread here, outside of the traditional Russian goals they’ve had since the days of The Tsar.
Communism was so insidiuous because there were many true believers who worked to destroy their countries from within. But that’s not what the Russians are selling this time around.
A good leader can turn this around in a month.
Unfortunately we don’t have a parliamentary system (and I’ve never felt that way before).
The main point is that Russia isn’t selling a thing. The West is saying what Russia should be like for “good” relations. Yet, it is allegedly a “threat” for liberal values.
Western Alliance? With who? Canada? UK? Germany, France or any of the other EU pukes? I feel no affinity of purpose with any of them, frankly. If I have any sympathy or feelings of commonality with any country that could loosely be described as ‘western’ it would be Poland or Estonia or one of the FSU countries.... and from the other side of the world, ANZAC? Not frigging hardly.
Iran and China are watching and salivating. Iran can just taste those nuclear warheads they’ve been wanting; Xi is looking at real estate in Taiwan.
Good point. Putin is selling the same message the Czars were for 300 years: that all Slavic nations have temporarily forgotten that they are really Russians.
Indeed. But the line of succession is now Harris and then Pelosi. That gives me shudders!
“Communism was so insidiuous because there were many true believers who worked to destroy their countries from within. But that’s not what the Russians are selling this time around.”
They don’t need to. The revolutionaries they trained decades ago have been operating independently for decades accomplishing the goal for them.
So what?
Why must we care about the Russian attempts to claim Russian speaking people from Ukraine?
We can’t take care of tent dwellers in the western Democrat waste land of California, Oregon and Washington. Why must we waste thoughts on Ukraine.
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