Has NATO’s Strategy To Bleed Russia Backfired?

My short answer to the question — Yes! I received an interesting response to my request for opinions on what constitutes the “Endgame” in Ukraine from a man named Matt. Here is his analysis:

The end game is to diminish/weaken Russia. The US has determined they cannot fight and win a war against both China and Russia. The US and it’s allies have sought to pick off the weaker of the two. The longer the US bleeds out Russia, via Ukraine, the better. Not all NATO (think Germany) were onboard with the plan. Hence, NATO starts talks with Ukraine about joining. Such talk provoked a response from Russia. Blowing up Nordstream forced Germany fully on board. The US/NATO will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. NATO weakens Russia; US clears the decks to more capably deal with China; arms manufacturers make money, and politicians skim money here and there. The way the conflict is currently postured, this can go on for some time, all of which benefits US/NATO. Last thought, the EU will need to take laboring oar on rebuild. Current projections are $1 trillion and rising. EU will need to issue bonds. Interest rates currently too high. Plus, you get into problems between the rich northern countries, and poorer southern countries ((PIGS)). The US won’t publicly announce they win by weakening Russia, by taking away a Chinese ally, and saddling Europe with a generation of debt, but that seems to be happening. What do you think?

My response — “Matt, Thank you for taking the time to write something thoughtful. I think the facts on the ground contradict you. For example, the US economy is in recession with the added whammy of inflation. Russia’s economy is growing not shrinking. It is the United States that cannot supply Ukraine with an adequate supply of artillery rounds and HIMMARs. Russia by contrast is not running out of weapons/missiles. It continues to fire and hit targets in Ukraine. It is the US that is bleeding out.

Why do you believe that the US is so strong militarily? We no longer meet recruiting goals and the military leadership is more worried about proper pronouns rather than a competent military.”

I think Matt is correct observed that the original plan of the United States and NATO was to “bleed out” Russia. The phrase, “bleed out,” refers to an arterial wound that cannot be staunched. A person with such a wound will die within four minutes if the bleeding is not stopped. Only one little problem — Russia ain’t bleeding; it is NATO and the United States that are hemorrhaging.

The Wall Street Journal published a news item this week making this very point, Europe Is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo:

Europe, home to some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, is struggling to produce enough ammunition for Ukraine and for itself, jeopardizing NATO’s defense capacity and its support for Kyiv, officials and industry leaders say.

A lack of production capacity, a dearth of specialized workers, supply-chain bottlenecks, high costs of financing and even environmental regulations are putting a brake on efforts to increase output, presenting the West and Ukraine with a fresh challenge for next year.

The United States and its European allies have been deceived by their use of military force over the last 30 years. They have never had to fight a peer nation with the capability to produce all of its own military equipment that is on par with what the West relies on. They have deployed their military forces against ill-equipped, poorly trained armies that lacked air power and effective artillery and tank forces. The United States and NATO were lulled into a state of complacency.

Compounding the problem was the decision of the West to shift much of its manufacturing capability to foreign countries. American can no longer do what it did in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when the United States switched its massive industrial base into manufacturing tanks, planes, ammunition, battleships and air craft carriers. Modern day America specializes in producing grotesquely expensive, unreliable weapons that take months and years to appear on a battlefield.

This also is an intelligence failure. It appears the CIA bought into the nonsense that Russia had a small, weak economy and would crumbled in the face of Western sanctions. A real analyst would have raised the fact that sanctions, historically, have been ineffective in forcing regime change. Cuba and Iran are primary examples. It looks like the CIA donned its cheerleading uniform, complete with Blue and Yellow pom poms, and parroted the lie that Russia could not produce the rockets, artillery shells and precision missiles to support a long war. We are ten months into Russia’s “Special Military Operation” and they continue to shred Ukraine’s troops and infrastructure like a lethal Energizer Bunny — those pesky Rooskies keep going and going.

We enter the New Year under a dark and dangerous cloud. The failure of the United States and NATO to stop Russia may lead the Western alliance to act with more desperation and recklessness. Russia, for its part, admitted as much this week and is taking steps to bulk up its forces in the event this escalates into a World War. I continue to pray for peace, but there are no Western leaders embracing that approach. They are pinning their hopes on getting rid of Vladimir Putin without taking a moment to consider that Putin’s replacement would likely be more nationalistic and less inclined to negotiate. We are living in an historic, epochal moment that likely signifies the beginning of the end of American dominance in world affairs.

The CIA formented the Color Revolutions and unrest by pushing the LGBT agenda into school classrooms and filling the churches with homo’s and pedifiles. The CIA became complacent at the same time, engaging in it’s woke employees destroying conservatives using the hallway and corridor reputations in Langley and the State Department Hallways.

The bubble of DNC minded people’s only post-USSR challenge was engaging in political assination of republicans and conservatives within their own ranks. Strengthening their own ranks of essentially DNC type liberals and socialists, the type of education employed within the United States has begun to take its toll on the quality of people filling the ranks of the CIA as well as her Sister Agency, the State Department. People whose first thoughts which are sniping other employees not already woke and ruining their careers, in order to advance their own careers at the junior levels.
Within the ranks of mid-level management, looking in from the outside, it is evident to any casual oberver, the core membership is permeated with a type of back-biting career democrat that thinks legistation Can It Make So, thus a kind of mindset that believes if you make a rule or pass a law that changes the rules of nature change... a new kind of evolution. These people occupy the 5-20 year service of Administrative and IT or Technical Staff of wantabee Mr. Bonds.

Then you get the FS1s that have navigted the hat broken policy driven “evolution” Analytically Produced information
that is passed upward the Desicion Makers... these folks are about 60% DNC foot soldiers and the Political Appointees. Within the United States are the entitled and educated minds that no longer are able to rationalize through normal experiences the interactions of foreign friends and advertisers alike. Those whose experiences in life are essentially still ruled by Natural Law, and by Cause and Effect, rather than the BS used to control and weigh down the masses. No longer are American’s produced thru education which able to think like normal people unencumbered politically class driven BS. This is the level within the CIA and State (really the entire government and several thousand political appointeees....).

The reason American Intelligence fails to properlly analyze forign countries is that since the 70’s America has been ruled by that political class of 1968, e.g., the Hillary Clintons, the Ayres, John Kerry’s. This old generation is and has been in control of all facets of America and foreign policy - but the mechcanisms they created in American Education and Soceity, are unable to think like the older Class Warriors. This group of 68 is wanning, and America is caught 50 years later, without people able to step in and fill the void.

American Intelligence created corporations such as Face Book, Twitter, and licensed then essentiallly incoporated Microsoft, Google, Apple into the NSA umbrella where backdoors and secret keys of COMSEC are kept. The CIAs ability to produce “unfunded money” thru their companies is unmatched and all encompassing. Because America, since idiomsObama, is no longer a two-party form of govrernment WE are no longer hearing the dissenting voice or alternatives THE plan. All too often, the PLAN is the prideful brainchild of whoever pushes it forward. This bubble of like-minded embessals and idoits were educated in the public schools by DNC run National Teacher’s Association and partner Union’s grip since the mid-70’s, who are unable to properly access situations abroad.

The solution to bad American Intelligence Assessments and Policy is to incorporate the dissenting opinions of conservatives. It is the conservatives that are able to think logically, to think apart from the LGBT BS pushed by the public schools. Even Ivy League or top 25 private elite colleges no longer product competent doctors, sociologists, terachers (who come from those failing other majors), scientists, etc. No longer does the American College Education provide the advantages required in the ever shrinking Global World WE live.

The Department of State and increasingly, the CIA (and FBI) require a college degree. In fact they are making competitive applicants get dual major degress in addition to Master’s Degrees. The DNC run school system produces a singuarly like-minded type of “WoKeFoRcE” American employee.

The college educated mind has learned that making laws change everything from History to Evolution. They learn things like men can compete in women’s sports if they identify as female, and that female no longer exists at the other end of the axis. Going back to the Classical Education with broad application in the Natural Sciences, and the application of Cause and Effect, can and will product American’s who have a logical capacity, and an even minded approach to all societial interactions.

The Old Guard of 1968 War Protesters are a dying breed. They are losing grip at the helm, and the Obama led generation of the 80’s couldn’t before and still can’t find the bowl or stern of the Ship of State thus the rudder no longer has any meaningful bearing.

you repeat the lie about “expanding NATO” — no promise was made
Gorbachev and the documents show ZERO promise not to enlarge
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/

What the Germans, Americans, British and French did agree to in 1990 was that there would be no deployment of non-German NATO forces on the territory of the former GDR. I was a deputy director on the State Department’s Soviet desk at the time, and that was certainly the point of Secretary James Baker’s discussions with Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. In 1990, few gave the possibility of a broader NATO enlargement to the east any serious thought.

The agreement on not deploying foreign troops on the territory of the former GDR was incorporated in Article 5 of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which was signed on September 12, 1990 by the foreign ministers of the two Germanys, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France. Article 5 had three provisions:

1. Until Soviet forces had completed their withdrawal from the former GDR, only German territorial defense units not integrated into NATO would be deployed in that territory.
2. There would be no increase in the numbers of troops or equipment of U.S., British and French forces stationed in Berlin.
3. Once Soviet forces had withdrawn, German forces assigned to NATO could be deployed in the former GDR, but foreign forces and nuclear weapons systems would not be deployed there.

When one reads the full text of the Woerner speech
http://nato.int/docu/speech/1990/s900517a_e.htm

cited by Putin, it is clear that the secretary general’s comments referred to NATO forces in eastern Germany, not a broader commitment not to enlarge the Alliance.

Former Soviet President Gorbachev’s View
We now have a very authoritative voice from Moscow confirming this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev,http://rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against_all_walls_40673.html
who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”

Gorbachev continued that “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.” To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.

Several years after German reunification, in 1997, NATO said that in the “current and foreseeable security environment” there would be no permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members. Up until the Russian military occupation of Crimea in March, there was virtually no stationing of any NATO combat forces on the territory of new members. Since March, NATO has increased the presence of its military forces in the Baltic region and Central Europe.

Putin is not stupid, and his aides surely have access to the former Soviet records from the time and understand the history of the commitments made by Western leaders and NATO. But the West’s alleged promise not to enlarge the Alliance will undoubtedly remain a standard element of his anti-NATO spin. That is because it fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West.

Here is the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Final_Settlement_with_Respect_to_Germany

to summarize , it means that Soviet forces would withdraw from East Germany, and that no foreign forces would be stationed there afterwards. In other words, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, only the German military would be allowed to be stationed in the former East Germany.

NOTE — not in the former East Germany.

Absolutely NOTHING about going to Poland, the Baltics etc.

So stop repeating the lie about “promised to not go one inch further east”

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