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Slouching Towards Peace
https://www.kunstler.com/ ^ | Oct 20, 2025 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 10/20/2025 8:31:22 PM PDT by little jeremiah

Well, “No Kings” came and went. Inflatable animal costumes did a brisk business for one week. The old Boomers got a social space to act out their nostalgic re-visit to the Age of Aquarius. They resisted. . . something. (Mainly authority of any kind, a retarded adolescent fantasy.) And now it’s back to Rachel Maddow for further instructions. The Republic slogs on, albeit with a shut-down government.

Did you forget about Ukraine? Yes, a war is still going on there and it’s a weeping lesion on Western Civ, possibly leading to fatal sepsis. US neocons set the stage in 2014 with the Maidan color revolution as a wedge to wreck and then loot Russia. Then, for eight years, Ukraine harassed the Donbas with US-supplied missiles and artillery. Russia had enough of that in 2022 and ventured in to stop it. For “Joe Biden,” the war was a nice smokescreen to cover his long-running grift operations in Ukraine. The Euro club stupidly came along for the ride.

It was all a tragic and feckless waste. Mr. Trump wants to stop it, but Western Civ as a whole is in such a state of florid strategic disorder that he’s had to pretend the US supports Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky could not possibly carry on this mischief without US weapons and loads of US taxpayer cash. Still, the Russians advance implacably on-the-ground. They are going to “win” this war eventually — meaning, the US and Europe will lose — and everybody knows it.

It would be nice if France, Germany, and the UK were still stable, thriving, rational nations, but they are not. They have entered an arc of collapse, largely due to their own stupendously bad choices, and their leadership is insane. Macron, Merz, Starmer. . . these are the Three Stooges of our time, and Europe’s collapse has degenerated to morbid, masochistic slapstick as their factories shutter and the Jihadis go about raping their wives and daughters. Do you think that’s not happening?

Mr. Trump surely realizes he has to cut the US loose from this evil clown-show. That they are our NATO allies complicates things, yet, really, the Euro gang is impotent and NATO has become an irrelevant anachronism. They have no effective military mojo. Their economies are imploding. They have surrendered their culture to a savage cult. Their populations are demoralized, emasculated, in thrall to the menopausal viragos in their councils and ministries. They know full-well that Ukraine lies in Russia’s sphere-of-influence — a centuries-long reality — and that it is none of their business. Yet, Macron, Merz, and Starmer keep pushing the fantasy that Russia seeks to invade them, and so they must strike at Russia before that happens . . . all pure delusion.

You can suppose that Mr. Putin wants a negotiated peace rather than continuing the long grind on-the-ground, with all its casualties and expenditures. Such a negotiated peace really amounts to the US ceasing to support Zelensky’s war effort. Of course, such is the insanity of US political life, that many in our government pretend that we have a stake in Ukraine, and must retain some control of it.

Mr. Trump must know this is insane and is against the interests of the USA. He knows that Ukraine is historically in Russia’s sphere of influence — as Venezuela is in ours — and that the best outcome of this mess would be for Ukraine to return to its prior status as a harmless frontier between Russia and western Europe — as it had been since 1945 — looking to its humble business of growing wheat for export. We do not need Ukraine to be anybody’s problem, despite the insane yearnings of the neocons, the weapons manufacturers, and the reckless globalists of the EU, to make it everyone’s problem.

Hence, Mr. Trump’s dilemma: how to dissociate from this losing proposition and come out looking like a winner, saving Europe from becoming a smoldering ashtray, stanching the flow of US taxpayers’ money and US-made weapons into this black hole, and forging friendly relations with a Russia that is decades beyond being our ideological enemy? America and Russia’s interests are geopolitically aligned, though no one in the arena is willing to admit it. Russia has much more to worry about with China right at Siberia’s doorstep than with the USA, just as the USA has much more to worry about with China as it weaponizes A-I, moves into outer space, and casts a covetous eye on the resources of the USA, Australia, Africa, and its next-door-neighbor, Russia.

These are the matters that Presidents Trump and Putin must be touching on in those long, two-and-a-half-hour phone confabs they hold. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump must put on a vaudeville show for his US adversaries about maybe giving tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. . . no, maybe not doing that. . . and the rest of the song and dance to make it appear that we are kinda-sorta still on Ukraine’s side when the truth is we are not so much at all.

And so, the two presidents head for Budapest where — if the intel spooks of Euroland don’t try to bump them off there — they might come to the necessary agreement that the war will end because the US no longer supports it, not even the pretense of supporting it. President Viktor Orban of Hungary, who Mr. Trump respects, will be on hand for moral support. Expect some tough-talking mummery from DJT, just to throw the MSNBC lunatics off-balance. Rogue idiots such as Senators Blumenthal and Schiff will fume that “Trump lost Ukraine,” but the 50-plus percent of Americans who are not-insane will understand what actually happened.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: russia; ukraine
Zelensky is toast, the sooner burnt to a crisp (figuratively), the better.
1 posted on 10/20/2025 8:31:22 PM PDT by little jeremiah
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To: MtnClimber; Carriage Hill; GOPJ; Mama Shawna; notdownwidems; The FIGHTIN Illini; JZelle; ...

I hope I got all the ping list for Kunstler. A very good one.


2 posted on 10/20/2025 8:32:56 PM PDT by little jeremiah (SCARE: Social Chaos And Response Emergency)
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To: little jeremiah

“No Kangz”

“We was Kangz”


3 posted on 10/20/2025 8:42:43 PM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy ("Stare too long into the dachshund and the dachshund stares back.")
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To: little jeremiah

the Age of Aquarius

________

From the astronomy point of view, the age of Aquarius is still about 500 years away!
It is coming, but still a long way to get there!


4 posted on 10/20/2025 8:48:47 PM PDT by AZJeep (sane )
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To: little jeremiah

No more furry animal costumes.


5 posted on 10/20/2025 9:00:25 PM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: little jeremiah

No peace is coming, it is just temporary...


6 posted on 10/20/2025 9:58:32 PM PDT by dpetty121263
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To: little jeremiah

Nope. The “No Kings” participants are not resisting authority or autocracy. Where were they when the Autopen decided to unilaterally declare that some students didn’t have to pay back their student loans? Where were they when the Autopen Administration imposed mandates to take an experimental vaccine and acted to ban any public debate of the risks and benefits? Quiet as church mice, they were.


7 posted on 10/20/2025 10:30:52 PM PDT by csn vinnie
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To: MtnClimber

😄🤣🤣🤣

(Inflatable animal costumes)

It was ridiculously bad and pathetic


8 posted on 10/21/2025 12:06:57 AM PDT by SaveFerris (Luke 17:28 ... as it was in the Days of Lot; They did Eat, They Drank, They Bought, They Sold ......)
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To: little jeremiah

xAI’s Grokopedia is about to save us from Wikipedia. The first version is expected to be available starting next week.


9 posted on 10/21/2025 12:19:18 AM PDT by lefty-lie-spy (Stay Metal)
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To: csn vinnie

Resisting autocracy or authority of course is not their motive. First of all, getting paid in many cases; second reason is they are indoctrinated fools.


10 posted on 10/21/2025 11:30:29 AM PDT by little jeremiah (SCARE: Social Chaos And Response Emergency)
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To: little jeremiah

James H. Kunstler is a commonsense treasure.


11 posted on 10/21/2025 1:57:45 PM PDT by Gritty (The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution. - Saul Alinsky)
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