Let’s state some hard facts of life as per 2022:
The core legacy bequeathed to post-WWII politics was, and still is,
the unacceptability of the “nuclear option.”
Those who feel otherwise, or believe that a nuclear exchange can be “managed,” need urgent psychiatric evaluation. If you’ve forgotten Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you need to urgently watch this.Western “values” (always in quotes) are great coffee-and-cakes stuff, during a break of teaching Politics 101, but when it comes to the
hard-knuckles reality of contemplating
a perfectly avoidable global war, “values” should be left on the desk of the “public diplomacy” section as props for hoodwinking the masses.Russia, if you haven’t noticed already, exists in a neo-Stalinist “improved” state-of-mind, whose perpetual guardian, and manipulator, is president-for-life Vladimir Putin.
Save an unexpected event that will lift Vladimir to Orthodox heaven, Russia shall remain caught in her claustrophobic obsessions spawned by the Bolshevik coup d'état, and obsessively perfected during the monstrous Stalinist homicidal reign 1922-1953.
Your doctorate from a prestigious Western university, or your otherwise gained “expertise,” re. Russia are both of no consequence when trying to reach decisions of going toe-to toe with Moscow unless you have been naturally gifted to “sense” the inner darker complexities of the Russian psyche.
In my humble opinion, our current Free World politics is found wanting in this department. An older, very small, contingent of Western experts on the USSR is now almost entirely gone—and their passing cannot be replaced by the endless deluge of bona fide New Age, iPhone-armed, wonks whose ‘relevant analyses’ are, often hopelessly, jamming the West’s governmental innards.
Another uncomfortable truth, still rejected by almost all in the West, is that, in reality, Ukraine, is
OUR freedom
from what is now morphing, courtesy of our own war mongers, into a “neo-Hitlerite” threat engineered by Putin’s insatiable power appetite.If you still insist in looking at the current Ukraine catastrophe as a this modified “Hitlerite” threat against Western democracy remember that Zelenskyy’s domain is too far away from resembling a near copy of the Western Europe Nazi Germany attacked in 1940.
Ukraine was, and still is, a tortured divided land, with her own violent far-right totalitarians, who sided with the Nazis during WWII, and her own horrific history of “dealing once and for all” with Hitler’s criminally obsessive “Jewish Question.”
To boot, take another break to re-think the real tangible threat of deifying an amateur comedian Zelenskyy, as the unique symbol of defending our “Western values,” and allowing him to prod a widely gullible “Free World” public opinion to endorse pouring sophisticated armaments into the hands of “heroes,” who believe they can hurt Putin into submission (David and Goliath is a great heart-warming myth, but I wouldn’t engage it as source of rational thinking at this particular junction).
If you are American, and/or close to being one, with the long memory of how the US walked into Vietnam, only to ultimately suffer the brutal, and unnecessary, costs of failing to develop, and implement, true peripheral strategic vision, think twice before you fire off your next tweet demanding we side with Zelenskyy the Hero and meeting his every perceived need, no questions asked (hint: Ole Joe, despite his obvious crippling “woke” inabilities, is surprisingly hesitant in fully committing on the side of the warmongers).
But, the pro-war advocates will insist, isn’t Ukraine an unacceptable humanitarian disaster? The answer is “absolutely, yes, it is.” The indiscriminate death and destruction currently dealt upon civilian innocents cannot be defended or “rationalized” in any way. Yet, it is also obvious, that Zelenskyy, the Hero, missed no opportunity to sting the Kremlin Bear with his EU and NATO fire-and-forget demands without pausing to weigh the consequences. Any, even modestly rational, person in his shoes would have been far more cognizant that poking a dozing bear, without the slightest capability of dealing with her wrath if one succeeds in waking her up, is tantamount to a deliberate attempt to commit suicide, which is exactly what has befallen Kiev beginning 2014 and the US-instigated Maidan “pro-democracy” uprising.
Risking Nuclear War for a Corrupt, Increasingly Repressive Ukraine
Fortunately, President Biden thus far has rejected the most risky policies that hawks are pushing in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Despite being under intense pressure, he continues to rule out proclaiming a no-fly zone, and he flatly rejects suggestions (including from one close political ally) that he consider sending U.S. troops to Ukraine. However, even the policies the administration has embraced entail an unacceptable risk of entangling the United States in a military confrontation with a nuclear-armed power. The United States and some NATO allies are pouring increasingly sophisticated weapons into Ukraine to bolster that country’s resistance to the invasion. Russia recently reiterated its warning that such shipments are legitimate military targets. In addition to lavishing arms on Ukraine, Washington is sharing key military intelligence with Kyiv. The United States is skirting very close to becoming an outright belligerent in an extremely dangerous war.
It would be imprudent for US leaders to put America at such risk even if Ukraine were the most splendid, pristine democracy in history. It is utterly irresponsible to do so for an appalling corrupt and increasingly authoritarian country. Yet that is an accurate characterization of today’s Ukraine.
The twin problems of corruption and repression were evident well before Russia launched its invasion. Ukraine has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the international system, and that situation did not improve appreciably after the so-called Orange Revolution put pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko in the presidency in January 2005. Corruption charges continuously plagued Yushchenko’s presidency. The optics were not improved by his 19-year-old son’s ostentatious lifestyle, including tooling around the streets of Kyiv in a new BMW sports car worth $120,000. Media accounts proliferated about the apparent financial improprieties involving the president and his family.