The Ukrainian Crisis and Imperial Weakness
Summary: Neoliberals are drooling for World War III with Russia, but let’s not get too excited. Putin amassing military forces along the border is most likely a defensive action in response to belligerent NATO/Ukrainian exercises coming up soon.
A lot has happened in the last few days. Russian forces are concentrating along the Ukrainian border. Scuttlebutt has it that the US might respond by sending more ships to the region. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is rattling the saber, whipping up the neoliberal media into a hysterical frenzy over imaginary conspiracies to rig elections and baseless accusations of Putin issuing bounties on American troops. Accusing Russia of meddling in Afghanistan sounds a bit lacking in self-awareness, but hey, the best defense is a good projection.
One of the most noteworthy propaganda efforts in the Red Scare, aside from Russiagate, is blaming the SolarWinds cyber-attack on “Russian assets.” Now President Biden has taken the particularly daring route of warning Russia that there will be “consequences” to any “reckless” behavior. Way to sic it to them, Joe!
However, this frenzied media coverage in America and Western Europe is missing a crucial piece of context. Russian buildup coincides with the West’s fast approaching annual dose of masturbatory war mongering, Operation Cossack Mace. What’s particularly interesting about this exercise is that there isn’t even a pretense of simulating a defensive action. It’s a naked display of aggression. Even the name is more aggressive than usual. Of course the Russians would respond with their own show of force. No sane person wouldn’t.
Journalists are, for the most part, ignorant ambulance chasers. Every time a carrier group moves an inch, the entire mainstream media shrieks like it is some significant event. Same for military exercises. The Ukrainian war games I mentioned above are not new, but apparently, no one at CNN, CBS, or any of the other major American news outlets could do a five second internet search. However, an accusation that these journalists are stupid is being generous. More likely, they’re deliberately peddling lies to incite public panic.
Let’s say the worst-case scenario becomes reality and the nefarious Red Menace does charge across the border. What would happen? My money is on the Russians taking what they want while Team Biden does nothing meaningful about it.
The color revolution overthrowing the Ukrainian government no doubt felt good, but it had no chance of long-term success. Ukraine is the most valuable piece of real estate in the Russian sphere of influence besides Russia itself. I sincerely hope that Western policymakers didn’t believe the Kremlin would tolerate Ukraine disintegrating into a white supremacist ethnostate. They certainly wouldn’t tolerate Ukronazi gangs waging Holocaust 2.0 and I don’t think that’s a bold statement on my part.
(See this related piece on the Ukrainian election last year)
That should already be obvious after the failed color revolution in Belarus. American and European leaders, especially Merkel, condemned Russia’s support of Lukashenko’s government. I think a German politician condemning Russia for human rights violations is a little ironic. To be honest, Germany really doesn’t have the right to accuse anyone of human rights violations, but that’s just my opinion. The Belorussian government cozied up to Putin, who in turn got aggressively territorial. He warned that foreign meddling would be “unacceptable” and everyone backed off for the most part.
In short, Russia is willing to risk war in defense of the surrounding regions while the West is not, so far at least. Themes of the Belarus standoff echo a previous incident when Hillary Clinton made shrill demands for no-fly zones in Syria – a deranged idea that more rational heads in the room quickly shot down, pun intended.
I don’t understand why neoliberals would be so obsessed with Russia, except their overarching desire to cause as much chaos and death everywhere they can. But desire and feasibility are not the same thing. Perhaps globalists and the billionaire technocrats of Silicon Valley are willing to start a world war over Ukraine, but the American voters are not. Woke liberals on Twitter love bombing children, but they would not be boots on the ground in a theoretical invasion of Ukraine. I see a lot of woke military officers on social media too, but they’re almost all clerical workers and wouldn’t be boots on the ground either.
Perhaps the most serious problem facing globalist Warhawks is a self-inflicted one. Joe Biden is a hopelessly weak president. I doubt there is a single person on God’s green Earth who takes him seriously. The puppeteers behind Biden’s throne must be embarrassed about the time Putin effortlessly humiliated him, not that this is some huge accomplishment. All one needs to outwit Biden is the ability to string together a single coherent sentence without being racist, senile, or both.
Under normal circumstances, Biden might have been able to get away with feeble and incompetent, but the one scenario an American president can’t get away with weakness is in a time of war, even a proxy one.
The globalist conspiracy to fraudulently install Biden in the White House was almost certainly a Trojan Horse to ram Kamala Harris down our collective throats. One solution to Biden’s weakness would be to invent an excuse for him to resign, clearing the way for Harris to take his place as Warhawk in Chief. However, there are serious problems with this course of action. For starters, Biden needs to survive at least two years in office. If he gets himself fired or drops dead before then, Harris won’t be able to run for a second term. Ten years of Harris is too delicious a wet dream for globalists to give up except under the direst circumstances.
Even if Biden’s handlers did give him the boot, Harris wouldn’t be a good war president either. She is one of the most universally despised public figures in the country and her primary run failed miserably. That’s the reason she had to be shoved through as a running mate to begin with. Unfortunately for her, fighting a war is a lot harder than locking up poor black people for crimes they didn’t commit.
There are other strange happenings in the White House recently. For instance, why the sudden flip-flop on immigration? Part of looking like a strong nation is having secure borders. One can hardly intimidate the Russian military when we’re unable and unwilling to defend ourselves against barely armed drug dealers in Mexico. It’s possible that this Ukraine scuffle plays into a larger theme of Team Biden struggling to make him look stronger than a sock puppet under a teenage boy’s mattress.
Will all this amount to anything? Just wait and see. As if we have a choice. There’s no way off this roller coaster except ride it out to the end. What a mess! Let’s see how it plays out.
Ian Kummer
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