Lindsey Graham recently reiterated America's willingness to "fight to the last Ukrainian".
Literally, his words.
The problem with the war in Ukraine is that western rhetoric has been so hysterical and its commitments so intensive that the West has given itself no choice but to keep on doubling down.
This misuse of the Sunk Cost Fallacy is entirely intentional.
True.... but to me, mostly on the surface... in the end Zelensky got some money and one - one!!! - patriots battery... A lot of words and no substance, isn't it? In a real war, PR only gets you as far; paraphrasing Stalin: "The West! How many armored divisions has he got?”
To be honest, like most, I have got such an incomplete picture that whatever I believe might be wrong or biased. Though, I mantain that while is true that a long walk starts with a small step, getting the misery of one patriot battery in 2024 is not a small step, is a microscopic one!
"We can't give up now! We've already given them all that and a bag of chips! Muh American credibility demands that we step up! Winston Churchill!"
Throw in a steady propaganda diet of improbable Russian atrocities accompanied by Russian losses, and you don't need to be Nostradamus to see where this ends up.
Not to mention that, even if the Administration were to step back from the brink, anything less than Total Victory and Team R would pounce, screaming something about "appeasement" and Munich. Were Team R in the White House, Team D would do exactly the same.
There must be a HUGE segment of the Ukrainian population who want to END this NOW! Truly, Ukraine was a 50%-50% 2 party country, as are most electorates in ANY Democracy (in a true democracy the biggest landslide wins are ~60-40). Thriving and peaceful. Expats went there for jobs and study. Surely the utter destruction of Ukraine and suffering is NOT worth a NATO certificate hanging on the wall. There was a perfectly functioning "Ukraine" BEFORE the distribution of "Marie biscuits in the Meydan" by she-who-shall-not-be-named (Ms Voldemort---The Marie Biscuit war.). You will never hear their Ukrainian voices for ceasing war immediately in the "free western press". Never. They are under threat even by the fascists in their own country, who came to power with Oligarchs (Kolomoisky, Pinchuk) buying their governments only to outlaw corporate giving to parliament once they sat on the throne themselves!. Utterly nasty war. Imagine the horror, suffered in silence.
Fellow westerners who read this article, please do all you can - rallies, protests etc., - to stop the western involvement. From the very start, it only increased pain and death both in Russia and Ukraine. And in many other places in the world. As a Russian, I want this to stop. And there is one way for this: West should pull out.
I think there is a reason for the increasingly unhinged psychodrama being played out by our political players.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking serve as blood and the circulation system of society.
With public government and private banking, financial interests have the upper hand, as they have much less oversight and don't have to work around election cycles, with the resulting loss of focus.
Consequently government has been essentially hollowed out and the flunkies and hustlers willing to take the job really only have one real chore, to create the public debt the banks need to function. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Consider the Federal debt has been growing since the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then WW2 came along as the greatest public works project in history and the die was cast.
Basically the MIC is the trophy wife of the banks, as they make the borrowed money disappear, without empowering anyone who would question rule by wealth.
Which would, for one thing, explain the utter military and strategic ineptitude and why no one is held responsible.
So now our political class has devolved from actual stage actors, with Ronald Reagan, to total psychopaths, because they have enormous power and money to throw around, but no real authority and responsibility to temper their judgement and principles. Essentially it's like giving spoiled children matches to play with and ignoring whatever they do, so they do whatever they feel like. They have all the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish.
Consider that Russia and China have essentially gone back to private government, in which Putin and Xi function as chief executive officers, when the depredations of the oligarchs grew too expensive.
The question now is whether the bankers will be able to rein them in, when they realize nuclear war will destroy the ecosystem and as top predators, they are even more vulnerable than the little critters in the bushes.
Or has the Monster grown too big for Dr. Frankenstein to control?
Interesting comments, John. It was the bankers on Wall Street who got us involved in the First World War, as the millions they lent to Britain, France and a few other countries was a gamble, and if Germany and it's allies won, the international bankers wouldn't be repaid. The sent fellow banker Bernard Baruch to Wash. D.C., convincing the naive President, Woodrow Wilson, to lobby Congress and the American people in fomenting anti-German sentiments, and one of their biggest propagandists for it was newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst. The rest is history, and some historians feel that had the US stayed out of the European War, a stalemate and eventual truce might have manifested, as nobody was really winning, and both France and Germany suffered losses of approximately 16% of their young man on the field of battle.
Again, Patrick has a keen perspective on the Zelensky regime in the Ukraine and the US/NATO group of war-mongers.
There was certainly a lot that got swept under the rug, in the lead up to WW2, as well. Joe Kennedy and Prescott Bush come to mind.
My view is Western Civ has various structural flaws to it and if the current powers that be don't blow us all up, it might be an opportunity to really tear apart the books and shine some light on them.
I wrote an essay to submit to the Saker, but didn't get a reply, so I put it up on sub stack. It's a quick analysis of some of the issues I've considered;
Well done, Patrick. Appropriately apocalyptic. As you know, I think there is a third way. In a proxy war you have three players. One of them, country X is an evil country and wants to be able to crush country Y. But country X fears attacking country Y because it might get it's ass kicked. So it gets country Z to attack country Y instead. One would think that it would suck to be country Z and it does, but if the denizens of country Z are stupid enough and they mindlessly hate country Y enough, Country X can get away with it. Well, they can get away with it as long as country Z remains stupid and mindlessly hateful. The minute that country Z wises up, country X is in serious trouble. I suggest that might well happen.
I've considered the same thing and hope you are right. Ukraine is paying the price for the West's ideological commitment to hegemony. If I were Ukrainian I would hate the United States because the U.S. is responsible for the destruction of their country and the deaths of tens of thousands of their men.
Cara, you call it "the West's ideological commitment to hegemony" and I won't disagree with you but I'm beginning to think that it is naught but the aggressive urge to steal that fueled the colonization of the world by militarily more advanced Europeans starting 500 years ago.
I'm coming to this article a few months late. (The Bakhmut disaster has now concluded, one of the Dniepr dams has been blown up, way delayed Ukrainian "Counteroffensive" is getting bogged down) On the judgement of the reasons why this whole mess started I broadly agree with one caveat: The Russian government has utterly failed to influence the politics of its formerly friendly neighbor while the US succeeded. That never made sense to me. Did Putin hope he could let the Maidan thing happen, then swoop in and get celebrated as a great big saviour while gobbling up resources? That seems naive.
He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war."
He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society...
... would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope."
He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict: "Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had...
... announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because...
...since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true."
He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:
"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others. After Vietnam...
...Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us'. Nothing would be existential for America.
Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly. America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power'...
...of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.
If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, American monetary and financial controls of the world...
...would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we...
... are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other."
He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:
"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees American weakness, who knows that the...
...confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of...
The rhetoric, the rhetoric, oh the rhetoric. A rhetoric to which we proles sometimes can't add much.
Despite global circumstances, I'm happy to be writing here [everything net-wise working a nice circumstance by itself]. Main reason on this day: if I write something under "The Year End Review Open House" (Gonzalo Lira's "Roundtable" sometimes on YouTube), it isn't accepted. Yep, I had the nerve to suggest prioritizing causes/initiatives...after all, new year's resolutions, etc. But...rhetoric control. Don't know if Gonzalo has a pay-4-substack or anything like that; but, if anyone here's joined up to any such thing, you might slip him a line that YouTube's whacking comments under his last Open House zoom. Just so he doesn't think he's read all the reactions there might exist out there to be read.
Many, many, many thanks for all your pieces, Patrick. They're an anchor in this world for sure.
I find your conclusions reasonable, not hyperbolic or incendiary instead accurate in light of the what Professor Deneen calls “ the political narcissism of the liberal imperium.”
American mercantile ambition is now cloaked in an ideological argument; ideological purity is the main means of rallying popular support for war. But it’s still about money and power.
Lindsey Graham recently reiterated America's willingness to "fight to the last Ukrainian".
Literally, his words.
The problem with the war in Ukraine is that western rhetoric has been so hysterical and its commitments so intensive that the West has given itself no choice but to keep on doubling down.
This misuse of the Sunk Cost Fallacy is entirely intentional.
True.... but to me, mostly on the surface... in the end Zelensky got some money and one - one!!! - patriots battery... A lot of words and no substance, isn't it? In a real war, PR only gets you as far; paraphrasing Stalin: "The West! How many armored divisions has he got?”
If you think that this will end with a Patriot battery....
To be honest, like most, I have got such an incomplete picture that whatever I believe might be wrong or biased. Though, I mantain that while is true that a long walk starts with a small step, getting the misery of one patriot battery in 2024 is not a small step, is a microscopic one!
"We can't give up now! We've already given them all that and a bag of chips! Muh American credibility demands that we step up! Winston Churchill!"
Throw in a steady propaganda diet of improbable Russian atrocities accompanied by Russian losses, and you don't need to be Nostradamus to see where this ends up.
Not to mention that, even if the Administration were to step back from the brink, anything less than Total Victory and Team R would pounce, screaming something about "appeasement" and Munich. Were Team R in the White House, Team D would do exactly the same.
There must be a HUGE segment of the Ukrainian population who want to END this NOW! Truly, Ukraine was a 50%-50% 2 party country, as are most electorates in ANY Democracy (in a true democracy the biggest landslide wins are ~60-40). Thriving and peaceful. Expats went there for jobs and study. Surely the utter destruction of Ukraine and suffering is NOT worth a NATO certificate hanging on the wall. There was a perfectly functioning "Ukraine" BEFORE the distribution of "Marie biscuits in the Meydan" by she-who-shall-not-be-named (Ms Voldemort---The Marie Biscuit war.). You will never hear their Ukrainian voices for ceasing war immediately in the "free western press". Never. They are under threat even by the fascists in their own country, who came to power with Oligarchs (Kolomoisky, Pinchuk) buying their governments only to outlaw corporate giving to parliament once they sat on the throne themselves!. Utterly nasty war. Imagine the horror, suffered in silence.
Fellow westerners who read this article, please do all you can - rallies, protests etc., - to stop the western involvement. From the very start, it only increased pain and death both in Russia and Ukraine. And in many other places in the world. As a Russian, I want this to stop. And there is one way for this: West should pull out.
I think there is a reason for the increasingly unhinged psychodrama being played out by our political players.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking serve as blood and the circulation system of society.
With public government and private banking, financial interests have the upper hand, as they have much less oversight and don't have to work around election cycles, with the resulting loss of focus.
Consequently government has been essentially hollowed out and the flunkies and hustlers willing to take the job really only have one real chore, to create the public debt the banks need to function. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Consider the Federal debt has been growing since the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then WW2 came along as the greatest public works project in history and the die was cast.
Basically the MIC is the trophy wife of the banks, as they make the borrowed money disappear, without empowering anyone who would question rule by wealth.
Which would, for one thing, explain the utter military and strategic ineptitude and why no one is held responsible.
So now our political class has devolved from actual stage actors, with Ronald Reagan, to total psychopaths, because they have enormous power and money to throw around, but no real authority and responsibility to temper their judgement and principles. Essentially it's like giving spoiled children matches to play with and ignoring whatever they do, so they do whatever they feel like. They have all the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish.
Consider that Russia and China have essentially gone back to private government, in which Putin and Xi function as chief executive officers, when the depredations of the oligarchs grew too expensive.
The question now is whether the bankers will be able to rein them in, when they realize nuclear war will destroy the ecosystem and as top predators, they are even more vulnerable than the little critters in the bushes.
Or has the Monster grown too big for Dr. Frankenstein to control?
Interesting comments, John. It was the bankers on Wall Street who got us involved in the First World War, as the millions they lent to Britain, France and a few other countries was a gamble, and if Germany and it's allies won, the international bankers wouldn't be repaid. The sent fellow banker Bernard Baruch to Wash. D.C., convincing the naive President, Woodrow Wilson, to lobby Congress and the American people in fomenting anti-German sentiments, and one of their biggest propagandists for it was newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst. The rest is history, and some historians feel that had the US stayed out of the European War, a stalemate and eventual truce might have manifested, as nobody was really winning, and both France and Germany suffered losses of approximately 16% of their young man on the field of battle.
Again, Patrick has a keen perspective on the Zelensky regime in the Ukraine and the US/NATO group of war-mongers.
There was certainly a lot that got swept under the rug, in the lead up to WW2, as well. Joe Kennedy and Prescott Bush come to mind.
My view is Western Civ has various structural flaws to it and if the current powers that be don't blow us all up, it might be an opportunity to really tear apart the books and shine some light on them.
I wrote an essay to submit to the Saker, but didn't get a reply, so I put it up on sub stack. It's a quick analysis of some of the issues I've considered;
https://johnmerryman.substack.com/p/peeling-away-the-layers-of-performative
Well done, Patrick. Appropriately apocalyptic. As you know, I think there is a third way. In a proxy war you have three players. One of them, country X is an evil country and wants to be able to crush country Y. But country X fears attacking country Y because it might get it's ass kicked. So it gets country Z to attack country Y instead. One would think that it would suck to be country Z and it does, but if the denizens of country Z are stupid enough and they mindlessly hate country Y enough, Country X can get away with it. Well, they can get away with it as long as country Z remains stupid and mindlessly hateful. The minute that country Z wises up, country X is in serious trouble. I suggest that might well happen.
I've considered the same thing and hope you are right. Ukraine is paying the price for the West's ideological commitment to hegemony. If I were Ukrainian I would hate the United States because the U.S. is responsible for the destruction of their country and the deaths of tens of thousands of their men.
Cara, you call it "the West's ideological commitment to hegemony" and I won't disagree with you but I'm beginning to think that it is naught but the aggressive urge to steal that fueled the colonization of the world by militarily more advanced Europeans starting 500 years ago.
I'm coming to this article a few months late. (The Bakhmut disaster has now concluded, one of the Dniepr dams has been blown up, way delayed Ukrainian "Counteroffensive" is getting bogged down) On the judgement of the reasons why this whole mess started I broadly agree with one caveat: The Russian government has utterly failed to influence the politics of its formerly friendly neighbor while the US succeeded. That never made sense to me. Did Putin hope he could let the Maidan thing happen, then swoop in and get celebrated as a great big saviour while gobbling up resources? That seems naive.
Arnaud Bertrand translation of key points of French article.
Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the "Third World War has started."
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1613930072855171073
He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war."
He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society...
... would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope."
He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict: "Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had...
... announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because...
...since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true."
He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:
"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others. After Vietnam...
...Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us'. Nothing would be existential for America.
Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly. America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power'...
...of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.
If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, American monetary and financial controls of the world...
...would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we...
... are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other."
He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:
"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees American weakness, who knows that the...
...confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of...
The rhetoric, the rhetoric, oh the rhetoric. A rhetoric to which we proles sometimes can't add much.
Despite global circumstances, I'm happy to be writing here [everything net-wise working a nice circumstance by itself]. Main reason on this day: if I write something under "The Year End Review Open House" (Gonzalo Lira's "Roundtable" sometimes on YouTube), it isn't accepted. Yep, I had the nerve to suggest prioritizing causes/initiatives...after all, new year's resolutions, etc. But...rhetoric control. Don't know if Gonzalo has a pay-4-substack or anything like that; but, if anyone here's joined up to any such thing, you might slip him a line that YouTube's whacking comments under his last Open House zoom. Just so he doesn't think he's read all the reactions there might exist out there to be read.
Many, many, many thanks for all your pieces, Patrick. They're an anchor in this world for sure.
I find your conclusions reasonable, not hyperbolic or incendiary instead accurate in light of the what Professor Deneen calls “ the political narcissism of the liberal imperium.”
American mercantile ambition is now cloaked in an ideological argument; ideological purity is the main means of rallying popular support for war. But it’s still about money and power.
Thanks a lot !!!
FYI - a great interview with Rumble CEO on TC Today: "The Rise of Rumble"