Past is Prologue

Catherine and Frederick carving up Eastern Europe

You have the hard right and the hard left saying that Ukraine should give in and concede its occupied territories to Russia in the name of peace.  Oh, and give up its bid to be a NATO member so that Russia will no longer feel antagonized by our presence along its expanded borders and cease to take any more territory.  Fortunately, both political parties are calling out their radical fringes, pointing to the simple fact that Russia has always been an imperialist nation and will never be content with its boundaries until it has seized what it feels rightfully belongs to its once great empire.  Yet, guys like Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appear to be gaining some traction, mostly as a result of the weariness of another long war.

We have spent virtually the entire 21st century engaged in one war or another, spending trillions of dollars on failed efforts in Afghanistan and Syria and marginally better results in Iraq.  One can understand the fatigue especially when none of these wars were really necessary, including Ukraine, if only we had been quicker to call out totalitarian regimes and use economic pressure to curb their territorial ambitions.  We certainly could have held Russia in check, but instead we emboldened Putin, largely thanks to our failures in Afghanistan and Syria, but also by turning the other cheek when he first invaded Georgia and Ukraine.  We also emboldened Iran and China, proving how ineffective we were in bringing the Taliban and other radical Islamic factions to heel.

We finally have an opportunity to redress these mistakes where it matters most in Europe and finally force Russia to come to terms with itself.  It's economy has begun to buckle under the strain of war.  It is relying heavily on Chinese financial support and to a lesser extent other BRICS nations.  The recent failed moon mission illustrates this once formidable industrial and technological giant is no longer capable of even the simplest tasks because it is so riddled with internal corruption.  Yet, there are many countries, including Western nations like France, who would be more than glad to extend a lifeline to Putin out of fear of what might happen with the collapse of his regime.

This is a redux of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  In the 80s the West did its best to prop up the Gorbachev regime, pouring billions of dollars into their floundering economy in an effort to build a "kinder, gentler" nation that would no longer be at cold war with the West.  The only problem is that nobody in the East wanted this to happen so they continued their resistance movements until the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in 1991.

Unfortunately, there are many on the Left who see Russia as the surviving rump of the once great Soviet Union.  On the Right, you have people who view the new totalitarian nation that rose from the ashes of the collapsed state as a model for their own political ambitions.  They seem to believe that the only way to ensure the kind of traditional social and economic society they imagine is through autocratic control.  You would think the twain would never meet, yet it does in demagogues like Ramaswamy, Kennedy and Cornell West, who lurks even further out on the fringes of the political spectrum.  They all believe that NATO caused this current war in Ukraine.

Even the Pope believes it, extolling the virtues of Tsarist Russia in a recent speech and implying that Ukraine was better off under the control of Peter the Great and Catherine II, who were responsible for the Partitions of Eastern Europe in the late 18th century.  I don't even know where to begin to unpack a speech like this other than to say that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a Catholic nation, suffered horribly at the hands of these tyrants, and in no way saw this as a glorious period. There was no humanity in the decisions made by these imperialist leaders. They fully subjugated Eastern Europe, rendering it a "Pale," or buffer zone, to the West where they herded Jews and other unwanted ethnic minorities into tightly packed ghettos from Vilnius to Odessa.  What a fucking moron!

That's pretty much how I feel about all these fringe figures and am so glad Nikki Haley called out the little tech bro at the debates when he first broached the subject of conceding to Russia.  Vivek has no fucking clue what he is saying unless he is acting as an agent of the Kremlin.  As for Kennedy and West, they are so hopelessly deluded that they function as useful idiots for the Kremlin.

The best thing is simply to ignore them, not allow them anymore airspace than they have already gotten in recent months.  Unfortunately, the longer this war lingers more dissenting voices will materialize, which is why it is incumbent on the West to close the deal.  Give Ukraine what it needs to push Russia out of its internationally recognized boundaries and bring an end to the Putin regime once and for all.  Virtually anything is better than the current kleptocracy that pervades Moscow. 

I was so glad to see Norway join the ranks of NATO nations willing to give F-16s to Ukraine so that it can better defend its airspace.  This should have been done last Fall when Ukraine had Russia on the retreat but ran out of firepower to drive them further back from the occupied territories.