The Berlin Wall comes down. Gorby pulls down the Hammer and Sickle.Tinpot despots fall from Bucharest to Prague. The Iron Curtain crumbles to dust and the End of History, we were told, was at hand.
I mean if you believed any of that hooey about history ending and swords into plowshares and shining cities upon hills thanks to the fact that the Big Bad Red Wolf had been whipped and was cowering only in countries like Cuba and North Korea, I pity you. As I pity myself: as a young man I believed in a world of new opportunities, one in which we could re-allocate hundreds of billons of dollars from national defense to national improvements.
And why did we need NATO anymore? Or better yet, why didn’t we invite not just all those Soviet Bloc countries to join, but even Russia itself? I’ve been asking this question a lot lately and pretty much the closest thing I’ve gotten to an answer is “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” And that could very well be what Putin is telling Ivan Pint’o’vodkaski over there, too.
Truth be told, we needed to give them some time to get their shit back together before they could be sold as a global villain again. In the meantime, that role fell to Global Islam, the Saddams, the bin-Ladens, the WTC bombers from the ‘90s, the surly ol’ Ayatollah, weird lil’ Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, poor ol Muammar, and the Taliban.
You’d think a NATO expanded to include Russia would have been of some assistance against this crew, given that Russia has been in near constant wars with its southern vassal states and neighboring countries since Islam was invented, but neither of us apparently wanted that.
Boring down on why we never invited them in, we say they lack true democracy and human rights and yet…well, Turkey is a little shady on those fronts. But who’s counting. On their end, I’ve read stupid sentiments like “Great nations don’t join coalitions. They build them.”
That does not seem to be working too well for them, with their current squad of global buddies consisting of the likes of Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and North Korea. When you are Russian and you’ve lost the Serbs, you’ve wandered well beyond the pale.
And it’s easy to point and laugh at this apparent fiasco of an invasion but for one thing: the ever-growing possibility of global thermonuclear war.
I fear we are staring at the modern-day version of the “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” that Otto von Bismarck predicted, 30 years in advance, would set of World War I. Which in turn set off World War II.
All of this because the west and the Russians could not sit down and agree to set up a neutral and pacified Ukraine?
Right now the best case scenario is for a cabal of the oligarchs — way back in Russian history, their like was known as “boyars,” — to find a way to neutralize Putin. But in the event that comes to pass, what comes next? I’ve learned in recent years not to be too optimistic on such matters. If Putin falls, then what? Russians tend to like them some clear lines of succession, and there is not one here, so perhaps the nation falls into a civil war. Too bad, so sad, you might think, but again, remember, nukes, Lots and lots of nukes, in silos in Siberia and under the wings of supersonic bombers and worst of all on submarines that can run silent and deep all over the world and deliver hundreds of war heads in single salvos
Instead of rooting this war on, we need to be calling for a ceasefire. As much as it would gall us, we need to stop talking about integrating Ukraine into the west. What we need to do is demilitarize the entire country. That’s what Putin says he wants. If he is lying then when can negotiate that by whatever means necessary, but we should give him the chance to keep his word.
In light of the onslaught of Ukrainian propaganda we are all awash with, this will be a widely unpopular opinion. But when you are hearing about a “free Ukraine” right now, what that means is a “Western Ukraine,” one that will be held in debt to the IMF and the EU.
The freest Ukraine would be a neutral Ukraine. Do people regard the Swiss as servants or vassals because of their neutrality? Or the Scandinavian nations? No, they do not. And yes, there is a difference between imposing your own neutrality on the world and having it imposed, as would be the case here, but as I see it, Ukraine, and the world, have no choice. They’ve been a rag toy to be gnawed and tug of warred between Germany, Poland, and Sweden and Russia forever. Imagine if all of that was brought to a halt, peacekeepers entered, Kyiv was given license to practice shady banking a la Zurich and London, and, well, the world could live as one.
At least in Eastern Europe. Watch this space. Tomorrow, I will tell the world how to fix Asia once and for all.