Ukraine is a black hole and only a fool pours billions of dollars of cash into it and expects an outcome.
NATO’s role in the Ukraine war and the credibility of western elites in general seems to be reaching what could be called a tipping point. This is evident with the level of panic we are seeing from Emmanuel Macron and others who in reality don’t have the silver bullet for how to get out of Ukraine without it looking like a humungous western defeat. The tension is really about the self-preservation politically of the French president as well as Scholz in Germany and of course Biden. How will these leaders explain that the west, emboldened by an even bigger NATO, has essentially been defeated? For Biden, the iconic video footage of hundreds of Afghans running along the tarmac as a C130 transport plane takes off from Kabul will probably remain as a damning eulogy of U.S. foreign policy – with really nothing comparing to it since the last days of Vietnam. For Macron, losing to Russia three key French speaking satellites in Africa – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – under his watch is also a spectacular failure which he has managed better than Biden. But if this year Russia gains ground in Ukraine, there will be little if anything the West will be able to, other than plan more false flag attacks and crank up the so-called Russian threats towards Ukrainian nuclear power plants. The West is losing. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion and it will be left to the military and geopolitical buffs to pour over the ashes to see what were the warning signs early on which should have been red flags to have stopped the madness.
Right from the very beginning, the ineptitude of western leaders was breath-taking. Miscalculation was in overdrive on every level but never more so on sanctions. If you get the feeling that when western leaders like Macron take to western media to bang on the “more military spending” or “troops to Ukraine” drum it is simply that they have run out of moronic ideas and all that is left is a sham PR exercise in protecting themselves from the more acerbic attacks which they have factored.
Macron doesn’t want NATO troops in Ukraine. This is the first lie of many peddled. But in the same week as Ukraine passes a law which lowers its own minimal age for conscripts, the ugly truth of Macron’s Economist interview is that we are entering a new level of stupidity and so we need even more radical, brain dead ideas which at the very least can muster up a war atmosphere – which of course allows western governments to gouge themselves on an even bigger feast for their bellies in the form of eroding the last remnants of civil liberties.
A former British diplomat who was in the British embassy in Moscow and advising the UK government lifts the lid on just how futile Russian sanctions have been. Ian Proud was left aghast when officials in London instructed him to enact sanctions against officials who had no assets at all in the UK and made London look deluded at best and stupid at worst. All that the UK is investing in is longer-term resentment on the Russian side which pushes further back the possibility of negotiating later on questioning the “real foreign policy choice in Ukraine, which has always been whether to commit to war or peace with Russia. The eight Foreign Secretaries since 2014 have wanted neither” he points out.
The West has simply run out of ideas and has no strategy now as it knows only too well that 50bn dollar’s worth of kit from the U.S. on its way isn’t going to make any difference at all, given that half of it will be sold on the international black market and the rest will be misused by a dwindling and poorly trained Ukrainian army. NATO’s solution is to throw more money on the bonfire of vanity and hope the warmth that it generates for a few precious moments keeps everyone distracted away from the chilling truth that nothing is working for the West in the war but only backfiring. If NATO gets approval from its own members to stump up another 100bn in the coming days, this will also be like using gasoline to put out a fire. Ukraine doesn’t have the numbers of troops and certainly not the quality to use the equipment and it beggars belief that western media can’t see how even increased levels of fevered funding isn’t doing anything at all there. Ukraine is a black hole and only a fool pours billions of dollars of cash into it and expects an outcome. Even when you throw a pebble into a well you are rewarded with a faint ‘plop’.
Der Friedensstifter 