18+ 
The script reads like a spoof straight out of legendary Mad magazine 1960’s cartoon “Spy vs. Spy”: Secret Pentagon Documents Fall in the Hands of Malign Russia. Well, actually in the hands of millions accessing Twitter and Telegram.
The ‘ploy’ may turn out possibly as counterproductive as that of trying to collapse the Russian economy through financial war. That was another wheeze that didn’t work out well! So now it is the turn of ‘Lawfare’ against the Russian President, in place of financial war.
Thus, the U.S. mode of existence has become geopolitically conceptualized as a simultaneous correlation of liberal-democratic values and strategic interests on a planetary scale.
A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you’re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by selected stops and enlightening conversations, crystallizing disparate vectors one year after the start of the accelerated phase of the proxy war between U.S./NATO and Russia.
Many writers, but notably James Hillman in his book A Terrible Love of War, attempt to address our addiction to war; so terrible, yet providing a Mars-like fury that bonds men in battle: “I felt like a god”. One sentence, in one scene, from one film, General Patton, sums up what Hillman tries to explain: The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burned tanks, dead men. He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc and says: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life”. Simply said, societies have found -- and continue to find -- meaning in Life through war.
The US proxy war on Russia is stupid. Professor of Law at the LSE, Peter Ramsay, in a review of Benjamin Abelow’s book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine, outlines how the latter eschews the simplistic ‘Putin invaded Ukraine’ narrative -- attributing primary responsibility for the war to less proximate causes: ‘American governmental stupidity and blindness’ and ‘the deference and cowardice’ of Europe’s leaders toward this American governmental ‘stupidity’.
A strategic aim would require a unitary purpose that could be succinctly outlined. It would require additionally a compelling clarity about the means by which the aim would be achieved and a coherent vision about what a successful outcome would actually look like.
The Middle East will soon face a fractured Europe -- imposing new dilemmas for the region, on top of it having to navigate Beltway Foreign Policy constituencies slugging it out in Washington for primacy over Russia policy.
We now have an embarrassment of ‘wars’ of which paradoxically, Ukraine is perhaps of lesser strategic import – though it does retain significant symbolic content. A ‘flag’ around which narratives are spun and support rallied.
Yes, there are no less than five overlapping and interlinked ‘wars’ underway – and they need to be clearly differentiated to be well understood.
These last weeks have witnessed several epochal shifts: The Samarkand Summit; the OPEC+ decision to reduce the oil production of member nations by a (headline) two million barrels per day as of next month; and President Erdogan’s explicit declaration that “Russia and Turkey are together; working together”.
Bedrock U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, India, South Africa, Egypt and groupings such as OPEC+ are taking a major step toward autonomy, and toward the coalescence of non–Western nations into a coherent bloc – acting to its own interests and doing politics ‘its own way’.
Many are confused. Europe has just lost a key source of cheap energy needed as the resource base to run any modern society and economy. It comes at the very moment too, that Britain and the Euro Zone have entered into an inflationary financial crisis.
©2024
18+