The Reality of the Situation

Pronoun lectures and drag queens in military corridors are no match for tanks.

My friend Jonathan Last has a must read take on Russia and he’s spot on. The reality is the West has ignored what Putin has been saying and openly planning all while making Europe more dependent on Russia.

Putin has assassinated people on NATO ally soil. He has jailed dissidents. He has propped up pro-Russia regimes and toppled those that dissented. All the while, he has been very open that he wants to expand the Russian sphere of influence and curtail NATO.

The West kept ignoring him all while he put chess pieces on the board. To quote Last,

They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.

They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.

They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.

They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.

They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.

European powers have steadily cut back their use of nuclear and fossil fuel sources. They have relied on wind and solar power that provide no baseload power. Then they had to rely on Russia for natural gas. They have become so dependent on Russian sources of energy that even today Germany is all, “Guys, maybe we need to slow down the sanctions stuff.”

Back in the eighties, the Soviets funded anti-nuke and environmentalist groups in the West that agitated against capitalism as bad for the environment and nuclear power and missiles as agitations for war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, all of these voices just became louder environmentalist voices always advancing policies designed to cripple Western free markets and energy. I would not be surprised if Putin is routing money to them still.

On top of all this, as Last noted, the United States abandoned the two-war doctrine in the Obama Era. We used to have a military designed to fight two big wars. It was so successful, we actually thought we didn’t need it anymore. But China and Russia could not fight us. Now, they can both challenge our leadership because we can’t contain them both concurrently.

American foreign policy and military strategy have been so successful for so long, we concluded they wasn’t needed anymore instead of realizing we had been so successful for so long because we deployed strategies to keep the. bad guys at bay.

Now things are going to get a lot more dangerous in large part because the Biden Team does not have the will or sense to rapidly build back up the military. On top of that, they don’t really have the will to stop Putin in Ukraine.

If they wanted to stop Putin, they’d be sending guns around the clock to Kyiv. They’d be building up Western Ukraine as a military outpost with our weapons. They’d be rapidly building up the Keystone XL pipeline. They are not doing that. They’ve slapped sanctions on Russia that Russia can bypass via China.

Likewise, Europe is too dependent on Russian natural gas to keep this going for too long unless we start doing the fuel equivalent of the Berlin Airlift. Unfortunately, Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, which was designed to transport petroleum to the Gulf Coast for easy shipment to Europe.

There were ways to prevent this. It was always preventable. Putin said what he intended to do and Western leaders, led by the United States, twiddled their thumbs and signaled their permission by their inaction.

Now, again, things will be more dangerous. The Western powers have decided signed agreements keep the world order stable. For six thousand years, the world has actually been kept stable through violence and threats thereof. Pronoun lectures and drag queens in military corridors are no match for tanks.