Vladimir Putin, who former President Trump rhapsodized at the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as savvy and a genius, isn't looking all that savvy, and not so much a genius either.
Putin's army has acquitted itself as no more than second-rate, with his limited advances in Ukraine a function of indiscriminate artillery barrages often targeting civilian dwellings and infrastructure, relatively unchallenged air capability, and his willing slaughter of Russia's ill-trained human conscripts and former prisoners as cannon fodder. Small wonder that an estimated 200,000 draft-age Russian men have fled to neighboring Kazakhstan, while tens of thousands of others have fled to Georgia, Argentina, and Western Europe and, according to US Customs and Border Protection data, 22,000 Russians (men, women, and children) have made their way to our southern border.
Putin is looking for friends wherever he can find them, and few are to be found. He is counting on our former President's sycophants in Congress to scuttle continued American and allied support for Ukraine as that beleaguered nation defends itself against Russia's unprovoked assault.
And what precipitated the Russian assault on Ukraine? Listen to former Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, as it turns out, was Putin's most effective military commander. All of the talk of demilitarizing or de-Nazifying Ukraine was nonsense. According to Prigozhin, "this entire bloody war was nothing more than Putin being manipulated by Russian Army Chief Shoigu's desire "to become a Marshal and earn a second Hero Star."
Few Ukrainian citizens consider themselves part of Russia, and the two countries do not share a history of comity. Indeed, what most Ukrainians understand of their old tie to Russia was Russia's calculated genocide against their country in 1932 and 1933. It is known as the Holodomor (the famine), the deliberate starving, by Josef Stalin, of an estimated 4 million Ukrainian men, women, and children.
Other than Belarus, it is hard to find any nation sympathetic to what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Had Putin succeeded in bringing Ukraine to heel in a matter of days as he assumed he would, he could have emerged relatively unscathed. Instead, the Ukrainians, with the help of the West, led by the United States, have relegated the Russian dictator to the realm of failed tyrants. Putin will never again strut on the world stage as a strong and respected leader among the world's nations. Instead, he will be shunned as a destroyer of cities, a kidnapper of children, a deliberate killer of civilians, and a lowly tyrant among men.
Putin's scheme for a fast and deliberate kill was foiled before it began, mainly because American President Joe Biden skillfully broadcast every preparatory move to the world. Putin's planned retaliation against a bogus false-flag attack by Ukraine was upended by America alerting the world in real-time what Putin was up to. History will treat the American President well in writing this chapter of events.
So where is Putin turning to find allies other than the puppet nation Belarus? Right here in America. Many Republicans in Congress are wringing their hands and beating their chests over the financial cost of our aid to Ukraine, although none of them seemed to worry about the budget-busting deficits of the Trump years.
Of course, anyone paying attention knows that Trump and his congressional chorus are apoplectic over President Biden's leadership in revitalizing and rallying NATO to its most significant moment since the alliance ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo a quarter century ago. The last thing the Republicans want to see in the lead-up to the 2024 election season is a Biden-led NATO success in providing the means to stop Russia's attempted rape of Ukraine. It is a no-win gauntlet through which the Republicans are running. They are on the wrong side of history and not President Biden. It is shameful.
It is also treacherous. Henry Kissinger's 1979 memoir, "White House Years," discusses how North Vietnamese officials took careful note of congressional opposition to the war in Vietnam. Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's lead negotiator at the Paris peace talks during the Vietnam War, would cite chapter and verse to Kissinger the reports of congressional opposition to the war. It's a safe bet Vladimir Putin is keeping score of political opposition in Congress to American aid to Ukraine, just as Le Duc Tho kept score a half-century ago.
It is no secret that Putin would like to re-incorporate the old Soviet republics back into what is now the Russian Federation and, in the process, threaten other nearby nations too. That's why the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and now Finland and Sweden, have allied themselves with NATO and the West. They want no part of Putin or his dreams of a greater Russia.
Other former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have sent aid to Ukraine, signaling to Putin to guess again if he thinks they ever want to be part of a greater Russia.
Time will tell whether Americans who support Ukraine's determination to stay free and independent of Russia are on the right or wrong side of history. According to the most recent Pew Research Center study of this question, American support is essentially a function of Party affiliation. For example, 59% of Democrats support American aid to Ukraine. In comparison, only 23% of Republicans approve of American support, which is not surprising given the protestations against America's aid to Ukraine of such GOP luminaries as Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anna Luna, and others.
History's verdict will not be long in coming. With the aid of many nations led by the United States, Ukraine will have prevailed to remain free, or she will soon be another Russian vassal state. The world will see Vladimir Putin either as the tyrant he is or, as former President Trump declared, a savvy genius.
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Delusions die hard, especially those fortified by the relentless narratives of power elites. Spend a few minutes reading Alastair Crooke's essay, "A Bonfire of the Vanities," that examines the persistence of delusions that must be maintained in the face of unacceptable realities.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/07/17/a-bonfire-of-the-vanities/
Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat. He is founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum. Following are the final paragraphs of his post:
The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid. If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.
The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.
...Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.
Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.
With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.
The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.
They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.
Equating a few Congressional representatives with all Republicans is simply name calling propaganda. I know a few who consider themselves to 'lean right' or to be longtime Republicans. None of them are in the pro-Putin or pro-Russia camp as regards their invasion of Ukraine.