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The Congested Road to Kyiv

To maintain our deterrence abroad, we must tighten our belts at home, pump oil and gas, begin to balance our budget, dismiss wokeism as a nihilistic pleasure, and re-calibrate our military.

One of the stranger reactions to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been the formulaic response that "borders can't alter in modern Europe" or "this doesn't happen in the twenty-first century."

But why should the twenty-first century be spared from the pathologies of the previous two centuries? Are we more intelligent than the Romans? More forward-thinking than the Florentines? Do we have leaders who are more astute than Lincoln or Churchill? Are they more lyrical than Demosthenes? Is anyone aware that 130,000 people were slaughtered in the old Yugoslavia barely 30 years ago, as NATO planes bombarded Belgrade and nuclear America and Russia almost squared off?

Is it possible that globalization, the "rules-based order," the Davos reset elite, and the "international community" have so changed the way humans think that they have rendered the now ossified ancient concept of deterrence obsolete? Will the Kardashians and Beyoncé tweet us a road to world peace?

What about international non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? WHO? NATO? The United Nations? Is all of their recent service records evidence of our more higher modern morality? Will a newly developed Wuhan virus modify human nature, putting a stop to its innate ancient illnesses and therefore eradicating war as we know it? Are we not the League of Nations now that Putin has assumed the presidency of the Security Council?

In reality, anything may happen to anybody, anywhere, at any moment—and it has and will continue to do so until the end of time.

So let us take the busy road down to Kyiv.

Russia's Agenda

Putin believes that Russia was once a major actor (usually described as "feared") in international affairs. But it—that is, he—is no longer there. He believes that if he can reclaim some of the former Soviet Union's lost 100 million people and 30 percent of its area, his Russia will once again become a superpower—especially given the natural resources of his former Soviet states.

He understands that the longer some of these countries are Westernized and acculturated to popular culture's passions, the more difficult it will be to compel them into being Russian subjects. So Putin has a sense of urgency that was not always his devious signature in the past, but is now perhaps heightened by his age or health. Given his constant citations of NATO bombings on neighboring Serbia, the 2004 orange revolution, or the 2008 Ukrainian coup, U.N. Security Council Chairman Putin's rage at his alleged wounds is limitless.

He thinks we're decadent, soft, and spoiled to the point of not responding to his provocations. As a result, he presses. In his Stalinesque thinking, we do not deserve the power and influence we allegedly inherited at his expense, whereas his Russia, he boasts, is tough, pious, and deserves far more from the modern era than its current weakened status. He, like Stalin, has developed a visceral aversion to preaching Western elites, none of whom he believes can box, judo kick, fish, shoot, or ride bare-chested at his level.

So, to the extent that Putin believes, based on a cost-benefit analysis, that any envisioned attack will be profitable, he will invade wherever he believes the chances favor his goal. And if he does not see a deterrent from America or NATO, if oil is plentiful and cheap, and if Western leaders are serious and powerful rather than noisy and weak, he will not gamble. That's all there is to it. Putin will swallow up a torso if you feed him a hand.
Ukraine: Will It Survive?

Given the sheer odds against it, Ukraine should not last. Surprisingly, it appears to be unprepared for a huge invasion. Its roadways do not appear to be obstructed or mined. Putin has been massing forces since November, so why hasn't NATO flooded the country with armaments in late 2021 to ensure an infinite supply of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles?

Still, we hope that the Russians will have a difficult time in Ukraine, if only because the country is greater in both size and population than Iraq. It has several supply routes across its borders with four NATO nations, allowing it to eventually begin receiving arms. An attacker who cannot prevent resupply from third-party neighbors will rarely be able to subjugate its target.

So, if Putin cannot shock and awe the elite or decapitate the government in a week, he will have a difficult time subduing the populace. He doesn't have much time on his side. Sanctions are meaningless in the short term, but they might bite afterwards.

His three-pronged semicircular attack on Ukraine is uncannily similar to Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland from East Prussia, Germany, and a shattered Czechoslovakia. Even Hitler, who was later aided by the Soviet Union's invasion from the east, suffered 50,000 casualties from a poorly armed Polish army.

Fossil Fuels

A much of the current mess can be traced back to gas and oil, and the people who wanted to limit them. The nihilist Biden's voluntary cancellation of new pipelines, federal leases, ANWAR, and leverage loss of bank funding for fracking, as well as the loss of well over 2 million barrels of daily production, will be recognized as more than simply an economic calamity. It was a strategic blunder.

When Europe, or the West in general, is reliant on Russian goodwill to drive and keep warm, it will never be free. Ending American energy independence is more than simply AOC's passion. In January, Russian hackers targeted our Colonial pipeline, shutting down almost 1 million barrels of transported oil in a single day. The more we dismiss the strategic implications of having or not having oil, the more our adversaries focus on it.

I have a few questions for Joe Biden: Was the US pressing Russia to sell it more oil before he became office? Why was this the case after he assumed office?

Why did Biden blow up the country's reliance on energy? Couldn't Biden change his mind tomorrow and approve the Keystone pipeline, reverse his idiotic opposition to the EastMed pipeline, which will aid allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel help other allies in southern Europe, and open up additional federal leasing to deliver liquid natural gas exports to Europe?

What is more moral, alienating Bernie Sanders and the team, or protecting our allies and ourselves from foreign attack? What's so ethical about following the green advise of billionaires like global jet-setter John Kerry at the expense of the middle classes, who can't afford to drive or heat their homes?

A Military Deterrent?

Consider the humiliation in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of $80 billion in arms and equipment, a $1 billion Kabul embassy, a multimillion-dollar refit of Bagram Airbase, the woke politicization of the Pentagon, the McCarthyite hunt within the ranks for white rage/supremacy, the inane rantings of retired admirals and generals, the revolving door of four-stars to defense contractor boards—and the military has lost a half-century

All of this and more has weakened the world's dread of the US military. We have almost completely demolished American trust in our own armed forces (only 45 percent of the Americans poll great confidence in the military). In addition to increasing pensions and social justice costs, the woke danger forces the defense budget to rely on genuine defense readiness. Our military's once-feared deterrence was eroded by our own top military and civilian leadership, not by enemies. Time is running out, and the adversaries are numerous. Can we find a brave soul to resurrect the military?
Goliath of America?

America may be awakening. It may believe it has moved beyond polluting fossil fuels and can flourish on wind, solar, and batteries. It may believe it is morally superior, and, like 19th-century pith-helmeted British foreign officers, it can preach to the globe about everything from pride flags and George Floyd murals in Kabul to no need for protection in Benghazi.

However, we are also buried in a $30 trillion debt. In order to make a mockery of inflation, we print $2 trillion per year. Our big cities are rife with crime, and the streets are medieval, with homeless people and sidewalk sewers. Race relations are at an all-time low.

We don't have a southern border. Nearly 50 million of our citizens were not born in the United States, posing a challenge at a time when we have given up on assimilation and integration. The awakened virus has distorted racial and ethnic relations and is undermining the concept of meritocracy. We are enslaved by Jacobin craziness, a top-down elite race to perdition. It is a thought crime to glorify America's past. The uneducated, who have no concept when the Civil War began, lecture the nodding that 1619, not 1776, was America's true establishment date.

In a nutshell, the America of 1990 no longer exists. To maintain our deterrence abroad, we must tighten our belts at home, pump oil and gas, begin to balance our budget, dismiss wokeism as a nihilistic pleasure, and re-calibrate our military.

NATO

NATO is now merely a figment of the imagination. It was created and exists in Europe to do three things: keep America in, Germany down, and Russia out. Germany is now on the rise. America has left. And Russia has agreed to participate.

The vast majority of alliance members followed Germany's anti-American lead and abandoned agreements to spend only 2% of their budgets on military preparation. It's strange that only hundreds of dead in Ukraine can quickly convince Germany's pompous leadership that their own performance-art pacifism kills.

Germany, NATO's richest and second-largest member, polls a desire to be closer to Russia rather than the US. Does this imply that they prefer Putin's invasion than NATO's resistance? Sixty percent of Germans polled expressed no inclination to honor NATO's Article Five mutual help clause, and hence would not seek to assist a fellow member in distress.

Germany, on its road to green Lalaland, rejected all warnings about buying $1 billion in natural gas per day from Putin. Consider the following absurdities: Germans no longer have a great deal of affection for Americans. They do, however, expect them to pay their defense and protect them against Russians, with whom they have lucrative energy accords. The latter will eventually force them to rely on Putin for 50% of their energy needs.

So, what exactly is NATO? In reality, about 25 of the 30 members of the nation are helpless. They rely on the US to safeguard them against enemies in their own country. Only Britain and France's NATO nuclear monopolies provide a deterrent umbrella over both NATO and the EU—on the quiet certainty that a considerably larger nuclear American umbrella covers all of them.

We should simply ask those who have agreed to meet their military responsibilities to stay, and the rest to go gently and peacefully, following the Swiss model. Why are there any combat forces from the United States in Germany? Are they there to defend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline against Russian attack? To commend Germany for spending less than 2% of its GDP on defense?

China

For five years, Americans were obsessed not only with Putin, but also with the left-wing myth that Russians were under all our beds—the tattooed, gap-toothed cruddy villains of Hollywood movies, the alleged Satanic colluders of the Steele dossier, the nefarious bankers who communicated with the White House at night. So, when we previously pitted dictatorship China against totalitarian Russia, we consciously threw up the old Russian triangulation card. The Kissingerian concept said that neither of them should ever grow closer to each other than they are to us. We abandoned up on all of it and instead hung on every word of Bob Mueller, James Comey, and the lunatics at CNN for two years.

Meanwhile, China created and concealed the roots of a virus that decimated the American economy and damaged our entire culture. Thousands of Chinese are here primarily to assist in the theft of US technical skills. Add in the Uighurs and the now-defunct Tibet, and China outdoes even Putin in terms of human rights violations. If Ukraine falls, Taiwan will be the West's third "lost" nation under Biden's presidency.

Mania on the Left

On cue, an embattled Left now proposes some bizarre explanations for why Putin invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2022, while magically bookending Trump's four invasion-free years. We're told that the hiatus was caused by Putin getting everything he wanted from Trump and rewarding him by not attacking any of his neighbors.

Really?

Were Vladimir Putin and his advisors overjoyed that their dog Trump inundated the world with price-crashing oil? They were relieved that Trump had murdered Russian mercenaries in Syria?

Putin himself was pleased that the US had backed out of his own lucrative missile deal? Was he overjoyed that Trump sold previously prohibited US assault weaponry to Ukraine? Was the Kremlin overjoyed when Trump increased the US defense budget? Was Russia especially grateful that Trump bullied NATO into paying an additional $100 billion on defense? Did Putin applaud when Trump assassinated Soleimani and Baghdadi and blasted ISIS to oblivion?

We are now subjected to lectures from the ubiquitous former Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the political operative chastising America for its sluggish response to save his home Ukraine. All of this from one of the primary operatives in impeaching the one president who, unlike his progressive predecessor, armed Ukraine and sent it offensive weaponry embargoed by the Left, along with the Biden Burisma consortia.

The helpful Vindman may have been presented to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. But he never realized that any society gullible enough to swallow the Left's false promises of autonomy and freedom legitimized by mere liberal decree will be abandoned by its utopian backers whenever a nearby powerful thug invades.

Biden

Now we hear that Biden has handled the problem admirably during his midterm campaign. Winston Biden has corn-popped "killer" Putin, metaphorically taken "the bully" behind the proverbial gym and given him a whopping, slammed his head on the global lunch counter, and in Biden's deterrent fashion, called him a chump, one of the dregs, a junkie, fat, and a lying dog-faced pony soldier—and topped it all off with "You ain't white!"

Joe threatened the harshest penalties in history, which were meant to prevent an invasion on Wednesday but were never meant to deter an invasion at all by Saturday. However, Biden vows a "discussion" someday to determine if he will continue to deliver the worst penalties in history. Until then, he offers Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy safe passage out of Kyiv—the easiest method to eliminate Ukraine's tenacious resistance.

Years of predatory Biden family profiteering in Ukraine have gone unmentioned, as has a decade of leftist passive-aggressive love and hatred of Russia, from obedient reset to greedy Uranium One to pathetic "tell Vladimir... " to insane vetoing of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

What a congested route to Kyiv.

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