A new chapter in the decline of the West

“Putin knows that when I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.” Joe Biden, 2019

I was wrong about an invasion and not even for good reasons. I knew that the way journalists assume economics is what drives politics is wrong and yet I thought economic motives would dissuade Putin from all-out war.

He wants in his seventieth year to leave a monument.

I was wrong and MI6 was right. Missiles rain down on Kiev and an amphibious assault on Odessa is taking place. Does this mean a Russian-Romanian border as up to 1917? Odessa and Kiev suggest Russia means to occupy most of Ukraine. I presume she will not attack western Ukraine, captured by Peter the Great, by Poland in 1919-20, by Stalin in 1939, by Hitler in 1941 and Stalin again in 1944. But who knows for certain?

Those writers like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (who always write brilliantly and always forecasts doom) who said this was the perfect moment for an invasion, which I accepted, were right in saying one would happen.

In an article in the Daily Telegraph this morning headlined

The world is sliding into a new Dark Age of poverty, irrationality and war 

Allister Heath says,

"Imperialism, war, irrationality, disease and economic dislocation: modernity is ending as it began."

"It is hard to be bullish about the next few years. As the 2020s progress, it will become obvious that our civilisation relied on a series of increasingly invalid assumptions: that genuine, destructive wars are unthinkable between major economies; that real incomes are on a permanent upwards trajectory, powered by globalisation; that technology necessarily empowers individuals; that deadly pandemics are a thing of the past, and biowarfare unimaginable; that our ever-more woke Western elites still believe in liberty, popular democracy and the rule of law."

The irrationality started in the 1960s with the extreme left. Imperialism did a lot of good as well as bad in the 18th and19th centuries. Modernity is surely the problem. Godless, egalitarian and sterile. Allister Heath like me thinks 1990 was the high point of Western civilisation. But the rose was cankered even in 1900.

One can be pretty confident that had Donald Trump won in November 2020 this wouldn't be happening. 

Some deal would have been made between him and Putin, to the latter's advantage.

I presume you do know that Putin is demanding the "denazification" of a country that has a popularly elected Jewish president and recently had a Jewish Prime Minister.

Stephen King the horror novelists two days ago was much more wrong even than me.