To adapt Lord Acton's aphorism about unconditionally obeying the papacy, if a man admires Vladimir Putin he must have made terms with murder.
Only recently I was saying I disliked Putin even more than I dislike Biden, which though true seems in poor taste now. (Yes. I know George W Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq and Hillary and Boris wanted regime change in Syria. That was wrong too. Comparisons are odious.)
After about 18 years I am again watching television. Daniel Treisman, professor of political science at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), said on the BBC World Service TV channel an hour ago that Vladimir Putin told him that the invasion of Crimea was his idea, not that of his advisors, and he was surprised at how well it went.
I can't forgive Vladimir Putin for making me take the same side as Ursula von der Leyen and, much worse, Justin Trudeau.
But I have no choice.
Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Putin reminds me of Frederick the Great, of whom Lord Macaulay said, "In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.“
Russian television viewers think the fighting is confined to Donbass, where war has been going in since 2014, and about Russian soldiers defending their people against Nazis.
A word about these Nazis.
The war in Donbass which attracts naturally very right wong young men on both sides is a response to Putin's invasion in 2014 which was purely a response to the revolution in Kiev in 2014.
Most of your observations on geopolitics are either too partisan or too nebulous to be of relevance, you all too often overthink the matter. Here you have the core of much that is problematic in politics. This is the extreme and obvious result of people putting too much faith in and abdicating too much power to a single individual. Putin, Merkle,Trump, Johnson, Obama, Blair , all stand as testament to the truism of "all your eggs in one basket".
ReplyDeleteMost of your observations on geopolitics are either too partisan or too nebulous to be of relevance, you all too often overthink the matter. Here you have the core of much that is problematic in politics. This is the extreme and obvious result of people putting too much faith in and abdicating too much power to a single individual. Putin, Merkle,Trump, Johnson, Obama, Blair , all stand as testament to the truism of "all your eggs in one basket".
ReplyDeleteYes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.
ReplyDeleteWhile the timing of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is no doubt connected to a variety of factors, including the Russian dictator’s read on U.S. domestic politics and the preferences of his own superpower sponsor in Beijing, the sense that Ukraine poses a meaningful threat to Russia is not a product of Putin’s paranoia—or of a sudden desire to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, however much Putin might wish for that to happen. Rather, it is a geopolitical threat that has grown steadily more pressing and been employed with greater recklessness by Americans and Ukrainians alike over the past decade.
That Ukraine has allowed itself to be used as a pawn against a powerful neighbor is in part the fault of Kyiv’s reckless and corrupt political class. But Ukraine is not a superpower that owes allies and client-states judicious leadership—that’s the role of the United States. And in that role, the United States has failed Ukraine. More broadly, the use of Ukraine as a goad against enemies domestic and foreign has recklessly damaged the failing yet necessary European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining.
Why can’t the American security establishment shoulder responsibility for its role in the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine? Because to discuss American responsibility openly would mean exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States.
Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble
By tying itself to a reckless and dangerous America, the Ukrainians made a blunder that client states will study for years to come
BY LEE SMITH
FEBRUARY 25, 2022
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble
This unfortunately is absolutely right and Biden and Blinken (probably the old man leaves much of the thinking to Blinken) are even more culpable, having seen how Russia reacted to the revolution in Kiev in 2014. Biden knows Ukraine well and his son made a lot of money influence peddling there.
DeleteWhen you talk about a man admiring Putin, you may have in mind the American media's vilification of Trump for expressing his admiration for Putin's cleverness ("getting a whole country for $2 worth of sanctions") - that's not the same as admiring Putin. It's a pointed contrast with the stupidity of the US regime and NATO.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. I am surprised that you see this.
DeleteAh I got two Carolines mixed up. We know how untrustworthy and warmongering the media is but this time we agree with people we know are usually appallingly misguided.
DeleteThe more I study things the more I see how appallingly to blame is the US. This does not take away blame from Russia but America has wickedly misled Ukraine and then failed to come to her aid. I hope this is seen as a greter failure on Biden's part than withdrawing from Afghanistan, which was the right thing to do but done badly. The Taliban took over because they had the support of many perhaps most Afghans, very unlike what is happening in Ukraine.
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