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He was a (one of several) 'managing director' at Bear Stearns Investment Bank from 1993 to 2006 and writes in Asia Times under the name of Spengler.
This interview with him is exceptionally interesting.
In it he blames Messrs Zelensky and Biden for not agreeing to Germany's suggestion, two or three days before Russia invaded, of a declaration that Ukraine wouldn't join Nato.
He thinks the people who make policy in Washington are behaving like children.
(This reflects better on them than if they were adults, who actually wanted to lure Russia and therefore Ukraine into an endless war.)
He fears Putin intends a long war to depopulate Ukraine, as Richelieu ground down Pomerania in the Thirty Years' War.
This is exactly what is happening - just as it happened in Syria and Chechnya. The millions fleeing Ukraine are doing Putin's work for him.
David Goldman admires Viktor Orban, who goes along with sanctions against Russia but doesn't want to make an enemy of Putin, who will still be there after the war.
He points out that China and India are playing very careful games. Outside the West and Japan no countries seem to be taking sides against Russia. At least not very visibly.
Calling Putin a war criminal or arguing for regime change, as Joe Biden and others are doing, makes a negotiated peace unlikely. This is very bad.
I have changed my mind. I was wrong to be happy that Sir Lawrence Freedman thinks Ukraine can win the war. That means decision makers in London think this and want a war to continue till Ukraine wins or until Ukraine is destroyed.
I suspect the latter is more likely, but it's just a guess.
Charles Moore says as much - he says Poland, the UK and the USA in that order want Ukraine to win this war - Germany and France want a negotiated peace.
Lord Moore relishes a long, Manichean second cold war. He's by no means alone among English opinion formers.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is a military expert but, as we know, experts are political actors. It is probably not a coincidence that he wrote a key speech for Mr Blair in favour of wars for values, while David Goldman likes Steve Bannon.
Freedman seems to me a liberal internationalist. They have caused an awful lot of trouble, from Woodrow Wilson to Bernard-Henri Levy.
I much prefer Metternichians, despite Henry Kissinger.
Patrick Cockburn suspects that there is a lot of fight left in Russia (we are all guessing) and a negotiated peace is a good outcome - but unlikely to happen because of Burcha and other atrocities.
Those who like Professor John Mearsheimer, and those who do not, should listen to him speak in the first twenty minutes of this recording published about three days ago. His words always have pith.
I do not believe that Mr Putin is a reasonable person - so making a deal with him (say formally stating that the Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO) would not have worked. He would just have found some other excuse.
ReplyDeleteDavid Goldman says that Russia usually keeps her undertakings and Putin is very angry that the Anglo-Americans broke their promise not to expand Nato eastwards. Putin has been loyal to Assad. Putin is perfectly sane. It's absolutely not acceptable to assume no negotiated peace with him is possible. You are making him the latest Hitler.
DeleteI wish people would forget about the Sexond World War but it has become a quasi-religion.
DeleteSecond
DeleteJews will not tolerate a non-Communist Russia, and will do whatever it takes to destroy Putin. Who do YOU think is funding Navalny???
DeleteThis is a silly remark. Nobody important hopes to make Russia Communist again, although I know that it does have a communist party whjch is permitted opposition. I am told by a friend who lived in both countries, that Russians are very often antisemites, Ukrainians somewhat less so, but both have prominent Jewish oligarchs and powerful Jewish public figures. I admire Navalny and have no idea who funds him. I note he has been accused of antisemitism and homophonia and othet things.
DeleteAs far as I know, Mr Hitler did not organise the murder of people in the United Kingdom in the 1930s. Had done so, even Prime Minister Chamberlain would have refused to meet with him. At every step over the last 22 years, Western leaders (starting with the useless President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair) have refused to make a stand against Mr Putin - they have treated this murderer and thief as if he was a legitimate political leader and just watched as he destroyed Civil Society in Russia - now we have reached a stage where many people (including former friends of mine) think that all Russians, that the Russian people and Russian culture itself, are inherently bad. A worse situation than the Cold War - when a sharp distinction was rightly made between the Soviet regime and the Russian and other peoples of the former Soviet Union.
DeleteWell of course, Jews do not support Communism. I mean, simply because Bernie' campaign claimed the gulags "paid a living wage" and Bernie never repudiated that claim is no reason to suspect them. Surely the Jews have repudiated Bernie, eh?
DeleteFilthy lying Jew swill!!!
Bernie Saunders is and always was a democratic socialist not a Communist.
DeletePlease call down.
Delete'Please call...'
Delete...the nurses' station.
Well of course those gulags were "only" socialist, not Communist, eh???
DeleteFilthy Jew swill!!!
I wanted him to calm down. Predictive text.
DeletePaul, what you say is true, but Biden took another tack with Putin with disastrous consequences for the Ukraine.
DeleteA good summing up by James:
ReplyDeleteOn the Bucha 'Massacre' and What's Really Happening in Ukraine
https://delingpole.substack.com/p/on-the-bucha-massacre-and-whats-really?s=r
The allegations of the Bucha massacre are false.
ReplyDeleteLeo Goldstein
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/was_there_really_a_massacre_at_bucha.html
Please keep posting. Your POV is essential to Anglophones starved for information, rather than the globalist/NATO party line
ReplyDeleteCA
WRSA
I hope I an not being courageous, anonymous.
DeleteI have been asked to clearly state my position so I will. I hold Mr Putin to have always been an evil man who has robbed and murdered Russians for decades - and I also hold that his evil has now got totally out of control, that it has overwhelmed his reason. But I also hold that the ordinary Russian people are NOT evil - and that there is much GOOD in traditional Russian culture.
ReplyDeleteMy position means that I am totally isolated - the Putin supporters hate me, and the people who hold that the Russian people and Russian culture are inherently evil also hate me. I will not convince anyone - the lines between the two sides are drawn (the two sides being the "Putin is in the right" side and "the only good Russian is a dead Russian" side), I am on NEITHER of these two sides. I detest Mr Putin - but I refuse to accept that the Russian people and Russian culture are inherently evil (the Russian people are victims of decades of lies and propaganda). I have nothing more to say on this matter.
No reasonable person thinks the Russian people are evil. How can an ethnic group be evil? And what idea could be more anti-zeitgeist? Is Putin evil? Possibly. But his invasion, though cold blooded murder, like all unnecessary wars, is perfectly rational and very predictable. Many people predicted it very long ago, including George Kennan, Noemi Chomsky, Henry Kissinger, Nigel Farage and Bucharest's Matei Paun.
Delete"We've had it up to here with duplicitous thugs."
Deletehttps://www.bobmoran.co.uk/other-work/up-to-here
I wouldn't consider Russian people intrinsically evil, but their culture has a lot of elements of "ghetto" culture - an entirely material world view devoid of any abstract values, glamorization of violence, disdain for knowledge and ostracization of anyone with a bit of curiosity, etc. I've known plenty of Russians from all walks of life, including academia, and they are not like other Europeans (for the most part) due to their different values and cultural norms. This makes sense, given the utter destruction of their elites by the Bolsheviks and the promotion of the most marginalized members of their society. I also saw something comparable in Cambodia - killing off the elites and promoting the riff raff had similar results.
DeleteToma, neither Boris Johnson or Volodymyr Zelensky is a thug exactly. Boris Johnson is duplicitous but is President Zelensky? He has lots of faults and should have stuck to his election programme to do a deal with Russia, he might be corrupt and certainly has gaoled opponents, but why duplicitous?
DeleteHe's a fraud. A master of deceit.
DeleteThe Boris And Zelensky Show / Hugo Talks
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ltqJyQgTI&t=310s
In this new era of simulacra, fake news, virtual reality, and false flags, the entertainer Zelenskiy — who played the role of president in a TV series — fell comfortably into the new mode of post-truth politics in which one’s own side is flawless and one’s opponents are the epitome of evil–Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, take your pick and in which any lie or false flag is justified given the putrefaction of the enemy.
DeleteAnother problem that confounded Zelenskiy’s development into a normal politician — if there is such a thing — is that the regime over which he took the reins of power upon winning the Ukrainian presidency had been midwifed by a false myth, a hoax, a false flag operation, surrounding the formative experience of the ultranationalist-oligarchic Maidan regime in February 2014. Any regime’s founding experiences have a tendency to set a pattern of behavior that echoes down through the history of the state over which a regime holds sway.
https://gordonhahn.com/2022/04/15/kvartal-22-zelenskiys-simulacra/
I want to reply to The Vidra but he wrote a week and a half ago and probably won't see this. Yes and no. Russians (and Belarussians Ukrainians etc I expect) think very differently from other Europeans, which is why I love them - but it's to do with being cut off from the west by history, religion and Communism rather than because of Bolshevism per se.
ReplyDeletememo to self: I must read and reply faster.
This underestimates Poland's national and imperial pride. Danzig-Gdansk was exactly the core of centuries-old discord between Poles and Germans since the Teutonic knights took the city in 1308. It's like expecting Ukraine today to simply give up part of its territory or even its existence without resistance. Poland in those days not only wanted to be respected, it also wanted to be expansionist, as Churchill noted.
ReplyDeleteThey had the irredentism towards Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine called Kresy and of course the geopolitical project of Intermarium. Centuries earlier, the absorption of Russia had already been attempted, as was done with Lithuania. It started with dynastic marriages until there was firm Polish control. I know some from the diaspora and they are convinced of the teachings of their fathers and ancestors, about how the Polish people are benign and harm no one, while they have been tortured and victimized throughout history. However, their imperial neighbors do not differ much in their speeches. All are good and have been victims, but as Poland's periods of imperial glory are in the mists of time, the status of just oppressed is widely accepted, while hardly anyone pays any attention to Kresy and Intermarium.