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From his vantage point, sitting across from senior Kremlin officials and advisers, it was apparent that the greatest issue was that the Russians were unable to articulate what exactly they wanted and needed.
“They don't know how to define victory or defeat. In fact, some of the elites to whom we spoke had never wanted the war in the first place, even saying it had been a complete mistake,” he said.
“But now they’re at war — suffering a humiliating defeat is not an option for these guys.”
“The dead and the unborn are as much members of society as the living. To dishonour the dead is to reject the relation on which society is built – the relation of obligation between generations.”
The United States is the strongest military power in the world and the American political system the most democratic. That does not mean other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with far different histories, cultures and religions, will accept Washington’s advice or direction on their forms of government.
In 2019 Oleksiy Arestovych, advisor to the Office of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, eerily predicted, with stunning accuracy, how events in Ukraine would unfold in 2022.
In an interview with Ukrainian news channel "Apostrophe.ua," Arestovych believed that Nato accession was Ukraine's only hope of securing its independence. "If we don't join Nato, it's gonna be absorption by Russia within 10-12 years," he said.
However, the choice was not simple and Ukraine has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place, while also stating that any talk of Ukrainian accession to Nato would "provoke Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine." Ukraine's price for joining Nato, he said, would be large-scale war with Russia.
Arestovych believed that Russia would have the goal of degrading Ukrainian infrastructure and turning the country into a "devastated territory" in order to make the territory of Ukraine "uninteresting" to Nato. Russia would seek to destroy as much of Ukraine as it could prior to it being accepted into Nato, due to Russia not wanting to confront Nato directly, Arestovych said. Ukraine becomes "uninteresting to Nato as a devastated territory," he said.
I just came across Professor Robert Wade of the LSE - these are excerpts from something he wrote in Le Monde in 2015. He points out that the threat from Russia was exaggerated during the Cold War, something that is certainly true. Writing in 2015 he thought the Russian threat again exaggerated.
The full essay is here and is worth reading.
The distinguished Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus explained on 12 January why it is so dangerous – to us in the West – to keep framing security issues in the cold war framework, as though Russia and China constitute our major threats. He starts with the US Navy’s current claim that it must spend hundreds of billions of dollars in order to keep ahead of Russia and China’s rapid upgrading of blue-water naval capabilities. Then he shows how far behind the US Russia and China are, using the examples of nuclear-powered supercarriers and advanced submarines. He goes on to observe: “These days, terrorists are the first threat, and not a single one will be deterred by a nuclear warhead.”
So why does “US vs. Russia” and “US vs. China” continue to dominate the security agenda and security budget? Pincus’ short answer is that the defence firms earn vast profits from no-competition capital-intensive projects to build armaments against Russia and China; but much less from labour-intensive projects to build capabilities against terrorists.
Whether Russia invaded the eastern provinces is even less clear. A group of eight retired US intelligence analysts wrote to Chancellor Merkel on 30 August 2014, alarmed at the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping official Washington and the spectre of a new cold war. They reported the contents of a (leaked) 1 February 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The cable said that U.S. Ambassador William Burns was called in by foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who explained Russia’s strong opposition to Nato membership for Ukraine.
A historian I met once said to me that socialism is an absolutely terrible ideology, but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.
He was right.
I sent an English friend of mine in his early fifties, who belonged to the Liberal Democrats and wanted to be an MP, a story from the Daily Mail about nine year olds in England being shown videos in sex education classes of men ejaculating. He has a daughter.
He replied,
"This was a discussion even when I was at school. Healthy debate when it's appropriate. People won't always get it right."
Wherever you look the problem is the liberal outlook.
I can be shockingly naive. I actually read about the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline and how it was the Russians who were probably to blame without seeing at first that this was absurd. I just accepted the nonsense for a few days.
Propaganda is insidious.
I was rightly incensed that the media that pretended that the Russians were to blame then suppressed the evidence in Seymour Hersh's scoop that it was the Americans.
Nevertheless, the evidence from his anonymous source has been shown to have as many holes in it as the pipeline. Who gave it to Mr Hersh?
Who blew up the pipeline? I really didn't know until the Russian "pranksters" Vovan & Lexus, pretending to be President Zelensky, asked Henry Kissinger who he thought was guilty. Dr Kissinger responded after a very, very long pause: "I thought you were."
As he thinks that then so do I, for all the difficulties in believing the Ukrainians were capable of it, the biggest difficulty being that the Ukrainian navy is in the Black Sea not the Baltic.
But who else could it be? Had it been the Americans surely the secret wouldn't have been kept, as Anglo-American Russia expert Fiona Hill said. She also thinks it's the Ukrainians and, wrong headed though she is about Donald Trump and much else, she is not stupid.
If not the Ukrainians then I can't think of any other suspects other than the Americans. But I trust Kissinger's instinct.
‘Spain will go a long way down the road that [the West] wants: democracy, pornography, drugs and so on. There will be a lot of crazy things but nothing terminal.’How did he know?
‘Because I’m leaving something that I didn’t find on taking over the government of this country 40 years ago: the Spanish middle class… There won’t be another civil war.’
I remember back in 2014 arguing with friends that there was no evidence that the Americans caused the 2014 Kiev revolution. There is not but their activities might very well have been decisive. What on earth were they doing?
In 2014 I pointed out the billions America admitted spending in Ukraine to a British diplomat who replied by asking how much were the Russians spending there.
l should have told him that the Russians were supporting the legal government of Ukraine.
Esprit d'esclalier.
Certainly the Americans had no right try to replace the Ukrainian government.
Certainly that is why the current war is happening, although American folly does not justify the Russian invasion.
Please watch this short clip. I found it on Twitter along with this tweet.
I was certainly right to decide that Obama would make a better president than McCain.In December 2013 John McCain, live from Kyiv, tells CNN the US delegation in Ukraine is seeking to "bring about" a "transition" in the country (remove the government) and declares how "pleased" he is that Victoria Nuland is with him on the scene, attempting to achieve this goal.
A friend of mine who worked with her says 'Toria' Nuland like all other intelligent people has for many years believed that Putin wanted to restore the Soviet or Czarist empire.
If she thought that she was unfit to be employed by State.
I don't think she is evil, a word so much bandied about. She is a misguided ideologue, though I don't understand what her ideology is.
It's not patriotism as Americans understood the word in Coolidge's day. It's liberal imperialism, I suppose.
This is from the New York Times. Anonymous senior US officials are frustrated that Ukrainians won't sacrifice enough of their soldiers. For US interests or Ukrainian ones?
A really great American foreign policy analyst says this. Why don't the papers or TV stations report views like his?
When I discovered John Mearsheimer very many years ago it was a revelation. I saw he was the first writer I had read who understood geopolitics now in the way AJP Taylor understood it in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In this very insightful essay from last month he says a peace is not possible because both sides now have maximalist objectives and the result will be Ukraine as a rump state. He blames the Americans for leading Ukraine to this, something he and Kissinger warned the world about many years ago. Of course Putin alone is to blame for the war but of course Mearsheimer is right. As Kissinger said, to be America's friend is fatal.
That goes for other countries besides Ukraine.
I didn't imagine I'd see a worse American President than Bush the Younger but today I decided that Joe Biden is even worse.
She says 10,000 Russians have died in the counter-offensive. Douglas Macgregor says only hundreds of Russians have died in the offensive compared to 20,000 or more Ukrainians. I wonder what the truth is.
I certainly do not trust her. I think her wholly malign. I don't see the evidence for what be says. He mentions that it comes from newspapers and records of funerals but he does not give us a link to the information online.
The degradation of Russia’s position represented by the Serbian War is what Putin was alluding to when he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This statement is often misunderstood or mischaracterized: he did not mean by it any desire to return to Communism.I don't know if Putin only meant the Kosovo war. I can see nothing on the net to support Caldwell's statement and there were many other indications of Russian weakness that Yeltsin presided over, but the Kosovo war was a huge humiliation for Russia. Putin was talking about how Russia had fallen into grave decay.
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
'In ramping up military support for Ukraine, western officials are mindful anything less than a crushing defeat for Russia risks failing to deal with the problem.
'“We need to ask ourselves: How do we want this to end up? Do we want to end up in a situation when Putin will survive and he will have more time?” says an EU foreign minister. “Something like the lull between the first and second world war.”'
Overheard in the Athénée half an hour ago. (I hate calling it the Hilton.)
'How are things in Britain?'
'The middle classes are still in shock.'
'The process of European integration has historically not been a European project but rather an American one.
'It is an American project both ideologically and politically. Ideologically because, from the American viewpoint, the European continent is home to quarrelsome micro-states still trapped in their own history, unlike the United States of America which broke away from its past, discovered the secret of good government in 1776, and never looked back. That secret is to be found in federalism and constructivism—the idea that a polity can be created ex nihilo, based on rational principles alone, and free from the determinisms of history. It is this invented nature of the American republic that gives it its famous millenarianism—novus ordo saeclorum or “the end of history” as it has been more commonly known in recent years. The European project is inspired by the same idea that Europe should turn its back on its own history and embrace a constructivist and rationalist project in order to achieve peace.
'Politically, this deep American conviction that Europe should Americanise has been conjugated since 1945 with the conviction that the U.S. needs to maintain a military presence in Europe to ensure its global hegemony. Without a bridgehead on the Eurasian continent, the “island” state cannot hope to dominate the “World Island,” to use Sir Halford Mackinder’s terms for the U.S.A. and the Eurasian continent. Americans hold their inter-war isolationism responsible for the outbreak of World War II because, with a Hobbesian logic, they believe that their power is the only antidote to the otherwise anarchical society of international relations.'
In 19th century Italy the bundle of rods, fascio, came to symbolise strength through unity, because whilst each independent rod was fragile, as a bundle they were strong. Fascio came to mean union, band or league in the 1870s and was used by groups of revolutionary democrats in Sicily to describe themselves.
The word had heroic, revolutionary connotations. Young men who demanded Italian intervention in World War I formed fasci and it was to one of these groups, with no party affiliation, that Benito Mussolini belonged.
The Italian fascists had imitators throughout Europe and beyond until the end of the 1939-1945 war. Since then there have been few who use the word of themselves.
As Douglas Murray said, the need for fascists (by progressives) far outstrips the supply.
Franco remained after 1945 but he strictly speaking was not a fascist. He was supported by three organisations, one of which, the Falange, was. Salazar was not one either, just another right-wing, reactionary Catholic dictator.
The interview with Stanley Payne in the National Review that I mentioned below quotes Orwell who said "Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
De Tocqueville in Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America. I came across this quoted in an interview by Stanley Payne, the historian of Franco's Spain, in relation to America since Obama became president. It reminds me more of modern Western Europe and the UK.
'Like the wheel, bronze, iron, the stirrup, gunpowder, guns, rifling, navigational instruments, airplanes, and submarines, the hypersonic missile is about to change warfighting dramatically, perhaps causing the demise of the Navy’s carrier fleet and its air wing—which is what America has used to project power since WWII. There’s no question that a surface fleet, especially carriers and planes, will still have vital functions to perform, but if it comes to war among major powers with thousands of hypersonic missiles ready to launch, then a pilot lifting off a carrier deck would look anachronistic, like something belonging in the 20th, not the 21st, century.
'We may long for the romantic and heroic days when acts of military derring-do were performed by Medal of Honor recipients, but it looks like the future belongs to the ugly, impersonal, and utilitarian high-tech hypersonic missile.'
I just listened to a short talk on the origin of the werewolf and vampire myths.
I don't think those myths were of great importance before Hollywood used them, by the way, but all myths are very interesting and appealing, to me at least.
Even though fairy tales bored me to tears when I was three or four I love them now. Why, I don't know.
Were Neanderthals the original vampires?
Others think vampires are linked to the rare disease porphyria, which makes sufferers flee the sun.
Perhaps porphyria is a Neanderthal legacy.
Vampires are not important in Romanian culture, by the way. An Anglo-Irish pulp fiction writer copied the idea of a vampire story from another more gifted Anglo-Irishman, who had set his vampire story not in Transylvania but in Styria in Austria.
I have no idea if Robert Sepehr is a good authority but his theories about war between Cro-Magnon and cannibalistic Neanderthals who saw well in the dark are worth hearing, though his stuff smacks slightly of the stuff people like Erich von
This is the beginning of an astonishing article in the achingly liberal, globalist, Democrat newspaper the New York Times, about Richard N. Haass, the outgoing president of the oldest American foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, set up by the daddy of American liberal foreign policy, President Woodrow Wilson.
It seems Mr Haas, 71, has witnessed a shaft of light before the setting of the sun.
It reminds me of the mystical experiences that Aquinas and Pascal experienced late in life which they said were worth more than all their philosophy.
Everywhere he has gone as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass has been asked the same question: What keeps him up at night? He has had no shortage of options over the years — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, climate change, international terrorism, food insecurity, the global pandemic.
But as he steps down after two decades running America’s most storied private organization focused on international affairs, Mr. Haass has come to a disturbing conclusion. The most serious danger to the security of the world right now? The threat that costs him sleep? The United States itself.
“It’s us,” he said ruefully the other day.
At breakfast yesterday on the terrace opposite the National Bank a lady at the next table with a German accent was deploring this story about Old Man Biden making AI woke.
I deplore it too. It seems the developed world is a country under enemy occupation.
She said 'I agree with everything Trump said. Even his remarks about girls. Those girls are only interested in money, baby'.
She thinks Biden should go to prison. I didn't hear why.
I wish my Romanian was good enough to eavesdrop - eavesdropping is the best source of writing material.
A Romanian friend, who publishes novels in America and has to keep her liking for Donald Trump a secret if she wishes to continue to be published, says AI 'already is woke. I use it.'
The US Democrats and Western progressives are like an army of killer zombies.
I should keep telling you what taxi drivers say about the Ukrainian war. The last two once again divide the blame but think America provoked Russia. The second talked about how badly ethnic Romanians are treated in Ukraine. And how much money given to Ukraine is stolen.
One hears both those points quite often. Both are true but I remember an American who lives here getting angry when I mentioned the stealing. He's a Democrat. He has lived here eighteen years but has not learnt cynicism.
It is naivete which runs right through American foreign policy, like the word Southend through a stick of rock .
A close Romanian friend told me last night that there is no hope for West and suddenly for the very first time after years of doomsaying, I felt a cold chill of something like despair.
But I refuse to despair.
She has and moved to the countryside, and a village with a convent, to escape modernity.
I said that Bucharest was my refuge and by British standards it is one.
For the time being.
It's a bit like the civilised, Christian Britons after the Romans left, waiting for the German barbarians.
That was the moment when King Arthur fought and we should too.
He is at least a beautiful heroic myth.
Here is something good but very frightening that I read just now in an article by William Lind called The Future of War.
<The origin of fourth-generation war lies not in technology nor in tactics, but in a vastly larger phenomenon: a growing and near-universal crisis of the legitimacy of the state. All around the world, the state has become a prisoner of a new class—an elite class that can’t make things work, that uses its wealth and power to insulate itself from the consequences of things not working, and which cares about only one thing: remaining the elite.
The non-elite majority is seeing through the game and trying, where they are allowed, to vote the bastards out; hence the victory of President Donald Trump in 2016. But the whole elite rallies to defend its position, often by destroying the person who threatened to topple it. And when populist forces do score a victory, the deep state mobilizes to thwart them at every turn. Eventually, ordinary people just switch the whole thing off.
But that “thing” includes their primary loyalty. Instead of giving it to the state, which they now view as illegitimate, they bestow it, as before Westphalia, on a wide variety of alternatives: on races and ethnic groups, religions and cults, business enterprises (legal and illegal), gangs, regions, causes such as “animal rights” and radical environmentalism—again, the list is endless. And many of these people, who would never fight for the state, willingly, even eagerly, fight for their new primary loyalty. (The environmentalist who engages in “tree spiking” by burying a metal rod in a tree, hoping to kill a logger, is committing an act of war, not just a crime.)
And so states dissolve in a many-sided civil war, returning one former state after another to a Hobbesian state of nature, a place where life is dominated by wandering groups of armed men taking whatever they want from anyone too weak to resist.>
