3) A War to the Last Ukrainian?
The U.S. political dynamics of war and peace have been utterly reversed.
Supposedly hawkish and bloodthirsty Republicans have never supported the leftwing desire to bleed out Russia by fighting it to the last Ukrainian. Joe Biden rarely if ever deplored the horrific carnage on both sides. Donald Trump talks nonstop about it.
The Left sees the destruction of Ukraine (a depleted population now of about 28 million from its once 40 million) as a regrettable but necessary geostrategic cost in thwarting the Russians.
Ironically, the worst geostrategic blunder of this entire misadventure was to draw China closer to Russia, a hard thing to do given their historic animosity and mistrust.
No one knows the number of dead and wounded in aggregate. But Russian and Ukrainian combined casualties may be nearing 1.5 million or more—the greatest wastage of European-Russian life since the nightmare at Stalingrad in 1942–43—a carnage that this current war is increasingly beginning to resemble.
How odd: the “bloodthirsty” Trump is playing the peace-maker role of Teddy Roosevelt who tried to use third-party American influence to end the senseless 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War.
Meanwhile, the “anti-war,” pacifist Left sees the defeat of Russia as worth the utter destruction of Ukraine, as if Putin’s implosion will justify the hundreds of thousands of dead youths.
Or is the Left’s obsession to finally prove its discredited mythologies of Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, the Russian Alfa Bank hoax, or the Russian Steele dossier fake conspiracy, and on and on?
4) The final irony?
The Left’s unhinged obsessions with Putin derived from its original stupid and costly appeasement—and humiliation by—Putin! That 2009 naïve reach-out to Putin, and his swatting it down by invading Ukraine in 2014—forever embarrassed the Left.
It was, after all, Putin, whom in 2009 they eagerly courted as their friend, and who, they said, had been treated unfairly by the evil George Bush for inordinately sanctioning him for invading Ossetia and Georgia.
The Left believed that after the demonized toxic warmonger Bush had left office, Obama’s pacifistic charms would entice Putin to gradually become mesmerized into creating a democracy and embracing Western values—as if there had ever been any evidence of such a liberal tendency among the czars, the Soviet communists, or the Russian federation oligarchs and dictators for liberal democracy.
After Putin repaid their naivete with aggression, they went into DefCon-1 hatred of Russia, and thus they were off to the races to Russian collusion and disinformation.
5) The Taboo Subjects
There are certain subjects that must remain unspoken about the Ukraine War.
One, is Ukraine really any longer a democracy after the government has a) banned opposition parties; b) censored the press; c) ended habeas corpus; and d) suspended presidential elections? So, are we really fighting to save democracy in Europe or supporting an empathic but largely corrupt target of Russian aggression, amid a complex web of historical territorial claims and counter-claims dating back centuries—not unlike the labyrinth of the Balkans?
Two, did any serious politician, here or in Europe, really believe that Ukraine—non-democratic and corrupt (cf. Burisma and Hunter Biden)—belonged in NATO? The problem with the 32-member alliance is not that there are too few members, but that there are too many that have no defensive capability but have dangerous and insecure borders to which nearly all of Europe is pledged to defend.
Does anyone think should Ukraine have been in NATO that the youth of Amsterdam, Barcelona, or Paris would have been recruited into manpower-short NATO armies and rushed to defend the Ukraine-Donbas border and fight the Russian army, or that the U.S. would have ordered Putin out of all that he stole in 2014—or else, as we warned Russia that Kyiv was now under the U.S./NATO nuclear shield?
What was the real method of weakening NATO?
Adding more and more members to bulk up its military and deter enemies—or adding many weak members who are ostensibly unarmed but expand greatly NATO’s exposure and are likely to unwind the alliance, given not all nations would wish to enter an existential continental war over the borders of the Donbas?
The post <span class="ultra-flag 4"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>Ukrainian Bitter Realities and Visions of Peace? Part Two appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.