by HELMHOLTZ SMITH
Now that the Ukraine war is dragging to a close and NATO is running out of willpower, money, guns, tanks and artillery shells, with shaky economies, unstable politics, too many angry farmers and new wars (domestic and foreign) to worry about, it’s time to remember just how it all began.
Easily, lightheartedly, stupidly –
if you don’t know anything, everything looks easy.
False assumptions and false history explain how Washington and the NATO it controls got into this mess.
- Assumed Russian economic weakness. They believed that the Russian economy was weak, easily demolished and that Putin’s rule was based on sharing the loot with underbosses. Sanctions would cripple the economy and cut the underbosses’ takings and they would get rid of Putin and that would be that. Maybe Russia itself would break up. “Cripple the economy”, “Ruble to Rubble“.
- Assumed Russian battlefield incompetence. They swallowed the “Three Alibis“. Russians were no good at war and only beat the Germans because Hitler made stupid decisions, it was cold and they had endless manpower resources. The work of David Glantz’s team was forgotten.
- Assumed NATO superiority. They believed that NATO training, weapons and everything else were wonderful, superior and “game changers” – ooh, so powerful! Russian weapons were junk, they were running out of them, superior NATO training and weapons would make the disheartened and untrained Russian oafs run screaming in terror.
- Bad history. They swallowed the postwar falsification of history – captive nations, “communist subjugation of free people” – all Nazis were Germans and Hitler drove the trains. Nazi collaborators became brave freedom fighters who dreamed of the American Way. We knowingly let Nazis into our countries? No way. So when Putin talked of Nazis in Ukraine, they knew he was just making it up.
All wrong.
And so they bet the farm on an innocent “captive nation”, yearning to be a democracy just like us, which was attacked by a clumsy, stupid mass army of imperialist incompetents from a country with a feeble economy and unstable politics. No wonder it all looked so easy.
Russia hasn’t collapsed, run out of weapons, the ruble isn’t rubble and Putin is still there. The Russian economy, says the IMF, grew more than any G7 country last year and its military, says General Cavoli, is stronger and those who were then sure that “Putin is finished”, now tremble for their foundations. And maybe NATO has ruined itself.
Have they learned anything? Let’s ask Victoria Nuland who is just returned to Kiev for the tenth anniversary of gluing the thing together. Nope. Failure.
If you start with imaginary assumptions, you’ll get imaginary results. As they say in German “Putin wurde brutal unterschätzt.”
This was a huge catastrophic mistake by the west. They were never going to effect regime change in Russia. The west underestimated the resolve of Putin.
Before we started funding the biden crime family with a phony war in Ukraine, Russia was in real trouble. Their population was in freefall:
The average age of women in Russia was 44.2 years.
That means that even if their government paid women to have more babies, there are too few women young enough to make a difference.
Out of 236 total countries on earth, Russia ranks 221st in population growth/shrinkage.
Russia is deep in population shrinkage.
It takes 2.1 children per woman to be a ZERO population growth, but Russian women only have 1.5 children.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/#people-and-society
We should have left it all alone, but joe saw a way to launder our tax money into his pocket.
So, here we are.
Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden doesn’t have a history of doing the right thing.
Find out if your Senator needs a Primary
Hey Pianist since when does war save lives, you are down to old men, cripples, your young women, and some mercenaries.
A generation of young Ukrainian men are lying in their graves, hows that new mansion?