I’ve used this space to express my feelings/expectations of impending doom. Along with the discomfort caused by the thought of the aforementioned doom. I hate to beat the proverbial dead horse ( I expect I would hate to beat an actual dead horse as well), but I don’t believe our odds of a rosy ending have increased. Since I last posted, we now have the conflict in Gaza. This could explode into a larger conflict at any moment and in so many ways. Our forces/instillations around the greater region have come under attack multiple times recently. War may soon break out in North Africa as well. The conflict that has had the main focus of apocalyptical vision though, is the war in Ukraine. I have feared, since the recent invasion (that I was totally wrong about whether or not it would happen), that we would end up putting Putin in a corner and have him use nukes. I didn’t buy into the mad man trope, he seems horrible, but not insane. I still didn’t how he might react when faced with losing his power or life. I thought it was far to possible to just be brushed aside the way our current administration and their partners in the media were/are doing. While I do definitely still have that fear, a new one has been creeping in slowly.
The powers in the West seem to be slowly acknowledging that Ukraine cannot win this war. The can’t even maintain the current stalemate without the ridiculous amount of weapons and money the West has been dumping into Ukraine since the conflict heated up again last year. A bargained peace with some land loss and promise of neutrality ( or promise of NATO membership, depending on; conditions on the ground, public sentiment, ect….) is the likely outcome. That leads me to ask, what happens to Zelenskyy?
He’s seemed a stooge of the West over the last few years, but I’ve heard that story before. How long is the list of undemocratic leaders around the world that the US has armed, only to have to fight later? How tight are the reins on this guy exactly? Money don’t matter if you think your gonna get the old Putin special cocktail. What kinda weaponry does this guy control? Have we given him enough rope for him to hang us along with himself if he so decides?
Sadly, I have no faith in our leaders to resolve any of the hardships currently facing our country. That will not change with the 2024 election, unless something truly unforeseen happens. I am particularly concerned with this conflict though. I feel we live in the least rational world of my lifetime. It seems like both sides of our politics have been reduced to the least common denominator. It’s not just our politics, but they wield the power. (Unfortunately, our leaders are indistinguishable from the executives at Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, ect….. So our foriegn policy comes out looking like a bonus program for defense contractors.) Our whole culture seems to reject any sense of evenhandedness or reasoning. Our foreign policy establishment seems to be following suit. Maybe the rationality will come from Russia and Ukraine. Their people are the ones suffering. I hope with all my heart that Putin and Zelenskyy show restraint when faced with the inevitable political fallout at home when this war comes to an end.
It would be nice to see that restraint come from the US and the West as a whole. For all the high mindedness our and the EU leaders like to espouse, they rarely seem to put it into action. We dump money onto a leader who suspends elections, arrests opposition leaders (I’ll get back to the horrible precedent set by the Trump prosecutions again in a later post.), and shuts down media outlets he doesn’t like. I really hope the natsec crew knows what their doing (they don’t). When the time comes, it’ll be down to decisions by a few key people. If those people mess it up, the consequences for us all are terrifying. We’ve been lucky for a lot of years when it comes to nukes getting launched. We’ve come very close, both intentionally and accidentally, several times. I hope our lucky streak continues.