Slouching Towards Peace
“Zelensky has been given a Russian ultimatum via Trump. Accept Russia terms or face total destruction.” —SiriusReport on “X”
Well, “No Kings” came and went. Inflatable animal costumes did a brisk business for one week. The old Boomers got a social space to act out their nostalgic re-visit to the Age of Aquarius. They resisted. . . something. (Mainly authority of any kind, a retarded adolescent fantasy.) And now it’s back to Rachel Maddow for further instructions. The Republic slogs on, albeit with a shut-down government.
Did you forget about Ukraine? Yes, a war is still going on there and it’s a weeping lesion on Western Civ, possibly leading to fatal sepsis. US neocons set the stage in 2014 with the Maidan color revolution as a wedge to wreck and then loot Russia. Then, for eight years, Ukraine harassed the Donbas with US-supplied missiles and artillery. Russia had enough of that in 2022 and ventured in to stop it. For “Joe Biden,” the war was a nice smokescreen to cover his long-running grift operations in Ukraine. The Euro club stupidly came along for the ride.
It was all a tragic and feckless waste. Mr. Trump wants to stop it, but Western Civ as a whole is in such a state of florid strategic disorder that he’s had to pretend the US supports Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky could not possibly carry on this mischief without US weapons and loads of US taxpayer cash. Still, the Russians advance implacably on-the-ground. They are going to “win” this war eventually — meaning, the US and Europe will lose — and everybody knows it.
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It would be nice if France, Germany, and the UK were still stable, thriving, rational nations, but they are not. They have entered an arc of collapse, largely due to their own stupendously bad choices, and their leadership is insane. Macron, Merz, Starmer. . . these are the Three Stooges of our time, and Europe’s collapse has degenerated to morbid, masochistic slapstick as their factories shutter and the Jihadis go about raping their wives and daughters. Do you think that’s not happening?
Mr. Trump surely realizes he has to cut the US loose from this evil clown-show. That they are our NATO allies complicates things, yet, really, the Euro gang is impotent and NATO has become an irrelevant anachronism. They have no effective military mojo. Their economies are imploding. They have surrendered their culture to a savage cult. Their populations are demoralized, emasculated, in thrall to the menopausal viragos in their councils and ministries. They know full-well that Ukraine lies in Russia’s sphere-of-influence — a centuries-long reality — and that it is none of their business. Yet, Macron, Merz, and Starmer keep pushing the fantasy that Russia seeks to invade them, and so they must strike at Russia before that happens . . . all pure delusion.
You can suppose that Mr. Putin wants a negotiated peace rather than continuing the long grind on-the-ground, with all its casualties and expenditures. Such a negotiated peace really amounts to the US ceasing to support Zelensky’s war effort. Of course, such is the insanity of US political life, that many in our government pretend that we have a stake in Ukraine, and must retain some control of it.
Mr. Trump must know this is insane and is against the interests of the USA. He knows that Ukraine is historically in Russia’s sphere of influence — as Venezuela is in ours — and that the best outcome of this mess would be for Ukraine to return to its prior status as a harmless frontier between Russia and western Europe — as it had been since 1945 — looking to its humble business of growing wheat for export. We do not need Ukraine to be anybody’s problem, despite the insane yearnings of the neocons, the weapons manufacturers, and the reckless globalists of the EU, to make it everyone’s problem.
Hence, Mr. Trump’s dilemma: how to dissociate from this losing proposition and come out looking like a winner, saving Europe from becoming a smoldering ashtray, stanching the flow of US taxpayers’ money and US-made weapons into this black hole, and forging friendly relations with a Russia that is decades beyond being our ideological enemy? America and Russia’s interests are geopolitically aligned, though no one in the arena is willing to admit it. Russia has much more to worry about with China right at Siberia’s doorstep than with the USA, just as the USA has much more to worry about with China as it weaponizes A-I, moves into outer space, and casts a covetous eye on the resources of the USA, Australia, Africa, and its next-door-neighbor, Russia.
These are the matters that Presidents Trump and Putin must be touching on in those long, two-and-a-half-hour phone confabs they hold. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump must put on a vaudeville show for his US adversaries about maybe giving tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. . . no, maybe not doing that. . . and the rest of the song and dance to make it appear that we are kinda-sorta still on Ukraine’s side when the truth is we are not so much at all.
And so, the two presidents head for Budapest where — if the intel spooks of Euroland don’t try to bump them off there — they might come to the necessary agreement that the war will end because the US no longer supports it, not even the pretense of supporting it. President Viktor Orban of Hungary, who Mr. Trump respects, will be on hand for moral support. Expect some tough-talking mummery from DJT, just to throw the MSNBC lunatics off-balance. Rogue idiots such as Senators Blumenthal and Schiff will fume that “Trump lost Ukraine,” but the 50-plus percent of Americans who are not-insane will understand what actually happened.
Coming in two weeks: JHK’s new novel, a comedy set during the week of the JFK assassination, November, 1963. JD Salinger makes his debut as a major character in American fiction. You can pre-order here !
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fishermen at the Falls of Northumberland on the Hudson River
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
“I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality.”
—James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
"And now it’s back to Rachel Maddow for further instructions"
This perfectly wraps up the NPCs that now comprise the left.
Thank you, excellent and sane account of the situation. One reason I've observed why the Democrats — at least the corrupt idiot Democrats who run my small California city — are loathe to let Ukraine go towards peace is it gave them the chance to wear blue and yellow to any meeting with their taxpayers. That way they remind those of us who pay their exorbitant salaries for breaking what doesn't need fixing, that we are the fortunate ones who should give up all our rights so they can help Ukraine along with the homeless, Antifa, BLM. Yes, my very own county supervisor deigned to meet with some of us who are unhappy with her pot nursery policies and came decked out in Ukraine blue and yellow.