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Russia Versus The West
Why Russia will continue to win meaningful victories and thereby doom our civilization
To my surprise, the US House of Representatives finally unblocked a Bill that will see some $61 billion allocated to Ukraine, yet spent mostly in the USA to replace old munitions and old equipment that the US military will eventually send east. Many people in the West who, like me, don’t want to see Putin dominating Europe and don’t want to see China invading Taiwan in the next two or three years are now jumping up and down gleefully because they think that the good news train has finally pulled into the station.
Alas, as is generally the case, the journalists and commentators who tell ordinary people what to think are quite wrong. The good news train is a wreck and this is the final stop it will ever make.
Of course, it’s better for this aid Bill to have been passed after a six month delay caused entirely by the neofascist US Republican Party’s earnest desire to hand Ukraine to Putin on a tawdry gold-painted Trump-branded platter. But it won’t actually make any difference to the outcome, which unfortunately will be Russian triumph followed by an invasion of the Baltic nations. China will proceed with its planned invasion of Taiwan. The USA will continue its inexorable downward spiral into tyranny and complete dysfunction and Europe will remain impotent and clueless.
Although it is extremely depressing to witness the end of the West when such a fate was entirely unnecessary and theoretically entirely avoidable, it’s important we have a clear-eyed view of what has happened, why it has happened, and why the end of our civilization is now inevitable.
The first obvious point is that Putin’s triple invasion of Ukraine (two in 2014, the most recent in 2022) has demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that the West regards legally binding treaties as worthless. On 14th January 1994 the USA and the UK entered into a binding obligation to guarantee Ukrainian territorial integrity. This was ignored when Putin invaded Ukraine twice in 2014 (Crimea and the Donbass) and again when he invaded on 24th February 2022. Instead, the West just did nothing at all. The UK was too feeble to act and the USA under Obama was too spineless.
