The Western response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine has revealed that the West is finished. Three times now, the USA and UK have pretended they never signed a binding commitment to guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity (14th Jan 1994) in exchange for Ukraine giving up the 1,000+ nuclear weapons it inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed. This tells the world two things: (i) Western promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, and (ii) Job One for every nation that doesn't want to be invaded is Get Nuclear Weapons Now.

Our "leaders" are hopeless: spineless halfwits who are excellent at arguing over a punctuation mark in a 10,000 word communique no one will ever read, but utterly incapable of dealing with real threats. This is the triumph of representative democracy: ignorant halfwits elected by ignorant halfwits.

NATO is a hollow joke and everyone knows it. The UK has twice come under fire from Russian aviation (a SU-35 fired an air-to-air missile at a UK Tornado and another Russian jet strafed a UK warship in the Black Sea) and each time the UK has done the same thing: pretend nothing happened, because that's easier than addressing the threat. Biden is feeble and Trump is an infantile moron who will pull the USA out of NATO during his next administration.

This is why the Baltic nations are training their citizens in guerilla warfare for post-invasion resistance, and why Poland is rapidly building Europe's most capable military force. No one now believes NATO's Article 5 means anything more than "we'll send a few medkits and helmets if you're invaded" because we've repeatedly shown our inability to confront threats, preferring empty words and empty gestures.

Sadly it's Ukraine that today is paying the price for our self-indulgent stupidity; but the 1930s showed us that appeasement always leads to larger conflict and so our own children will soon enough be paying for our grotesque stupidity.