Putin Thinks We Are a Bunch of Karens
Biden’s refusal to engage in serious diplomacy with Russia cost Ukraine
When did the turning point come for Russian President Vladimir Putin in making his decision to invade Ukraine? His final choice probably arrived quite late in the crisis; even senior Russian leadership below Putin seemed to be out of the decision loop and surprised by the course of events.
But the building blocks for that final decision have been longer in the making.
It would be easy to say that the Fall of Kabul was the watershed. A country in which the USA had invested thousands of lives and trillions of dollars collapsed the instant U.S. forces were set to leave. The dotard in the White House, Joe Biden, personally made foolish decisions and then tried to blame it on his generals, while still preening that “the buck stops” with his office. The USA was left with a demoralized military attuned to counter-insurgency in backwaters, which is mostly irrelevant to deterring Russia, China, or Iran.
However, for Putin, an event earlier last year may have also been a strong influence. The leaders of the G7 got together in Cornwall, England, two months before the debacle in Afghanistan, and put on a very convincing clown show. Free from the meanie Donald Trump after four years when the USA occasionally injected reality in such love fests, Biden declared that “America is back,” and offered his attendance as proof.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who finally edged out Cannuckistan Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the title of greatest fool in the West, waxed poetic about economic and cultural government engineering, saying he wanted to “build back” in a more “gender-neutral and feminine” way.
The aesthetics were even worse. The summit was a swan song for German leader Angela Merkel, the now-retired Empress of Europe, which gave it a valedictory quality. Her courtiers who lead the other six nations, despite being double vaccinated, were wearing masks outside and fist bumping each other. Clowns.
It was mostly a repeat later in the year with the G20 summit, which Biden attended after a meeting with the Pope in which he is rumored to have crapped his pants. It was the same at the COP26 hootenanny in Glasgow, where the world elite gathered to worship its pagan god of climate change alarmism. Amid wildly unrealistic estimates of the cost and time to achieve a green-energy transition, major oil producers in the Middle East and Russia offered a verbal nod or two, and carefully stifled smiles knowing their continued production of oil and other essentials of modern life would leave them richer and more powerful as the decade wears on.
Back in America, things were worse. As 2021 began, our top general, Mark Milley, shimmied into his uniform in the closing days of the Trump administration and colluded with the Chinese government against his own president. To please his new woke masters in the Biden administration, he professed to be searching for the origins of “white rage.” The army he leads put out an ad about a female soldier with two lesbian mothers, in which the soldier conflated her youthful political activism with “defending freedom.” This led to an unfavorable video juxtaposition on RT to a Russian army ad that actually celebrated masculinity and warfighting skill. Also in 2021, America’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, authorized the display of “Black Lives Matter” banners at our embassies around the world, touting a domestic leftwing terrorist group.
Aside from cultural self-destruction, the West was also setting itself up for economic despair, which Putin can also read. In each of 2020 and 2021, the USA borrowed more than $3 trillion, mostly by printing new dollars, and now has 130 percent debt to GDP, surpassing France and second only to Japan. Not a dime of this new spending, which has resulted in annual budgets above $6 trillion with annual deficits above $1.5 trillion for as far as the eye can see, went to a stronger military. Meanwhile, Russia’s debt to GDP is less than 20 percent and it has a balanced budget. Higher oil and gas prices from the prolonged Ukraine crisis benefit Russia, which produces 10 million barrels of oil per day and exports half of that. It may mean that the Russian invasion will pay for itself.
And then there was the home stretch for Putin. Biden made the most outlandish threats of what would happen to Russia if it attacked Ukraine. He had Secretary of State Blinken say:
Anachronistic Russian displays of military power will not turn back the tide of history… We will resist any Russian attempt to consign sovereign nations and free peoples to some archaic sphere of influence. We will not allow Russia to wield a veto power over the future of our Euro-Atlantic community… Our strategic goal now is to make it clear to Russia’s leaders that their choices are putting Russia on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance.
Except it wasn’t Blinken who said that, it was Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s top diplomat, who made the statement after Russia helped separatists slice off a part of the nation of Georgia in 2008. Putin has heard all of this nonsense before. He knows it means very little for him or Russia.
Putin also knows the sanctions imposed by the West are a speed bump at most. Energy and stock markets that remain stable show that no one cares about the new sanctions enacted. The tougher options suggested by some, such as kicking Russia out of the SWIFT mechanism for cross-border financial transactions or preventing Russian banks from engaging in the dollar-denominated transactions that rule global finance, would actually harm the USA most by inducing Russia, China, Iran, and others to create alternatives. The end of the greenback’s near monopoly as the world’s reserve economy would be devastating to the U.S. economy.
Rather than talking tough, It is time to ground our dealings with Russia in reality. This is not 1991, where America has just won the Gulf War in the most lopsided victory since Hitler’s blitz into France and is the sole superpower. Russia is no longer on its back economically and militarily. We face a serious threat from China, whose aspirations are far grander than merely conquering Taiwan. We need to set priorities, and maybe even take the advice from Clint Eastwood’s character in Magnum Force: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Republicans suggesting we fund an insurgency in Ukraine are filling air time without serious thought. It would be hard to imagine a step that would provoke Russia more and inflict a more devastating tyranny on Ukrainians. Likewise, those who suggest deploying a larger U.S. military component to Poland and the Baltics are suggesting we incur maximum downside with little upside. Such action would again let Europe off the hook for defending Europe—and this is a grouping that includes 400 million people and a $21 trillion economy. They must learn to defend themselves, and we must end the moral hazard we create by suggesting we can defend people beyond the limits of our actual military power and political will.
Our willful ignorance of Moscow’s concerns about its security—the traditional Russian refusal to permit a hostile military alliance on its borders, which will outlast Putin—has to be tempered. It helped drive Biden’s refusal to engage in serious diplomacy with Russia, instead causing him simply to repeat ad nauseam what the USA supposedly would not tolerate, which Putin already knew. Ukrainians now get to the pay the price for what Biden has done.
Moscow says it is willing to engage in diplomatic talks. Who knows if that is sincere. Moscow has done more than its fair share of lying and all warfare is based on deception. But there might be an outside chance to negotiate the neutrality of western Ukraine, which would prevent it from being subsumed into a greater Ukraine that is firmly controlled by Russia. Our objective from the beginning should have been a neutral and whole Ukraine similar to Austria during the Cold War. But these ideas seem beyond the realm of possibility in Washington, which now probably gets to deal with a unified Ukraine firmly under Moscow’s control.
Simon & Whiton
Check out our latest edition of Simon & Whiton, in which we discussed the politics and patriotism of Asian Americans, dumb statements by Olympic athletes, and the gap between the views of the elite and the middle class. Available below on YouTube (video), Apple (audio), and Rumble (video). We also have video on Spotify now in addition to audio.
https://rumble.com/vvm1yq-optional-americanism-vs.-asian-american-patriotism.html