By Selwyn Duke
It’s hard finding an American, anywhere, who believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a good thing. I’m no exception. War is ugly, and innocent people suffer as the pseudo-elites play their geopolitical chess games driven by power-lust, pocketbook and politics. This also isn’t about rooting for the “good guys.” For Vladimir Putin cannot be counted among them, and, for that matter, neither can ex-actor and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy or our globalist “leaders.” Rather, this concerns something else.
When I was on some medication a while back and wanted to take Benadryl as well, for a more frivolous reason, I hesitated because I couldn’t determine how the drugs would interact. I didn’t take the Benadryl; as someone close to me put it, “You don’t want to risk dying over something stupid.”
The same point could be made here as our leaders, who can’t even figure out what boys and girls are, and who tiptoe around WWIII in the backyard of the nation with the world’s largest nuclear weapons stockpile:
Do we really want to risk dying in an atomic holocaust over something stupid?
This isn’t emotion-driven fear-mongering. Trends forecaster BCA Research is predicting a 10 percent chance of a civilization-ending nuclear war within the next year — and I fear the probability may be greater still.
Before anyone starts going on about the moral imperative of taking up the cudgels for Ukraine — with the pretensions about how “higher gas prices are worth it” (“vaccinating” was the previous moral obligation) — let’s review the stupidity in question.
In 1991-’92 the Soviet Union, in the grip of reformers, allowed the Berlin Wall to come down, dissolved into 15 nations, pulled the Red Army back within Russian borders and even began behaving, arguably, in a more pro-American fashion. For example, “Russia did not use its veto in the Security Council to block the U.S. war to drive Saddam Hussein, an ally, out of Kuwait,” commentator Pat Buchanan reminded us in 2007. “When 9/11 struck, Putin gave his blessing to U.S. troops using former republics as bases for the U.S. invasion.”
In other words, we had a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot our relationship with Russia. We possibly could’ve even turned the Bear into an ally, a valuable asset in what is the current cold war against our main geopolitical adversary: China. For certain is that the United States and Russia have far more in common than either country does with Beijing, sharing both European heritage and essentially the same foundational religion.
But our globalist pseudo-elites didn’t seize this opportunity. What they did instead was take NATO — which had lost its raison d’être as it was created to counter an empire no longer extant, the USSR — and expand it to Russia’s very borders.
In fact, despite then-U.S. secretary of state James Baker assuring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would extend “not one inch [farther] eastward,” there are now on Russia’s borders four NATO members: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Our globalist pseudo-elites perhaps couldn’t help themselves, being both relatively stupid and morally corrupt. They possibly couldn’t dispense with the Cold War mentality and shake the one-worlder obsession with never, ever shrinking but always expanding international alliances and unions. But you don’t have to believe Putin is a good guy — you just have to not be a dumb guy — to grasp that getting along with a fellow nuclear power is both an imperative and requires being reasonable.
Now, question: How would we react if China forged a mutual defense alliance with Mexico and then, later, drew Canada, Cuba and the Bahamas into it? Would we view this as friendly? We certainly made clear with our Monroe Doctrine and during the Cuban Missile Crisis that such meddling was a red line for us.
And so has Putin made clear repeatedly — after decades of NATO expansion — that NATO inroads into Ukraine constitute a red line for him.
Despite this, our pseudo-elites entertained Ukraine’s NATO membership for years and armed the nation with Western weapons. And the stupid bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy just continues flowing forth and escalating the crisis. Kamala Harris recently said while doing “diplomacy” in Europe that she appreciated President Zelenskyy’s desire to join NATO. We’re currently waging total economic war on Moscow, too (though Russia expert Clint Ehrlich claims the sanctions have increased Putin’s approval rating 10 points). There also are more Western arms shipments into Ukraine, which Moscow now warns are “legitimate targets.” Are you at ease with this?
Demagogues would call my talk “un-American”; this label has already been applied to Ukraine realists just as those rejecting “vaccines” and COVID regulations were called unpatriotic. This is not only a childish reaction in a very dangerous time but is the precise opposite of the truth.
Reality: Our Founding Fathers warned against entangling alliances and involving ourselves in European wars. Yet against all reason, this is precisely what our pseudo-elites are doing — in spades. They are the ones being un-American.
To be clear, I was never one to say “Better red than dead” even back when “red” meant communist and Russia was still the Marxist Soviet Union (you know, back when our leftists had sympathy for it and long before they started kowtowing to Beijing). If China or Russia lands troops on our shores, then we do what we must; we perhaps even fight to the last man. But just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was at our doorstep, Ukraine is in Russia’s backyard.
And you must tread softly in another great power’s backyard — like it or not. For that power cannot back down at its own doorstep without losing unacceptable face and credibility. It’s quite as when chasing a man who has repeatedly avoided conflict to his very front door, screaming and shouting and refusing to leave. You may force his hand and have a fight you’ll end up wishing you didn’t start.
Note, too, that many have reveled in likening Putin to Adolf Hitler. While Nazi comparisons are overdone (including by Putin himself), if anyone really believes this, what are the implications?
Well, imagine it’s April 1945, Hitler knows WWII is lost and he’s sitting in his bunker. Now also imagine, however, that he has Putin’s 6,000 nuclear weapons a button’s touch away. What would he do?
We all know.
The point: Many have theorized that Putin may be physically and/or even mentally unwell. A renowned psychiatrist posits that he may even have Paranoid Personality Disorder. He also wields something uncomfortably close to absolute power in Russia, and it has been said that he has staked everything on this war and cannot lose it. So, while we can’t read his mind, do we really want to risk turning him into a man with nothing to lose, a man who maybe, just perhaps, could descend to a point where all he wants is to see the world burn?
Not over a Red Dawn kind of situation, either, mind you — but Ukraine?
If I could snap my fingers and undo Russia’s invasion, I would; I also would, if I could, reverse the decades of foolish NATO expansionism. But that’s water under the bridge. So what’s the solution now?
As Professor Thomas Sowell has pointed out, sometimes in life there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The best trade-off here, I believe, is a quick Russian victory in Ukraine. For the longer this crisis continues, the greater the chances that our pseudo-elites and a possibly unhinged Putin could spark nuclear carnage.
Secondarily, also worth mentioning is that the longer the war continues, the greater the probability there will be a dangerous accidental release from the Ukrainian bio-labs (Son of COVID?), which Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland recently admitted do exist.
Perhaps this is worth it to certain pseudo-elites. Some have posh fallout shelters they can retreat to, after all, and killing off billions sure would be a “great reset.” But for the rest of us, it would be a pretty stupid reason to die.