MARK STEYN DRIFTING TO ARMAGEDDON
https://www.steynonline.com/14610/drifting-to-armageddon
Actually, it turns out I’ve gone full-on Bidenist, literally more submissive to his Delaware beach house than the Delaware beach house itself. As widely reported in Britain and Europe, “there is an American veto on Ukrainian use of Storm Shadow missiles to attack targets at depth in Russia, even though that will materially assist Ukraine.”
So what is still nominally the “Biden” Administration is restraining London and Paris from letting the Ukrainians strike Russia with their UK-provided Strike Shadows and French-provided SCALP missiles. The “Biden” Administration evidently feels nuclear Armageddon might not be helpful in, say, the tighter swing states such as Pennsylvania or Michigan, so would rather the next world war be postponed if possible until, oh, mid-November at the earliest.
Nevertheless, yesterday, Monday, a Ukrainian drone strike hit an oil refinery in south-eastern Moscow. The same day Polish aircraft were scrambled, and the country’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, told The Financial Times that “Poland has ‘duty’ to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine“.
It’s difficult to have a one-sided proxy war. At some point, the logic of the US, UK, France and Germany gifting Kiev with an arsenal they could never have accumulated on their own and then permitting Zelenskyy to lob his freebies deep into Russia will lead the Russkies to conclude that a state of war exists between them and Nato. What then? From The Guardian:
Russia will make changes to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons in response to what it regards as western escalation in the war in Ukraine, state media quoted deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Sunday.
The west’s insouciance – indeed, total indifference – to “escalation” with a country that has more nukes than anybody else on the planet stands in marked contrast to its urge to de-escalate certain other conflicts. Headline from the BBC:
Harris tells Netanyahu ‘it is time’ to end war in Gaza
Just so. In London the same government eager to let Zelenskyy fire its Strike Shadows at Moscow has just “limited” arms sales to Israel.
Bibi may still take Kamala’s calls, but the rest of the planet moves on to the post-American world. Also yesterday, Turkey, a Nato member, applied to join BRICS (the “R” stands for Russia). One more from Monday, a day when Americans were preoccupied with beaches and barbecues, but the world was rather busy:
Putin Arrives in Mongolia in Defiance of I.C.C. Arrest Warrant
Indeed. The International Criminal Court reminded the Mongolian government of its duty to arrest the President of Russia as if he were a social-media entrepreneur landing in Paris. But oddly the Mongols declined to comply, so the ICC is now threatening to fine them. Has Mongolia joined BRICS yet?
If Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan, the Washington power couple playing with other people’s money and other people’s lives, get their way and let a one-sided proxy war escalate into a two-sided ol’ regular war, one thing can be said for certain:
America will lose.
Because that’s all the Pentagon knows how to do.
They account for forty per cent of the planet’s military spending and can’t win nuttin’ – Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam… As I put it way back when:
In domestic terms, an unstated, perhaps even unconscious purpose of the wars launched twenty years ago was to purge the dark lingering psychoses of Vietnam. Instead, we made it a pattern of behavior. The right’s reflex response to every veteran interviewed on TV and radio this last week – ‘Thank you for your service’ – carries with it an implicit extension ‘…in yet another thankless bloody worthless unwon war’.
What strategic goal has America’s money-no-object shock’n’awe accomplished this century? In Afghanistan, the Taliban control more territory than before we went in in 2001. The Iraqi parliament is considering a law permitting men to marry nine-year-old girls. Hillary Clinton’s breezy dispatch of Gaddafi (“We came. We saw. He died.”) has delivered every Libyan port into the control of ISIS people-smugglers.
Granted, the semi-incompetent Russian military has not demonstrated any great finesse in this conflict, but how skilled do you have to be when you’re up against guys who take twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser and then butch up by droning Kabul’s most photogenic moppets on the way out the door? How many extra medals did the beribboned buffoon Thoroughly Modern Milley get for that one?
In Kiev and Moscow, under-performing generals and their civilian commanders still get fired and replaced. But, in a corrupt and diseased pseudo-imperial capital, losing a war impacts your access to the medals and big bucks not a bit. A century before the Fall of Kabul, listeners to our Hundred Years Ago Show may recall, the men responsible for Greece’s disastrous defeat by Turkey were put on trial in Athens. They included Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s father-in-law, Prince Andrew, a senior Greek commander. He was convicted, but sent into exile. Six other bigshots were not so lucky: they were executed by firing squad.
I’m not saying necessarily that I want the Joint Chiefs put up against the wall …well, actually, I am – if the alternative is what we’ve had for the last three years: that not a single guy with a Pentagon executive-washroom key has paid any price for a global humiliation that is in part responsible for Putin concluding he could get away with invading Ukraine. “Weakness is a provocation,” as Rumsfeld used to say – and fiasco even more so.
The American way of war does not work – and I don’t mean just the obvious bollocks like introducing Take Your Child Bride to Work Day to Helmand Province. As with so much else in American government, years of failure are no obstacle to being wafted onward and upward to more medals, more money and more failure. It beggars belief that, on the track record of the Pentagon, all the smart guys like Lindsey Graham and Robert Kagan are hot for another, bigger, nay nuclear war.
By the way, if the nukes do start flying, I would bet that (enough of) theirs will work …and ours won’t. As I wrote of Kagan over a decade ago:
Kagan would counter that America won what he calls ‘the war that never happened,’ the one with the Soviet Union, but, given the way the others turned out, it is perhaps just as well it never happened. A great scholar of the American way of war, he’s fascinated with every aspect except victory. ‘The United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known. . . . The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat, and would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle.’
But put ’em up against illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer, and you’ll be tied down for a decade.
Oh, and re “the war that never happened”, we didn’t really win that one, did we? Every major institution in America has been hollowed out by variants of cultural Marxism, including a military whose priority under the present general staff – all ribbons and no chest – is not rediscovering how to win wars but “white rage” and tuck suits for trans combat pilots.
But yeah, sure, war with Russia: Made it, ma, top of the world!
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