That was interesting, and it has prompted me to think about why our governments are lying to us, and what is so important about it.
In order of importance:
1. The sunk costs. We spent so much money on Ukraine, and to turn around and say, actually, Ukraine is losing and we have to pull out, is painful.
2. That we lied. We would just have to admit that 90% of what has been said about Ukraine was untrue (a no no for the media as much as for governments)
3. That we started it (coup, arming Ukraine, direct CIA/Nazi links, strategy, everything)
4. That we are the bad guys. We backed Nazis. We use up to four million Ukrainians as proxies, of whom about one and a half million are likely dead. Biolabs and a lot lot worse.
5. That NATO was just defeated by Russia.
6. That NATO is a weak, flabby force with crap weapons, and has been for a long time.
It seems to me that 6. the weak Nato is the prime issue here. By Nato I mean both US military and Euro Nato military. I recall some sages in Jan 2022 arguing that Nato could never want a war with Russia because it would quickly clarify how weak Nato weapons are. They have been propped up by western nonsense propaganda and deliberate ignoring of the March 2018 Putin presentation of modern Hypersonic missiles. I'm assuming many here understand this con-trick, but that we are a tiny mnority.
2 years ago Biden claimed US could fight Russia and China at the same time. Now US can’t fight Yemen and Iran at the same time and has just 2 out of 11 carriers at sea. The importance of denial has never been higher. I don’t think a government can fail its people more than by being caught short on defence. This applies across Europe too.
I once, long ago, commented to my ‘life mentor’ that I thought anger stemmed from fear. His response was that it came out of impotence.
Recalling that exchange while reading this essay I thought about the populations rather than the governments and about the current global malaise and impotence of we people to bring sanity back into the world. I also thought how easy it becomes for a paranoid government to exploit that impotent population, give them a target, usually “the other”, for anger to flourish, for senseless wars to find support.
On Russian fear... My understanding is that the Russians (and the Chinese, for that matter) have always been absolutely petrified of the West's hybrid power. I think that even though in 2022 they calculated that the power balance had shifted sufficiently in their favour so that they could start confronting the West in a more substantial way, that fear remains strong. It is this fear I think that is helping them, as Mearsheimer might say, remain disciplined and excellent strategists.
I do not disagree with anything said here but i will answer one of the questions raised here in this essay that says european
leaders " they must surely be under the grip of some quite special and powerful emotions " , well yes they and its not hard to work out what they are , they are three letters namely the U.S.A.
The war with Russia started when the U.S.A. persuaded Ukraine to announce that it was going to let the U.S.A. site its weapons missiles armed forces etc along the border that Ukraine has with Russia .
Russia said NO we wont allow you to do that.
U.S.A. was already threatening the EU with tarrifs and increased contributions towards the cost of NATO.
The EU was doing a bit of tit for tat with U.S.A. with regrd tariffs and it was inclined to refuse to increase NATO gdp % spending .
The U.S.A. wanted to get on with taking control of the oil in several of the major oil producing countries around the world and was prepared to do it by force Iran being the first so to hurry along the concocted war between Russia and Ukraine and force the EU to increase NATO spending it shot off a warning sign to the EU , it cut off the supply of gas from Russia to the EU by destroying the nord2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea.
EU leaders got the message quickly and committed the billions of euros etc to Ukraine to fight this war with Russia.
Yes you can say it was an increase in NATO spending as instructed by the U.S.A. but it was also more than that , it reduced the thinking that the EU could trade in the world markets as an equal to the U.S.A. the end to cheap gs from Russia destroyed large parts of the EU industrial base so that was the end of EU as a trade competitor with the U.S.A.
Next in line was Iran , as we see now the U.S.A. has spent hugely fighting Iran to take control of Irans oil the same way it has taken control of Iraqs oil both huge top ten world producers , since the fake weapons of mass destruction war with Iraq all Iraqs oul is extracted by U.S.A. oil companies and when its sold off the money is banked in the U.S.A. New York to be exact.The U.S.A. government then tells Iraqi government you will get some of your oil money but only if you elect government officials we like , on occsion Iraq dont and their oil money payments stop.This is whats been happening for over ten years.Iraq is desert it doeant have much else other than its oil, to be honest they dont even have that because U.S.A. takes huge cut for itself as payment for controlling this forced illegal oil extraction.
The U.S.A.thought Iran would be toppled easily too and because China gets a lot of its oil from Iran the U.S.A. thought it could kill three birds with two stones , it thought that it could end its main world trade competitors EU , Russia , China by tying all three of them in knots with war.
The plan is stop EU competing with U.S.A. by getting it to spend hugely on a never ending war supporting Ukraine against Russia.
The plan is stop Russia competing with U.S.A. by getting Russia to spend hugely in a never ending war against Ukraine and EU and UK. and be unable to sell its oil to EU and UK but China decided to thwart that and increased purchses of oul from Russia.
The plan is take control of Iran oil the same way it took control of Iraq oil then dictate how much of that oil it deprives China of but that has not worked either.
The plan is take control of Venezuela oil ( thick heavy oil ) and mix it with U.S.A. ( thin oil ) to make kerosene and diesel but the problem is refineries in U.S.A. that can do this mixture are located in the wrong places.
All this explains why Russia and China supply Iran with weapons and other goods to counteract U.S.A. mendacity.
All this explains why Venezuela no longer supply Cuba with oil required to power its electricity stations.
All this explains why EU and UK leaders behave like idiotsand make stupid decisions , they know that if they do not obey the U.S.A. they will be toppled from power , possibly overthrown , certainly interfered with in terms of world trade , tariffs and sanctions they are individually all cowards and collectively all lemmings.
I think that this piece is among the most analytically serious pieces on European behaviour in the Ukraine crisis that I have encountered and that thaught me something new and I am thankfull for that, and the fear framework, particularly the observation that fear of one's own weakness is more dangerous than fear of another's strength, and the Andropov-RYAN case study as the most precisely documented available exhibit of fear producing confirmation bias at the institutional level, deserves wider circulation than a Substack essay typically receives. The Algeria parallel is exactly the kind of historical analogy that illuminates rather than decorates, and the specific point that De Gaulle's planet-sized arrogance was the specific personal quality required to do what rational calculation alone could not produce is the kind of observation that academic international relations consistently misses by design.
And yet, and yet, the initial gut feeling I get is that the essay, for all its analytical care, consistently stops just short of the question that would make the framework complete. That question is the oldest in political analysis: qui prodest? Who benefits? Not from Ukraine's destruction or Russia's humiliation as abstract geopolitical outcomes, but from the specific perpetuation of the fear that the essay so carefully documents, the fear that keeps European decision-makers marching forward because turning back is too complicated, the fear that converts rational assessment of Russian security concerns into the impossibility of taking those concerns seriously, the fear that makes the collective security alternative proposed in Moscow's December 2021 draft treaties appear not as a serious negotiating position but as a threat to be managed.
The fear is real and the essay documents it convincingly. What the essay does not ask is which institutional actors had material interests in amplifying that fear beyond what the evidence justified, and which institutional actors had the specific capacity to shape the information environment in which European decision-makers were operating when they made the choices that led to where we are now.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's Chief of Staff at the State Department and watched the 2003 Iraq war's diplomatic preparation from the inside, has described in considerable detail over the past twenty years the specific mechanisms through which American strategic interests are embedded in European political decision-making: the early grooming of promising political talent through fellowships and network introductions, the funding of think tanks that define the range of options considered serious, the intelligence-sharing arrangements that give the Americans specific leverage over European interlocutors, the NATO infrastructure that makes European military capacity structurally dependent on American logistics and command decisions in ways that are not reversible without political costs that no individual European government can bear alone and the 1001 dark methods to bring people in line, by hook or by crook.
After the diplomatic fiasco of 2003, when France, Germany, and Belgium refused to support the Iraq war publicly, Wilkerson documents the specific American investment in replacing the recalcitrant western European nodes with more compliant eastern and central European ones whose specific historical experience of Soviet occupation made them considerably more receptive to the framing of Russia as the successor threat. The EU that is panicking about Ukraine is substantially the EU that was redesigned after 2003 to be more reliably aligned with American strategic objectives, and the fear gripping it is genuine and is also the fear that the specific institutional architecture was designed to produce and maintain.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented operation of what Aurelien himself would recognise as normal great power institutional influence, applied by the United States to its European allies with the specific efficiency of a power that has had eighty years to refine the instruments. What makes it analytically important for the essay's framework is that it converts European decision-makers from agents responding to their own fears into nodes in a network whose specific function is to align European policy with American strategic objectives, and whose formation has shaped not only their policy preferences but their sense of what institutional alternatives are even worth considering. The December 2021 Russian proposals were not evaluated seriously by European governments and then rejected. They were not evaluated seriously because the network that had formed European decision-makers had specifically excluded the collective security alternative from the range of options considered serious, for reasons that had nothing to do with European security interests and everything to do with the specific American interest in preventing a European-Russian settlement that would reduce European dependence on American military presence.
The fear framework explains why European leaders cannot turn back once they have started marching. The network framework explains who shaped the terrain they are marching on, and why the exits that would have prevented the march from beginning were closed before anyone noticed they were there. Aurelien is right that fear is the mind-killer. It would be worth asking, in a subsequent essay, whose hand is on the switch.
Europeans are behaving like whining teenagers -- desperate to blame anyone other than themselves for their problems. It is all the USA's fault -- even though Europe has a bigger population, more industry, more history.
Europeans have agency! Europeans could stop the war in the Ukraine by cutting off funding & arming for Zelensky. Europeans have the capability to force the Iranians to re-open Hormuz -- which is much more important to Euros than to the US. But the only things Europeans are doing are (1) provoking Russia into a wider war which will be very destructive to themselves, and (2) blaming the US. It is time for Europeans to grow up and take some responsibility.
Are you talking about the European elites, or European in general? And yes they (elites) could (except opening the Hormuz), if they were differently moulded, like the generation that refused the Iraq war. But it is not what we have, isn't it?
"And it is indeed inexplicable if we rely purely on traditional international relations and political science clichés about how governments make and implement policies. Which suggests that we need to look elsewhere. And unfortunately, better and more serious explanations suggest that European governments are behaving in increasingly irrational ways, and are likely to become even more irrational, which I find worrying: I don’t know about you."
It has long been abundantly obvious that european government have no priority other than The War On Russia, specifically, in getting Americans to fight for them (again) while europeans bark joyously from a safe distance.
It does not matter whether this policy is rational or not. It is the policy, and woe betide any politician who dares question it.
Yes, WWIII is coming, in part as a result of Russian dithering, indecision and incompetence, acting as if the war were a temporary spat with a partner, rather than a blood feud with a full-blown sociopath, a feud in which europe, quite simply will be satisfied with nothing but their deaths.
"From the Russian point of view, of course, their fears seemed reasonable, because fears always do."
Ummm -- Russia has burning oil refineries, thanks to European missiles launched from the Ukraine. is that a "fear" or a reality? Russia has burning e-commerce distribution centers thanks to European missiles launched from the Ukraine. Again, "fear" or reality? Russia today faces massive drone attacks on Moscow -- "fear" or reality? Russia warned against the eastwards expansion of NATO about 2 decades ago ... and their warnings were ignored. Russia proposed a new Europe-wide mutual security basis ... and their proposal was ignored. There comes a time when reality replaces fear.
It may be accurate that long-festering fear played its part in setting the stage for the conflict currently confined to the Ukraine and deep into Russia, but Russia now has to face realities, not fears. The willful failure of Euro "leaders" to understand that ensures the conflict will not remain confined to the territories of the Ukraine and Russia. The very real threat to Russia does not lie in the Ukraine; it lies in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin. Unless the Euros wake up soon, that is where the war is heading.
Europeans should not underestimate the massive reluctance of the great mass of the American people to get involved in yet another European war. Regardless of NATO, this time Europe is on its own.
I believe that the European elite and their politicians have identified, based on the example it has set for European voters, Putin’s conservative and traditionalist policies as a mortal enemy to their post-national, liberal European agenda.
And that is why, even after their American master made it clear that he was no longer interested that much in this war, they do not want to stop the conflict. Regardless or because of everything they’ve invested, they know this is a matter of political survival. They have no choice but to continue as long as possible. And until the last Ukrainian if needs be.
The European NATO countries that repeated for years after 2014 that Crimea was Ukrainian, and that they would help to get it back, were not underestimating Russia so far as they thought a build up of armament of Ukraine was necessary before making a realistic attempt.
"... fear and vulnerability expressed by US officials about the possibility of a missile attack from Iran or North Korea, even in the days before those nations had acquired missiles with sufficient range. (By contrast, the fear that Al Qaida might try to pull off another mass-casualty attack after 2001 was actually quite rational: it was known that they wanted to, but were unable to mount it. ..."
And yet the great attack on the US, when it came, was mounted by the federal government's own public health apparat. Ironic, innit?
That was interesting, and it has prompted me to think about why our governments are lying to us, and what is so important about it.
In order of importance:
1. The sunk costs. We spent so much money on Ukraine, and to turn around and say, actually, Ukraine is losing and we have to pull out, is painful.
2. That we lied. We would just have to admit that 90% of what has been said about Ukraine was untrue (a no no for the media as much as for governments)
3. That we started it (coup, arming Ukraine, direct CIA/Nazi links, strategy, everything)
4. That we are the bad guys. We backed Nazis. We use up to four million Ukrainians as proxies, of whom about one and a half million are likely dead. Biolabs and a lot lot worse.
5. That NATO was just defeated by Russia.
6. That NATO is a weak, flabby force with crap weapons, and has been for a long time.
It seems to me that 6. the weak Nato is the prime issue here. By Nato I mean both US military and Euro Nato military. I recall some sages in Jan 2022 arguing that Nato could never want a war with Russia because it would quickly clarify how weak Nato weapons are. They have been propped up by western nonsense propaganda and deliberate ignoring of the March 2018 Putin presentation of modern Hypersonic missiles. I'm assuming many here understand this con-trick, but that we are a tiny mnority.
2 years ago Biden claimed US could fight Russia and China at the same time. Now US can’t fight Yemen and Iran at the same time and has just 2 out of 11 carriers at sea. The importance of denial has never been higher. I don’t think a government can fail its people more than by being caught short on defence. This applies across Europe too.
I once, long ago, commented to my ‘life mentor’ that I thought anger stemmed from fear. His response was that it came out of impotence.
Recalling that exchange while reading this essay I thought about the populations rather than the governments and about the current global malaise and impotence of we people to bring sanity back into the world. I also thought how easy it becomes for a paranoid government to exploit that impotent population, give them a target, usually “the other”, for anger to flourish, for senseless wars to find support.
On Russian fear... My understanding is that the Russians (and the Chinese, for that matter) have always been absolutely petrified of the West's hybrid power. I think that even though in 2022 they calculated that the power balance had shifted sufficiently in their favour so that they could start confronting the West in a more substantial way, that fear remains strong. It is this fear I think that is helping them, as Mearsheimer might say, remain disciplined and excellent strategists.
Mearsheimer is for me one of the only sane voices out there about this war. He's very vilified in the US for that same reason.
I do not disagree with anything said here but i will answer one of the questions raised here in this essay that says european
leaders " they must surely be under the grip of some quite special and powerful emotions " , well yes they and its not hard to work out what they are , they are three letters namely the U.S.A.
The war with Russia started when the U.S.A. persuaded Ukraine to announce that it was going to let the U.S.A. site its weapons missiles armed forces etc along the border that Ukraine has with Russia .
Russia said NO we wont allow you to do that.
U.S.A. was already threatening the EU with tarrifs and increased contributions towards the cost of NATO.
The EU was doing a bit of tit for tat with U.S.A. with regrd tariffs and it was inclined to refuse to increase NATO gdp % spending .
The U.S.A. wanted to get on with taking control of the oil in several of the major oil producing countries around the world and was prepared to do it by force Iran being the first so to hurry along the concocted war between Russia and Ukraine and force the EU to increase NATO spending it shot off a warning sign to the EU , it cut off the supply of gas from Russia to the EU by destroying the nord2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea.
EU leaders got the message quickly and committed the billions of euros etc to Ukraine to fight this war with Russia.
Yes you can say it was an increase in NATO spending as instructed by the U.S.A. but it was also more than that , it reduced the thinking that the EU could trade in the world markets as an equal to the U.S.A. the end to cheap gs from Russia destroyed large parts of the EU industrial base so that was the end of EU as a trade competitor with the U.S.A.
Next in line was Iran , as we see now the U.S.A. has spent hugely fighting Iran to take control of Irans oil the same way it has taken control of Iraqs oil both huge top ten world producers , since the fake weapons of mass destruction war with Iraq all Iraqs oul is extracted by U.S.A. oil companies and when its sold off the money is banked in the U.S.A. New York to be exact.The U.S.A. government then tells Iraqi government you will get some of your oil money but only if you elect government officials we like , on occsion Iraq dont and their oil money payments stop.This is whats been happening for over ten years.Iraq is desert it doeant have much else other than its oil, to be honest they dont even have that because U.S.A. takes huge cut for itself as payment for controlling this forced illegal oil extraction.
The U.S.A.thought Iran would be toppled easily too and because China gets a lot of its oil from Iran the U.S.A. thought it could kill three birds with two stones , it thought that it could end its main world trade competitors EU , Russia , China by tying all three of them in knots with war.
The plan is stop EU competing with U.S.A. by getting it to spend hugely on a never ending war supporting Ukraine against Russia.
The plan is stop Russia competing with U.S.A. by getting Russia to spend hugely in a never ending war against Ukraine and EU and UK. and be unable to sell its oil to EU and UK but China decided to thwart that and increased purchses of oul from Russia.
The plan is take control of Iran oil the same way it took control of Iraq oil then dictate how much of that oil it deprives China of but that has not worked either.
The plan is take control of Venezuela oil ( thick heavy oil ) and mix it with U.S.A. ( thin oil ) to make kerosene and diesel but the problem is refineries in U.S.A. that can do this mixture are located in the wrong places.
All this explains why Russia and China supply Iran with weapons and other goods to counteract U.S.A. mendacity.
All this explains why Venezuela no longer supply Cuba with oil required to power its electricity stations.
All this explains why EU and UK leaders behave like idiotsand make stupid decisions , they know that if they do not obey the U.S.A. they will be toppled from power , possibly overthrown , certainly interfered with in terms of world trade , tariffs and sanctions they are individually all cowards and collectively all lemmings.
I would think that the greed of the US and its desire to remain top dog is the main driver of everything we see happening in the world today.
You have explained it well.
I think that this piece is among the most analytically serious pieces on European behaviour in the Ukraine crisis that I have encountered and that thaught me something new and I am thankfull for that, and the fear framework, particularly the observation that fear of one's own weakness is more dangerous than fear of another's strength, and the Andropov-RYAN case study as the most precisely documented available exhibit of fear producing confirmation bias at the institutional level, deserves wider circulation than a Substack essay typically receives. The Algeria parallel is exactly the kind of historical analogy that illuminates rather than decorates, and the specific point that De Gaulle's planet-sized arrogance was the specific personal quality required to do what rational calculation alone could not produce is the kind of observation that academic international relations consistently misses by design.
And yet, and yet, the initial gut feeling I get is that the essay, for all its analytical care, consistently stops just short of the question that would make the framework complete. That question is the oldest in political analysis: qui prodest? Who benefits? Not from Ukraine's destruction or Russia's humiliation as abstract geopolitical outcomes, but from the specific perpetuation of the fear that the essay so carefully documents, the fear that keeps European decision-makers marching forward because turning back is too complicated, the fear that converts rational assessment of Russian security concerns into the impossibility of taking those concerns seriously, the fear that makes the collective security alternative proposed in Moscow's December 2021 draft treaties appear not as a serious negotiating position but as a threat to be managed.
The fear is real and the essay documents it convincingly. What the essay does not ask is which institutional actors had material interests in amplifying that fear beyond what the evidence justified, and which institutional actors had the specific capacity to shape the information environment in which European decision-makers were operating when they made the choices that led to where we are now.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's Chief of Staff at the State Department and watched the 2003 Iraq war's diplomatic preparation from the inside, has described in considerable detail over the past twenty years the specific mechanisms through which American strategic interests are embedded in European political decision-making: the early grooming of promising political talent through fellowships and network introductions, the funding of think tanks that define the range of options considered serious, the intelligence-sharing arrangements that give the Americans specific leverage over European interlocutors, the NATO infrastructure that makes European military capacity structurally dependent on American logistics and command decisions in ways that are not reversible without political costs that no individual European government can bear alone and the 1001 dark methods to bring people in line, by hook or by crook.
After the diplomatic fiasco of 2003, when France, Germany, and Belgium refused to support the Iraq war publicly, Wilkerson documents the specific American investment in replacing the recalcitrant western European nodes with more compliant eastern and central European ones whose specific historical experience of Soviet occupation made them considerably more receptive to the framing of Russia as the successor threat. The EU that is panicking about Ukraine is substantially the EU that was redesigned after 2003 to be more reliably aligned with American strategic objectives, and the fear gripping it is genuine and is also the fear that the specific institutional architecture was designed to produce and maintain.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented operation of what Aurelien himself would recognise as normal great power institutional influence, applied by the United States to its European allies with the specific efficiency of a power that has had eighty years to refine the instruments. What makes it analytically important for the essay's framework is that it converts European decision-makers from agents responding to their own fears into nodes in a network whose specific function is to align European policy with American strategic objectives, and whose formation has shaped not only their policy preferences but their sense of what institutional alternatives are even worth considering. The December 2021 Russian proposals were not evaluated seriously by European governments and then rejected. They were not evaluated seriously because the network that had formed European decision-makers had specifically excluded the collective security alternative from the range of options considered serious, for reasons that had nothing to do with European security interests and everything to do with the specific American interest in preventing a European-Russian settlement that would reduce European dependence on American military presence.
The fear framework explains why European leaders cannot turn back once they have started marching. The network framework explains who shaped the terrain they are marching on, and why the exits that would have prevented the march from beginning were closed before anyone noticed they were there. Aurelien is right that fear is the mind-killer. It would be worth asking, in a subsequent essay, whose hand is on the switch.
Europeans are behaving like whining teenagers -- desperate to blame anyone other than themselves for their problems. It is all the USA's fault -- even though Europe has a bigger population, more industry, more history.
Europeans have agency! Europeans could stop the war in the Ukraine by cutting off funding & arming for Zelensky. Europeans have the capability to force the Iranians to re-open Hormuz -- which is much more important to Euros than to the US. But the only things Europeans are doing are (1) provoking Russia into a wider war which will be very destructive to themselves, and (2) blaming the US. It is time for Europeans to grow up and take some responsibility.
Are you talking about the European elites, or European in general? And yes they (elites) could (except opening the Hormuz), if they were differently moulded, like the generation that refused the Iraq war. But it is not what we have, isn't it?
Exactly this. Thanks.
"And it is indeed inexplicable if we rely purely on traditional international relations and political science clichés about how governments make and implement policies. Which suggests that we need to look elsewhere. And unfortunately, better and more serious explanations suggest that European governments are behaving in increasingly irrational ways, and are likely to become even more irrational, which I find worrying: I don’t know about you."
It has long been abundantly obvious that european government have no priority other than The War On Russia, specifically, in getting Americans to fight for them (again) while europeans bark joyously from a safe distance.
It does not matter whether this policy is rational or not. It is the policy, and woe betide any politician who dares question it.
Yes, WWIII is coming, in part as a result of Russian dithering, indecision and incompetence, acting as if the war were a temporary spat with a partner, rather than a blood feud with a full-blown sociopath, a feud in which europe, quite simply will be satisfied with nothing but their deaths.
As usual, a very interesting political reflection.
Without a doubt, fear is a fundamental metapolitical variable. And the worst part is that it's paralyzing and pushes us to persist in error.
"First it was the legs race, then it was the arms race, and then, if we're lucky, it will be the human race"
Brunner
"From the Russian point of view, of course, their fears seemed reasonable, because fears always do."
Ummm -- Russia has burning oil refineries, thanks to European missiles launched from the Ukraine. is that a "fear" or a reality? Russia has burning e-commerce distribution centers thanks to European missiles launched from the Ukraine. Again, "fear" or reality? Russia today faces massive drone attacks on Moscow -- "fear" or reality? Russia warned against the eastwards expansion of NATO about 2 decades ago ... and their warnings were ignored. Russia proposed a new Europe-wide mutual security basis ... and their proposal was ignored. There comes a time when reality replaces fear.
It may be accurate that long-festering fear played its part in setting the stage for the conflict currently confined to the Ukraine and deep into Russia, but Russia now has to face realities, not fears. The willful failure of Euro "leaders" to understand that ensures the conflict will not remain confined to the territories of the Ukraine and Russia. The very real threat to Russia does not lie in the Ukraine; it lies in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin. Unless the Euros wake up soon, that is where the war is heading.
Europeans should not underestimate the massive reluctance of the great mass of the American people to get involved in yet another European war. Regardless of NATO, this time Europe is on its own.
Yes. Fear.
I believe that the European elite and their politicians have identified, based on the example it has set for European voters, Putin’s conservative and traditionalist policies as a mortal enemy to their post-national, liberal European agenda.
And that is why, even after their American master made it clear that he was no longer interested that much in this war, they do not want to stop the conflict. Regardless or because of everything they’ve invested, they know this is a matter of political survival. They have no choice but to continue as long as possible. And until the last Ukrainian if needs be.
The European NATO countries that repeated for years after 2014 that Crimea was Ukrainian, and that they would help to get it back, were not underestimating Russia so far as they thought a build up of armament of Ukraine was necessary before making a realistic attempt.
"... fear and vulnerability expressed by US officials about the possibility of a missile attack from Iran or North Korea, even in the days before those nations had acquired missiles with sufficient range. (By contrast, the fear that Al Qaida might try to pull off another mass-casualty attack after 2001 was actually quite rational: it was known that they wanted to, but were unable to mount it. ..."
And yet the great attack on the US, when it came, was mounted by the federal government's own public health apparat. Ironic, innit?
“You can’t reason with fear and hatred.”
Giorgio Bassani
Within the Walls (1956)