A Fan-dance of Unity, Strength and Virtue
As Western leaders posture in endless pouty, moralistic denunciations of Vladimir Putin and the Russians, I think it’s past time to look this dragon in the teeth, but also assess the countless Western Weasels who will do nothing substantial. Germany is perhaps the most useless of all the European NATO members, now strangled by their dependence on Russian gas and oil, particularly the former, and has said they will not go along with sanctions targeting SWIFT. You see, the Russians expect payment for their fossil fuels, and SWIFT is how those payments are made. The same is true of the US, the most useless in NATO overall, which is still buying a lot of Russian oil daily. When SWIFT sanctions were used on the implacable Iranians, they immediately returned to negotiations. What Western nations are doing now is a fan-dance of epic proportions. They’re virtue-signaling while doing absolutely nothing of consequence. Their “rules-based international order” is a hoax, and it’s in shambles.
One former Polish Former Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said plainly in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the Western nations have disgraced themselves by their unwillingness to take even these purely financial measures against the Putin regime. All of it was perfectly summed up in one of Sikorski’s retweets of Ukraine’s foreign minister:
To some European leaders who are still hesitant: each year at commemorative events you say ‘Never again’. The time to prove it is now. Russia is waging a horrific war of aggression in Europe. Here is your ‘never again’ test: BAN RUSSIA FROM SWIFT and kick it out of everywhere.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) February 25, 2022
Therein lies the unvarnished truth, and it goes for all the fake, pontificating morons in power on both sides of the Atlantic, who like to regard themselves as experts in foreign affairs and diplomacy: They like to posture as the guarantors of freedom and human rights, and as guardians of the memories of past atrocities, but when it came time for them to actually do what all their posturing promised would be their stance, they defaulted to what would cause them the least immediate economic pain.
I understand the tendency of politicians to do what is expedient with respect to those who elected them, such that imposing sanctions that wind up costing your own populace economic pain may not be popular, but Kuleba is correct: These are cowards of the worst sort. It’s easier to try to fake their alleged virtue by pretending to do something.
At the same time, if you look at the situation in the United States, the Biden administration has been entirely unwilling to place sanctions against Russian energy. The reason is simple: We consume an incredible amount of Russian oil each day. Given that Biden’s administration is only too happy to effectively place sanctions on the American oil industry, it seems preposterous on its face. If Biden’s administration were even mildly serious, they’d dump the stoppage of the Keystone Pipeline, they’d get rid of their various bans on fracking, they’d permit the restarting of exploration on public lands, and they’d generally get out of the way of American oil production, such that in short order, we’d need no Russian oil. This would in turn cripple Putin, drop prices for American consumers, and American companies rather than the Oligarchs in Russia would profit. Hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs would spring into existence, and we would quickly eliminate our reliance on foreign oil, which would crush Russia.
When you consider the idiocy of the policy, and realize how these simple steps are fundamentally all that is required to cripple Putin, one wonders why they’ve not been(and will not be) undertaken. The answer remains the same as ever: This is how they’re paying Putin for getting rid of that pesky Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. All of these left-wingers now controlling the Western governments, from Germany to Italy to France to Canada to the US, each and every one, has been involved in one way or another in profiting from the long-run corruption that had been the hallmark of Ukraine governments until Zelenskiy arrived.
If a few Ukrainians die, and Putin gets some spoils, it’s a small cost to pay in exchange for ridding themselves of dangerous reformer President Zelenskiy. Some will suggest that the motive is something simpler and more political, for instance that the Biden administration is now captive to the hard-left de-growth movement in the United States, and while there’s an element of truth to that, we know they’re perfectly willing to throw their hard-left under the bus for the sake of electoral salvation, knowing their hard-left really has no place else to turn with their vote. It’s much the same game as RINOs like McConnell and Cornyn and Graham use on their own conservative voters: If they can stave off primary challengers, in the general election, it’s not as though a conservative voter in Texas is going to opt for the latest Democrat lunatic to run for the Senate. They’re stuck, as ever, between the lesser of two evils, and this is how these monsters always manage to retain power. It’s the strategy Abbott is trying to use to stave off a strong challenge by Allen West. He needs desperately to avoid a run-off, because if it becomes a two-man race, there’s a good chance Abbott will be beaten. His approach is to win by foreclosing on conservative challengers in the primary next week. (I suspect it’s also the reason FoxNews pre-empted Mark Levin’s Sunday show this week, which was to feature West among the guests. Paul Ryan, now on the board of FoxNews, absolutely detests Allen West.)
In any event, that’s the nature of the Washington game with captives bases. They know their most hard-core voters will default back to them in every election. This is why I do not believe this idea explains the failure of the Biden administration to do that which would clearly punish Putin most effectively, while earning him general good will with voters in an election year. No, there is something much deeper here, and I think the nexus between Hunter, Burisma, Ukraine and Vlad the Invader, along with similar associations with Clinton, Schiff, Pelosi, Romney, Kerry, and several others does a much better job of explaining the situation. The only motivator greater than pure greed for money and power is the absolute necessity to avoid any legal liability, particularly of a criminally corrupt sort. Seeing Zelenskiy silenced is a convenient outcome, the people of Ukraine be damned.
NATO has become largely a virtue-signaling organization, from recruiting to their world-facing side. Here’s a video of their most recent fan-dance:
If this doesn’t convince you that they’re not serious about defending the West, I don’t know what will. This whole exercise in Ukraine is pointless, because they don’t mean to do anything effective. More, most of them will be happier when Zelenskiy is gone. Welcome to the greatest show on Earth.
Update: Reminder, remember when Obama told Medvedev to communicate to Putin that he’d have more flexibility after the election? Obama was re-elected, and then Putin took Crimea. Think about it. Now Biden is in office, and Putin attacks Ukraine. Peter Schweizer told us that Biden is compromised. Do you still wonder about our Western fan-dance?
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