I am not a pro-war partisan. I took several history courses on Russia in the 1980s and one of Russian governance in the 10s as part of my world history focus and understood the problem of the West’s irrational exuberance to plunder Russia en passant with the fall of the Soviet Union. Western leadership was ignorant (Bill Clinton) and expansionist (EU and NATO) and just kept doubling down on their initial carpet-bagging.
Intimidating and forcing Russia to know tow to a queer and subservient political economy overseen by a corrupt west that thought it could finance its deficit spending by extraction from Russia was and is a partisan Democrat play book. They used maximum force to try to accomplish that so far as possible. They are corrupt and stupid.
Democrats sought to negate the peace maker Donald Trump by incriminating and convicting him although he deserved a Nobel Prize that partisan expansionist Swedes would never give.
Trump’s felony conviction occurred in a heavily partisan political area with obvious conflicts of interest. The crime itself seemed to be not a crime; that is claiming payments made to suppress bad publicity as a campaign expense seems reasonable. Political campaigns pay a lot for positive advertising- paying not to have negative publicity is the flip side of the coin. Trump’s work presently is valuable for trying to end the Ukraine war. European and Ukrainian security will be guaranteed with peace and renormailzed economic relations and development rather than continued adversarial relations. To draw down the knife fight both sides need put away the blades.
Peace between superpowers is based to a certain extent on trust. Like the value of the dollar based on nothing more than the faith and credit of the United States rather than gold or some other material, peace can only be as strong as trust and respect for other nations. One need put effort into building peace and renormalizing relations between Europe, Russia and the United States directly.
At the super-power level trust needs to be the deterrent to war. When each side can obliterate each other there is no value in engaging in battle at a conventional scale that easily can get beyond control resulting in the end of human civilization. Clemenceau wanted to guarantee the peace for ending World War One, and it wasn’t, and World War Two grew to fruition. That paradigm is however anachronistic. There is no Maginot Line that will prevent World War Three.
There are so many that argue in favor of continuing conflict. I don’t mind if they reap what they sew except they draw everyone else into the consequences of their failure of good sense. I wouldn’t equivocate categories of crimes- I think they are all quite different. Some laws on the books are unfair or enforced selectively; just laws are what matter. Giving student loans to some and none to others is a concern; laws should be applied equally rather than selectively and with bias.
The Democrat Party after the end of the Cold War bungled the peace. I regard the present situation as entirely the fault of Democrat leadership. Russia was quite willing to exist peacefully with the west; the west insisted on taking all of Ukraine including Crimea that was astoundingly provocative, and then expanded eastward. The formation of the EU swoll their ambition. Irrational exuberance made discounting negative consequences of expansion trivial. Russia was disrespected and found no remedies beside war. In my opinion the west created their own enemy- and even insisted on it and doubled down reminding me of the sci-fi movie ‘Forbidden Planet’.
