July 24, 2023

“This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.” – John Mearsheimer

Flooding the zone in American football usually means putting more pass receivers on one side of the line than the other team can reasonably cover. In literature, the cliché usually means too much of everything – or anything.

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If we had to give a name to NATO strategy in Ukraine today, we might call it “flooding the zone” with damn near everything – a reckless infusion of money and weapons into a barely functional client with more than a whiff of neo-Nazi politics and a tradition of corruption thought to be the worst in Europe.

America and the EU cannot possibly cover all of the unintended consequences of a prolonged feckless war in Europe.

Bipartisan unanimity in America, the European Union, and the British Commonwealth on the Ukraine war is more than offset by Russia’s cordial relations with the rest of the world. China, India, the Muslim world, and the Third World are either indifferent or hostile to America’s surrogate war in Ukraine.

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Surely, economic sanctions are not working against Russia.

And just as clearly, a majority of the world’s population does not support NATO’s latest military boondoggle. Most observers know that NATO’s transparent objective in East Europe is to destabilize the Kremlin regime, not to save a corrupt Kyiv.

The recent jubilation in the western press over the coup that wasn’t in Russia is probative. Yevgeny Prigozhin ran some of his Wagner mercenaries up the road towards Moscow – and then it was over. Prigozhin, an irregular, predictably doesn’t play well with the Russian General Staff. Putin handled the “crisis” by expelling Prigozhin peacefully to Belarus and repurposing Wagner mercenaries as a kind of “Afrika Korps” for duty outside of Ukraine for the moment.

Seems that Putin has taken a page out of the CIA playbook. Indeed, if Prigozhin steps out of line again, it will probably be his last misstep.

Beyond coup fantasies, the grinding war in Ukraine is not going well for Brussels and Washington. Summer is waning and Ukraine’s much ballyhooed “Spring” offensive seems to be stuck in the Dnieper River mud. The south is flooded, the grain embargo is back in force, and Moscow is ratcheting up her own economic sanctions by confiscating western assets in Russia, from beer makers to drilling equipment.

If the Ukraine/Russia grain embargo provokes a famine amidst the underdeveloped nations; given the legacy of colonialism, victims are likely to blame the EU, not Russia. And given the mayhem we see in Paris and other European cities, a restive immigrant Jihad seems to be taking a bigger toll on European Union stability than NATO might be trying to provoke in the Russian Federation.