The Winner of the Cold War
In 2012, Barack Obama directly told Dmitry Medvedev to beg the latter’s leash-holder, “Vladimir,” to be patient until after Obama’s upcoming “last election,” at which time he, Obama, “would have more flexibility” with regard to accommodating Putin’s wishes on (Russian) defense matters. In 2014, Putin occupied Crimea, a direct and overt violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in response to which Obama did exactly nothing. Or rather, he did something very specific, namely offer a rhetorical surrender to Putin’s expansionism, opining that “the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” A pretty flexible response from an American president there, one might say.
In 2016, Russian internet trollbots flooded America’s “conservative” news websites regurgitating, in poor English translations, the Kremlin’s case for Donald Trump, and swarming with copy-and-paste invective every website or writer that dared to post any article supporting another Republican presidential candidate, or arguing against Trump’s candidacy — and creating exactly the feedback loop intended among the former conservative grassroots, proving Obi-Wan Kenobi’s observation that the force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded. As president, Trump — the victim of a notorious deep-state-sponsored “Russia hoax witch hunt,” as we all know — spent four years bending over backwards (with more flexibility than even Obama had displayed), to accommodate and defend Putin and Putin’s interests at every available opportunity: demanding Putin’s inclusion at the G7 meeting against the principled opposition of America’s European allies (due to the occupation of Crimea), dismissing the military occupation of Crimea as a settled issue and old news on the grounds that Russia had already spent a lot of resources sprucing the place up for use as a Russian naval base, handing Syria and the fate of the Kurds to Putin, and so on and so forth in a veritable fireworks display of pro-Putin words and deeds, just ripe for distortion into a “Russia hoax witch hunt.”
And now we have the secret cadre of non-senile progressive masterminds collectively calling themselves Joe Biden, who in the face of a full-scale Putin invasion of Ukraine, were forced by optics to pay lip service, and even dedicate some resources, to helping the occupied nation defend itself, but who have quickly made it clear that they do not have, and indeed never had, any intention of seeking the actual defeat of Putin, or the actual thwarting of Putin’s obvious European expansionist ambitions.
The Putin syndicate which calls itself “Russia” (and is compliantly named as such by its friendly apologists in the West) won the Cold War after all. They are now winning the hot war. Case closed. Why closed? Because the three candidates in the 2024 US election will be the cadre calling themselves Joe Biden, the reality TV persona calling himself Donald Trump, and the Putin apologist “anti-war” protest candidate calling himself RFK.
It will be too late to do a thing about this outcome and its long-term implications by 2028, even if it were possible for anyone to appear on the American political scene with the ability to snap the country out of its coma, which of course is not possible.
With every new blustering boldness followed summarily, like clockwork, by a mewling surrender, America sends ever-clearer messages to all her rivals, big and small, East and West, that she is a lethargic coward, has no principles, and lacks the willpower to stand up to anything, or for anything. Such is the fate of the nation that once stood as the last bulwark against the world’s increasingly rapid descent into terror and abject submission. This is not a left-right issue, as the above brief survey of recent history reveals. It is simply a case of Putin achieving the KGB’s Cold War goals, perhaps a bit late but certainly with an absoluteness worth waiting for. The inherent weaknesses of democracy, and the corruptibility of the American populace in the face of decades of easy pleasures, educational subversion, immoral entertainments, and apolitical self-absorption, have borne their intended fruit at last. America is an empty suit, easily laid on its back, or on the ground as a soft carpet to protect one’s boots.
