Increasing tensions with a nuclear superpower - smart or not?

Weirdly the narrative of "Evil Russia" is very much alive on both the Left and the Righ. You got the odd Chomsky who actually argues for a bit restraint of provoking the Russians, but in general if you read online comments or listen to NATO chiefs and politicians, you have this feeling of collective insanity.

Everyone seems to have accepted the narrative that "The Russians Must Be Stopped", and that "provocative steps are necessary to ensure peace". It seems like there's a collective amnesia about the history of the last 25 years, and everyone is just happily engaging in their happiest paranoid Cold War mindset.

First of all- the argument that we can't let a country just do whatever it wants- the world has changed.

Really.

Iraq war, anyone? Torture? Cyber attacks against a sovereign country? (An act of war, actually.) Threat of a nuclear strike against a sovereign country? (You know, a war crime in itself.) Mass surveillance even -grasp!- of foreign politicians? Bombing sovereign countries? Supporting "moderate" rebels (aka the merry men of ISIS)? Talking about and executing regime changes? Drone strikes in areas which are outside of a war zone? Assassinations? Suspension of Habeas Corpus? Supporting murderous medieval regimes who wage horrible wars in Yemen?
These things are a-OK? If the Russians put a fleet close to US coastal waters every time the Americans exercised their hyper-interventionist policies, we would have all died of a nuclear holocaust by now.

But I digress. Let's not engage in "whataboutery", as these things are labelled whenever they are brought up as an inconvenient counterpoint.

Let's focus on Russia.

Why are the Russians are so damned aggressive, you'd ask. Well, you can ask why a guy in the pub is so darn aggressive once you took his drink and tried kissing his girlfriend.

They are aggressive, because they have been provoked, idiots.

What has the NATO been doing to provoke them, you ask? After all, they're just minding their own business, not doing any hostile moves?

Well, for one, they are expanding east, in direct violation of their promise. And make no mistake: this is an aggressive move against the Russians. The NATO has not ceased its anti-Russian rhetoric since the Cold War. (Ironically this whole Cold War thing seems to be a product of American paranoia; the Soviet Union seemed to have tried to join NATO... although don't quote me on these; and they are tangential points, anyhow.)
The Russians have experienced two devastating wars from the West, and ignoring their history and their attitude (isolationist, pretty defensive and xenophobic) is stupid. They want their buffer states around them, and if you threaten this you threaten them. It's that simple. Ask the Americans about Latin America if you want to see something similar. If you look at Russian interventions they usually were defensive in nature. Even the famous Winter War started because Stalin wanted some buffer between him and the Germans.

Foreign adventures like the war against Georgia is normally brought up at this point. Too bad the narrative is a lie, is it? Funnily the truth isn't the "evil Ruskies against the poor, defenceless Georgians" as it is still touted by the media. Weird in this era of the free press, is it?

Ukraine is being brought up. Consider this: you remove a pro-Russian government with a coup, and install a pro-Western (pretty far right) one  instead, threatening their access to their only warm water port. Can I ask you something politely? What the fuck did you think would happen? Seriously. Did you expect them to just accept the fact that their direct neighbour is a pro-NATO country, while you have been putting NATO bases, radars and other "defensive" structures in Central Europe? Have you forgotten what triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis? (Hint: something to do with the nukes in Turkey.) They wanted to keep their bloody port, so they took the Crimea. You did not have to be a genius to see what would happen.

With Syria we see a similar issue. While human rights mean nothing when our dictators are trampling them (see: House of Saud), they mean everything when we can screw the Russians over. Assad might not be a pleasant individual, but he is miles ahead of the US/Saudi supported fundamentalist "moderate" rebels who not only hate Christians, they hate Muslims, too, if they don't subscribe for their own particular sect. And in this case hatred does not mean toilet papering each other's lawn. I have Syrian friends (Christian Arabs), and they all said: Assad is the best alternative. (Even the Syrian expat community in Budapest seems to think so if the window of a Syrian shop is any indication: it has a huge poster of Assad on it.) The civil war was a horrible crime the US and her allies helped to fester. It needs to stop. And the only people willing to put a stop to it is Assad and the Russians. Trump -and it pains me to say so- is right in this. Once the war is over, then the issues can be addressed; but nothing will be gained from supporting rebel fractions whom we think are "moderate". (I wonder what the "moderate" Islamic fundamentalist looks like.) Just look at what happened in Mosul after a little western meddling: the community is completely torn apart by hate.

Pushing the Russians will not help at all. Raising tensions when both sides can essentially destroy all human lives on this planet is just fucking stupid (and I apologise for the word but this is the best description I could find). What you need is de-escalation, mutual respect and a willingness to compromise. The Russians are smart enough for that; the US and her allies so far have been unable to grasp that perhaps they can't always dictate things from the position of absolute power. It works when you're pushing over little dictators you nurtured, but it does not work with a superpower. And like it or not, Russia IS a superpower, even if the Russian GDP is low. There is more to a superpower than GDP, you know. A couple of thousands of nuclear warheads will do the trick.

Lions and donkeys

This famous line is supposed to be about the British soldiers of WWI- the poor, brave souls, who suffered through hell over and over again, and died needlessly by the hundreds of thousands because of the –perceived- incompetence of their superior officers.

This post is not about these officers, and what they could have/should have done to avoid this suffering. This post is about our world leaders: politicians, bankers, and pundits.

Christopher Hitchens supposed to have said that during his first meeting with world leaders during a dinner, he realized that we are led by people who are markedly NOT smarter than we are. In fact, he realized to his growing horror that these people were more stupid than he was.

This is a sobering thought, but, if we take a look at world events, it is very much possible that it’s true. We, the little man, Joe the plumber, the plebs, sleep well, knowing that our elected (or not elected) leaders are smart, they know what they are doing, and they are with a plan. A plan that might go wrong, but they have one nevertheless. We never actually stop and think about what they are doing. If we did that, these people would not be in power for long. The sad fact is: we are (lions or not) being led by donkeys.

We can be more forgiving towards rulers who inherited their position, or were put in place by a foreign sponsored coup. They did not get to their position of power through their merit; they were chosen by either sheer luck (they were the ones who exited through the vagina of their mothers) or by the whims of their sponsor. Wilhelm the Second was born to be a Kaiser; and nobody thought of making him pass an intelligence test before he took his throne. The Sah of Iran was put into power by a British-US lead coup; nobody stopped to think about his abilities as ruler. So when these people fuck up, we can dismiss them as the unavoidable results of a non-democratic political system. (Although we’d have harder times explaining the very much effective Chinese technocrats, who were not voted on, but who WERE selected according to their capabilities.)

But the sad fact is that our elected leaders are not much better than an inbred aristocrat. To see this, it’s enough to take a look at the politics of the post First World War world, and especially the US of A. Democracy does not mean meritocracy. Just the opposite, it seems.

The US has been consistently acting on knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats, and based most of its politics on ideological grounds, rather than realpolitics; just look at how successful they were at transforming an anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam into an anti-Communist war; or how they achieved the presence of Al Quaida in Iraq following their invasion.

And not to be accused of America-bashing: the very same thing can be said about European politics. It seems like our dear leaders either act on very short-term, short sighted policies (like the constant support for oppressive regimes and “freedom fighters” abroad), or on ideological grounds regardless of facts (the fixation on austerity above all else in British politics), or simply out of general ignorance, cluelessness and stupidity (the Ukrainian conflict or the recent issues with dealing with the migration problem).

The Ukrainian conflict is an especially good case to this point. A quick recap: Russia pulled back from East Germany and the rest of the satellite states on the condition NATO (which, we kind of need to keep in mind, is an anti-Russian alliance) does not try to move East. Fair enough; the US did not tolerate any deviation from its ways in its own spheres of influence. (Just look at how they reacted to Cuba, and the misery they wrought to Central and South America with coups, banana republics, death squads and puppet dictators.) Any sane, and reasonably informed person (yours truly included) would understand this. And in fact, did.

Yet, the EU and the US (along with the NATO) has violated this agreement over and over again. They pushed further East, which obviously distressed the Russians. Don’t forget: they are a paranoid people, when it comes to the West, and with good reason. They have about 40 million reasons to be paranoid: the death toll of the two World Wars together. The Communist takeover, which resulted from the First War also did not help to make them more trustful of our conflicts. The NATO has been edging closer and closer; there have been efforts to put a missile defence shield into place in Central Europe; and lo and behold, Germany will be hosting US nuclear weapons again. Why would the Russians NOT be worried? Wouldn't you be? So when the democratically elected (albeit corrupt) government in the Ukraine was toppled by a coup, and a coup in which the US had its hand in, the shit obviously hit the fan.

The international press depicted the situation in a very pro-NATO, pro Ukraine (even going as far as ignoring the influence of the far-right light in the new Ukrainian government) - but it’s just as false as their reporting about the Georgian conflict in 2008. Both journalists (if you can call them that) and politicians ignored the crucial fact: the Russians reacted to a situation the NATO/EU has helped to create in both cases. In Georgia the NATO emboldened Georgians shelled Ossetia to try to conquer the contested territories, to which the Russians reacted with force. You did not have to be a genius to see the Russian reaction coming; yet it took both the NATO and the Georgians by surprise. In the Ukraine they reacted when they saw that the possibility of Western military bases close to their Western border –and the loss of access to the Black Sea- was becoming a reality. Again; no great surprise here. If you poke the bear, you have to expect that the bear will not roll over. In fact, you can expect just the opposite.

You can decry the Russians to be evil, to be Hitler, but the fact remains: the US would not have tolerated the presence of a Warsaw Pact nation in Latin America, either. In fact, you only need to look at Nicaragua or El Salvador to see what happens when a mildly socialist government is elected there –democratically. Or how they reacted to the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba –even though they already had more missiles in Turkey at the time.

And so we have it: the EU “sleepwalked” (not my words) into a volatile situation with Russia. A situation which did not need to happen, a situation which you could foresee –even if you are a lowlife little guy, like me, with no access to classified intelligence and international experts. And yet this shitstorm happened nevertheless, because the politicians in charge were absolutely, completely retarded, and were unable to behave like responsible adults. The same case can be made about the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the way Merkel and others dealt with the refugee situation in 2015… it all shows an utter inability for logical thought and planning. I cannot believe but it seems like that in the Ukraine situation only Putin had shown the slightest shred of intelligence… and unfortunately in many other cases there were not even a Putin around to act as a grownup. And this is not limited to politicians. Billionaires, CEOs and other, supposedly smart people sacrifice long-term benefits on the altar of extremely short-term profits. They are happily amassing wealth, creating incredible inequality (something they mustknow will create political instability), fight the acceptance of climate change, hence delaying action, so that they get some more money (something they also must know will impact their own children, like it or not), or work hard to dismantle the welfare state, even though they must know a happy and healthy workforce is more productive than a sick and demoralized one. You can’t export all jobs to China. It seems like the “elite” is far from the evil, scheming overlords many people would think them to be; there are no Illuminati, no Free Masons or Conclave of Rabbis. They are more like egoistic, infantile little fucks, who have no real idea what the long-term consequences of their actions are.

I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have people who are intellectually vastly superior to me to lead us, even if they are schemers, and not bleeding heart liberals. I would prefer to have the Illuminati to these bunch. The sad fact is, we’re in no better situation than the Tommies in 1915; only our problems are not as acute as theirs were. Perhaps this is why we let these morons run amok: we don’t perceive the problem either.