Can the US Reinvent Itself ?

 Engaging the US in permanent military conflicts abroad is not the way to solve the serious problems at home, but a way to court disaster. America can and should reinvent itself, not as an "indispensable nation", but as a normal country.

The gaping ruins in Ukrainian cities, the thousands of deaths and millions of refugees now pouring into the West are spelling the end of the US's unipolarity in international affairs. The same conflict, however, is important for a vastly different reason: that of bringing into sharper focus the West's internal strife and the accelerating decay of its political systems and societies. 

Through the extrapolation of observable tendencies, one can safely assume that unless the US and the countries making up the Western alliance reinvent themselves and adapt to the world as it is, their very survival could be at stake. For this to happen, there are some major issues the Western alliance countries must urgently attend to. These encompass the military, diplomatic, economic and social fields. 

From a military point of view, the US's first priority is the long-overdue dismantling of Nato. As matters now stand, Nato is held responsible for a mindless expansion to the East which has led to the war in Ukraine. Undaunted, the foreign ministers of Nato countries and some from the Indo-Pacific have recently reunited in Brussels and have decided to change the organisation's European focus into a global one. This can only mean that Nato members could be involved in far-away military conflicts in the South China Sea in the future. Such an outcome was predictable ever since the US decided to use Nato in its quest for maintaining its global hegemon status. 

The war happening now in Ukraine, however, has proved beyond a doubt that the Russian army is much less powerful than the Red Army during the Cold War era and cannot conceivably represent a credible conventional military threat for Europe. It follows, therefore, that enrolling new Nato members has been done through deception, with the hidden agenda of expanding the US military-industrial complex's customer base.

The preference for unipolarity springs from the fact that American military and political elites consistently draw the wrong conclusions from their study of history. To give but one example, soon after the US became a nation-state, its elites emulated not the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but those of Ancient Greece. As a result, those elites decided that their democratic system of government was fully compatible with the institution of slavery. Consequently, they kept slavery going for more than 50 years after all other European nations outlawed it, one after the other. The result of such a skewed reading of History was the American Civil War of the 1860's, which made tens of thousands of victims and almost jeopardised the unity of the country. (It was rather fortunate for the US that Abraham Lincoln did not attend an Ivy League university or have a classical education)

Closer to our own times, American pundits became infatuated with the study of the Roman Empire, identifying with Rome as the foremost military power in ancient times. These type of studies increased in intensity after the fall of communism and were used to provide the historical arguments in order to maintain America's unipolarity well past its due date, like in the case of the 19th century slavery issue. We are all familiar with the results of this flawed reading of Roman history, and so are the Serbs, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians and now the Ukrainians.

The US is also fully engaged in preventing China from replacing it as world hegemon, an effort that could result in war in the Indo-Pacific. The lens through which American policymakers interpret China's rise is that of the "Thucydides Trap", which also forms the basis of US foreign policy. Again, the study of Ancient Greek historical thought has led some otherwise highly educated Harvard historians to import ideas from the infancy of humanity into a mature and highly complex society which the United States is today. Considered one of history's deadliest patterns, it almost mandates that countries involved in such a "Trap" must go to war with each other. Sadly, it has not occurred to American historians and pundits that the two rather small city-states of Ancient Greece - Athens and Sparta - can by no means be a model for the enmity that exists between the US on one side and China on the other, today.

For its part, China has time and again assured the US that while it disagrees with American unipolarity, it does not intend to substitute itself in its stead. Rather, the Chinese preference is for a 19th century European type of multipolarity, revamped to suit the management of global affairs in the 21st century. To be more precise, China seems to be in favour of an institution like an enlarged G7 - which is to include both established and emerging economic and military powers - that would take over the management of global affairs from the United States. Unfortunately, the ancient model of Thucydides Trap still exercises a strong fascination over the minds of American policymakers, a fact that could have catastrophic practical consequences. 

For the United States, another emergency is an overhaul of its diplomatic service, which has to include the sacking of all neoconservatives who are lurking in the hierarchy of the State Department. The neoconservatives are the foremost supporters and enablers of American unipolarity, which saw the US dragged into needless wars and nation-building fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and now in Ukraine, all with disastrous consequences. Given their propensity to push for the wrong foreign policy measures and initiatives, such people should not be allowed nowhere near the State Department or its embassies abroad. Instead, the US should start a major education program for top State Department bureaucrats and diplomats, aimed at making them understand the finer points of multipolarity and how it is to be implemented and operated in practice.

One of the biggest headaches in the Western world during modern times has also been the presence of Catholics in positions of leadership in major European countries or in the US. Indeed, practically all modern times' crusades were led by Catholic leaders, from Napoleon and Hitler to Tony Blair, or Boris Johnson and Joe Biden today. There is currently an unholy alliance between neoconservative bureaucrats in the State and Defence Departments and Catholic political leaders like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Boris Johnson, who have joined forces to unleash the latest crusade on Russia via Ukraine. The US cannot reinvent itself with Catholic leaders in control of its foreign policy and neoconservatives in charge of its diplomatic service.

There is a great need also of an overhaul of the American military-industrial complex, and of limiting its access to federal legislators and administration officials alike. During the Obama administration, some initial efforts were made to trim the US defence budget by some 10 percent. The defence budget is the lifeline of this complex, which unfortunately has been amply funded by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Consequently, its representatives have a vested interest in expanding the US military, in the expansion of Nato and what is commonly called the "forever wars", which have become a fixture of US involvement abroad.

Being a highly secure country positioned between two oceans, the US should have reduced the size of its military significantly after the fall of communism. Again, only the Obama administration started a process of downsizing the American military, a commendable effort that wasn't followed through by the next two presidents. Unfortunately, having an oversized military and a huge defence budget is bound to ignite ever larger conflicts abroad to justify the expense. This is in part what we are witnessing in Ukraine, and an explanation for the push to paint China as a US strategic competitor, to prepare for war with it.

Finally, there are other urgent measures that have to be taken in order to make the American economy more performant and less dependent on global supply chains, as well as make American society fairer and more egalitarian. However, not being a specialist in these fields, I would not attempt to recommend solutions, but just to highlight the need to fix these problems. Like the military and diplomatic fields, the West has to find the appropriate remedies to its ills and reinvent itself if it is to survive and thrive in the future. As Americans are bound to find out, there is life after unipolarity after all.

The West's Last Crusade

 The  possible disappearance of Ukraine from the political map of Europe is the least of the problems facing the international community of states. We are all at a make-or-break junction in world history and not only Russia, but also the 'West and the rest' have to take a stand and help out to bring about a fairer, multilateral world order. Anything less could mark the end of civilisation itself.

Before tackling the West's last crusade happening under our own eyes, I feel we should appreciate Vladimir Putin for trying to reverse western expansionism in his neighbourhood and for pointing the conflict back to the ones responsible for promoting it for ages. 

The fact that we are all only a few steps away from all-out war against Russia as well as from nuclear catastrophe is by no means accidental. As matters now stand, the United States is led by a Catholic president and its House of Representatives by a Catholic speaker. We all know that Catholics have been Russian Orthodoxy's implacable foes for centuries. In fact, as Natalia Narochnitskaia explains in one of her papers "it is ridiculous to explain 600 years of unprovoked expansion to the Western fringes of Russian Orthodox lands by the 'divisions of Poland' and 'czarism' [...] It was the West using the spear of east European Catholics that was consistently moving eastward from the 10th to the mid-20th century. The territory of Russia was consistently pushed further away from the cradle of the Russian statehood."

As the balance of power in Europe shifted in the 18th century in favour of Russia and older powers like Poland, Sweden and Turkey declined, the importance of the Russians increased manifolds. Unfortunately, "civilised" Europe found it very hard to accept such geopolitical shifts ever since, and insisted on labelling Russians as "barbarians", just as Zelensky and president Biden do now. 

Nor was the strategy of alleviating east-west tensions by involving Russia in various European coalitions successful in the longer term. As the same Natalia Narochnitskaia points out, "a larger part cannot be integrated by a smaller one, which goes a long way towards explaining the centuries old rejection by the West of Orthodox Russia.[...] Russia is the vehicle of Byzantine legacy the West hates so much". 

Most of today's American political leaders have been influenced in their views of Russia by Zbigniew Brzezinski's depiction of Orthodox Slavs as culturally inferior to other ethnic groups in the world. In the current environment, this enables Zelensky and Ukrainian ultranationalists to reject peaceful compromise with Russians and advocate their indiscriminate killing by the local population instead. 

NATO's relentless eastwards expansion to the borders of Russia, therefore, fits a centuries-old tradition. This latest crusade is now led by a small number of Slavic nations that have joined the alliance in 1997, aided and abetted by an American Catholic president who is catastrophically ill-prepared for the job. Since 2014 as vice-president, Joe Biden has been in direct control of the upheaval in Ukraine and the subsequent takeover of the Kiev government by Ukrainian ultranationalists, most of whom are Catholic themselves. The conflict in Ukraine has however been presented to a hapless Western public as a fight for democracy against autocracy. It is hoped, in the view of American planners, that such a false narrative might eventually convince misguided Europeans or even Americans to fight the Russians directly in Ukraine in the near future. 

The expansion of the West using Europe's crusading Catholic Slav nations, like Poland, is not the sole explanation for Nato's expansionism in the last 20 years. The other ingredient contributing to today's explosive situation is the US military-industrial complex (MIC), a traditional major provider of American jobs. The expansion of Nato has been instrumental in assisting US industries working for the complex to sell military hardware to its new member countries, which have become its captive customers. 

To date, only president Obama has tried to reduce the size of his country's MIC and to cut defence budgets. He is also credited with starting a series of brainstorming sessions among the military with the objective of finding downsizing solutions. Soon after he left office, however, president Trump allocated more money to the military and, using the current tensions in Ukraine, president Biden increased the US defence budget yet again.

For American citizens, the US is a safe and secure country defended by its geographical position in between two oceans. The average American finds it hard to understand why the US should pay for Europe's defence via Nato, or why it should take on the obligation to fight on behalf of any Nato member that might come under attack, for reasons that have nothing to do with the interests of the United States. Still, by continually depicting Russia as a menace to American democracy or as the barbaric aggressor of innocent, democratic Ukrainians, the Catholic lobby in the US and Europe - which also includes the Vatican - has succeeded in preparing the Western population psychologically for war with Russia.

Problem is, Catholic pundits and political leaders are acting like a dangerous bunch of idiots. Russia is not only a huge and militarily powerful country, but it is also the main nuclear power in the world today. Short of eradicating it from the map, the US has no other solution but to reach an acceptable compromise with this former foe and learn to live with it peacefully. This, of course, involves first and foremost giving up Catholic-inspired crusades against this country.

As FDR advised during the forties, the US and Russia should try to become in some ways more like each other. For its part, Russia did try to become more like the United States, in adopting a market economy. It is now up to the United States to ditch liberal democracy in favour of electoral democracy and to start accepting the fact that Orthodox Christians around the world are in no way inferior to Catholic Christians.

On a wider, Western scale, the Catholic faith should finally be reformed in ways that would prevent it from interfering in international relations between states the way that the Church has in the past, and still does today. In order to defang it, it would be a good idea for the Italian state to abolish Vatican statehood, transform the Vatican into a national museum with the proceeds going to the Church's many victims, and give it 44 hectares to move its headquarters somewhere else in Italy, away from Rome itself. This way the Catholic Church would become like any other Christian denomination and hopefully act accordingly.  

We have to keep in mind that all modern day political leaders who have organised crusades against Russia were Catholics, from Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini, to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson today. The current arrangement with the Italian state which recognized in 1929 the sovereignty of the Holy See within the Vatican was a major error. As Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church has thrived for centuries by giving religious backing to all European powers in their quest of empire-building, from the Spanish and the Portuguese in the New World to the Austrians and French within Europe. In truth, the Catholic Church has been responsible for keeping the flame of imperialism and crusades alive for most of its existence, all while benefitting handsomely from the leaders and countries it supported in their quests. By revoking the Lateran Treaty from 1929 and by moving the Catholic Church head office outside Rome and getting this church out of international politics, the Italian state would make a huge contribution to world peace.

As matters now stand, the Catholic Church has a big share of responsibility in fuelling American hegemonism around the world and trying to cash in on it. I advocate this course of action not out of hate for Catholics, but in the interest of avoiding a devastating nuclear war, which Catholic crusaders are unfortunately ill-equipped to prevent.

The Language of Losers

Political losers can easily be recognised by their propensity to level against their opponents the most far-fetched accusations.

 Up until now, one could rarely see in international politics leaders who debase themselves by calling their opponents names. But this is exactly what is happening lately, starting with Joe Biden's almost daily slur offensive against Vladimir Putin, and on to Zelensky in Kiev who calls the Russian soldiers "animals" in order to rob them of their humanity.

The most outlandish accusation Biden has levelled against Putin so far was to brand him a "war criminal", for the excesses attributed to the Russian army in the field, as if the Russian president personally instructed the soldiers to attack and kill civilians in Ukraine. 

To be sure, I have never heard anyone call George W. Bush a war criminal for the excesses made by the US army in Fallujah or Abu Ghraib, for example. Moreover, the United States refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court and its military has quite a reputation of engaging in summary executions in all the wars it initiated or participated in, or in rapes even in peacetime.

The real butcher in Ukraine is actually Zelensky. From the outset he called on Ukrainian civilians to carry arms, produce Molotov cocktails and attack Russian troops and tanks. He encouraged women to bake and serve poisoned cakes to Russian soldiers. In so doing, Zelensky has transformed Ukrainian civilians into combatants. As such, he made them legitimate targets of the Russian army. How can any leader sacrifice his country's population this way ? In fact, Zelensky has armed the whole population because from day one he had the intention to provoke a high number of civilian casualties, in order to turn around and accuse the Russian army of war crimes. For Zelensky, the events unfolding in his country are everybody else's fault but his own or his team's. 

What we are dealing with here are two losers who cannot accept that their plans to bring Russia to its knees have backfired. One can recognise losers in domestic or international politics fairly easily. They usually launch outlandish accusations against their opponents and try to make public opinion believe that their targets are psychopaths, or war criminals and the like. Actually, all politicians resorting to such personal attacks have lost or are about to lose the allegiance or respect of their own electorates. Their handling of disputes, both in domestic and in international politics, is usually disastrous and leads to serious trouble for their own country or their allies.

The test of true leadership, however, also means having the guts to assume one's own shortcomings and errors and not blame these on one's opponents. 

Russia's Bismarckian War in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is in many ways puzzling, not only for the average European but also for seasoned historians who have failed so far to recognise or admit to its nature. This is so because, living as we are in a post-Cold War world and with a distant Atlantic power acting as the military leader in Western Europe, the actual nature of this war has largely been hidden from sight. 

As we all know, there are many types of wars. Hegemonic wars, like the ones France and Germany fought during the 19th and 20th centuries; straight wars of conquest involving the acquisition of real estate at the expense of one's neighbour, which was the main type of war during the Middle Ages; wars of extermination, such as the ones fought by the Americans against the indigenous Indians, or by the Spanish against the Incas; there are also civil wars, which are wars within the boundaries of one country which can provoke significant loss of human life, as it happened during the war of secession in the US during the 1860s. In Europe, we also experienced the ravages and devastation provoked by religious wars, which afflicted the continent for 30 years and ended with the Peace of Westphalia. Finally, there are small-scale wars such as border wars, which mainly involve countries in Asia and which do not represent a major threat for international peace.

The war in Ukraine is exceedingly rare and we can call it a Bismarckian-type war. Such a war takes place within a group of countries that do not only neighbour each other but also share the same culture or language and are part of the same ethnic group. The Germans experienced such a war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. 

A strongly militaristic Prussian state, built around Berlin, wanted to eliminate a second pole of power within the German world, Catholic Austria, which was dividing the German world and was making it impossible for them to unite into a more powerful political unit. This situation led to the " German war of brothers", or Deutscher Bruderkrieg.

The political leader at the time was the well-known Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. He spilled German blood during his war against Austria, but succeeded in his drive to unite most Germans around Prussia and remained to this day one of the greatest political figures in German and European history. (His legacy in international affairs was the advice - unfortunately not followed by his successors - that in order to have peace in Europe, a "good treaty with Russia" was paramount).

Like today, Bismarck's war was fought after the European continent experienced a long period of peace which followed the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. The similarities do not end here. Prussia, like Russia, was no fan of liberal democracies, but rather an authoritarian state managed with an iron fist by its emperor and its chancellor. Like Russia in the nineties, Prussia had been  affected by the 1848 revolutionary wave in Europe - similar to the 1989 revolutionary wave - which sought to bring to power liberal-minded governments on the whole continent and generally democratise European political life. 

The Slav world also oscillates between two religious poles and two nations that would like to be considered as leaders. One is Russia, a militaristic Slavic "Prussia", which has weathered many national crises and defeated two major enemies in modern times (the French and the Germans). 

The second is - since the election of Karol Wojtyla to the Papacy - Poland. Its contribution to bringing about the fall of communism during the eighties, the implosion of the USSR, and its accession to NATO have rather adversely affected the minds of Polish politicians. Their hope is that by initially building Ukraine up as a client-state which is to be ultimately led by the Catholic element in that country, they would in time be able to challenge Russia together, for the leadership position of the Slav world. This is the main reason why Poland, which is militarily weak, is the most strident advocate of NATO intervention on behalf of Ukraine. But not being able to fight the Russians by themselves, the Polish leaders believe they have the cunning to push the Alliance to fight the war with Russia for them.

Russia felt that its primacy within the Slav world was being challenged by the Poles, who enlisted not only Ukraine's help but that of the Czechs and Slovaks as well, and in the end was forced to initiate a Bismarckian-type war in order to quell such plans. The Russians correctly assumed that such inter-Slav rivalries were a godsend to the advancement of Washington's unilateralist agenda, and to the final triumph -via Russia's defeat- of the neocon unipolar world project with America on top.

The only major difference now compared to Bismarck's times, therefore, lies in the existence of an extra-European superpower, the US, who has tried hard over the last twenty years to remain the sole leader in world affairs after the disappearance of the bipolar world. Still, it would be hard to believe that Americans would risk an all-out nuclear war with Russia, which is one of the champions of a multipolar world, in order to enforce their claim. For all practical purposes, by assisting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, the US and the EU are playing the role France played in 1866 in supporting Austria diplomatically. That, to be sure, will not make Ukraine win this or any other war against Russia.

 

A Manifesto to the Ukrainian People

 The horrendous suffering in Ukraine prompts me to speak to you from my heart, as a concerned neighbour, but also as a Romanian-born historian, fully aware that your country is the scene of a tragic confrontation with your much larger neighbour Russia. 

When you started your nation-building process back in 1991, your leaders could have taken a close look at the way the Romanians built their state 163 years ago. Unlike Ukraine, Romanians had lived under Ottoman rule and started their unification process in 1859, in a much more agitated international environment than that of the 1990's. The leaders who built the nucleus of contemporary Romania were, however, learned, skillful and dedicated to the task of building a united and independent state. The state-building process was completed in 1918 at the end of the first world war, when Romanians living under Austro-Hungarian and under Russian rule were united in a single state for the first time in their history. 

Alas, 22 years later Romania was forced to give up Moldova and northern Bucovina to the Soviet Union and northwest Transylvania to Hungary, following the conclusion of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. 

After the 1946 Peace Congress in Paris, Romania recovered its lost territories in Transylvania, but not Moldova and northern Bucovina, which continued to be incorporated into the USSR. 

With very few exceptions, the Romanian nation-building process, which took some 60 years to achieve, was guided by outstanding and committed political leaders who tried to limit loss of life on the battlegrounds of Europe to a minimum. When Romania, like Ukraine today, faced a similar kind of predicament in 1940, it was enough for Stalin to send an ultimatum to the Romanian government and the politicians of the time gave in to his demands. I can assure you that they did not do that out of cowardice, but simply because the Romanian army was no match for the Soviet army. Romanians have always believed that dying for a cause is commendable, but also that sacrificing one's life stupidly is a mistake. You might be told by your leaders that you are braver or smarter in battle than the Romanians, but this is just not the case.

Nowadays, Romania is - as you know- a stable country in southeastern Europe and a member of both NATO and the EU. This was made possible by the fact that Romanians are part of the larger, Latin group of countries, like France, Spain and Italy, but also because Romania does not have a common border with Russia, having allowed Moldova to become an independent republic which acts as a buffer state between Russia and Romania. For Romania that has meant a loss of some 34,000 square km and a population of 3 million people, 20% of whom are Russian speakers.

Sadly, I think Ukraine's misfortune lies in the fact that it has not been blessed with competent and selfless political leaders. Your leaders should have been able to select the best possible administrative formula to run the country so that it behaves as a non-threatening neighbour to Russia. Although the key to Ukraine's independence would have been its strict adherence to a neutral status, like Moldova's, after 2014 and the Maidan upheaval Ukraine's leaders preferred to seek an alliance with the United States, a distant superpower from some 8,000 km away. To make matters worse, various Kiev governments refused to offer the inhabitants of the Donbas the autonomy they were asking for, choosing to fight and kill some 14,000 of them over the last 8 years. 

The situation worsened after the election of Zelensky in 2019. The changes that were made to the Ukrainian constitution enshrined as national objectives the country's adherence to NATO and the EU. Moreover, the new national security doctrine of Ukraine, adopted at the same time, stipulates that the country must try to recover Crimea from Russia and annihilate the armed resistance of the people in the Donbas. 

This explosive mix of mistakes prompted the Russian army to mobilise for almost a year on Ukraine's border starting with 2021. The Kremlin's hope was that the Zelensky government and its American backers will agree to scrap the NATO membership provision in the Ukrainian constitution and that they will apply the Minsk II agreement. 

Time and again, however, the diplomatic negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the US have led nowhere. Both the US and the Ukrainian governments proved intractable during negotiations and refused to even acknowledge Russia's security concerns at its western border with Ukraine. Ultimately, Russia was left with no alternative but to invade Ukraine, which is - I am convinced - the last thing it wanted to do. 

Even now, with the Russian army in the country and 4 million Ukrainian refugees at the borders, the Zelensky government refuses all meaningful talk or compromise to end the conflict. The heroic resistance of Ukrainians is instead being used by Zelensky in order to become what Andriy Yermak said recently in London: "a leader of the free world". This objective, to be sure, shows that Zelensky's oversized ego is impairing his judgement and that he is not sound of mind.

I wish to remind you that Zelensky is but a TV actor and Andriy Yermak a film producer and that their lack of experience in government means that they do not realise how destructive it is for Ukraine to fight Russia. As you have probably noticed, however, the leaders of the 30 countries that compose NATO do realise it, and that is why they will not indulge Kiev's requests for a no-fly zone or additional tanks and heavy military hardware. These leaders are both experienced and protective of their populations, unlike Zelensky, Yermak & co. 

Unhappy with this, Zelensky is now actively trying to undermine their leadership by addressing the Western public directly by videolink in the street, "instructing" citizens to pressure their governments to give him what he wants. This, to be sure, is an unheard-of attempt to undermine the governments of nations which provide humanitarian help for Ukraine and shelter for its refugees.(The only other known example of this was when Stalin mobilised Western factory workers during the Great Depression against their bosses and political leaders, but in more subtle ways)

As a concerned neighbour, I find this behaviour to border on madness. It is now up to you, the Ukrainian people, to individually and collectively try to get Ukraine out of this mess. For a month now, you have proven your valour on the battlefield. It is now time to stop the destruction and the deaths by putting your weapons down. Unlike the Ukrainian army, I am sure that the Russian soldiers won't shoot you in the kneecaps or resort to castration if you do. 

For the time being, Ukraine is used by the US and the UK as a pawn against Russia. Both the American and the British leaders are trying to deflect the anger of their citizens from scandals at home, by focusing their attention on the tragedy in Ukraine. They also supply more weapons and ammunition to Ukraine in order to prolong the war. As one American politician put it, the US is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, if necessary. Now, you would agree with me that this geopolitical battle between nuclear powers has nothing to do with the Ukrainians, and no Ukrainian should have to die for it either.

The Zelensky government's advertised plans to "defeat Russia" and make Ukraine the arbiter of a new security architecture in Europe are both unrealistic and outlandish, and no Ukrainian soldier or civilian should lose their life over them, simply because that will not happen. 

My advice to you is to cut your losses short and refuse to play in Zelensky's latest film "How I Became Leader of the World". From my part I can assure you that a majority of Western politicians are quite fed up with Zelensky's antics, even if they humor him because they feel a lot of compassion for the ordinary Ukrainian people.

From where I stand, the way your leaders went about building the Ukrainian state was wrong and led to catastrophic consequences not only for you, but for our entire region and for Europe as a whole. Please stop and rethink it all, taking into account the interests of your neighbours as well.

Spare a Thought for Joe Biden

 " Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum"

The American president is in big trouble, both domestically and internationally. After only one year in office, Joe Biden is considered one of the most unsuccessful presidents since George W.Bush. On the home front, the Democrats' fortunes are going south in all major polls, the party risks losing a significant number of Congressional and Senate seats in the fall. Former allies are deserting the party in droves and no wonder: the current administration has mishandled both the pandemic and the American economy, with inflation having risen to a 40-year high long before the Ukraine conflict started. The president's approval rating is one of the lowest ever, proving that Obama's advice - who told Joe Biden he did not have to run in 2020 - was both prescient and timely. 

The bad news on the home front is more than matched by disastrous news from abroad. As soon as he moved into the White House, Biden brought the ill-famed team of neocons Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland into the State Department and the national security apparatus, together with whom he had masterminded the so-called Maidan "revolution" in Ukraine back in 2014. This team did not waste any time in botching diplomatic negotiations with Russia throughout 2021 and provoking it to intervene militarily in Ukraine. They are currently undermining any bilateral talks which might lead to a peace treaty being signed, if Blinken's declarations are any guide. As Victoria Nuland recently told Congress, they envisage a long drawn-out conflict in Ukraine. This would suit the neocons' strategy to torpedo Russia's economy and leadership.

European political leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, were shocked when Joe Biden launched his savage personal attack on Vladimir Putin in Poland, advocating for regime change in Moscow. This, however, was consistent with the neoconservative agenda regarding Russia, despite Blinken's official denials. By calling Putin a "butcher", Biden is desperately trying to determine American feminists to vote Democrat in the midterm congressional elections. Sure enough, the importance of geopolitics in international affairs is hard even for seasoned politicians like Olaf Scholz to grasp, let alone for feminists. This is the reason why they have reduced the entire Ukraine situation to an issue they have been nursing for some time, that of Vladimir Putin's "toxic masculinity". According to leading American feminists, a kind of hormonal reaction of the Russian president explains Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 

Neoconservatives deserve another special mention, however. Affected as they are by the virus of global hegemonism that destroyed Napoleon's France in the 19th century and Hitler's Germany in the 20th century, they continue to push a "USA uber Alles" unipolar agenda in international affairs. Their hate towards Russia is not racial in nature, rather it is based on the realisation that the two other major hegemonic drives in the West's modern history were stopped only with the help of Russia. By refusing to accept NATO's expansion up to its doorstep, Russia - together with China - became the biggest obstacle to their global hegemonic plans.

Any sane American administration would have relegated the neocons to the dustbin of history long ago, not recycled them as they did. Instead, Joe Biden gave them center stage in framing American foreign and defense policies once again, and the results are nothing short of disastrous. Small wonder, therefore, that leading neocon figures are calling this period in US political history "the neocon moment". Walking back American foreign policy from its current predicament seems to be a tall order, which, unfortunately, will have to wait until the next US presidential elections. Let us hope that after so many decades of overseeing US foreign policy, Joe Biden will at least be able to avoid igniting World War III.

The United States' Mad Drive for Unipolarity

 After the collapse of the USSR, unipolarity was supposed to last for no more than a decade. By extending it for two more decades, the US got embroiled in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine. This has to stop before it's too late.

Over the last few days I have watched in disgust the sorry spectacle of an American president visiting the Old Continent in order to prove to the world -and probably to himself, too- that Western countries stand united behind the US in its latest proxy war. On Friday he met up with young American soldiers deployed in Poland at the border with Ukraine, he ate a pizza with them and had the cheek to lie to them with a straight face as he tried to explain why the United States are putting them in harm's way, some 8,000 kilometres from their home country. He told them that they are there to  fight for democracies against autocracies, which - it goes without saying - the US is ready and willing to spend blood and treasure to defend.

Well, not quite. The real reason why US soldiers are being posted in Eastern Europe is to defend American unipolarity against multipolarity, which has been the natural state of affairs in international relations for centuries. As we know from the examples of Napoleon and Hitler, power is a heavy drug which makes political leaders act in dangerous, if not always catastrophic ways. Unchecked, unrestrained power - because this is what unipolarity is all about - is far worse, however, and that's what has brought the world to the brink of a fully-fledged nuclear war this time.

I have also watched in disbelief over the past few weeks how the US - which has interfered irresponsibly in Slav and in European affairs since 2014 - is propping up a Kiev regime bent on starting WWIII in order to weaken its larger neighbour, Russia. The US has not made the slightest effort to lean on the Ukrainian leadership to sue for peace, but is instead using Ukrainian people as cannon fodder, and the rest of Europe as a refugee camp only to provoke regime change in Moscow. Russia's cardinal sin, it appears, is that of being one of the main challengers to the unipolarity of the US in world affairs.

Unfortunately for all concerned, unipolarity cannot be saved. Regardless of how many allies the US enlists in this quest and how many inept sanctions they pile on Russia, (which are sure to be extended to China in the future, as well). As no sane political leader can disregard geopolitical imperatives in the conduct of foreign relations, like the US has for the past few decades, nor can unipolarity be enforced for long against multipolarity. Thus, although Zelensky wants Joe to be the "leader of the world", the truth of the matter is that this is not his choice or Joe's to make. 

After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, an American geopolitician friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, described him as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". After watching the American president for about one year go about "solving" international crises from Afghanistan to Ukraine, I can now confidently confirm that my American friend's assessment was an understatement. The US president is not only overwhelmed by the crisis in Ukraine, but his neocon team is a menace to world peace, and his monumental misunderstanding of the US's place in international affairs is there for all to see.

For most of us from Europe, the conflict in Ukraine is an internal problem of the Slav world. The other major ethnic groups that compose the EU - the Latins and the Germans - do not exhibit such fratricidal tendencies and get along fine with each other and with Russia. Similarly, an armed conflict between the countries of the Anglosphere has been inconceivable for more than 200 years. The attitude of the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks in this conflict is -for the rest of the Europeans - puzzling, to say the least. Furthermore, neighbouring countries like Hungary and Romania see no valid reason why they should become involved in the Ukrainian mess, were it not for American pressure. In hindsight, the inclusion of Slav nations of Europe in NATO might have been another major error, on top of the admission of Baltic states.

I cannot call myself a Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his loss of the 2020 elections proved to be an unmitigated disaster, both for the United States and the world as a whole. As a businessman, Donald Trump at least understood the fact that the US cannot go about invading countries indefinitely or sponsoring pointless resistance movements, like in Syria or now Ukraine, and he was willing to adjust American foreign policy accordingly. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House, the Russian intervention in Ukraine would possibly have never happened.

The sooner American elites and foreign policy circles can acknowledge the huge risks involved in keeping up their claim to unipolarity, the better it would be for the world as a whole. I say this because by keeping up the fight to remain sole hegemon, the US runs the risk of not only losing its current (undeserved) status, but also of destroying large areas of the world in the process.