It is unseemly to crow about me being prescient and right in the past but I ask you to read my featured flashback post in the left margin, Crimea River. Written in January of 2017, the writing was on the wall regarding the foolishness of President Trump's words and actions regarding NATO and the EU.
Putin worked his American pal like a violin, or a useful idiot, whichever you prefer.
"Now if I was a citizen of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland or the Ukraine, those people have good reason to worry. Because Herr Trump now says that NATO is obsolete, as is the EU. This is a major deck reshuffle and might pave the way for the Russian Bear to recoup some major real estate. Think Trump will utter a peep?"
Blind dog or a broken clock, nice to be right once in a while, if the end result was not so horrific. Unfortunately the writing was on the wall with this one.
2 comments:
Trump should be obsolete. And, Putin.
I have this idea that the west was on a high after the Berlin Wall fell and now there was nothing to sweat. We shifted our focus to getting rich. When there were problems with getting rich, like the two economic disasters that occurred in the 21st century we turned on each other getting politically polarized and fighting each other. Perhaps we needed a "devil" like the USSR to prevent our own internal strife from taking over. Well, we brewed up a devil in Putin even though we didn't pay much attention as he grew horns and tail. These big historical processes probably would have occured with or without the individual actors Trump and Biden. Trump was happy to green light Putin right to his face. Biden knew what a pain Putin is but he more or less green lighted him with the badly executed Afghanistan withdrawal. Then there is Russian history with its imperial strivings and its long history of autocracy that gave Putin a nice Petri dish to incubate in. In this general scenario Putin could be swapped for some other devil but the nature of the other devil is likely to be similar due to Russian history.
Perhaps the good news is that we now have an external devil, so it could be that we don't need to create internal devils to substitute for the external devil that we appear to need in order to focus us and keep us from deciding that the devil is some other poor American sap who happens to identify with the party you don't like.
Or perhaps I need to get a life and stop thinking about this.
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