BUNKERVILLE | God, Guns and Guts Comrades!

by Mustang

At least one thing is true —

Which is: the American people never tired of having to re-learn lessons from the past … and I’m talking about the very recent past.  For example, the American people MAY have imagined that they learned a valuable lesson from the incompetence of President George W. Bush, as illustrated any number of ways beyond the Middle Eastern Wars and the Russo-Georgian War (2008), which (in the minds of some voters) may have justified hiring Barack Obama to replace him (2009).

“File:2008 South Ossetia war en.svg” by Andrei nacu at English Wikipedia

But then, apparently, by hiring Barak Obama, the American voter only made planet Earth a worse place to live — particularly if one happened to live in Ukraine or anywhere on the Crimean Peninsula (2014).  Possibly, you don’t remember.  Here’s a refresher —

1. Mr. Putin, as writer Peggy Noonan reminded us back in 2014, behaves a certain way for his own reasons, which are entirely independent of anything an American president might do or say.  Vladimir Putin moved against Georgia in August 2008 when he sensed (correctly) that George W. Bush was a weak and ineffective president of the United States.  All Putin had to do was observe Mr. Bush’s unwon wars, his terrible ratings at the polls, and the spiraling U.S. economy (which presented itself in September 2008).

2. Ms. Noonan also reminded us that Mr. Putin never moved against Ukraine or Crimea because of anything Barack Obama said or failed to say.  He did it because Putin correctly took the measure of Obama during the Syrian crisis, judged him as weak, and correctly guessed that Mr. Obama was, more than anything else in the world, in love with his own negro voice.

Then the American people hired Donald J. Trump to replace Obama.  Suddenly, Mr. Putin had to contend with an unknown factor.  Trump was no politician; he was a businessman — and he was unpredictable.  Did Vladimir Putin ever challenge Trump to a game of international chess?  No.

“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore

And then Vladimir Putin discovered that the American people, long ago having lost their spines, did not much appreciate Mr. Trump’s mean-tweeting and that he, Mr. Trump, would have to go.  Vladimir no doubt guessed that one of two people would become Trump’s presidential replacement: it would either be Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Both were incompetent; both firmly believe that they are smarter, wiser, shrewder than they actually are, and both could be taken advantage of by a wilier person, such as Mr. Putin. Either one would be a bonus to Russian foreign policy.

In 2014, Peggy Noonan predicted three things:

(1) Vladimir Putin would, in the future, use his big lies to confuse American and NATO diplomats — and that they’d fall for it.  Mr. Putin did this when he recognized the so-called Breakaway Republics in Eastern Ukraine.  It was a repeat performance of Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014).  In 2022, Ms. Noonan was proved correct.

(2) Mr. Putin would use “military invasion” to cause everyone in the U.S. State Department to pee their pants and everyone in NATO and the E.U. to stop breathing for a few days.  She was right about that, too.  And she was right about claiming that despite all the silly accusations bandied about in the press and on blogs, Vladimir Putin is not Satan, is not possessed by demons, is not a communist, and is not a madman.

Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing.

(3) The world would enter into a new kind of warfare.  Putin learned a lot from the Middle Eastern actors.  By dressing his soldiers in civilian clothing, Putin planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of U.S. and NATO war planners about who they were dealing with.  It is war by stealth, a situation where no one claimed responsibility, and everyone (except Putin) hesitated.

In 2014, Peggy Noonan offered this pearl: What is our (America’s) foreign policy?  Disliking global warming?  Ms. Noonan was just being silly, of course.  She knows that we (Americans) don’t have any foreign policies.  All we have is an empty suit leading a cabinet room of other empty suits, and who once each year steps behind a microphone during joint sessions of Congress to promise things, never with any intention of delivering them, and convincing our potential enemies that they have nothing at all to fear from us.

In 2020, the American people demonstrated their keen sense of history when they elected Joe Biden as their president.  They did this deed even though Joe Biden has nothing to recommend him to such a level of responsibility.  They made this selection despite every possibility that their poorly rendered choice would result in the death of innocents numbering in the hundreds or thousands.  Elections have consequences: Joe Biden’s certainly did.  American voters do not seem to care if they send their own sons and daughters off to die in foreign wars; why should they care about a bunch of Ukrainians?

American voters: making Vladimir Putin’s job easier every day. By the way, the preceding is not just my opinion; it is also the opinion of the one man whom all of Europe fears more than anyone else: Vladimir Putin.  And he came up with this opinion after taking full measure of the American president and everyone who elected him.

Mustang also blogs at Fix Bayonets and Thoughts From Afar