A Price For Everything

Posted on February 19, 2024 by thezman

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A tenet of the old right was that some things are too important to a society to be subjected to the crucible of reason. Traditions, for example, not only bind people to their ancestors, but to one another in the shared understanding of the past. Treating traditions as mere superstition inevitably leads to their abandonment and the loss of their associated social capital. A society without tradition and history is a temporary, ad hoc collection of deracinated individuals.

Reason is not just questioning and demanding proof. The marketplace is a manifestation of reason in the exchange of goods and services. Sellers compete with one another to attract buyers. Buyers compete with one another through the mechanism of price in order to determine the best good or service. Reason states that if you have a competitive and open market, you end up with the best products and services winning over those of lesser quality or higher price.

The old right would agree to the theory behind open market economies but point out that some things are too important to subject to the market. The moral claims of a society, for example, should not be up for bid. The marketplace would no doubt decide that slavery in certain areas is the superior option, as it has for all of human history, but we have decided that owning other humans is immoral. Therefore, we do not make this moral claim subject to the crucible of the marketplace.

We are getting a real-world glimpse of this with regards to the war in Ukraine which the Western managerial elite insist is a moral crusade. Helping Ukraine, they say, is proof that we worship the god called democracy. The Munich Security Conference just ended and speaker after speaker insisted that the god of democracy demands we empty our wallets to help Ukraine. The Danish prime minister went so far as to say that the West must give all of its weapons to Ukraine.

No one really knows, because the cause is too important to waste time on accounting, but the West has supplied Ukraine with weapons and money in amounts many times more than Russia is committing to the war. Hundreds of billions have been given to Ukraine with hundreds more lent though various contrivances. The sorts of people who perform at events like the Munich Security Conference are fond of talking about how the arsenal of democracy is going to save Ukraine.

The trouble is the weapons supplied to Ukraine have not made much of a difference and in many cases have been worthless. French supplied armored vehicles are nothing more than expensive death traps. British Challenger tanks are great on the parade route but unsuitable for actual combat. The German Leopard tanks were sitting ducks against Russian artillery in the summer offensive. Despite the economic advantages, Western weapons have not made much of a difference.

The reason gets back to the tenet of the old right. There is a story in the German tabloid Bild that takes a look at how Germany is supplying armored vehicles. Instead of producing or selecting vehicles best suited for the war, it is an elaborate financial scam that profits the arms dealers and their foreign suppliers but results in expensive and poorly suited vehicles to Ukraine. The German taxpayer is paying three- and four-times retail for equipment that is useless in the war.

To give some perspective, the Russians probably spend the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars for an armored vehicle. The Germans are paying six hundred thousand dollars, but for the wrong sort of vehicle. This is a pattern that repeats across the Western supply chain to Ukraine. Either suppliers see a chance to unload useless junk at inflated prices or their top-line equipment, in the case of Western tanks, is proving to be ill-suited for the actual fighting.

The Russians, meanwhile, work from that old right tenet. Some things, like fighting land wars on their border, are too important to be subjected to the marketplace. There is competition within the Russian military industrial base, but the winners are not picked by the invisible hand of the marketplace. They are picked by the demands of the military for the situations they are facing. One reason Russian arms tend to be simple compared to American arms, is the military doctrine of the Russians.

It is tempting to think this old right idea applies only to something narrow like war fighting, but war fighting is a consequence of other factors. After the Cold War, the Russians did not embark on a process to ship their manufacturing base to low-cost countries as happened in the West. One reason for that is the Russians do not make profit the singular goal of their society. They set about modernizing their manufacturing base and now they are reaping the rewards.

This is a pattern we see all over the West. Open borders, like slavery in the ancient world, are profitable for society, but it erodes the social capital. It attacks the customs and habits of the people, the things that bind them together as a people. Once you have monetized the social capital of the people and carried it off to vaults in New York, it is no longer available when the crisis comes. It turns out that national borders should not be subject to the crucible of reason.

The crisis surrounding Ukraine, and make no mistake that crisis is spilling over into the West now, is a microcosm for what awaits the West. The reason for that is Western managerial elites turned their societies into for-profit enterprises. The decision point in every matter is whether it profits the managerial elite. Even the abrogation of ancient rights is merely a defense of the bottom line. It turns out that when everything has a price, nothing has value, not even your society.

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Plotting The Collapse

Posted on February 7, 2024 by thezman

On 24 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin went on television to announce the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Russia is a legalistic society, so Putin did not declare war or even say it was an invasion, as those terms carry meaning within Russian law that would trigger other parts of the law. We are now fast approaching the two-year anniversary of what everyone involved thought was going to be a quick and largely bloodless path to a negotiated settlement.

For the last eighteen months Russian leaders have talked about the conflict lasting years, as it is now a proxy war between Russia and its partners and the United States and the vassal states of the West. Some have suggested this war is like the Thirty Years War in that it will radically change the moral and political order in Europe, eventually seeing the United States exit Europe entirely. Others see this as another sign that the West is in crisis and headed for dark times.

Putting aside the big picture aspects of the war, things may be running ahead of schedule, at least from the Russian perspective. The first big item to start the year is the stalemate in Washington over Ukraine funding. To the shock and horror of the neocons and their fellow travelers, the public is not interested in the issue, which means there is no risk to opposing more money for Ukraine. The result is money for Ukraine is probably a dead issue for 2024.

That will have enormous implications for Ukraine. The billions flowing from Washington to Kiev do three important things. First, Zelensky uses the money to buy loyalty, as he is Washington’s bagman. This allows him to buy off the various factions in Ukraine and make sure pro-Washington people are in the government. It is why he has faced little opposition to cancelling the elections. Those inclined to speak out against this have either been bribed or jailed by those being bribed.

That brings up the second thing the money does for Ukraine. Those dollars are not just dumped on Ukraine. Instead, the dollars are converted into Ukrainian hryvnia, which are then deposited into the Ukraine banking system. Of course, Ukraine also gets euros from selling energy products and agricultural products to the EU on special deals and those are converted to hryvnia. This is what allows Kiev to pay government employees and mask the money printing to pay the soldiers.

The final piece of the puzzle is the corruption around converting dollars and euros into weapons that can be used in the war. Even regime media has been forced to admit that a lot of the weapons have ended up on the black market. No one knows how much has been stolen or who is doing the stealing, but Ukraine is a pirate’s cove now, with privateers, official and unofficial, stealing everything they can. Even Kiev is getting worried about the degree of theft.

If the flow of dollars stops or even significantly declines, all three legs of the Ukrainian side of the racket will snap. We may be seeing the first signs of this in the drama between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny. It has been known for months that Zelensky wants to fire Zaluzhny, but so far, he has not been able to do it. Zaluzhny simply refuses to cooperate by resigning or taking another position. Instead he posts pics of himself with the leader of the ultra-nationalist faction.

When the president of a country wants to fire his top military officer, the officer usually resigns in order to save some face. In some cases, the civilian leader will fire the man in order to make a point. Truman fired MacArthur in order to send a message and underscore the subordination of the military to the civilian government. When the civilian leader cannot fire the top military commander and that commander is openly challenging the civilian leadership, there is a crisis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the head of the Wagner organization repeatedly challenged the authority of the Russian government. He even went so far as to stage a ceremonial march on Moscow. The Russians foolishly thought they could tolerate the behavior of Prigozhin until that point. They realized their error and it was not long before Prigozhin’s plane was falling out of the air in pieces.

You also have to add in the fact that Ukraine is a lawless, corrupt kleptocracy now flooded with weapons and soldiers. Last year, one of Zaluzhny’s lieutenants was blown up by a grenade hidden in a gift intended for Zaluzhny. Someone tried to poison the head of the secret police, Kyrylo Budanov, but missed and poisoned his wife and some of his staff instead. Of course, the Russians mysteriously got the coordinates of Budanov’s location and tried to take him out with a missile.

In such conditions, it is not hard to see how the end of dollars from Washington could set off a political crisis. If that is not enough, the war is going poorly for Ukraine as the Russians slowly ramp up the pressure on all fronts. According to Ukraine, they need thirty thousand new recruits a month to keep up their numbers, which means they are losing a thousand men a day in this war. Many of those men are trained, experienced soldiers who cannot be replaced with raw recruits.

As of this writing, the Russians have broken through one of the biggest strongholds in Ukraine, a place called Avdiivka, or often spelled Avdeevka. Since 2014 the Ukrainians have been building this place up with tunnels, bunkers, mine fields and heavy weapons, to be an anchor point of the front line. Reports from Ukraine say the Russians have entered the city and have trapped Ukrainian forces. That would mean a starving out operation will be followed by a surrender.

There are similar stories around smaller fortifications along the front and all of it is due to the shortage of men and material. According to Ukraine, they have mobilized close to a million men so far and they have plans to mobilize half a million more. Those kinds of losses are added pressure on a political system that has major cracks. If the money runs out, it is not long before some factorions think about what sort of deal they can cut with the Russians to end the war.

Collapse is like the famous Hemingway line about bankruptcy. It happens a little at a time and then all of a sudden. Armies collapse slowly over time then they begin to surrender in great waves. Governments collapse over a period of time, punctuated by crises until the principles either flee or end up dead in a final crisis. The current crisis in Ukraine could be just one chapter, but not the final chapter. Maybe the Republicans will produce the money and save the day.

Regardless, all of this points to a catastrophe down the road and probably right around the November presidential elections, which will make for great drama. Eventually the reality of Ukraine will come home to Washington, no matter how hard they try to pretend it does not exist. Like all bankruptcies, the failure of imperial foreign policy proceeds a little here and a little there, all leading to a point when the whole project collapses, maybe taking the empire with it.

The Setting Sun

Posted on January 30, 2024 by thezman

According to news reports the United States is about to get more directly involved in the slowly evolving regional war in the Middle East. The Biden administration is planning to authorize attacks on Iranian assets in response to the attacks on the American bases in northern Iraq and Syria that killed three American soldiers. The nature of the attacks on Iranian assets is unknown, but reports suggest they will focus on militia groups that operate in the Iraq and Syria, allegedly backed by Iran.

Most of the analysis suggests that this is part of a game by the neocons running Biden policy to instigate a war with Iran. They want this game of tit-for-tat, hoping Iran will take the bait and do something the administration could then use as a reason to launch a full-scale attack on Iran itself. Others suggest the administration will avoid hitting anything important in order to avoid escalation. The United States is not prepared for war with Iran, so will try to avoid it.

This raises an important question. Could the United States ever reach a point where it could have a winnable war with Iran? Conventional wisdom does not contemplate this question, as conventional wisdom remains stuck in the 1990’s when the American military was able to blitzkrieg the Iraqi army in Desert Storm. Since then, it has been assumed that every opposing army is no better than the Iraqi army and the results would be the same if they messed with the U.S.

The war in Ukraine should have dispelled that myth. Modern war is not much like Desert Storm, especially when it comes to powerful countries. Iran is a powerful country in the region and she can project power well outside her borders. The fact that the Houthis are firing relatively inexpensive missiles at Israel all the way from Yemen should give everyone pause when thinking about a war with Iran. The Iranians have a vastly better missile program than the Houthis.

In other words, missile technology has changed modern war. The Israelis are finding this out in the now bogged down war in Gaza. They are able to take out most of the rockets and shortrange missiles with their air defenses, but not all. The cost of defending against these missiles is very high, while the cost of producing rockets and missiles is relatively low. That is the major change in modern war. It is about the relative cost of technology between weapon systems.

This brings us back to the dreamed of war with Iran. The dream says it will not be a regular war with an invading army but a massive air assault. The dream of the shock and awe campaign never dies. The trouble is the Iranians have very good air defenses that can take down cruise missiles. Again, this is a lesson from the Ukraine war where the Ukrainians were initially able to defend against Russian missiles. The Iranians would not be able to defeat every missile, but many of them.

This is where things get tricky. The Russians learned that the only way to effectively use their missiles was to first defeat Ukrainian air defenses. They did this by flooding the system with missiles and cheap Iranian drones. Those attacks on Ukraine energy facilities were about draining the stock of Ukraine air defense missiles. Once the Russians depleted the Ukraine air defense, they then started attacking the launchers, radar stations and command centers.

It took the Russians about a year to defeat the Ukraine AD system. They launched an estimated seven thousand missiles of various types and massive numbers of cheap drones that they now produce on their own. The United States has about four thousand cruise missiles it could throw at Iran. It does not have cheap drones it can use to flood the Iranian air defense system. It is not clear how many dummy missiles the United States has for attacking air defenses.

You can quickly see the problem. The way to attack a modern air defense system is not with super smart and super expensive missiles. The air defenses simply keep pace so the cost-benefit ratio never changes. The way to defeat the Iranian air defense system is the way the Russians defeated Ukraine’s system. You throw masses of relatively cheap missiles and drones at it until they run low on ammunition and then you attack the air defense system itself. The U.S. cannot do this.

Then there is the reverse problem. The Iranians have built up their anti-ship systems to the point where they could hit U.S. surface ships operating in the Persian Gulf, which presents an obvious problem. American ships have sophisticated air defense systems but they are not equipped with unlimited missiles. Iran could throw waves of drones at these ships, much as the Russians did to the Ukraine system. This is also what the Houthis have been doing in the Red Sea.

There is a bit of irony to all of this. The long-forgotten Iran – Iraq war was a foreshadowing of the future battlespace. Both Iran and Iraq had relatively expensive aircraft they could deploy against enemy positions, but they dared not risk them against relatively inexpensive air defenses. Iran in particular was able to neutralize the superior Iraq air force this way. The result was something like we are seeing in Ukraine where both sides relied on artillery and massive mine fields.

The microprocessor revolution has allowed air defenses to catchup to even the best air assault weapons in terms of effectiveness. More important, it has allowed air defenses to surpass air power in cost effectiveness. On the other hand, cheap technology has resulted in cheap drones that can evade and overwhelm expensive air defense systems with the result being a stalemate in the air. Like land war after the introduction of the machine gun, air war is now a war of attrition.

The post-Cold War assumption was that American technology was such a force multiplier there was no need to focus on the production of cheaper weapons, especially cheap air weapons. America’s high-tech air force and missile systems would own the skies in any war. The result of this technological revolution is that American air power is no longer unchallengeable and that means the American military is no longer an unstoppable force that can bully the world.

One final change makes war with Iran unlikely. In the two Iraq wars, the United States could muster forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the first war they also had forces in Turkey, but the Turks refused in the second war. This created a logistical problem leading to a much slower invasion. In a war with Iran, the Saudis would not host American troops and the Turks would certainly not do it. In other words, America no longer has the local support for a land war in the region.

This is why there will not be a war with Iran. Even if the United States does something stupid and attacks Iran itself, the Iranians know time is on their side. America cannot maintain those bases in Iraq and Syria much longer. Iran can use local militias to attrit those facilities until they must be withdrawn. In the next decade the United States will not be a player in the region. This is why the Saudis are in BRICS and why Iran can bide its time and avoid a war with the United States.

The Biden administration will put on a show by attacking caves and bunkers in Iraq and Syria, but avoid hitting anything important. There is a good chance they warn Iran in advance in order to make sure nothing bad happens. A flunky from the administration will come out and explain why these attacks were important and the slobbering toadies in regime media will dutifully repeat it. Meanwhile the sun sets a bit more on the American empire in the Middle East.

Fifth Column State

Posted on January 4, 2024 by thezman

No one knows for sure who coined the term “fifth column” but it seems to have originated in Spain during the civil war. Legend has it that Franco said in a telegram that there were four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column waiting to attack from the inside. Given that the telegram was discovered long after the phrase was in use suggests another source, but maybe Franco used this phrasing in other formats and that is how it got into circulation.

A fifth column is a group of people that conspire to undermine a larger group from within by disguising themselves as supporters. It is not just random individuals who disagree with official policy, like protestors. The members of the fifth column coordinate their efforts with an outside group, usually an enemy of the group. Unlike spies, who are usually motivated by greed or resentment, the members of the fifth column have a primary loyalty to the outside group for whom they work.

This is all relevant today as the client list of Jeffrey Epstein makes the rounds and is used by partisans in the usual partisan way. Lost in the usual bellowing is the fact that Epstein was an agent of a foreign state. The most likely explanation for his existence is that he was paid to get dirt on prominent Americans. He was running what people in the wilderness of mirrors call a honey trap. He used girls and boys to play on the sexual weaknesses of his targets on his island in the Caribbean.

Of course, the foreign state for whom Epstein worked was Israel. His long-time paramour was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Ian Robert Maxwell, whose real name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Maxwell was a high-level intelligence officer for Mossad his entire life. So high level, in fact, that when he died, all of the living leaders of Israel showed up at his burial. More important, six former heads of Mossad were there, and Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

It could very well be a one in six million coincidence that Epstein was hooked up with the daughter of the most prominent spy in Israeli history, but the law of parsimony says that this was not a coincidence. It does not take long to see gaps in Epstein’s official biography, so we know he was not a middling school teacher who suddenly discovered he was an investment genius. Someone was underwriting his operation, and the most likely culprit is the state of Israel.

Espionage is as old as nations, so it should come as no surprise that Israel spies on America and Americans. It relies on American stupidity and generosity to underwrite the Zionist project, so informational asymmetry is important to them. It is why Israel stole nuclear material from a United States company, even though it resulted in a massive contamination of an area around Pittsburgh. The Apollo Affair was just part of a program to use America to further the Zionist project.

The Epstein case and the Apollo affair have another link. Unlike most espionage cases, the people doing the treachery were not motivated by greed. The oldest and most successful way of turning someone into a spy is to give them money. As George Washington said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. Most men with secrets to sell are not particularly virtuous. In the case of Israeli spying, money was not the primary motivation for these crimes.

This is where the fifth column concept comes into the picture. One of the most aggressive and powerful lobbies in Washington is the Israel lobby. This is something everyone knows, but most people are afraid to discuss. Pat Buchanan was anathematized for pointing out the obvious. The Israel lobby does not limit itself to bribing politicians. It is everywhere in America. These documentaries (here, here) done by Al Jazeera a few years ago are a good primer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbying groups in America. Their primary reason to exist is to convince Americans, especially politicians, that the interests of Israel are the primary interest of America, and therefore can never be questioned. It is right there on their website, so it is not as if they are hiding it. Prominent Zionist like Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro make this precise argument every day.

Up until now, no one has cared about this as the cost of underwriting Israel was small and times were generally good. Times have changed and people are naturally wondering if a luxury item like money to Israel is a good idea. Billions in Israel funding is jammed up in Congress because the line of foreigners demanding billions is getting long and the needs of Americans are not being met. Millions of foreigners are flooding over the border and Biden is worried about Israel and Ukraine.

What all of this points to is a defect of democracy. The American concept of democracy is a continent sized town hall meeting. It is a marketplace of ideas where competing interests hash it out with one another. Since it is a marketplace, it means everything, and everyone is for sale. This is how foreign interests like the Israel lobby are able to turn the instrument of American democracy to their favor at our expense. It is also how economic elites can undermine public will.

Imagine you are the king of a country and one of your advisors, a fellow with unusual headgear, is constantly lobbying you on behalf of a principality. At first you think he just favors that prince but then you learn he is related to that prince. Not only that, but he is also part of a network that is loyal to that prince. You will have that advisor sent to the tower because that person has misrepresented himself and he has worked to undermine you to the benefit of a potential rival.

In American style democracy, this logic is flipped on its head. The people’s representatives all come with a price tag on their chest. Anyone, foreign or domestic, can buy their loyalty. The reason the Israel lobby exists at all is the system rewards those who lavish politicians with money. It is the reason that every congressman quickly moves from representative of his people to Washington to Washington’s representative to the people of his district.

It is why America is a fifth column state, because it is defined by the players who operate like fifth columns. Israel is just one of the best at the game, but every country has a similar operation going in Washington. People forget that the Chinese bankrolled the Clinton operation. Charlie Trie was just a good ol’ boy from Arkansas, when he was not a bagman for the Chinese government. When everything has a price, nothing has any value and that is what we get from our political system.

The Long Collapse

Posted on December 18, 2023 by thezman

Note: Our good friend Ed Dutton has a new book titled, The Naked Classroom: The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School. While watching paint dry I intend to read it and post up a review this week. Please but two copies, one for yourself and one for a friend or family member.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post titled Eloi, Morlocks and the Cable Guy, a post titled Missing The Executioner, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Societal collapse is a topic that has always had a following, especially on this side of the great divide, despite the fact that there are no signs of it. You can point to current trends and say they could one day lead to collapse, something like the systemic abuse of the money supply or the degradation of the American military. On the other hand, liberal democracies have shown an ability to self-correct. The money supply and the military were a mess in the 1970’s until they were fixed.

The closest we have come to witnessing the collapse of a complex society was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Over a thirty-year period, the member nations of the communist bloc had slowly integrated their economies and military, under the umbrella the communist world, so when these countries broke free, what followed was a period of chaos that eventually spread to Russia itself. The 1990’s were a dark time in Russia, marked by lawlessness and social chaos.

Even so, these countries that made up the the communist world did not disintegrate after the fall of the Soviet Union. The captive nations quickly reoriented themselves economically and politically toward the West. Russia had a dark period of chaos and confusion, but eventually regained itself. In other words, these societies did not collapse, even though the political-economy collapsed. They simply had to refashion their economics and politics, which they did.

Another example might be Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam. The main reason Iraq fell into chaos and the American military had to fight a guerilla war to gain control of the country was the old system collapsed. Of course, that would not have happened if not for the thousands of tons of explosive dropped on the country by the American military. It was more of a self-controlled demolition more than a collapse of a complex society in the Joseph Tainter sense of the phrase.

The coming year may provide some examples that are not quite what Tainter described, but not quite like the recent examples either. Ukraine, for example, seems to be on the cusp of collapse after two long years of war. The political class is in turmoil, leading many to predict a coup against Zelensky. The army is running out of men and material to hold back the Russians. Both Europe and Washington are now slow-walking future aid due to the growing problems in the country.

It is possible that we see something like Iraq, where a guerilla army forms up after the regular army collapses. The Bandera elements could try to seize power, leading to a civil war between them and other factions. The minority groups in the West could see this as a chance to gain their freedom. The term Carpatho-Ruthenian could start appearing in Western media. There could also be a general collapse of civil order, including the operation of the infrastructure.

Unlike Iraq, there is a sidecar to this that bears watching. For two years much of the political class in the West has been convinced that Ukraine just needs to hold the line, as the Russians will eventually collapse. This was the prediction made at the start by the neocons who control Western foreign policy. We are seeing some glimpses of politicians waking up to reality. No one knows what will happen when reality comes rushing in like a winter wind blowing open the door.

It is not just a credibility issue here. Hundreds of billions of booty have been promised by those politicians to powerful interests. For example, Blackrock has been buying up land rights in Ukraine, expecting a Ukraine victory. What happens when the new Ukraine government repudiates these deals? No one really knows how much money has changed hands on the assumption that Western oligarchs will get to plunder the place after the Ukrainians defeat the Russians.

It is easy to forget that the imaginary world in which our rulers operate is their reality, so when that reality slams into genuine reality, there will be consequences. We tend to think of collapse in terms of practical things not working but collapse also applies to narrative frameworks and beliefs. For over thirty years the Global American Empire has rested on the assumptions that arise from being an invisible force. When that premise is no longer valid, there will be consequences.

Of course, there are important elections coming in the next year. The most significant of which is un the United States. The only Ukraine skeptic is Donald Trump, who could be forced off the ticket for that reason. People forget that Trump’s primary crime against the regime, as far as the regime is concerned, is his opposition to the neocons. They slimed him with the Russian collusion hoax and then impeached him over Ukraine. A collapse of Ukraine will add some spice to this already spicy stew.

If they do force Trump off the ballot, that means the candidates in the general election will be Ukraine fanatics controlled by the neocons. Imagine the 2008 election was between John McCain and John Bolton, against the backdrop of the Iraq fiasco and you have a glimpse of a possible future. If on the other hand Trump is on the ballot, imagine him pounding away at this every day until election day. It is possible that 2024 makes 2016 look like a debate at the philatelic society.

Closer to home, in the dissident sphere, a weird subculture has developed around Ukraine and the war. This debate provides a nice summary of their beliefs. It is as if the people in that pro-Ukraine subculture were given a potion by the neocons that causes them to repeat all of their most absurd claims, without realizing they are parroting the people they claim to oppose. If Ukraine collapses, we could witness something similar to what happened with the Seekers in this famous study.

Failure has consequences and collapse is a form of failure. Unlike a typo or a math error, collapse takes with it whole systems of thought and belief because it is the result of those systems and beliefs. Maybe all of this is avoided, and Ukraine bumps along to some new arrangements that avoids a catastrophe. That is something Tainter observed about the modern age. Collapse is much more difficult because all human systems are interconnected, so they have external support.

Ukraine will provide a test of that in 2024. Russia does not want collapse, as that just makes their task more difficult. The Poles do not want millions more Ukrainian refugees, so they do not want collapse. There are forces withing Ukraine that would like a soft landing, even if it means capitulating to Russia. Maybe Tainter is right, and the structure of the West will prevent collapse. On the other hand, the failure of Project Ukraine is just one step in the collapse of the West.

Ukraine Intrigue

Posted on December 13, 2023 by thezman

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Determining what the regime is plotting is often a guessing game, as the regime has turned itself into the father of lies. The people in positions of authority lie even when the truth would serve their interests. As a result, we are left to look at what is going on around the regime, how various players are reacting, in order to guess at what may be happening inside the black box that is Washington. We just got a dose of that this week when Zelensky arrived rattling the tin cup.

Everything about the trip was weird, compared to what has been the norm regarding Ukraine over the last two years. His arrival was not met with a big ceremony and the media was not flooded with Ukrainian agit-prop. The closest we got on that score was a press release to C-level crazies in fringe media. Six months ago, these stories were regular features in regime media. Instead there were grim stories about Ukraine at a cross roads militarily and politically.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Zelensky was not invited to Washington, even though his trip was certainly arranged by the Kagan cult. They first had him show up in Argentina at the swearing in of their new ruler. Since he was in the neighborhood, he decided to swing by Washington just as the Biden administration is begging Congress for more money for Ukraine. This week is the last week to get a package passed as Congress goes on an extended break.

That is the other bit of weirdness. House Republicans suddenly grew a spine for the first time in generations and have refused to give Biden more money for Ukraine without getting significant concessions on immigration. In fact, they are holding up Israel money in the process, which is no doubt angering the usual suspects. The administration refuses to separate out Israel money from Ukraine money and the House refuses to consider a bill that combines the two.

The final bit of weirdness to the drama is they had Zelensky make the rounds in order to guilt Congress into relenting. The thing is, he only met with the Senate and reportedly the meeting did not go well. He did not meet with House members, presumably because they would be even more hostile. He closed his trip with what was expected to be a tongue bathing from Fox News zombie Brett Baier, but the producers gave Bair some real questions to ask, which ruined the effect.

Taken in total, it was a disaster for Zelensky. It is not just being cut off by Congress but the way it was done. He now has to go back to Kiev empty handed and with the impression that Washington no longer loves him. His main card in Ukrainian politics right now is he keeps the money flowing. If he is not keeping the money flowing and he is not on good terms with Washington, then what is his point? Why keep him around if all he does is strut around in gym clothes?

That may have been the point of this trip. Back in Kiev there is a power struggle between the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, head of the secret police Kyrylo Budanov and Zelensky. Some generals are siding with Zelensky, and no one really knows where Budanov stands, but the bulk of the officer corps backs Zaluzhnyi. What really matters, of course, is which faction is backed by Washington and that is why this trip matters.

It is possible that the Kagan cult has determined that Zelensky is a liability, and they need to find a replacement. If it appears that Zelensky has fallen out of favor and that is slowing the flow of cash to Kiev, then there is a good chance that the anti-Zelensky factions will come together and topple the government. In this context, a military junta run by Zaluzhnyi makes some sense. He is on good terms with the Western war machine, and he has credibility with regards to conducting the war.

On the other hand, this may be a bit of 2-D chess. By now everyone in the White House has to know that Ukraine is lost. The question now is how to manage the endgame, especially in light of an election in eleven months. The last thing the regime wants is scenes of Russian tanks entering Ukrainian cities this summer. If the army overthrows Zelensky, the administration can claim the failure is due to Republicans cutting off funding which resulted in a coup and then collapse.

This sounds a bit farfetched, but keep in mind that Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. Everyone in Kiev knows this. That is why stories like this one in a CIA front operation are important. The Kiev Post is not in Kiev. It is one of the many nodes of disinformation operated by the regime. Stories about a third coup in Kiev coming from such a source are intended to send a message. Zelensky’s palace could soon be the closing scenes of the movie Scarface.

One always has to consider ineptitude in these matters. It could simply be that the Biden people have poorly managed all of this and the botched trip to Washington was just one more self-own. Mike Johnson is as green as grass, so he is trying to earn some street cred by holding the line on Ukraine money. The Biden people handed him this gift of trying to tie Ukraine money to Israel money, so he is using this impasse to make pleasant noises about immigration.

Taken as a whole, the best we can say for certain is some elements of the regime are now moving into the endgame phase of project Ukraine. Whether or not they have internalized how this will end is hard to know, but clearly some elements are thinking about how to manage the inevitable defeat of Ukraine. Given the implacability of the Kagan cult, this suggests Zelensky brought the gift of palace intrigue to Washington, as the tribes duke it out over how to manage Ukraine.

In the end, none of it really matters. Moscow has ruled out negotiations with Kiev and is in no mood to do Washington any favors. For the Russians, Ukraine is one part of a larger war against the Global American Empire. That means they will continue to manage the Ukraine war in light of that larger conflict. The fate of Ukraine is no longer in the hands of Washington. Once important people in Kiev understand this, the war ends along with the current Kiev regime.

Orphan Child

Posted on December 5, 2023 by thezman

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, John F. Kennedy supposedly said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Whether or not he actually said it is unknown, but the expression has been with us ever since. Supposedly it was an updated version of the Tacitus line, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” Kennedy was pithier but Tactus captures the truth of the matter.

We are seeing this with the Ukraine war. The news from the battlefields is uniformly bad for the Ukrainian army. The West is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the much publicized counter-offensive, which ended in disaster soon after it was launched, but the West spent the last few months in denial. Ukraine does not publish numbers as far as casualties, but independent guessing suggests they lost between seventy and one hundred thousand men in the counter-offensive.

As the overall condition of the Ukraine military comes into focus, the recriminations are beginning to turn up in Western media. This long story in the Washington Post is a good example of the general tone. Washington is looking to place the blame on the Ukrainians, while the Ukrainians are placing the blame on their Western backers or on one another as the situation warrants. Europe has yet to join the blame game, but in time they will no doubt blame the Ukrainians.

Another pithy expression that is useful regarding the Ukraine debacle is “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” Washington never learns from its failures, which is why they have the Ukraine debacle, but the rest of us can gain some insight into how our pollical leaders stumble into these disasters by looking at some of the major blunders in this war. How they managed to reach this point speaks to how they view the world and their role in it.

The first major blunder was getting into a land war with Russia. This is right up there with “Never getting into a land war in Asia” and the slightly less well-known “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” The Russians are bad at many things but when it comes to fighting a land war, they are exceptional. When they view the land war as an existential threat it quickly becomes a great patriotic war and the whole of Russia organizes to defeat the enemy.

This is what the West managed to do in what should have been a low-grade border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The West made this into a game of the world against Russia and the Russians accepted the challenge. The sanctions regime was clearly intended to hurt average Russians, which made it easy for the Russian leadership to recast this conflict as this generations great patriotic war. That war is with the West, not just the Ukrainians.

The question is why did the West do this? The reason is they assumed Russia was too weak to fight an actual war. They came to this conclusion not based on observable facts but on the power of their own rhetoric. They kept saying that Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country” so often that they believed it. Instead of looking at what was happening in Russia, the West told themselves appealing stories about what would happen if they blew hard enough on the Russian house of cards.

This gets to the second colossal error of the West. The Russians crossed into Ukraine with a force of about one hundred thousand men with the assumption the West would demand a peace meeting. They were not prepared for an actual war. Ukraine, on the other hand, had an army of over three hundred thousand regular army troops and another three hundred thousand reserves. Russia, the attacker, was outnumbered three-to-one one by Ukraine, the defender.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainians had a chance to smash the Russian army if they went on the offensive. It would have come at a price, but they could have pushed the Russian back into the Donbas and maybe out completely. Instead, the Ukrainians dug into defensive positions along the line of contact. This gave the Russians time to reorganize their lines into more defendable positions and begin the process of building a much larger force to take on the Ukrainians.

The reason Ukraine did this is they were repeatedly told by their Western backers that Russia could never sustain an army in the field for long. The best people ran to their favorite media outlets predicting an imminent Russian collapse. The intellectual everyone in the West considers a seer claimed early on that Russia would not just lose but disintegrate as a result of the war. The fact that Fukuyama has not been right about anything in his career has not lowered his status in the West.

Here again we see that the West blundered into a catastrophic mistake not because they misread the evidence but because they confused their own magical thinking about the world and their role in it with reality. People with what passes for impressive credentials in the managerial class spun fabulous tales about the imminent collapse of Russia and those tales became reality for the war machine. Meanwhile, the Russian army used this time to prepare for what we see happening now.

This brings up the third colossal error. Having figured out that Russia was not going to disintegrate in the face of what amounted to an internet cancel campaign, the West prepared Ukraine for a big arrow offensive. They conscripted close to one hundred thousand fresh troops, trained them in NATO tactics and supplied them with NATO weapons for the purpose to driving the Russians out of the Donbas. This was the great spring counter-offensive that kicked off in the summer.

In the early hours of the offensive, columns of Western armor barreled into the Russia outer defensive lines in the south with the aim of driving to the Sea of Azov. Instead, they bogged down in massive minefields. The mine clearing equipment provided by the West turned out to be useless for the task, so the armored columns were trapped in the minefields and obliterated by Russian artillery. A large area in the south is called Bradley Park because it is full of destroyed Bradley fighting vehicles.

It is impossible to overstate the failure here. The Ukrainians not only lost the entire army assembled for the task, but they stripped their lines in order to supplement this army on the expectation that it would smash through the Russian defenses and those reserves would then flood into the breech. Instead, these reserves were thrown into what was called a meatgrinder. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed and maimed in order to capture one tiny village in the south.

What is even more stunning than the enormity of the failure is the fact that Western military planners were so slow to accept reality. Even as it was clear that the Russian defenses were too strong, General Milley was talking like it was just a matter of time before they collapsed and Ukraine rolled to victory. Even after thousands of videos appeared online of burning Western tanks, Western generals kept saying that things were on schedule for a glorious victory.

The result of this catastrophe is Ukraine no longer has offensive capabilities and is struggling to maintain its defensive positions in key areas. The massive losses of men and material cannot be replaced. Ukraine is running out of men to conscript for the war and the West is out of equipment to send them. This is why we are seeing reports in Western media talking about who is to blame. No one wants to be the father of what is going to be a collapse of Ukraine in 2024.

The theme throughout this two-year debacle is that the people making the decisions have substituted a preferred reality for actual reality. These are the type of people John Derbyshire once described in another context as those who are “awfully good at creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” For the last two years their version of reality has crashed into a reality that rests on the truth, not narrative.

The Ukraine debacle is a microcosm of what plagues the West. The people in charge are long on credentials that are meaningful only within the artificial reality that is the managerial class. The result is an echo chamber populated with credentialed idiots who compete with one another to produce the most pleasing sounding narrative to describe what they imagine lies outside their reality. They live in a simulation but seek to impose what they experience on the world around them.

These are the same people now operating the court system based on their paranoid fantasies about invisible enemies and staffing the air traffic control system to match their image of the inclusive society. What lies ahead for the West is what we are seeing in Ukraine which is the fantasies of a delusional and deranged ruling class smashing into the reality of the world, all paid for by the common man. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

The Israel Problem

Posted on November 22, 2023 by thezman

The founding of Israel seventy-five years ago brought with it a problem that has never been resolved, one that is at the heart of the current troubles. In fact, times of trouble operate as a reprieve from the hard work of ignoring that central issue. Israeli leaders can stimulate Western leaders into worrying about what Israel means to them, rather than what it is. The current war in Gaza lets the American Right forget its troubles and cheer blindly for its favorite country.

That central problem at the heart of it all is the definition of Israel itself. The “Jewish state” is a label used by Israelis, especially those on the Zionist side, and one that should raise some question. No one uses the term “Irish state” or the “German state” when describing those countries. No one would dare call Germany the home of the German people, but Western commentators disposed to Israel comfortably say that Israel is the home of the Jewish people.

Israel is by design, an ethnostate. It is the only self-declared and self-defined ethnostate in the modern world. From the very beginning, the point of Israel was to be the homeland of ethnic Jews. This is the central problem for Israel. To be a citizen of an ethnostate requires one to be accepted into as a member of that ethnicity. You cannot just one day decide to be a Jew and emigrate to Israel. Unlike Western countries, Israel is not an idea. It is a genetic threshold.

This is the problem Israel faced on day one. At its founding, the newly minted Israelites found themselves with lots of non-Jews in their lands. Those non-Jews could never be citizens, as that would violate the logic of the ethnostate. Those non-Jews were not going to voluntarily evacuate for new lands, so it meant Israel had a population of aliens in its midst that could never be assimilated. Like a pebble in your shoe, this non-Jewish population would be an irritant to the Jewish state.

Israel could extend most of the rights and privileges of citizenship to this non-Jewish population in an effort to pacify them, but they could never extend all of the rights and privileges to them. The non-Jews are not citizens and can never be citizens, so therefore they must always be suspect. In any two-tiered status system one class must be superior and the other inferior and this must lead to conflict. From the start, Israel was saddled with a hostile alien population.

Of course, the logic of the ethnostate demands that Israel do what it must to expel this non-Jewish population from its midst. Again, the whole point of the ethnostate is to create a homeland exclusive to your people. The reason Israel exists is to clear and hold the land of Israel for the Jews and only the Jews. Add in the natural hostility of the dispossessed minority population and conflict was inevitable. By definition, Jews can never be at peace with the minority population.

If that minority population were Mongols or Bantus, people with no natural connection to anyone in the region, this would have been an easily solved problem. Obviously, that was never the case, so this inevitable and necessary conflict with the non-Jewish population has defined Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. If Israel were, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, a nation of ideas, this would not be the case, but Israel is an ethnostate which sets it apart from all other nations.

This would be true even if the surrounding nations were ethnostates. The logic of the ethnostate starts with the assumption that the people of the proposed ethnostate are superior to other people. A people cannot demand a land of their own unless they think they deserve it. That can only come if those people, at some level, see themselves as superior to others, at least with regards to their claims for a homeland. Exclusivity begins with the claim of superiority in some critical respect.

Compounding things for Israel is the fact that their definition of a homeland includes territories now currently occupied by others. This has been true from the founding of Israel in 1948. Just look at old maps and it is easy to see. Israel is the only country in the modern era to expand its borders at the expense of its neighbors. It does this because the logic of its existence requires it. It is why the first response to the Hamas attack was the call to expel the people from Gaza.

This is the crux of the “Israel’s right to exist” debate. The Arabs understand the logic of the Israeli ethnostate and what that must mean for them. Israel’s right to exist means her right to expel non-Jews from the lands claimed by Israel. It also means using whatever means necessary against those defending those non-Jews. The non-Jews living in those lands can never agree to those terms. Therefore, they can never accept Israel’s right to exists, at least not as an ethnostate.

This also explains the ruthlessness of Israel’s response to Hamas. The unspoken truth of the Israeli – Gaza relationship is the people in Gaza must go away to that this land can be absorbed into greater Israel. Any resistance to that is viewed as a threat to the very idea of Israel, which warrants a maximum response. From the perspective of the Zionists, genocide of the Palestinians is a proportional response to the terrorist raid perpetrated by Gaza last month.

Obviously, this flies in the face of Western political morality, but money can buy a lot of political blinders. That and there is a strong Christian Zionist subculture in the United States that provides easy cover for the political class. Washington can pretend they are catering to public support for Israel, while cashing checks from the Israel lobby on the condition they never mention the reality of the Israel ethnostate. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees prepare to emigrate to your town.

Send In The Clowns

Posted on November 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: Thinking about doing a mailbag show for Friday. If anyone has an interesting question, post it up here or on Gab.

President Harry S. Truman famously said is a speech at the end of his career that if it is a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article. He was giving a pre-election pep talk to his fellow Democrats who were downcast at their prospects in 1952. His point was that if you proudly give the voters an alternative to the other option, they will at least consider what you have to say and may even vote for you.

It is interesting to note that the two parties were having a uniparty problem way back in the middle of the last century, but it is the nature of democratic systems. Like all markets, they eventually converge on one dominant market player. It is why we have one operating system maker, two mobile phone makers and so on. In the marketplace, people seek safety, which is a form of protection. As Robert Nozick noted, protection must always lead to a monopoly or something close to it.

Like consumers in a grocery store staring at rows of the same product, people will flock to novelty, even if the market prefers predictability. We are seeing this in Argentina where the voters elected what can best be described as an autistic Austin Powers character as their next president. Javier Milei won Sunday’s run-off against Peronist former Minister of Economy Sergio Massa. It was a stunning victory for a man who promises to radically change the Argentine economy.

Javier Milei is the next in line in what has become a tradition that started with Beppe Grillo a dozen years ago in Italy. He was the former television comic who formed a joke party to run for office, which quickly turned into a social phenomenon. Getting back to what Truman said, given the choice between people acting like clowns, the voters in democracies have repeatedly picked the genuine clowns. Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni and now Milei have come to power this way.

That is not to say that these eccentric candidates have not come with a real platform and a genuine list of issues. It is that their primary appeal is their eccentricity. A more traditional presentation would have failed, even if the issues were popular, because part of the problem for voters is the dreadful sameness of the candidates. One of the ironies of “our democracy” is it produces gold-plated phonies. The least relatable people on the planet are popular political figures.

Of course, it goes deeper than just a desire for authenticity. The unspoken truth of politics for the last thirty years is the sense that something is deeply wrong, despite the relative material prosperity. One reason so many were so quick to embrace the Covid madness is the sense that we were about to get what we deserved. Mother Nature was about to balance the scales with a great plague. These eccentric candidates are something of a search for absolution by the voters.

There is also an end of time issue with many of them. Italy has been convulsed with populism since Beppe Grillo because no one is able to answer the big question that hangs over every human society. Why does it exist? Italians no longer have a reason to exist, which is why they have stopped having children. People like Grillo and now Meloni offer some hope for a purpose. Their anger and eccentricity are a little bit of light in the gathering darkness of their civilization.

This may be the case in Argentina where they have been ruled by a combination of kleptocrats and maniacs for generations. One party steals the nation’s resources on behalf of international interests in the name of fiscal discipline until the people grow weary of it and replace them with the maniacs. These are the socialists who then start printing money to buy happiness until inflation gets out of control and the banks stop lending them money or accepting pesos for debts.

This is where Argentina is now. They currently have inflation at 120%, a swelling debt crisis and a stagnant economy. In addition to being an entertaining weirdo during the campaign, Milei promised to dollarize the economy, de-unionize the private sector, cut taxes, and restore private property rights. He calls himself a libertarian, but he has not promised to give free weed and porn to children or convert to Bitcoin. Perhaps he is saving that for his second act.

This is where Milei will turn out to be like the other eccentrics that have paraded across the stage of democracies over the last decade. There is little chance he will get any of his agenda implemented. The two main parties still control all of the important institutions, so they will collude to block his initiatives. Another feature of democracy is the controlling parties are incentivized to not address genuine problems. The metastasizing social ills are the systems’ defense mechanism.

In the end, that may be the function of these eccentric populist characters that are turning up in democratic politics. They gain support mostly because they are a break from the dreary reality of the system. If voting is not going to lead to good public policy, then at least it can lead to amusing failure. If food prices rise faster than you can count pesos, then maybe having autistic Austin Powers staring back at you through the television will take your mind off things.

So far that has been the result. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement accomplished nothing, other than helping the EU sidetrack genuine reform. Trump and Bolsonaro, of course, were stymied by the system. Meloni’s angry housewife act remains popular, but her administration is the same as her predecessor. What all of these eccentric characters are, in the end, is proof that there is no voting your way out of the problems of liberal democracy.

Winter In Kiev

Posted on November 20, 2023 by thezman

The war in Ukraine is heading into the winter with the great counter-offensive all but officially declared a great failure. After six months of attacks, the Ukrainians gained a small sliver of ground in the south and lost a large swath of territory in the north, along with billions in Western equipment. Outside of small ventures to keep up appearances, Ukraine is no longer conducting offensive operations. The big question that looms over all of it is what comes next for Ukraine?

The place to start is the battlefield. The Russians have the initiative everywhere now and they seem to be preparing the battlefield for winter. They are about to take the fortress city of Avdeevka in Donetsk and there are reports that they have fire control of the key logistics hub in the north called Kupyansk. There are also increasing reports of desertions on the Ukrainian side as the Russians press them nonstop. Right now, the Ukraine army is doing what it can to hold its positions.

This is an untenable position for Ukraine as the politics of this war are such that they must always be looking like they have the initiative. This is why so much time and money were invested in the public relations system. Ukraine needed to look like it was winning the war and that meant flooding Western media with stories about Ukrainian success on the battlefield. Stories about Ukrainians desperately clinging to bombed out fortress cities is poison for the public relations system.

There are three angles to the politics. One is the internal politics of Ukraine, which at this point is the struggle between the military, Zelensky and the secret police, all of whom have friends in Washington. It is assumed they need to be showing progress on the battlefield in order to keep the money flowing. The fallback plan in these cases is always the same and that is find a scapegoat. You blame that guy for the failures and buy another round of funding the operation.

Rumors out of Kiev suggest Zelensky wants to fire his top general, Zaluzhnyi, and the head of operations in the south, Oleksandr Syrskyi. Last week there were rumors that both had been arrested then there were rumors that they were in hiding. Officially, nothing has happened, but Zelensky no longer uses their names in public, instead referring to their titles. That is the only hard evidence that something is happening, but it confirms that there is a rift of some sort.

For his part, Zaluzhnyi has made no bones about telling Western media that the offensive failed and the situation is dire. The reason to do this is to publicly undermine Zelensky who always insists that things are going great in the war. The result here is you have Zelensky trying to pin the blame on Zaluzhnyi, while Zaluzhnyi tries to undermine the credibility of Zelensky. You do not have to be a political genius to see where this is heading if things deteriorate much further.

This is why CIA director William Burns was sent to Kiev last week. One school of thought says he was sent to calm the situation, while another school of thought says he was sent to get a frank assessment of what is happening. This seems strange, given that the whole war is a Washington operation, but it is clear that the Ukrainians have not been entirely forthright with Washington. This is most likely at the behest of the State Department, which has been running things on the side.

That brings up the second political angle. Washington has been poached in a warm bath of public relations nonsense for two years, so the reality of the war is now just starting to appear in the media. With an election on the horizon and Biden in serious trouble, mentally and politically, bad news from Ukraine is very bad news. That is probably part of what Burns is up to in Kiev. If the White House needs to abandon the Ukraine project, they need a plan to do it.

The third political angle is the money. The Ukraine project is and has been a very lucrative money laundering operation. This means it has a very large lobbying effort behind it, so cutting off the money will be difficult. On the other hand, sending unknown billions through a failing operation, one that could be overrun by the Russian army very soon, is a tough sell even for Washington. Therefore, pressure is on to produce a new winning narrative to keep the money flowing.

This is why the Republicans are going to move heaven and earth to get fresh cash into the money laundering system. If the cash runs out, not only does the money laundering end, but it also means the end of Ukraine in a hurry. Ukraine no longer has a functioning economy and it is no longer able to pay for its own government services. If money from Washington and Brussels stops flowing, Ukraine will collapse in weeks. This kills project Ukraine for future money laundering.

The result of all this is all the players now see the status quo as the only workable option, even if the battlefield reality says otherwise. Zelensky knows he cannot kill Russians with dollar bills, but dollar bills keep him alive. At the same time, Washington thinks they can pretend it is a stalemate as long as Zelensky remains in charge, so giving him money works for them. Of course, the money laundering machine wants the cash to keep flowing for its own sake.

The trouble is the reality on the battlefield. The Ukrainians officially mobilized three quarters of a million men. They have less than half that number remaining. There are pictures of girls and old men turning up dead in trenches now. There is only so much damage an army can take before it begins to crack. The politics of the war point to maintaining the status quo, but the reality of it is pointing to collapse. That is what lies ahead for Ukraine in 2024.

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