Pax Americana

A muscular America prevents "minor incursions" that turn into major wars - but has American leadership lost the will to win?

Photo courtesy of SkyNews

I can't get past this idea that some hold that "If you are against the war in Ukraine, you are a Russian stooge who wants to see Ukrainians raped and killed." That is a position that is both stupid and wrong.

I don’t buy the idea that Russia is out to get the band back together or has the resources to do it.

While I am sure that Putin wants that, it doesn’t seem many of the Russian people do and the stalemate in Ukraine seems to indicate that Russia doesn’t have the military capable of doing it. The only reason Russia even has any ability to threaten anyone is the fact they have a nuclear arsenal.

Why did Ukraine happen?

It happened because the US was/is weak.

Ukraine gave up its nukes in 1994 under the Clinton State Department brokered Budapest Memorandum. Bush allowed Russia to invade Georgia. Obama allowed Putin to take Crimea and cross “red lines” in Syria with no real repercussions. Biden’s fecklessness and history of bad foreign policy decisions gave Russia the open door to invade Ukraine.

Putin didn’t go after Ukraine during President Trump’s term for the same reason the ChiComs behaved for Nixon, the USSR fell under Reagan, and Putin held fire under Trump – they assumed all three were crazy enough to do exactly what they said they would. Strategic unpredictability kept China, the USSR, ns Putin guessing, but today it seems that presidents are expected to telegraph every future action to prevent another world war (or have Mark Milley just call ahead).

Biden’s comment that “it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do” pretty much sums up his reliance on the old Obama dictum of “leading from behind”.

Look, I was for the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. I believed both were moral and necessary – but I grew to oppose US involvement when it became clear that neither major American political parties had a real will to win and our military leadership either had no strategy to win or were simply not allowed to put one on the table. Then came Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan, a national embarrassment to this nation, one that emboldened both Putin and Xi. Both Russia and China became far more belligerent after Biden left billions in American hardware and tech on the ground in Afghanistan. The Biden administration also left Americans and Afghans on the ground that we had pledged to get out, leaving the dirty work of getting them away from Taliban murderers up to civilian missions to execute.

I guess it is a coincidence that China produces a UAV (designated the Pterodactyl) that is essentially a carbon copy of one of our Predators. Russia is buying Iranian drones and deploying them in Ukraine that have Chinese control systems that mimic circuitry from US drones left behind in Afghanistan.

America’s leaders are doing the same thing in Ukraine that they have done since Vietnam – they are getting people killed because they are not willing to do what needs to be done. The old process of waging proxy wars to suit the CIA and defense mega-contractors is no longer viable. The façade of “we are just supplying material” and “the Ukrainians are doing the fighting” is bullshit. When you are approaching $100 billion in “aid” over less than two years, you are simply prolonging the killing just to give yourself a little moral distance from dirty hands.

It's wrong, and we know it is wrong.

The only proven deterrent to world chaos is Pax Americana.

Pax Americana includes a muscular foreign policy based on US military might and a political class willing to use it with extreme prejudice in focused actions designed to yield disturbing results. Threats of violence do not deter when the bad guys know you aren’t going to do what you say. Telling Putin “Really bad things will happen” if he crosses a line loses all impact when he crosses the line and nothing happens except a corrupt American regime trying to slap fight their way out of a corner they painted themselves in while bankrupting the country.

I have never been against protecting Ukraine or the Ukrainian people from Russian aggression – my beef is the way it is being done. When you have a class of politicians who will commit American treasure and technology to protect Ukraine’s borders but leave our own open and are more concerned about DIE in the ranks than our soldiers dying, you know you are dealing with fools at the top.

I would be for direct action if only I trusted our civilian and military leadership and I thought the politicians had an actual will to win – to let our military do what it is designed to do, kill people, and break enough things to cement the idea of defeat in our enemies. That willingness is the only thing that will keep Russia out of Ukraine and China out of Taiwan.

By the actions of our leadership, we are already in it – and since we are, we should be in it to win it.

If we are not, we should not be in it in the first place.