Is Ukraine violence a step to world war?
China and Russia seem to be forming a Communist alliance.
Canadians like to think of Russia as a far off country of little significance to Canadians and an old cold war enemy now in disarray. Our school system has done nothing to educate our kids on the facts of geopolitics and our government even less. A good starting point for any analysis is geography. I am confident most Canadians would not know that Russia is only 2.5 miles from the United States at their closest point and that only Alaska separates Canada from Russia.
The geopolitical landscape is even closer. On December 5, 1994 the Ukraine agreed to abandon its nuclear arsenal in return for security guarantees from the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom. Russia ignored its guarantee by invading the Ukraine last week. The United States ignored its guarantee by pretending its soft sanctions would deter Russian aggression. Europe, dependent on Russian oil & gas, blusters and looks the other way. The Ukraine, like Crimea only a few years ago, is on its own and likely will be conquered by Russia despite courageous resistance to Russia. What next?
Putin has made it clear on several occasions that his vision is to rebuild the U.S.S.R. since its December 26, 1991 collapse. Fifteen former Soviet Republics were created by that collapse - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and of course Russia. Under Putin’s regime, Georgia was invaded by Russia in August 2008 and fell in a matter of days. Belarus became a “puppet state” of Russia in 2020 when Alexander Lukashenko turned to Russia for support to quell a revolution threatening to oust him from power. Neither NATO nor any western democracy did anything but snivel and complain as Russia expanded through military force. Now Russia is invading the Ukraine. Am I alone in seeing a pattern here?
Under leader Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who is demonstrating extraordinary courage and resolve in facing down Putin, Ukranian military and civilians are putting up strong resistance to the invasion.1 Outnumbered and outgunned, the Ukranians will fight until the bitter end to remain independent and democratic but will likely fall to Putin notwithstanding the abrogration of their security agreement with the United States under the weak Biden administration. Success in taking over the Ukraine will simply embolden Putin who is working towards a close alliance with Xi Ping in China. The absence of any statement denouncing the Ukraine invasion coming from China is a ringing endorsement of the union of ideologies of Russia and China and an ominous silence for Western democracies.
The next step in territorial expansion by Communist countries could well be Hong Kong or Taiwan, both of which have been targets of Chinese expansion plans for decades. It is a marathon chess game, not a sprint by China, but Ping plays the long game and Western leadership changes every four to eight years and cannot sustain any rational foreign policy for any lengthy period of time. I am persuaded that Putin would have been reluctant to move on the Ukraine under Trump’s administration since Trump was unpredictable and not terrified by the prospect of war with Russia.
Biden is terrified. As a result, U.S. Russia policy has a “Biden problem” as reported recently in the New York Times, not exactly a Republican rag. He will resort to tough sounding speeches while his European “allies” have become dependent on Russian oil & gas and will soft pedal their response to Russia’s belligerence to avoid worsening the energy crisis they have created with poorly conceived “climate” policies grounded in the nonsensical belief that CO2 can cause climate change.
All eyes will be on Eastern Europe and Asia as the geopolitics evolves, but those eyes should also be on Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular. Putin and Maduro are on speaking terms and Venezuela has recently promised “military cooperation” with Russia. Venezuela’s crumbling economy under Maduro makes that country, home of some of the largest fossil fuel deposits on the planet (300 billion barrels), vulnerable to any threat from United States and fear that his despotic rule may be upset by domestic revolution or American intervention has brought Maduro to where an alliance with Russia is an attractive option for him personally and a valuable alliance for Putin who can see the value of the massive resources in Venezuela and knows it would be easy to be invited to merge that country with Russia as another “puppet state”.
It is only a matter of time before the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) charade collapses under its own weight and the world wakes up to the reality that the laws of physics will prevail over the nonsensical theories promoted by left wing governments for political gain that rely on a linear regression of global average temperature (impossible to measure within 1 or 2 degrees C, if at all) and atmospheric CO2 concentrations (easy to measure but irrelevant to global temperature) to conclude that the Earth’s average temperature has risen by about 1 deg. C in a century and project it will keep rising if CO2 levels keep rising. It is laughable that so-called “climate scientists” ignore the laws of physics but are enamored by linear regression of the unmeasurable “global average temperature” against atmospheric CO2 levels to forecast climate which is itself a complex, chaotic non-linear system. AGW has about as much validity as the beliefs of the Incas and Aztecs that child sacrifice was needed to improve the weather.
Putin can see the value of 300 billion barrels of oil at the current price of $100 U.S. barrel amounting to some $30 trillion, enough to fund a military expansion capable of world domination from a South American base. I have not seen much coverage on CNN, MSNBC, CBS or in the New York Times of Putin’s conversations with Maduro, likely because it does not fit the left wing narratives they promulgate, but Russia’s interest in Latin America has seen Putin open face-to-face dialogues with Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Alberto Fernandez of Argentina. These leaders have spoken out condemning the invasion of the Ukraine, a politically correct step for countries incapable of preventing or slowing the Russian invasion.
Territorial expansion has been the objective of almost all wars over the past several centuries, with alliances and blocs forming to carve out large aligned territories sharing common ideologies to bolster self-defense. The disintegration of the U.S.S.R. was an anomaly, and Putin is determined to correct it. World domination is a long standing Communist objective, neither a fantasy nor a conspiracy theory, and an alliance between Russia and China is a foreboding step in that direction.
Putin is 69 years old and his time is now. He cannot wait to advance his global domination agenda because at his age his time is running out. Putin put his nuclear forces on alert today, evidence that he will not back down in the face of the “sanctions” imposed by the West.
What it means for Canada is hard to call. Canada has virtually no armed forces, no nuclear deterrent capability, and weak political leadership under Trudeau who embraces the concept of the “Great Reset” promoted by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset is a concept, not a conspiracy theory, just as Communism was a concept originating with the writings of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, who imagined a utopian world where personal advancement or enrichment was subordinated to the collective benefit of society - a lot like the “Great Reset” and the left wing embrace of ESG and “stakeholder capitalism”. Utopia is a wonderful dream but it cannot be achieved by human beings who are predestined to desire to advance themselves through education, work, merit and good fortune. Economist Vilifredo Pareto observed many societies of all political ilks during the 1800’s and concluded that “equality” existed nowhere regardless of political system and that 20% of the population provided 80% of economic growth and of that 20%, one fifth (or 4%) provided four fifths of the growth.
We all take pride in our chidren’s successes in sports and education, urging them to try harder to win games races and get higher grades. Equal outcomes never result from competition regardless of equal opportunities. Utopia does not exist because it is an undesirable state. We don’t want to have “equal outcomes” or “equity” as the left wing often describes it - we want to advance ourselves and achieve greater economic benefits for our families. That is why capitalism works.
As territorial expansion plans of Russia and China evolve over the coming decades (or even longer, but don’t think they will go away), I think they will eventually come to North America. As minerals and fossil fuels were discovered in Alaska, Russia has come to regret its decision to sell that piece of real estate to the United States. Few Canadians and likely even fewer Americans remember or even knew that Alaska was part of Russia until that territory was sold to the United States in 1867, just as Canada was enacting its confederation. Russian political scientist Yuri Gorodenko claims Alaska must be returned to Russia owing to the failure of the United States to honor the agreement through which Alaska was purchased.
Canada is also rich in natural resources (although you would not know that if you listen to any Trudeau speech), making Canada an ultimate target for both the United States and Russia, not to mention China who has used economic power to gobble up many Canadian resource deposits and oil & gas interests, but without much fanfare and always respectful of our Impact Assessment Act and Foreign Investment Review legislation. China plays the long game. But most Canadians would be surprised to learn that China has tens of thousands of troops in Canada. Compare that to the size of the Canadian army which today is about 23,000 soldiers on active duty.
The subject of this thought piece is “will the Ukraine violence lead to world war”? In my opinion, it already has but in 2022 “world war” is less about boots on ground and more about economic power and cyber warfare and that “world war” has been underway for some time and is not abating. Shooting wars are fought over territory and territorial expansion is about resources more often than not. Climate change nonsense has created a global energy shortage weakening Western democracies and making them more reliant on imported energy. The shooting wars that I expect to evolve will be about energy since dominance in fossil fuel resources are key to political dominance, like it or not.
Canada may be in the crosshairs within the next century.
Compare his courage to Justin Trudeau hiding in an undisclosed location when the Freedom Convoy entered Ottawa, or Biden’s bluster devoid of substance.