Ukraine is probably toast

Biden and Johnson wear this one. Trudeau is irrelevant.

The courage of Volodymyr Zelensky and his family is an inspiring study in grace under pressure. The weakness of Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Boris Johnson (among others) is a pathetic milestone on the decay of Western democracies and the likelihood of a sea change in geopolitics that shifts power from West to East with China, Russia and North Korea emerging as the primary power bloc and NATO members and allies relegated to a defensive posture incapable of stopping territorial expansion of Russia, China and possibly North Korea over the coming decades.

In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union had Western democracies lauding a new world order where the United States was the dominant power, a standoff based on “mutually assured destruction” with nuclear weapons touted as the stabilizing influence over geopolitics, and China a backward country plagued by widespread poverty. Thirty years later, the tables have been turned and our leaders turned them.

Today, China is emerging as the dominant world power with an economy that continues to outgrow that of America or Europe. In terms of purchasing power parity, China has already passed the United States as the largest and strongest world economy and Canada is now fifteenth in rank, below once-chronic basket cases like India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey. Is it only a matter of time before Canadian emigrate to those countries to “seek a better life”?

Canadians under Trudeau live in a fool’s paradise laboring under the misapprehension that “climate change” is an “existential threat” and that “diversity, inclusion, and ESG” are values that assure a healthy economic future. CO2 is harmless and over time the world will wake up to the fact that the laws of physics (and not Trudeau’s dreams of a “post-national global socialist government”} will determine the reality of both climate and geopolitics. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) nonsense will be recorded by historians as an era of mass hysteria. “Diversity” and “inclusion” are left wing buzzwords that do more to divide society than to unite it. ESG is a virtue-signaling pretense that adding excess costs to productive corporations to achieve “stakeholder” goals enhances their performance when in fact it reduces returns and weakens economic growth.

A post-national global socialist government may well be in the cards, not because of any outcome of the leadership of Biden, Trudeau, Klaus Schwab, George Soros or other proponents of the Club of Rome fantasy that “climate change” can be used to redistribute wealth across the globe. Instead, old-fashioned territorial expansion of Communist countries may be revived and accomplished using military power rather than relying on the AGW “movement”. AGW does serve leading Communist countries well. The AGW theory has seen the Western democracies weaken their own economies by squandering trillions on “renewables” while Russia and China continue to benefit from cheap and reliable fossil fuels. The resultant “global energy shortage” created by inane climate policies just accelerates the decline of the West, fueling rampant inflation and inflicting “energy poverty” on millions of citizens of those democracies, while profiting Russia who benefits from the higher oil & gas prices caused by the man-made energy shortage, and China who uses fossil fuels to power economic growth.

The stability of the theory of “mutually assured destruction” has run its course and evolved into Western democracies folding their tents as soon as Putin threatens the use of nuclear weapons. Within days of Putin even hinting that nuclear weapons were an option, the United States and Europe canceled plans to provide Ukraine with fighter aircraft and rejected the notion of enforcing a “no fly zone” on the basis it might lead to warfare between nuclear powers.

Now the mere threat of use of nuclear weapons has Western leaders cowering in fear and serving up Ukraine while spouting virtue-signaling “support” for Ukraine through economic sanctions and tough speeches. Neither of those will prevent Ukraine from falling, and before long we will have the equivalent of the ill-fated Malta Conference of 1945 and its successor conference at Yalta, neither of which led directly to peace. Once the Ukraine falls, it is virtually certain there will be a “peace conference” that legitimizes Russia’s absorption of Ukraine or at least its Eastern regions and exacts hollow “promises” that Russia will not expand further West. Good luck with those promises, likely of no more value than the 1994 agreement signed by the United Kingdom, United States and Russia to ensure the independence of Ukraine.

What did lead to peace in World War II was the failure of Nazi Germany to displace Russian resistance at Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow and Germany’s inability to sustain a war on two fronts, while in the East Japan was finding the Chinese a formidable opponent in the second Sino-Japanese war. As the war on Germany was reaching its end and Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the United States rushed to execute the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not because those atom bomb attacks advanced peace talks militarily but to ensure the United States emerged as a dominant world nuclear power.

America’s willingness to murder tens of thousands of Japanese women and children in those two atom bomb attacks is not materially different from Putin’s willingness to do the same to civilians in Ukraine to establish Russia’s ability to proceed to expand using military power in total defiance of NATO. Putin hasn’t the slightest concern the United States or United Kingdom would do anything of substance to enforce the 1994 agreement they signed to protect Ukraine independence in return for its return of nuclear weapons to Russia, and it is now clear they will not. It is equally clear NATO is impotent to stop China from invading Taiwan or Russia continuing to expand towards the West or even in Latin America.

Empires are built by psychopaths, willing to sacrifice their own citizens for expanded power and confident that weak leadership in countries that oppose them will facilitate their empire-building. European kings of Spain, France, Germany and England were quite willing to send millions of soldiers to die on battlefields to expand their empires and use their navies to reach far off shores in doing so throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. India, Indonesia, Africa and North and South America became playgrounds for that military expansion. History records their successes with terms like the Habsburg Empire, the British Empire, the Holy Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Empire, among others. Every major empire was built under the leadership of a single man, most often a psychopath by any definition.

Today, the psychopaths are Putin and Xi Ping. The weak leaders are Biden, Macron, Johnson, Trudeau, and Scholz among others. NATO is little more than a social club and the United Nations has evolved into a left wing propaganda source with no meaningful ability to stem aggression or territorial expansion by Russia or China. The UN’’s only role today has been to promote AGW nonsense and plead for world cooperation. The stage is set for a dramatic and painful realignment of world power and we in Canada are on the wrong end of that realignment.