It’s rather amusing to watch Clown World attempting to do diplomacy without actually going through the traditional diplomatic exercises in order to maintain its facade of complete control of the situation.
NATO leaders will “send a clear and positive signal” to Kiev regarding Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told journalists ahead of a two-day summit in Lithuania. The country will be able to skip one of the normal steps for candidates, he predicted.
The official said he proposed to member states to “remove the requirement for Membership Action Plan (MAP)” for Ukraine. This will change the accession path “from a two-step process to a one step process,” he explained during a conference on Tuesday.
In absolutely-related news, Turkey has unexpectedly dropped its opposition to Sweden’s entry into NATO.
NATO has cleared the way for Sweden to join the Western military alliance by persuading Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end his opposition to Stockholm’s bid.
Persuading = large cash payments. But hey, whatever works, right?
All of this frantic non-diplomacy diplomacy is meant to “send a message” to Russia, which is completely futile since Russia doesn’t consider NATO or the USA to be “agreement-capable” and the entire world now knows that NATO is ‘victory-incapable”. The idea is to threaten Russia with a full-scale direct confrontation with NATO, and the problem is that the threat is simply not a credible one now that NATO’s ammunition and armor stores have been significantly depleted.
Meanwhile, Russia is growing stronger by the month, as its productive capacity is growing and it is building more tanks and APVs than it is losing. More importantly, the NATO calculation relies upon its own alliance while completely failing to take into account the extent to which Russia’s allies are capable of assisting it, both in terms of supplies and siphoning off NATO resources to other theaters.
I’d always thought that it would be the loss of several aircraft carriers that would signify the end of the US empire. But it increasingly appears that it is the combination of economic and military futility being exposed in Ukraine that will do so instead. And the longer this process continues to play out and methodically weaken the infrastructure of Clown World, the better it will be for the sovereign nations and the American posterity.