Tag: war

Regime Change in Russia

Joe Biden unilaterally declares war on the nation with the most nuclear weapons on the planet.

Now we deign to ourselves the right to remove a nuclear power’s leader and denude its government?

What has Putin argued was the goal of The United States and NATO all along, starting with the lies put forward during the integration process of Germany, we have now confirmed as official US policy?

To destroy Russia — erase it as a nation and replace its government with one fashioned after our ideals.

We have called this claim of Putin’s propaganda, and claimed that was not our goal, nor that of the Western Nations, including but not limited to NATO and the remainder of Europe.

President Biden just admitted that Putin not only as not publishing propaganda now he was never wrong; the Russian premise, that our actions from 2004 forward when we admitted former Soviet satellites to NATO, was indeed to destroy Russia’s government and Russian national identity.

“In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either,” Biden said.

So this is not really about Ukraine at all, is it?

No.

Ukraine is simply a foil, a convenient hotbed of corruption that was “useful” to the underlying goal.

The official goal of the Biden Administration is the destruction of Russia.

For the last two decades, across Adminsitrations, it has been about destroying Russia.

And as long as Biden and those who enable him to continue to be President do so it will continue to be about exactly that, which means the real “western goal” is exactly what Putin said it was, and which we stridently (and falsely) maintained it was not.

We got away with this — a policy of “regime change” — in multiple other places. Bosnia and Iraq to name two of several.

Putin isn’t the problem with this statement.

The entire Russian Federal Assembly, along with the Russian people are the problem. Joe Biden just declared war on their political system, their representation such as it is, and their way of life, stating that the United States is now committed to their destruction however long it may take, recognizing and committing to the fact that it will not occur in days, weeks or months.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. It’s worth noting that Russia clearly pays very close attention to these sort of anti-Russian statements by national leaders and takes them at face value.

DISCUSS ON SG

Preparing to Back Down

Some officials of the Fake Biden Administration are beginning to think about how they’re going to climb down from the “Failed Russian Invasion” narrative they’ve relentlessly pushed since the day it began now that it is becoming obvious that they simply didn’t understand Russia’s limited objectives:

One major issue the Tiger Team is looking at is the threshold that could prompt the alliance to use military force in Ukraine. Mr. Biden has made clear that he is enormously reluctant to do so, fearing that direct confrontation with Russia could escalate the conflict beyond control. “That’s World War III,” he noted recently.

A second team of officials, also created by Mr. Sullivan’s Feb. 28 memo, is looking at long-term opportunities for the United States to improve its geopolitical position as a result of Mr. Putin’s invasion. Inside the White House, it has become an article of faith that the Russian leader made a huge strategic error — one that will diminish Russia’s standing, cripple its economy and alienate potential allies for years. But it is early in the conflict, other officials caution, and that conclusion may prove premature.

The immediate concern is what Mr. Putin may do next — driven by a desire to rescue a failing military effort or re-establish his credentials as a force to be feared.

Officials believe the chances that Mr. Putin will resort to detonating a nuclear weapon are small. But Russia’s steady stream of reminders that it has its arsenal at the ready, and could use it in response to anything it perceives as an “existential threat,” has put Washington on high alert.

The narrative concerning Putin’s threats about resorting to nuclear weaponry is also false. NATO, the US, and the globalist media have all interpreted these threats as indicating desperation that supports the failed invasion assumption. But that isn’t true. The reason that the Russians have continuously hammered home their willingness to use nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic, is because US strategy specifically assumes that no one will ever use nuclear weapons under any circumstances, thereby rationalizing the use of the very conventional measures that will trigger a nuclear response under the Russian military doctrine.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Intoxification of Success

The neocons running the neo-liberal world order are not hesitating to sabotage the economies they are financially raping even though the negative consequences are obvious.

Ross: Michael, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is all we hear now. We’re sanctioning people. The West sanction people back to the Stone Age. What are the unintended consequences of sanctions?

Michael Hudson: Well, one is to serve very much like a protective tariff on the sanctioned country. For instance, when America made sanctions on European trade with Russia, Lithuania dutifully stopped exporting cheese to Russia. Well, the result is that Russia set up its own cheese’s sector, and now it’s self-sufficient in cheese. If you sanction a country, you force it to become more self-reliant and across the board, from agriculture to dairy products to technology, Russia is forced to become more self-reliant and at the same time to depend much more on trade with China for the things that it is still not self-reliant in. So America is bringing about exactly the opposite of what it intended. It’s hopeless to somehow isolate Russia and then be able to go after China without Russia. And instead, what it’s doing is integrating the Eurasian core, Russia and China, exactly the policy that Henry Kissinger warned against going all the way back to Mackinder a century ago that said, Eurasia is the world island, Russia and China could be the whole world centre. That’s what the fight is all about. Well, American sanctions are driving Russia and China together, and America has gone to China and said, Please don’t support Russia. It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.

Ross: Don’t people who apply these sanctions think this through? Are they so short-sighted they don’t understand that these sanctions are going to build further capacity within Russia, push Russia further towards China, make that economic alliance concrete and, ultimately, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on in in Europe? All the while underestimating the fact that from a food security point of view – take the U.K., for instance, a net importer of food – not appreciating the fact that, for instance, Russia/Ukraine, they create twenty five percent, a quarter, of all wheat annually. The estimation this year is one hundred and two million tonnes Russia and Ukraine, wheat. Don’t people realise that there’s going to be a massive knock on effect?

Michael Hudson: Yes, they do realise it. Yes, they’ve thought it all through. I worked with these people for more than 50 years.

Ross: Who are these people?

Michael Hudson: The neocons, basically, the people who are in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, the people that President Biden has appointed all around him, from Blinken to Sullivan and right down the line. They are basically urging people around the New American Century. They’re the people who said America can run the whole world and create its own reality. And yes, they know that this is going to cause enormous problems for Germany. They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad.

In fact, sanctions against Russia and Iran have worked so well in bending those nations to the will of the global imperialists that now they’re actively pushing for sanctions on China.

Britain will sanction China if it supports Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a Cabinet minister warned last night. Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan urged Beijing not to send arms or financial aid to Russia after the US claimed it requested China’s support, which both countries deny.

Joe Biden last week warned Chinese president Xi Jinping there will be ‘consequences’ if he backs the invasion.

‘We’ve sanctioned Belarus right alongside Russia precisely because they basically said ‘feel free to park your tanks on our lawn’. That is just not acceptable,’ she added.

I used to wonder how Hitler could possibly have been dumb enough to seek a two-front war after being unable to finish off Britain in 1940, and how the Japanese armed forces could have imagined it was a good idea to bring the USA into the Pacific war while they were still absorbed with fighting the Communists and Kuomintang armies in China. Both ideas appeared, in historical hindsight, to have been obviously stupid even at the times the decisions were made. And it is already obvious that the multi-front economic war is a failure, even before the Chinese front has been opened.

What is clear is that Western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are allowing Putin to exploit Russia’s leverage as a full-spectrum commodity superpower.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Now that I’ve seen how the neocons who have taken over the US empire and overthrown the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine are intoxicated with their successes, it doesn’t surprise me that they would attempt to extend their European satrapy by engaging in economic war with both Russia and China. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the consequences of their failure will be even more horrific for them and their subjects than the consequences of their previous failures were.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia Will Go Nuclear… if necessary

Dominic Cummings points out that US nuclear strategy has always rested on false and self-serving assumptions.

In the Cold War America based its nuclear strategy on an intellectual framework that was false.

It defined standards of ‘rationality’ then concluded the Soviets would not use nuclear weapons in many scenarios. There was a governing tautology: rational leaders would be deterred otherwise they would be irrational. Given this tautology, more vulnerability improves ‘stability’ (e.g submarine launched weapons), while better defence is ‘destabilising’ (e.g missile defence).

The Cold War was won. The West concluded ‘we were right’. Many in the world of policy concluded: there is a reliable theory of nuclear strategy that allows us to send carefully calibrated signals, like ‘escalate to de-escalate’. You can see this false confidence in many politicians, journalists and academics over the past month. E.g Professor Elliot Cohen’s calls for America to attack Russian forces because he’s confident Putin is bluffing.

After the 1991 collapse some scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along. Actually the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.

The theoretical basis of some of the west’s analysis, such as game theory from the likes of the economist Schelling, had been disastrously misleading. More important (I think) was the development of a theory that encouraged leaders/strategists to ignore an eternal lesson of history: one story after another of people risking death in ways opponents or observers thought ‘irrational’, ‘crazy’.

Despite being a game designer, I would not hesitate to declare that history is a much more reliable guide to anticipating human behavior than game theory. Because humans are irrational creatures and game theory relies upon something that is observably rare, to the extent it can even be said to exist at all, which is to say human rationality.

Cummings also points out that the globalist narrative concerning the Russian leader flies directly in the face of these strategic assumptions.

The more you think ‘Putin made a terrible blunder in invading Ukraine, he’s lost the plot, isolated by covid fear, the institutions around him don’t work, he’s fed lies by sycophants’ — which is the standard view in London and DC today — the more sceptical you should be that simplistic ideas from the Cold War about ‘rationality’ and deterrence would work as planned.

Fortunately, the globalist narrative is entirely false. Which, no doubt, is why Cummings has reached the correct conclusion that should be shared by every Christian, every defender of Western civilization, and anyone who cherishes the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

If you care about ‘preserving western values’, I strongly advise that you focus on regime change in London and Washington, not in Moscow. Putin is less dangerous than our own idiocracy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why the Narrative Changed

Three days ago, I noticed that the globalist media narrative had suddenly changed. Reports of Russian complete military failures and Putin’s inevitable fall didn’t vanish entirely, but were severely reduced as the focus shifted to other news. Some test balloons were even floated about the possibility that the anti-Russian narrative might be incorrect, and perhaps this unconfirmed report of the results of the recent missile strike on the base near Yavoriv is why.

$400 million worth of Western supplied weaponry destroyed in a single russian strike on the military base near Lvov — radio intercepted comms suggest that 267 foreign mercenaries have been killed in the strike. 50 year old Peter from Austria who fought alongside the “international legion of Ukraine” said that 800 to 1000 foreign mercenaries were present during the strike. Around 400 mercenaries were evacuated to Poland, many of whom have suffered severe burns & torn limbs from the Kalibr strike. There’s a high number of missing individuals still under the rubble which includes a high number of Americans, Poles and Romanians. Former NATO officers are Amongst the dead.

The number of fatalities sounds absurdly high, to be honest, but even if the number of casualties is closer to the “at least 169 dead and wounded” reported by the Ukrainians, the possibility that NATO officers have already died in Ukraine will likely have installed a new sense of caution in the media’s paymasters. Especially since the airstrikes continue to target military bases in western Ukraine.

Russia again today used hypersonic Kinzhal missiles on ‘military targets’ in Ukraine, according to the defence ministry in Moscow. ‘A Kinzhal attack on a fuel and lubricants base from which fuel for Ukrainian armoured vehicles was supplied was launched from the airspace over Crimea,’ said a statement. High-precision airborne missiles also struck a training centre for ‘foreign mercenaries’ near the village of Ovruch, in Zhytomyr Region, claimed the Russians. The type of missile strike was not specified. ‘More than 100 servicemen of [Ukraine’s] special operations forces and foreign mercenaries were killed.’

And if Russia can strike so effectively past NATO’s air defenses at will without even using its hypersonic missiles, there is nowhere in Europe where the globalist warmongers can consider themselves safe from targeted missile strikes. And now that the attempts to split China from Russia have obviously, and publicly, failed, it is safe to conclude that more countries will be openly taking sides against the globalist imperialists.

DISCUSS ON SG

Cracks in the Narrative

The globalist media begins to prepare the great mass of NPCs that the Ukrainians are not winning the war, Putin is not going to be overthrown, and jaw-jaw does not trump war-war. While globohomo clearly won the information war, Russia is winning the actual boots-on-the-ground war.

As Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine grinds on into its fourth week, the physical war rages in the cities and countryside, while an information war is waged over the airwaves and on the internet and social media.

On the actual battlefield, the Russian offensive has undoubtedly slowed over the past week. But what is being described as a ‘stalled’ takeover may be the result of the Russians taking time to reorganize their forces and improve their logistics.

On the Western side of the information war, we were told from the opening days of the conflict that the Russian military would break due to high casualties and defections, loss of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and aircraft, and domestic opposition.

Videos of Russian battlefield setbacks abound in the media, and strangely there is little reporting on Ukrainian losses.

And yet, over three weeks into the war, Vladimir Putin remains president and the Russian war machine has not collapsed but in fact continues its plodding, imperfect, and messy advance.

Ukraine certainly has won the war on social media and in the press. This gives the average Western viewer the impression of a lopsided victory in favor of Ukraine.

Additionally, the Pentagon has taken the unprecedented step of conducting daily briefings on the war, even though the U.S. is not at war.

The Pentagon assessments often track closely with assessments given by the Ukrainian government.

The Russian military has used a mix of maneuver and siege warfare in an effort to achieve its goal of breaking the Ukrainian military and government and conquering vast regions of the country.

This is not a condemnation of the West’s use of information and disinformation.

These tactics play a role in the management of conflicts. But the West should not delude itself into believing that the Ukrainians will be saved by wishful thinking.

Optics are not everything. Propaganda is not power. And no amount of wishing and wordspelling is sufficient to defeat air, sea, and ground superiority combined with the will to complete the mission.

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The Significance

A lot of the misinformation – as opposed to intentional disinformation – being broadcast across the West can be more correctly interpreted and understood if you consider some of the implications of the statements being released by the Russian Defence Ministry.

▫️ The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the special military operation.

▫️ The grouping of troops of the Lugansk People’s Republic with the fire support of the Russian Armed Forces liberated more than 90 percent of the territory of the republic.

▫️ Currently, the units of the Lugansk People’s Republic are eliminating scattered groups of nationalists on the southern outskirts of Rubezhnoye liberated settlement.

▫️ In the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue their successful offensive in the northern direction. During the day, they took control of Zolotaya Niva, Novodonetsky, Novomayorskoye and Prechistovka. The advance was 16 kilometers.

Ignore the rhetoric and the various factual claims, which may or may not be true. What do you notice about the specific military elements that are being discussed?

The significant element worth noting here, in my opinion, is that the main offensives are being conducted by the Republican militias. The Russians aren’t even utilizing their second-line infantry against the best Ukrainian brigades in the east, except apparently in Mariupol where the formidable Azov Special Operations Detachment has been surrounded by Russian regulars.

The Russian military is offering artillery, air, and sea support to the militias, as well as air defense, but they are not engaging their armor and infantry forces on every front. This reliance upon the militias for the ground offensive may account for what Western observers consider to be suboptimal tactics and higher-than-expected casualty rates, as well as the observation that it is mostly older, outdated tanks and APCs being destroyed.

The fact that using one’s least-experienced and least-valued forces first has been a common method of warmaking since Xerxes sent the Medes against the Spartans before sending in his Immortals at the Battle of Thermopylae appears to have escaped the media’s military experts. Apparently their grasp of military history and theory doesn’t even rise to the level of Arkhaven comics.

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The Official Story is Always False

The purported meeting of the three Eastern European ministers with Zelensky in Kiev made no sense to me, given the proximity of the Russian troops and the ease with which a train could be destroyed from the air. I even wondered if the globalists were setting up a sacrifice of their minor servitors in order to provide NATO a casus belli to directly enter the war.

But, as it turns out, the meeting was just more fakery to serve the Narrative. The three prime ministers never entered Ukraine. Zelensky isn’t in Kiev either, but in Poland.

The summit meeting of East European leaders, hosted in Kiev by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on March 15 was fabricated by the Polish government, with Polish secret service agents playing the part of journalists, and fake photographs of the meeting, press briefing, and train journey prepared by Zelensky’s press office.

The operation was designed by the Poles to promote their role in support of the Ukraine, the Ukrainian refugees, and in defence of Europe against Russia, and seek new European, American, and NATO alliance funds and military equipment.

According to the Ukrainian publicity, the operation was designed to promote the appearance that Zelensky’s regime is in control of Kiev, and to accelerate their application for admission to the European Union (EU).

The Anglo-American media have reported the meeting, as announced by Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister, with “the aim…to express the European Union’s unequivocal support for Ukraine and its freedom and independence,”

The result of the summit meeting, according to the Financial Times in London, was “a show of European solidarity even as Russian shelling continued on residential neighbourhoods in the Ukrainian capital. The trip by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia is the most high-profile visit to Kyiv since Russia invaded the country on February 24.”

“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made,” the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced. “It is here that freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future of us all hangs in the balance.”

Morawiecki and the western press were lying – there was no meeting in Kiev. Instead, the meeting was staged at the Polish rail junction town of Przemysl, 95 kilometres west of Lvov (Lviv), and 20 kms inside the Polish frontier with the Ukraine.

In a report published by the Associated Press (AP) bureau in Warsaw, “the long journey over land from Poland to Kyiv by Morawiecki, Poland’s deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Ministers Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Janez Jansa of Slovenia sent the message that most of Ukraine still remains in Ukrainian hands.”

The evidence gathered from sources in Warsaw and from analysis of the videos and photographs published on the meeting proves there was no “long journey”; no meeting in Kiev or in Lvov, the Galician region capital, which is the operating headquarters of the Ukrainian government. From the evidence provided by the Poles and also by Zelensky’s publicity staff, it is now clear that only a small part of western Ukraine remains in Ukrainian hands. Zelensky himself is now in Polish hands…

The Czech and Slovenian officials flew into Rzeszow Jasionka, the nearest airport to Przemysl; the airfield is also a NATO logistics and security base. They then drove to Przemysl. There the Ukrainians had despatched one of the luxury versions of the regular train service between Przemysl, Lvov, and Kiev. This had been fitted up for fabricated photographs of the Polish, Czech and Slovenian officials meeting as they purportedly travelled towards Zelensky in Kiev. The press which has published these pictures knows them to have been faked and has assisted in concealing the real location.

Look at the pictures. This is quite literally fake news. Now ask yourself what else is being passed off as real by the imperial media?

In not-unrelated news, the Italians have discovered munitions being hidden in “humanitarian” flights to Ukraine:

Nelle scorse ore è emerso che dal Cargo Village sito presso l’aeroporto civile di Pisa sarebbe dovuto partire un volo contenente casse di armi, munizioni ed esplosivi, in contrasto con lo scopo stesso del viaggio, data la sua natura umanitaria. Infatti, il volo avrebbe dovuto fornire cibo, medicinali, e altri prodotti utili alla popolazione ucraina, in difficoltà a causa dei combattimenti delle ultime settimane.

Ai lavoratori dell’aeroporto “Galileo Galilei” di Pisa era stato chiesto di caricare degli aiuti umanitari destinati all’Ucraina. Quando si sono ritrovati però di fronte a casse contenenti materiale bellico hanno deciso di non eseguire l’ordine.

Pisa, armi al posto di aiuti umanitari: gli aeroportuali bloccano volo per l’Ucraina, 15 Marzo 2022

As Karl Denninger notes, this echoes how the USA arranged its entry into WWI, a war which the American people had clearly and unequivocally indicated they had no wish to fight.

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An Alternative Application

Didact’s Mind explains how the failure to translate and understand Clausewitz makes it difficult for US strategists and analysts to make sense of Russia’s approach to making war:

The fundamental difference between the American and Russian ways of fighting probably comes down to understanding one of the greatest mistranslations in history.

That one quotation from the legendary Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz, that you probably remember from school – assuming you were misedjoomuhcayted in an American public indoctrination camp school, that is – likely goes something like this:

“War is politics by another means”.

It is an elegant aphorism. And it is wrong.

The true quote is this:

“Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel“.

In Ye Olde Queene’s Englishe, which of course Americans don’t speak, this literally translates as:

“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with the interference of other means”.

Pay close attention to the difference between “BY another means”, and “WITH (the interference of) other means”. In this slight difference in wording lies a vast, yawning gap of understanding.

The Western way of war dates back to the Greek hoplite phalanx formations, and essentially consists of two armies smashing against each other until one or the other is dust, at which point, the victor dictates terms to the vanquished. In that way of thinking, war is almost an all-or-nothing exercise in achieving a very specific end.

The Russian way of war involves using military force in combination with negotiation. They take the Clausewitzian doctrine literally to mean, “use war and violence to force the other guy to the negotiating table and get him to agree to your terms – and if he doesn’t, ratchet up the pressure on him until he does”.

Put simply, the West seeks to decapitate and destabilise. The Russians seek to strangle and supplant.

Or for those who are stronger in military history than military theory, simply compare the maps of Russian offensives in WWII to the maps of the current Ukrainian situation. Note, in particular, the amount of time that separates each offensive. Doing so should dispel any notion that the special military operation isn’t proceeding more or less as the Russians intended.

This also explains why one so often sees the word “cauldron” utilized in translations from Russian sources instead of the Western “envelopment” or “pocket”. It is a fundamental element of their theory, as opposed to a strategical maneuver to be utilized when the opportunity presents itself.

And then, think about what a geostrategic cauldron might look like in terms of global unrestricted warfare.

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Why Trump Failed

Donald Trump’s failure to cross the Rubicon is explained by his reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Former President Donald Trump admitted he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin was only trying to ‘negotiate’ when he sent troops to the Ukraine border and was ‘surprised’ when the Kremlin leader actually invaded the country.

‘I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border. I thought he was negotiating,’ Trump told the Washington Examiner during a Tuesday evening phone interview from his Mar-a-Lago estate. ‘I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate.’

Trump, who seemingly developed a close working relationship with Moscow during his presidency, said Putin has ‘very much changed’ since the pair last worked together.

‘I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along,’ Trump said. ‘And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.’

I’ve mentioned this observation before, but Trump’s character has never been demonstrated more clearly than by this comment about Vladimir Putin. Trump’s strength is that he is a legitimately great negotiator. However, as with all successful men, his weaknesses are related to his strengths. Trump is a talker, not a doer. He is a negotiator, not a warrior. He conflates speech with action. He’s not a fighter, and never having been punched in the face or thrown down another man in the judo ring, he doesn’t understand men who are.

Of course he thought Putin was negotiating by mobilizing the Russian Army, threatening an invasion, and issuing an ultimatum, because he thinks everything is a negotiation. Hence his failure to take action after the fraudulent election of 2020; there probably wasn’t any chance of him actually doing so even if the US military could have been relied upon to obey its Commander-in-Chief – something we can’t know either way despite what various people claim – because for him even an approach to the Rubicon would have been a negotiating point rather than the beginning of a military action.

Remember, the Senate was massively surprised when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, because despite his military successes on the Mediterranean and in Gaul, they knew him to be a skilled politician and negotiator. And negotiators always prefer jaw-jaw to war-war.

So Trump is a negotiator and Putin is a fighter. What, one wonders, is Xi Xinping?

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