Dear Editor,
And so the world woke up last week to the Russian Army marching over the border into the Ukraine. As usual, there is shock and dismay. How can this possibly happen? Our diplomats with their fine speeches were making so much progress. Our political leaders had threatened “sanctions” and all manner of devastating response in case something really did happen. In fact, my hopelessly incompetent, illiterate and feeble President of the United States, Joe Biden, went so far as to threaten to “unfriend” the Russians on his official Facebook account if they invaded. That sure slowed them down.
In the meantime in Europe, who by some strange happenstance gets 40 per cent of its energy from Russia, their overwhelming response was to ban Russian athletes, limit access to all the banks except those which happened to be handling the energy business and write several mean letters to Putin’s mother telling her what a bad boy he was being.
And how did we get here? Years, if not generations, of hopelessly weak governments on both side of the oceans unwilling to meaningfully pursue energy independence and bowing to the political nonsense of the mythical carbon footprint.
As pointed out recently in another publication, “The world has surrendered its energy independence to the whims of a Swedish teenager.” Nuclear plants are closed. Coal fields are abandoned. Oil reserves are untapped in the hope of capturing the elusive “carbon footprint unicorn”. And so, what happens? You give one nation like Russia the power to make you freeze in the winter and grind your industry to a halt. When you give a bully leverage the only result is that you get bullied over and over again. No number of canceled concerts, banned athletes or the meaningless endless platitudes of those who stand by with their hands in their pockets will change anything.
The Chinese build a military airbase base in the middle of the ocean on an island they don’t own in territorial waters that are not theirs. Sharp words are exchanged. Political appointees so dumb you wouldn’t let them mow your lawn file formal protests and in the end, what is the result? The Chinese have their airbase and no one does anything about it. Maybe the fact a large part of the Democratic party in the U.S. have billions of dollars’ worth of business interests in China might have something to do with it? No, probably not. That’s just coincidence.
You would think that the world would learn. The last time appeasement was tried we ended up with the second world war. And what are you looking at now? Will NATO do anything against the Russians? No. Biden knows that if he commits American troops to protect someone else’s border while his own Southern border is a sieve that Americans will never elect another Democrat in modern times. That will probably be the case next November anyway, but putting boots on the ground in the Ukraine after the Afghanistan debacle would be political suicide.
Will the EU step in? Nope. they do too much business with Russia and besides, they don’t want to be cold next winter. And besides, they have no stomach for the fight any longer anyway.
And so the Russian strategy becomes self-evident. They will succeed because they face a world that has sacrificed its self-sufficiency to a fantasy and that is being led by hopelessly weak individuals far more interested in their own self-enrichment rather than their own nations’ best interests.
What’s next? China moves on Taiwan in the next 12 months. Why? Because they know they can. If the U.S. tries to stop them, China won’t ship any of the electronics it makes that keep 85 per cent of U.S. industry alive. We sacrificed that independence long, long ago.
Where is Ronald Reagan when you need him? … But I would more than settle for Donald Trump.
Steven Johnson
