And you too....
Victor Davis Hanson
Ok I found him already, seems like a smart guy.
A Woke West?
Putin is history’s most recent and first nuclear irredentist. He believes any group of Russian speakers anywhere, or former residents of imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, or Russian orthodox worshipers, all belong to Putin’s new Russian Empire. Even if Russian speakers are independent or happy as minorities in other countries, Putin has a grandiose plan toforce them into his new mother Russia.
Only that way can a huge new Russia of 270-300 million people, with a vast area comparable to the old Soviet Union, become again a player on the superpower stage to rival China and the United States.
In Putin’s mind, he has already forced Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine back into the Russian fold. Many of the old Soviet Republics are already his de facto satellites or puppets. If he can get back all of Ukraine, the crown jewel of the old Soviet Union and Mother Russia—41 million people, 230,000 square miles of territory, the best farmland in Europe, rich in oil and minerals—Putin feels he would achieve his irredentist goal. The remaining few lost Russian territories then will either be easily absorbed, or their puppet governments will obey Russian orders. Then, he believes, the former Warsaw Pact nations, in terror, will supposedly shed their NATO alliance or at least become no-fly-zones.
Putin may have initially underestimated the Ukrainian heroic resistance. He foolishly discounted any chance of NATO defiance. He had no idea how much the supposedly decadent West still controls the levers and wheels of the international financial and commercial system now directed at Russia. He was clueless that new weapons such as cheap drone planes and improved model Javelins and Stingers put into the hands of relative amateur shooters could allow them to blow up multimillion-dollar tanks, and huge trucks full of soldiers—all with a good chance of the shooter escaping with his life, and the destruction videoed for global social media consumption.
Now shamed by prior inaction, emboldened by the unexpected Ukrainian resistance, and egged on by the Churchillian emergence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, European Union countries like Germany have suddenly all but apologized for their former appeasement, nihilist cutbacks of oil and gas production, and virtual disarmament.
In the United States, the public is ebullient at the scenes of defiant Ukrainians and hopeful that Putin has at last met his irredentist Waterloo. The point is not that Putin is stopped for good but that in theory he could be stopped. And that is something, given the odds against the Ukrainians and the declinist postmodern West.
In truth, Ukraine is vastly outnumbered, out equipped, and outmanned. It was armed by the West far too late. It should have received tens of thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles months ago. Last summer, the United States should have increased daily oil and gas output, not cut it back. The EastMed pipeline into Italy should have had the full support of the Biden Administration. Joe Biden should have stopped with the gratuitous “killer” and “bully” Corn Pop rhetoric, spoken softly, and instead upped targeted defense spending and stopped the commissariatization of the Pentagon.
https://victorhanson.com/
