The celebrated Israeli historian Yuval Harari argues that whatever now happens in Ukraine, Putin has lost “his war.” A report on his article is here: “Yuval Noah Harari: No matter what he does, Putin has already lost this war,” Times of Israel, March 5, 2022:
“Whether he pulls his troops back or attempts to bomb Ukrainian cities into submission, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already lost the war he launched against the country, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued.
“This war is not about conquering this city or that city. Putin can conquer all of Ukraine, that’s completely true,” Harari told Channel 12 news on Friday. “But this war is over the very existence of a Ukrainian people.”
Putin, he said, began the war “because he has a fantasy he’s built up in his head that there isn’t a Ukrainian people, that Ukrainians are actually Russians, that they want to be a part of Russia, and that only some small Judeo-Nazi gang in power is preventing it.”
Nothing has so united the Ukrainian nation, made its people so aware of themselves as distinct from the Russians, as Putin’s war. If there were many Ukrainians who before the invasion were well disposed toward Russia, there are none now. Putin has done the opposite of what he hoped: he has made Ukrainians feeling more distinct, and distant, from Russians. and what Putin calls “Mat’-Rossiya” (Mother Russia).
Putin believed that he’d go in, President Volodymyr Zelensky would flee, the military would surrender and the population “would greet the Russian tanks with flowers.”
Zelensky did not flee, but instead became a national hero and the international, symbol of Ukrainian resistance. And he will remain a symbol of that resistance, whether he lives or dies.
But he [Putin] was wrong all along the way.”
The past few days, Harari said, had proven that “there is a Ukrainian people; Zelensky did not flee; the Ukrainian military is fighting like crazy; and the population is throwing Molotov cocktails at tanks, not flowers.”
“Putin won’t be able to hold it… There is no chance. With every passing day, he sows more and more seeds of hatred between Ukrainians and Russians — who didn’t hate each other before. They were family. This is hatred for generations. By his own hand, he is ensuring there is no chance of them uniting.”
Putin’s fantasy, in which Ukrainians would turn out to welcome the Russian tanks that have arrived, in his view, to rescue them from “Nazis” (Harari’s claim that Putin has been blaming “Judeo-Nazis” is incorrect) whom Putin claims now threaten Ukraine, has exploded In his face. Not flowers, but Molotov cocktails are being thrown at those tanks; the entire male population of Ukraine, from 18 to 60 years, has been mobilized; schoolteachers, economists, and IT specialists have been learning to use weapons, from rifles all the way up to Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles; they’ve learned to construct steel anti-tank barriers, known as “hedgehogs,” and to bury mines in strategic places. In Kyiv, women without children have joined the fight. The entire country appears to have gone to war.
But Harari acknowledged that there was a real danger Kyiv and other cities would become the next Aleppo — the Syrian metropolis that was pounded by Russian forces, causing untold tragedy.
The war seems to have entered a new phase. Putin has responded to the unexpected Ukrainian resistance by unleashing rockets and missiles into civilian buildings everywhere, including in Kharkiv and Kyiv. He has shown that, in his anger at being foiled from obtaining what he assumed would be a quick victory, he is now fully prepared to level large parts of Ukrainian cities. Civilians fleeing Mariupol, Irpin, an other cities are being deliberately shelled. Putin can achieve a military victory, but in so doing, he will only reinforce the tremendous will of Ukrainians to resist. And If Russian troops manage to conquer Kyiv, and then all of Ukraine in the next month or two, what then? Does Putin keep 200,000 troops – more than a quarter of Russia’s 900,000-man military – permanently in Ukraine? How much will that cost in men, materiel, money, and morale? What happens when the Russian soldiers comprehend how they have been used, in what they thought, as they crossed the border into Ukraine, was going to be a war to “free Ukrainians from Nazis”?
All over the country the Ukrainian resistance will fight on, civilians and soldiers both, counter-attacking against the invader wherever they can, laying mines, firing their Javelins at tanks and Stingers at planes. Snipers in cities will pick off Russian soldiers; they killed a Major General the other day. Volunteers from all over have been arriving to help the Ukrainians; some 15,000 so far. The Russian soldiers whom the Ukrainians have captured have expressed bewilderment at what they are doing in the Ukraine. They had been told they were going on maneuvers, and then found themselves crossing into Ukraine, told only that they would be rescuing the Ukrainians from “Nazis.” In the face of such massive resistance, the Russian conscripts are becoming ever more demoralized. They have seen for themselves the ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance.
Meanwhile, the attempt by Putin to prevent any information about the Ukraine war reaching the Russian public is bound to fail, as more social media sites that tell the truth will keep popping up, and for each one that is taken down by Putin’s men, several others will spring up. Cyberwarriors from all over the Western world will be enrolled in the effort to inform the Russian public about the war, the resistance, and in the places the Russians have conquered, the insurgency. Putin’s attempts to ensure that only the regime’s lies will be heard in Russia will be overwhelmed by the assault coming from thousands of European and North American cyber warriors..
When people like Putin come up against a cold hard reality they don’t like, he said, they tend “to try and break reality.”…
Putin will throw more troops into the war, intent on conquering all of Ukraine, but failing to realize that during the resulting Russian occupation, the insurgency will continue; he is planning on an endgame, but there is no end to the war he started, until Russian troops leave the country. Ukraine is not tiny Georgia, where Putin forced Tbilisi to give up Abkhazia and North Ossetia; there are 45 million people in Ukraine determined to fight. How many of Russia’s soldiers is Putin willing to lose in trying to put down such an insurgency by the Ukrainian people?
As for now, the iron grip of Putin’s regime on the media prevents the Russian people from learning the truth about the invasion of Ukraine. Any journalist in Russia who dares to report the truth, or even use the word “war” instead of “special operation,” can be sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. There are no independent news sources in Russia; the entire staff of the last independent news channel, Ekho Moskvy, or Moscow Echo, resigned en masse. Facebook and Twitter are censored. So far, the great majority of Russians support Putin’s policy; his propaganda is all they hear, and two weeks into the war, they still believe his nonsense about fighting “Nazis” in the Ukraine. But as more crippling sanctions are imposed on Russia’s economy by many different countries, as more crowds appear in the capitals of Europe denouncing his invasion, as the body-bags with dead soldiers, believed to now number over 10,000, appear back in Russia, as the Western powers find ways to transmit news to Russians, the way they did with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the Cold War, on social media sites that keep popping up to immediately replace those the Russian government takes down, in a whack-a-mole game where the West can keep going indefinitely, the Russians will begin to abandon support for an increasingly isolated and rattled Putin. First there were hundreds, then thousands, and now there are tens of thousands of Russian protesters in different Russian cities, with their signs “Ne Voine” (No To War), who are being hauled off to prison. But the numbers of the dissidents keep growing. What will happen when there are crowds of hundreds of thousands of Russians, protesting against that quite unnecessary war of choice that one man started?
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russians had a brief encounter with democracy under Gorbachev and then Yeltsin. But the country eventually reverted to despotism under the rule of Vladimir Putin, a man akin to those who had ruled the Soviet Union for seventy years, beginning with the October Revolution of 1917. Ukraine, however, chose the democratic path, and has stuck with it. And the next time Ukrainians hold a free election, that most unlikely hero of our time, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and winner of a Dancing With The Stars competition, and now the symbol of Ukrainian resistance, will win in a landslide that even a despot would envy.
The Russian troops have already taken the cities of Kherson and Mariupol, and are brutally besieging Kharkiv and Zyiv, and a dozen other population centers, as the Russian tanks fan out across the country. 1.5 million Ukrainians—women and children, and boys under 18 and men over 60 — have already left the country.
Many hundreds of billions of dollars will now be spent on arms, offensive and defensive, not only by the 30 members of NATO, as an understandable reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also by other countries outside NATO that will have had brought home to them in particularly brutal fashion the need to prepare for military aggression from bad actors in their neighborhood. Outside of Europe, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and India will all be more zealous in building up their military against possible aggression by China, which has approved of Putin’s war. China has shown in its military exercises conducted so close to Taiwan, in its creation of artificial islands, and its seizure of existing ones in the South China Sea in order to buttress its claim to undersea oil and gas deposits, and in its ruthless suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, that the military danger it poses to its neighbors is growing apace. A supremely confident China, the world’s second largest economic power, with the world’s largest, rapidly-modernizing army, has seen how Putin so far appears to have gotten away with his invasion and conquest of Ukraine. All those countries in Asia that rightly feel threatened by China will be pouring money into defense spending, thanks to Putin’s war thousands of miles away.
“People thought ‘nuclear weapons are something from the sixties, there was some Cuban missile crisis…’ [But] it is here and now — it took three days from the outbreak of war to the beginning of threats with nuclear weapons.”
I’m not sure Yuval Harari is correct here. Worries about a nuclear war are unwarranted. On February 27, Putin publicly ordered a “special mode of combat duty in the strategic deterrence forces.” These forces include a nuclear triad of air, ground, and naval nuclear weapons; precision-guided long-range nonnuclear munitions; missile defense capabilities; and the command-and-control system that links them all. This was a bit of bravado, designed to scare the faint of heart, but this was no more than a military exercise, a rattling of cages. None of the Western nuclear powers have made any changes in their military posture as a result.
On the subject of Western sanctions on Russia, Harari said Russia has little going for its economy beyond its natural resources.
Not quite true. Russia’s main exports are: fuels and energy products(63 percent of total shipments, of which crude oil and natural gas accounted for 26 percent and 12 percent respectively); metals (10 percent); machinery and equipment (7.4 percent); chemical products (7.4 percent) and foodstuffs and agricultural products (5 percent). That is, almost 2/3 of its exports consist of oil and natural gas. European countries have shown their willingness to do without those Russian exports. Germany has surprised many by pulling out of the Nordstream Pipeline Project, and is now seeking alternative natural gas suppliers, from the U.S., Qatar, Algeria, and Israel. The Americans and Europeans are also planning on ending imports of crude oil from Russia.
“If the West is smart, what it should do is not just sanctions, but a ‘Green Manhattan Project.’ Green energy that will dislodge oil and gas from their central role. When oil prices go down to $20 a barrel, it’s the end of Putin’s regime.”
Undoubtedly this Ukraine war, and the interruption, by Europe itself, of Russian oil and gas imports, will cause European governments to speed up their use of renewables. They are already in a state of alarm from the latest report on global warming, Now they have another reason — a belligerent Russia, an unhinged Putin — to get off fossil fuels faster still. This accelerated switch to renewables should drive down long-term demand for, and thus the prices of, oil and gas. As Yoav Harari says, if oil is driven down to $20 a barrel, “it’s the end of Putin’s regime.”
Asked what he thought of comparisons between Putin’s campaign and Adolf Hitler’s expansionism that launched the Second World War, Harari said he was not a big fan of the rush to compare the two, though he acknowledged that “there are certain similarities.
However, he stressed, “There’s a very big difference. Hitler had an ideology, and the German people were to a great extent united behind this ideology. Here it’s a war of one man only. It’s not a war of the Russian people. The Russian people don’t want this.”…
It’s not accurate to say that “the Russian people don’t want this.” Most Russians are still behind Putin. Right now, out of a population of 145 million, fewer than ten thousand Russians have staged protests. How could most of them not support Putin, given that his version of events, with this “special operation” undertaken to rescue Russia’s little brothers, the Ukrainians, from “Nazis,” is the only version they now hear. It would be truer to say that “while the vast majority of the Russian people still support the war, with each day more of them have become the war’s opponents, filled with shame and chagrin” as they learn the truth from social media.
Now that the oligarchs’ luxury apartments in London and Paris have been declared off-limits to them, now that their luxury yachts and private planes are being seized, now that their children are being denied educations in the West, the oligarchs are growing unhappy with Putin’s war, but most of them, so far, continue to declare their loyalty to the man who has made their obscene fortunes possible; he’s the godfather of the oligarchs’ criminal organization. They may be unhappy but they do not dare to express it, for Putin is quite capable of seizing their fortunes. “Imagine they go to complain to Putin,” said a diplomat from a European country where several Russian oligarchs own large assets. “They say, ‘Can you please revise your policy? I lost $4 billion of my $5 billion’. Putin says, ‘Do you want to keep the $1 billion?’”
The Americans think that the oligarchs can pressure Putin to stop the war. They are wrong. Putin made a deal long ago with the oligarchs: they could keep their wealth, but only so long as they either supported, or kept silent about, Putin’s policies. They face the seizure of everything they possess, if they dare to publicly express their opposition, or even worse. Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, dared to question Putin’s policies, and ended up spending ten years in jail. He now lives in exile, in London, stripped of almost all of his wealth. Other oligarchs who have run afoul of Putin have also ended up in prison, or in exile, or dead. With Khodorkovsky’s example very much in mind, few oligarchs are willing to speak out.
He also suggested that a potential silver lining of the war could be “an end to the culture war within the West: left against right, liberals against conservatives, Fox News against CNN.
“One of the most optimistic things that happened to me in the last few days was I was switching between CNN and Fox News and suddenly they looked the same. They suddenly understand that there’s something infinitely more important, and infinitely more terrible than what they’ve been afraid of over the past few years, and they can unite around it. The moment that happens, there’s no need to fear anyone. The Western world is far stronger than the Russians and even the Chinese.”
Is it really true that the political abyss that separates the woke progressives on the left of the Democratic Party from the Republicans has been bridged? CNN and Fox News can agree on opposing Putin’s war in the Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean that they agree on anything else, from mask mandates, to critical race theory being taught in the schools, to Biden’s handling of the economy. Those differences remain. And as soon as the Ukraine war ends, or even just subsides into a slow grinding down of Ukrainian forces by the Russians, so that the war no longer monopolizes the evening news, and is no longer the main topic on social media, while the West’s attention turns elsewhere, those differences will reemerge.
The notion that the culture wars that have riven opinion in the West will be healed by the joint effort undertaken to oppose Putin’s invasion strikes me as fantastic. It’s a little like the predictions of a united Western world, never again to be sundered, after 9/11; European nations expressed sympathy for, and solidarity with, the United States, but nothing concrete resulted from those sentiments. America continued to contribute the lion’s share of NATO’s budget, and none of the other 29 NATO members offered to raise their defense spending as a result of the terror attacks in New York and Washington. This time, Putin’s War should lead — but will it? — to lasting changes in the defense budgets of NATO countries. Still, we’ve been disappointed before by our NATO allies. This time, don’t get your hopes up.
jewdog says
Did you see where two Iranians were arrested for plotting to assassinate Amb. John Bolton, but the Biden admin is refusing to indict them for fear that it would derail the new JCPOA with Iran? Unbelievable.
gravenimage says
*Sickening*, jewdog.
Here’s this appalling story:
“Two members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard want to assassinate Trump’s National Security Advisor – but the Biden administration is holding back on charges to push for a nuclear deal”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10587269/Two-members-Irans-Revolutionary-Guard-want-assassinate-Trumps-National-Security-Advisor.html
Enabling a nuclear Iran is more imporant to Biden than protecting his *own people*.
Infidel says
Oil may be 2/3rds of Russia’s economy, but another big sector is military sales. Given who they sell to – Syria, Iran, China, India, don’t expect that to go anywhere soon
Incidentally, this article read more like a Hugh article than an RS one
Robert Spencer says
Infidel, you’re quite right. It is a Hugh article. The idiot site editor (me) inadvertently put it in under the wrong byline. It’s fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up.
Infidel says
No problem! It reminds me of the old saw from years ago that you and Hugh were the same person ?
Robert Spencer says
Yes, I know it feeds right into that sort of thing. I wish I could write like Hugh.
Infidel says
Don’t we all? ?
gravenimage says
Mr. Spencer, I think you are a great writer.
Hugh Fitzgerald is certainly one of a kind, though–reading him often expands my vocabulary.
PMK says
Many points of disagreement:
1. Fear of a nuclear conflict is entirely valid. War hawks are calling for NATO to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The US would have to do it. That puts US and Russia, two nuclear powers armed to the teeth,, in danger of direct conflict as they knock down each others’ fighter planes.
2. Putin may have lost the war, or at least not achieved his aims, but any ‘victory’ by either side will be pyrrhic, at best.
3. Russians and Ukrainians may hate each other, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be forced to live under one flag. Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
4. The dream of a world powered by renewables won’t happen in the next century. It’s still winter here. Homes must be heated. Water must be heated year-round. The world’s population continues to grow, which means energy needs grow. All of the electric vehicles people want need a source of power. It will come from FOSSIL FUELS or nuclear power. The idea that going green will lessen chances for conflict and reduce Russian (or Chinese or any other people’s) ability to wage war is ridiculous. Add to that, the fact that many of the materials needed to make solar panels and windmills and EV are found in non-Western nations. Going green will not reduce the opportunities for conflict..
jewdog says
Ukraine gave up its nukes and bombers for western guarantees which have proven worthless. The arguments for not engaging Russia will still be used when Putin invades other states, so I expect him to get away with it, article five notwithstanding.
PMK says
Jewdog,
Russia also guaranteed Ukraine sovereignty. They were part of the Budapest Memorandum. ..
Westman says
Tend to agree with most of your points, PMK. I don’t think renewables, when considering the toxic byproducts, final residues of battery storage, and junked renewable generator systems, will ever supply all energy. And plastics will still come from fossil fuels.
I’m betting the “Green New Deal” will get boiled down to, “The War On Energy Dependence”, while
Putin’s and Gretta’s pictures will be on pub dartboards.
Infidel says
I disagree w/ #3. Ukraine is making Afghanistan look like a picnic. Unlike the 80s, when the bulk of Soviet troops in Afghanistan were from the -stans – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, this time, the bulk of them are Russians and nobody else (even though Russia is said to be considering bringing in Belarus and Kazakhstan into this war). While they may or may not like it, one thing the Ukrainians are – like the Russians, they are inheritors of the Soviet military, which explains why they are providing a more fierce resistance than what the Afghans did during Babrak Karmal’s regime: it’s like a Russian civil war in slow motion.
Given how long it has taken, as well as the fact that the entire Russian army is now on this front, I don’t think that an escalation is a given. For one, the US could tell Russia that flying over Ukraine is no different from flying over Chukotka – just across the Bering Straits, and simply ask Russia why they’re not defending that if they think that they’re at war w/ the US. And if Russia loses its entire army in Ukraine, you’d have a nation of some 6.6 million square miles w/ hardly anyone to defend it. Almost like the Americas in the 1500s
And on Newsmax just now, I saw a report about mothers in a district in Siberia confront a Putin special envoy (that’s what they seem to call governors out there) about their kids being sent off to war, when they are totally unprepared. Expect uprisings like this all over the country as the truth about this war leaks out to average Russians
PMK says
I want to see Ukraine remain independent as well. Their resistance is encouraging. But we have to face facts. Wishing for something doesn’t mean it will happen.
How much of Ukraine will be destroyed before the West gets the word out to Russians? Russian parents might not want their children fighting in Ukraine, but they have no power to stop Putin. He doesn’t care what they think. At this point, the Russian military would have to depose him, but how likely is that?
Wellington says
“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”
Initially, PMK, this is often the case, but as William Manchester in his magnificent biography of Douglass MacArthur, “American Caesar,” has MacArthur himself opining about this very subject.
The great General observed that tyranny is inevitably inflexible compared to democracy and democracy, i.e., freedom, has the capacity, long term, to “think outside the box” far better than tyranny does. And that, per MacArthur, is why democracy, when really implemented, will always win out over tyranny. Sure did in WWII.
I agree with the General.
PMK says
Wellington,
Instant communications and globalization mean democracy is not enough. Democracy cannot win out over tyranny, particularly when it has been corrupted. The same arguments being made for sanctioning Russia could also be made against China. They won’t though, because Western businesses and governments have sold us out to China. Therefore, our freedom is being sacrificed to appease China. Speech that offends the CCP is censored. We can feel good about sanctioning Russia but it means nothing.
gravenimage says
PMK wrote:
2. Putin may have lost the war, or at least not achieved his aims, but any ‘victory’ by either side will be pyrrhic, at best.
……………..
PMK, I don’t believe that maintaining your freedom, even at great cost, represents a pyrrhic victory. Do you think that Ukraine should have surrendered the nation to Putin as soon as he started threatening an invasion? Should every nation do this?
This certainly would have made things easier for Hitler and Stalin…
More:
3. Russians and Ukrainians may hate each other, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be forced to live under one flag.
……………..
That “one flag” would of course be Russia’s, since Ukraine is not threatening to invade and conquer Russia.
More:
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
……………..
As Wellington says, perhaps at first. Did you happen to notice that the free, democratic nations won out over Fascism in WWII?
More:
4. The dream of a world powered by renewables won’t happen in the next century. It’s still winter here. Homes must be heated. Water must be heated year-round. The world’s population continues to grow, which means energy needs grow. All of the electric vehicles people want need a source of power. It will come from FOSSIL FUELS or nuclear power. The idea that going green will lessen chances for conflict and reduce Russian (or Chinese or any other people’s) ability to wage war is ridiculous. Add to that, the fact that many of the materials needed to make solar panels and windmills and EV are found in non-Western nations. Going green will not reduce the opportunities for conflict..
……………..
Generally agree here, PMK. This still doesn’t mean that we should kowtow to Russia because of oil production, any more than we should bow to Islam because of oil production in the Middle East. We should be as energy independent as possible.
PMK says
gravenimage,
WWII ended over seventy five years ago. The world has changed. The countries that lived behind an iron curtain are the only ones fighting for freedom today. The free democratic nations that ‘won’ WWII are slipping further and further into fascism. Look at Canada. Trudeau answered peaceful protests by getting banks to freeze accounts and threatening to confiscate savings of the participants. Europe is bowing to Islam every day. So is the US government. Our military is busy teaching about diversity, equity and inclusion. Tech giants in the US are censoring a free press and preventing the exchange of ideas between people. Doctors who had differing ideas on how to treat COVID were threatened with loss of their medical licenses. THIS is freedom?
James Lincoln says
gravenimage,
“THIS is freedom?”
I certainly share your frustrations.
And fraudulent elections have consequences:
The current fraudulent leadership in the United States does not share the values of the average bread-and-butter American.
If the United States cannot guarantee to its citizens free and fair elections during the upcoming midterms, there is nothing currently stopping the United States from being destroyed from within.
gravenimage says
PMK, I agree that many years have passed since WWII, and many things have changed, and not always for the better.
Still, our actions then proved that tyranny need not always win.
Westman says
“Putin believed that he’d go in, President Volodymyr Zelensky would flee, the military would surrender and the population “would greet the Russian tanks with flowers.””
I can’t find any quote from Putin that supports this fantasy: “would greet the Russian tanks with flowers.”
And oil at $20 a barrel(42 gallons)? At $40? Never again. What could you buy this week with $20? Who honestly thinks whatever you can buy for $20 is worth more than the energy in 42 gallons of crude oil? Have you not read of 3rd world folks risking, and losing, their very lives to collect a few gallons of damaged pipeline spills?
The Russian tail is about to wag the EU dog which is scrambling for a non-existant alternative to Russian gas. Putin is threatening to turn off the gas to Europe if it sanctions Russia.
Reactors take years to build. Germany had 17 and closed down all but 3. It would be surprising if some of the idled German reactors could be restarted and manned in a year. There are not enough LNG ships to supply Europe’s shortfall.
Does anyone remember what happened when the US blockaded fuel to Japan in 1941? We seem to have a rhyming situation.
Russia may be about to “break our reality” about our actual ability to control its economy. We may have started a MAD of the EU and Russian economies and damage to our own with the use of sanctions on Russia.
Economists are rarely right about their predictions which seems strange since most were trained in STEM disciplines. Maybe they have forgotten to remove the politics from analysis and just bean count. Warren Buffet said that reading all those boring corporate reports was the key to his success rather than listening to economists.
Yes, Putin the worst of the worst, a nefarious human being. Will be a pariah of history. A lightening bolt should seek him. Doesn’t change anything.
Infidel says
Oil will never be $20 a barrel. The closest that it got to that was in 2020, in the midst of the lockdown and before the George Floyd riots. And when it did, Trump intervened to stop the vicious price war b/w Russia and Saudi Arabia, which was sending oil prices into negative territory. Otherwise, the US oil market would have suffered along w/ the Saudi and Russian markets
And forget about it ever getting anywhere close when environmental Marxists like the Bidens are in power
Westman says
Agree completely, Infidel. I can’t imagine how any clear-thinking economist could think even $40 for a barrel of oil. The chemicals and plastics in it are worth more.
Inflation itself pumps the price of oil in an endless spiral until demand stabilizes. With China seeking more energy, that equilibrium cannot be established without increased production.
Biden’s handlers have gone simple-minded and kicked off a wage-price spiral that likely cannot be stopped with interest rates.
gravenimage says
Westman–with all respect–I don’t think we should bow to Russia’s demands because they are an oil producer–nor should we bow to the Muslim world. Russia produces 12% of world oil–a huge figure, but this should not give them the right to dictate to the rest of the world as you seem to believe.
Infidel says
I didn’t read him as advocating kowtowing to Russia. As we all know, we could shut down the Climate Change Commissars, and renew the Trump energy policies that we had before this zombie took over. Instead, we’re exploring how to replace Russia w/ Venezuela, which has forgotten how to produce oil and has to procure it from Iran. And don’t even get me started on having Russia mediate a new JCPOA w/ Iran
gravenimage says
We should be as energy independent as possible.
Saydalii says
I’ve read Yuval Noah harari, very interesting mind. If I remember correctly I think I read that some of his books are required reading for high schools in Bhutan.
Obviously some big assumptions he is making. Which is what he does best, theorizes. I think Russia will end up taking all of Ukraine, will negotiate down to what they want to rule.
Will pound the population and win it over with constant propaganda for 3-5 years about how the west was so silly and said all these things but did nothing to actually help you (maybe true). You think they are your friends. I think the west knows they won’t actually send real troops so we should give the impression and crazily scream how much we support Ukraine and how Russia is the most evil country and Putin equals worse than Hitler. To try to convince the Ukrainians we “really care”.
Meanwhile China will invade Taiwan, taking pressure off of Russia. Then Turkey will start to invade parts of Greece.
Purely my opinion, I don’t have thousands of links and clippings to support it. Just my own 30 year old brain looking at the world.
GreekEmpress says
+1
Westman says
Well, Saydalii, some of your conjectures seem very likely and some plausible. Let’s hope this isn’t a time that China flexes muscles. That 30 year-old brain functions well, and logically.
I hope we’re all safe when the hostilities are finished.
gravenimage says
Saydalii wrote:
…I think Russia will end up taking all of Ukraine, will negotiate down to what they want to rule.
Will pound the population and win it over with constant propaganda for 3-5 years…
……………
I don’t think that five years of propaganda will be enough to convince Ukrainians that living under Russian conquest is a good thing.
I share you concerns over Taiwan and Greece. If Putin *is* successful this will embolden other thugs in the world, including in Dar-al-Islam.
CogitoErgoSum says
I don’t think Putin is going to give back what he has gained. He wants Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. He has those now and should declare victory and end the war with the stipulation that he will be back for more if Ukraine even thinks about joining NATO. However, he will take more if can get it so the war will go on until the Ukrainians decide that being a neutral nation is preferable to endless fighting. I don’t see the Russian people turning on Putin any time soon. They have a strong will and this will become a war of wills. The West (especially the U.S.) is not very good at that kind of war. I sincerely hope I am wrong and Biden will turn out to be some kind of genius but I have serious doubts about that happening (Afghanistan). I’m afraid it’s more likely Putin will turn to nuclear weapons than that Biden will become a leader for the ages.
Infidel says
I think Crimea is settled, given that their people in 2014 voted for Russia over Ukraine, and even independent surveys like Pew later seemed to confirm that. The evidence is less clear about the Donbass, and there, the best solution might be that the south-eastern part of both those oblasts, which were occupied by the Russian separatists before this war, can either go to Russia or be the so-called ‘independent’ republics (like Transnistria or Abkhazia), while the north-west part of both those oblasts go to Ukraine, like before this war
I do think Ukraine would do well to not officially join NATO, but quietly arm themselves to the teeth throughout the country – from Kharkiv to Odessa to Lviv to Mariupol. And also build up a capable air force, backed up by AI, so that any future invasions from Russia can result in counterstrikes on Moscow itself
Finally, I do think that a long term solution to all this would be the US itself withdrawing from NATO, and then having military agreements w/ frontier countries, like Ukraine, Poland, Baltic nations, Finland and Georgia. And let Russia do what it likes in Mexico and Cuba
And yeah, I doubt that Putin is going anywhere. There needs to be either a disguised realist in his party capable of succeeding him, particularly given that there is no real opposition to United Russia, and it takes a while to develop one
gravenimage says
CogitoErgoSum wrote:
However, he will take more if can get it so the war will go on until the Ukrainians decide that being a neutral nation is preferable to endless fighting.
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CogitoErgoSum–with all respect–you have said before that if only Ukriane declares neutrality that thier problems would be over. But declaring neutrality only works if you are staying out of a conflict between two beligerants. If you are the nation *being attacked* this does not work.
CogitoErgoSum says
I guess they should have been neutral a little sooner.
gravenimage says
Being “neutral” when threatened with invasion does not work, either. Could Czechoslovakia and Poland have simply declared neutrality and Hitler would not have invaded them?
gravenimage says
Israeli Historian Yuval Harari: Putin Has Already Lost His War
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Yuvai Harari may well be right; grimly, this does not mean that Putin will stop attacking Ukraine.
Proud Islamophobe says
I disagreed with this guy from the headline alone. This is *not* about the Ukrainian people. Putin has already warned Sweden not to join NATO, which means he’s going to plow through Sweden next. Turkey has attacked Greece, and China has sent its warplanes into Taiwan airspace. Putin doesn’t need Iran and China to conquer Ukraine. This war is about conquering ISRAEL.
gravenimage says
Proud Islamophobe, Putin is pretty antisemitic, but he is actually invading Ukraine, not Israel.