No Truce With The Heartland

No Truce With The Heartland

Tom Luongo

The cost/benefit analysis of continuing the Ukraine project has reached the tipping point. The problem now is too many in power, like European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, still believe they have room to maneuver in a conflict looking increasingly stuck in the geopolitical mud of the Donbass.

The optics at the G7 meeting couldn’t be more stark. Meeting in the one city that is the ultimate symbol of Western madness, Hiroshima, the symbolism was very clear. We are united in our self-righteousness and if you don’t like it, remember what happened to Japan.

We will destroy the planet in order to save it. Indivisible European/Asian security is a euphemism for global war.

No amount of failure seems to dissuade these people. Because failure is simply not an option.

The problem however, is that their myopia is predictable.

We’ve all spent too many words working through this. It’s very simple.

If you know your opponent will throw everything they have at a conflict then your strategy is a simple one; destroy everything they throw at it until they run out of money, men, and materiel to throw into it.

And this is exactly what Russia has done.

It is exactly what I expected them to do at the outset of the war (here, here, and here) failing a swift victory over Ukraine; continue their war of attrition across all theaters against the West until they either 1) sue for peace or 2) collapse under the weight of their own hubris.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Who else?), put the kibosh on any early negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine.

To Crooke’s point, the West’s investment in Ukraine was simply too big to give up that easily. Believing the ultimate sanctions package would overthrow Putin and destabilize Russia, both Davos and the Anglo-neocons bet too heavily on this working. As my dad used to say about pro athletes, “he spends too much time reading his press clippings…”

Because of the closed-mindedness of those in power in the West — their biases, racism, and arrogance — they will not stop in Ukraine until they are forced to by circumstances.

Those circumstances will likely be dictated by the revamped Russian military now configured to fight a longer and different kind of war than the one that began in February 2022.

Every day we see signs that Russia’s military-industrial capacity is increasing rapidly while the EU languishes. The US is rapidly trying to bring back onshore manufacturing lost to the ZIRP and Greenspan Eras, but this is a slow and painful process especially since it has run out of room on the balance sheet to deficit spend to accelerate things.

“Biden” and his merry band of vandals in D.C. are more than happy to burn the place to the ground more thoroughly than the British did in the War of 1812 if they can’t get their way on unlimited taxing and spending.

So, here we are. Bakhmut has fallen. The Ukrainian counter-offensive is non-existent. If anything it was already absorbed by Putin and Prigozhin. Zelenskyy will now get F-16s to attack Crimea and use that as some moral high ground for justifying NATO’s official involvement after Russia’s inevitable counter-attack.

Then the air will be thick with the smell of thermobarics in the morning.

But, regardless of any of that, there will be no truce in the Heartland. Russia will not back down. China will back them to the end, as will OPEC+ and the rest of Central Asia. But they will not escalate one inch further than they need to. Allowing the West to keep thinking they can win is the ultimate form of grinding out a superior opponent.

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