I would like to explore an essential idea that is little developed among commentators:
It is first of all the United States which leads an existential combat.
An existential fight in what they consider as their essence: to be the First, the Sovereign, the Master of the World.
The American fight and their Ukrainian error can only be understood, it seems to me, with the help of this idea: the United States became aware a few years ago of their decline, – I was going to say of their destiny – of the inexorable fall in their standard of living, of their regression to the rank of mere power. And this they cannot bear or even imagine. Their whole exceptionalist culture refuses it. They cling to it. Even Trump, the pariah recognizes him, he who chose the MAGA, “make america great again”, to make America great again.
The term existential is a term referring to physical continuity in time and space. It is life reduced to its bare essence. But it can be used in an abstract sense, and be perceived as an objective quality – especially when threatened with annihilation. Here I take this term in a totally different way from the current meaning, I am not suggesting that the United States is concretely threatened, no what I am saying is that it is their status, it is the idea that they make themselves who are threatened.
“ The world America made ” is an imaginary world and it is this imaginary which is threatened.
This war is basically about maintaining the unipolar world. The United States cannot bring themselves to accept its transformation into a multipolar world of which they are only a part. The Russians and the Chinese understood this very quickly and they did not hesitate to make it known, in particular to the BRICs.
Commentators generally fail to understand what is happening because they have been fed the milk of this American exceptionalism, they too live in this imagination. They are reluctant to question their catechisms, foremost of which is the belief that the “indispensable nation” is the only sovereign worthy of defining the parameters of a “rules-based international order”.
The media in particular have internalized this catechism. and, they share with the American elites this perception of self as superior, irreproachable. Even the vassals of the USA believe they are leading the planet towards a glorious if not just destiny.
We are in the exceptionalist gospel of the West.
It is enough to listen to the Borrells and others to be convinced of this: we are not in the exceptionalism of the white man but almost, we are in one of its derivatives.
As Masters of the World, Sovereign, the United States has the right and the duty to manage world sovereignty; they distribute sovereignty, so they can give the sovereignty they lack to the Ukrainians and take it away from the Russians who don’t deserve it, because they are subhuman.
The cast of the film that the Americans are playing chose the “good guys”, the Ukrainians and the “bad guys”, the Russians. In the same way in the West, in the countries, the “good guys” are those who support the enterprise of maintaining unipolarity, the “bad guys” are those who consider that it is outdated.
The war is not a war between two regional nationalisms, the Ukrainian and the Russian, no it is a struggle between Western unilateralism and its favorite enemy, the Russian!
Western unilateralism has the Anglo-American axis as its backbone, as we have seen clearly with the leading positions of Boris Johnson, who now wants to be the boss of NATO. It is therefore no coincidence that the Empire chose its victim; Russia.
The vassalization of Russia has never ceased to be the objective of the Anglo-Saxons. This is a historical guideline.
If you’ve followed me this far, you agree that this war is an existential struggle between Russian sovereignty and Anglo-Saxon imperial continuity. This interpretation has the merit first of allowing to understand the leading role of the English, they are in a position of desperate decline, and then the blindness of the American elites who are under ideological influence. We are neither in the practical nor in the realist but in the historical myth.
You also understand that Germany can only be the rival .
A finding that gives full meaning to actions to deprive Germany of cheap energy, to break its too close ties with Russia.
The most haunting concern of the Anglo Saxon empire in recent years has been the progress of Russian-German reconciliation and the rise of their economic collaboration. For decades this prospect of an association between the two countries has always been understood as the greatest threat to Anglo-American domination over the Western world. This development of complementary links had to be stopped before it could gain momentum. This concern has become even more crucial after Britain’s Brexit which sent Britain back to its old hegemonic dreams of sea power. With Brexit, Great Britain cut its continental anchorage and chose to return to the High Seas. To Big Politics. Ukraine is the Empire’s stratagem to smash the Russian-German partnership.
We are in the old hypocritical Anglo Saxon clichés, in the illusory and imaginary qualities of the Empire, of course financed by credit, counterfeit money, speculative activities and unequal exchange:
the glowing city on the hill
the indispensable nation
the beacon of civilization
the champion of the new oppressed who by the way are, if we are to believe the boss of the British intelligence services… are the LGBTQ!
etc etc
This interpretation based on the myth and the abstract existential risk is rich in consequences because it makes it possible to understand the errors made by launching this Ukrainian company. From the moment the USA/Anglo-Saxons experience themselves as superior, exceptional, they inevitably tend to consider all the others as inferior and therefore to underestimate them. That’s what happened to them with Russia.
Western decision makers did not think according to reality, no they thought according to the pseudo reality they imagined!
NATO military leaders, influenced by politicians, overestimated their Ukrainian proxy army of half a million men, “well armed and trained to NATO standards” and they effectively disdained the army Russian and its commanders.
Their vanity persuaded them that the Russians would smash into pieces against a well-armed, entrenched force, guided by such superior American electronics… They were so confident in the genius of their plan that they persuasively encouraged several hundred NATO veterans to ‘share the glory’ of humiliating the Russians and bringing down Putin’s regime once and for all.
They have been mistaken bordering on the ridiculous in their calculations of the effects of the sanctions; not only were the Russians ready, they have a strong real economy , but the BRICS also refused to join the embargoes and sanctions. The ruble did not collapse, it quickly returned to its optimum level.
They were mistaken in believing that the Russians lacked strategic acumen and logistics. They got it all wrong; arguably the biggest miscalculation of all was believing that the Russians lacked sufficient stocks of ammunition to conduct a protracted, high-intensity conflict.
ignorance of history
Immersed in their ideological unrealism, ignorant of history, misinformed by their spies, they ignored centuries of European history. They somehow convinced themselves that they could succeed where all others had failed: to defeat Russia militarily and take the spoils of its resources.
The masters of the world, the overlords have fantasized a Russia intellectually, organizationally, culturally and militarily inferior to Westerners. The war proved this to be a catastrophic miscalculation.
A mistake they refuse to acknowledge. Now they imagine that continued Western arms supplies to Ukraine can freeze the conflict, bring it to a stalemate from which some form of geopolitical victory can be forged.
There too they remain in the imagination with their myths of two hundred thousand Russian dead and thousands of armored units, vehicles and artillery destroyed and an allegedly impotent Russian Air Force.
With his back to the wall, anxious to last a little longer, Zelensky talks of even further Western escalation in the form of longer-range missiles and F-16s that could well enable the Ukrainians to drive Russian forces out of Donbass, deliver the Crimea and why not go to Moscow. And why not a direct NATO intervention which would inflict the humiliation on the Russians, the much desired humiliation. How about a preventive nuclear strike? The delirium is complete not only in Zelensky, but in Poland, in the Baltic countries, in Boris Johnson and the irresponsible. German greens.
The most important difference between the two camps, the Imperial and the Russian lies in the relationship to the Real: the Russians are in the real, the Empire is in the air, in the bubbles, in the Com, in lies, in myth and he lives in self-persuasion.
The Russians entered this conflict aware of the reality they were about to face, and they were much better prepared for a prolonged conventional conflict than all NATO armies combined.
After a full year of conflict, the Russian economy is on a war footing. Armaments factories have been working around the clock for months already, they produce all types of weapons that the year of combat has proven to be effective. Putin does not boast, in his last speech to elected officials he addressed not the international community but the Russians and he played the card of support and national unity.
Putin keeps explaining that he believes in the power of Truth. She makes you strong.
Russian production levels coupled with the mobilization of half a million reservists project the prospect of a Russian military even stronger than a year ago, and growing stronger with each passing month.
During this time, all the “surpluses” of the old NATO stocks are exhausted. Announcements replace actual deliveries. The hundreds of battle tanks grew into dozens, most long out of service and in need of major repairs to make them fit for combat. The crews are not yet formed.
The indisputable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are unable to meet the enormous material needs of modern industrial warfare.
on Prime
Point of view: the United States is struggling against the meaning of history.
The United States is playing the game with different rules for different interests.
They defend their interests and only their interests.
While EurAsia would benefit from peace, the United States only benefits from war and hostility.
For what ?
The United States indeed has a rational point of view – not a moral point of view – when it comes to its geopolitical position on the planet.
In fact, they are simply too far removed from the economic and cultural center of the world, which was, is and increasingly will be EurAsia.
If they “let” EurAsia develop (that is: the energy of Russia and OPEC feeding the technological and human potential of Europe and China), they will simply be left behind and will lose their hegemony.
Hence their strategic interest in preventing this from happening.
Therefore, they will do everything – and everything means anything – to prevent this from happening. They will manipulate, they will fight, they will starve Europe and they will kill masses if necessary.
They don’t care about morals and don’t care that history judges them harshly, as it did to the Romans, the Brits and the Third Reich who didn’t care.
Therefore, I disagree with Mearsheimer (whom I admire intellectually) saying that only Russia is existentially threatened.
The United States considers itself to be and considers itself to be threatened because it actually is, by virtue of the meaning of History which obeys material objective forces.