🦅 It is slowly and reluctantly dawning on Western officials and their servile media that the Ukraine counteroffensive is failing. Not only the two-month-old counteroffensive but indeed the entire conflict. Ukraine hasn’t a chance of prevailing against Russia’s superior forces.
Still, the violence and killing go on. No diplomacy, peace, or sanity. Why?

Only a couple of months ago, the Western media were full of bravado claims that the United States’ and NATO’s weapons and training would turn the tide for a “stunning victory” against Russia. Today, those same media are meekly reporting on a “grinding counteroffensive” (Washington Post, New York Times, CNN) and “failed expectations” (London Times).

How to explain the glaring conundrum? The United States and its European NATO allies have supplied the Kiev regime with up to $100 billion worth of weaponry over the past year, ranging from battlefield tanks to Patriot missiles. And the military gifts keep coming, with the Biden administration requesting another $12 billion for Ukraine last week. In the coming months, the U.S. and its allies are planning to supply F-16 fighter jets.

And yet all this mind-boggling largesse won’t make a difference to the outcome of an eventual Russian victory. Tens of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers will be killed of course and a wider all-out nuclear war with Russia is a reprehensible risk. But why does the insanity continue? Why are Western politicians and media not exploring diplomatic alternatives to the endless slaughter?

This war in Ukraine is the ghoulish epitome of Western capitalism ❌

💬 Finian Cunningham writes

#capitalism #military #Ukraine #war #West

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🌑 The present moment is defined darkly as one of severe economic forebodings, co-existing with a mood of political impasse. It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the ‘Ukraine project’.

Sunny predictions and projections of certain victory did not materialise, and instead, the West is facing the reality of the blood-drenched sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men to their fantasy of Osiris dismembered. The West does not know what to do. It ambles around, looking lost 🌀

The whole mess is sometimes explained as a result of a miscalculation by the western élites. The situation, however, is far worse than that: The sheer dysfunctionality and the prevalence of institutional entropy is so obvious that there is little need to say more.

The dysfunction of the West runs far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It is absolutely everywhere.

💬 Alastair Crooke writes

https://telegra.ph/Weep-for-the-West-08-21

#West #war #geopolitics

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🌏🦅 Well, the West is running for the door. But leaving the Ukraine consequence is not possible – ‘Relax’ Team Biden, the night man says; we are programmed only ‘to receive’. You can’t just ‘go’.

There are two ‘camps’ in the U.S.: the first proposes to freeze the conflict in place, and shout ‘Mission Accomplished’; and the second, to fight on, until Russia cracks, and flies the battle space.

The distress, the pain of human loss, the angst of extended conflict, shapes a different mode of psyche: war psyche. It is one that does not readily accept the humanistic calculus. It wants the ‘other’ to suffer, as ‘they’ have suffered. The rationale of ceasefire, of acquiescing to ‘realism’, can seem inadequate psychologically, even if rational politically.

In the case of Ukraine, the U.S., it seems, is tilting towards a more permanent (yet less intense) war. The so-called ‘Israeli formula’ 🧨

💬 Read more by Alastair Crooke

#NATO #Ukraine #West

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🪩 Isn’t it a tad naïve to expect the West to recant its stealth colonialism?

Western primacy hangs on the pillars of the threat of financial and sanctions war; the monopoly of tech patents, regulatory standards and protocols, and in holding and keeping a global ‘technological edge’. Does Prime Minster Modi truly think that the West can be induced simply to relinquish these assets because the Global South asks it?

It seems ‘a stretch’ (though no doubt Xi and Putin have explained some of these financial ‘facts of life’ to Modi).

Is it happenstance that a quiet financial war, triggered by the drip-drip of de-dollarisation and higher energy costs, might finally give BRICS the leverage to coerce a change of policy in the West? And should western reluctance to re-structure persist, might the BRICS leadership ratchet higher? The newly expanded BRICS, after all, is now a Commodity Powerhouse.

So, who now controls inflation in the U.S.: A trapped Fed, or the new commodity king? 👑

💬 Read more by Alastair Crooke

#colonialism #West #BRICS

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