If the alternative is the U.S. fighting yet another war in Europe, I say yes.
Europe has a bizarre love affair with socialism. They ridicule the U.S. for not having enough of it. Self hating Americans join in.
Now they may be confronted with socialism's inevitable end game: to run out of material to steal at home and begin taking over territory not yet bled dry by the looting. They love socialism? Well here's a genuine KGB man to bring it to them.
Let Europeans have what they want, servility and dependance. Let us open our own resources back up and tend to our own business.
Europe brought it on themselves.
Europe and US failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine because the West is lost in soft renewable energy delusions, whilst Putin was grounded in hard physical reality of nuclear energy, oil, and natural gas. And now, Ukrainians are paying for our wishful thinking.
With an economy smaller that that of Texas, and average life expectancy ten years less than rest of Europe, how does he manage to launch unprovoked full scale attack on another country, how is he able to pull this off? Here is how... the first answer is mathematical, and second purely (ideo)logical.
He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants Ukraine to be free. Putin is willing to risk tremendous loss of life and resources to get what he wants. There are serious limits to how much the US and Europe are willing to do militarily and Putin knows it. Missing from that explanation thought is a story about material reality and basic economics.
Two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe,
first is that Europe produces 3.6 million barrel of oil a day but uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. Europe produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, but uses 560 billion cubic meters a year. Europe uses 950 million tons of coal a year, and produces half of that. At the same time, Putin knows that Russia produces 11 million barrels of oil per day, but only uses 3.4 million barrels. Russia produces over 700 billion cubic meters of gas a year but only uses around 400 billion. Russia mines 800 million tons of coal each year, but uses 300 million tons. That's how Russia ends up supplying about 20% of Europe's oil, 45% of its gas and 20% of its coal. The math is simple, a child could do it, but none of the leaders on the West do.
The reason Europe doesn't have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression and in fact prevented the US from getting allies to do more, is that Europe desperately needs Russian oil and gas. How is it possible that European countries, Germany in particular, allow themselves to become as dependent on authoritarian country over the thirty years since the cold war ended? Well, these countries are in the grips of delusional leftist ideology that makes them incapable to understand the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insist that we don't need nuclear, and we don't need fracking, it insist that it's just matter of will and money to switch to all renewables, it insists that we need to de-growth the economies, and that we are facing looming human extinction because of the climate change.
Than there is John Kerry, the guy who will only marry you if you are a widow with shitload of money, and he is the US "climate envoy". This guy is such a pseudointellectual, it's mind boggling. He perfectly captured myopia of the view that West holds, when he said two days before the war that "the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have profound effect... profound negative impact on the climate".
It's the West that focused on healing of the planet, soft energy renewables, and moving away from natural gas, and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain stranglehold over Europe's energy supply. As the West fell into hypnotic trans about healing relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshipping Greta Turnberg, Putin made his moves. Whilst the expanded nuclear energy from Russia was kicking ass, Europe was shutting down their power plants and importing more and more gas. Western governments were spending their time and money obsessing over carbon footprints, (the term that was created by the advertising agency working for BP, they spend thousands of hours for climate anxiety therapy in order to ban plastic straws, whilst Putin expanded his oil and gas production and doubled his nuclear energy production to allow more exports of his other energy sources. Europe shut down their nuclear plants, closed their own gas fields and refused to develop advance methods of fracking.
The numbers tell the story the best, in 2016, only 30% of gas used by Europe came from Russia, in 2018 it jumped to 40%, by early 2020 it was 44% and by early 2021 it was 48%. Love him or hate him, Trump defied diplomatic protocols and called out Germany publicly in 2018 for its dependence on Moscow. He said that Germany is captive to Russia and he was right. At the time Angela Markel (former commie, by the way) was widely praised for her environmental conciseness, and just as socialist being wrong in just about everything, it turned out they didn't disappointed this time. She was saying that "Germany can make their own policies and decisions in regards energy" and the result is the worst energy crisis since 70's. These policies are driving price of all electricity and gasoline high around the world, and it's crisis fundamentally because of inadequate supply. The scarcity is entirely manufactured. The Europeans, led by figures like teenage idiot, who got rich of it, and green party leaders, supported by American idiots like John Kerry, believed that "heathy relationship with mother nature" requires to make energy scarce, but by turning completely to renewables, we are maybe saving a planet a little (which is questionable, given amount of energy needed to produce renewables), but we're completely destroying Ukraine by giving it to Russia. In service to green ideology, we made the perfect the enemy of the good, and the enemy of the people of Ukraine, and next potential victim country.
I'll continue with
second reason in another post.
