Thinking back to the pre-war era Keynes wrote, “Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly.”
Are we living in the third pre-world war calm?
While western media’s attention has been rightly focused on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been busy.
Nineteen Russian drone missiles entered Polish airspace on Wednesday. An optimistic interpretation was that this was an error. Mistakes happen. But Polish President Donald Tusk believes that his country was facing “... a large scale provocation”.
Nineteen Russian drone missiles entered Polish airspace on Wednesday. An optimistic interpretation was that this was an error. Mistakes happen. But Polish President Donald Tusk believes that his country was facing “... a large scale provocation”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a press
conference in China.Maxim Shemetov / AP
Poland is a Nato country. Nato has three nuclear-armed members. Poland has form for being at the centre of escalating global conflicts. Is Putin testing the limits of the West’s willingness to defend itself?
Well. He has the answer. We are not. Recent polling shows only 16% of Germans would definitely take up arms to defend their homeland while 59% said they probably would not. Polling in the United Kingdom demonstrated a similar malaise.
We have, in the west, lost interest. We no longer care. Distracted. Disillusioned. Dissolute. We struggle to raise enough energy to breed. We are a culture in demographic and economic decline and the few OECD nations showing positive or stable population growth are reliant on migration.
Meanwhile, our allies continue to falter. The respected Institute for the Study of War writes that Russia has an effective strategy of making small battlefield gains while keeping Ukraine’s allies off balance.
It seems inconceivable that Russia would have provoked a Nato country a decade past. Now, Nato is impotent. In order to invoke Article Five, the clause requiring mutual defence, all thirty members have to proceed. It seems improbable that Hungary will agree and possible that Turkey will find some reason to be difficult.
Meanwhile Russia and Belarus are conducting large-scale military exercises, the ZAPAD, or West, in Belarus adjacent the three Baltic Nato states, as a show of contempt and belligerence.
It is difficult for this columnist to ascertain the health of the Russian economy but the analysts at Chatham House, a non-partisan British think tank, has concluded that her economy has “…proven much more durable through three and a half years of full-scale war in Ukraine”, and that the economy is growing in real terms.
Put bluntly. Russia is winning and the free world is losing. At this point the best case is for Kyiv to sue for peace on humiliating terms and the impotence of Nato and the democratic model be exposed.
Meanwhile Chinese leadership has been openly talking about ‘reunification’ with Taiwan and has been open about its large military investment and refusal to rule out the use of force to achieve its aims.
In 2001, President Bush asserted that America would do ‘whatever it took’ to defend Taiwan. When President Biden made similar remarks his officials were quick to clarify that the leader of the free world was confused and that American policy was still to refuse to confirm what everyone has already worked out.
The US position is ‘strategic ambiguity’ which is a polite concession that Washington would provide thoughts and prayers, and maybe some Ready to Eat meals but, Uncle Sam isn’t going to get into a shooting war with another nuclear armed state.
The West can no longer defend its allies and is struggling to hold the line on its own borders. The recent commitment by Nato members to pay 3.5% of their GDP to core military spending is meaningless when that spending is debt because the commitment is neither credible nor sustainable.
Our weakness isn’t a guarantee of surrender. American military power remains dominant and the planet has a surfeit of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical and, I assume, biological. It is when empires decline that they are the most dangerous.
Channelling Keynes from a century past, respected American political scientist Rose McDermott recently wrote, “Believing in rational stability is a salve. A way to avoid knowing that we live on the knife’s edge of extinction.”
Individual lives are brief. The duration of our species potentially immortal. Yet here we are, dominant for a blink of time and on the precipice of oblivion. Each moment contains a tiny probability for a catastrophic misstep and there are an infinite series of moments between now and what seems that inevitable misstep......The full article is published HERE
Poland is a Nato country. Nato has three nuclear-armed members. Poland has form for being at the centre of escalating global conflicts. Is Putin testing the limits of the West’s willingness to defend itself?
Well. He has the answer. We are not. Recent polling shows only 16% of Germans would definitely take up arms to defend their homeland while 59% said they probably would not. Polling in the United Kingdom demonstrated a similar malaise.
We have, in the west, lost interest. We no longer care. Distracted. Disillusioned. Dissolute. We struggle to raise enough energy to breed. We are a culture in demographic and economic decline and the few OECD nations showing positive or stable population growth are reliant on migration.
Meanwhile, our allies continue to falter. The respected Institute for the Study of War writes that Russia has an effective strategy of making small battlefield gains while keeping Ukraine’s allies off balance.
It seems inconceivable that Russia would have provoked a Nato country a decade past. Now, Nato is impotent. In order to invoke Article Five, the clause requiring mutual defence, all thirty members have to proceed. It seems improbable that Hungary will agree and possible that Turkey will find some reason to be difficult.
Meanwhile Russia and Belarus are conducting large-scale military exercises, the ZAPAD, or West, in Belarus adjacent the three Baltic Nato states, as a show of contempt and belligerence.
It is difficult for this columnist to ascertain the health of the Russian economy but the analysts at Chatham House, a non-partisan British think tank, has concluded that her economy has “…proven much more durable through three and a half years of full-scale war in Ukraine”, and that the economy is growing in real terms.
Put bluntly. Russia is winning and the free world is losing. At this point the best case is for Kyiv to sue for peace on humiliating terms and the impotence of Nato and the democratic model be exposed.
Meanwhile Chinese leadership has been openly talking about ‘reunification’ with Taiwan and has been open about its large military investment and refusal to rule out the use of force to achieve its aims.
In 2001, President Bush asserted that America would do ‘whatever it took’ to defend Taiwan. When President Biden made similar remarks his officials were quick to clarify that the leader of the free world was confused and that American policy was still to refuse to confirm what everyone has already worked out.
The US position is ‘strategic ambiguity’ which is a polite concession that Washington would provide thoughts and prayers, and maybe some Ready to Eat meals but, Uncle Sam isn’t going to get into a shooting war with another nuclear armed state.
The West can no longer defend its allies and is struggling to hold the line on its own borders. The recent commitment by Nato members to pay 3.5% of their GDP to core military spending is meaningless when that spending is debt because the commitment is neither credible nor sustainable.
Our weakness isn’t a guarantee of surrender. American military power remains dominant and the planet has a surfeit of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical and, I assume, biological. It is when empires decline that they are the most dangerous.
Channelling Keynes from a century past, respected American political scientist Rose McDermott recently wrote, “Believing in rational stability is a salve. A way to avoid knowing that we live on the knife’s edge of extinction.”
Individual lives are brief. The duration of our species potentially immortal. Yet here we are, dominant for a blink of time and on the precipice of oblivion. Each moment contains a tiny probability for a catastrophic misstep and there are an infinite series of moments between now and what seems that inevitable misstep......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
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