“NATO and the EU posed a threat to Russia, but not a military one. The principal threat was that thriving, prosperous democracies on Russia’s doorstep were a standing rebuke to its own failures. That rebuke undermined the Russian’s regime’s legitimacy and, potentially, its stability. The dual failure of Russia’s efforts to democratize and modernize its economy left the Kremlin with major problems. To legitimate its rule, the post-Soviet regime has relied on traditional Russian nationalism. Putin seized that rationale and fueled it with his seething anger over his country’s loss of territory and Great Power status. Russia, as he saw it, was a great nation, humiliated by the West. And he intended to end that disgrace and restore Russia to its rightful place. (China’s communist regime has an almost identical view of its past and future.)”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/putin-attacks-cold-war-order/
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The New York Times Magazine, noting that the KGB of the seventies that Putin joined was no longer really a murder factory but just another “thinking corporation,” even compared him once to Russia’s first true Western-looking leader:
In him, Russia has found a humane version of Peter the Great, a ruler who will open the country to the influence of a world at once gentler and more dynamic than Russia has ever been.
I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t.
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“”…the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, has been overcome”…That triumphal article appeared on the site of Ria Novosti, Russia’s main state online news agency, on February 26th. Presumably the publication of this screed was scheduled well in advance, on the assumption that Mr Putin’s forces would win a quick and easy victory, and someone forgot to cancel it. The day it appeared on Ria Novosti’s site, heavy fighting unfolded around Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian invaders. Ria Novosti quietly pulled the celebratory article from its site; there was nothing to celebrate.”
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“One clue to look for: whether or not the progressive herd-think instinctively attacks Southern red states for the inevitable summer wave that we know is a regional and seasonal feature of this illness. Will we get the familiar, almost formulaic drumbeat in the media? … I have a feeling that the need for economic recovery in the service sector is going to keep the masks and vax passports at bay. Already the airlines have been lobbying hard to get rid of restrictions. Countries that rely on American tourism are going to realize that a lot of us aren’t vaccinated, and they are going to drop their travel restrictions, too. At least, one hopes.”
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“Biden does not want to admit that his woke-progressive climate alarmism, which echoes Western Europe’s, has shackled U.S. energy production, such that there is no presently available American alternative to turn to if Russia retaliates. The result, which Biden also prefers not to mention, is that the U.S. and our allies are underwriting the Russian aggression that we all so decry. Western governments have put us in this repulsive position, with eyes open.”
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“…had America acted differently over the past decade, Iran wouldn’t be entrenched in Syria, Israel could have been coordinating airstrikes on Hizballah with CENTCOM rather than Moscow—and Vladimir Putin, knowing the costs of assailing an American ally, would be acting far more timidly in Ukraine.”
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2022/02/israels-ukraine-problem-and-americas/
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“For someone to instead, almost instantly, be suspended from one job, dismissed from another and resign from a third because of such a thing is a disproportion of punishment to crime. It is extreme and unnecessary and ultimately lacks reason. There’s something amiss if we’re now at the point that someone’s career is to be permanently tarnished and perhaps ended based on a passing error, which started as a misguided attempt at praise and which has been profusely apologized for. We must assess what the actual purpose of this kind of language policing is. We must ask: What, in terms of combating racism, is accomplished? Will it result in better and more available psychiatric care — or medical care in general — for Black people? Will it make Columbia University, where I am a faculty member, a more open-minded place?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opinion/psychiatry-professor-tweet.html
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“We have not sanctioned Rosneft and Gazprom, nor some of the energy lending banks, so Mr. Putin’s oil and gas war-financing scam continues. We’re going to have to make a tough call pretty soon about this, unless the brave Ukrainians can somehow stop Mr. Putin’s war machine. But this whole problem was brought on by radical-left, green new deal policies, and of course the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. These problems are of Mr. Biden’s own making.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/heres-the-diagnosis-stop-putin-by-stopping-the-fossil-fuels-jihad?utm_content=buffer7a773&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR3d64xwc9aT_ruhQNVkBIGVEgCsrbt4OQyiVOMbe5ni28G3Nzb_D709YDU
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“In his forthcoming book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, Bill Barr predicted that Russian president Vladimir Putin would become more aggressive with Joe Biden at the helm in the United States. “I am afraid that, with a wavering, intermittently alert Joe Biden in the Oval Office, Vladimir Putin will pursue Russian strategic goals more assertively and feel little need to find agreed-upon frameworks with the United States,” writes Barr…”
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“The U.S. president took office intending to reduce American reliance on weapons of mass destruction. Russian aggression should put that folly to rest.”
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“Russia's invasion of Ukraine has left Beijing struggling to straddle a line between its cardinal foreign-policy principle of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and support for an ally. That discomfort has set off a flurry of speculation over what China knew about President Vladimir Putin’s intentions. Whatever the conclusion, it doesn’t look flattering for Xi Jinping….Was Beijing aware of Putin’s plans and went ahead with its pact with Russia regardless, hitching itself to a country that was about to turn into a pariah? The alternative explanation is that Putin kept his hand hidden. If that’s the case, it hardly helps to burnish Xi’s reputation as a master strategist steering China’s path back to greatness…”
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"Simply put, Joe Biden can no longer speak properly. He slurs and mangles his words; he struggles mightily to distinguish between concepts — and contexts; his memory cannot keep up with his folksy off-script digressions, which now end with a trail-off or a pivot or an involuntary Kerouacian riff. Unable to read or process the contents of the Teleprompter, Biden talked last night about “a pound of Ukrainian people,” confused “Ukrainian” with “Iranian” (provoking a mouthed correction from Kamala Harris), referenced “other freedee loving nations,” and praised the Ukrainian “mall of strength.” And those were just the highlights. Throughout, Biden exhibited the talent for compressing full sentences into single words that brought us his campaign-trail commitment to “truindenashendduvbapresser.” No wonder Nancy Pelosi looked so nervous."
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“Principal Yeou-Jey Vasconcelos tangled with parents last year after she proposed cutting back on AP classes to reduce stress on students and to give teachers more freedom in creating their curriculum. But a PowerPoint presentation on the school’s AP courses last year offered an additional critique of the model. LaGuardia — which counts Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli as graduates — told families that “colleges acknowledge that standardized test scores reflect systemic racism rather than student achievement,” according to the document. School sources said that some AP teachers have been told to discourage kids from taking the exams, which confer college credits if students pass a corresponding test.”
https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/parents-furious-over-ap-math-course-bungle-at-laguardia-high-school/
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“Zelensky "was pleading with the United States and the Germans to shut down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. I'm old enough to remember being told...it couldn't be done…We've learned in the last two weeks, oh, actually it could be done."
—Jonathan Swan, Axios
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“It was the West’s focus on healing the planet with “soft energy” renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply. As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r
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“Putin may imagine that he’s the reincarnation of Peter the Great, but I suspect that those who prop him up are a lot more concerned about keeping their yachts than they are about reassembling the Soviet Union, piece by bloody piece. They may decide that it’s time to install a new, less ambitious czar. And, all the while, Xi will be watching from the mountaintop.”
https://nypost.com/2022/03/05/with-us-distracted-by-ukraine-china-plots-its-own-invasion/
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“…by the end of the year, the prosecutors had switched gears, in part because Mr. Trump’s lenders had not lost money on the loans but had in fact profited from them. The new strategy was to charge Mr. Trump with conspiracy and falsifying business records — specifically his financial statements — a simpler case that essentially amounted to painting Mr. Trump as a liar rather than a thief.”
https://dnyuz.com/2022/03/05/how-the-manhattan-d-a-s-investigation-into-donald-trump-unraveled/
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“Liberty is an idea in bad odor among a narrow but influential set of thinkers whose livelihoods are enabled by liberty itself. The West’s chief competitors for global dominance, Russia and China, are busily rebuilding a geopolitical order that has left liberalism behind. They’re doing so by force because they cannot otherwise seek the influence they hope to wield. We should all take a good, long look at the true champions of a post-liberal world. They’re on the march.”
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/take-a-good-look-at-who-is-fighting-for-post-liberalism/
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