"The economy, you fool!" James Carville's now-classic saying pointed with laconic precision to the key to Bill Clinton's 1992 election victory.
By all human calculations, that George Bush Sr. seemed invincible, but he still came up short because he didn't pay enough attention to the economic variable.
Today, there is an almost complete consensus among Western security policy experts, military analysts, politicians and military historians that President Putin's adventure in Ukraine will bleed in the same place as the re-election of the defeater of the Soviet Union. According to the explanation so familiar to all of us, Russian aggression will fall to pieces after hitting the wall of economic reality, within a very short time. According to them, this fatal accident will occur on two levels:
- At the military level, the Russian state will soon be unable to logistically support its troops fighting in Ukraine.
- And at the national level, the ever-increasing economic and financial loop will gradually suffocate the Russian economy.
State bankruptcy is inevitable, because it is a not very fast, but at the same time deterministic process. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" will mix the foreign push slap of Great Russian imperialism with elegance. And the unipolar world order - if we are to believe George Friedman - does not have to stand still, as it has never wavered for a single minute. Kurz und gut , the world turns to spring again. China will not occupy Taiwan. The USA may finally get the coveted Iran nuclear deal, and the Iranians the nuclear bomb. Europe can also return to the occupational therapist of the geopolitical mental asylum, with whom you can play with windmills and solar panels. In a short time, the great war scare that opened the year 2022 will become a distant memory, and at most it will return from the past as the subject of Pest jokes.
But what happens when experts who have advanced from soldiers to economists are wrong?
What if the Russians continue the war in Ukraine?
Without Hershey's chocolate, self-warming cans, air-conditioned tents and camp wifi? Soldiers without shoes, looting local thrift stores. Chechen irregulars in an assault rifle, with the logistical support of two slices of bread and a Koran. The well-fed, well-paid mercenaries of the Wagner group rely on the efficiency of a private company. Middle Eastern marauders driven from the deserts of Syria and Libya by religious fanaticism, free looting, and a lust for bright-eyed Ukrainian Hurics. Impromptu supply chains with requisitioned private cars, railroads restored with slave labor. If we have deja vu after hearing these, don't be surprised. We've seen these pictures somewhere before.
This is the ragged and incompetent Russian road roller that runs over Europe once or twice every century.
And what if the "global" sanctions system is more like a well-ripened Emmental cheese? Stuffed cheese, the holes of which are filled by the Chinese yuan. What if India, the Persians, the Arab world, and many others make the privileged and hypocritical West feel terrible? Then they start trading with Russia in Chinese currency?
What options do we have then to help the Ukrainians and continue the proxy war?
There aren't too many options out there, and the experts mentioned above know that best.
In a war that is existential for the Bear but not for us, the Bear will always be one step ahead because that one step is its own desperation.
They also know very well that if you corner a desperate Bear, it all ends with something that heals after eight days.
As a result of all this
it is possible that what they are trying to sell us: the determinism of the inevitable economic fall of the Russians, is just a big scam. The only purpose of the scam is to reassure the outraged and capricious Western public that the proxy war against the Russians is going on in full force.
That is why it is important that a retired general or a retired political scientist appear every night and assure the audience that the Russians have stopped in front of one of God's cities and have sunk into the Ukrainian mud.
That's why it's important to push the military buck parade so that the esteemed public has no doubt that the Russians have a knack. That is why it is important to create such an optimistic atmosphere that the one-time Martian visiting Earth would come to the conclusion that the Ukrainians fenced off the Russian capital and not the other way around.
This booming optimism industry is the guarantee that the Western public, faced with millions of refugees, atrocities, and immeasurable human suffering, will not strike the table and demand even stronger action against Russia. Because the Western political elite are even more afraid of their own citizens than the Russians. It is well known that the biggest threat to democracy is democracy itself.
The most dangerous opponent is the naive voter who still believes that the state order in which we live is based on the sovereignty of the people. And this bastard is even able to show his indignation. All organization, without BLM and George Floyd. Just like that, spontaneously. Out of self-diligence. Then, as he voted for Brexit and elected Trump, he would now even be able to demand more decisive action against the Russians.
And this should not happen, because we have no other cake in our bag besides war.
This is the point where the interests of NATO and Russia collide in a Faustian balcony scene. NATO gets the walking flag of its unwavering position on the cheap, just at the price of a little sanctions and arms exports, and the Russians don't deny anything, because in return they can take what they want without being disturbed.
It is possible that everyone has already received theirs, in the positive sense of the word:
- Mr. Zelensky's capitulation speech, which was given to him by the Three Kings during their visit to Kyiv under the title of a compromise agreement.
- Russia also gets roughly what it wanted, without having to put the population of a few cities half the size of Hungary to the sword.
- Western security policy experts, military analysts, politicians and political scientists will be given the right to brag to their grandchildren that they brought the largest state on Earth to its knees with economic means alone.
