NATO v RUSSIA: Sleepwalking Ukraine into oblivion and taking the EU off the table.

The Ukraine War has gone beyond rationality.
As most wars do.
But this one in the era of drones and static front lines can't even match WWI trench level in it's habit of attrition and killing young men for a treeline.

The West has a death wish, and it’s dressed up in blue-and-yellow flags. The war in Ukraine has now become less about territory and more about narrative theater — a delusion crafted in Washington, consumed in Brussels, paid for in blood by Ukrainians and (for right now) energy bills in Europe.

The propaganda is thick in a 24 news cycle. That whole idea of if Putin isn’t stopped in Donetsk, he’ll be planting the Russian flag on the Eiffel Tower by spring. Really? The Russian army, that's struggled to take small towns on its own border, is apparently going to blitzkrieg through Poland, Germany, and into Paris, all while fighting NATO logistics and air power. It’s damn laughable. But like all good propaganda, it’s not about truth — it’s about fear.

And fear works.

Fear sells like girl scout lemonade on a hot summer street corner. If it weren't so tragic, it'd be laughable. Fear justifies blank checks to the defense industry. Fear convinces Europeans to tolerate inflation, shortages, and energy bills that look like ransom notes. Fear allows American politicians to posture as Churchillian defenders of freedom while their donors cash in.

After that stunt summit in Alaska, we've got the terms made clear. The Russians haven't changed those demands since day one even if they now have a bleeding nose. But it's obviously do or die for them and more pressure pulls tactical nukes into play. What game is being played here?

Moscow’s demands are embarrassingly simple compared to the West’s fever dreams:

1)No NATO in Ukraine.

2)Recognition that Ukraine is neutral territory.

3)Room for Russia to trade oil and gas without being strangled by sanctions.

That’s it. Not the Second Coming of Stalin, not tanks in Trafalgar Square, not some Slavic crusade to turn Western Europe into a non gay colony.

History backs this up. The Soviet Union — with a vastly larger military and an ideological mission — tried to dominate Eastern Europe after WWII. It ended in stagnation, collapse, and McDonald’s opening in Moscow. The modern Russian Federation doesn’t even have the industrial base to sustain a long-term occupation of Western Europe. They can’t even fully modernize their tank fleet, but sure, they’re going to occupy France and manage Belgian bureaucracy. Let's be real here. The fact that they can A/B test this message and mainstream media can push this out onto a public brutalized by COVID, trying to pay for a full grocery cart and pay a heating bill borders on the absurd.

Europe is teethering on the brink of a stupid war where the average citizen can't even point out Ukraine on a map.

So why won’t the war end? Because Europe’s political class has decided to play proxy warrior. Brussels — egged on by Washington — sees Ukraine as a convenient buffer zone. Let Ukrainians die, let Ukraine burn, and let the European economy take a sledgehammer to the face, just so Russia stays “contained.”

But contained from what? From selling gas? From trade that Europeans desperately need?

Here’s the funny part: Russia would prefer to be Europe’s gas station. Selling hydrocarbons is far more profitable — and sustainable — than trying to occupy hostile populations. But instead of embracing this ridiculously obvious reality, Europe has convinced itself that trade equals danger and war equals virtue. The result? A continent sabotaging its own industries, turning its energy grid into a roulette wheel, and begging the Americans to sell them overpriced LNG shipped across the Atlantic.

There are a lot of people laughing their way to the bank.

Its like shooting yourself in the foot because you neighbor's dog might bite your ankle.

The U.S. loves this. Washington is playing the proxy war at arm’s length. Europe bleeds, Ukraine burns, Russia strains, and China watches. Meanwhile, the Pentagon keeps writing shopping lists, Congress keeps approving aid packages, and American defense contractors keep celebrating on their yachts.

This is classic U.S. grand strategy: keep Europe dependent, keep Russia off balance, and keep the arms flowing. If Europe’s economy tanks in the process, so what? That just makes Brussels more pliable. The beauty of geography is that the U.S. is a whole ocean away from the fallout, even if the tactical nukes get launched. Let's face it, there is no win scenario here for the Europeans. Even if the Euros could put a million man army together (which they can't) it'd push Russia into using tactical nukes and now we get to play Fallout for real.

Here’s where the clown show stops being funny. We are now in open discussion of tactical nuclear weapons — as if this is some manageable escalation step, just another red dot in some boring corporate war-game PowerPoint meeting.

Think about how insane this is: world leaders are playing chicken with nuclear weapons, while the media packages it like a Marvel movie. The assumption is that nobody will actually pull the trigger. But what if they do? What if miscalculation, pride, or desperation sets of Thanos?

The West likes to pretend the nuclear threat is just Russian bluster, but escalation cuts both ways and is a dangerous game. The more NATO arms pour into Ukraine, the more the Kremlin feels cornered. And unlike the fantasy of Russian tanks in London, tactical nuclear strikes are a very real possibility. That’s not Cold War paranoia. That’s today’s morning coffee.

The biggest danger isn’t even the nukes themselves. It’s the lie that sustains the whole mess: “Russia wants to occupy Europe.”

This lie justifies NATO expansion. It justifies endless weapons shipments. It justifies Europe’s economic suicide. It justifies Ukrainian conscripts being thrown into meat-grinder offensives with no hope of victory.

The truth? Russia wants a buffer zone. The West wants leverage. And the people caught in between — Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans — are paying the price for lies their leaders tell to preserve their prestige. And look at the leaders have now. They are not even operating from a majority, just some coalition of random parties; a confederacy of dunces. Meanwhile there are riots on the streets, massive censorship, you can go to jail for a social media. Not exactly any type of democracy ever envision, more like Orwell with an i-Phone.

A solution?

Good luck with that. But if pressed surely some type of Yalta conference hammers out the following/

There’s exactly one path out of this insanity, and it’s the path no politician wants to say out loud: neutrality.

Ukraine becomes permanently neutral — no NATO bases, no missiles pointed at Russia, no “forward operating democracy” on Moscow’s doorstep. In return:

Security Guarantees: A multinational coalition (not just NATO) promises to defend Ukraine if Russia violates the deal.

Economic Reintegration: Sanctions lifted in phases. Ukraine gets reconstruction cash, Russia gets markets, Europe gets cheap energy again.

Verification: International monitors make sure both sides keep their word.

Face-Saving Optics: Everyone declares victory. Putin “secured Russia’s borders.” NATO “protected democracy.” Ukraine “preserved sovereignty.” Europe “saved peace.” Cue the photo-ops and champagne.

Of course the madmen will cause it appeasement. But the choice isn’t between appeasement and victory. The choice is between appeasement and annihilation.

Those are the main nuke targets in Europe. Not much space to get out of the way right?

The war in Ukraine will not end with some Hollywood-style victory march into Moscow. It won’t end with regime change in Russia. It won’t end with NATO flags flying in Sevastopol. It will end the way all stupid wars end: with negotiation, compromise, and lies dressed up as triumph.

Get you garden ready to bury the bodies. Neutrality is not surrender. It’s survival. Ukraine is not some Switzerland-with-wheat-fields, even at the sttart of this war it was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And now half the population has left — but now it’s the only thing standing between Europe and a mushroom cloud.

But if Europe wants to die in a fire, and if the U.S. prefers endless proxy war, and if Russia prefers escalation to humiliation, then let's all party while we still can. After all, we civilians are all just extras in the world’s last great super event!

The end will be many things. But mostly it’ll be a tactical nuke and due to the EMP blast won't be narrated by anyone on any screen as they'll all be black as the lights flicker out for the last time.

China v Japan/Taiwan?: Not ready for Primetime.

    China v Japan sure would be a fun war.

    Fun, of course, being a relative term.

   For those who like watching the world burn, sure, it'd be an interesting fireworks display. At least until cheap Asian labor dried up and Walmart had no shit left to sell. The world economy right now is married to the idea of backwater peasants, recently liberated from subsistence rice growing, getting subsumed into the brave new world of working for peanuts in concrete warehouses that fill western economies with cheap plastic toys and tech goods. China, the ultimate behemoth population wise, has been rising ever since they ditched Maoism and embraced the idea that Marxism, while a nice idea in theory, doesn't work because of a basic law in evolutionary science.

   We're all greedy self preserving assholes and nature likes it that way.  

   A quick look at recent Chinese history tells you that the burgeoning new middle class in China (they bought more new cars than the US in 2011) are casting a cold eye on their history and noticing how they've been screwed over by outside forces (white men) since forever. Worse still, at least for Western war planners, the Chinese angry people are angry and they've got money now. Critical difference from colonial times. Poor people complaining means jack shit in the worldwide equation. But when consumers complain, shit  get's serious. 

   Chinese history makes Chinese people angry. 

   Hell, the nineteenth century British won an Opium Heroin War where they basically turned a huge segment of the working population of China into junkies just so they could pay for Asian goods in smack instead of silver. For all of China's rise in the early 21st century, Japan has been dealing with stagnation. The Japanese cannot process this. The Japanese are primarily a warrior culture. And I'm not even talking about just Samurai here. From the moment their resource poor island culture got wind of the industrial revolution, and they got wise to the idea that they needed oil, war was the method. Two nukes later and a surrender in WWII meant they had to give up on the idea of domination and accept US Pacific hegemony. The Japanese got with the post war program and saw the value of getting rich instead of having plowing cash into a naval fleet. And rich they got, flooding the world with cars and electronics that made western nations in the 70s and 80s wonder who the fuck won the war in the first place.

    Japan these days are entering the bumpy 21st Century and experiencing an existential crisis. They're economy is stale, electronics can me made cheaply elsewhere and they've got 1.6 billion just across the water Their aging population can't process this; to them, the Chinese are a bunch of filthy peasants.

   But for the rest of us one thing is certainly for sure; if this war ever went live and these old school belligerents went at it (ostensibly over a bunch of shitty islands but really because both countries hate each others guts), so many escalation events present that nobody could put the nuke genie back in the bottle. It'd be like India v Pakistan on steroids. It'd screw the world economy so hard that any China/Japan shooting exchange would make Israel's bunker busting dream strike on Iran's nuke sites about as interesting to the world public as Bono talking about Africa at a U2 concert.

   That's probably why China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon.

   Because nukes.

   Yeah, I'm one of those crazy fuckers who is a big fan of nuclear warheads. The cost benefit analysis since 1945's Fatboy airburst over Hiroshima has been positive once you take into account the conventional war alternatives. Nukes are probably the best thing to happen to first world economies since penicillin although it's not really a fair comparison because nukes have probably saved more lives. Without nukes, the Red Army would have stormed through the Fulda Gap and turned Western Europe into a mega death zone. Without nukes there would have been no Cold War and we'd be living in an endless Orwellian nightmare Eurasia v America war where the conflict is continuous but not winnable. Sure, without nukes to define the limits of human madness, proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam would have been obsolete but who cared about tertiary nations post WWII? Sadly, why people kill each other in world history is impossible to discuss due to the multitude of reasons But nukes cut through the bullshit and make war impossible. Sure, Penicillin saved a lot of 19th century top hatted sport fuckers from syphilis but western Europe under Stalin's policies would have wiped out the global economy.

   And that would have resulted in a lot of dead people. Everywhere.

   Advantage nukes.

   That's why any future China v Japan conflict isn't going to happen any time soon. Japan is under the US nuke umbrella. We're still about a decade away from the time when the reNal noose tightens on the world economy when both Asian oil dependent super populations realize there are limits on growth. Energy supply is the ultimate limit  which means everything from bread to i-Pads get expensive fast, especially when you don't have an Iraq in your back yard. Both China and Japan are reliant on seaborne delivery of oil right now. That's probably why both countries see the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and their possible offshore oil and gas deposits as not some shitty island chain but a possible source of future energy that could keep the lights on in both countries for a few years more.

   Still, when countries like China or Japan end up fighting for scraps, and that's what a shitty uninhabited island chain in the South China Sea is, you know the barrel is being scraped out.

   Right now the Japanese surface fleet could handle itself versus China's medium tech fishing navy with it's sketchy second hand Russian carrier and cobbled together radar and missile systems. But if China decided to take the gloves off and started lobbing long range missiles at Japanese military installations, things would obviously get really ugly really fast. The US would be drawn in to break up the pew-pew but after that first ordinance trade, it'd already be way too late. China and Japan hate each others guts so much that the Senkaku island dispute would be just the marzipan layer on the global economy funeral cake. WWII and the Japanese rape of Nanking isn't going away anytime soon, probably never on Asian grudge timescales. That's why, as far as the US is concerned, this thing needs to be contained and so the US dispatched the USS George Washington carrier group to the South China Sea last week to remind everyone to keep their shit on the down low.

   Naval power is not what it used to be.

  Though the USN has the largest fleet of the next 5 nations combined, they're still operating off a 19th century British Empire paradigm. Every admiral worth his salt these days knows that naval warfare is a leftover from the 20th century. Naval warfare is great for force projection versus low tech nations but for industrialized nation v industrialized nation warfare missile tech is so sophisticated these days that surface ships are really just large, floating, meat filled shipping containers, easy to hit hold overs from a different century when having a Dreadnought added inches to your nation's dick. The Russians and Chinese have expended years of R&D on satellite guided ways to sink USN carriers but that doesn't mean fielding a carrier group is not force projection. Still, history says you may not always be right in how you allocate your dollars. 1916 was fun for the British if you liked Dreadnoughts but then there was a precedent setting dust up in at Jutland where they traded some shells with the Germans, both sides lost a few ships and the crafty Germans realized naval battle with the largest fleet in the world would be very costly and so they went back to port and preserved the idea that having a naval "fleet in being" was better than having no navy at all.

     These days it's economic war with a smiley face where the plebs glued to the TV watch as the multi national corp that owns the politicians mixes some irrigation project in Africa into their mass media advertising campaign and suddenly the thirsty people ear somehow beneficiaries from our lunch burger as the proceeds dig a well in some comfortably far away shithole.  Maybe. If you believe those fuckers. Either way, it amounts to the same thing. It's the whole world working their asses off and some fucker on a yacht in Monte Carlo hosting a party you'll never be invited to.

   It's like Victorian London but with i-Phones.

   Military history is sometimes a story of battles that were never fought.

   And that sure holds true for now.

   The era of nukes has made force projection primarily an economic move. These days national might is based on how many semi conductors you can fabricate on the cheap in you city annex or how many teenagers you can send to college in your post industrial service economy.  

  The US defeated the Japanese in the Pacific in WWII. While a victory it was primarily an industrial win, when the unstoppable juggernaut of US industry churned out ships at a rate that sank the Jap navy; the skilled US victory at Midway excepted. In many ways, that victory  set a precedent in US naval war theory and in many ways the post war Navy grew exponentially because of it. Carrier groups won that war as far and today the USN has eleven carriers that cost billions to run and ultimately, haven't been tested in the modern realm of hypersonic missile tech even potential enemies like Iran can afford.

   Advantage boats. 

   For now some dated military maxims remain true. One of them is that when you see a US carrier group sitting off your shore, that means you're probably fucked. Unless you're China or Russia when shit could get interesting. Fast forward one hundred years from that Jutland "fleet in being"  and we're looking at a similar type stalemate for China and Japan. Neither of them have the force projection to land an army on each other's mainland. Sure, they may not like each other but they are still each other's main trade partners. How do you fight the guy paying for your lunch even if his uncle killed your grandpa?

   No easy answer for us upright apes.

   War costs a fuck ton of money and worse, it's really bad for business.

   The time when the G12 nation states go to war is still quite a ways off. But at some point later this century, shit's going to be worth fighting for. Iran oil reserves are major but the Arctic circle offers promise too. The only question is when does the cost benefit analysis reach a zero sum point. When does launching a nuke become the same as not launching a nuke? At what point does energy supply dip so low that your food demanding hungry population ask the question... 

   Which is better? Death by your enemies' resource squeeze or death by your enemies' nuke?

   Either way, that's the ultimate question of the 21st century.

  Interestingly, this whole Japan v China stuff suits both nations politically for now. The upcoming Chinese "communist" (lol) leadership benefits because pointing out how bad the Japs are diverts attention from the serious failings of the Chinese political class in the sudden Chinese economic rise. China is suddenly dealing with a middle class with all those imported dollars floating around, and the rise of a middle class is when populations start asking questions of their government. Enter a Senkaku Island dispute to deflect attention to the nearest enemy, Japan. There's nothing better to deflect the masses then rekindling the doings of an outside enemy.

   The Japanese are not adverse to this conflict either, languishing as they are under a stagnant economy for twenty years and dreaming of the '80s when their multinationals ruled electronics. They have a right wing you never hear about in Western media and they get a pass because their modern post WWII capitalist economy is in line with the West's except for those schoolgirl used panty vending machines which are skipped over at the UN. Also, there's the Tokyo mayor, X. He's like a neocon Karl Rove on crack and goes and worships at Jap war memorials where at least twelve generals buried there are convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal. The Japanese sure have a sketchy record when it comes to their memory of their actions in World War II. Whereas the Germans have been dealing with guilt for the past 70 years and attempting to make recompense for it, the Japanese are classic Basil Fawlty about the whole thing and don't mention the war.

   The Chinese demand an apology for Nanking.

   Unfortunately, the Japanese do apologies the same way they do unconditional surrender. That is, you have to bust out more than one nuclear detonation over a major population center before they'll consider the merits of your argument. For right now, the Chinese are dealing with the fallout.

  Of course, all this fomenting conflict in the "Pacific Theater" could be part of China's wider geopolitical plan. If the Israelis go ahead with their dream strike on Iran, the crafty Chinese see the Senkaku islands as a way to disrupt any action against all their sweet and cheap Persian oil. By stirring things up in the South China Sea and along with their support of the Syrian regime, they see a way of keeping US forces busy.

   



  Still, if we ever hit a full on China v Japan shooting war, it sure would be interesting.

   At least the opening salvos.

   For one thing, Japan's version of the AEGIS cruiser/destroyer system, the Kongo based on the US Arleigh Burke class, would go up against China's lower tech Chinese vessels spamming anti-ship missiles and, if they got close enough, torpedoes . The Chinese Navy relies on foreign tech and their ships have cobbled together reader and missile systems from France, Russia and reverse engineered stuff in true Chinese improvised fashion. The fun part is how all these missile trading systems (the role of modern cruisers along with sub detection) )would hold up under the classic "Fog of War". Sure, in multi country war-games these designs have been billed as effective, intercepting at best X% [classified] of the incoming missiles but all it takes is 1% of the incoming to gets through and what happens if it's in the nuke belly of a carrier?

   That's why nobody really wants this war.

   How does this play out if both sides want to appease the forum warriors?

   Basically, I see it as a rerun of the Falklands War in 1982 where one side lands a token troop contingent and declares an exclusion zone around the islands while the UN frantically scrambles to stop WWIII. Meanwhile, 3 US carrier groups arrive and we have a rerun of the Cuban missile crisis and the world shits bricks.

   Even though Japan might be superior in surface vessel tech the Chinese wouldn't be out of the battle by any account. Their sub surface fleet of diesel submarines is large. Sure, you might giggle at the mention of 'diesel' (conjuring up images of sweaty guys running around leaky pipes) but don't be so quick to discount the effectiveness of old 20th century pistons and batteries just because we've gone all nuke generation on primary sub fleets. The Soviet K-19 story is an object lesson in how these designs are dodgy even if everybody these days says sleeping in close proximity to a nuclear reactor is about as harmful as playing Space Invaders on acid. Diesel subs still have a card in the game especially when you consider the continuing stealthiness of the old diesel designs. Just ask the Germans, Israelis, Australians or, in this case, the Chinese in the proven quietness of a diesel sub. The Chinese managed to surface one undetected in the middle of a USN carrier group in exercises off Taiwan in 2006. The Chinese have a lot of these babies ranging from the useless to the effective but modern sonar technology has shown that even the AEGIS system is vulnerable. 

   For fun, let's say two Jap cruisers go down to Chinese torpedo tech because they strayed inside the hypothetical "exclusion zone".

   By now, the Japanese are wishing to fully enact that clause of the Agreement where the US assures their mutual defense in return for them having only a "defensive" army. God, you gotta love us humans and our bullshit. No country on earth has so far gathered their armed forces under the moniker "Offense Department". All of us together have "defensive armies" and that sure makes for some kind of divine comedy for the aliens... if they're watching.

   There is no such thing as a defensive sub. They are primary attack weapons and the Chinese have more of them so yeah, the naval war will be fun. This is the point where the war must die because the next step is trading missiles at "military installations" but you know how that always works out. The Blitz on London by the Luftwaffe relieved bombing on RAF airfields just when the Germans were about to knock the RAF out of the war but an errant night raid by Lancaster bombers on Hamburg so enraged Hitler that he lost the plot and ordered city bombing on population centers.

    Human affairs are like that.

   Full of lies, stupidity, genius, luck, irrelevance, madness and sometimes a little common sense.

   For right now, the Senkaku island dispute stays irrelevant.

   Because we're not that desperate.

   Yet.