Is Ukraine a contest between two dangerously unstable superpowers?

 

That's what Sarah Hoyt hypothesized yesterday.  Her argument is thought-provoking.

This morning, this thread hit my mailbox from three separate sources.

<snip> ... for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are ... only symbols to use in domestic factional fights.

The need to show ideological purity & resolve – “virtue signaling” in modern terms – as a means of achieving power inside the ruling in-group becomes more important than objective reality.

Only the internal power matters ... as outside reality is merely a symbol to be used in the internal power game.

The ruling Imperial Japanese military faction of 1931 – 1945 was a classic example of this irrational regime hypothesis. </snip>

Now I want you to consider that it’s not one, but two irrational regimes, we’re dealing with.

This has been bothering the heck out of me, because it smells like they’re cooperating, only that’s not QUITE the right pattern.

None of this makes sense, unless you have TWO irrational regimes (Ours and Russia’s. China is too, but it’s another ball of wax. China doesn’t really believe other nations are real, anyway. They’re just Barbarians and China is all-under-heaven, so this is all much of a muchness on that front) that are using each other as scarecrows to quiet the opposition at home.

. . .

Why do they act like they’re simultaneously enemies and besties, and all the while are bringing us closer to nuclear war than we’ve been in 40 years?  What sense can we make of this?

This is not about Ukraine. This isn’t even a shadow war between us and Russia.

This is two, enormously unstable regimes, who don’t understand why the internals of their country aren’t conforming to their theories and things aren’t falling into place as their ideological certainty tells them they should, trying to stomp on internal enemies and keep/increase power. 

The other/opponent is just a paper target, something to focus the eye on, but it’s not really what they’re shooting at. I submit to you that Biden’s supporters really, truly thought that the “right” (for lack of a better term) would not just say “Well Putin has a point” (Which is the worst I’ve heard) but fall in, vocally, ecstatically, behind Putin.  That because they’ve been told Trump is Putin’s bud (And remember the left assumes that the right in the US goes for cult of personality as much as they do) we would all rush to vocally support Putin.

And then, as they did during the two world wars, and claim was done during the cold war (waggles hand. Sometimes. Inconsistently) they could righteously suppress the opposition as traitors in a time of war and paint them as evil to the populace.

Meanwhile Putin thought that he could have a short victorious war, start on his dream towards greater Russia, and cement the suppression of opposition, and his cult of personality at home.

Those were the actual goals, and that explains the “we wouldn’t object to a small incursion” and the crazy cakes way Putin went at the war.

It didn’t work, on either end. So now the only thing the two can do is escalate, in pursuit of their real goal: the cementing of internal support/suppression of opposition. This is the only thing that explains why Biden is still making obvious “gaffes” that take us to the brink, and why Putin, reportedly is conducting the war from a nuclear-proof bunker.

Will they go that far? I don’t know. Grandma was fond of saying “I’d not go anywhere – even to heaven – with a madman, because he might push me down.”  And we’re dealing with two insane regimes.

May G-d have mercy on our souls.

There's more at the link.

Like me, Sarah's experienced a Communist revolution, and seen the cultural, economic and political devastation it leaves in its wake.  (We can be quite the pair of downers at a gathering if we go off into a corner and start reminiscing about Communist plots we have known.  It's a depressing subject, but once you've seen it at first hand, you don't forget it.)  We've both learned the lessons of history the hard way, and wish we hadn't.  From that perspective, I think there may be something to her theory.

That's made more clear when you consider that Biden is clearly not in charge of his own administration.  He's a senile old man.  He's no longer capable of strategizing even his lunch today, or figuring out what clothes to wear.  The way he's being treated as a convenient figurehead, a political fig-leaf, by the powers behind the Oval Office is nothing more or less than elder abuse, and I hope and pray those doing it will be called to account for it one day . . . although, knowing American politics, they're probably confident they'll get away with it.  Nevertheless, it's as plain as a pikestaff that the Biden administration isn't.  It's the third Obama administration, with a healthy dose of left-wing oligarchy to boot.  It's seeing everything through ideological spectacles, not actual, factual analysis of what's really going on.  The old proverb reminds us, "There are none so blind as those who will not see" - and the ideologically bound are chronically incapable of seeing anything except what they want to believe.

The neocons on both the Left and the Right of US politics are slavering at the mouth over the Ukraine crisis, seeing it as a wonderful opportunity to "put Russia in its place".  They appear to forget that we're dealing with a failed superpower that still possesses more nuclear warheads than all the other nations on earth put together.  (For that matter, the United States is perilously close to becoming a failed superpower itself.)  If, as Sarah Hoyt posits, the Putin administration in Russia is as unstable, in its own way, as the Biden administration is in our own country, that's a recipe for potential disaster.  There's no other way to put it.  (See Peter Ziehan's views on that in yesterday's article and video discussion.  He clarifies very neatly the dilemma confronting the Putin administration in Ukraine.)

I hope Sarah's wrong . . . but I fear she may be right.  That's anything but a comforting thought.

Peter