Imagine being a frontline Ukrainian soldier on February 28th, having survived another nightmarish day of trench warfare with satellite enabled battlefield transparency, kamikaze drones, and what some analysts reckon to be at times an 8 to 1 artillery disadvantage, turning on your phone to check how your president got on when meeting the leader of the country keeping your military afloat.
Through your Elon Musk provided Starlink access, you log in to your account on the Elon Musk owned X, only to see Elon Musk share a video of your president in a public meltdown, with the very hand that feeds him, in front of the world’s media: “Watch this carefully. Very important.” To make matters even worse, you then scroll down to see that your president has even lost the support of Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most hawkish figures of the hyper-militaristic neocons. Graham says: “He either needs to resign and send somebody over who we can do business with, or he needs to change.” And to cap it all off, you then note how the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, sat in the Oval Office and responded with head in hand despair to this diplomatic train wreck.
That said, no matter what happened in the meeting between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance, the nation of Ukraine was going to be in a terrible situation. As I have outlined elsewhere, no matter how committed or courageous the fighting men of Ukraine may be, inadequate weapons production and dire manpower issues mean that Ukraine has arguably lost the war already. The Collective West, including the US, does not have the industrial capacity to produce enough of the relevant weaponry for Zelensky’s armed forces to continue the war of attrition against Russia and, even if the required matériel could be produced, Ukraine is running out of men – not to mind men that have been adequately trained to navigate the most technologically sophisticated warfare to ever occur on this planet.
Since the Oval Office drama, European leaders have been in panic mode. So much so that British PM, “Two Tier” Keir Starmer, infamous for locking people up for social media posts while deflecting attention away from the gigantic industrial rape gang scandal involving “predominantly Pakistani Muslim” men, hosted a conference to discuss.
This aspiring council of war, plastered with signs saying “Securing Our Future” and including various European leaders alongside Canada’s Justin Trudeau, would be glaringly impotent if not for the presence of the militarily-beefy Turks who, according to Chas Freeman, former US Assistant Secretary of Defence and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, are fresh off supporting the supposedly “diversity-friendly” and “inclusive” jihadists who toppled Assad’s regime in Syria.
In a manner akin to agreeing to stepping outside the pub for a fist fight only on the condition that if you were to end up coming off the worse your heavyweight MMA fighter mate can step in, Starmer promised to put “boots on the ground, and planes in the air“, but only if the US would step in should they get into trouble: “To support peace in our continent, and to succeed, this effort must have strong US backing.” But even if the US were to commit to this “backstop”, what are the rootless and disenfranchised men of Britain even fighting to protect? Why should British men fight for a British government that doesn’t care about its own borders?
British journalist Ed West addressed this sentiment at length: “On the day that a British Army of the Dnieper was being mooted, another 500 young men of fighting age crossed the Channel unchallenged; the vast majority will be allowed to settle here, and will be placed either in hotels or social housing. We’re expected to make sacrifices to defend Ukraine’s borders, but won’t defend our own. Britain perhaps understands its military and economic weakness in a dangerous world; it hasn’t got to grips with the full extent of its internal social weakness.”
To make this whole spectacle more absurd, all of this is set to take place within a “coalition of the willing” – the very term used to describe the countries that jumped on board the Nuremberg 2.0 worthy US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. It boggles the mind that Starmer would want to explicitly associate his loosely-bound hodgepodge with a historically catastrophic escapade, launched on fictional intelligence reports about Weapons of Mass Destruction, that resulted in hundreds of thousands killed and a region destabilised to no benefit of anyone other than Western arms manufacturers and Islamist militants.
Speaking of the arms industry, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President who, while German Defence Minister, “ordered that tanks be rebuilt to suit pregnant drivers”, has announced the creation of an enormous (slush?) fund, amounting to more than €800 billion, for the rearmament of Europe. Even if this money actually becomes available, what European industrial capacity would be able to fill the orders for matériel? And will they expect to power these giant factories using wind and solar? Or will Europe continue to buy Russian energy from third parties such as India, or from Azerbaijan and Turkey which Chatham House reckon are laundering Russian gas “to meet continued high European demands”?
Carl Deconinck has outlined in Brussels Signal how “European defence stocks soar as leaders call for major military rebuild”, but analyst Stephen Bryen has argued for caveat emptor and, instead, suggests that it will be US and Israeli arms manufacturers who are set to “get a lot of business”.
Bryen said: “European defence stocks surged on the news. But there is a huge gap between expectation and realisation. European countries these days face serious economic problems compounded by the huge rise in energy prices in most of Europe. […] The bigger problem, however, lies beneath the surface of Europe’s defence companies themselves. Most of them are hardly competitive and the cost of defence hardware is unrealistically high, as a report by the respected European think tank Kiel Institute for the World Economy says. […] As a former President of the North American division of Italy’s largest defence company, I know that European defence companies are inefficient, slow and rarely support the hardware that comes out of their factories. […] Stuffing these companies with lots of money is likely to put them in a tailspin of greed, instead of an outflow of hardware.”
And just like Ed West outlined above in the context of Britain, how many European men will sign up to fight for the de-nationalised elites running their countries? Europe’s establishment have, for decades, demonised what R.R. Reno has termed “Strong Gods”: “the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” In place of the Strong Gods that have historically straightened the back of European Man, such as his Christian faith or his ancestral rootedness to a specific people and place, has been a (mostly) soft-totalitarian enforcement of asymmetric multiculturalism: the cheerleading of non-European culture and tradition as worthy of praise, while simultaneously assaulting indigenous European culture as inherently oppressive and racist. Why would the men of Europe be willing to kill and die to defend a deranged mercantile regime that wants to trans their kids and ram infinity immigration down their throats?
The chattering gaggle of Teacher’s Pet Hall Monitors in charge of most of Europe, of which Starmer and von der Leyen are Jungian archetypes, would be laughable in its incompetence if the consequences weren’t so dire: this warmongering blob wants to spend money it doesn’t have, to buy weapons that industrial capacity doesn’t exist to produce, in order to arm a deracinated populace who have no interest in fighting for an establishment less focussed on patriotism than gay communism. C.S. Lewis comes to mind: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Alas, what seems to be an inevitable brute force confrontation with realpolitik and material reality may yet save not only Europe, but the fighting men of Ukraine who are quickly running out of time, from the deluded ambitions of “men without chests” who are, for now, personally sheltered behind podiums from the gritty consequences of their anti-peace decision making. Or so we can hope and pray, at least.
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