Blackwater Founder Eric Prince

It's always an important data point when a reality check comes in from an unexpected source, originating with a speaker who as no apparent need to "talk their book". That's especially true when the outspoken observer with no obvious commercial interest of their own makes a critical observation, in this case some facts many members of his own Navy SEALS community might not wish to hear about the bloated US military industrial complex's preference for gold-plated weapons in the face dirt-cheap enemy mass AND precision in a peer or near-peer war. This is especially important when the speaker is closely connected to Trump Administration 2.0, while not claiming to speak for it.

Eric Prince Tackles the Technologically Backward Russians Myth

Such was the speech recently delivered late last week by Blackwater Private Military Company (PMC) co-founder Eric Prince (starting from the 5 minute mark, and again at the 12 minute mark), at an interesting choice of venue: Hillsdale College in Michigan. The Prince family incidentally, have deep ties to the state's Republican elites, including via Eric's sister former US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, wife to Amway Corporation founder Dick DeVos; Prince having sold the eponymous family company to Johnson Controls in the mid-1990s. Thus, the Eric Prince clip going viral on X and Telegram (after it was picked up off YouTube by Russians and subtitled in their language) cannot be dismissed as a shot in the dark. The clip has also been featured on Russian TV in discussions of the ongoing SMO/war in Ukraine.

Pro-Ukrainian Vets Ignore Prince's Remarks Amid Kiev's Mass Casualty Retreat from Kursk

Most pro-Ukrainian vetbro grifters and bread-tubers have predictably ignored Prince's remarks, rather than attempting to "debunk" them by pointing to the Russian Army's previously slow rate of advance. Perhaps the collapse of the Ukrainian Army's Western media and veteran-celebrated Unternehmen Wacht am Suzdha with fierce denials of President Trump's claim that any encirclement took place has left the mind space of this set preoccupied with contradicting Trump. This argument is pedantically but pointlessly correct, in typical midwit militaria fashion: once the Russians isolated the pocket with round the clock drone and glide bomb attacks, then infiltrated it via an underground gas pipeline that the Ukrainians had ironically shut off the gas to months earlier, the UAF pocket around Suzdha rapidly collapsed. This resulted in terrible UAF losses, which are still filling body bags being collected by Russian soldiers and volunteers in the woods and fields all around the small border town of Suzdha with a pre-war population of merely 5,000 souls.

So indeed, midwits and legacy media fact checkers, there was no classic WW2-style encirclement battle in Kursk. Instead it was very much a 21st century battle in the sense that drone operators and mostly not direct fire control choked off Ukraine's vulnerable supply lines along the two paved highways into its three-sided pocket. But maybe the likes of Ryan McBeth or Jake Broe realize that attacking Prince's educated military professional opinion on major Russian warfighting improvements or admitting the colossal waste of Ukrainian armor and lives in Kursk will hurt their case (and grift).

Prince Discusses Russian EW Negating Western GPS-Targeted Systems

Returning to Prince's influential choice of venue to deliver a hard hockey check to the contradictory "Russia is hopelessly backward and incompetent, but the Russians might just take over the Baltics or Poland next if Trump cuts off support to Ukraine" propaganda line...Prince is saying Russia is not going to invade Poland anytime soon, but the Russians are neither weak nor backward. They are highly intelligent, advanced, and adaptable adversaries who have learned how to mass produce and deploy drones as effectively as their Ukrainian adversaries, that is, better than NATO can. And Russian electronic warfare, Prince says in the clip above, has negated one system after another that the Americans and the rest of NATO have provided to the Ukrainians. Such that we hardly hear of successful HIMARS strikes by the Ukrainians anymore and the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) has hardly been heard from in combat either. (Prince could've added that the Turks had to stop sending their vaunted Bayraktar drones to Kiev that were celebrated by pro-Ukrainian vets earlier in the war, due to so many of these high flying easy targets being shot down by Russian jets and SAMs or being effectively jammed by Russian EW--but that would've rubbed in the gullibility of many fellow vets to "friendly" foreign government and MIC sponsored propaganda).

For foreigners unfamiliar with why this Prince speech and its venue matters so much, who do not know anything about American conservative politics, Hillsdale College is a non-denominational institution of higher learning. It has been affiliated with the Baptists, aka Evangelical Christian or "born again" Protestants since its founding in 1844. For the past 40 years dating to the Reagan Administration years, Hillsdale has been a leading voice in the conservative movement on both higher and childhood education. Amid libertarians largely advocating for the practical uselessness of woke Higher Ed and emphasizing vocational or business training, Hillsdale has spoken in defense of the Great Books and the Greco-Roman Classics.

The Iraq War and Its Disastrous Aftermath Killed Dubya Republicanism Dead, Donald Trump Was Merely the Undertaker

Nowadays thanks to Donald Trump, the term "movement conservative" and especially, "conservative veterans" have become perhaps loaded and controversial terms. This is especially true compared to say the George W. Bush years, when the British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge published The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, their authoritative guide to the American Right a few months after the Iraq-invading height of the "Dubya" presidency. At that time, a relatively easy victory in Iraq appeared to be at hand, and the Bush 43 Administration was dismissing a growing insurgency as simply a few Baathist diehards, who would soon be marginalized in a new and free Iraq--one that would use its oil revenues to pay for the reconstruction costs of the war.

We all know what happened after that--thousands of American soldiers and contractors died in IED and mortar attacks. Regardless of how you feel about Blackwater, dozens of those killed in Iraq were Eric Prince's friends and colleagues. Over 100,000 Iraqis died in the sectarian civil war unleashed by the fall of Saddam Hussein's minority Sunni-led regime. The Libyan and Syrian Civil Wars could also be seen as spin offs from the Iraq War, in the sense that the Obama Administration basically decided that waging proxy wars via selective use of airpower or CIA/MI6/DGSE support for jihadists was far cheaper and thus preferable to Bush 43's direct regime change via invasion. Both the Iraq and Syria wars initially benefited Iranian hardliners and their Hezbollah allies as well as their enemies in Al-Qaeda, later spinning off into ISIS. Not coincidentally ISIS or Daesh sought to make a splash by symbolically abolishing the Sykes-Picot drawn border between Iraq and Syria, creating a Syraq-spanning and cursed "Caliphate" that a US-led coalition, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi'a militias jointly dismantled.

Vets Look for a "Good War" After the Fall of Kabul and the Vaxx Purge Leads Many Red State Vets to Tell Their Kids Not to Join the US Military Like They Did

The bloody occupation of Iraq discredited mainline Republican Party's "muscular Reaganism" for a generation (and nevermind that the real Reagan hated the concept of nuclear war, appointed Russophile advisors especially in his second term, and would've been appalled at what the neocons did in his name). Most critically, failure in Iraq contributed to the rise of Donald Trump and his transformative effect on the GOP. It also created an entire generation of cynical GWOT vets, regardless of which political party they leaned toward. That degree of cynicism and burnout increased after the Biden Administration and Pentagon's botched 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, leading some vets to desperately turn their eyes to Ukraine months later for a "Good War". A war that as in Syria, could be sold by the bipartisan warmongering Blob as the US cleverly not having to fight itself, but through the Mother of All NATO Proxies in the Ukrainian Army.

In psychological terms, the Ukraine War could somehow salvage the prestige of the top American military brass if not the military profession itself which, it's fair to say, reached a post 1991 nadir in America, amid the vaxx-refusal purges/discharges of 2021 as well as the Fall of Kabul, reminiscent as that event was for Baby Boomers of the Fall of Saigon. The fact that Kiev did not fall swiftly to a Russian coup de main, even after CJCS Gen. Mark Miley's ridiculous and possibly intentionally short-timed forecast of Ukraine holding out for three days or perhaps a garbled three weeks, was taken as proof that the US and NATO by extension was back as a dominant military power. Wokeness and COVID vaccine refusal purging had not done any real damage to US military capabilities or morale, and Russian Neanderthal He-men were being routed by Ukrainian chicks and rainbow flag patch wearing gay soldiers armed with American Javelin missiles.

The reality in February 2022 through mid-spring was much more complex, as Russia obviously didn't launch its Special Military Operation (SMO) with anywhere close to enough troops to storm a city as large as Kiev. And yes Ukraine War watching vetbros, the Russian General Staff most certainly had studied the US race to Baghdad in 2003 amid General Eric Shinseki's warnings about inadequate American troop numbers. And they no doubt concluded that the American "thunder run" into Baghdad left far too many Baathists and weapons around to form a very painful insurgency for the Americans, and that any effective strategy for Ukraine would either be a swift coup de main, or more likely, a war of attrition. In fact, the haste of the SMO with many units raising to catch up with the elite spearheads strongly supports the case that Russia was NOT initially planning to invade, but only mass forces at the border and then proceed to tougher "Minsk 3.0" negotiations with Kiev over the caught-in-a-purgatory state of the Donbass, which the Ukrainians were increasingly shelling right up until the invasion.

Rather than serving as a bridgehead for an assault on the capital itself, the daring Gostomel Airport heliborne operation on the first day of the war achieved its objective of serving as a mass distraction from rapid Russian advances seizing critical points further south and east (this despite Ukrainians claiming to have shot down not one but two IL-76 transport planes full of VDV, which turned out to be a Ukrainian cargo plane brought down by friendly fire). What the Russians sent to Gostomel was a diversionary reconnaissance group (DRG) on steroids, backed by SU-25 and gunship strikes. Today of course, such a heliborne raid would likely prove suicidal in the face not of enemy MANPADs, which the Russian Vitebsk systems successfully jammed on February 24, 2022, but wire-guided FPV drones taking down the Russian helicopters.

While Kiev drew all the attention and Zelensky's cronies handed out AKs to anyone who would hold one, the Russians swiftly cut off and ground down the vaunted Ukrainian garrison consisting of the "elite" Nazi SS-runes insignia-wearing Azov Brigade clowns in Mariupol. Russian forces also secured the Zaporozhe nuclear power plant, the largest nuke plant by reactor blocks and territory in Europe. That said, Russia also suffered many painful losses, as its tanks and armored vehicles were strung out in easily ambushed columns along the northern Ukrainian highways, racing to catch up with the airborne spearheads north and northeast of Kiev. A Russian recon platoon that managed to reach the very center of Kharkov in the opening hours of the war was ambushed and wiped out, with many spetsnaz fighting to the death.

The Gravest Western Hubris, Besides Underestimating Russian Industrial Strength and Technological Capacity: Failure to Visualize the War Through the Russian or Chinese Enemy's Eyes, Lack of Strategic and Operational Empathy

The "goodwill gesture" pullback of Russian troops from Kiev, despite accompanying serious negotiations that Boris Johnson notoriously rushed to sabotage in Istanbul, reinforced British and Ukrainian wartime propaganda, that Russia had immediately been placed on the back foot. And all that NATO had to do was pour in weapons and start bleeding the Russians heavily to win--no actual NATO servicemen would ever have to fight and die for Ukraine. The facts that any protracted years-long war of attrition would not favor the Ukrainians due to their shrunken draft-age male population and military industrial inferiority, or that Ukrainian demographics were hardly those of North Vietnam in 1965 or Afghanistan age bracket in 2005-2020 to sustain a years-long war, were pushed aside by triumphalism. No one discussed in 2022 or even spring and summer 2023 how NATO would very rapidly burn through its late Cold War legacy stockpiles, or that China had every incentive while eyeing Taiwan to see NATO and especially the US get bogged down and suffering "advisor" and "volunteer" casualties in the Ukraine, while thinking that they had succeeded in bogging down the Russians.

You see the Chinese too, understand the Soviet concept of reflexive control, that is nudging or even funneling an adversary toward what you want him to do. In the Pentagon, let alone in the "Extending Russia" RAND Corporation stink tanks periphery (which oddly enough, back in 2019 had produced blueprints for provoking this "unprovoked" Russian war), none of this had sunk in. Boris Johnson scuttling the Istanbul talks this time approximately three years ago was seen as a triumph, rather than a tragedy for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. All that mattered was bleeding the Russian Bear, reducing any grand US geostrategy to a video game in which one takes down the underboss (Russia) before the showdown with the final boss (China).

Defeated Nazi Generals Telling Their New Bosses What They Wanted to Hear Lazy Leftover Myths from WW2 Continue to Misinform Western Military Minds

Combining the initial media blitz over the Russian withdrawals from northern Ukraine and Kherson city in 2022, plus Western hubris and assumptions leftover from fighting largely small-arms and IED equipped insurgent enemies during the Global War on Terror, as well as lazy nostalgia for the last Cold War and even defeated Nazi generals' tropes about the Third Reich only losing WW2 due to the Germans being swamped by superior Russian numbers, and a bitch's brew of military make believe emerged. One in which Kiev's manpower losses/desertion rate and the destruction of NATO artillery and especially limited air defense stocks was immaterial, because only one side of the attrition ledger mattered--Russia's.

The fact that most US/UK military men had only been taught in war colleges about two wars of attrition, WW1 and Vietnam, and had never understood how attrition was critical to the Russians grinding down in 1941-42 and eventually crushing the Wehrmacht in 1943-45, exacerbated these assumptions based on false stereotypes, rather than facts. Such as that the final Axis to Soviet losses ratio after Kursk, according to the eminent American historian of the Great Patriotic War David M. Glantz was 1 to 1.3, meaning the Red Army killed ten Axis soldiers for every thirteen it lost. The Red Army won not so much via "meat" or even T34 tank assaults' on heavily fortified enemy positions and cities, as raining wrath of God level amounts of artillery/Katyusha steel and high explosives on their German, Finnish and Japanese enemies. Let's not forget the August 1945 Soviet curb-stomping of the Kwantung Army across Manchuria that almost certainly hastened the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan--just to show our ally "Uncle Joe" Stalin that we had the Bomb and he did not (yet have one).

Ukrainian propaganda of course, leaned strongly into all of these WW2 and Cold War legacy tropes about Russians (but not Ukrainians) waging "meat assaults", at least until the vaunted Summer 2023 Offensive fell flat on its face, with US/UK generals directing the latest Leopard 2 German panzers NATO could provide into a thick Russian minefield/kill zone. It was as if no one in the entire US or British general staff that had 'advised' Kiev to concentrate its armor assault exactly where the Russians expected them to had bothered to pick up a book about the classic Soviet defensive battle of WW2, the 1943 Kursk campaign (known as Operation Citadel on the German side). Once again, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, questions about incompetent yes men dominating the top brass as well as the US/NATO underestimating their enemy raised their heads.

The Difference Between a Bloody Stalemate and Ukraine Losing the War by Attrition

After Ukraine's failed 2023 offensives, the Western public started to understand the Ukraine War to be a bloody WW1-style stalemate. Even if it was not in fact a stalemate but a more dynamic battlefront than meets the eye, the fact is the average person's grasp on the war's reality was closer than that of the pro-Ukrainian vets and think tankists declaring victory as being just around the corner for Kiev, with one more tranche of money or shipment of the latest "game-changer" weapons system. Whether that be HIMARS/ATACMs, F16s, and now Mirage fighter jets to replace the Soviet legacy SU24s and MiG29s that have been shot down or cannibalized for parts.

To put it simply, now that Donald Trump has won on a peace in Ukraine platform and appears to be sincerely trying to bring the war to a negotiated settlement (whether or not he'll start a war with Iran), the question is just how painful will the final deal prove for Ukraine in de facto if not de jure acknowledging the loss of Crimea, the Crimean land bridge along the Azov Sea littoral, and the entire Donbass. And this is arguably the best case "Art of the Deal" scenario for the Zelensky regime and its European backers, with the Ukrainian-held cities of Kherson and Zaporozhe potentially also on the table as part of Russia's demands for the full territories it now constitutionally claims as its own.

American and British Vets Buy into a London/Kiev Manufactured Stab-in-the-Back Myth

Many American veterans, responding in disbelief to these developments and crying betrayal, are now embracing a 21st century version of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany-prevalent Stab in the Back Myth. They are insisting that Ukraine cannot possibly have lost or be losing this war by attrition, as Imperial Germany was exhausted by superior forces and firepower. Ukraine can only lose the war via subversion and betrayal. After all, the Collective West is all-powerful--if it can only muster the political will to back the Ukrainians to the tilt, sending them everything but tactical nuclear warheads--and the West couldn't possibly lose the Mother of All Proxy Wars aka WWIII by Proxy to those damn backward Rooskies and their Asiatic Iranian, North Korean and Chinese allies.

Instead of "the Jews" stabbing an otherwise victorious Germany in the back, the present dolstosslegende has the Russians fulfilling the role of the sneaky subversive Jews through the Kremlin's alleged blackmail or puppeteering of one Donald Trump. And this belief is spread, ironically enough, among many Democrats and woke veterans on Substack and Bluesky (having retreated to their bubbles from Elon Musk's X) who think viewing Russians as subhuman, or demanding that a Fortress Europe unite in both anti-Americanism and to destroy Russia aren't Nazi beliefs. And yet the last time a "united Europe" tried to take on the Russians and Americans at the same time, that ended with GIs and Russians shaking hands and embracing at the Elbe River, 80 years ago next month.

Massive, Systemic Lying By Omission/Cover Up of Kiev's True Casualties

The main glue holding this pastiche of Russophrenic cognitive dissonance together, whereby Russia is simultaneously on the verge of collapse but might end up conquering Ukraine because Russian agent Trump threw them a lifeline-- is of course, lying. Primarily legacy media backed by US/UK intelligence agencies lying by omission about the sheer scale of Ukrainian "sanity losses"--that is dead and grievously wounded and thereby permanently removed from the battlefield. To extensively quote the historian Michael Vlahos, who has been a frequent guest on the New York City-based John Bachelor Show podcast:

Kiev and Washington — and the entire Media and Official Propaganda industrial complex — has been silent on the subject of battlefield losses until recent months, when the yawning catastrophe could no longer be denied. Yet all along there have been signs and signals and harrowing data points. Stitched together, this is the story they tell.

In the first 18 months of the war — simply counting military obituaries and dead SIM cards — comes to ~330,000 Ukrainian soldiers KIA. Moreover, more than 50,000 lost one or more limbs. Moreover, in the last 18 months, monthly losses intensified. Kiev itself has declared that the army needs 30,000 replacements a month just to maintain the current force. Does this mean that, from September 2023 to date, another ~540,000 soldiers were lost?

Here, it is necessary to be mindful of what Soviet historians call “irrecoverable” losses. Hence, a soldier who will never return to the fight is “irrecoverable.” Killed, crippled, missing: This is the true sum of an army’s losses in war. For Ukraine, arithmetic says that number is not less than ~920,000 men.

Yet not all of these are dead or crippled. Deserters also represent, in a very real sense, irrecoverable casualties, as these are the able-bodied who have fled the country, or who have gone to ground inside Ukraine. Eurostat reports that 650,000 men of fighting age have fled Ukraine. Furthermore, reeling under Russian hammer-blows across the Donbass Front, desertions are reportedly over 200,000 in 2024. Thus, Kiev has been forced to raise its monthly mobilization target from 30,000 to 40,000.

Ukrainian journalists cite a desertion rate of 160 per day in early 2024, rising to 200 by summer, and then jumping to 380 by autumn. This suggests that desertion, over the past year at least, has accounted for a thick slice of irrecoverable losses, perhaps 4500-5000 per month. The sudden surge in desertion after September 2024 has been driven by crushing exhaustion and defeat. This in turn has pushed the state to desperate measures. All “conscription” in Ukraine today takes the form of violent kidnapping, even of the sick, aged, and infirm. Yet in spite of the utmost brutality, that 40K per month target is now short about 20,000 each month.

Moreover, actual irrecoverable losses, across the board, are almost certainly understated. For example, many platoon and company commanders simply do not report desertions, for fear of punishment by their field grade superiors. Likewise, the number of missing KIA is massive, given the sheer number of Ukrainian corpses left on the battlefields. A recent composite of casualty estimates puts the KIA total at 780,000. Adding in the severely wounded, total irrecoverable Ukrainian battle losses could be as high as 1.2 million, after 1000 days of war.

To put all this in perspective: Today’s shrunken Ukraine is half the size of the French Republic in 1914. In World War I, France lost 3.6 percent of its population: A monstrous and unnecessary national bloodletting, and a stain on the very idea of “Civilization.”

America’s proxy war against Russia — goading and pitting Ukraine against a nation nearly 8 times its size — has led to yet another unnecessary bloodletting. Ukraine has lost 3.9 percent of its population. Hidden from us for years, in plain sight.

What hath America wrought? Biden’s narrative narcissism would have us believe the United States has been heroically defending democracy against tyranny and pure evil. How he boasted, loudly, that America was bleeding Russia white — all for the price of not one American soldier. What a bargain! However, in sharper focus, an American emperor and his court, in their lust to bring Russia to its knees, destroyed another nation (and this time, not a “primitive,” but rather a “European” nation) to no purpose but to fulfill its own vanity.

Unwittingly perhaps, the real effect of Biden’s fulmination was to fulfill the enemy’s existential need. Curating and handcrafting this naked American proxy war, ironically, gave Russia the signal opportunity to halt NATO expansion, and buy itself strategic breathing room. Biden's assault served to mobilize and renew Russian national identity. Eager and blind, an addled Emperor thus became Russia’s strategic helpmate.

That last sentence is of course, precisely what Eric Prince said last weekend at Hillsdale, a couple months after Michael Vlahos said it: what hasn't killed the Russian Army has made it stronger. And for anyone who read about how radically better the Red Army of Summer 1943 and especially by the final year of August 1944-1945 was at combined arms than just two or three years before, this shouldn't be surprising. Because so many Western military minds have a simplistic or simply Gulf War-lopsided victory "understanding" of combined arms that has no relationship to 21st century peer or even near-peer warfare. That is, warfare in which the enemy actually gets a vote and unlike in Ukraine, there are no magical NATO lines to prevent him from lasing your satellites, sinking many of your modern warships, or shooting down your supposedly invisible on radar F35s; or even say a sophisticated drone and missile-launching adversary like Iran pummeling the fuel tanks and hangars at your Qatari and other Gulf region bases. And the US to date still cannot field a hypersonic precision strike weapon called the Dark Eagle, whereas Russia has hundreds of such combat-proven missiles in its arsenal, while China has thousands of such (yet-to-be-fired in anger) weapons.

But what's clear is that, despite many so-called conservatives in the Congressional GOP and among the "Never Trump" er ex-Republicans insisting that the Ukraine War has been a relative bargain for the United States in degrading Russian military power on the cheap (not counting the price for hundreds of thousands of killed or maimed Ukrainian men), Eric Prince would not agree. Prince instead states in the viral clip above that the onslaught of American targeting data paired with NATO weaponry that's kept Ukraine (barely) in the fight has in fact had a Darwinian effect on Russian forces. That instead of achieving a massive degradation of the Russian Army, Moscow's troops have emerged tougher, stronger and considerably better adapted to the 21st century drone-saturated battlefield than they were this time three years ago. As for the hopes of pro-Ukrainian veterans and Democrats that Europe is about to launch a massive rearmament, and that British and French soldiers will soon show up in Ukraine and the likes of Starmer and Macron will shortly show Putin who's boss, I leave ESW readers with some thoughts from a Substack which goes by Jupplandia:

Russians know the difference, more than anyone, between real strength and its absence.

The break between the West and East comes not so much because Putin is a madman or bent on world conquest or even would rather like to restore the Tsarist or mid Soviet borders and spheres of influence of Russia, as it comes because WE keep insisting that the events of today should be viewed solely as a repetition of something else. We are the ones trapped in the past, not Russia. Russia and Putin when historical causes are discussed at least know their own history, at least reach back before their own birth. We apply 1939 endlessly, again and again, as if that isn’t ridiculous. Or we apply the Cold War, again and again, as if nothing has changed and more particularly our power and their weakness were both fixed, just like our Goodness and their Evil.

The fact that our leaders are considerably less good than they used to be, our causes considerably muddier, and our reach and power as reduced as Russia’s has been restored under Putin, escapes us. But it doesn’t escape the Russians.

What they share in common with Trump, MAGA and blue collar Americans who would rather fix the problems at home is not evil, as European and British snobs and leaders would suggest, but realism. And that realism can see what a tottering mess Western Europe really is.

The truth is that the life of the ‘international rules based order’, the thing that we are supposed to worship and love and wish to preserve, the thing which comes with vast Soviet style bureaucracies such as the UN and the EU, even the concept of the Free World meaning an Anglosphere with Western Europe attached, has been around just a little longer than the Soviet Union existed for. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years. From the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 the EEC/EU has been with us for 67 years. The UN is slightly more venerable at 80 years of age. NATO is 75 years old.

In other words, all of these things which we are supposed to consider so necessary that existence without them cannot possibly be contemplated, all of these things which we are supposed to imagine the world could not exist without, all of these things for which we are supposed to be eager to go to war with Russia, have existed about the same length of time as Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the oldest leaders of the former Soviet Union.

This rules based order set up in the rubble of the end of WWII is not the natural state of affairs. It was an artificial creation fitted to the already missed problems of the 1930s, coming fully into being in the 1950s, and parasitically dependent from its first moment of existence on the United States of America. The UN is housed in New York. The US gives the greatest financial contribution. NATO’s budget, likewise, is 70% supplied by the US. In 2024 the US had over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe. This year it stands at 84,000. This commitment to the defence of Europe, with Europe as a near helpless dependent that takes the US military umbrella while blaming the US for any raindrops that fall, is also in its 80s.

I think it’s actually a good mental exercise to picture this commitment, these institutions, this system that is now demanding we go to war with Russia and demanding we worship Ukraine and Zelenskyy and demanding we see this conflict in the same terms that applied to the Cold War when Churchill effectively announced its start, in human years of life. It is a good mental exercise to picture NATO as a 75 year old man. To picture the EU as a 67 year old woman. To picture the UN as an 80 year old of indeterminate gender.

And to picture them all naked too.

And then ask yourself if this is what you want to die for. Or would ask anyone else to die for?

While Prince is correct that the Western world underestimated the Russians' ability to technologically adapt to a drone-saturated battlefront and rapidly learn from and exceed their combined NATO/Ukrainian adversaries in electronic warfare, the fundamental issue and the one that has Russians convinced they're winning by attrition is this: how many non-Ukrainian Europeans are ready to bleed and die for Ukraine? If Starmer and Macron cannot answer that question from their electorates, then they had better accept whatever terms however harsh Putin will present via Trump's team to Zelensky, rather than deceiving everyone--including themselves--about having their bluff called on the battlefield.

– Belisarius

March 18, 2024