I started writing this blog a couple of days ago but gave up several times. I just couldn’t find a sensible way to explain the utter madness which is being inflicted on us by the 650 useless, corrupt, self-aggrandising fools and knaves in Westminster and their thousands of advisers, sycophantic supposed ‘experts’ and sundry gravy-train-riding hangers-on.
I have written about the Port Talbot steel-works disaster before. Around 2,800 skilled, well-paid workers are getting fired as the steel works closes down its blast furnaces. Around £500m of our money is being given to the site’s Indian owners, Tata Steel, to replace the supposedly environmentally-harmful blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces. But electric arc furnaces only do a small part of steel production and so 2,800 workers are being tossed on the scrap heap. This is a catastrophe for those workers, their families and the whole area. However, our Business and Trade Secretary, Kemi Badenoch (touted as a possible next leader of what pathetically little is left of the Tory Party after the next election) mysteriously claimed this calamity was a brilliant move by the Government and a huge success for the British economy: “The U.K. Government is backing our steel sector. This proposal will secure a sustainable future for Welsh steel and is expected to save thousands of jobs in the long term.”
Meanwhile up in Scotland, the part Chinese-owned energy giant Petroineos is going to close its oil refinery in Grangemouth (Scotland) in spring 2025 because it could no longer compete with overseas rivals. Repurposing the site to just a fuel import and distribution business is likely to result in the loss of about 400 of the current 500 jobs at the Firth of Forth site. Neil Gray, the current Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy (yes, there apparently is such a position in the SNP administration), ludicrously claimed this closure of the refinery as a success for Scotland: ‘The Scottish Government is committed to working with industry to secure a sustainable future for Grangemouth that reflects our ambitions for decarbonisation and a just transition for Scotland’s industrial sector while recognising the important role it plays in meeting fuel demand in Scotland’.
The next industry our politicians look set to destroy are British gas boiler makers. In a couple of years, these companies will be fined thousands of pounds if they fail to sell a sufficient number of useless, noisy, ludicrously-expensive heat pumps. This system of fines only applies to UK manufacturers. Foreign manufacturers are exampt. In anticipation of having to pay the fines, several UK gas boiler manufacturers have started to raise their prices. Naturally, this makes them uncompetitive against foreign makers and so our politicians will end up wiping out yet another British industry.
Why are our rulers wrecking our economy and destroying skilled, well-paid jobs? To hit their own 2050 Net Zero targets, of course. Behind these disasters is the way our worthless political elites have decided to measure our CO2 emissions. If a tonne of steel is produced in Britain, the CO2 emissions from its production are counted as UK’s CO2 emissions. But if a tonne of steel is produced in China or India and then shipped halfway around the world in a diesel-powered cargo ship, the CO2 emissions are not included in the UK’s CO2 figures. This incentivises our rulers to close down much of Britain’s industry in order to meet their own completely arbitary CO2 reduction targets. And, as the examples of Port Talbot and Grangemouth show, they’re succeeding in this. The UK’s CO2 emissions have plummeted:
But so have the number of people employed in British manufacturing:
And so has manufacturing as a percentage of GDP:
And so has the UK’s share of global GDP:
Meanwhile (apart from a small drop during the Chinese lab-leaked Covid pandemic) most of the world carries on increasing its CO2 emissions:
These events pose two rather important questions:
Can’t our rulers see that they are destroying our country for no purpose at all?
Here’s the opening paragraph of Ursula Fond of Lying’s speech to her globalist, jet-setting chums at this year’s Davos knees up:
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Klaus,
Your annual Global Risk Report makes for a stunning and sobering read. For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate. It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies. These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing: changes in our climate – and our geopolitical climate; shifts in our demography and in our technology; spiralling regional conflicts and intensified geopolitical competition and their impacts on supply chains. The sobering reality is that we are once again competing more intensely across countries than we have in several decades. And this makes the theme of this year’s Davos meeting even more relevant. ‘Rebuilding trust’ – this is not a time for conflicts or polarisation. This is the time to build trust. This is the time to drive global collaboration more than ever before. This requires immediate and structural responses to match the size of the global challenges. I believe it can be done. And I believe that Europe can and must take the lead in shaping that global response.
In a blog last week, I wrote about the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative. This includes many of the world’s leading news media, the main press agencies – AP and Reuters – and the big tech megacorporations:
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a partnership, founded by the BBC, that includes organisations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.
TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.
I guess this means that people like myself – people who supposedly spread ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ with my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – will no longer be permitted to have a voice or even to take part in society. Instead the globalists will restrict what information we are allowed to know in order to ‘build trust’ – as Ursula explains “this is not a time for conflicts or polarisation. This is the time to build trust” by tackling ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’.
George Orwell warned:
Anyway, here’s our beloved leader, Ursula, laying our her plan to control what we useless eaters will be allowed to hear and say.
You only need to listen to the first minute or so of Ursula’s speech to understand the glorious future she and her globalist pals have planned for us:
Unfortunately I don’t have any talents as a novelist. If I did, here’s a dystopian novel which is so likely that it could probably be knocked out in a few weeks by even a moderately-talented writer as it almost writes itself.
Let’s start this dystopian novel with a real event.
The WEF and ‘Disease X’
This week, from 15th to 19th January, the 54th meeting of World Economic Forum (WEF) – its annual jamboree for the rich, famous and powerful – will take place in Davos. The theme of this year’s knees-up is ‘Rebuilding Trust’ and apparently 200 sessions will be livestreamed so we useless eaters can see that nothing nefarious is being planned against us by our rulers.
One of the sessions is titled ‘Preparing for Disease X’. The WEF blurb explains: ‘With fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that an unknown “Disease X” could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic, what novel efforts are needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead?’
What this means is that research labs around the world will launch programmes to identify viruses which exist in nature and could spill over into humans and these labs will muck around with these viruses often making them more potent. This will be done supposedly to prepare medical procedures – probably vaccinations – so, if a virus spillover does occur, treatments can quickly be developed.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for a start, often this work will be done in corrupt countries in often unhygienic, dirty, badly-run labs. And secondly, most technical and scientific developments have both a civilian and military application.
This is the starting point for our dystopian novel – an actual event.
But before we get onto the plot, we just need to provide some context by looking at fatality rates – what % of the population is killed – by previous pandemics
Previous pandemic fatality rates
The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of the European population, as well as approximately 33% of the population of the Middle East.
The 1918 Spanish Flu only killed around 50 million people – 0.6% of the world’s population at the time.
(Incidentally, if my memory serves me correctly, the Spanish Flu actually originated in a US army training camp. But when wartime censors in the belligerent countries suppressed bad news to maintain morale, newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the “Spanish flu” misnomer.)
(Another useless fact about the Spanish Flu. During the 2019-2022 Covid pandemic, Australia was heavily criticised for isolating the country. However, during the 1918 Spanish Flu, Australia had a vey low death toll precisely because the Austrlaian government islolated the country requiring all arriving vessels to quarantine offshore to ensure no passengers or crew members were infected.)
If Covid-19 has killed say 7 million. Then that’s just under 0.1% of the world population.
Now back to our dystopian novel.
To be a real threat, a new virus – ‘Disease X’ – needs to have two main qualities. It needs to be highly infectious and it needs a reasonable fatality rate. To be highly infectious, something which can be transmitted through the air by coughing, sneezing and even breathing would be good. As for fatality rates – anything with the potential to kill say 5% of the world’s population would be pretty effective.
For dramatic effect, it would be great if ‘Disease X’ in our dystopian novel killed people by say haemorrhagic fever (like Ebola and, I think, the Spanish Flu) – have them coughing up and drowning in their own blood – or else by destroying their central nervous system.
Now for our novel, let’s assume that a lab somewhere does manage to develop a highly-infectious, 5%-fatality-rate virus and that this little beauty does escape either through negligence or else even through being released by some disgruntled employee.
Fortunately, using the ‘brilliant’ new mRNA technology, a vaccine which is partially effective in preventing death from the virus is developed in only around a few months. Unfortunately there is only sufficient production and vaccination capacity for around 10% of the population. Naturally, these vaccines are given out to politicians, government officials and the rich, famous and influential. We plebs are not considered worth protecting.
The violence starts
As ordinary people start to see their family members sicken (and in some cases even die) from ‘Disease X’, social order begins to break down:
there are riots as mobs demand vaccinations
deliveries of vaccines are looted and so have to be guarded by armed soldiers
some deliveries are hijacked by their military guards as they’re not willing to see their families die while they protect vaccines for the rich and powerful
soon hospitals and other medical facilities are being attacked and looted as furious mobs search for any vaccines being stored there
The rumours run wild
Next come the phase of wild rumours. These include:
One rumour is that, as the vaccines are based on the miracle new mRNA technology, they alter the genes of the vaccinated protecting them against serious illness from ‘Disease X’. This means that the unvaccinated believe they can gain some protection by injecting themselves with the blood of people who have been vaccinated. Violent mobs begin attacking houses in rich neighbourhoods on the assumption that people there will have been vaccinated. The rich are strung up and their throats cut while they are still alive so their blood can be pumped out by their still beating hearts and collected to be injected by the unvaccinated
Another rumour is that different ethnic groups are getting a disproportionate share of the vaccines. For example, Muslims are told that due to Islamophobia Hindus are getting more than their fair share of vaccines while the Muslim community is being starved of the vaccines. Angry Muslim mobs begin attacking Hindu areas destroying shops and homes and killing many Hindus. In retaliation, Hindus start forming defence groups which attack Muslim areas and we have widespread race riots across all our main cities. Already overwhelmed by anarchy on Britain’s streets, the police and military are powerless to intervene Thousands are killed.
Profiting from the breakdown in law and order, criminal gangs run riot robbing, looting, raping and murdering knowing there are no authorities to stop them.
How it all ends?
Who knows? Eventually martial law is declared. There are curfews every night. Anyone breaking the curfews is either arrested or just shot. Britain has turned into military dictatorship. More people die in the societal breakdown and chaos than are killed by ‘Disease X’.
And for this, we should all give thanks to the wonderful members of the World Economic Forum who deliberately funded the development of ‘Disease X’ in order to save us from ‘Disease X’.
But, of course, these are just the rantings of a failed novelist. These events could never happen in real life.
I’ve been rather unwell and so haven’t had time to think about writing a blog. But during my withdrawal from the human race, I came across this recent YouTube video from Dr John Campbell.
It seems those clever Chinese have really found ‘the big one’. Apparently Chinese scientists have managed to identify a coronavirus from pangolins and developed it in the lab to create a real winner. For a start, this new virus is highly contagious as it is transmitted through the air by people coughing or even breathing. That’s great.
But the most wonderful thing about this virus as that it has a 100% fatality rate in what are called ‘humanised mice’ by destroying the central nervous system and the brain. Just what any self-respecting authoritorian dictatorship would want in its arsenal of weapons.
I wonder how long it will be before this little beauty is accidentally released from a corrupt, dirty, badly-run, unhygienic Chinese lab or before a country full of crazies like Iran gets hold of it and decides to have a little fun?
It has become quite fashionable for much cleverer people than myself to write books explaining why some countries developed while others didn’t. The two books that I remember are Guns, Germs and Steel (1998) by Jared Diamond and Prisoners of Geography (2016) by Tim Marshall. Though I imagine there must be several more of their ilk. But writing this blog, I’ve just come across a book I’ve never read – The Intelligence of Nations (2019) by Richard Lynn and David Becker. The blurb on Amazon says:
Richard Lynn and David Becker update IQs for all nations in the world showing that they range from an average of 69 in sub-Saharan Africa to 105 in Northeast Asia. In addition, they summarize studies of the genetic and climatic causes of these IQ differences and also of their numerous educational, economic, sociological and demographic effects. They conclude by discussing the future of national IQs and argue that dysgenic fertility and immigration will reduce intelligence in the United States and Europe, leaving China to emerge as the world super-power in the second half of the twenty-first century
On Amazon, Guns Germs and Steel has 11,812 reader reviews, Prisoners of Geography has 18,660 reader reviews and The Intelligene of Nations has just 2 reader reviews, both very negative. There are two possible reasons for the disparity in the number of reader reviews. Perhaps The Intelligence of Nations is a lousy book which nobody bought? Or perhaps, people in today’s politically-correct, woke society are terrified of the thought that there might actually be marked differences between the IQs of different races and countries? After all, isn’t that the great taboo?
Why intelligence can differ
We all know that intelligence is a product of heredity and environment. We know that our characteristics are a result of our parents’ genes. Several top sportspeople are children of athletes. And children of academics and scientists tend to have higher IQs than average. Moreover, one’s environment will stimulate, or not, one’s intellectual development – someone brought up in a complex, technologically-advanced Western society is more likely to have a higher IQ than someone from an African village. Tests have shown, for example, that learning a musical instrument can boost a person’s IQ by up to 7 points and my personal belief (though I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere) is that the higher IQ bell curve of the Chinese can be partially attributed to the complexity of the language children have to learn.
Why is this important?
Here’s a chart which claims to show the average IQ by country:
(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
I’ve recently been in a country where the average IQ is 88.6. It’s around 100 in most of Western Europe. And I’ve worked in over 15 countries around the world. The key difference I’ve noticed between higher IQ countries and those with lower scores is the ability to defer gratification. Let me try to explain:
a few years ago I featured a YouTube video made by a Chinese engineer who had been sent to work on a project in Africa. He was amazed at how the Africans had received so much from us supposedly ‘evil’ British colonizers – roads, railways, trains, hospitals, schools and much else – and how the Africans had allowed everything to rot away
if we compare a poor English village from a few hundred years ago with an African village today, the key difference would probably be that in the English village, the men would get together and decide to improve things like roads making it easier for that village to get its goods to market and create prosperity. In the African village, men mostly sit around all day chewing some local drug or drinking cheap alcohol while the women produce babies and farm a small patch of almost worthless scrubland. Nothing develops and nothing improves.
you’ll often see ads on daytime TV from charities showing how they’ve brought fresh water to poverty-stricked African villages. I suspect, though cannot prove, that as soon as the charity workers and film crew have gone, the local men dig up most of the metal piping and sell it for scrap plunging their village back into the poverty the fresh water could have helped them escape
I recently saw a documentary about South Africa’s ongoing collapse and Zimbabwification. One of the key reasons for the country’s economic self-impoverishment was the failure of the state electricity generator, Eskom, to provide constant power. Blackouts of 10 to 12 hours were common. And nobody can run a successful business, create wealth and hire more people if they don’t have a reliable electricity supply. Eskom’s failure was largely due to corruption and incompetence. The company had just become a feeding trough for members of the useless, venal ANC and a bunch of ANC-linked criminal gangs. There was seldom any preventive maintenance done on key equipment; all kinds of equipment would be stolen and sold off for a pittance; trucks with coal would turn up, be weighed, be signed off as having delivered and then would just drive away only to return a couple of days later with the same coal and be signed off as having delivered yet again and much more like this. And when there were power cuts, gangs would go around cutting down electricity cables to sell for scrap metal. Eventually the situation became so desperate that the company had to hire a white man to try and sort it out. But his efforts were constantly blocked by thieving ANC politicians and criminal gangs and so the country’s electricity shortages and economic decline continue
I may not have explained this terribly well. But anyone who has spent any time in any of the world’s more intellectually-challenged countries will know what I mean.
In all these cases, the inability of people to understand the benefits of delayed gratification were ruining their lives. They simply couldn’t see that by investing a bit of time and effort, rather than always looking for immediate gratification, would bring them longer-term benefits.
As we import a million Third-worlders a year, most with a lower IQ than the British (yes, amazingly that is possible), what will happen to our country? Will be see our ever more diverse population giving us a renaissance – a flourishing of initiative, industry and prosperity benefiting us all? After all, as we all know, ‘diversity is our strength’. Or will we gradually turn into the Third World – social breakdown, decline and self-imposed impoverishment?
As Christmas comes closer, I doubt anybody wants to read me moaning about the ongoing collapse of the West due to the stupidity, greed, incompetence and venality of our West-loathing rulers.
So, I propose to give it a rest till Wednesday 3 January 2024.
Just before I go, I noticed this short video from the excellent Simon Webb’s History Debunked YouTube channel bemoaning the quality (or lack thereof) of far too many ‘British’ doctors.
Webb discusses how easy it is to get dodgy medical degrees in some countries. But he doesn’t touch on a possibly more important issue – corruption. A couple of years ago, after a totally avoidable plane crash, Pakistan International Airways found that around a third of its pilots weren’t actually qualified to fly planes. They had either cheated in their tests often by paying someone else to take the tests for them or their families had paid bribes to testing officials or, in the case of attractive female aspirants, offered sexual services in return for qualification. Given that the whole of Pakistan is rotten with corruption with Pakistan being at number 140 out of 180 countries on the Transparency International Corruption Index, at the same level as such earthly paradises as Liberia, Uganda and Cameroon, there is no reason to doubt that a similar (or worse) level of corruption exists in Pakistan’s medical education system.
Slightly further down on the Corruption Index is Nigeria at number 150. Currently around 500 nurses from Nigeria are being investigated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for having paid someone else to take the tests they were required to pass to become eligible to work in Britain.
The number of foreign-educated NHS staff is rising:
Over 100,000 NHS doctors and nurses come from countries where corruption is a way of life: India – 60,533, Nigeria – 22,581, Pakistan – 7,082, Ghana – 6,134, Zimbabwe – 5,917, Egypt – 4,148. So it’s not inconceivable that up to a third of them – 30,000 foreign doctors and nurses employed by our collapsing NHS – achieved their qualifications using ‘creative methods’ rather than actually acquiring the necessary knowledge and competences to practise in the UK.
Anyway have a great holiday and, if possible, try to avoid going anywhere near any multi-culturally-enriching medical staff. Though, with many doctors on strike until the evil Tory government is replaced by Starmer and his band of fools and knaves and with the NHS comatose your chance of seeing someone with any medical qualification, however dubious, are vanishingly small.
I’ve been surprised that our Net-Zero-obsessed rulers don’t seem to have noticed a rather major shift in geopolitics.
For years/decades our grandstanding, virtue-signalling rulers have been pompously and arrogantly telling the main oil- and gas-producing countries that their products are destroying the planet or mankind or whatever and that soon the ‘energy transition’ means that we’ll no longer want to buy any of the oil and gas these countries currently sell us.
So, what have these countries done? Wait passively while their major customers wean themselves off oil and gas? Or just go and find new customers who do want their products?
I’ve written on previous blogs about the rise and rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Many readers will be aware of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) ‘Belt and Road’ programme. This is aimed at making China the world’s economic superpower by gaining control of the world’s natural resources and by dominating trade routes across the globe. The CCP is pursuing the Belt and Road programme mainly through what has been called ‘debt colonisation’. The CCP lends large sums of money to resource-rich or geographically-strategic, but often massively corrupt countries, which are usually dictatorships. Much of the money is siphoned off by the local political, bureaucratic and business elites. Then, when the interest payments can’t be made, Chinese companies controlled by the CCP take over assets such as mines, ports, airfields agricultural land and so on.
But not so many people know about The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The SCO, formed in 2001 with objectives such as combating terrorism, promoting border security, strengthening political ties and expanding economic cooperation, initially included China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. India and Pakistan officially became members of the SCO in 2017, and Iran is in the process of obtaining full-time membership. Coal- and mineral-rich Mongolia is an ‘observer’. Moreover, many more countries are lining up to join.
But the key development, in my uneducated, ignorant and humble opinion, has been the fact that countries which are moving towards membership by becoming ‘dialogue partners’ include key oil- and gas-producing countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia:
(left-click on image then left-click again to see more clearly)
In fact. Mr Putin, who is a key driver of the SCO, was recently on a friendly diplomatic visit to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia:
The Net-Zero-pursuing West is already experiencing the highest energy prices in the world – around four times as expensive as in China or India – and energy shortages due to the economically-suicidal stupidity of Net Zero. One of Biden’s first acts as president was to cancel the Keystone XL pipelinewhich was expected to carry 830,000 barrels per day of Alberta oil sands crude to Nebraska. Following this, the US didn’t have sufficient oil and had to offer to lift sanctions on its arch enemy, socialist dictatorship Venezuela, in return for Venezuela agreeing to supply more oil to the US.
In New South Wales (Australia) the authorities are asking/begging households to cut down their use of airconditioners, washing machines and other electricity-guzzling devices due to a power shortage. And energy rationing and blackouts will soon become a regular feature of our lives in Britain and across the EU. For example, one of the key functions of Britain’s so-called ‘smart meters’ is to enable ‘dynamic pricing’ – this lets electricity suppliers increase the price of electricity at peak times to discourage households from using so much – a policy, like all the ‘green’ policies, which hurts the poorest households the most.
The move of the main oil-and gas-producing countries towards closer relations with China, Russia and the SCO doesn’t bode well for the West. In a few years Western leaders may find to their utter astonishment, what the rest of us have known for years, that you can’t run a modern economy on intermittent, unreliable and ludicrously-expensive wind and solar with a smidgen of nuclear and hydro. What then? Will we go begging the oil- and gas-producers to sell us more of their products just like the idiotic Biden went begging to his arch enemy Venezuela? Will we find that the oil- and gas-producers have committed most of their production to long-term contracts with members of the SCO? Will we then be told that they can sell us what we need, but this will be at much higher prices than they sell to the SCO countries as we haven’t set up long-term supply contracts? Or will they just tell us – ‘you said you didn’t want our oil and gas, so unfortunately we’ve commited our production to countries who do want what we sell. Maybe come back next year and we’ll see if we have a bit to spare for you’?
Hopefully our rulers have thought about this and made contingency plans to rescue the declining West from the catastrophic effects of our rulers’ own self-imposed, self-destructive and scientifically-ignorant Net-Zero policies?
First let me say that I’m no fan of Russell Brand. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of his videos. However, this one came up when I accessed YouTube a couple of days ago. I only watched the first 10 minutes. But it opened my eyes to how totally deranged the US mainstream media has become over the possibility of the return of Donald Trump as the next president.
At around 2 minutes 30 secs into the video Brand features an interview Trump gave when he jokingly said that he would become a dicstator only on Day 1 of being relected. It’s a joke. OK?
Then from about 5 minutes 30 secs till around the 10 minute point we see po-faced mainstream media ‘pundits’ seriously discussing how re-electing Trump will destroy American democracy and turn the country into a discatorship. Just to help viewers understand what a threat Trump is to democracy one channel even had pictures of Mao and Mussolini in the background.
I realise our own BBC hates Britain and despises most ordinary British people. But our biased BBC seems to be a beacon of balance and moderation compared to the hysterically deranged anti-Trump American media:
As our Western media continues to portray the Russia/Ukraine conflct as a clear case of good (plucky democratic Ukrainians) vs evil (Putin’s Orc army), I’m deeply troubled by what I see as misreporting.
First, let me make it clear – I am not condoning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin has made it very clear for at least the last 15 years that he saw Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO as an existential threat to Russia and warned, “not an inch eastwards”.
The West arrogantly ignored Putin’s warnings. That was dumb.
At a NATO conference in April 2008, where Putin was invited to address NATO leaders, he warned that inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, and thus parking NATO troops and missiles directly on Russia’s borders, would be seen as an existential threat to Russia’s security.
For years, Putin has repeated his warnings that he would not allow Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, to join NATO. In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would be unacceptable – the first minute of this 3-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat
Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO’s open door,” Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”
There seem to have been at least two disastrous misjudgements which led to the current war:
The West thought Putin was bluffing. But Putin wasn’t bluffing. Putin doesn’t do bluffing. After all, he has had three successful mini-wars in the last few years – the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia in which Russia routed the Georgian military; the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea without a shot being fired and the Russian invasion (sorry, I meant “peace-keeping force”) during the Armenia and Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
It would seem that Putin believed the Ukraine invasion would be just another of Russia’s quick mini-wars – charge into Ukraine with 169,000 troops, take the main cities, depose the West-friendly government and install a Russian glove-puppet regime. But Putin got that one horribly wrong and so now we have a real mess on our hands.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that NATO – due to its arrogance, short-sightedness and catastrophic misjudgement of Putin’s character – possibly bears just as much responsibility for the Ukraine mess as Putin’s nationalist aggression and overestimation of Russia’s military power compared to Ukraine’s.
Though, apart from one article by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, I haven’t seen such a balanced view expressed anywhere else in the Western mainstream media. In fact, the background to the war seems to have been forgotten as all the Western mainstream media only pumps out the ‘good versus evil’ propaganda..
David Craig, on January 20th, 2024
