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Skip to contenttraditionalRIGHTTraditionalism in a changing world.MenuHomeAboutVictoriaResourcesPlaying with Nuclear War — and Some Advice for My Friends in SwedenThe Blob, the Washington foreign policy establishment, is playing with nuclear war. So what if Russia goes nuclear in Ukraine? We will just pile on even more sanctions, make Russia more of an outcast, and tell her she must grovel in the dirt to be readmitted to the concert of powers. Some are going further: the lead op ed in the April 28 Wall Street Journal, by former deputy undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey, was titled, “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War.”No, it can’t. A single nuclear weapon detonated on one American city would do this country more damage than it has suffered in all its wars to date. No foreign policy goal can justify such a price. No threat to our “credibility,” no diplomatic humiliation, no “abandonment of our allies” can outweigh the consequences of a single American city getting nuked. Not only would we suffer tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by the blast, and far more doomed to radiation sickness, we would have a collapsed financial system and economy, a completely discredited government and quite possibly a revolution or devolution as people withdrew their allegiance to a state that had brought catastrophe upon them.What is the danger of this happening? Unfortunately, it’s fairly high. The course of events leading to it is already taking place in Ukraine. Russia and her armed forces have been humiliated by the failure of their initial campaign in Ukraine. They have regrouped and are trying again, with more limited goals. As of writing this (May 1), the outcome of the second Russian offensive is unclear, but it seems to be making slow progress at best. If it fails, the initiative is likely to pass to Ukraine as the shift will be a natural event after a defense succeeds. But in part, it will also be because of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine. At some point, the shift may permit Ukraine to go on the offensive.What does Russia do then? What does President Putin do to save his neck? Near the top of the list will be escalating by using tactical nuclear weapons. Where does the escalation stop?A wise U.S. and NATO foreign policy establishment would now be building a golden bridge over which Russia can retreat rather than going nuclear. Asking itself the question, “What would Bismark do?”, it would call a conference in, say, Vienna. A deal could look something like this:Ukraine sells the portions of Luhansk and Donetsk that had already declared their independence to Russia, along with a narrow land corridor connecting them to Crimea (which remains Russian). The price is high enough to make a substantial contribution to re-building Ukraine.Ukraine agrees not to join NATO unless Russia also joins. That would leave open the door to the alliance Christendom needs, one running from the U.S. Pacific coast to the Russian Pacific coast, oriented south.Russia agrees to Ukraine joining the EU.Russia cedes East Prussia (the “Kaliningrad Oblast”) to Ukraine, giving Ukraine a Baltic as well as a Black Sea outlet for her grain exports. Russia also funds building a new, high capacity railway, not running through Belarus, connecting Ukraine with the East Prussian port of Konigsberg.What does Ukraine think of all this? It doesn’t matter. In true Bismarkian style, the great powers make the deal and inform the smaller powers what they are going to do. Otherwise, no deal is possible in cases such as this.And in Vienna, let the ball commence. A word to my good friends in Sweden. Sweden is considering joining NATO. Don’t do it. The reason Sweden still has Stockholm’s Old City, the wonderful 18th century dockyard at Karlskrona and much else is that it has not gone to war since 1815. As Swedes know, Sweden did almost join Germany in both World Wars. Had it done so, Stockholm would have no Gamle Stan, and Karlskrona would have been shelled or bombed flat. After their abysmal performance in Ukraine, neither Sweden nor Finland nor anyone else has much reason to fear Russia’s conventional armed forces. And even a mad Putin is not likely to nuke Stockholm or Helsinki in a neutral Sweden or Finland. Neutrality has benefitted Sweden greatly for more than two centuries. Don’t kill the chicken that has laid so many golden eggs.Author William S. LindPosted on May 4, 2022Maneuver Warfare in UkraineHas maneuver warfare turned up in the conflict in Ukraine? Yes, and it has done so in ways that are instructive.The original Russian campaign plan was classic maneuver warfare at the operational level. Stavka has focused on operational art since before World War II, indeed in some ways back into the Czarist period. But as I said in a previous column, the Russian army in Ukraine fell into a trap of its own making: its units could not deliver on the tactical level what the campaign plan required on the operational level. This is not unique to the Russians. In the First Persian Gulf War, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps could not move fast enough tactically to attain its operational objective, the encirclement of Iraq’s Republican Guard. In World War I, my favorite German general, Max Hoffman, said of the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, that his plans were operationally brilliant but his army could not execute them. That raises the question of whether a plan for an army that cannot do it is a good plan. I tend to think not.On the Ukrainian side, the April 14 Wall Street Journal, in an article by Daniel Michaels titled “NATO Training Retooled Ukraine Army,” reported that:NATO countries also helped Ukrainian military leaders adopt an approach called mission common, where higher ups set combat goals and devolve decision-making far down the chain of command, even to individual soldiers.This is Auftragstaktik, one of the central components of maneuver warfare. I wonder just who in NATO the Ukrainians got it from? The U.S. Army is an unlikely source, since, though it may talk about Auftragstaktik, it does not do it. The translation as “mission command” suggests the British army was a source, since that is the term they use. The Bundeswehr is also a possibility, although I don’t think it was involved in training in Ukraine.A more intriguing possibility is that Ukrainians have some ancestral memory of Auftragstaktik. Ukraine first received its independence from Germany in World War I, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought for Germany in World War II. All is not forgotten. Some years ago, when speaking to the Balitic Defense College, I said, “Don’t model yourselves on the U.S. Army of today. Model yourselves on the Wehrmacht.” many of the students responded by saying, “sure. My grandfather fought in the Wehrmacht.” As disorienting as it may be to Americans, in much of central and eastern Europe, the Germans were the good guys since they were fighting the bad guys, the Bolsheviks. As the Russian mother of a friend of mine, who was in Riga when the Red Army arrived in 1940, said to me, “When the Germans came in 1941, it was liberation.”As the Russians gear up for a new offensive in eastern Ukraine, maneuver warfare also has something to say to the Ukrainian high command: do not let your army get encircled.From what I read in the newspapers, Ukraine has stationed most of its best units in the country’s east. Russian operational art dictates that the Russian goal must be to encircle those forces. From the Ukrainian perspective, the desire to defend every inch of ground is understandable. But it can also easily be fatal. If Ukraine must choose between giving up ground or having its mobile forces encircled, maneuver warfare theory says to pull those forces back, even if that means the Russians take Donetsk and Luhansk. Ground can always be re-taken, but Ukraine’s ability to reconstitute mobile forces is small. If they are lost because of the blunder of adopting a cordon defense, they are lost for good. At that point, Ukraine will have no capability of launching a counter-offensive and the war will be decided. (Maneuver warfare theory also points out that a counter-offensive is often more powerful than an offensive, because in the former the enemy will have few or no reserves. That’s what happened to the French in 1940.)If Ukraine were to adopt a defense based on an operational level counter-attack, it could also make use of an ability it has demonstrated, namely to hold on to urban areas come hell or high water. Mariupol is only one example. By holding the cities and larger towns in areas where it hopes to counter-attack, it not only ties down large Russian forces, it also blocks the Russians from using the railways to resupply, because the tracks run through those urban areas. A defense based only on holding fortresses can do nothing but delay defeat, but a defense that combines holding fortresses with a strong mobile reserve can be powerful.More lessons for maneuver warfare and many other things will undoubtedly flow from the war in Ukraine. Let’s hope one of them is not that nuclear war must be avoided at all cost.Author William S. LindPosted on April 20, 2022The Ghost of 1914World War I ended with a global pandemic. Has the next world war begun with one? I pray not, but no historian can look upon the war in Ukraine and not see the ghost of 1914 rising wraithlike from it – a ghost which, I fear, bears a striking resemblance to Conrad. When was Przemsyl last in the news?When we think back to World War I, to its origins, its course and its consequences, the parallels are frightening. The first is that, in 1914, no one expected war or wanted war – at least a general European war. Kaiser Wilhelm II certainly did not. On the contrary: as soon as he realized, too late, where events were leading, he made desperate efforts to head them off. He ordered a cable sent to Vienna telling Austria to take Belgrade and then stop, but the German Foreign Office did not send it. Tsar Nicholas only approved the order for mobilization with great reluctance; his war and Foreign Ministers acted before he could change his mind. The Kaiser even halted his army on the Belgian frontier when the British Foreign Secretary hinted Britain might stay out – but then Grey pushed the British cabinet in.Are events today again running away from those who seek de-escalation? Russia expected a quick victory (like everyone in 1914), but now finds herself bogged down in a stalemate with no clear exit. As wars go on, they tend to spread. The West is upping the ante in the help it is extending to Ukraine. At what point does Russia start hitting Western weapons shipments while they are still on NATO’s soil? How long can China remain on the fence when Russia is her principal ally? If Russia uses chemical weapons in urban combat, does the U.S. wrongly declare them “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and thereby open the nuclear Pandora’s box? There are a lot of ways for this conflict to get bigger, fast.The parallels do not end with the merely military. In 1914, the world had a global economy. Only in the last decade did the value of global trade reach 1914 levels, as a percentage of the global economy. But even before Russia invaded Ukraine, America’s use of economic sanctions as weapons was swiftly undermining Globalism, as did the Coronapanic and its effects on global supply chains. Now, every country is striving to “re-shore” whatever it can, in a security-driven race towards autarky.World War I ended with the destruction of three great, Christian, conservative empires, the Russian, the German, and the Austro-Hungarian, with ongoing consequences for Christendom. What states may fail as a result of the war in Ukraine and its potential expansion? Then, the old empires reformed as republics. But now, we live in a time when the state is in decline and non-state entities are rising. Fourth Generation War theory says that a defeated Russia might break up still further, as the Soviet Union did, to become a vast stateless region with lots of nukes and delivery systems floating around.What then, Russophobes, which is to say the Blob, the neocons, and the neo-libs? You destroyed states such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya and have not been able to put them back together. What is your plan for a stateless region running from the Polish border to the Pacific Ocean?The political establishments in Washington and the EU would be wise to remember that World War I brought a wholesale collapse of establishments. The monarchies in Russia, Austria, and Germany were swept away, replaced in the first by Bolshevism and the latter two by socialism. Shortly after the war, in 1922, the Italian political establishment was replaced by Fascism, and in 1933 in Germany by National Socialism. Do the cultural Marxist elites that now rule in Washington and most European capitals think they are likely to survive a cataclysm they created? (I promise them their replacements will come from the right, not the left.)If those establishments want to survive, they need now to bend every effort to de-escalate the war in Ukraine, to build a golden bridge Russia can withdraw over without humiliation, one where the Kremlin can claim some sort of victory (i.e., Ukraine will never join NATO and Crimea is recognized as Russian) and all Western sanctions are quickly removed. The U.S., the E.U., and Russia then join to rebuild Ukraine.In 1914, the post-1815 European order sleepwalked itself into a world war that swept it from the board. In 2022, the post-1945 world order is on the verge of doing the same.Author William S. LindPosted on April 1, 2022Is the Defense Now Dominant?As of this writing (March 19), the Russian invasion of Ukraine is stuck in the mud. That is bad news for Russia, because time favors Ukraine. As Western military aid pours in and Ukraine mobilizes all its resources, the correlation of forces shifts in Ukraine’s favor. With the typical Russian logistical collapse, it is hard to see how it can regain the initiative. This is a problem with Blitzkrieg-type offenses: if they fail, the next move is not obvious.Russia’s failure to date raises a broader question: is the defense now dominant? If it is, that would come as no surprise to Clausewitz: he argued that the defense is inherently stronger than the offense. Were not that the case, we would routinely see the weaker side in a conflict take the offensive.What we’ve seen so far in Ukraine makes it tempting to think the defense is now generally stronger. The ability of Ukrainian forces armed with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to stop Russia’s armored offensive appears to suggest that is the case. Broadly, the packaging of firepower in smaller containers has historically helped the defenders. In World War I, where the defense was dominant, developments such as land mines, barbed wire, and machine guns enabled individual soldiers or small groups to lay down firepower or create fortifications that previously would have required much larger units. In 1914, a German infantry regiment was armed almost exclusively with rifles. By 1918, it had many machine guns, trench mortars, and hand grenades, plus a few artillery pieces (Sturmartillerie). This pushing down of firepower to lower levels made the 1918 regiment far more powerful than its 1914 counterpart.A hypothetical situation allows us to see the same phenomenon: what if at Stalingrad Germany and its allies had Panzerfausts in large numbers? Would the Soviet armored forces that created the encirclement still have been able to break through the Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian units holding the flanks?But there is another side to this coin. Before we jump to the conclusion that the defense is now dominant, we need to factor out the elements that are unique to the current situation in Ukraine. First, Russia committed the common mistake of underestimating its opponent. That in turn led to Russia attacking with second and third-class units that mirrored Russian units throughout history: conscripts with low morale, poor training, and, again, logistics that quickly collapsed. In the 1970s, I visited Professor John Erickson, who wrote the definitive history of the Soviet Army in World War II, at his university office in Scotland. One of the things he said to me was, “Do you want to understand the Russian army today? Ask yourself what it was like under Czar Nicholas I.”My information is that Russia has four first-class divisions, manned by well trained, long service volunteers and given Russia’s best equipment. It held these in reserve until it’s offensive failed. Now it has committed two of them, but, again, once an armored offensive has failed, it is challenging to get it moving, especially with weak logistics. All those failed Russian units still have to be fed, fueled, and given ammunition, plus the new units. In addition, March means the Rasputitsa, the dissolution, where the roads all turn into bottomless mud holes. Russian logistics are heavily rail-based, but the Ukrainians still hold cities near the Russian-Ukrainian border through which the rail lines pass. As a German military historian, I have to say this is deja vu all over again, in all the same places, but with the boot now on the other foot.Yet another factor particular to the situation, but certainly not historically unique, is that the Russians’ operational plan demanded more of the tactical units than they could deliver. This was to some extent true of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan in 1914, although she was actually winning on the Marne until the fatal order to withdraw was given (over Kaiser Whilhelm’s objections). Max Hoffman wrote in his memoirs of the Austrian chief of staff, Conrad, that his plans were brilliant but his army could not execute them. But is a plan good if the army it is written for can’t do it? This was a dilemma for the Soviet Army throughout the Cold War, and it seems like it still is.These factors particular to the situation make me hesitant to declare that the defense has once again established its dominance over the offense. During and after the 1973 war in the Middle East, the vulnerability of Israeli tanks to Egyptian Sagger anti-tank missiles, supplied by the USSR, led many experts to declare the days of the Blitzkrieg were over. But Sharon’s classic operational maneuver, crossing the Suez Canal and taking Egyptians from the rear, showed it still had a great deal of life in it, despite some Egyptian victories at the tactical level.A higher level trumps a lower. At the tactical level, the Ukrainian defense has defeated the initial Russian operational plan. But that plan was defective, in that the units ordered to execute it could not. As to whether the defense can now prevail over a good operational plan for an army that can execute it, I think the jury is still out.Author William S. LindPosted on March 27, 2022Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is a Disaster for ChristendomAs of this writing, March 4, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned into a typical Russian mess. Ukraine is not dead yet. The Russian army’s logistics have broken down, as they usually do. And Russia has suffered a monumental self-inflicted defeat at the moral level of war, which is the most powerful level.But the magnitude of the disaster is only visible if we step back a bit and look at the grand strategic effects it has on all of Christendom, the great civilization that stretches from the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific Ocean coast through Britain, Europe, and Russia, to meet the Pacific once again. Just when we thought Christendom’s civil wars had ended, allowing us to focus on the new threat from the global south, Mr. Putin has plunged us back into an east-west conflict. It is hard to imagine a worse development for Christendom’s future, short of nuclear war.To see this picture clearly, we need to remember our civilization as it was in March, 1914. Quite simply, it ruled the world. Even in places such as China that remained independent, our culture was the model everyone aspired to. Christendom itself was full of self confidence. It knew it was the best, most productive, most morally sound culture the world had ever produced (this slighted China, an equally successful culture, but in 1914 China seemed hopelessly backward).Then, in August of that awful year, Christendom launched itself on the first of three civil wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. In the course of the 20th century, Christendom devoured itself. Not only did it kill a hundred million or more of its own people and reduce much of its physical patrimony to ashes, it lost all confidence in itself. In fact, its own elites became its worst enemy, worms gnawing its vitals from within, replacing the faith that created it with an ideology, Marxism (of several varieties), that called on it to destroy itself.Then the Cold War ended. Christendom could be reunited. But it wasn’t. The Blob, the American foreign policy establishment, made an error of vast proportions. It crowed over Russia as a victor, when it should have welcomed a non-Communist Russia back into the Concert of Powers. Not only should the U.S. and western Europe not have expanded NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, they should have welcomed Russia into NATO. Why? To meet the threat rising from the global south.Today, not a single Russian soldier stands on American or western European soil. But both are swamped by millions of far more dangerous invaders, immigrants from other cultures very different from our own. They are fleeing their own defective cultures, but they bring those defective cultures with them because they are all they know. At least the American picture is not too bad; most of the illegals pouring across our southern border are Christians. But many of those breaching Europe’s borders are Moslems. They are not coming to join Christendom; their intention is to Islamicize us – by whatever means necessary.Until Russia invaded Ukraine, a “reset” was still possible. President Trump understood we needed Russia as a friend and ally, not an enemy. He grasped the fact that the real threat is south-north, not east-west. Russia could still have been invited to join NATO. After all, she holds Christendom’s vast right flank, running from the Black Sea to the Pacific.Now, Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has killed any possibility of ending the east-west conflict to face south. The Blob and the Pentagon are of course delighted; they can go on pretending that the world is still shaped by great power rivalries, that nothing need change, that the invasion from the south is just the movement of “undocumented workers.” They forget that endless civil war is what destroyed the Roman Empire. We now face what may be the last act, the last fatal civil war, in Christendom.Is there a way out? One, I think. President Putin could become the new Lavrentii Beria. Beria, as the head of the KGB, was in charge of Stalin’s terror machine. Shortly after Stalin’s death, he was taken out and shot. Dead, he was more useful to Russia than he was alive. Why? Because all the Blunders and horrors of Stalin’s regime could be explained with, “Oh, that was Beria’s doing.”Mr. Putin has made an enormous blunder. He has gravely embarrassed the Russian army, never a good thing in Russian politics. Were he suddenly removed, the invasion of Ukraine could all be blamed on him – especially if he were not available to deny it.If you pick up your paper in the morning and find a headline announcing Mr. Putin is no longer President of the Russian Federation, don’t be surprised.Author William S. LindPosted on March 14, 2022Putin Rolls the Iron DiceAs of this writing (Friday, February 25), the Russian campaign in Ukraine looks like a model of maneuver warfare, a direct follow-on to the Soviet campaign against the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945. But the year is not 1945, and the results may be an operational victory but a strategic defeat for Russia.Why is that a likely outcome? Not because of Western economic sanctions, which Russia has prepared for. The strategic question for which I suspect the Kremlin has no answer is, once you have taken Ukraine, what do you do with it? Any government installed in Kiev by Russia will have no legitimacy. The U.S. just found out in Afghanistan what happens when the foreign troops backing such a government go home. If Russia keeps substantial forces in Ukraine to buttress its puppet government, those Russian soldiers will be targets for Ukrainian resistance forces. How will a constant, if low-level stream of Russian casualties play on the home front?How does Russia get a strategic win out of all this? By annexing Ukraine? That also runs into the problem of endless Ukrainian partisan warfare. It is difficult to see a positive ending for Russia here.I did not expect President Putin to take the risk of invading Ukraine. It’s more than a risk, it is a gamble, throwing the iron dice of war and hoping for a win. As the old saying goes, hope makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.Why did Putin do it? My guess – Zeppelin reconnaissance only reveals so much – is that he expected a diplomatic solution. But NATO, led by Washington, offered him nothing, dismissing Russian security concerns and stressing that Ukraine had every right to join NATO.Why did the American foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob, take a position that almost forced Russia to go to war? Maybe the answer is just the Blob’s usual combination of hubris and incompetence. But it is also possible it wanted Russia to get into what may prove a strategically unwinnable war. With the rest of the American Establishment, it hates Russia because Russia rejects cultural Marxism, as do most of the former Soviet bloc countries. It seems they know a thing or two about Marxism and are not so eager to get another dose of it. In looking at the Blob’s motives, remember that the U.S. has no real interests at stake in Ukraine. Our involvement is strategically gratuitous. Ideological motivation, in Washington, not Moscow, may be at least a partial explanation for the unhelpful role the U.S. has played.On the Russian side, President Putin began with a brilliant move (only former President Trump, among American leaders, acknowledged its brilliance). By recognizing the independence of Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, he put the Ukrainian government on the horns of a dilemma. If it accepted the loss of those provinces, it was finished politically. If Ukraine invaded them, Russia could present its attack on Ukraine as a defensive response. Russia would have been in a relatively strong position at the moral level of war. But Putin jumped the gun, with the result that Russia is now universally seen as the aggressor. There are times when inaction is a form of action, and Mr. Putin did not grasp that this was such a time.Perhaps the most important question at this point in the conflict is, will it expand to include NATO? I do not expect NATO to change its position and intervene in Ukraine. But there are at least two scenarios that lead to NATO involvement in the fighting. The first is if, in response to Russian moves toward western Ukraine, Poland sends troops in to secure territory that was, between the wars, Polish, including the important city of Lemberg (now Lviv). The other is similar: if Russia decides to take Moldova en passant, Romania, which also claims Moldova, could intervene. In both cases, the armed forces of NATO countries would have taken the offensive, so NATO would not be obligated to come to their aid. But the hawkish mood in Washington might lead it to do so, with incalculable results.What does this state vs. state war mean for Fourth Generation war theory, and vice versa? Those who reject the 4GW concept will say it proves their case that Great Power rivalry will continue to determine international affairs. But breaks between generations of war are not clean. If they were, today’s U.S. military would still be modeling itself on the Second Generation French Army of the 1930s, a model that went down to defeat in six weeks in 1940 when hit by the Third Generation Wehrmacht. Institutional change takes time, often too much time for contemporary Great Powers to maintain their positions.4GW theory makes another point: if Russia fails strategically, there may be serious danger that the Russian state, not just its current government, falls apart. That was a real possibility during the Yeltsin years, and the reason President Putin is popular in Russia is that he has strengthened the state. The Blob would see Russia’s disintegration with delight, at least until the implications of a vast, stateless region with nuclear weapons hits home – possibly with a mushroom cloud or two.As someone who recognizes Russia’s importance in the defense of Christendom, holding as she does its whole right flank from the Black Sea to Vladivostok, I am not delighted by the potential the war in Ukraine holds for a delegitimizing Russian strategic defeat. But Russia seems to have fallen into the same trap Japan jumped into in the 1930s, the trap of acting out of time. Japan saw itself as merely doing what the European powers did before World War I, invading other countries and subjecting them to its empire. But the post-war world was a different place, and what was legitimate in 1880 was not legitimate in 1937. President Putin’s apparent goal, restoring the Russian Empire, would have been acceptable in the 19th century, maybe in most of the 20th. But today, it is not, unless it is accomplished peacefully. Let us pray that the consequences of Russia acting out of time do not engulf us all.Author William S. LindPosted on February 27, 2022Putin’s GambitAs of writing this (Tuesday, February 15), Russia has not invaded Ukraine. I doubt that it will. Why? Because Russia has more to gain by not invading than by taking all the risks war entails.On the surface, that may not seem to be the case. Russia has spent a great deal of money positioning her armed forces for an invasion. By not going ahead with it, she might look weak, at least in the eyes of fools. The neocons and the Blob – the Washington foreign policy establishment – will claim threats of U.S. sanctions forced President Putin to back down, even though he has repeatedly said he has no intention of going to war.That points to the first benefit to Russia by not attacking: Putin will appear to be a man of his word, while the Blob will have been exposed as an hysterical fraud. That will not hurt the Blob domestically – it and its neo-con lampreys have been wrong on everything since the end of the Cold War yet remain in power – but the rest of the world will take note. It will be less likely to react the next time the Blob barks at the bear.For Russia, the biggest payoff from not invading is to have proven that it can. The Russian military will have carried out (quite well) a completely convincing mobilization for a conflict in Ukraine. No one doubts that, should she be forced to do so, Russia can take Kiev in two weeks. There is no near-term possibility for Ukraine to join NATO, so Russia has no need to act presently. But everyone now knows what the Russian Army can do.Meanwhile, the financial cost to Russia of her extensive mobilization is easily repaid by intelligence she has gathered. Intelligence on what? On what NATO and especially the U.S. can and cannot see. The Blob’s panic has led Washington to reveal a great deal of intelligence, which in turn points to sources. The Russians now have a clear picture of what U.S. intelligence can perceive and, of even greater importance, what it cannot. Maskirovka – masking or camouflaging planned actions, especially the massing of forces before an offensive – has long been a central Russian principle of war. Russia – but not the U.S. – knows from what we revealed where her maskirovka worked. She can do more of what worked while trying to do better elsewhere.Finally, Russia will have reminded the world of the limits on American military power. On the Eurasian continent, continental powers are dominant and maritime powers, including the United States, are less important players. Fortunately, President Biden realized we could do nothing effective and ruled out sending American troops to Ukraine. But what he did instead, dispatching handfuls of paratroopers to Poland and Germany and a few light armor units to Romania, showed how weak we are on the continent, not how strong. Due to our shortages of both air and sea lift and the enormous logistics train American units require, all we could contribute to a major continental war is a few speed bumps.As I have said in previous columns, this whole situation was easy to avoid. All the U.S. had to do was to assure President Putin, in writing, that the U.S. was and would remain opposed to any changes in NATO’s by-laws. Those by-laws prohibit any country that has a border dispute with a neighbor from joining NATO. That would toss the hot potato back in Ukraine’s lap, since ending its border disputes with Russia would mean accepting Russian ownership of Crimea, something no government in Kiev can do. Problem solved.On the other side of the ledger, President Putin must know that the course and outcome of wars are never predictable. Russia could probably get away with slicing off a corner of Ukraine, enough to get a land bridge to Crimea. But more than that would mean sailing into uncharted waters, waters where the Russian state could run hard aground.In the end, Russia has more to gain by not invading Ukraine than by going to war. This is one of the rare situations where the low risk course offers more gain than a high-risk venture. I suspect President Putin saw it this way from the outset. He is now positioned well to gain from his gambit, and not just in central Europe.Author William S. LindPosted on February 21, 2022His Majesty’s BirthdayAs I do every year, on this January 27 I phoned my liege lord and reporting senior, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to offer congratulations on his birthday. I expected to find him in high spirits, thanks to the growing Reichsburger movement in today’s Germany, which recognizes that he was the country’s last legitimate government. Nor is that all: Germans are organizing a new, grass-roots movement to put Prussia back on the map. The Hohenzollerns’ stock is on the rise, and rightly so.After a few rings, the telephone was answered, not by His Majesty but by Her Majesty, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria. She was beloved by the German people, and I was delighted to be able to tell her that she still is. But I still needed to speak to her Willi.“His Majesty expected your call,” she said, “and would love to speak with you, but right now he is unreachable. The Reisekaiser is off on a grand tour of the United States, and the crowds welcoming him are so vast and enthusiastic that he cannot predict his schedule. He requested that you talk with me instead.”“Well, I am both honored and delighted with the opportunity to do so,” I replied. “But I must say I’m curious as to why he is receiving such a rapturous reception in my country. He deserves it, of course, but just over a century ago Americans looked on him with somewhat less favor.”“Yes, well, they now know what they were told about him and the German Empire were all British lies. But more than that, they know the dirty little man they elected President, Mr. Wilson, also lied to them. They did not want to go to war, and they re-elected him because he promised not to, and then in a month after his inauguration he did. And all those American boys died, and the Spanish flu was brought to America, with America fighting for the wrong side. I understand the Devil has given Mr. Wilson quite a splendid palace in Hell. It even has air conditioning!”“Yes, well, he earned it,” I replied. “But I think people nowadays would like to hear what you, and all the other good Christian women in Heaven, think about our time. You represented everything good in women, not just German women but women everywhere. What do you have to say to us?”“Well, for me and for all the women here, it is just sad, very sad. We do not understand why so many women in your time have unsexed themselves. They want to live the lives of men! Why? Do they not understand that women’s work is not only different from mens’ it is more, not less, important? It is women who pass the culture, our Western, Christian culture, on to the next generation, boys and girls alike, as mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, neighbors, and friends. When women fail to do that duty, it goes undone, because it is not natural to men. And when it is not done, civilization itself is lost, as you see all around you. Oh, when we compare our time to yours, we weep. Why do you think that when the Blessed Virgin appears in your world, she does so weeping?”“So when your husband said women are for “Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche” –children, the kitchen, and the church – he was not putting them down?”, I asked.“No, not at all,” the Kaiserin replied. “Men and women are equal but different. Up here, that difference is celebrated. After all, did not the Virgin Mother herself devote her life to her child, her kitchen, and the newly-created church? What higher calling could we have then hers?”“So what would your message be to American and German women today,” I asked?“Just be a woman!” she said. “But there is something more I would say to some of your women, the black women in America. The pain you are suffering as your young men shoot and murder each other is something you can stop. And perhaps only you can stop it. How? Refuse to have anything to do with young black men unless they get rid of their guns. Take a page from 19th century women in the Temperance Movement. They said, ‘Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,’ and that convinced many young men to give up their drinking. Tell your men that it’s us or the guns, you can’t have both. Organize a pledge campaign, march in the streets, take your sons by their ears to the gun buy-backs.”“So sometimes women do need to get out of the kitchen, you’re saying?” I asked.“Yes! But not by becoming men. The women who did so much good in the Temperance Movement still dressed like women, had the manners of women, kept their homes clean, and put three good meals on the table each day for their men. Women’s moral power comes from being women, not pretend men. And because we use that moral power only when men fail, we are stronger than men.”“And America’s black women should see Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata?”“Yes, exactly,” said Her Majesty, laughing.“Well, it sounds to me as if you should follow his Majesty and visit my country. Our women need to hear you.”“Willi said exactly the same thing in his last cable. He told me the Imperial Zeppelin will be at my disposal, and I look forward to the trip. He said the President’s daughter, that nice girl Alice Roosevelt, would love to be my hostess.”“Hmm, Alice Roosevelt? ‘Nice’ was not the adjective usually applied to her. You, the nicest woman in all of Germany, and she should be an entertaining combination. Well, thank you, Your Majesty, and please pass my birthday best wishes on to your husband. And let me close by saying all Germany awaits your return mit Ungeduld.” “Komme gleich,” als die Osterreicher sagen,” she replied with a laugh. And so she rang offAuthor William S. LindPosted on January 28, 2022January 6: The Unasked QuestionThis column is not another retrospective on the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021. rather it is a retrospective on the recent retrospective of the original event.What we saw in that retrospective is what anyone who understands the system would expect: false claims that the original event was a coup attempt, an Insurgency, even a rebellion (it was just a riot); that President Trump intended and designed it (he was as surprised as anyone else); that he should have rushed to the Capitol and told his people to stand down (It would have been a good move on his part, but security would never have allowed it); and that only the right would ever do such a thing (Well the left regularly riots, loots and burns in our cities nationwide). The left’s hypocrisy reeks to the heavens.But the most interesting thing about the retrospective was the question that was never asked, at least not within the Establishment or it’s kept media: why did Americans think they had to physically invade the Capitol in order to be heard?The answer is that the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill was the flip side of the “cancel” coin. When the Establishment decrees that anyone who voted for President Trump or fails to abase himself before cultural Marxism becomes an “un-person,” those people have only one way to make themselves heard: take to the streets.To understand the dimensions of this problem, realize that somewhere between a third and a half of all Americans have been “canceled.” What that means is that from the Establishment’s standpoint they no longer exist. They may not be allowed to speak. Their interests can have no representation. They may not be quoted or published. If their politically incorrect views, speech or writing can be brought to the attention of their employer, that employer must fire them or be canceled himself. They must be driven from their field and made unemployable. They may be physically attacked without fear of their attackers being charged with a “hate crime.” They are political Untermenschen, sub-humans, and if they or their property are subjected to a Krystalnacht by the goons of the left, well, they had it coming. And the event will not make the papers.In its impudence, the Establishment, which is wholly owned by cultural Marxism, thinks there will be no blowback for canceling somewhere upwards of 100 million Americans. Well, on January 6, 2021, there was blowback. A year later, through their rigged retrospective, they smirked that their kept media wrote the story, so the ordinary Americans who made themselves heard that day are presented as monsters. The house owns the gaming tables, sucker, so place your bet and lose.An objective observer would realize there is another America out beyond the Establishment and its rigged media whores. That America is made up of the worker bees who make the Establishment drones’ lives comfortable. They see the game that is being played at their expense. They know they have been declared “unpersons,” that they have no voice, and their interests do not matter. At a certain point, events will propel them out into the streets across the whole country, not just Capitol Hill. That is what happens when you tell everyone who voted for Mr. Trump, and millions more who did not vote but reject cultural Marxism, to go f*** themselves. And that is the message the retrospective on January 6 sent.Author William S. LindPosted on January 14, 2022January 14, 2022Ukraine: The BackstoryAmerican establishment media, which combine historical ignorance with shallow ideology, are presenting Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine as just typical Russian bad boy behavior. However, there is a backstory to current events, and if we understand that backstory Russia’s actions become a good deal more understandable.The backstory begins with the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908. The Russian foriegn minister at that time, Izvolsky, made a deal with his Austrian counterpart, Aehrenthal, that Russia would not object to Austria annexing Bosnia if Austria would similarly not object to Russia taking the straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean (both territories were then owned by the Ottoman Empire). Izvolsky set off for other European capitals to obtain their OK to the deal – something Aehrenthal knew he would not get. Austria, however, moved quickly to annex Bosnia, leaving Izvolsky looking like a sucker and Russia humiliated. In 1914, one of the main arguments of the pro-war faction in St. Petersburg was that anything was better than another embarrassment like that of 1908.Now the backstory moves forward to the late 1980s. As the Soviet Union careened towards dissolution, the United States assured Gorbachev that if Moscow dissolved the Warsaw Pact, NATO would not expand into the former Pact countries – Poland, Hungary, Rumania, etc. Then, after the USSR was gone, NATO did exactly that. When Russia objected and pointed out America’s promise, Washington replied, “You did not get it in writing.”You think Russia might now have some reason to distrust the promises of both European capitals and the United States? And why she now demands written promises that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO? Has anyone in the U.S. State Department ever heard of the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908 and the role it played in starting World War I?The ignorance and incompetence of the Blob, as the American foriegn policy establishment is now known, is once again setting the world up for disaster. I am sure Russia does not want to invade Ukraine. She knows the cost will be high, especially if she bites off more than she can chew and faces an endless guerrilla war in lands she occupies. But after we lied about expanding NATO eastwards, what choice does Russia have given the humiliation and geo-strategic threat NATO membership for Ukraine would mean for her?The Ukraine crisis is one of our own making. The Blob’s combination of hubris – the rest of the world must do as we tell it, or we will send in the U.S. military (and lose)– and Wilsonian idealism, which denies that other powers have legitimate interests, has pushed Russia into a corner. The Blob neither understands nor cares, asking itself (it only talks to itself) what Russia can do about it. What Russia can do, and is completing its preparation to do, is have the Russian Army in Kiev in two weeks and reply to the sanctions we threaten by shutting off the gas to Europe and letting NATO freeze in the dark. It is no accident the Ukrainian crisis is occurring in winter; President Putin knows Russia’s two best generals have always been General January and General February.There is a way out of this situation without war. The White House needs to dump the Wilsonian idealism that prattles, “Ukraine is a sovereign country and can do whatever it likes,” recognize that great powers, us included, have legitimate spheres of interest in their neighborhoods, express our understanding of Russia’s security concerns and promise, in writing, that Ukraine (and Georgia) will not be invited to join NATO. This should not be a hard promise to give, because NATO’s own rules say that no country with a border dispute can join. We can maintain peace by giving up nothing.Will it happen? The Blob cannot change, because if a member of the Blob lets even the slightest hint of realism show, his career is instantly over. The top people can overrule the Blob, but those top people, the Secretaries of Defense and State and the President, are currently Winkin’, Blinken, and Nod. The one potential player in a position to make both Washington and Moscow listen to reason is Berlin. Let us hope it asks itself, what would Bismarck do?Author William S. LindPosted on January 8, 2022Posts navigationPage 1Page 2…Page 52Next pageNow AvailableRecentlyPlaying with Nuclear War — and Some Advice for My Friends in SwedenMay 4, 2022Maneuver Warfare in UkraineApril 20, 2022The Ghost of 1914April 1, 2022Is the Defense Now Dominant?March 27, 2022Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is a Disaster for ChristendomMarch 14, 2022HomeAboutVictoriaResourcestraditionalRIGHTProudly powered by WordPress