In Paris today, representatives from 35 countries—including 27 heads of state—gather for what the French presidency calls a meeting to demonstrate “alignment” between Washington, Kyiv, and European allies. The Coalition of the Willing, launched by France and the UK, convenes to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine as diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire, er, accelerate.
Among the attendees: Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Mark Carney, and Ireland’s own Helen McEntee, who will “emphasize that EU membership is an important security guarantee for Ukraine” and “underline Ireland’s strong support for progress on Ukraine’s EU accession path.” One can only marvel at the combined military might Ireland brings to such deliberations—a moral superpower unburdened by the vulgarity of actual power projection.
Meanwhile, the essentials remain unchanged:
Ukrainians have much to fear from the Golden Age of Ameriʞa we’ve just entered. So do Canadians, Venezuelans, Greenlanders, and maybe Colombians. If you don’t have nuclear weapons, you must sit in the back of the bus, which is currently being driven by superannuated would-be tough guys treating sovereignty like a timeshare presentation.
Hasn’t it always been this way?
Of course. That’s the whole sick joke.
The gang running things has always been the same—different uniforms, different flags, same business model. Power belongs to whoever can credibly threaten the most corpses. “When you’re not in the skin of a man, you can’t understand anything”—Céline knew this. The diplomat in his morning coat and the Zed in his unmarked fatigues are players in the same stupid game.
Shaw spotted it in 1914: every belligerent claimed God, civilization, and wounded innocence. The British condemned Prussian militarism while running the largest empire on earth. The Foreign Offices of Europe spent forty years preparing for war, then acted shocked—shocked—when it arrived. A massacre conducted by mutual agreement, dressed up as moral necessity.
Nothing’s changed except the technology. The nuclear club makes it explicit now: the hierarchy isn’t based on justice or democracy or any of that rot. It’s based on who can subjugate whom.
Canada, Venezuela, Ukraine, Greenland—they’re learning what smaller nations have always learned: there’s no international law, no balance of power, no cosmic juice. Just the eternal return of the same old squalor. The powerful do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Thucydides wrote it down twenty-five centuries ago.
The old monsters hired poets to lie about their motives. Now they just send tweets—or dispatch special envoys to Paris hotels while the actual decisions get made elsewhere.
This caught my eye:
Longtime Liberal Chrystia Freeland announced she’ll step down as a member of Parliament in the “coming weeks” after accepting an unpaid role advising Ukrainian President Volodymyr Z. “Ukraine is at the forefront of today’s global fight for democracy,” she wrote.
Global fight for democracy?
No. Z has spent the last six and a half years driving Ukraine into economic collapse while presiding over the grisly deaths of countless civilians. His recent “Mindichgate” scandal—where leaked recordings revealed his top lieutenants discussing how to embezzle as much as possible—suggests the democracy being fought for looks suspiciously like grand theft auto with better PR.
Freeland’s appointment is a perfect specimen of the genre: another Western politician converting proximity to carnage into post-political cachet. Call it what it is—a photo op in a flak jacket, dressed up as statecraft.
Meanwhile, if you’re an independent journalist in Ukraine, you don’t have an Achilles’ heel—you’re just another smear on the tracks waiting to happen. And when the train’s conductor is Z, derailment starts looking less like sabotage and more like public service.
Anent that, here’s an updated illustration of Thug Life.
