Getting Killed for Nothing

NATO wants us dead

In an ideal world people with idiosyncratic ideas don’t get listened to, or they don’t get jobs. It’s not like anyone is cancelling them, but they’re just choosing not to pay attention to them, so their ideas can wither on the vine or be disregarded.

And ridiculed.

Which brings me to the months-long bad habit of Ukraine’s best friends, including on Team USA, who can’t seem to get it through their thick heads that Russia wants to kill us — all of us — as quickly as possible.

On Friday, at the conclusion of a meeting at Ramstein AFB of the dozens of nations supplying the war effort, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, blurted out what he said last fall.

The NATO Alliance Is Holding Strong on Ukraine. But Fractures Are Emerging. The allies differ on strategy for the coming year and the more immediate question of what Ukraine needs ahead of a major offensive in the spring (The New York Times (January 20, 2022)

Can we blame the general for pretending to be pragmatic? Yes, because it’s his fucking job to make it very, very easy to vaporize as many Russian invaders as possible, not to complain about how very, very difficult the task is.

So far, the models referred to by generals and politicians in the West for predicting when it will be safe to rub noses again in Ukraine have been self-serving and unconvincing.

Making matters worse, Germany says its war policy is guided by the following principles¹:

1. Back Ukraine as much as possible.

2. Prevent NATO and Germany from becoming warring parties.

3. Coordinate very closely with international partners, especially Team USA

In other words, soup.

Maybe Milley and Hebestreit are correct, or maybe they are poorly calibrated agents with bad ideas. We don’t know with certainty.

Increasing our trust in foreign leaders backing Ukraine by demonstrating that they are not seemingly aware of unremitting efforts by Captagon-popping zombies to erase us, pointing out things like, “Well, don’t you know that the longer the war lasts the more of us will be killed?” reminds me of Deweyan pragmatism, which I would rather avoid. You know, the line of thinking that says experience demonstrates that a problem without a solution is simply not a problem.

Dewey, Pragmatism and War (Libertarianism.org, 1981)

A great recipe for getting killed for nothing.

1. Allies Fail to Agree on Sending Tanks to Ukraine (The New York Times, January 20, 2022)