A significant shift in the war aims was broadcast last week. Not from the Ukrainians, but from the United States.
On Sunday, a day after her visit to Ukraine, Ms. Pelosi told a news conference in Poland: “America stands with Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won. And we stand with NATO.”
Ms. Pelosi, the second in line to succeed President Biden, is the highest-ranking American official to visit Kyiv since the war began, and her words carry weight, seeming to underscore an expanded view of American and allied war aims.
Wait we’re in this until victory?
For the life of me, why is victory so important for Ukraine to achieve, but had literally no value or interest by our leaders in our own wars?
“Her visit, with a congressional delegation, followed a joint visit to Kyiv by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III only last Sunday. Mr. Austin caused some controversy and debate afterward when he appeared to shift the goal of the war from defending Ukraine’s independence and territorial sovereignty to weakening Russia.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Mr. Austin said, implying that the United States wanted to erode Russian military power for years to come — presumably so long as Vladimir V. Putin, president of Russia, remains in power.”
What this means is, we are actually at war, albeit a proxy war, with Russia. Of course, this has been signaled for a while. I noted back in March that US policy seemed to be to keep the war going in order to lengthen the war for Russia and weaken them militarily as a consequence. So, what about the Russians? What do they think of this proxy war?
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded to the upsurge in weapons shipments this week when he said, “NATO is, in essence, going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.” Lavrov accompanied that with some nuclear saber-rattling, and then said that NATO and the U.S. were running the risk of turning the war global and involving nuclear weapons: “The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” he said Monday night on Russian state television. “Under no circumstances should a third world war be allowed to happen. There can be no winners in a nuclear war.””
Fueling much of the war hysteria is the Putin=Hitler comparison, which goes to the shockingly poor education of our “elites,” not to mention the general public. The more proper comparison isn’t 1939, it’s 1915. We are close to making ourselves a combatant in this war by supplying arms and supplies to the Ukrainians, and by declaring an avowed US foreign policy goal of beating the Russians. What happens when a desperate Russia takes a swing at stopping those supplies from getting in?
We’re one Lusitania away from getting into a shooting war with Russia, and if the talking heads on cable news shows had a vote in Congress, we would be at war right now.
Mike Street Station 