{"id":255430,"date":"2024-02-26T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-26T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=255430"},"modified":"2024-07-01T08:20:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:20:00","slug":"grand-delusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/02\/grand-delusions\/","title":{"rendered":"Grand Delusions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Germany\u2019s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on their way to Air Base Jagel in northern Germany, June 2023.
(NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

This year\u2019s Munich Security Conference was predictably all about the imaginary danger that Russians intend to proceed westward into Europe as soon as they finish in Ukraine.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

20 Feb 2024<\/em> – Let\u2019s listen for a moment to Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, in a mid\u2013January interview he gave to Der<\/em> Tagesspiegel<\/em><\/a>, a small Berlin daily whose history dates to 1945, when the Allies set about democratizing the Nazi-era press in the capital\u2019s western sector.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hear threats from the Kremlin almost every day, so we have to take into account that Vladimir Putin might even attack a NATO country one day,\u201d Pistorius asserted with a display of confidence. \u201cOur experts expect a period of five-to-eight years in which this could be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where to begin with this liar.<\/p>\n

No, neither the Germans nor anyone else in the West hears threats from \u201cVladimir Putin\u2019s Russia,\u201d as we must call the Russian Federation, either daily, weekly, monthly or in any other time frame you may choose. If you can manage to listen to the Russian president over the din of flabby-minded bureaucrats such as Pistorius, you hear quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

To take a ready-to-hand case, here is Putin during that much-remarked interview<\/a> he gave Tucker Carlson Feb. 6:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c\u2026 We have no interest in\u00a0Poland, Latvia, or\u00a0anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don\u2019t have any interest. It\u2019s just threat-mongering.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Threat-mongering: good phrase. That is precisely and all Pistorius was trading in when he spoke to Der Tagesspiegel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Pistorius\u2019 apparent purpose was to raise the curtain on this year\u2019s Munich Security Conference, held in the Bavarian capital last week. It was predictably all about the imaginary danger that Russians intend to proceed westward into Europe as soon as they finish in Ukraine, and Europe had better spend countless billions of additional euros on weaponry and make sure its unnatural alienation from Russia remains more or less permanent.<\/p>\n

Jens Stoltenburg, Washington\u2019s water-carrier as secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, now predicts that the crisis in East\u2013West relations is likely to endure for decades. He actually improved on Pistorius\u2019 \u201cfive-to-eight years.\u201d\u00a0 In Munich, Stoltenburg got Putin\u2019s threat to invade Western Europe down to three-to-five. He must consult different \u201cexperts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Get this, from a report published in the Sunday editions of The New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAs the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they\u2019ve done so far \u2014 sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment \u2014 would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Say whaaa? What we see out our windows is a \u201cworld order?\u201d Putin and the rest of the Moscow leadership have made their intentions clear too many times to count: It is to restore order to a world the Western alliance has led to the brink of an out-of- control chaos that has many non\u2013Western nations, Russia high among them, near to quaking.<\/p>\n

Let us draw the larger lesson here and then apply it elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Detached From Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Stoltenberg addressing 60th Munich Security Conference on 17 Feb 2024<\/p>\n

(Michaela Stache\/MSC via Stenbocki maja, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Those purporting to lead the collective West are now executing a set of aggressive foreign and military policies that are not short of dangerous for their distance from the true circumstances of our time. These policies are costly \u2014 in themselves and as measured in lost opportunity \u2014 economically and socially distorting, and, straight to the point, unmoored from reality.<\/p>\n

There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents.<\/p>\n

Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly<\/em> (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess.<\/p>\n

The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.<\/p>\n

Even The New York Times<\/em>, in the same edition it repeated the Russian-threat-to-Europe bit, now reports \u2014 albeit elliptically, text and subtext \u2014 that Ukraine has either lost the war with Russia already or is in the process of doing so. Among the only people still unwilling to acknowledge this are those intent on shaking loose more money and mat\u00e9riel to send to the corrupt regime in Kiev \u2014 those in power in the West, this is to say.<\/p>\n

[See:\u00a0Throwing Good Money After Bad in Ukraine?<\/em>]<\/a><\/p>\n

Kiev is losing the war, but there cannot be any negotiations with \u201cPutin\u2019s Russia\u201d because the Russian president \u2014 another incontrovertible lie \u2014 insists any settlement must be on his terms. So: more money, arms, and therefore lives, all wasted on a lost cause, but the door to talks that could end the conflict, suffering, and wastage must remain closed.<\/p>\n

Deceptions & Self-Deceptions<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Carlson interviewing Putin in Moscow on Feb. 6. (Kremlin)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This is how the West\u2019s purported leaders insist on shaping the world we live in \u2014 a world based on deceptions and self-deceptions. This is what Tuchman meant by folly.<\/p>\n

As Israel\u2019s atrocities in Gaza continue daily, the delusions among the policy cliques in Washington and the European capitals are yet more grotesque.<\/p>\n

In my previous column<\/a> I considered the post\u2013Gaza planning the policy cliques in Washington are currently running up the flagpole. Its three \u201ctracks,\u201d briefly enumerated, are the good old two-state solution providing for a separate Palestinian nation, formalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia \u2014 this the steel I\u2013beam supporting Israel\u2019s place in the region \u2014 and a renovated Palestinian Authority that will govern Gaza after Hamas is removed.<\/p>\n

None of these propositions bears the slightest relationship with reality. Not one. They are all, please forgive me, masturbatory fantasies. But never mind: They are in the works as a new U.S. policy in West Asia.<\/p>\n

Antony Blinken emerged from one of his multiple rounds of talks in Riyadh in mid\u2013January to declare the Saudis had responded positively to his proposal for normalized relations with Israel. The Saudis wasted no time pushing a custard pie in Blinken\u2019s face, making public a statement saying there is no chance of ties with Israel without just settlement of the Palestinian question.<\/p>\n

\"\"Let\u2019s call this the march of folly in real time.<\/p>\n

I thought further about those policy proposals after filing the above-linked commentary and recognized in them a subtext we must not miss: It is the working assumption that when Israel is done with its grotesqueries in Gaza the dust will settle, the region will come to forget, and all will return to some kind of normal.<\/p>\n

This, it seems to me, is the greatest of all the delusions the Atlantic world\u2019s policy circles now entertain and act upon.<\/p>\n

There is no chance \u2014 does this go without saying? \u2014 that Israel, the Palestinians, or West Asia will return to any kind of status quo ante once Israel disperses those Palestinians in Gaza it has not murdered.<\/p>\n

Israel is already down as a pariah state. If it were South Africa I would say it is the early 1980s on history\u2019s clock, 15 years or so before the apartheid regime gave up the ghost.<\/p>\n

As is well-known, loyalty to the Palestinian cause had faded among Arab nations and further abroad prior to the events of Oct. 7. Now the world is again paying attention, as South Africa and the International Court of Justice announced last month. As the Saudis just signaled, the fate of Palestinians \u2014 and of Israel, and of the U.S position in the Middle East \u2014 are bound together now.<\/p>\n

The Biden regime, epicenter of the West\u2019s delusional foreign policies, especially those concerning the non\u2013West, has permanently altered its position in West Asia. Overexposed on the ground, it is likely to find itself more vulnerable than it has been for the past eight decades and more suspect on the diplomatic side even among those nations it has traditionally counted friends.<\/p>\n

Policy unrooted in reality cannot address the challenges or crises of its time. Those who shape it, having no capacity to address such pressing circumstances, are on their march to folly.<\/p>\n

What do you give it before the consequences of the West\u2019s delusions \u2014 in Ukraine and in relations with Russia; in the Middle East \u2014 become evident? Five to eight years? Or three to five?<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the <\/em>International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century.\u00a0His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.\u00a0His website: <\/em>Patrick\u00a0Lawrence<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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