Unmasking Politics
When politicians talked about freedom and democracy (or WMDs), everyone rolled their eyes and kind of just assumed the Iraq wars were about oil. Now that we have politics turned into reality TV and people get to see upfront the political workings of government, we clamor for a return of the façade. Europeans still have that façade, but their mask is cracking under the realpolitik of the Trump administration.
They talk about freedom and democracy and hold up Ukraine as this last line of defense for Europe, all the while they fund Russia through buying their oil and gas, and we’re talking about billions. They give money to Ukraine but in the forms of secured loans rather than grants. They rely on the US to do the heavy spending on defense while they spend it on social programs to keep their citizens docile. Oh and they imprison their own citizens for Facebook posts, force green policies that have their farmers up in arms, and refuse to deal with immigration-related crime. And they have the audacity to pretend to take the moral high ground. There is nothing moral about what Europe is up to. And they have a particularly entitled and unearned attitude towards the US.
Trump has always been an asshole, since the days of the Apprentice, and has this pompous attitude that responds best to flattery, but he’s also a kind of capital-realist. While Europe pretends to be ideological, they act — as politicians do — in their self-interest. Trump does not pretend ideology, if anything his ideology is realpolitik, and yet, the result is more ideological than the posers would offer us. For the capital-realist, you cannot have an ideology if you do not have economic security and power. Trump, for all his self-interested agenda, has in fact better results (and better desires, as in putting an end to the senseless killing) than the ideologues — who are actually, not really ideologically motivated but just another breed of self-interested realists.
Like I said at the beginning of the war when Russia invaded, this is a proxy war between the West and Russia with Ukrainian men (many of whom are forced into fighting) as the fodder, and it will end, as most wars do, in a comprise which should’ve happened a long time ago.
