Define ‘winning’.
Various commentators covering World War Two and its aftermath noted that Germany and Japan thrived after the war. And the surviving Jewish population grew substantially more influential in world affairs, with an exclusively Jewish nation to boot, despite the horrendous slaughter of six million Jews, killed by the Germans and the people in countries which sided with the Nazi’s, with a prominent place for the ‘Banderites’, the followers of Stephan Bandera in Ukraine, strong in the western part of what was an ‘Oblast’ of the Soviet-Union before the war started. And that’s where their ideological descendants are strongest today.
The people involved back then are no longer with us, but their brethren are. The Soviet-Union, formerly Czarist Russia, on the same side as the ‘Western Allies’, the AngloSaxon Nations, suffered badly, but in the end they were instrumental in defeating the Nazi’s and their associates in various countries. The loss of life was horrendous, with close to twenty-seven million people who perished, close to nine million as part of the armed forces. By far the largest loss of life of any country involved in the war. To state that this resulted in a national trauma is understating the impact that war had. Then came several decades in which their friends from the war identified them as the enemy, with Churchill promoting an attack on the Soviet Union to finish where the Nazi’s left off, labeled ‘Operation Unthinkable’, because Roosevelt was no fan, and when Truman entered the scene, Churchill was a pensioner, sent on his way by the electorate. A close call. Plans to attack an ally without the slightest provocation, but who knows ‘one day’ someone might dust off ‘Operation Unthinkable’, and the creation of NATO, openly aimed at fighting the Soviet-Union, left the Soviet-Union no chance to recoup from the war, since they were dragged into an arms-race they eventually lost.
The NATO-Powers won the ‘Cold War’, but failed to win the peace when they insisted on taking slices from the Soviet-Union, promoting various ambitious (former) communists to declare independence from ‘Moscow’, while robbing ‘rump-state’ Russia, and the independent nations which formed, blind through the introduction of ‘Financial Capitalism’, or so the people in Russia came to see it. And I concur. Since I had the privilege to travel to the Soviet-Union during the ‘Cold War’, and after former communist Yeltsin took over, and handed the keys of the economy to the ‘Harvard-Boys’, with devastating consequences for the people, but great opportunities for western banks and ‘investors’, I do appreciate, and share the criticism of people blaming the communist system in Russia for this economic stagnation after the war, but I’ve seen the blinding poverty the west introduced instead. No ‘Marshall-Plan’, but vultures loaded with freshly minted Dollars ‘buying’ everything of value, primarily oil and gas, and the huge mining business, while corrupting politics, which didn’t need too much help for ‘Operation Turncoat’, with various former communists, already ‘on the take’ in the Soviet-Union, switching to serve their new masters in ‘Wallstreet’ and ‘Londen’ at the blink of an eye. But Putin was different, and that's why the people elected him.
Various observers said that was a serious mistake, and that we’d come to regret it. If we went with a ‘Marshall Plan’ to save Nazi-Germany and Imperial Japan from devastating poverty, which worked out just fine, why on earth did we treat the Soviet-Union differently? The answer depends on who you ask, obviously, but allow me to observe that within the victorious NATO-countries, there was this idea that it was extremely dangerous to allow the economic rise of ‘Eurasia’ to happen, and since the US already became ‘Best Friends Forever' with the communist regime in China, in their effort to unseat the militarily much more potent Soviet-Union, it was unthinkable that NATO-countries would allow Russia to become a prosperous country more in line with Germany and Japan.
Returning Germany and Japan on the path to creating wealth served American and British bankers well, where they thrived themselves as ‘Rent-Seekers’, destroying the industrial base of the American and British economies, and hooking Europa and ‘South-East Asia’ up on their Dollar-specific ‘Services’, which included selling them weapons and ‘protection’. But that latter part of the proposition only works with some sort of ‘Present Danger’, an enemy. ‘Financial Capitalism’ is a parasitic construct which has no future if ‘Industrial Capitalist’ countries cut them loose, because the ‘Financial Capitalist’ has nothing to offer what the ‘Industrial Capitalist’ countries cannot produce themselves. The biggest headache for the US (‘Wallstreet’) and the UK (‘The City’) was continental Europe coming to its senses, and understanding that their future prosperity was best served when they allowed this ‘Eurasian’ trade mechanism be born.
In a sense Trump anticipated on that development, whether or not he thought things over, or acted on intuition and nationalistic pride, when he embarked on this mission to ‘Make America Great Again’. The neocons panicked, because Trump was about to kill the goose which lay the golden eggs. And worse, his ‘isolationism’ would put a turbo on Chinese designs to create an alternative for the ‘Davos’ approach to globalism, creating this dreaded ‘Eurasian’-trade community out of full cloth. I personally do not list Trump as a visionary, keen on returning to ‘Industrial Capitalism’ as an alternative to ‘Financial Capitalism’, since his entire business is breathing ‘Financial Capitalism’. Whether he intuitively went with ‘Blue Collar’-America for electoral reasons, seeing that the ‘Democratic Party’ abandoned them, switching to ‘Woke’-ideology of spoilt generations instead, or that he was married to some kind of ‘Made in the USA’-nostalgia, I don’t know. But it was a mistake to alienate both China and Russia, using sanctions and economic warfare to offer room for American businesses to grow, although they could never compete internationally due to the far higher costs in the US.
A somewhat similar objection to what Biden is doing in the US to fight inflation, since the subsidies provided, coupled to cutting Europe off from affordable energy, will bring business to the USA, as companies leave Europe for the US, with lower energy costs, thanks to the US and UK blowing up Northstream and pushing the Middle-East into a league with China, India and Russia, but Europe will implode as a result, and will be unable to buy American goods, not even under threat. Something went horribly wrong.
The US is being pushed out of the Middle-East, and Africa, and it can no longer rely on South- and Central America either, while Asian ‘partners’ may appear to be impressed by American military displays around Taiwan, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on their willingness to go to war with China. Ukraine is a ‘basket case’, and a tremendous drain on the US economy, while ‘FTX’ and the ‘Hunter-probe’, finally underway by the looks of it, will expose some pretty nasty ‘dealings’, even Hunters involvement with Ukrainian companies working on bio-weapons, as the Russians assert, which may drag the whole ‘shithouse’ down, destroying everything in its way.
Winning, in other words, is not occupying a stretch of land west of the Dnieper, recently vacated by the Russians, while you can’t even provide basic needs for the population, let alone offer some kind of perspective for the future. But some military types may be seen ‘High-fiving’ on their websites telling each other that Crimea is next. I do admit that I have no information on what Russia has in mind, or what their capacity to produce more artillery shells and precision missiles and drones is, yet there is this little voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me that ‘Moscow’ had a plan, and came prepared. While NATO is slipping and sliding, with a huge overhang of frozen ‘Mickey Mouse Debt’ which may come unstuck as the next thoroughly corrupt fraud lands.