The Peanut Gallery: Britain Steps Up, While America Steps Back - Crown Opens Coffers For Ukraine.
January 13, 2024
Welcome to the Peanut Gallery! Your daily dose of unfounded speculation.
Please remember that I know nothing.
Howdy folks,
I wanted to take a few minutes to rant about Vexler’s latest interpretation of the conversation in the West. Vexler argues the West is not committed to a Ukrainian victory, an interpretation with which I agree, but he goes on to argue that the current inclination is to freeze the war. I think he’s got it backwards.
The West’s goal cannot be to freeze the War because, look up, we're at that finish line. That was the original terms of the whole thing: maintain Ukraine’s independence. We helped them pull that off. Ukraine will remain sovereign, it has a path into NATO, and they’ve liberated great swaths of territory. Mission accomplished. The West achieved what it set out to do: put Putin in his place. We never wanted to destroy Russia.
What most don’t understand is that Americans don’t care about our hegemony. Yes, we care about safety, and freedom of commerce, and we pay lip service to universal Liberty. But if we gave a shit about control then there would be 77 US states instead of 50. We had that opportunity at the end of the Second World War and chose to do something different. That decision was what separated us from the Soviet Union.
Americans are Humanists, Individualists, and (at least following the decline of the Great Awakening) Materialists. We hate dependence, either our own or others upon us. Even our hyper-nationalists just want to be left alone, which is why Isolationism is such a reoccurring theme in our history. It’s why we never joined the League of Nations. It's why we scream "Small Government!" And hell, it's why we sailed to Plymouth Rock in the first place: everyone else can go fuck themselves.
When you think of America you should imagine a dude on a farm in the middle of Wyoming. That is who we are on a fundamental level.
The New Years’ conversation regarding Ukraine is the collective realization that we’ve accomplished what we set out to accomplish. Ukraine will remain independent. They have the capacity for self-determination, whether they succeed or fail in that goal is up to them. We have no (formal) obligation to continue.
We do, however, have a moral obligation. That is what we are currently discussing. It breaks down into three camps,
The bureaucracy, the military, and anyone with a functioning brain.
MAGA isolationists.
Institutional conservatives.
The MAGA nutjobs are a Lost Cause. Their influence is on the sharp decline and will die completely when we put Trump in prison. There will be a massive flashpoint in the next couple weeks, which may or may not destroy the GOP, but so long as we don't tear ourselves apart in a civil war, then MAGA will go the way of the Tea Party.
It’s the second group who’re the bigger problem. Always have been.
Institutional conservatives, both Democrat and Republican, benefit from the current status quo. These are the people who dream of 2019 and push the return to office narrative. In Vexler’s analogy, they’re the ones who want to turn around halfway across the river because it’s too far to go all the way. They look at the nonsense in Yemen and go, “Wow, life was a lot simpler when people weren’t pissed at random spikes in inflation! Maybe we should all just take a step back?”
But we can’t take a step back. The Free World is under attack and it’s only going to get worse the longer we allow this to go on. That fact is inescapable. America will quibble, we will delay and hide and shirk, but at the end of the day we’ll do what must be done. Always have...we just need to try everything else first.
My disagreement with Vexler’s video is one of focus. He successfully homes in on the problem, yet with such intensity that it becomes all he sees.
Cheer up. Zoom out. Ukraine’s supply situation isn’t in any immediate peril.
Ukraine and the United Kingdom (UK) signed an agreement on bilateral security guarantees pursuant to the G7’s July 2023 joint declaration of support for Ukraine.
See? Just the sort of thing I’m talking about.
While this,
US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby stated on January 11 that the US has suspended security assistance to Ukraine and will not resume sending aid to Ukraine until the US Congress approves funding.
is certainly true, so too is this,
Sunak also announced a military assistance package valued at 2.5 billion GBP (roughly $3.19 billion), which includes long-range missiles, air defense components, artillery ammunition, and maritime security provisions, and at least 200 million GBP of this package is specifically allocated to producing and procuring drones, most of which the UK expects to produce.[4] Sunak also announced an additional 18 million GBP to support frontline humanitarian efforts and fortify Ukraine’s energy infrastructure against Russian strikes. Sunak reiterated the UK’s commitment to long-term support for Ukraine and stated that the new UK-Ukraine security pact will last ”100 years or more.”
God save the King. It’s moments like this that I feel bad about that time we cold brewed all their tea.
America delivered its last funded aid package on Dec. 27th in a shipment worth $250 million. Great Britain just committed several multiples of that number, with clear intent to continue for the next century.
I encourage Putin to take note. For many of these countries the limit on this aid isn’t what their governments can spend, it’s how much they can physically send. Ladies and gentlemen, the military industrial complex is running at maximum capacity. We are, industrially, not on a war footing, so any drawdown in strategic stockpiles could have very near-term consequences.
Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov expressed confidence in Ukraine’s ability to produce one million first-person view (FPV) drones in 2024.
ISW as of December 2023 reports Ukraine produced ~50k drones / month domestically.
Russian forces made confirmed marginal advances northeast of Bakhmut, northwest of Avdiivka, southwest of Donetsk City, west of Verbove, and in (east) left bank Kherson Oblast amid continued positional fighting along the entire front.
Still no planes in Kherson.
The Russian State Duma will consider a draft law allowing foreigners with a criminal record to serve in the Russian Armed Forces.
Oh look! They might start taking foreign criminals now! Outright paying countries to dispose of their prisoners as cannon fodder. Y’all think they’ll let us ship Trump?
Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko confirmed that Russian authorities have deported over 2,100 Ukrainians, including 500 children, to Russia for medical reasons in 2023.
Please give Ukraine what they need to bring this to an end.
'Q’ For the Community:
How will the conversation in the West progress over the next several months?
Join the conversation over on /r/TheNuttySpectacle.