by PAUL COLLITS – ONE of the great questions of international relations and of history is what “causes” war. Many tomes have been written about both individual wars and about war in general.
One is by our own Geoffrey Blainey. The literature is endless. The origins of World War I is a case in point.
- JD Vance has weighed in behind the President.
- Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, Niall Ferguson and Tony Abbott counter Trump’s version of Ukraine.
- Trump Derangement Syndrome combined with endless self-regard runs deep.
Thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas had useful things to say about proximate and remote causes. And his distinction is highly relevant to the matter of war causation. No explanation of any war can avoid the Aquinian distinction.
World War II saw a great battle among the historians. AJP Taylor blamed Hitler in his The Origins of the Second World War. An argument without response, you would think.
NUANCE
Allan Bullock, in his classic study, Hiter: A Study in Tyranny, introduced more nuance. He begged to differ.
He explored the possibility that the origins of the Second World War had more than a little to do with the outcomes of Versailles, following World War I. The punishing reparations. The humiliation of Germany. Hubristic sticking the knife in the side of the Germans.
Not thinking several moves ahead, like – err – Trump does. The West ballsed it up.
The Allies’ sought to crush Germany. They didn’t. They simply set up the German response, and, later, the disastrous 1930s British appeasement of Chamberlain. Another ballsup.
Maybe AJP Taylor was of the establishment, and Allan Bullock was a dissident. Who was right?
Which brings us to Ukraine (God help us all).
Trump says Zelensky caused it. RFK Jr long ago exposed the Western Ukraine scam. A money laundering operation engineered by the corrupt crooks, aka the Bidens.
JD Vance has weighed in behind the President.
Then we have a strange unity ticket of Sir Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, Niall Ferguson and Tony Abbott, to counter Trump’s version of Ukraine. And others among the usual suspects class.
Here is Tony Abbott: “Russia started this war, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in fantasy land.
“This isn’t peace, it’s a surrender. And it’s a surrender to a vicious dictator…
“This idea that you can somehow appease dictators, this idea that might is right, that is completely foreign to everything that America and the broader West has stood for these past 70 years.”
Refer Thomas Aquinas, Tony. Russia started this war? It is a little more complicated than that. And no, it isn’t fantasyland.
Abbott’s criticism came after an extraordinary string of comments from Trump in which he claimed Zelensky is a dictator who wasn’t democratically elected and enjoys barely any public support, and was responsible for the outbreak of the war with Russia – all essentially Kremlin talking points.
Oh dear. Nope. Not Kremlin’s talking points.
Are their eyeballs on the issue or is Trump Derangement Syndrome kicking in? Re-read the causes of war literature, and scrub up on international relations theory.
There are others on the case here, like the realist school of international relations scholars who think things are a bit more complicated than Hitler/Putin. See under John Mearsheimer.
KEATING
And Paul Keating, of all people, back in the 1990s. Pushing NATO towards the Russian border was a bad idea. Then, and now.
The Bilderberg guy, the Henry Kissinger biographer, the ARC speaker, Niall Ferguson, grumps: “It is not every day I am accused by the vice president of the United States of purveying ‘moralistic garbage’ and ‘historical illiteracy’, and of being a ‘globalist’. But those were the charges levelled against me by JD Vance this morning.”
Oh dear. We are hurt. Trump Derangement Syndrome combined with endless self-regard goes deep.
At Compact magazine, we have this: “While the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have been clashing violently on the bloody battlefields of Eastern Europe, a parallel war has long been underway in the media sphere, where armies of information warriors have battled to shape the ways Western publics think about the conflict.
“The dominant army in this information war has comprised most Western governments and leading media organs, abetted by a formidable array of public relations firms working in partnership with the Ukrainian Government.
“It has insisted that the Ukraine war is best understood as a modern-day variation of Nazi Germany’s World War II aggression, with Putin reprising the Hitlerian role of revanchist dictator seeking to grab land and dominate Europe.
“Unless he is stopped through resolute military force, they argue, his armies will move from Ukraine to the Baltic states, Poland and beyond.
“Arrayed against this army has been a loose band of realist experts and anti-establishment skeptics who contend that the war’s origins more closely resemble those of World War I.
“To varying degrees, they acknowledge that Russia’s paternalistic attitudes towards Ukraine have played a significant role in Moscow’s motivations, but they argue that the invasion is fundamentally the product of what international relations theorists call a ‘security dilemma’.
BOLSTER
“Steps by NATO to bolster the security of its members and aspirants were perceived as threatening by Moscow. Aggressive efforts by Russia to block these moves threatened the West, producing a spiral of action and reaction that continued to escalate absent diplomatic efforts to arrest it.”
NATO has been put on notice to pull its head in.
The NATO of Bill Clinton and since has stuffed up relations with Russia. This was Neocon hubris, nothing more.
We won! Idiots. Keep provoking. The bear will respond.
Then we go even further. We help install an aggressive amateur, apparently despised (to this day) by his own people. We install Hunter Biden into the mix.
We pump weapons, personnel and hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars into the cause. We bomb the Nord Stream. We stall peace talks in 2022.
We relentlessly escalate a war between to former Communist States. We go recklessly to the brink of nuclear war with, of all people, Boris Johnson! The goon who made it to the top. A modest comedian. The military industrial complex is the winner.
Remote and proximate causes.
Trump’s take on the current state of affairs: “A modestly successful comedian, Zelensky, talked the United States into spending $350b to go into a war that couldn’t be won…
“But they’re no longer dealing with the same United States they were dealing with a few months ago.”
Certain people don’t get this. Many of the establishment puppets at ARC in London don’t get that they have been dealt out of the hand. They are grumpy. I get it.
Let’s hope they don’t lose even more of their much-professed knowledge of international relations.
WHO CARES?
Is Zelensky a dictator? It’s a plausible claim. But who cares?
He is no more and no less than a dictator than his Western Eurotrash allies. We know they are dictators. Like Ursula Von der Liar. The Brussels dictatorship.
Most Western democracies are now not remotely democratic. Look up democratic theory, the social contract, political obligation. And reference the UniParty.
More importantly, the Ukrainian comedian is a bad actor. And a conman. He conned the girlie hair sniffer Biden. He now wants to create “an armed forces of Europe”.
God help us all. More war! The man is a lunatic.
The establishment’s attack on Trump’s “tone” on Zelensky is simply absurd. The TDS brigade has always been down on Trump’s “tone”.
They seem to have forgotten that Trump’s “tone” has delivered the second American revolution. And, perhaps, the West’s last hope of survival. Not against Putin, the perennial Hitler/Stalin figure, but against the far more sinister internal enemy. As Vance said in Munich.
The conservative establishment still hates Trump.
They cannot get over it. They just have to win. They think they have an opening on Ukraine. An opportunity to be conservatively “pure”. They are way behind the game.
The last word goes to Paul Joseph Watson: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that his country received less than half of the US$177b in aid agreed by the US under the Biden regime and that he doesn’t know where the rest of the money has gone.”
Crikey. Who exactly are the goons here? Perhaps it is all a question for DOGE and Elon.PC
