Liberal Forum

Cedar » Today, 8:51 am » wrote: ↑

Today, 8:51 am

How much has Ukraine cost

Oh, just wait. It has cost far, far more than any bottom line on a balance sheet. 

It has exposed NATO as a paper tiger. It has exposed the U.S. Dollar as an unreliable medium of global exchange. It has encouraged the global south to create an alternative to the dollar. It has put into question American hegemony, emboldening people whom deep state actors DO NOT WANT emboldened.

What will be the cost of all of that? It depends on how the myriad issues arising from it are handled. But it is a multi-headed hydra they have unleashed upon themselves. 

The PLAN was to bankrupt Russia with sanctions and constant insults to its sovereignty through the Ukrainian proxy. That was the plan. The people would be unhappy, Putin would be deposed by the oligarchs or voted out or forced to flee. A weak man chosen by the west would take his place, and the west would feast on Russia's sovereign treasure and resources. It was a raid. 

The reason there seems to be no Plan B is that the swamp never entertained the notion that Russia had the resilience it is showing. It was outside their Overton window. That is why there was never any Plan B, and so what we have is pure default - the beast being the beast. The US corporatocracy will now feed on the E.U. corporatocracy, because when the Count cannot get Christian blood, he will settle for Renfield. He must be fed, after all. So there's Panama, and there's Greenland, and there's Canada, and there's the E.U. All of these are stand-ins for Russia. 

So. Danmark will pay the price of giving up Greenland - a magnificent resource that it was always kept from exploiting by deep state NGOs and their own neoliberal white guilt - NGOs that will pack up their carpet bags the minute their services are counter-productive to their American deep state masters. The E.U. nations at large will pay the price of being captive customers of U.S. corporations, shut off from the cheap Russian gas that was essential to their respective economies. Mexico and Canada will lose much of their customer base, as the tariffs will put their products out of reach of consumers. And consumers will pay higher prices, because the tariffs will lock the cheaper products out of the now captive market. 

One of the biggest single force multipliers in a Navy SEAL - and having served as a Baby SEAL, I know whereof I speak - is a phrase that they repeat to themselves in times of extreme discouragement: "Not dead; can't quit." Not dead can't quit. That is NOT a mindset you wish to encourage in your intended victims. But it is quite likely, in my view, that this mindset is precisely what they have anchored into nations fed fresh hope by the spectacular failure to seize Russia's treasure and replace its democracy with a western puppet regime. If Russia can do it, we can do it - that is likely the mindset in Iran today. Nations that were easy to bully will become more resistant to bullying, will take greater effort to bully. What is the dollar cost of this?

How does one quantify the costs of all of that? And those particular costs are only the ones that a man without any formal education in economics can identify. God knows what other calamities their failure in Ukraine RUSSIA has unleashed on them. I suspect that there is new steel in the spines of adversary nations - new hope in the intended fresh victims of the Count. Such costs are quite impossible to translate into a dollar figure.