Tea and Vitriol

It's a case of life imitating art! "The Flintstones," an American cartoon series from the 1960's featured an episode titled "The Frogmouth." "The Frogmouth" was a stage play was about an unimportant, obnoxious, abrasive, loudmouth, and the director of the play felt that Fred Flintstone was a natural for the role. Fast forward to the 21st century, to real life in the real world. Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has become "The Frogmouth!" Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of frogmouths in the world of politics, especially among populists. US President Trump and Russia's President Putin are two such examples on the world stage. Along with China's President Xi, they are the three most powerful men in the world. They can afford to be rude, crude, abrasive and aggressive because there is nobody out there powerful enough to stop them or even effectively resist them. And then there's Viktor Orban, whose pretensions ...

For a few brief shiny moments, it looked as if the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be the solution for ending the war in Ukraine. Erdogan offered to provide the setting for negotiating the end of the war. He also stated that he had the manpower and the war materiel to act as a peacekeeper in Ukraine to act as a guarantor. In fact, Turkey's military is larger than that of anything the European Union can quickly muster (second only to NATO's dubious forces) and has been manufacturing and exporting weapons in huge quantities for years, some of which he sold to Ukraine. He has also been actively involved in Syria's civil war, which has provided his military with experience in war settings. At the same time, Erdogan has maintained relatively civil relations with Putin, refusing to enforce the European Union's sanctions against Russia while purchasing gas and oil from them. Meanwhile, Erdogan has stated that Ukraine's territorial integrity must be restore...

Watching the leaders of the European Union and their associates scamper to organize ways to protect themselves in the wake of US President Donald Trump's deserting them would almost be amusing if the consequences weren't so catastrophic. As stated in previous blogs, the success of the European Union has always been predicated upon one thing: The USA. It was American money, war materiel and men that allowed for the EU's prosperity and quick expansion into the Eastern European states that were once part of the Soviet bloc. Similarly, those states were quickly admitted into NATO, the military alliance originally created to protect its member state from Soviet aggression. It gave the EU a false sense of security and the belief that the US would always provide support for them almost unquestioned. Given this mindset, the EU never imagined that they would have to protect themselves, hence their lack of coordination among its individual states' military and a complete lack of ...

 "Sir" Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, hosted a summit meeting in London on Sunday, the purpose of which was to come up with proposals to end the war in Ukraine that would leave that nation sovereign and independent. It was a study in absurdity, because the proposal that this meeting ultimately arrived at was to be presented to US President Donald Trump for his approval. That won't be forthcoming any time soon. President Trump and his vice president publicly humiliated Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday and the latter quickly left the White House and America to head to London for Starmer's summit meeting. President Trump made it clear that Zelenskyy had better come back begging for him to "settle" the war in Ukraine...under Russia's terms, which would effectively end Ukraine's independence. President Trump is clearly uninterested in Ukraine's survival or that of NATO or even of the European Union, which ...

The war in Ukraine has begun. People have already died in this new war. It has been expected for months, yet world leaders have done nothing to seriously dissuade Russia's Putin from going to war. Now that the war has begun in earnest, despite all of the "diplomacy" used to prevent it, world leaders are condemning it. That includes the United Nations, which has long been an expensive, impotent forum for world opinion. And doing nothing. To be sure, world leaders have threatened Putin with economic sanctions against Russia if he went to war. And yes, they did provide Ukraine with wholly inadequate amounts of money and war materiel to be used against the Russian powerhouse should war come. But that is all. Because they are afraid of provoking Putin into a nuclear world war. Putin himself has stated to the world powers scolding him that they had better not interfere with his plans for Ukraine, because there would be "consequences you have never seen." This was espe...

  Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban this past weekend and with it the effective government of that nation. It was not unexpected. The US and our NATO allies have been leaving for months, although there was still a sizable US presence in Afghanistan, as well as tens of thousands of native Afghanis who were associated with the Western Powers whose lives were therefore at risk after our departure. What shocked the world is the swiftness with which the Taliban captured Kabul, since the US blithely informed everyone that such an event was months away and the the western withdrawal could continue in a slow, steady pace. Then, pow! The Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Kabul as tens of thousands of people tried to get to the airport to escape on US transports out of the country, more Americans were trapped in other parts of Afghanistan... And President Joe Biden? He was on vacation. Yet, there was a sense of deja vu about this. We HAD been there before, in Saigon, w...