After the West finally toughened up economic sanctions against Russia and started providing Ukraine with weapons and other materiel, much commentary has appeared celebrating Europe’s awakening from its decades of myopic foreign policy idealism. Typical was columnist Michael Barone, who announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine".
But judging from past history, these moments of renewed vigor are unlikely to produce the deeper structural reforms needed to meet future challenges, especially from China and Iran.
There’s no question that EU nations have taken steps no one would have expected. Most noteworthy, Germany, which has long institutionalized pacifism and zero-carbon energy goals as expressions of national identity, is providing weapons to Ukraine, pledging to keep closed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, and postpone the decommissioning of its remaining nuclear power plants. It also promises to raise its military spending by 100 billion Euros, with 78% of Germans approving the move.
According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.” The EU and NATO, as optimists claim, are now restoring national defense and military preparedness to its rightful place in their spending, rather than relying on U.S. taxpayers to subsidize their security.
However, we’ve lived through such confident predictions before. After 9/11, the proliferation of flags on houses, the numbers of people joining the military, the return of open displays of patriotism and affection for our country, and the swift punishment of the Taliban for enabling the 9/11 attacks all suggested “this changes everything” as many said. The vacation from history during the Nineties was over, and the U.S. was back, confident in the righteousness of its power and the goodness of its political order.
It didn’t take long for all that to change. The flags disappeared, and the country elected the vacuous “lightworker” Barack Obama, who instituted a foreign policy of retreat and “leading from behind” and warned us against celebrating “American exceptionalism”.
Even as we are trying to confront a brutal aggressor in Ukraine, our diplomats in Vienna are partnering with Russia to restore the feckless Iran nuclear deal with a genocidal regime that, like Putin, has made clear its traditional jihadist aims of establishing Islam’s sharia hegemony over the whole world. Such is the incoherence of our decrepit foreign policy orthodoxy.
As a result of that stale paradigm, we are now faced with the biggest armed conflict in Europe since 1945, one that no Western leader is going to mobilize his military, or even shut down Russia’s oil and gas revenue, to end. The institutional structures, foreign policy shibboleths, and political calculations that have put us between a geopolitical rock and a hard place have not changed.
The second deep-seated bad idea that has made this crisis so difficult is the war on carbon that the West has been waging for decades, and that has given Putin such powerful leverage. Europe may keep some nuclear power plants and build some LNG terminals, but the underlying rationale for this obsession with “green” and “renewable” energy is not going to be abandoned. “Climate change,” which is more correctly known as Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW), is too embedded in the cultures of the West despite its dubious science and reliance on hinky computer models. There is too much money to be made from “green” subsidies and research grants. But there’s something more than just lucre. In a secular age of declining traditional faiths, political religions fill the void. ACGW embodies old nature-love myths and anxieties about modernity and technology, yet wraps itself in the quantitative data and polysyllabic jargon of science, the better to exploit our cognitive elite’s fetish for “following the science". The cost of this cult has been high. Pursuing the green-energy chimera has endangered the West’s access to the cheap energy that has powered the phenomenal growth in wealth across the globe. And it has empowered Russia and China, who have no intention of following the West over the green cliff. Hence the most stark repudiation of the “net-zero carbon” delusion: even if the West creates a carbon-free world, temperatures will not decline. But our civilization will, while emission-spewing China replaces the West as the global hegemon. If history is a guide, the current recovery of common sense and moral vigor will fade once the crisis abates. All Russia and China have to do is wait.
Those of us who were part of the Baby Boom generation, now in our 60s and 70s, no longer recognize the nation in which we grew up. We are strangers in a land that gets stranger by the day.
We believed in the American dream. We worked hard, paid our taxes and obeyed the law —even laws we thought were idiotic.
We married and had children. Today’s young adults cohabit and have pets.
We struggled to raise families. Some of us went to war, like our fathers and grandfathers before us. We thought that when we grew old, there would be more for us – more than alienation.
Most of us don’t recognize Biden’s America. Patriotism has become passe. Our military is led by men who are social workers and politically correct hacks.
They can’t fight, but they’re great at getting soldiers to use preferred pronouns and combating imaginary racism in the ranks.
Giant corporations have replaced individual enterprise, which – in many cases – has been taxed and regulated out of existence. Government bureaucrats and corporate executives are like the pigs and men at the end of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
We look in vain for a Ronald Reagan, a Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. Instead, we find corrupt clowns like wizened Nancy Pelosi, Commissar Ocasio-Cortez (the Cuban pinup girl selling socialist snake oil) and our president – a cranky septuagenarian slipping noisily into senility.
If we’re white, we’re told that we are responsible for every problem that plagues people of color. That’s right, we’re to blame for the roughly 70% of black children born out of wedlock (we forced their parents to behave irresponsibly), just as cops are to blame for the deaths of thugs who threaten their lives.
Savages who burn down cities are hailed as heroes and celebrated as warriors for social justice. But misguided middle-class citizens, among them veterans, who trespassed in the Capitol 14 months ago are branded traitors and insurgents.
Mayors take down statues of Washington and Columbus and commission murals of George Floyd.
If you’re white, you’re also responsible for slavery, segregation, the Wounded Knee massacre and Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Racism is in our blood, they tell us. Remember, throughout the course of human history, racism has never existed anywhere but here.
By “despoiling the earth,” we’re also responsible for climate change. If we end up paying $7-a-gallon for gas – well, it’s our own damned fault.
Forget racial minorities. Now, we’re told that there are “sexual minorities” – that people who used to be considered odd are in fact oppressed. And that a man who thinks he’s a woman in fact is a woman – and is entitled to use the ladies’ room with our granddaughters. And if we refuse to accept this bizarre fantasy, we are hateful.
What passes for entertainment is sickening – all blood and gore, sadistic killers, aliens who pop out of people’s stomachs and monsters in various guises. We search in vain for contemporary movies with characters we can admire or at least care about. So we retreat to cinema of the 40s and 50s on TCM.
On top of living in a country that’s unrecognizable, we can’t even afford to live here anymore. You need a second mortgage to buy a steak. A hamburger and fries at McDonald’s is a gourmet feast.
Filling up the tank is agonizing. Paying confiscatory taxes marks us as serfs. Inflation is at an almost 40-year high, and politicians tell us it’s because government isn’t spending enough.
Our parents could retire at 65, in the mortgage-free home they bought in their 30s. We’re still working at 75. Retirement is a distant dream. We’re working to provide benefits for illegal aliens, addicts and loons who camp and defecate on the streets.
Many of us are the grandchildren of immigrants, a fact of which we are proud. Our people helped to build this country. But we witness with unalloyed horror the tide flowing across our southern border unimpeded. The middle class view them as criminals, gang members and mooches. The Democratic party sees them as voters. We can’t defend our own borders, but are expected to defend those of distant lands.
This used to be an English-speaking country. Now it’s ballots in 20 languages, court interpreters and press one for Serbo-Croatian.
Our feeble president (who’s been sucking on the federal teat for half-a-century) is unable to perform his Constitutional duties, but has successfully waged war on domestic energy production. We went from energy independence to beggars with a gas can in a matter of months. The corpse that walks says climate change is the biggest threat our national security – along with transphobia.
Washington sputters about Putin’s war on Ukraine, but imports 670,000 barrels of Russian oil a day. While he lets pipelines rust and our oil, coal and natural gas remain in the ground, Biden pleads with the Saudis to pump more – and is thinking about imports from the Marxists of Venezuela and the jihadists of Iran, both Russian allies. Apparently, oil from anywhere outside the U.S. doesn’t pollute.
Officeholders for life treat us like mentally-challenged children. They snicker at those who pay their exorbitant salaries.
So we limp along into old age, too proud to go on the dole and too stubborn to just give up.
Besides, surrender now would be a betrayal of the America that once was.
Yes, we’re in a sad state, and unless we can get rid of the corruption in our government, it will just keep getting worse.