Destabilizers, Inc.; NATO will Squeeze Ukraine to the Last Drop.

For my money, the Doobie Brothers never delivered a finer performance than the one recorded at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia in July 2004, from which the lead-in track is excerpted. For one thing, the sound and cinematography were superb, as it was being recorded for a film; concert videos are frequently filmed on a cellphone with a speaker the size of Kamala Harris’s brain, which virtually guarantees the playback will fall far short of live sound’s richness of depth and tone. But also, the Doobies were a mature band here; not as old as they are now, obviously, but as far from their biker-band beginnings as a peanut from a peacock. The sax solo at the end of “Another Park, Another Sunday” is a standout, as well. Although this track does not feature Tom Johnson’s lead-guitar work, others – like “Clear as the Driven Snow” – showcase the lazy, syrupy bends, endless sustain and melodic mastery of a vastly-underrated guitarist. Although the band has never been embarrassed for originals, carefully curated performances of cover versions like Sonny Boy Williamson’s, “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” lend strut and polish to what was already a pretty good song. I highly recommend the whole performance. Alternatively, if you can get YouTube, most of the concert is available here for free, although the fidelity is hit and miss because the recordings are from different sources.

Johnson is plainly singing about a lost lover, but it occurred to me – yes, there’s the segue, you knew it was coming, I’m so predictable – that similar grief and dislocation might accompany the loss of power you might once have casually exercised, and that here it is allegorical with the west’s inability to bend Russia to its will. Just when you think you’ve got a good thing, it seems to slip away…I’ve got to get myself together, but it’s hard to do. Yes, I imagine it is, and just like in love, I imagine it is harder to get yourself together if what you lost was something you felt yourself entitled to, that it was yours by right.

And NATO has been the entitled manager – some would say ‘dictator’ – of global stability for a long, long time. When it sees something it doesn’t like, it takes whatever steps it believes necessary to re-balance things to its satisfaction; options like revolution, regime change and human-rights investigations are like comfort food for the west. When these are deemed necessary, it is always because the target population yearns for the freedom and democracy only the west can bestow.

And that might be fine, if the zeal for intervention was motivated by genuine altruism; the desire to see everyone get the same opportunity for a good life with decent work for fair pay, with sensible regulation to prevent exploitation, overseen by trustworthy leadership. But despite the wall-to-wall media control exercised by NATO governments over all forms of broadcasting in English bar social media, and their metronomic repetition of the freedom-and-democracy mantra, I can’t imagine anyone believes that any more. Political administration and management in the west are increasingly developed, produced and engineered by corporate interests, and their decision-making and interventionism are motivated by what is good for business and the accumulation of wealth. Several well-known examples exist of developing countries who attempted to nationalize their resources to forestall western profit-taking, only to have a ‘political opposition’ magically introduced and backed by the west, the government overthrown and a ‘freedom and democracy’ administration installed which allowed a free corporate hand to prevail.

But you have to have power and clout to operate the freedom-and-democracy-regime-change machine, and it is unforgiving of weaklings, amateurs and the insufficiently-ruthless. Boldness is all very well, but if you have nothing else, the plan quickly goes pear-shaped in an internationally-embarrassing way: like the ‘abduction of Maduro’, Operation Gideon.

So, too, the cratering fiasco in Ukraine. Contrast the fiery rhetoric of days gone by with the increasingly-pragmatic (read, ‘making the best of a bad deal’) rationalizations of today. Ursula Von Der Leyen brayed, “We cannot let Russia win!” Let them? Where in the history of military conflict is there an example of the enemy who is prevailing being denied a victory because some spinny bint in politics said they mustn’t? Even more absurd was her characterization of the pending denial of Russian victory coming about ‘with or without our US allies’. It’s pretty clear she spends more of her time reading gardening magazines than military reports; the combined military might of the EU couldn’t storm a Justin Bieber concert, and its highly-decorated senior officers who have ascended to the political realm are well aware of that; the EU armies taking on Russia right now would be a good way to get sent home with a red ass and tears on your face.

“This war will be won on the battlefield”, confidently announced Josep Borrell, another diplo-doodle with as much military experience as a dog has feathers. Well, Josep, it IS being won on the battlefield; but now, he decides that wasn’t exactly what he meant. And so the recalibration of the term ‘victory’ is ongoing – it’s gone into the shop for a little tuning up. A bit of chamfering here, some tapping there, and presto! If Putin does not get all of Ukraine, then it’s because Ukraine prevented it, so Russia lost.

When Zelensky says Russia has to feel like it is losing, enough that its people beg Putin to seek a settlement, he means – but does not say – that he needs Russia to feel like Ukraine feels: that there is no effective defense against this guy, nowhere to hide from his wrath, and certainly no capacity to strike him that means anything. With things breaking the way they are now – and this is important – there is no reason at all for Russia to sue for peace, to talk about an end to the war or even to attend a conference to discuss terms. But as Simplicius points out in his most recent Sitrep, the media servants of NATO governments busily construct scenarios for ‘disengagement’ and report on Ukraine’s softening of its position on ceding land to Russia as if they are still in control of the situation – as if they are going to be able to pull a fast one and get Russia to agree to accept temporary custody of lands Ukraine and the west will never acknowledge as Russian, and the remaining independent Ukrainian territory gets to join NATO! Who would be stupid enough to sign on to that? Nobody on the Russian side. It pretends it is still managing the situation, but in reality the west is simply feeling with its toes for the furthest level of acceptance, beyond which belief cannot be compelled and the bottom drops away from its feet.

Al Jazeera helpfully tells us there are at least – at least – 25 different ‘peace plans’ out there, and apparently none of them has a mechanism for proceeding if Russia simply bats it aside with a huff of annoyance; the assumption is that Russia is in a big sweat to sign and get a deal done while things are still going its way, when in fact there is no reason at all to imagine Ukrainian forces will not simply continue to retreat until there is nowhere left to go, or they are all killed. Tellingly, the ‘peace plan’ proposed by Russia – which is actually Russia’s conditions for a ceasefire, and not actually a peace plan, has only two conditions: Ukraine must withdraw all its forces from the territories claimed by Russia, and it must forswear any plans to join NATO before peace talk can begin.

Even more telling is the response; Zelensky blubbered that these are ‘ultimatum conditions’, like Hitler. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin – who must also be a fan of gardening magazines, since he is plainly not reading any current military Sitreps, or is vested in trying to pretend the crumbling of Ukraine’s defensive lines is just not happening – spluttered that ‘Putin is not in a position to dictate to Ukraine what it must do to bring about peace’. I beg to differ, Mr. Secretary – he is in exactly such a position. But you could be forgiven for not knowing that, because everyone seems to be building on the foundation that Russia is eager for a deal.

Which leads us to a question that must be asked, given that the US and its military forces anchor the NATO alliance – why is it so inconceivable to Americans and to European political leaders that Washington could lose? The only bright spot in decades of losses and withdrawals has been Grenada. The US military withdrew from Vietnam. Withdrew from Afghanistan. Lost in Iraq, and in Syria, where it worked mostly through radical proxies but did station US forces. It issued an ultimatum to Venezuela that its elected leader must step aside and hand power to a handpicked replacement, and he didn’t and he’s still there.

America’s ability to compel broad global support for its democratizing interference appears to have commenced to degrade – faster and faster – about the time it became undeniable that its guiding rationale for knocking over governments was to smooth the way for western profit-taking and corporate control. Now, only a couple of weeks from a presidential election which will once again feature a choice between two deeply unpopular individuals – one of them a last-minute substitute for an even-less-charismatic candidate whose last firing synapses fizzled out too early for him to portray himself as anything other than a crazy old man who should be using a walker so he doesn’t fall down – America is a polarized mess, and all the tough choices are still going to be there when the charade is over.

It’s got to get itself together. But it’s hard to do.