Short update and open thread

I can’t help but think of Russia’s “special operation” into Ukraine as ultimately intended as a sort of Samsonian jujitsu move against Germany and the wider EU. To wit, a quasi Kamikaze attempt to get back at Germany for what it perceives as its perfidy and hypocrisy in light of the fact that Russia (under Gorbachev) played a fundamental role in the reunification of Germany, i.e. in its literal reintegration, to which is owed the combined politico-economic might of the whole, and which in turn accounts for whatever greatness the EU itself might claim on the wider geopolitical stage.

But not only did Gorbachev’s quite generous condescension make all this possible (at no small sacrifice to the USSR!), the subsequent (but now expired) equanimity, amity, and complacency of Russia has sustained Germany via its existentially vital administration of relatively cheap energy. Yet how does this same Germany repay its post Cold War-era debt to Russia? By at best passively conniving with the US and NATO against the politico-economic integrity of the Russian Federation itself, an event that reached its fatidic consummation in the form of the 2014 Maiden coup perpetrated by the US.

The latter, btw, *the* hegemon par excellence, would have preferred that Germany never reintegrated and that the EU never formed, and that having formed, it had never achieved a competitive status against its own definitionally unipolar American interests. Such competitiveness being at least coequally a product of Pax Americana and of the USSR’s ease of acquiescence to German reunification and, if that was not enough, subsequently Russia’s role as the indispensable purveyor of the literal fuel behind the entire EU project: which is, in turn, dependent on the continued competitiveness of German industrial might as such.

Russia recoiled at Germany’s suspect perfidy and connivance against its own geopolitical integrity and status, a matter that became both graver and more absurd with every passing day, and that ultimately became insupportable when Germany appeared to irrevocably side with the US in supporting Ukraine over its existentially vital relationship with Russia. Russia was, by acting quickly, able to retain Crimea, but Germany became complicit in the piling of sanctions atop of sanctions against Russia, in addition to the piling of lies and conspiracies atop of lies and conspiracies against Russia as well. When Nordstream 2, a double lock and guarantee for the continued insurance of Germany’s “crown jewels” (the continuing viability of its industrial potential and might), was turned by Germany itself into an obscene and grossly hypocritical cudgel against Russia, that became the last straw for Russia.

Germany’s pretense to reduce Russia to a masochistic beggar even though the latter held the keys to Germany’s very existence must surely be one of the most absurdly grotesque spectacles in geopolitical history. So under the feint and pretext of imperial revanchism Russia has invaded Ukraine, and in lukewarm fashion operated to achieve certain superficial gains with an unusually circumscribed force (some indeed call the operation a failure). Yet as an attack against Germany, and thereby against the “pacifically” imperial might of the EU, whose heart and brain Germany is, it has been brutal indeed, promises to exponentially be even crueler with each passing day of Russian delay and dalliance in Ukraine.

Surely the EU will never recover from this self-immolation to its own reputation and prestige as an autonomous third imperial force on the world stage. Russia neither could nor wished to harm the US, nor was it of course in any form literally complicit with the former in the sundering of the source of German might: the east, not the West. But the effect could hardly have been any worse for Germany and the EU if it had done so (or indeed if it had used an atomic weapon against the latter). The US will come out on top alas, Russian standing on the world stage and internally is relatively sacrificed and harmed, but Germany, and by extension the EU (and especially the prestige of the Westernmost traditional powers within it) has literally run out of steam and stands as if millimeters before a cliff, if indeed it has not already fallen into the abyss.