Accepting Reality

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Are we accepting the reality that we might already be at war, or are we still believing we are in control? We are allowing higher and higher levels of escalation with no proper answers.

If that continues, we need to expect a Pearl Harbor day for Europe, when the escalation will be so impossible to ignore that it will bring about a Western reawakening.

…

Instead of asking will we risk starting World War Three, the question is: will we risk stopping it?

Gabrielius Landsbergis
Former Lithuanian foreign minister
October 5, 2025
Europe is facing its ‘Pearl Harbor moment’

Accepting reality is almost as difficult as determining what reality is. And keep in mind that in war, truth is the first causality. Furthermore, people have a very strong tendency to believe what they want to believe.

So where does that leave us? If Russia really is intent in rolling up Eastern Europe to recover its lost glory from the peak of the Soviet bloc, then Western Europe will delay longer than they should have. If Russia really only wants Ukraine, then a case can be made that the path of least human suffering (after you add in the human cost on all sides of Western Europe going to war with Russia) is to let them have it unopposed.

The dilemma is that letting Russia have the Ukraine with even moderate support from the West runs a high risk of telling Russia they can get away with the roll up. Hence, even if they did not originally intend to roll up Eastern Europe, they will be incentivized by the inaction of the west to do what they had not planned to do. If the west does crank of the temperature dial on WWIII to HOT, then history will forever haunt us with the deaths of millions that might have lived if only we had listened to the appeasers.*

It is very nearly a lose-lose situation.

I think predictions are extremely difficult. Especially about the future. Think of it this way, you want to “accepting reality?” The problem is, no matter what reality you “accept” you change the reality.

Prepare appropriately for me means an underground bunker in Idaho.

* I forget who I was talking to recently who asserted that Russia will not attack a NATO country. Russia is close to being number two when they are only up against Ukraine. NATO, he asserted, would have a busy week, but Russia would cease to exist. Hence, there is no real downside for non-Ukrainians to let them have Ukraine.

Share

17 thoughts on “Accepting Reality”

  1. All the big brains in geopolitics, of all political persuasions, assert that China is the most dangerous adversary. So why are we obsessing about Russia? In any sort of struggle with China, we need Russia and we need India (who we have antagonized by trying to force them into the crusade against Russia). My assessment is that we are trying to keep the Euros on side. But they are useless at best and hostile at worst, sabotaging peace efforts in both Ukraine and Gaza. The Ukraine war ends the day after we cut them loose.

    • The reasoning I find convincing is that deterrence is not specific to a particular enemy. If your #1 enemy sees that you don’t deter enemy #2, he might reasonably conclude that you won’t against enemy #1 either.
      This is the “Biden & Afghanistan” principle.

  2. NATO was formed to stop the Soviet Union from doing to Western Europe what it had done to Eastern Europe following the 2nd World War. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 they should have held a giant peace parade and invited all NATO member militaries to march through Berlin and then they should have dissolved NATO! If Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic want to ensure their freedom they should have formed their own military organization and armed themselves to the teeth including indigenous nuclear weapons and 1st and retaliatory strike delivery systems

  3. “If that continues, we need to expect a Pearl Harbor day for Europe, when the escalation will be so impossible to ignore that it will bring about a Western reawakening.”
    And mean while the back door is wide open to invaders from islame and the mud-hutastan.
    Which is the reality of having traitors for government.
    Russia is going to attack us! What a f’in bad joke.
    Russia has taken 300 kilometers in 2 years?
    In three generations they might get to Poland or somewhere close.
    Russia/Putin wanting Ukraine and Europe is like us wanting Mexico and south America. There nightmare places to control. So why bother.
    No matter. After Europe’s traitorous governments get finished destroying themselves and their people, he’ll be able to walk in.
    The reality is what Putin has said many times in public.
    We don’t want NATO to be able to fire missiles into Moscow and have no way stop them.
    And we proved him right. NATO has been firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine for a year now. Because they killed off all their fighting age men already.
    Just like India//Pakistan divided. We need to just give him everything east of the Dnieper River. If your Ukrainian get on the west. If Russian, get on the east. No NATO in Ukraine.
    It was that easy. Instead, the west has murdered a whole generation of Ukrainian men and women.
    Even if Ukraine remained intact. They don’t have anyone to occupy the place anymore.
    The reality is that the leaders of Europe want to murder off the last of the European native populations by getting them to kill each other.
    And the real reality of this whole exercise is that satan wants to kill off Christianity. Cause Christians recognize him for who he is, and what he does.
    Everybody else is just blissfully unaware of him while doing his bidding.
    WWI and WWII did nothing but murder off whole generations of good hard men. You think that isn’t the plan here today?
    Think again.

  4. 60% of London is non-British now. Russia is not and was not the enemy. The traitor class running the West has pretty much torched democracy and Christianity in Western Europe and any sort of meaningful revival in what was Western Europe is pretty much out of the question now. They lost. Oddly enough, what still remains of the West lies in the former members of the Warsaw Pact.
    The enemy isn’t Russia and it never really was. Just go back in history and show me when an unapologetic Russian power exploded into Eastern or Western Europe. Perhaps you’ll run across some references to the Ottomans and perhaps detect a clue to the nature of the real enemy.
    I can say the same exact thing about China. Just when and where did China historically overrun its neighbors and put them all to the sword?

  5. My opinion: Russia doesn’t want Ukraine. Not all of it, anyway. Russia wants the Donbas and Crimea regions because they are rich in oil and other natural resources and have ports on the Black Sea that are accessible to the Atlantic Ocean.

    But Ukraine won’t give up those areas for the same “strategic asset” reasons that Russia wants them. Completely reasonable reaction, but it means that to get them, Russia must take all of Ukraine.

    For what it’s worth, most of the people in Donbas and Crimea consider themselves ethnically Russian, primarily speak Russian, and follow Russian cultural norms. Given the choice, most of them would prefer to be governed by Moscow rather than Kyiv — the Ukrainian government has historically not been particularly kind to them — and so Russia also has a humanitarian justification for taking the region to “rescue” her persecuted people. But again, whatever their culture, they are Ukrainian citizens and Kyiv won’t let them be taken.

    There are no clear good guys in this one, nor clear bad guys. Both sides have moral and strategic reasons to fight, and both sides have moral and strategic reasons to walk away.

    (Source: Good friends who emigrated from the Donbas region, and who have family still there. Infinitely better “eyes and ears” than the news media provides.)

  6. Russia will not stop at gobbling Ukraine. They have stated as much.

    They want all of their old empire back. As Peter Zeihan would put it, they won’t stop until they have defensible borders, which means most or all of Poland and Germany, the Baltic states and several other countries. The border they have in mind seems to include the Carpathian mountains. See, for instance, this link:
    https://zeihan.com/the-russian-reach-geography-and-intelligence/.

    I don’t believe Mr. Zeihan is correct in all things, but his thoughts on this jibe with mine.

  7. For me it’s very simple, and based on principle.

    Ukraine gave it’s nuclear arsenal, formerly part of the USSR’s arsenal, to the Russian Federation in exchange for Russia signing a treaty that they would always respect the national boundaries of Ukraine. We the US, among others were signatories to that.

    Russia has failed to honor that arangement. First with it’s invasion or Crimea, and later with the current “SPecial Military Operation”.

    We should be either supporting Ukraine with weapons and resourses, or we should give them nuclear weapns systems to replace those they gave up in the treaty.

    Arguments about anything else are secondary.

    • I wonder if the need for kiev to bombard Crimea and the Donbass with artillery, after the overthrow of the prior government by the US, has been worth the human cost to the Ukrainian people?

Comments are closed.