Putin Trump Turning-Point Talk

The US cutting loose both Kiev and Brussels is the way to end the war, and that’s a good thing

The only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is to be its friend.

That is a statement often attributed to Henry Kissinger – the multiple, unrepentant as well as un-prosecuted war criminal, butcher of the Global South, and revelation-resistant icon of US foreign policy. And even if the sources are a little murky – involving the slightly deranged and badly overestimated arch-conservative grandstander William F. Buckley – it would have been just like bad old Henry: sort of witty, deeply malevolent, and yet realistic in its own, venomous way.

Never mind that the idea is not that original: Aleksey Vandam, an unjustly forgotten geopolitical theorist and general of the late Russian empire, knew that much already. Watching the British and Americans abuse China, Vandam felt the Chinese had every reason for concluding that “it’s a bad thing to have an Anglo-Saxon for an enemy, but God forbid having him as a friend.”

And yet some lessons are never learned. This time it is the turn of both Ukraine and America’s EU-NATO vassals to pay the price of trying to be friends with what, in a global perspective, has been – quite objectively, quantifiably – the most overbearing, violent, and disruptive empire of firstly, the post-World War II and, recently, the post-Cold War periods.