No One Really Wants Ukraine. However…

Here’s Ukraine in my mental map. Heading north to south-east, Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. Mostly landlocked and unable to defend themselves.

Reading the New York Times on the topic of Ukraine is like reading the work of a political science student, the day after they learn how to find Ukraine on a map (and Russia too).

Joe Biden and Vlad Putin recently met to talk about Ukraine. The Europeans weren’t invited. Nor Turkey. Historically, the future geopolitical table flippers always need something to reinvigorate their delusional importance and, once again, they have it.

To be fair, the U.S., Russia and China take the cake in pompous saber-rattling.

Another way to put Ukraine in context? Imagine if Putin wanted Louisiana too (except for New Orleans). Let’s say he offered every American $5,000 for it? Of course, everyone in Louisiana would take it (haha), but you’d be tempted also, right?

Why don’t “we” offer a similar deal to Ukraine? We do; that is, we dangle membership to NATO.

Geopolitics only gets interesting when you talk about what you don’t want the other guy to have, not what you’ve agreed to say that is yours, this is mine.

Ukraine is one of those you can’t have it, but I may want it places. Like Cuba for us.

There will be no war over Ukraine. It’s a straw man argument. The conflict is global.

What we have is the “woke” West against the autocracies in the East. Both cowards in their own ways. There’s no solution to Ukraine. If it isn’t Ukraine it will be somewhere else.

Neither the West nor the East will talk about a problem common to them both — populations increasingly split into politically or economically divided classes. A global depression cloaked by silly theories like there’s no depression, people just don’t feel like working.

Sanctions against Russia are laughable. Russia’s primary industry is oil and gas. U.S. citizens didn’t care for decades, what its government did, how many people died, to maintain low gasoline costs for their cars. Asian and Europeans won’t care either when they see this winter’s gas and oil bills.

It’s the 1930s all over again.

Somewhere the wrong shot will be fired because who knows. A bad reflection in the windshield of some crackpot’s about-to-get-repossessed klunker.

A Gavrilo Princip* is having breakfast today. He has no idea his act will start WWIII.

*yes I know he’s WWI.