For once, America’s doing the right thing
Anyone who knows me, knows that I have for decades been a bitter critic of America’s foreign policy, its obsessive militarization, its inexorable finger on the scale of every election in the world toward the right and authoritarianism, the tragicomedy of its military belligerence based on bogosities followed by its Keystone-Kops-level failure repeated in wars of choice over generations, and its general poor conduct on the world stage.
But when it comes to Ukraine, the US is actually doing the right thing.
Nuclear war is unthinkable. Direct conflict between Russia and the US is unthinkable. But allowing Putin to take Ukraine would be a very bad outcome.
A no-fly zone leads to direct conflict and is unthinkable. Zelenskyy, the master showman, keeps hammering on the no-fly zone precisely because he will never get it, and meanwhile NATO offers material support, at least delaying the bad outcome, while avoiding the unthinkable.
And Russia has received a mortal blow. This isn’t 1979: we are financialized now, baby! Being cut off the “monetary grid” (I just made that up, it isn’t official) makes the Russian economy bleed out and at some point everything will just stop — you see the first signs already.
