Greetings! I am stepping back from this column for a day or two.
In the unlikely event that anyone is feeling short-changed in the matter of reading material I strongly recommend they Google for the text or summaries of Putin’s four hour Valdai speech.
Here they will see firm insistence by Russia of its SMO terms (Istanbul+ ) certainly involving Ukraine’s complete detachment from NATO and possibly from the EU, in the sense not of some artificial formula of the pseudo-clever kind that passes for diplomacy in the neoliberalized West, but that is hard and guaranteed. Something that sets Europe firmly against reckless hankering for a suicidal nuclear war.
This clearly a moment of opening which will require of Trump a very smart and, from an orthodox neoliberal view, independent and intelligent response. We simply don’t know whether the incoming team will be capable of this. The outgoing team has failed in this and in most other respects, miserably.
For Russia I entertain some concern that Putin, despite himself, will be succored despite his careful attentions into the Gorbachev trap of naive goodwill towards a West that no longer exists, that probably existed only for a brief nano-second, but is a new West that is already imploding but which does not seem to know that. I am not at all sure what a non-threatening rump Ukraine could possibly look like, even with regime change in Kiev.
I was relieved to hear Putin finally and necessarily giving voice to the positive continuities between Russia and the Soviet Union, of which one has been its stance against capitalist colonization and neocolonial expropriation.
I now take a very brief moment of celebration at the collapse of a sickened, hypocritical and pro-genocidal, pro-war, elitist Democratic orthodoxy before I have a chance to turn my face towards whatever comparable odiousness its victorious opponents will now set before us.
Peace.