Reopening the Cold War
What a mess in Ukraine! Is it reversible? That’s doubtful. From now on, it’s a long way back to normality in the international arena. Back in 1991, at a British university where I was studying I was asked by a professor if NATO should play a role in the post-communist era. Back then, I unreservedly answered yes. I believed that NATO should have the first say in the shaping of the new world. The Alliance, however, was only interested in its unlimited expansion and not in adapting its doctrine. The Alliance's indifference to the fight against Islamic terrorism the past thirty years is really inexplicable.
Why didn't the West in general and NATO in particular do what they had to do? Why didn't they fill the huge gaps left in the post-communist world? Why did everyone in the US and Western Europe remain trapped in the Cold War doctrines? Why did the West refuse to change? Why so much hostility to those, let’s call them traditionalists and patriots, who could have been approached on a different way? The return to the post-communist world of certain values that had been "buried" by Marxist tyranny, eg Christian faith, was an opportunity that was lost. The bombing of Serbia by NATO was not a wise choice. The West put before anything else the creation in Western Balkans of artificial states that operate today as bases for criminals and Islamist terrorists. This whole strategy will be soon considered by historians as a case study of failed geopolitical engineering.
Today Christianity is persecuted in the secularized West, where politicians kneel before woke culture. Our values are ostracized. Eastern Europe today defends the Christian faith. The bridges between the East and the West of Europe & USA, fell before they were even built. In the post-pandemic era the West comes divided. Unfortunately, the scary events in Ukraine are just the tip of the iceberg. The decision for a new Cold War of indefinite duration was made and it’s going to affect us all.
These are times of huge challenges; Islamists, along with leftists, are working to destroy our civilization. Right now, conflicts between Christian nations are a costly choice. This seems to have been realized by the Visegrad four. Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia, are not eager to lose their cultural identity and their independence. They consider the above threatened by interference from EU institutions. They want to keep out money from Qatar and the Gulf in general and the keep the door closed for the people of Muslim Brotherhood and their likes, which infiltrate in various ways Europe's political and academic circles. The Islamists have been trying for years to penetrate Christian countries and their institutions; they are now attacking Hinduism as well via the left academia in American universities and they won’t back down. Russia has effectively fought Islamic extremism on its territory and its cooperation with the West could bring great results. That will be impossible in the near future.
Will a republican victory in the mid-term elections in November change the course of events? Will the election of a Republican President (and definitely not a RINO) de-escalate tension? Russian invasion in Ukraine changed everything in a few hours. From now on, we will experience an escalation of tension all over the place, which will have huge consequences for the international economy and consequently for the quality of life of all of us in the West.
“Today Christianity is persecuted in the secularized West.”
This is true but the Christian tradition was debunked in our educational institutions for generations before public leaders allowed its persecution. There were still a few American writers, teachers and journalists of the last generation, Tom Fleiming, Sam Frances, Clyde Wilson, Pat Buchanan Joe Sobran and others who spoke out publicly before they were purposely purged and who did indeed sound the very warnings mentioned here. There were even some Russian and East European exiles who spoke up as invited guests in the United States. They were silenced as well.
The idea of “freedom” promoted and used by those who monitor and moderate our print, television and digital media, who start and stop the wars they want or don’t want, and finance our national candidates, do not share a concept of freedom remotely familiar to any of us us or even to a foreign guest like Alexander Solzenitsyn. To even conceive a notion of freedom as a means to cultivate, sustain, defend or improve an inherited culture rather than a politically useful pretense to destroy, cancel, kill and create new earthly utopias, is certainly anathema today.
“T’is all in pieces” and has been for longer than most of us will admit.
I feel sympathy for those soldiers, sailors and servicemen, from Vietnam to the present, many without arms and legs, who probably volunteered to serve for the right reasons but were drafted and lead by politicians unworthy to even lick their wounds.
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