DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: The Year Foreign Policy Delusions Die Hard
America’s leaders are out to lunch as the nation lurches forward into a more dangerous world.
By Douglas Macgregor (DouglasMacGregor.com)
The war in Ukraine is ending in catastrophic defeat for Ukraine and the United States. The war in the Middle East is just beginning, and it will not end when the Israeli State decides to stop fighting.
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Washington confronts a world it does not know or understand. The House Republicans’ recent “Plan for Victory in Ukraine” exemplifies an acute lack of understanding. It seems certain that Russian forces will push forward to the Dnieper River and beyond. When the forward movement begins, U.S. space-based surveillance systems will detect the westward movement and sound the alarm. Yet Ukraine has no means of stopping the Russian advance.
This point notwithstanding, Washington continues to insist on pushing NATO forces to Russia’s borders, establishing new bases in northern Sweden and Finland and effectively repeating the mistake that led to war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, roughly 1,000 miles from the Ukrainian border, Israel’s war with Hamas has mutated into a campaign to rid Israel of its Arab population. This development pits Israel and the United States in a showdown with the Islamic world, and potentially Russia, China, and the Global South.
The war in the Middle East is just beginning, and it will not end when the Israeli State decides to stop fighting.
Events unfolding in Ukraine and Israel are symptomatic of a new distribution of power created by rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The shift in the balance of power is profound. It is decisively shifting political, military, and economic power away from the United States at a time when Washington’s ruling class is presiding over an economy sliding into deep recession or worse, depression.
Wishful thinking normally fails in the face of hard facts, but Washington’s ruling political class ignores the facts. The result is that Washington is guiding the American People down a dangerous path to wider war and financial ruin in 2024.
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Yuriy Lutsenko, former Ukrainian prosecutor general, appeared on Ukrainian television on January 7 and said that Ukraine had lost 500,000 dead in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. He added, “Ukraine loses 30,000 people a month in the war as killed and seriously wounded.” He further insisted that Ukrainian authorities should publish the real numbers of Ukrainian losses to show people the seriousness of the situation.
Though Lutsenko failed to mention it, U.S. military advice combined with the performance of U.S. materiel demonstrated a degree of American military weakness not seen since the outbreak of the Korean War. Washington’s foolish attempt to destroy Russia with the use of Ukrainian lives has produced a strategic victory for Moscow and revealed American weakness to the whole world. With the national sovereign debt approaching the threshold of default, and the progressive collapse of American societal cohesion, the potential for American military failure in action is an event Washington should avoid but seems incapable of doing so.
Part of the reason is that Washington lives permanently in the afterglow of America’s military success in Desert Storm. In 1991, the ruling political class acknowledged that the victory owed a great deal to superior American technology, organization, as well as high-quality soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.