[ Editorial ] Ukraine! Fateful Plain — Final Chapter

The West's still unacknowledged strategic defeat.

Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine ! fateful plain
Like a wave boiling in an overfull urn,
In your circus of woods, hills, and valleys,
Pale death mingled the dark battalions

(Victor Hugo’s original goes “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Fateful Plain!”)

You dear readers will have noticed that while our output on the Ukraine and Iran wars was prolific at the outset, we did not turn them into a serial. The belligerents' postures and the very conditions of these wars not having changed, we would have condemned ourselves to paraphrasing our own work — which may be good commerce, but is decidedly not good journalism.

[ Redux ] Ukraine, Dance Macabre of European Arms

[ Editorial ] Ukraine, Fateful Plain

The Iran Reckoning: A Biblical Defeat

Hypernormalization has as its first effect that those who claim to lead us are incapable of conceiving that any path other than their own might exist.

“A new criminal escalation,” thunders Benjamin Haddad, Secretary of State for European Affairs — a man whose career, before his election as MP in 2024, consisted exclusively of working for the Hudson Institute and the Atlantic Council - European sovereignty practiced. Russia did nothing more than retaliate against Ukrainian drone strikes on its own territory.

The difference being that when the Bear unsheathes its claws, it takes your head off in one swipe — not quite the mosquito bites that Kiev has been launching via the airspace of NATO member states.

How curious, don't you think, this parade of French presidential hopefuls making the pilgrimage to Kiev? Attal, Retailleau, Philippe… Were we feeling uncharitable, we might wonder about the real motives behind these visits. There is precious little to be gained from them electorally — the overwhelming majority of French voters are utterly sick of Ukraine, and no endorsement is to be found there. Campaign financing, then? Given the hundreds of billions poured in — of which, according to the Americans themselves, at least 30% was embezzled — does Ukraine now play the same role our old colonies once did? We haven't seen anyone turn up in Algeria yet — but rest assured, they'll all get there eventually.

Édouard Philippe intends to make Ukraine one of the grand themes of his campaign, a matter of both interest and principle, he tells us. But here is the thing: France has never had any interest in Ukraine, and still doesn’t. As for principles — if Monsieur Philippe had genuinely cared about Ukraine and Ukrainians, his policy as Prime Minister should have consisted of encouraging Kiev to maintain good relations with Moscow, and of doing everything possible to prevent a war that was lost before it started and could only lead to Ukraine’s destruction. Reactivating the Normandy Format, for instance. Instead, Édouard Philippe did the opposite.

Vladimir Putin put an end to the plundering of Russia’s vast resources that the West gleefully indulged in throughout the 1990s. Like it or not, he restored order in his country and hauled it out of the economic ditch. This was not achieved through consensus or quiet deliberation. He reasserted Russian sovereignty by expelling the organizations — NGOs, USAID, Western finance, and the rest — that, under cover of lofty universal principles, were engaged in carving Russia up for the taking. Russians have long memories, and serfdom — one wonders why, perhaps something to do with history — doesn’t suit them particularly well.

The only response Western leaders could muster to Russia’s return to the ranks of great powers was to expand NATO — in direct contradiction to the promises made at the time of the Wall’s fall, and in full exploitation of Moscow’s momentary weakness. A weakness that proved temporary: NATO’s creep to Russia’s borders, made possible by the Maidan coup of 2014, triggered the conflict whose final convulsions we are now watching.

Russia’s war aims have not changed since 2022. “Denazify the Donbas” — done. Destroy Ukraine’s military capabilities? Accomplished for a generation, given the number of Ukrainians — over a million, some say two — who died for nothing. Since Ukraine is financed and armed by NATO, the objective was also to drain the alliance’s arsenals. Hence the war of attrition that emptied Western stockpiles — European ones above all. Mission accomplished.

You will therefore understand our genuine exhaustion at having to discourse on conflicts whose outcome we already knew, in Ukraine as in Iran. You will also understand our profound irritation that no one speaks of what the State of Israel is doing in Lebanon, of what Paul Kagamé’s Rwanda is doing in Congo, or of the atrocious civil war in Sudan — instigated by the usual suspects: the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates.

We possess neither the immaculate white Charvet shirt, nor the fortune, nor the requisite cynicism to hold forth atop a pile of corpses.

The world is in a bad way. This is, in the main, the West’s fault. More precisely, the fault of the West’s leaders — elected or otherwise. Replacing them would resolve a good part of the problem.