The U.S is bumbling toward a serious confrontation with Russia over Ukraine

 2024 dawns with America embroiled in a war in Eastern Europe. The United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and the Russians are winning.

The United States bears a large share of responsibility for this catastrophe. Our government destabilized Ukraine in 2014 when it goaded the Ukrainians into overthrowing a popularly elected pro-Russian president. Within weeks, Russia responded by annexing Crimea. Six years later, Russia invaded Ukraine and now occupies the largely Russian-speaking Donbas region in the eastern region of that wretched country.

The Ukraine war has been a humanitarian disaster. At least a half million people have been killed or maimed in Ukraine, and the country's population has been cut in half as refugees flee to other European countries to escape the fighting. 

Without question, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia. Ukraine's vaunted spring counteroffensive achieved almost nothing. The Ukrainians will never oust Russia from Crimea or the Donbas, and everyone knows it.

Anyone who thinks Russia will tire of the war and simply give up doesn't know Russian history. Hitler besieged Leningrad during World War II for 900 days and never captured the city, even though one million Russians starved to death before the Russians broke the siege.

Americans are mistaken if they think the Ukraine misadventure will not affect them. Our politicians crow that the Ukraine war is a windfall for the United States because the Ukrainians are killing Russians with American weapons while the United States sits safely on the sidelines.  The Ukraine war will weaken Russia, the pundits say, but they are wrong.

Russia's army is larger today than it was before the Ukraine war began, and it is the United States, not Russia, that is tiring of the war. Congress is balking at the prospect of limitless funding for the Ukraine project, and our European allies are beginning to wish they had never followed our cognitively challenged President into the briar patch that is Ukraine.

Americans will pay a price for for our feckless and arrogant foreign policy. President Putin will have his revenge against us. He is tirelessly working toward the day when the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. We can expect some act of retribution on a scale that will shock us.

There will be a reckoning for our government's behavior, likely before the November 2024 election.

The Tar Baby Syndrome: Absent-mindedly, America lurches toward war with Russia

 A tar baby, in popular parlance, is a difficult problem only made worse by attempts to solve it. The term comes from an Uncle Remus story about Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. Brer Fox smears a doll with tar and tricks Brer Rabbit into striking the doll repeatedly in a futile attempt to get the doll to talk. Brer Rabbit’s punches and jabs have no effect on the tar baby, and soon Brer Rabbit is stuck in the tar.

Ukraine is President Biden’s tar baby. After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the President believed the Ukrainians could defeat the Russians if given modern weapons and training by NATO and the U.S. Army.

Things have not gone well. After 17 months of war, Ukrainian cities are in ruins, thousands of people have died, and millions of Ukrainians have become homeless refugees. Ukraine is an environmental disaster, with land mines strewn over the countryside and the lower Dnieper valley devasted by flooding.

And President Biden continues to punch the tar baby. First, his administration delivered ammunition, missiles, and javelin anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainians. That didn't do the job. Next, America and its NATO allies sent state-of-the-art tanks and armored vehicles in support of the Ukrainians’ much-ballyhooed counter-offense. But the counter-offensive bogged down, and the Russians destroyed many of the donated tanks and armored personnel carriers.

The Biden administration admits it can't supply Ukraine with all the conventional ammunition it needs to defeat the Russians. Thus, the President has decided to send cluster munitions outlawed by more than 100 countries, including many of America's NATO allies. Some call this move a war crime.

Are we done yet? Apparently not. This week the President authorized the Department of Defense to send 3,000 army reservists to Europe. This is in addition to the 20,000 troops sent to Europe earlier in the war. And Biden has promised to send F16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

President Biden is stuck to the tar baby, and the American people are stuck with him. I see no good outcome to this unfortunate war. Ukraine will never drive Russia out of Crimea, although Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, says he will do that. Nor will Ukraine recover the Donbas region.

We should remember that The US fomented this war in Ukraine when it helped topple a pro-Russian Ukrainian president in 2014, which prompted Russia to annex Crimea. Americans seem to think Ukraine is a democracy, but Zelenskyy suspended elections during the war, and his government is riddled with corruption.

This war is as stupid and unnecessary as the conflict in Vietnam or the First World War, for that matter. Yet Biden’s fight has broad bipartisan support in Congress and the mainstream media. No one seems concerned by recent disclosures that Hunter Biden has taken money from the Ukrainians. Nobody seems worried that an amoral octogenarian suffering from dementia is determining American war policy.

Some policy experts think the Ukrainian war will eventually destroy the Russian economy and force Putin out of power. I don't think so. NPR reported last April that the Russian ruble was the world's top-performing currency

No, it is the American economy that is most threatened by the Ukrainian shit show. By the time this tragedy winds down, the dollar will no longer be the world's reserve currency. We will be fortunate if we can get out of this mess without going to war with Russia.