In a recent videopodcast discussion titled “The Fertility Apocalypse,” the public intellectual Samo Burja said that “we don’t really understand” why total fertility rates are declining in every modern society. But he’s wrong. It’s not difficult to understand why.

Let’s do some arithmetic. In what follows, I show, using Canada as an example, why fertility rates are below replacement, and likely to remain so (at least until or unless the government decrees that artificial wombs be built in quantity, and infants born through that pathway are put into crèches to get raised in groups).

Here’s the basic operational logic: In modern societies, it is WOMEN who decide how many kids they want to produce, and women, on average, do NOT want to have more than two kids, because BOY is it a lot of work to raise kids, and it’s expensive, too.

Most women want to experience having a child, but once they’ve had either one or two kids, it feels like enough; their reproductive urge has been satisfied. It’s only a small minority that feels complelled to have three or more.

Now consider the numbers:

1. Some non-zero fraction NK of women decide to have no kids at all (some of them are biologically unable, others are mentally ill or mentally or physically disabled in some other way; some are drug addicts who realize they cannot offer a child a good home, and so on; some are “career women” who just don’t want to make the sacrifices required; some just don’t particularly like kids).

In Canada, for example, a 2023 Statistics Canada survey found that a third of women in their fertile years say they don’t intend to have kids. So in Canada, perhaps NK = 0.33. Here’s the key insight: To make up for the loss of total population fertility caused by no-kids women, just to balance this out, an equal fraction LK of Canadian women would have to give birth to FOUR kids each. In Canada’s case, a third of all women would have to give birth to FOUR kids. And that’s NOT going to happen!

2. Some non-zero fraction OAD are “one-and-done” women: they want to experience childbirth and raise a kid, but only once, because it’s expensive and time-consuming to raise a child, and stressful and career-disruptive to be pregnant, after giving birth once, they decide not to do it again. In 2021, 45% (!) of Canadian families only had one child. Here again, to balance this out demographically and keep total fertility at 2.0, it would be necessary for a corresponding fraction of women to be three-kids (TK) women, i.e., TK = OAD; in Canada’s case, it would be necessary for 45% of women to have three children. That’s NOT going to happen!

3. In fact, it really cannot plausibly happen. If 0.33 of Canadian women want zero kids and 0.45 want only one kid, that makes 0.78 of the female population choosing to have zero or one kid, and it leaves just 0.22, or 22% of the population, to make up the difference by having prodigious amounts of children. That 78% of zero-or-one-kid women have an average fertility rate (within sample) of 0.45/0.78 = 0.58. To get to a total fertility rate for the Canadian population as a whole equal to the replacement rate of 2.1, the remaining 22% of women would need to generate, on average, (2.1–0.45)/0.22 = 7.5 !

In the real world, according to Statistics Canada, 17% of Canadian families with children have “three or more” kids, but the vast majority of these have exactly three children, not four or more. And yet… If my calculations above are correct, then the 22% of Canadian women who are willing to have at least two children would need to have, on average, nearly EIGHT children per woman in order to make up for the 78% of the female population who are zero-kid and one-kid-only women.

Right now, 38% of Canadian households that do have children have two, and 45% have one, but in future, an even greater fraction will have none. There may be some uncertainties in these numbers because of variance between expressed future intentions vs. current statistics, etc., but the general point stands: it is unrealistic to expect women who DO want more than one child to have MANY children to make up for the low fertility of the large (78%) majority of women who either want none or only one.

Samo Burja and other commenters on the decline in the total fertility rate in nearly all industrialized nations, and even many developing nations, point to Israel-Palestine as the single exception to the rule. Yet it’s a very special case. If there are any lessons to be learned from that special case, it’s a worrying one.

The country (including the occupied territories) has a population of about 14 million, split evenly between Jews and Palestinians, and they’re in the midst of a demographic war to determine which ethnic population will predominate. Orthodox Jews believe they have a religious duty to generate as many children as possible (that’s the case whether they live in Jerusalem or New York). Other sects in other regions (e.g., the Amish) have a similar natalist religious ideology. The fraction of humanity descended from religious fanatics will therefore continue to grow, and if the gap between the fecundity of secular people and populations of natalist religious ideologues continues, we will eventually see a world dominated by the descendants of families motivated by religious natalist ideologies.

In coming decades, however, religiosity will on the whole likely continue to decline, as science continues to make a mockery of Iron Age religious ideologies and their absurd and obviously counterfactual claims; so unless (i) the emerging AGSI era (artificial general superintelligence) generates a planetary AGSI god we can truly believe in (because it will really exist), AND (ii) that god commands our women to bear many children, we will continue to see population decline… limited at the bottom end by populations of fecund religious fanatics from various obscure sects, many of them ethnoreligions that inbreed relentlessly on the theory that non-members of their sect are “unclean” or “damned” or some such tragic nonsense.

A corollary of this observation is that inbreeding sects whose members are told that they are something like a superior species, separate and set above all other humans, will perhaps be more inclined to go to war against rival sects. That kind of religio-tribal ingroup vs outgroup logic has been a factor in human history for millennia, and if the proportion of all humans that belong to inbreeding natalist sects grows as a fraction of the total human population in future, it might cause serious problems a few decades down the road. But perhaps our future planetary AGSI god will intervene to put a stop to religious wars — it’s impossible to know, at this point.

Anyway, now you know why (nearly) all industrialized countries are seeing average birthrates far below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per women.

Addendum (February 2026): a reader pointed out to me that independently of religion, over generations, an evolutionary algorithm should kick in which selects in favour of women who crave children more than the average woman of her generation does. There are now few constraints on survival of individuals — most girl babies will grow up to become adult women, whereas the same girl baby would have died as a child if she had even a mildly suboptimal immune system and had lived a century or two earlier — so the single factor of an unusually strong emotional desire for bearing manychildren could operate without constraint, i.e., this single characteristic may well suffice to result in women endowed with it bearing significantly more children. Also, artificial insemination technology (and social welfare supports) means women don’t even need to attract male partners to help them raise a family (though most still do try to do so, and do get married at least temporarily). The net effect going forward, over generations, should be a selection signal in favour of women more inclined to bear many children, even amongst women who are not members of natalist sects.

All that said, it’s difficult to project what’s going to happen in evolutionary terms if and as technology perhaps evolves to the point where genetically “enhanced” or modified babies can be grown in artificial uteri and raised in crèches.

This document:

sets out the current strategic situation,

explains the core narratives guiding Kremlin decision-making,

projects Putin’s likely next moves — internal Russian FSB intelligence estimates project Putin will likely escalate the war by means of an attack on military targets on NATO territory, and

proposes a solution that secures Western gains and Ukraine’s freedom whilst avoiding a spiral into catastrophe.

In Part I, we describe the problem and its context — how Russia and the West got into this mess — and we assess the present danger.

In Part II, we explore emergency de-escalatory pathways for interrupting the spiral toward a catastrophic war in Europe whilst securing Ukraine’s core strategic goals of securing its freedom and its European orientation.

In Part III, we put forward, as a basis for discussion, a proposal for the key points of a possible peace settlement to end war in Ukraine and avoid a war in Europe, with specified commitments by Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union.

What is now needed is understanding and compromise, not maximalist posturing amid credible threats of a wider war in Europe.

PART I. UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

Strategic assessment, Ukraine & Allies vs. Russia conflict, late March 2022

Ukrainians, supported by the world’s democracies, are winning the war in defense of their homeland’s freedom imposed on them by the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. This is very good, but it is also very dangerous, because as Western intelligence assessments show, Mr. Putin now realizes that although his armies can destroy Ukrainian cities, Ukrainians will not submit. Russia’s armies will continue to be subject to relentless attrition, and they will not be able to achieve a successful occupation of Ukraine. Putin now fears his regime could collapse under the pressure of harsh Western economic sanctions and the humiliating failure of his invasion. These setbacks will increasingly undermine the legitimacy of his rule in the eyes of Russian organs of state — the army, intelligence agencies, banks and other economic institutions.

Faced with this disaster, Putin will not back down; he will double down. Therein lies great danger. Since the start of the invasion, a series of situation reports have been leaked to a Russian dissident, Vladimir Osechin, by a disaffected senior FSB analyst in Moscow who has become known online by the moniker “WindOfChange.” According to a US military officer with whom I checked, these reports are deemed by American intelligence agencies to be genuine: he told me that his intel contacts assess that WindOfChange is in fact an active FSB analyst, and that the reports he is putting out seem credible. On the other hand, some commentators have expressed skepticism. In any case, what WindOfChange has written does seem in keeping with what game-theory suggests a ruthless sociopath keen on winning a game might do (a game which he initiated and is currently losing) — if unconstrained by concerns over causing vast human suffering.

According to WindOfChange’s reports, the FSB expects that Putin will try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by raising the stakes of his war, directly attacking NATO targets and demanding Europe’s and Ukraine’s capitulation to his demands, promising devastating damage to Europe and Ukraine as the price of refusal.

· If at first Europeans refuse to capitulate, as can be initially expected, Putin will, the FSB currently believes, escalate further in a series of ever more extreme hybrid military and cyberwarfare attacks on central and western European targets. He will ready his nuclear forces to red-alert level and warn that he will use them if NATO counterattacks into Russia. He may detonate one or more tactical nuclear weapons, probably inside Ukraine, to demonstrate the seriousness of this threat.

· Putin is unlikely to back down, because from his perspective, he is now in a winner-takes-all game, a staring contest in which whoever blinks first loses. If he backs down and admits defeat in Ukraine, he will lose everything. Conversely, if he forces Europe to end its support to the armed Ukrainian resistance and to accept his terms for a cease-fire between NATO and Russia, he could win everything: regime survival, concessions on the future status of Ukraine, regime change in Kyiv, and even the collapse of the NATO alliance, as nations abandon a common Article 5 response in the face of a credible threat of nuclear attack.

· Putin/FSB expect Poland and the Baltic states to take a hard line against concessions to Russia, but Putin will be counting on Europeans of other nations to sue for peace once the pain applied to them becomes too great to bear. He thinks most Europeans will decide that defending the independence of Ukraine’s government against Russian domination isn’t worth the destruction of Europe. Crucially, he will be betting that the United States will refrain from launching a full-scale all-arms attack on Russia in response to his series of escalatory attacks on European targets.

Given Putin’s sociopathic character, and his previous history of ordering ultraviolent actions resulting in heavy civilian casualties in the wars Russia fought in Chechnya and Syria, we can infer that the suffering imposed on Europeans by his imposing a wider war will not deter him, and nor will the injustice of his cause. To predict Putin’s actions, we must understand his character, his personal at-risk situation, his motivations, and above all, the narratives guiding his actions. This does not mean accepting the legitimacy of his narratives; our purpose is merely to understand why he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in the first place, and what he is likely to do next now that his armies are bogged down in an unwinnable quagmire there and Russia is the target of potentially regime-destabilising financial and economic embargoes.

Russia’s strategy in context: Ukraine and NATO in the Kremlin’s narrative

Given the range of options available to a dictator who lacks moral restraints, we can assess that according to the game-theoretic logic of the bad situation Putin now finds himself in — as well as predictive situation reports provided by “WindOfChange,” the disgruntled senior FSB analyst — Putin will escalate the war by attacking targets in Europe and triggering NATO’s Article 5, and he will blame the collective West for this escalation.

He will say that Russia is acting in legitimate self-defense. He will say that the West “forced” Russia to attack targets in Europe, e.g. weapons depots in Poland, because it ignored his warnings to not interfere with his “special military operation” to “de-nazify and de-militarize Ukraine” and “defend Russians within Ukraine and in the independent republics of Donbass against genocide.” He will say that the West effectively declared war on Russia by imposing economic war on Russia and by flooding weaponry into Ukraine for purposes of killing Russian soldiers. He may say that in so doing, “the West chose to start World War III.”

As outrageous as this narrative may seem to Europeans given that it inverts the roles of aggressor and victim, we must understand that it is likely sincerely held: a typical characteristic of bullies with sociopathic character disorder is that when they make mistakes and things go badly wrong, they always blame someone else — very often the victim of their actions, who “provoked” or “forced” them to become violent; they never blame themselves.

The US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership as seen by the Kremlin

In the narrative long dominant within Putin’s inner circle, Ukraine’s becoming a military ally of the US — whether by joining NATO or through a bilateral defense pact — presents an existential threat to Russia.This view, too, may be sincerely held, however mistaken it may be from a neutral observer’s point-of-view. From the Kremlin’s point of view, the bilateral pact signed by the governments of the United States and Ukraine in a ceremony in Washington on November 10, 2021, entitled “US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership,” was tantamount to a declaration by the United States that it would establish a permanent state of military pressure vis-à-vis Russia, using the disputed status of Donbass and Crimea as a pretext for this pressure, and an ever more capable Ukrainian Army as the instrument of pressure, with a significant likelihood that the Ukrainian Army would be backed up by the stationing of American nuclear-armed missile batteries on Ukrainian territory within the foreseeable future.

Putin and his circle saw the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership pact as a deliberate and serious provocation,especially in the context of the Kremlin’s repeated vehement warnings that it would never accept Ukraine becoming a military “vassal” or “instrument” of the United States. As became clear from the televised speeches he gave immediately before the invasion of Ukraine and in light of many previous statements, Putin was personally angered that these warnings were simply dismissed and ignored by the Americans. Indeed, it is true that these warnings were entirely dismissed by Ukrainian and American foreign policy makers: The Strategic Partnership pact proposed the full integration of Ukraine in the Euro-Atlantic network, in all military and security aspects as well as in economic terms. It promised that the US would provide assistance to Ukraine to achieve Kyiv’s ever-deepening integration into US-aligned Euro-Atlantic institutions and to progressively enhance its military capabilities. Moreover, the Strategic Partnership document explicitly stated in strong language that the US and Ukraine would never cede Ukraine’s claims to sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbass.

Proximate causes of the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine

In this narrative context, given the Kremlin’s insistence that a Ukraine allied to and armed by Washington and hosting Western military bases would present a direct existential strategic military threat to Moscow, and given Ukraine’s insistence on continuing to demand the “return” of Crimea to its jurisdiction, the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, which surprised most analysts, becomes less surprising.

Once the Strategic Partnership was in place, Russia had to act sooner rather than later, according to Putin and foreign minister Lavrov’s reasoning, because otherwise Ukraine would rapidly grow in military capability under American tutelage and would increasingly become integrated into NATO-adjacent and Euro-Atlantic institutional structures. Ukraine would soon pass beyond the point at which Russia could take “military-technical action” against Kyiv without provoking an allied military defense of Ukraine, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

From the Kremlin’s point of view, once the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership had been signed, Russia was at the point of “losing” Ukraine permanently. To prevent that outcome, immediate action was required to force Kyiv to exit the Partnership.

The Kremlin’s war objective is to force Ukraine out of its alliance with the United States, and to cancel the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership. Moscow’s failure to achieve these goals in negotiations meant that only forcible regime change in Kyiv could achieve them.

The three months of negotiations — at daggers drawn — between December 2021 and late February 2022 between Russia and US-Ukraine provoked no concessions whatsoever by Washington or Kyiv on the Kremlin’s core demands for Ukraine to commit to:

(i) Ukrainian military neutrality, to be enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution, replacing the existing clause (put there in 2019) committing Ukraine’s government to seek NATO membership;

(ii) de jure recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, and

(iii) de jure recognition of the independence of the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk (whose people we can expect will soon “vote” to join the Russian Federation in a dodgy referendum).

Consequent to its failure to gain concessions on these points, and on its additional, rather extreme demands for NATO to pull its military assets back to 1997 positions in central Europe, leaving the Baltic states and Poland with no allied defense against Russia (a demand which may have been included as maximalist positions to bargain away in negotiations), Putin greenlighted the invasion of Ukraine, mistakenly thinking that it a blitzkrieg approach would quickly push into Kyiv and topple the regime.

Putin expected the invasion to achieve rapid success in part because he appears to have viewed Ukrainian President Zelenskyi with contempt, and likely expected him to flee the country. Zelenskyi is a former television actor and comedian with no previous political experience prior to winning the Presidency; prior to the current war, he was widely seen — by most Ukrainians as well as by Western political analysts — as well out of his depth in his new role as President of Ukraine.

Net Assessment

The net assessment is as follows:

· We have backed Putin into a corner. He feels he could lose everything if he does not manage to turn the tables.

· Given his narcissistic perspective as the unchallenged autocratic ruler of Russia, as a quasi-Tsar, he appears to identify Russia’s fate with his own personal fate and that of his personalist regime — for him, a humiliation of Putin is a humiliation of Russia.

· Rather than backing down, he will double down by initiating a series of escalatory steps by attacking through an unpredictable tool-kit of hybrid and conventional military attacks on European targets, deliberately triggering Article 5; he will characterize these attacks as “defensive” and blame them on the “collective West”, which he will accuse of having declared de facto war on Russia, in light of the West’s harsh economic sanctions on Russia and its supply of weapons to Ukraine’s army.

· He hopes that any NATO military response to this will cause Russians to rally round the flag and support his government. Given his near-total domination over public media messaging, this expectation may be correct.

· An open question is whether cooler heads in Russia’s military and security agencies will continue indefinitely to go along with Putin’s increasingly high-stakes gambling.

· Given his sociopathic nature, as well as his ethnonationalist commitment to “protecting Russians” whilst seeing people who are not ethnic Russians as largely outside his circle of concern, he is not constrained by ethical or empathetic considerations over the enormous suffering he will cause by widening the war beyond Ukraine into central and western Europe.

· Nor is he likely to be constrained by the risk of potentially sparking a general conflagration by triggering Article 5: he believes the West is “decadent” and will not be willing to incur devastating costs to defend Ukraine’s political position.

· Moreover, rather than accepting defeat in Ukraine, he is tempted by the prospect of even greater winnings if he is able to stare down NATO and bully it into capitulation to his demands. He believes he could cause the collapse of NATO, as countries unwilling to risk nuclear destruction of their territories back off from their commitments to Article 5.

· He may increase his demands as he increases the spiral of escalation — specifically, he may demand that the United States withdraw all its military forces from Europe as a condition of his ceasing to launch a variety of harsh hybrid attacks on European cities and infrastructure. This outcome is the great goal, the top prize, the central objective of Russian geostrategy, according to Eurasianist ideologues like Alexander Dugin, whose thinking has long influenced Putin.

Inference: Unless the war is ended earlier by negotiation, we are days away from entering a spiral of escalation with a wholly unpredictable trajectory.

How could the West prevent this?

PART II: CHARTING EUROPE’S AND UKRAINE’S PATHWAY TO VICTORY WITHOUT CATASTROPHE

The way forward is to give Putin enough of what he wants to allow him a face-saving off-ramp from the war in Ukraine — one that does not require him to attack NATO targets — whilst securing Ukraine’s freedom and independence and thus its victory.

It is crucial to do this soon, before Putin enters the escalatory spiral and begins making ever more hallucinatory geopolitical demands that he will then feel unable to climb down from. He has spent his entire career aligned with the principle that once a threat is made, it must be stuck to, in order to avoid losing credibility. We must de-escalate now before he makes catastrophic demands coupled with threats that will not be acceded to, such as demanding the pull-out of all American military forces from Europe on pain of all-out attack.

There is a tendency, in crisis situations, for policy-makers to get caught up in very short-term tunnel-vision thinking. Europeans and NATO allies must now stay calm and remember the long view. It doesn’t really matter very much if some concessions are offered to Russia over the status of Ukraine in the current moment. Any and all agreements can be revised through later negotiations, when the situation has calmed down, when more reasonable and collaborative counterparties are in charge in the Kremlin. Putin will not be in office forever.

Indeed, he may not be in office for very much longer. He has already lost this contest; the military and FSB already know that he is to blame for a terrible miscalculation vis-à-vis Ukraine. His prestige is tarnished. Any dictator’s survival in power is contingent on the support of his security and military services (not so much on the support of the wider population — that only becomes relevant if massive popular demonstrations occur and the security services decide they are unwilling to continue to crack down on those demonstrations).

In Part I, I outlined the three minimum core demands the Kremlin has made of its goals for the future of Ukraine. These are “minimum goals.” A maximalist agenda would be for the Kremlin to absorb Ukraine entirely as a province within the Russian Federation (and sooner or later, probably Belarus as well). Perhaps Putin and his coterie, sunk into a narrative dream-state induced by reading histories of the Russian Empire and surrounding himself with sycophants and ethnonationalist ideologues, and completely out of touch with the realities on the ground in modern Ukraine, believed this maximalist agenda to be a realistic prospect prior to the invasion. However, the course of the war has shown that any such hope is illusory. Ukrainians have united in opposition to a Russian invasion and conquest, and they will not forgive the invaders.

At this point, Putin would be lucky to achieve the three-point agenda of Ukrainian military neutrality and Ukrainian de jure cession of Crimea and Donbass to Russia.

Proposals from Europe for Ukrainians to accept these terms will likely be met with hostility in Ukraine insofar as the people feel they are beginning to win the war (and likely to be able to punish the Russian Army ever more harshly the more Western allies flood powerful weapons into the battlespace across the border from Poland into Ukraine in coming days and weeks.

Many Ukrainians are in no mood for compromise. They are inflamed with nationalist passion, raging with anger at the Russians, mourning their dead, and keen to inflict revenge on Russia by reconquering these regions.

However, the reality is that short of a wholesale defeat of Russia proper, which would likely require a nuclear war which everone (including Ukraine) would lose, Ukraine will not be able to reconquer Crimea or Donbass from Russia. Ukraine can either accept this fact now, or accept it several weeks or months from now, after much of Ukraine and potentially also much of Europe lays in smoking ruin.

In addition, it seems very unlikely that Russia will stop its destruction of Ukraine until and unless its core demand is met that Ukraine backs off from becoming a military dependency of the United States (or of NATO). This means Kyiv must cancel the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, and it must change its Constitution to commit to military neutrality.

This doesn’t mean “capitulating to Russia.” Far from it. Russia has already been severely damaged by economic sanctions and its regime’s political stature has taken a heavy below. There will be no normalization of relations with Russia as long as Putin stays in power. Sanctions may be eased, but it seems likely that those of the sanctions which target Russia’s ruler and his cronies will not be lifted until there is a political transition. At the same time, the US geostrategic position has been strengthened in Europe, and Russia’s has been weakened, with a renaissance of NATO and a collective decision by Europeans to reduce or even completely stop buying Russian oil and gas as soon as this is technically achievable.

It is time for the US State Department and NATO planners to end this round of the game, collect their winnings, and step away from the brink. Continuing to pressure the cornered Putin regime until it lashes out in fury with escalatory attacks on Europe would be an act of historic miscalculation, even insanity. The complete military integration of Ukraine into the Euro-Atlantic alliance is not a strategic necessity either for European NATO members nor for the United States — certainly not in the short term, and not in the long term either, when one considers the matter dispassionately. The US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership pact was either a major diplomatic mistake or a tool which succeeded in providing a basis for provoking a hybrid war which — albeit at Ukraine’s expense as collateral damage — led to a renaissance of NATO and an opportunity to severely damage Russia and the Putin regime geoeconomically and politically. If that was its purpose (whether inadvertently or intentionally, it was certainly the result), that purpose has now been served. Military alliances are not ends in themselves. They are means to an end.

Russia will retain control over Donbass and Crimea, but Russia will pay heavily for that privilege — economically and geostrategically. It will remain a pariah state until its criminal regime of kleptocrats and Great Russian fantasists fades from power. There is no need for Europe or for the State Department to continue to press the Putin regime against the wall now. Europe may hope that the resulting explosion will be an internal regime change in Moscow, but it must not underestimate Putin: he will organise an explosion in the form of an external escalation of the war into Europe instead, in order to regain his footing.

If Russia’s minimal terms for an end to hostilities in Ukraine and the withdrawal of its armies — i.e. Ukraine’s military neutrality plus de jure cession of Crimea and Donbass to Russia — are complemented by an agreement — as Russia’s side of the bargain — to respect Ukraine’s freedom to democratically elect its own governments in fair elections and to enter into any economic partnerships it chooses, including with the European Union, barring only military aspects of these partnership, then Ukraine will achieve a status similar to that of Austria, Finland, or Switzerland. The West can enforce Russia’s agreement to these terms by means of a schedule of economic sanctions: i.e. any attempt by Russia to interfere with Ukraine’s political independence would come at a clear and heavy economic price.

The negotiations for the lessening of the economic sanctions against Russia are nearly certain to include provisions requiring Russia to pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Given that Western central banks are in possession of perhaps €300 billion of Russia’s reserves, and could also apply surcharges to any imports of Russian oil and gas, the funds for reconstructing Ukraine will be available.

Logic and reason must now triumph over the passions of war. It is not clear what improvement Ukraine could hope to achieve in its position by refusing to cede title to Crimea or Donbass and continuing to fight rather than accepting the terms outlined above. If in 10, 20, or 30 years, Ukraine is a vastly more prosperous country with its own robust independent non-aligned military, and Russia has by then undergone a democratic transition, that would be a time at which Russian and Ukrainian negotiators could discuss whether the status of Donbass might be reconsidered.

European leaders must now make it clear to President Zelenskyi and to the Russian government that Europe will support these terms — and that the sooner Russia agrees to them, the more generous Europe will be in reconsidering the harsh economic sanctions regime that has been put in place. Europe, not the United States, must take the lead in imposing a peace — it has far more at stake in this, since Russia’s strategy does not include military strikes on US territory, which Russian war planners — even Putin in his current distress — surely realise would be suicidal. Washington is much more likely than Berlin, Warsaw, Paris or Rome to be willing to continue to press its advantage in an effort to retain the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership and to keep the war going to inflict as much damage as possible on the Russian military, and to underestimate the costs and risks of a Russian attack on Europe outside Ukraine. It is time to cool things down and return to the negotiating table. European leaders must come together and impose a peace settlement, regardless of the preferences expressed by Washington, Moscow, or Kyiv.

They must do so immediately, within the coming few days, before Putin initiates the series of escalatory steps he is reportedly planning — and which game-theoretic coupled with personality type assessment suggests he naturally would be inclined to engage in.

The future of Europe is at stake in this moment. Far from crumbling in the face of Russian pressure or allowing themselves to be manipulated as tools by US State Department policy-makers tasked with European and Russian policy, now is the moment when European Union leaders can and must come together to take control of the continent’s destiny. Everything is at stake.

PART III: A PROPOSAL FOR THE KEY POINTS OF A EUROPEAN UNION IMPOSED PEACE SETTLEMENT

The following points are offered as a basis for discussion between negotiators.

An immediate cease-fire must be agreed and humanitarian corridors established. The flow of weapons from all sides into the territory of Ukraine should ideally be halted during the negotiations, which should be led by the European Union and seek to achieve a quick resolution, within days or at most weeks, not months. However, monitoring the flow of weapons during a cease-fire will be difficult, and both sides will have an incentive to cheat. Both sides will be concerned that the balance of weaponry might shift against them due to resupply operations during an extended cease-fire. This provides an incentive for rapidly coming to an agreement if both sides fear the other side could gain an upper hand during a cease-fire more than they hope they themselves will materially improve their position. In any event, even if there is no agreement on halting weapons flows, a cease-fire should be called.

European Union member Foreign Ministers, Ukrainian, Russian, and American negotiators must be summoned to Brussels under the aegis of the European Union to discuss the future of Ukraine. The EU position for a settlement should be approximately as follows:

Commitments and concessions from the Russia side:

· Russia must pull back its troops from Ukraine, excepting for Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea

· Russia will agree for UN supervised referenda to be held in Donetsk and Luhansk, with details to be agreed by consensus between the EU and the Russian Federation, to enable the residents of the region to choose their preferred affiliation (i.e. whether the regions will belong to Russia or Ukraine)

· Russia will pay reparations for the reconstruction of Ukraine; international adjudicators will be convened to assess the damage done and set the amount of reparations fairly and transparently. Russia will accept that measures including diversion of central bank reserve funds (some of which have been frozen in Western central bank accounts) as well as surcharges on future Russian oil and gas sales are legitimate sources for these reconstruction funds

· Russia will commit to refraining from any future military incursions into Ukraine, whether conventional or hybrid, will seek lasting peace with Ukraine, and will commit to fully respecting the political and economic independence of Ukraine, including any decision Ukraine may make to make economic association agreements with the European Union and to apply for European Union membership

· Russia will welcome negotiations with the European Union and NATO over restrictions on weapons of mass destruction in western Eurasia (i.e. Europe and western Russia), and will explore deconfliction measures on a consensus-building basis, free of threats or coercion, to mutual benefit of all parties

· Russia will seek a lasting peace settlement with the European Union and engage in long-term confidence-building measures on a consensus basis

· Russia will enter into good-faith negotiations to achieve a consensus settlement over the future of Transnistria involving Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and the European Union

Commitments from the Ukrainian side, guaranteed by the European Union:

· Ukraine will remain a free, democratic, and sovereign nation within Europe, and will seek to develop as a bridge of peace and reconciliation between Russia and Europe, rather than as a zone of contention

· Ukraine will delete from its Constitution its statement of aspiration to join NATO and will instead commit in its Constitution to military neutrality, with the examples of Austria, Switzerland, and Finland as leitmotifs for the structure and nature of its neutrality

· Ukraine will maintain its own independent defensive armed forces, and will seek to develop deconflicted and friendly relationships with the armed forces of neighbouring and European Union countries, e.g. by cooperating in joint integrated European and Eurasian multinational engineering corps for deployment in UN SDG-inspired civilian infrastructure development initiatives in developing countries, and for natural disaster response missions, focusing on jointly building peace rather than preparing for war

· Ukraine will not allow extremist ultranationalist armed groups with revisionary territorial claims or antidemocratic agendas to play a role in its armed forces or its police agencies; the European Union and OSCE will help ensure this is respected

· Ukraine will be free to make economic association agreements with any states and with the European Union as it prefers, and it will be free to apply to join the European Union, provided the issues of sovereignty over Crimea and Donbass have been permanently settled and there are no remaining territorial disputes with neighbouring states

· Ukraine recognises that it has a long way to go in its institutional evolution before it can qualify to become a member of the EU. The EU will assist in this process if asked by Ukraine, and will also assist with Ukraine’s infrastructure development consistent with EU goals and policies for a prosperous future based on fossil-free energy supplies and commodities

· Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States will recognise the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea

· Ukraine will allow water to flow into Crimea in an agreed amount similar to historically precedent amounts; an OSCE arbitration panel could be established to ensure this is dealt with fairly in a way that respects the interests of the people of the Crimean Peninsula

· Ukraine will agree to respect the results of an internationally supervised and organised referendum in regards to the choice of the people of the Donbass region over whether they want to be under Russian or under Ukrainian sovereignty — and Russia will also respect the results; if either party rejects the results of a referendum deemed free and fair by the international adjudicating bodies (e.g. joint UN and OSCE missions), the immediate result will be severe economic and diplomatic penalties on the party refusing to accept the results, with a pre-defined set of sanctions that would be imposed by the European Union, to ensure that everyone affected clearly understands the heavy price of non-compliance. The aim is to permanently settle this question and permanently end this source of conflict between Russia and Ukraine

· The Donbass referendum will be organised by international agencies, not by the local governments or by the governments of Ukraine or Russia, and will be subject to total transparency of rules and procedures to eliminate any reason for sincere concerns over the accuracy of the results

· If the referendum results are adjudicated by the administering body as procedurally questionable, e.g. if armed intimidation came into play against voters, the adjudicating body can require that the referendum be re-held under more equitable circumstances

· Ukraine will withdraw from the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership and will not enter into any similar military alliance agreements with the United States unless the government of the Russian Federation gives explicit written permission for Ukraine to do so (thus leaving the door open for future closer ties in a world in which, perhaps, Russia itself becomes an ally of the United States through voluntary choice, as was discussed by V.V. Putin in the year 2000)

· Ukraine’s freedom and security will be guaranteed primarily through its own development as a democratic republic, secondarily through its close association with the European Union, and thirdly through multilateral European and UN organisations

But in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany abruptly changed gears. It now sees Russia under “Putler” as a genuine threat. On February 27, three days after the Russian invasion, during a special session of the Bundestag (Germany’s Parliament), Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany’s annual military spending would immediately increase from about 1.4% of GDP in 2020 to at least 2.0% — and that’s not including a special fund for buying military hardware of €100 billion (about $110 billion at current exchange rates). In short: Germany is going to re-arm. It will soon have the third-highest level of military expenditure in the world, although it will still be far less than that of the USA or China, and it still will not have its own nuclear weapons.

What should Germany spend that money on — and what should it NOT spend money on? And what should the geostrategic perspective be that guides that spending? In what follows, I’ll provide several suggestions, from my perspective as a journalist and policy analyst who has lived in Germany for the past ten years.

Goals

Germany’s grand strategy should be oriented towards leading the world in the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include promotion of peace, prosperity, health, climate stability and biodiversity conservation. A key thrust of Germany’s grand strategy should be to actively wage peace on a global basis and to lead the world in global health, climate stabilisation, clean technology deployment, and ecological restoration initiatives.

It should also be oriented towards empowering the European Union and its institutions, not least the Euro currency, which should become a key instrument of power projection not only within Europe, but also globally, especially in Africa, the continent whose burgeoning population Europe will become increasingly engaged with as the century wears on.

Let’s look at some of the broad priorities and possible instruments consistent with this SDG and EU focused Grand Strategy.

Strategies

1. Germany should seek to strengthen the European Union’s unity, economic integration, prosperity, food security, and technological autarky (especially in terms of electronics and energy), and enhance the EU’s ability to exercise both hard and soft power by means of common European institutions, freed of the requirement for unanimous consent for policy initiatives from every member-nation government.

For this to be possible, Germany should propose to give the European Union a limited right of direct taxation and the European Parliament a limited ability to initiate legislation, and the European institutions should be able to agree on policy actions as long as a consensus of national governments representing at least two-thirds of the EU’s population is achieved. The rule that unanimous consent is required from every one of the EU’s member nations before any significant action is taken is absurd and it must end. Europe will not be able to unfold its potential or achieve economic and political security unless this changes.

2. A key goal is to reduce Europe’s and Germany’s dependence on the United States for the continent’s military defense, given that Donald Trump or some other unpredictable nationalist with a zero-sum worldview on global affairs may soon return to power in Washington. This means Germany should increasingly integrate its defense with European partners, above all France, Italy, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and preferably with Poland as well, provided Poland recommits to liberal democratic norms and institutions and that its government and military can be restrained from adopting an unnecessarily provocative stance vis-à-vis Russia.

3. Germany should build global citizen engagement institutions that develop communications and cooperation channels between citizens of different countries in ways that cannot readily be censored or interrupted by authoritarian governments.

The strategy for managing relations with Russia in particular should include counteracting Russian government propaganda and brainwashing, which seeks to mischaracterise the nature of central and western European societies in the minds of Russians as “enemies” of Russia, decadent, weak, unhinged by bizarre postmodernist ideology, and somehow populated largely by transgendered pedophiles. Active measures to counter-message such nonsense are badly needed now that the Kremlin has ended Russian media freedom almost entirely. Germany and Europe should invest in top-quality free media and social media channels which Russian citizens can access without interference from their governments, far more actively than they have done to date, and propagate these globally. For example, Germany could fund non-propagandistic top-quality journalism for propagation via the Telegram social media app.

Germany’s strategy should include funding institutions tasked with active outreach to the citizens and institutions of badly governed and authoritarian countries, to promote understanding, build cooperation, and engage them in constructive initiatives guided by the UN SDGs. Rigid ostracism and reliance on heavily armed deterrence are not going to work in maintaining peace or resolving conflicts in the long term. Engagement and promotion of benign metamorphosis is necessary, even in relation to countries with truly vile governments.

4. Peace-building efforts should include shared multilateral initiatives involving of people from Europe, Russia, China and other advanced Asian nations together with indigenous people working in integrated teams contributing to development projects in least-developed nations. Some of these teams could be civilian, along the lines of a German-funded International Peace Corps whose members are drawn from countries around the world, and others could be military units deployed for civilian SDG project development in least-developed countries. For the latter, imagine an institution called SDG Engineering Corps that is like a hybrid between the US Army Corps of Engineers, France’s Foreign Legion, and Engineers/Doctors/Nurses Without Borders: i.e. an integrated multinational force composed of mixed teams of soldiers trained for civilian technical duties and civil-military cooperation, deployed to least-developed countries to work on infrastructure projects and SDG-related services.

Add to this joint global educational initiatives, e.g. via the establishment of at least three generously funded top-quality global universities: one situated in Germany, another in Africa, and another in Asia, which bring together talented young people from around the world — including especially people from non-democratic countries — to build personal relationships and understanding. The alumni of these explicitly global universities may become the diplomats, policy-makers, and businesspeople whose personal friendships and network relationships, rooted in shared experiences and equipped with an excellent education in SDG-inspired peace-building skills will, later in the present century, prevent wars, resolve conflicts, and contribute solutions.

6. Germany and Europe should lead the world in climate stabilisation policy measures. The key metric should be prevention of sea level rise — and that means doing what’s necessary to prevent the Arctic ocean from going ice-free and the Greenland, West Antarctic, and Wilkes Basin Ice Sheets from continuing to melt away. Those ice sheets are nearing nonlinear thresholds in their physical ice mass loss dynamics, or “tipping points,” beyond which they will irreversibly continue to melt away no matter what we do. If that occurs, we’re facing at least 15 meters (50 feet) of sea level rise over several decades or centuries, and we’ll eventually lose our coastal cities — London, Mumbai, New York, Boston, Seattle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta, among many other cities; we’ll lose the entire coastal belt of China under the waves, with its densely populated industrial coastal cities; and we will also lose entire countries, including the Netherlands and Vietnam, amongst others.

There is a menu of actions that need to be taken during the 2020s to prevent these physical dynamics from going past the point of no return. Germany is in a good position to be a global leader in taking the necessary measures, which include (i) rapid deployment of clean energy supply chains — not only within Europe, but worldwide, at a profit, by means of a European Clean Energy Investment Fund, (ii) funding the development and deployment of “negative emissions” technologies (also known as “carbon dioxide removal” or “CDR” technologies) for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans and permanently re-sequestering them in mineral form, by means of a German and European policy campaign advocating for the creation of an IMF-managed and SDR-issuance-funded Global CDR Fund (SDR=Special Drawing Rights) to fund a global competitive market of at least ca. €100 billion annually in CDR projects, and (iii) building an international consensus in favour of deployment ASAP of solar radiation management (SRM) measures to ensure that the Arctic Ocean doesn’t go ice-free (if it does go ice-free, what will certainly result is radical global climate disruption and the onset of accelerating, irreversible ice mass loss dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet, leading to 7 meters (23 ft) of sea level rise from that source alone).

7. Together with European Union partners, especially France, Germany should expand its green-tech industrial development activities worldwide, guided by the SDGs. This can be implemented where appropriate by means of negotiating the establishment of Special Economic Zones in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, in which contracts are governed by EU regulations. The enormous power of the Euro has until now been underused; just as there is a global dollar banking system (“Eurodollar” market), there is the potential for the Euro to function as the basis for financial instruments and innovations that could extend EU financial and economic power southward. Germany should invest massively — and on a net basis profitably — in key measures for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals in Africa and in the poorer countries of the Middle East and South Asia. If this is not done, by mid-century the geostrategic challenge from Russia will come to seem trivial in comparison with that of billions of desperate, poorly educated people striving to leave chaotic, ill-governed countries made unlivable by overheating, poverty, and overpopulation. Vast populations will attempt to migrate northward into Europe unless they have good prospects at home. Well-meaning gestures and drop-in-a-bucket aid budgets are not enough. A systematic “Aufbau Süd” (Build Up the South) geoeconomic strategy is needed that makes use of innovative Euro-linked financial mechanisms and harnesses the technological capacity of European industry to the productive potential of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations to build prosperity in the Global South.

8. Germany should lead the world in building a global network of ecological reserves, prioritizing the world’s poorest countries which lack the governance capacity and will to achieve effective nature conservation by themselves. This could entail imposing a modest “biodiversity user fee” on European consumers of commodities, levied through a small (e.g. 5%) surcharge on every ton of nature-based commodity at the point of production or import: e.g. every ton of wheat produced in Europe or cacao or palm oil imported from overseas. These surcharges would be entirely at the expense of Europe, not of producer countries, and thus would not entail any downside for the economies and citizens of the latter. On the contrary: the money raised from Biodiversity User Fees levied in Europe would be collected into a Global Biodiversity Conservation Fund and from there, dispensed to the most effective nature conservation NGOs in developing countries with the approval of their governments and under contracts that ensure conservation measures are co-designed and implemented by local and indigenous people, to their benefit.

9. In regards to military technology, Germany should avoid making the mistake of spending vast amounts of money on yesterday’s weapons technologies — although the temptation to do so will be great, since major German weapons manufacturers are specialized in producing these. In particular, German politicians will be lobbied to buy battle tanks. However, they might just as well spend money on cavalry horses: today, tanks can easily be destroyed by man-portable or drone-mounted anti-tank weapons that cost less than 1% of the price of a tank. Battle tanks are essentially nothing more than very expensive metal coffins for the troops carried inside them.

Had anti-tank weapons like Javelin missiles and Bayraktar drones been distributed to Ukrainian troops in sufficient numbers before the Russian invasion began, not a single Russian armoured vehicle would have penetrated more than a few km into Ukraine’s territory.

Tanks are yesterday’s technology. Equipping the Bundeswehr with tanks would be a complete waste of money. Tanks are militarily useless against any enemy with the technological sophistication to build and deploy anti-tank weapons. Tanks are unnecessary and inappropriate instruments for repelling enemy tanks. The only remaining use of tanks is to fire large projectiles a few tens of km toward enemy targets from a mobile ground-based platform — but missiles are a better choice for that purpose, as they can be fired from a soldier’s shoulder or from hardened positions as well as from concealed mobile platforms that, unlike tanks, aren’t easily recognisable as military hardware and hence easily targettable.

Anti-tank weapons are getting cheaper, more diverse, and more effective year by year. Tanks are hugely expensive and helpless against modern anti-tank weapons. Let’s save some money by deciding right now to not waste German taxpayers’ money on buying tanks. Sorry, Rheinmetall.

10. Instead, Germany’s military would be well advised to spend its generous new budget on four main purposes:

(i) Drones — including automated or semi-automated anti-tank weapons that can destroy armoured vehicles without any risk to a German soldier, whilst taking into careful account the extremely dangerous nature of automated weapons systems. An arms race in these technologies is already underway, and it will accelerate toward an omega point over coming years. A well-designed set of automated weapons deployed in sufficient number (including land, sea, and air drones) will be able to destroy any invading army composed of flesh-and-blood soldiers, by remote control or even entirely automatically.

The challenge of the future will be to figure out how to avoid genocidal cataclysms carried out using weaponised drone swarms and how to prevent targetted assassinations from being carried out by means of AI-guided automated weapons of various kinds as these get ever smaller, “better,” more diverse, more numerous, and cheaper. Not deploying such devices while other countries do is not a very good option; and building tanks when cheap automated drones will be able to easily destroy any tank is an act of idiocy. Let’s forget about the tanks, Bundeswehr procurement office, okay? Focus on buying drones. And the German foreign ministry should, in parallel, be working very hard toward international agreements for limiting these awful machines, as proposed by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

Given appropriate European or NATO fleets of well-maintained and well-managed drones, any Russian army units that attempt incursions onto NATO territory or airspace would find themselves rendered inoperable within minutes. The Russians will know this, and so they will not make any such incursions.

(ii) Anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems in a variety of forms, capable of reliably destroying any and all invading enemy aircraft and incoming missiles.

(iii) Electronic warfare systems, including both offensive systems and defensive measures to ensure that German industry and society can continue to function no matter how aggressive an EMP attack or cyberattack is launched by a sophisticated enemy (Russia could do enormous damage with such an approach if it chose); and

(iv) A global system of German and allied SDG Engineering Corps, modelled loosely on the US Army Corps of Engineers, for deployment in training and advisory missions overseas to help African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian militaries develop SDG Engineering Corps of their own. The long-term goal should be to make war obsolete — by repurposing the profession of soldiering away from preparing for or fighting wars, and focusing army units on peace-building, ecological restoration, health services, and economic development projects and skills instead.

Repurposing the World’s Militaries: A Grand Strategy Goal for Germany?

Let’s imagine a future in which German, French, Russian, Chinese, American, and Nigerian soldiers (among others) work together in integrated SDG Engineering Corps units deployed to least-developed countries, developing solar power and water treatment plants, building and staffing mobile health clinics, and managing wildlife conservation and reforestation projects, and gradually becoming friends and comrades — rather than continuing to play the tournament sport called “war” against each other, which in our era has become fundamentally pointless.

In the past, war had a point — it served a purpose that was seen as legitimate. Historically, the sport of war was a sport of kings, and its point was to defeat the armies of rival kings, conquer territory, establish empires and grab women and booty. In the modern era, conquering territory and establishing empires is seen as immoral and has become illegal. The shock of the two World Wars of the 20th century made it clear that this sport needed to end. This is why every country renamed its military establishment from “Department of War” to “Department of Defense” — everyone pretends that they would never attack, never seek to conquer.

Most nations respect these norms. However, a very few countries continue to ignore the ban on sending armies of conquest into other countries — the United States first and foremost, but now also Russia, and in a limited way even a few smaller countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, whose armed forces have recently participated in the invasion of Yemen and (unofficially) occupied and taken territory. In all cases, the offensive military expeditions of these countries are mislabelled as something other than what they are — they are misrepresented as defensive rather than offensive operations.

The men staffing and commanding the world’s armies need something better to do — a more compelling mission than readying themselves to inflict mass slaughter on each other or on civilian populations, pseudojustified by some trumped-up story politicians cook up. Armies should be repurposed.

Germany’s Grand Strategy goal in regards to militaries should be to make war obsolete by developing new international institutions and engagements aimed at actively repurposing militaries for carrying out constructive peace-building work inspired by the SDGs. Hence my proposal for Germany to take the lead in the formation of SDG Engineering Corps as a new category of institution, a new pole of attraction for the world’s militaries.

Initiating a global drive to repurpose militaries away from war and toward peace-building would be a good way for Germany and its Bundeswehr (federal army) to pay interest on the unrepayable debt the German nation incurred from 1939 to 1945 — still within living memory: my own mother was 19 years old and wearing the uniform of a women’s auxiliary unit of the Luftwaffe in the last few months of the war, and at the age of 96, she’s still alive to tell about it — when Germany’s armies followed the orders of a racist ultranationalist madman and plunged Europe and Russia into a campaign of ethnosupremacist genocide on a scale that only the likes of Genghis Khan had previously implemented.

Let’s see how we go, Deutschland. Please try to be benign, smart, far-seeing and innovative rather than stodgy, near-sighted and traditional in your new role as Europe’s re-awakened pillar of strategic might.

I recognise that Ukraine is an insanely corrupt polity that ranks 122nd on Transparency International’s corruption ranking — but never mind, they have regular elections, and therefore we must defend their government with all means available — except by acceding to the Kremlin’s demands, which would entail our wise and great leaders in Washington and Kyiv offering to make Ukraine a neutral country and recognising de jure what is already true de facto, namely that Donbass and Crimea can never be returned to Kyiv’s sovereignty, because that cannot be achieved without militarily reconquering them from Russia, which in turn cannot be achieved without a nuclear war.

I am confident that if our wise leaders decide it’s worth that price, then it’s worth that price. It would be totally unacceptable to accede to the Kremlin’s demands on the flimsy grounds that doing so might avoid a nuclear war — or at a minimum, might avoid the reduction of Ukraine to rubble. There are far more important things at stake here— important principles about respecting international law and not attacking and occupying other countries based on lies and trumped-up excuses. These are important principles! Very important principles. Ask the Iraqis.

I recognise Zelenskyi as a great hero even though some negative nellies have churlishly pointed out that Zelenskyi was utterly incompetent as a statesman before the war, in that he completely failed to prevent it from occurring, which he might have done had he seen his diplomatic options more realistically. Admittedly, it’s true that Zelly ensured Putler would attack and destroy Ukraine by sticking to his, Zelly’s, unrealistic maximalist position, not giving an inch on anything in the lead-up to the war: insisting that Crimea and Donbass be returned to Ukrainian government control, and not even backing down on the demand that Ukraine join NATO (a demand that has been enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution since 2019), even though NATO member leaders made it pretty clear that this wasn’t really on the table — and even though the Russians had spent years saying with increasingly urgency and menace that UKR non-membership in NATO was an absolute, non-negotiable priority for them and that they were ready to apply “military-technical measures” to prevent Ukraine joining NATO or their becoming a military proxy of the US on Russia’s southwestern border. One gathers Zelly thought they were bluffing. Well, everyone makes mistakes. Never mind!

I’m not at all troubled that Zelenskyi kept on repeating his “we will join NATO” mantra even after various NATO member country leaders said there was no near-term prospect of that occurring. I think it’s brilliant that Zelenskyi ignored vehement Russian warnings that Ukraine must not become a military ally of the United States, and that on November 10, 2021, Zelenskyi signed an agreement for Ukraine to become a military ally of the United States.

The foreign minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed that agreement at a ceremony in Washington a full six months into the massive buildup of Russian combat units all around Ukraine’s borders, which began in Spring 2021. I’m sure that wasn’t an unnecessarily provocative, unwise, perhaps even suicidal move on Zelenskyi’s part. No, it’s surely only a coincidence that Putler sent his armies into Ukraine three months later, after last-ditch attempts at negotiating a peaceful settlement during which President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and their Ukrainian counterparts offered no concessions whatsoever on Russia’s main concerns over Ukraine’s future military alliances or its geopolitical sphere-of-influence status.

The November 2022 agreement that proposed to fully incorporate Ukraine into the US military, economic, and political sphere is termed the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership. Click on the link and have a read-through. The Strategic Partnership agreement effectively made the Ukraine a full military dependency / ally / vassal of USA — and it vehemently stated that neither US nor Ukraine will ever agree to cede sovereignty over Crimea or Donbass to Russia, and implied that both countries would make every effort to return these regions to Ukrainian control — which meant they were calling Russia’s bluff on the huge armies Russia had been building up all around Ukraine since Spring 2021. Wasn’t that brave of them? So heroic!

Here’s an excerpt from Section II of the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership:

Guided by the April 3, 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration of the NATO North Atlantic Council and as reaffirmed in the June 14, 2021 Brussels Summit Communique of the NATO North Atlantic Council, the United States supports Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.

1. The United States and Ukraine intend to continue a range of substantive measures to prevent external direct and hybrid aggression against Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for such aggression and violations of international law, including the seizure and attempted annexation of Crimea and the Russia-led armed conflict in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, as well as its continuing malign behavior. The United States intends to support Ukraine’s efforts to counter armed aggression, economic and energy disruptions, and malicious cyber activity by Russia, including by maintaining sanctions against or related to Russia and applying other relevant measures until restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
2. The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and reaffirms its full support for international efforts, including in the Normandy Format, aimed at negotiating a diplomatic resolution to the Russia-led armed conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine on the basis of respect for international law, including the UN Charter. The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to use the Crimea Platform to coordinate international efforts to address the humanitarian and security costs of Russia’s occupation of Crimea, consistent with the Platform’s Joint Declaration.
3. The United States and Ukraine endorse the 2021 Strategic Defense Framework as the foundation of enhanced Ukraine-U.S. defense and security cooperation and intend to work to advance shared priorities, including implementing defense and defense industry reforms, deepening cooperation in areas such as Black Sea security, cyber defense, and intelligence sharing, and countering Russia’s aggression.
4. The United States and Ukraine are key partners in the broader Black Sea region and will seek to deepen cooperation with Black Sea Allies and partners to ensure freedom of navigation and effectively counter external threats and challenges in all domains.
5. The United States remains committed to assisting Ukraine with ongoing defense and security reforms and to continuing its robust training and exercises. The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability.
6. Ukraine intends to continue to enhance democratic civilian control of the military, reform its security service, and modernize its defense acquisition processes to advance its Euro-Atlantic aspirations.
7. The United States and Ukraine underline the importance of close cooperation within international institutions, including the United Nations, the OSCE and the Council of Europe, and intend to multiply efforts in finding new approaches and developing joint actions in preventing individual states from trying to destroy the rule-based international order and forcefully to revise internationally recognized state borders.

I will loyally continue to support and admire Zelenskyi because he reportedly said a cool-sounding defiant line like “I need ammo, not a ride” when his American advisors offered to extract him from Kyiv and bring him somewhere safer, which was quoted in the press once the war had started — the war he admittedly might have prevented by being a little smarter and more skillful as a political leader, and perhaps somewhat less of a naive patsy vis-à-vis the State Department’s plan to use Ukraine as a sharp stick with which to poke the Russian bear. Had the war not started, he’d have continued to be seen as a rather incompetent comedian-turned-politician, out of his depth at his new job; whereas after the war started and he said some cool lines, he’s come to be seen as a global hero, and isn’t that a great turnaround? So cool! It was totally worth it!

I recognise that the aforementioned US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership agreement would presumably have been viewed, by the Kremlin, as very nearly akin to a US-Ukraine declaration of long-term low-intensity war on Russia, but I’m fine with it. It’s great the State Department went ahead and suckered the Ukrainians into signing the Strategic Partnership, because the resulting war presents a wonderful opportunity to test the readiness of nuclear weapons systems on both sides, and for using Ukraine as a battlespace in which to test the performance of Russia’s military forces. It seems clear that Washington is ready fight Russia’s army to the last Ukrainian civilian volunteer, and I fully support that. I have no doubt that the reduction of Ukraine’s cities to smoking rubble with hundreds of thousands of dead and generations of PTSD-deranged citizens is fully worth this great opportunity to troll the Russians and impose losses on their army and economy.

I think we should be prepared to take any risk, any risk at all, to maintain Ukraine and NATO’s completely unrealistic, fake posture proposing that Donbass and Crimea (the bulk of whose populations want to be part of Russia, not Ukraine) must be returned to Ukrainian sovereignty. I realize the Kremlin will never agree to it, but my life will be worthless without this sacred outcome. If risking nuclear holocaust is the price of maintaining this hallucinatory geopolitical pose, it’s worth it — I just can’t bear the thought of Ukrainian politicians and ultranationalists having to give up their cherished illusions and fake rhetoric about recovering Donbass and Crimea, regardless of what the Russophile residents of those regions might want or not want.

And I think it’s so great that Ms. Nuland is using Ukraine as a sharp stick with which to prod the Russian bear into a wild, murderous, take-no-prisoners rage, so that the US can impose economic war on Russia and have this seen as an act of “defense”. Wasn’t that a clever gambit?? Masterstroke! Bait the bear into a trap, hahaaa! What fun.

Also I’m totally copacetic with the global wheat and grain shortages which are going to result, the food price spikes, the mass starvation and unrest looming in the near future in the developing countries that are the main customers for Russian and Ukrainian grains, given that both Russia and Ukraine have now applied export moratoria on foodstuffs and Ukraine’s planting season will be disrupted.

None of that matters. It’s all worth it. Never, never, never should we back off from the State Department’s maximalist position that Ukraine be fully integrated into the US’s military alliance structure or that Donbass and Crimea are forever to be made the objects of reconquest fantasies. Nuclear war is definitely preferable to a negotiated solution. The idea that the Russians have “legitimate security concerns” around Ukraine becoming a military dependency of the United States is ridiculous. We needn’t pay any attention to anything the maniacs in the Kremlin say. It’s not like they’re dangerous, thin-skinned nuclear-armed sociopaths seething with injured pride and resentment over Uncle Sam metaphorically coming into their living room uninvited and eating their dinner. We have no reason to try to mollify them. We can bully the Russians into submission — we can grind them down! Of course we can!

Bullying always works, especially with the Russians. They’re pussies — that’s a well-known fact. We’ll fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian, or even to the last European, if we have to, since this is obviously going to spiral into a full-on NATO-Russia war if it continues on for another couple of weeks. And it’s totally going to be worth it. I’m confident our leaders have worked up a sound strategic approach that will get results. Bullying other countries into submission worked like a charm in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, didn’t it? Right? Then why shouldn’t it work in the case of Russia? The Russians are pushovers — everyone knows that. Just ask the Germans.

And the Russians, in turn, seem confident that they can bully and bomb the Ukrainians into submission. Hey, it worked for them in Afghanistan, didn’t it? Just like it worked for the Americans too, a couple of decades later… Wait. The geniuses in the Kremlin and the State Department have fully thought this through, right?

Sorry — for a second, I nearly doubted their wisdom. Never mind. You and I just civilians, nobodies. We couldn’t possibly fathom the depth of the brilliant geostrategic calculations the folks in the Kremlin and their colleagues in the State Department are making. Surely they know exactly what they’re doing. I don’t need to be troubled with the details. Just give me a flag to wave.

In that spirit, let me be perfectly clear: I will fully support Zelenkskyi tomorrow — Wednesday, March 16, 2022, a day that may well be remembered in history as a fateful day by future historians — when he speaks by videocall to the US Congress and pleads for a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine and thus, in effect, for the official start of World War III.

I will cheer patriotically when nearly all US Congressmen give Zelly standing ovations and then get onto talk-shows to tough-talk. When public opinion increasingly moves toward direct intervention — initially through growing support for imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but don’t worry, things will quickly get much more interesting from there — I will move with it, clutching my little paper flag, certain in my heart that everything bad is entirely the Russians’ fault. I like having a simple worldview; I sleep easier knowing there are good guys (that’s us) and bad guys (that’s them) and as long as someone tells me who counts as “us” and who counts as “them”, that’s all I need to know.

I’m well aware that right-wing American voters feel contempt for anyone “weak,” and US Congressmen and -women therefore permanently feel the need to pose as “strong”; and in present circumstances, anyone who advocates caution will obviously be dismissed as a “Putin apologist” or as “weak,” and I don’t want anyone to think I might be “weak,” so I too will loyally parrot misguided analogies and repeat the standard go-to reference to “appeasement” and “Munich,” and nod vigorously when American and conservative European pundits argue that Putler only understands “strength,” and that it’s time to face him down. Send the troops in! Let the jets fly! Our boys want to do their jobs! God Bless America! Or whomever. God picks sides in wars — whichever side is more patriotic. It’s a well-known fact. Just look at history.

I am desperately eager to die heroically from radiation poisoning or nuclear winter induced starvation as a result of all these brilliant Kremlin and State Department geostrategic considerations, a result which I expect with >50% likelihood will occur in consequence of the coming direct NATO-Russia clash, which in turn will be proximately caused in its immediate causal-chain initiation by the enormously important matter of V.V. Putin’s ego feeling hurt because he wasn’t shown enough respect by American presidents, and only slightly less proximately by the signing of the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership document in Washington on November 10, 2021, drafted by the State Department team of Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland (such a mensch!) et al. The Strategic Partnership is an agreement which in the Kremlin’s perception presumably looks like a complete military and economic vassalisation of Ukraine by US and a declaration of permanent hybrid war by the US on Russia over the pretext of whether Kyiv or Moscow will have sovereign title over Donbass and Crimea. But what do they know?

(As you saw in the excerpt reproduced above, the document states emphatically that the US and Ukraine will NEVER recognise Russian sovereignty over either region, and will thus strive forever to “return” them to Ukrainian sovereignty. That goal may seem dangerously provocative and wildly unrealistic to me or you, but you and I didn’t study international relations, did we? We’re not professional geostrategic analysts, are we? So what do we know? We should leave these things to the pros. They know what they’re doing.)

The Russians are just looking at this wrong, so we needn’t pay any attention to their paranoid ravings. We needn’t take into account that their paranoid ravings might actually guide their actions. We can just keep ignoring them. It’s perfectly safe to ignore them when they rant nonsense about “red lines” and threaten to take “military-technical measures” if the US keeps pushing its military development efforts into Ukraine. Totally safe. For the Ukrainians, especially, it’s super safe.

I don’t see any reason why anyone should care what the Russians think, because they have a nasty dictator who wasn’t legitimately elected, so ignoring them is simply the right thing to do. Just because the Russians had, by November 2021, built up a huge ready-for-war army on three sides of Ukraine — north, east, and south — and were warning that they would take “military-technical measures” if Ukraine didn’t back off from its military alliance with the US doesn’t mean Blinken at the State Department or the Ukrainian Foreign Minister should have paid them any attention. I support EU and US politicians when they say that the whole “sphere of influence” thinking is all wrong and passé, that the Russians should stop trying to re-establish a Russian “sphere of influence” encompassing Ukraine or anywhere else. Above all, they should stop opposing EU and US efforts to expand the EU’s and US’s sphere of influence. Who the heck do the Russkies think they are?

I personally am more than happy to die, and see all my relatives die, and see much of Europe turned into radioactive ash, over the hugely important matters outlined here, these gravely important questions of whether or not Ukraine will be a military vassal state of the US or not, and whether or not Crimea or Donbass will fly Russian or Ukrainian flags. I’m fully ready to give my life, and your life, and all our lives in passionate commitment to that cause. Until only a few weeks ago, I used to think preventing climate disruption, conserving ecosystems and wildlife species at risk of extinction, and implementing the UN SDGs so that children no longer need grow up in extreme poverty were my main faith-causes, but now I realize that my priorities were all wrong — all along, deep down, I’ve been longing to die as collateral damage in the on-going Clash of Empires between Washington and Moscow which is currently visibly moving toward an atomic climax.

And you know what? I’m thinking of the guys on the nuclear weapons stations on both sides who have trained for years to be ready for the coming moment. Don’t they deserve a chance to live their dream? Isn’t it time to give them their moment in the thermonuclear sun?

I am stoked that we are very likely only days away from a full-on NATO-vs-Russia war. Only a Chinese intervention to rein in the Russians might be able to stop the spiral into that catastrophe, since the Russians now have no other powerful friends left, and if Xi tells Vladimir that he, Xi, won’t be best friends with Vlad anymore if Vlad keeps the war going, maybe Vlad will simmer down a little. Hard to say. Will Xi intervene? Also hard to say. Whether the elites in Beijing bother to intervene to stop the coming NATO-RU war or not may depend on whether they think nuclear winter will destroy China, too.

Certainly, I feel totally fine with that and have every confidence that President Xi will do the right thing. I know he is a great man who is as absolute a ruler as his good friend Vladimir, and I totally think that untrammeled, unaccountable, unassailable authoritarian rulership decoupled from any and all feedback loops that aren’t instruments fo sycophantic yes-mannery is a VERY good thing. Nobody needs negative nellies! “Tell me what I want to hear, or I’ll have my goons throw you into a cage for 15 years and buttf*ck you on an irregular basis!” That’s definitely the way to remain well-informed and up to speed on the causal loop between one’s commands as a ruler and their results. I support that without reservation, Your Majesties, all of you. Yes.

Obviously, as a mere civilian peasant I have no idea what “the right thing” might be — I leave questions like the fate of the Earth and the wisdom of causing nuclear holocausts over questions of geostrategy to our great and wise supreme leaders and the capable senior civil servants in State Department and various foreign ministries with their clever secret plans.

I’m totally fine with the fact that neocon hawk Victoria Nuland, who was an important advisor to Dick Cheney when Dick was busy organising the invasion of Iraq (and whose husband is the neocon radical Robert Kagan who also played an important role in that geostrategic master-stroke) is substantially in command of US policy in Ukraine, and therefore NATO strategy, and therefore the fate of the Earth. That’s a picture of her below. Doesn’t she have a wonderful smile? She looks happy. I have no concerns at all about whether she has good judgment, nor do I doubt that it’s totally legit that she’s risking all our lives for the sake of playing exciting geopolitical trolling games against her counterparts in the Kremlin. I remember I used to like playing the board game “Risk” when I was a preteen. Lucky Vicky gets to play “Risk” IRL! Such fun!

I write all of the foregoing without a trace of irony, in humble confidence that Ms. Nuland, Mr. Blinken, Mr. Putin, Mr. Zelenskyi, Mr. Biden, Mr. Xi and the talking heads pontificating on TV are far wiser than you or I and that they have the situation fully under control.

Secretary of State Blinken of USA and Foreign Minister Kuleba of Ukraine signed the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in Washington in November 2021, six months after the Russians started assembling armies on the borders of Ukraine. I URGE YOU TO READ IT — at least the Preamble and Section II, entitled “Security and Countering Russian Aggression.”

The document, which replaces an earlier US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership document dating from 2008, proposes to make Ukraine a full-fledged partner state of the USA in all aspects of policy and institutional development, including in “political, security, and defense” domains. I’m resisting the term “client state” to avoid triggering you — but yes, the Strategic Partnership agreement proposes to make Ukraine closely dependent on the United States, especially in terms of its military and intelligence services.

The Russians see this as the US vassalisation of what was, for centuries, an integral part of the Russian Empire, and the men in the Kremlin don’t like that at all. Imagine that the state of Texas had seceded from the USA in 1991, developed ever closer ties to Russia since then, and now proposed to become a full-fledged client state of the Russian Federation — in political, economic, military and security terms. That gives you a sense of how this looks from the Kremlin’s point-of-view. This is not to excuse Putin’s heinous invasion of Ukraine — it’s just a point of information, to help you understand why he made the mistake of ordering the invasion.

The State Department entered into this Strategic Partnership with Ukraine knowing full well that the Kremlin was warning with increasing stridency that Russia would never accept Ukraine becoming a military ally of the USA. Moreover, State must have known very clearly how provocative the language of the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership document was in the Kremlin’s view, with the Partnership text’s strongly worded insistence that the US and Ukraine agreed they would never recognize Russia’s claim to Crimea or Donbass. Do read Section II of the Strategic Partnership document and see this with your own eyes, and let the significance of what is written there sink in.

US intelligence services publicly demonstrated in February 2022 that they had deep insight into Russian intentions; as President Biden reported, they accurately predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine ahead of time. Presumably the intelligence agencies were already providing, in November 2021, the State Department and White House with detailed analyses on how the Russians would likely react to the Strategic Partnership — and intelligence reports on what Kremlin insiders were saying to each other after the Strategic Partnership document was published.

Did the relevant policy people in the State Department actually *want* to provoke the Russians into this war? I don’t work for the US government, and I don’t have insider access, so I don’t know. But let’s consider this possibility. One job of foreign policy analysts working for the State Department is to anticipate how various players might react to a significant US policy move. From a US point of view, as of the time the Strategic Partnership was signed in November 2021, even without signals intelligence from inside the Kremlin, three possible Kremlin reactions to the Strategic Partnership could have been (and I think must have been) anticipated:

Option 1 — Either the Russians would make a diplomatic fuss, but ultimately do nothing of substance in reaction to the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership — in which case the US wins this round, and Ukraine becomes a full-fledged US vassal state;

Option 2 — Or the Russians would make the mistake of sending those armies they had been assembling around Ukraine across the Ukrainian border in an effort at regime-change in Kyiv, in order to reverse the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership — in which case the US wins big, because if they choose Option 2, the Russians will have been suckered into an unwinnable war in Ukraine that will cost them vast amounts of blood and treasure and turn them into a global pariah state; and the US will have a plausible reason to wage all-out economic warfare (“impose severe sanctions”) on Russia, weakening it severely as a geostrategic competitor. As bonuses, NATO will rediscover its raison d’être; its European member countries will buy lots of US weapons and US natural gas (delivered via LNG tanker), and will renew their commitment to supporting US hegemony in Europe. BIG win for Uncle Sam, right?

Option 3 — The Kremlin, after recognising Donetsk and Luhansk as “independent republics”, could have decided to send troops into Donbass to stop the Ukrainians from continuing their low-intensity war on the pro-Russia Donbass separatists, before organising another “referendum” and annexing the Donbass to the Russian Federation… without, however, invading the rest of Ukraine or attempting regime-change by force. This would not have reversed the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership, and would not have prevented Ukraine from becoming a militarily capable US vassal state committed — at least rhetorically — to regaining Donbass and Crimea, thus making Ukraine a permanent thorn in the side of Russia. And such a move would have been sufficient cause for the US to impose fairly severe sanctions on Russia, weakening it economically. Uncle Sam wins again.

In geostrategic terms, no matter which option the Russians choose, the Russians lose — and Uncle Sam wins.

The Kremlin chose Option 2. Silly buggers. The Russians lose in all three scenarios, but Option 2 is the one in which the Russians lose big. It’s also the one in which Ukrainians lose catastrophically, but hey — collateral damage, tsk.

At a minimum, therefore, by signing this maximalist Strategic Partnership with Ukraine in November 2021, the State Department and White House must have been knowingly increasing the risk that the Ukrainians might be subjected to a Russian invasion. An invasion was clearly a serious possibility, given the threatening Russian armies already gathered around Ukraine’s borders. Did the State Department not think about how provocative this re-affirmation and aggressively worded update of the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership would seem to the Russians at this sensitive time?

Did they provoke Moscow unintentionally? Or was it deliberate?

This highly provocative Strategic Partnership was a declaration that Ukraine would henceforward be, in effect, a full-fledged US client state — including in terms of close military cooperation — that would permanently maintain a vehement claim of sovereignty over Donbass and Crimea, thus presenting Russia with a permanent risk of military conflict with an angry US ally directly on its southwestern border. The State Department must have clearly known the Kremlin would see the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership agreement or indeed any US-Ukraine military alliance as a dangerous provocation. Not least because Putin, Lavrov, and any number of Russian spokespeople repeatedly told them so.

The military threat to Russian interests from the US-supported Ukrainian armed forces was (from Moscow’s point of view) set to grow in capability and seriousness the longer the Ukrainian army received training and weaponry from the US and other Western allies (it had already been receiving weapons and training from Western allies since 2014). This is presumably why Putin decided to invade now, rather than later, in order to render the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership moot. Had he waited much longer, the Ukrainian army would have been too strong. Also, immediately before the invasion, President Zelenskyi, who was an actor and comedian before getting elected to the Presidency, was very unpopular amongst Ukrainians, and widely seen by both Ukrainians and Western observers as incompetent and out of his depth in his role as President. No-one suspected he would prove to be an effective war leader. Putin must have assumed Zelenskyi would flee once Russian troops crossed into Ukraine. He seems to have thought his army would be able to easily take Kyiv within a few days and install a puppet ruler. He also probably thought Biden would prove too old and low-energy to convene a unified, effective and coherent policy reaction to the invasion amongst NATO allies. Putin was wrong on all counts.

The only strong argument I’ve been able to think of suggesting that perhaps the State Department did not deliberately sucker the Russians into invading Ukraine is that prior to the invasion, the US government did not prepare the Ukrainian Army adequately for the invasion by delivering the types and quantities of weapons the Ukrainians would need for holding off the invaders more effectively. Why not?

This failure to prepare the Ukrainians for the risk of war appears to have been a consequence of tragic incompetence. Perhaps the State Department failed to take seriously the risk of a Russian invasion as the Kremlin’s reaction to the re-affirmation of the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership, or perhaps it anticipated Option 3 but thought Option 2 so unlikely as to not require contingency preparations in the form of properly arming Ukraine.

Alternatively, perhaps the State Department did take Option 2 seriously, yet the US failed to properly arm Ukraine ahead of time due to a lack of coordination between the office at State that was responsible for advancing the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership document and other departments of the US government responsible for arranging weapons deliveries and coordinating allied military preparedness.

At a maximum, the geopolitical context in which the Strategic Partnership was agreed suggests that the State Department and White House were not only willing to risk a Russian attack on Ukraine — it’s all too plausible that key players intentionally wanted to provoke the Kremlin into making the huge mistake of invading Ukraine, knowing that this would result in NATO regathering under Washington’s skirts, and in the US and Europe imposing severe economic sanctions — i.e. embarking on full-fledged economic warfare — against Russia. And maybe they weren’t that fussed about whether the Ukrainians would be able to fight back effectively or not.

Similarly, the US deliberately baited the Soviets into attacking Afghanistan in 1979, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, later boasted. Click on the link to watch a CSIS video in which Elliot A. Cohen, the US official in charge of the “Afghanistan program” in the 1980s, in which the US armed Mujahideen jihadists to fight the Soviet Army — which he terms “one of our most successful programs” ever — discusses what lessons from that program could be applied to the current situation in Ukraine.

It was clear from the outset that the Russians would, at least in political terms, lose badly from invading Ukraine. The fact that much of Ukraine would be destroyed and tens of thousands (at least) of Ukrainians would die as a result of the invasion, and that massive disruptions to global food supply and prices and serious unrest in Russian and Ukrainian food-export client countries in the developing world would likely result given that Russia and Ukraine are respectively first and fifth largest wheat exporters (and key exporters of other key food and mineral commodities and fertilizer as well)… gee, that’s too bad. What can you do? It’s just collateral damage; history has shown that Washington is willing to take that sort of thing in stride. One gets the sense that the geostrategists at the State Department are quite willing to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian volunteer citizen-turned-fighter and to the last starving African.

You might be inclined to object and say: “But Washington engaged in a flurry of intense diplomacy to try to head off the invasion in the weeks before the war!” … and you’d be right. Sort of. After all, the US was set to win no matter what the Russians did — i.e. whether the Kremlin chose Option 1, 2, or 3 from the menu above. The Russians, on the other hand, would lose under all three scenarios. And the Ukrainians would lose horrifically under Option 2, even as Uncle Sam would win especially bigly.

Yet despite the fact that State Department analysts must have known all this, Tony Blinken refused to blink — even after US intelligence services were warning (as the President repeatedly made public in February) that Russia would launch a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. Blinken didn’t budge an inch on any of the Russians’ key demands, including the central demand that Ukraine never be offered NATO membership or its equivalent, i.e. that Ukraine must not be turned into a US military vassal state.

Blinken wouldn’t offer to take Ukraine’s NATO accession off the table even though he knew that the French and Germans were and are opposed to Ukraine becoming a NATO member. Nor did either Blinken or the Ukrainians budge on refusing to accede to a de jure recognition of Crimea (and Donbass) as part of Russia, even though these regions’ allegiance to and control by Moscow is de facto already the case, and likely to remain so.

It’s almost as though Blinken wasn’t serious about talking the Kremlin out of invading, isn’t it?

Moreover, much of the State Department’s flurry of diplomacy was aimed at getting NATO members and other Western allies to agree on imposing severe sanctions if Russia did in fact invade Ukraine… which by early February Biden was telling the world the US intelligence services were quite sure Russia would in fact do. And not surprisingly, given the complete lack of NATO movement on Russia’s core demands. I.e. Biden and Blinken’s intense diplomacy between the signing of the updated US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership on November 10, 2021, and the day of the invasion, Febuary 24, 2022, was about preparing an economic warfare plan that would be endorsed by NATO allies, not about preventing the war or waging peace.

Fatefully, the Kremlin chose Option 2 — even though Putin actually appears to have recognised the trap before he walked into it.

Check. Mate.

Now the question is whether this too-clever strategic chess-playing by Washington, in which the Kremlin was either deliberately or accidentally suckered into an unwinnable war in Ukraine, will or will not lead to a hot war in Europe between NATO and Russia, and perhaps spiral into a nuclear war. The Russians say they are already at war with the West, given the economic and financial embargo (which French Finance Minister Bruno le Maire on March 3, 2022, openly said was intended to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy”), and the fact that the US and its European allies are flooding weaponry into Ukraine to help Ukrainians kill Russian soldiers.

What will Putin do when he realizes he’s been backed into a corner, with Russia’s economy shattered and his troops unable to hold Ukraine?

Do the Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves? Yes, of course. Is their bravery in defending their homeland admirable? For sure. Did Putin, a ruthless dictator at the apex of a crony-capitalist kleptocracy, commit a monstrous crime in invading Ukraine? Hell yes. Does prolonging the war help the Ukrainians?

Well, consider: The Russians demand Ukraine be demilitarized and neutral, i.e. that they not be a military vassal state of the USA, and that Kyiv formally recognise that Crimea belongs to Russia and that Donetsk and Luhansk are “independent republics” (i.e. that they have a de jure status that will allow them to soon “vote” to join Russia as a sovereign decision under international law). These are the Kremlin’s conditions for Russia to stop its war machine’s ongoing destruction of Ukraine.

The Ukrainians refuse to accept these conditions.

The longer the war continues, the more of Ukraine the Russians will (temporarily) conquer, the more Ukrainians will die, the more Ukrainian cities will be reduced to smoking rubble.

Will prolonging the war make the Russians “give back” Crimea or Donbass?

No. There is effectively no way to make that happen.

Will prolonging the war make the Russian leaders (who will lose thousands more soldiers and many more tanks and aircraft in coming weeks, even as their army kills tens of thousands of Ukrainians and reduces more and more towns and villages to smoking rubble) more willing to give up on their goal of Ukrainian neutrality, more willing to accept a Ukraine that will be, as the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership document lays out, a militarized vassal state of the USA?

No, of course not. At this point, the Kremlin cannot back down; Putin would not only lose his strategic objectives — he would also lose face, and arguably this war is mostly about his injured ego, about his red lines not being respected (he has insisted for years, and vehemently since 2007, that he will not accept Ukraine or Georgia becoming NATO members or US military allies). He’s not a man who backs down. He has taken these extreme actions, applied “military-technical measures,” because he and his repeatedly stated concerns were simply ignored by US and European leaders; he is making sure he will no longer be ignored. The Russians will therefore continue reducing Ukraine to rubble until the Ukrainian leadership agrees to neutrality and to giving up its claims to Donbass and Crimea.

Kyiv can either accept those terms now, or they can accept those very same terms weeks or months from now, after much more of the country has been destroyed and tens of thousands more Ukrainians have been killed, even as the risk of this war turning into an all-out Russia-versus-NATO war rises relentlessly.

Over coming weeks, the Kremlin will feel increasingly pressed into a corner as the country’s economy shrinks due to severe Western financial and economic warfare, and as Russian losses mount on the battlefield as a consequence of a combination of Ukrainians’ bravery and the weapons flow from NATO armories into Ukraine across the Polish border.

At the same time, as Ukrainians are slaughtered in ever greater numbers and more Ukrainian cities are shelled to smithereens by Russian artillery, European and American publics and pundits will increasingly demand direct military intervention in support of the Ukrainian resistance — in fact, this is already happening. This situation isn’t akin to a powderkeg in a roomful of lit matches; this is a powderkeg whose fuse has already been lit, in a room full of burning Molotov cocktails.

So what’s the point of feeding weapons into Ukraine and prolonging the war? Doing that only hurts the Ukrainians; the longer it continues, the worse a position they end up in.

The point, from the State Department’s point of view, is to use the Ukrainians to bleed the Russians — in diplo-speak: “We worked with our G7 allies to warn that he [Putin] would face severe costs and a determined Ukrainian people,” as Blinken’s British counterpart, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, put it during a joint March 9, 2022 presser with Blinken. But in reality, of course, Putin isn’t facing any costs — he’s safe and warm in one of his palaces. It’s the Ukrainian people who are facing severe costs, along with the unfortunate Russian soldiers and conscripts Putin sent into battle.

The Ukrainians are mere collateral damage in the Great Game being played between the State Department and the Kremlin. The game is rigged; State wins and the Kremlin loses under every scenario but one — the one in which Putin pushes the red button. In that scenario, *everybody* loses, including Russia, but also including Washington. And might the cold, angry, thin-skinned, strange man in the Kremlin decide that after a long reign — he’s 69 years old now — he’d rather burn down the Northern Hemisphere rather than allow himself to be humiliated by his State Department nemeses? Kick the Americans hard in the nuts, even if he dies in the process?

I’m not at all sure he won’t do that.

And I don’t see why you should be sure he won’t do that, either.

Are the geniuses in the State Department and White House playing with all of our lives by backing Putin into a corner and pushing, pushing, pushing — Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and the rest?

Nuland, a neocon Cold Warrior, is currently Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Back in 2014, she stage-managed the State Department’s role in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich and his replacement by a pro-US leadership, as her infamous hacked phone call with the US Ambassador to Ukraine recorded weeks before Yanukovich’s overthrow showed. Ms. Nuland is now, in 2022, once again a key State Department official handling Ukraine policy, and if this turns into a nuclear war, her share of responsibility for that outcome will not be small.

Are these people — Putin and his cronies on the one side, and Nuland and her colleagues on the other — playing Russian Roulette with all our lives? Yes, I think it’s clear that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Here’s my suggestion: Let the strange man in the Kremlin have a partial victory, so that he doesn’t feel completely humiliated and consequently inclined to lash out and burn everything down in anger. In the larger scheme of things, he’s already lost the political contest — and Washington has already regained the fealty of its NATO allies, who have been shocked awake by the Russian invasion of a European country. The harsh economic sanctions that have been imposed on Russia should continue until Putler has retired and Russia has transitioned back to democracy. Russia will be enduringly weakend as a geostrategic actor for the indefinite future, until a regime change to Europe’s liking occurs in Moscow, and Europe can afford to patiently wait until that occurs endogenously, via a palace revolt in the Kremlin or a democratic uprising on the streets of Russia.

In all these dimensions, “the West” has already won this hybrid war. Even if Putin’s Russia gets to keep Donbass and Crimea, it will have paid a very heavy price. And they will continue to pay a heavy price. There’s no question of “letting them get away with it” or “rewarding the aggressor.”

On a net basis, Putin and Russia have already lost badly on their Ukraine invasion gamble. The State Department’s geostrategic gamers have already had plenty of wins in this game. They don’t need to squeeze the situation any further. It’s time to de-escalate, to reduce the risk of this war spiralling out of control. It’s time for the State Department to collect its winnings and take a break from the squeeze-Russia game. Let’s not push Putin to the point at which launching a nuclear war is his only alternative to a humiliating total defeat. Let Putin have Donbass and Crimea and let the Ukrainians have a free, pro-European, but militarily neutral Ukraine, with a status like that of neutral Finland or Austria during and after the Cold War.

Let’s be clear: the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership very much appears to have been an act of deliberate State Department overreach that is on the cusp of resulting in a full-on NATO-Russia war. The Partnership is an attempt to turn Ukraine in military and geostrategic terms into a client-state dependency of the United States, even though the Russians have consistently and ever more stridently insisted they will never accept that outcome — and have not only said, but now shown, that they will go to war to prevent it.

It doesn’t matter whether you think their fear of seeing Ukraine develop into a US military asset is paranoid and overblown, or that NATO will never attack Russia unless NATO is attacked first — I agree with that assessment, by the way; but what you and I think about this doesn’t matter. What matters is what the guys in the Kremlin think. And the narrative they ceaselessly repeat to themselves is that a Ukraine that’s a military ally and client-state asset of the US would present an existential threat to Russia. That may be nonsense, but if the men in the Kremlin believe it, they will act on that belief.

We now know what they’ve been warning for years: that they’re willing to go to war to prevent the Ukraine from becoming a US military-strategic asset. And we know that such a war could end up, accidentally or by miscalculation, triggering NATO Article 5 and becoming a major war between Russia and NATO.

The US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership was and is a wholly unnecessary and thoroughly insane gamble with the fate of Europe and the world. A neutral Ukraine, rather than a Ukraine coaxed into becoming a US client state, would have been a safer and better outcome for all concerned.

Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan — as well, obviously, as V.V. Putin — are playing Russian roulette with nuclear weapons. The barrel of the roulette gun is pointed at everyone’s head, including *your head,* dear reader. Your head and your children’s heads.

The large majority of the people Crimea identify with Russia more than with Ukraine, and so do many, perhaps most people in Donbass, at least in its eastern regions, though the data are less clear (an internationally supervised referendum could sort this question out). By now, eight years since the Donbass war started in 2014 and several weeks since the larger Russian invasion of Ukraine began, it seems likely that anyone who was pro-Europe rather than pro-Russia would have already fled the Donbass for central or western Ukraine.

Certainly in Crimea, and perhaps in eastern Donbass, the great majority of residents want to be under Russian jurisdiction. Should we force them to return to Ukrainian jurisdiction against their will? Is supporting the Ukrainian government in its determination to secure the return of these reluctant little regions to its jurisdiction a cause worth risking nuclear war over? Are you personally willing to risk your own death and the death of all your family and friends in support of Ukraine’s claim to the Crimea or Donbass?

No?

Than get in touch with your elected representatives about this and ask them to pressure the Biden Administration to revoke the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership and co-negotiate a militarily neutral, politically and economically free Ukraine in a peace process involving Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the European Union. While you’re at it, ask your elected representative to convey to President Biden that he ought to fire Ms. Nuland, and should consider replacing Mr. Blinken too.

Do it now. The risk of a full-on Russia-NATO war is growing more real with every passing day.

Do it. I’ve heard from people with insider connections to senior NATO military officers. What I’m hearing is that they’re actively preparing contingency measures for the big show, the real thing. For example: Three of France’s four nuclear submarines put out to sea in early March (usually only one is deployed at any given time), and France’s fighter pilots were sent on constant patrols to NATO’s eastern flank. Other NATO militaries are similarly on high alert. Everyone is worried.

This is no longer someone else’s business. Do what you can to stop this madness. Please call and write your elected representatives.

Get on it now.

Here’s the key insight: We don’t have to limit our extraction of geothermal energy just to locations where there are tectonic fault lines or geysers where hot rocks are close to the surface. We can find geothermal energy literally anywhere on the planet, if we’re willing to drill down three or four km — something oil and gas well drillers are routinely capable of. Geothermal power plants deliver steady, predictable baseload power 24/7, 365 days a year. And geothermal power is an entirely carbon-free renewable resource. So what are we waiting for?

On average, the temperature of the Earth’s crust rises by about 35 degrees C per km, going down from the surface. A bi-fluid geothermal power plant operates by harvesting water from 3 or 4 km below the surface, via deep geothermal wells, and pumping hot geothermal water up to the surface, and running it through a heat exchanger. This heats up a working fluid with a lower boiling point, e.g. butane, so the butane can flash-steam and thereby spin a turbine generator.

To achieve this, we need water that’s about 100 degree C in temperature (the boiling point of water at sea level). This means drilling wells 3 to 4 km deep until we find some porous rock layer, doing some horizontal drilling to allow water to gather into the pipe, maybe doing some fracking in order to increase porosity of the layer further around the well, and then pumping it to the surface to heat up the working fluid, before pumping it down another borehole 0.5 km to 1.0 km away, to recycle the fluid.

We can find sufficiently hot rock literally anywhere on the planet by drilling deep enough boreholes. We can also find porous rock layers in many locations. The only limitations on the rapid expansion of deep-well geothermal power seem to be (i) the expense of drilling to find the best locations, and the financial risk attendant on that, and (ii) the possibility of fouling of pipes and pumps via leaching from limestone or quartz rock layers (in some locations). Assuming we can manage the fouling problem (a problem which presumably is localized and could be avoided by finding locations with relatively clean deep-well water, or managed with a system for sluicing solvents through equipment), we could easily generate enough electricity with deep-well geothermal energy to supply the whole world for all purposes, many times over.

Again, deep-well geothermal power plants of this kind would deliver steady baseload power, 24/7, unlike solar or wind power. Taken together, deep — well geothermal, solar PV, and wind power, supplemented by hydroelectric power in some regions, can and will provide the technology solutions to produce permanent energy abundance world-wide. It’s not a question of whether these are going to be the main energy supplies for human civilization going forward — they will be. All four of these are mature and affordable technologies now, and they will keep getting cheaper and better every year. Time will tell which combination of renewable energy and energy storage and transmission systems is developed in each region of the world. The question is how quickly we decide to scale them up to provide 100% of our energy needs — and hence, how soon we’ll shut down fossil-fueled systems: soon enough to avoid disastrous climate disruption, or just a few years later, when disastrous climate disruption is inevitable?

The take-home message is that we have no excuse for continuing to run a fossil-fueled economy. Deep geothermal alone, solar PV alone, wind power alone, all these each have enough potential to power the entire planet on their own; in combination, they’re a feast of options.

Worrying about the direct financial cost of the renewable zero-carbon options vs. that of running coal- or gas-burning generators, and concluding that coal or gas are cheaper, is disingenuous gobbledegook put forward by lying and cheating fossil-fuels interests: They know perfectly well that in order to prevent catastrophic climate disruption and medium-run sea level rise from melting ice sheets that would drown all our coastal cities if we don’t return atmospheric carbon concentrations to pre-industrial-era levels ASAP, we’re going to have to pay huge amounts of money and energy to remove the more than 2,000 billion tonnes of CO2 we’ll have put into the atmosphere from 1850 (most of it since 1990) until about 2050, when we’ve left the fossil-fuels era permanently behind us.

If we refrain from including the price of scrubbing the excess carbon from fossil fuels burning in the price of coal-fired or gas-fired power (or of running fossil-fueled automobiles), a price that would at least triple the price of coal- or gas-fired power per MWh if it were included (and hence immediately end coal- and gas-fired power generation in favor of much cheaper renewable energy solutions), we’re just lying to ourselves… we’re subsidizing the ecocidal sociopaths who own fossil-fueled power generating equipment and who are collecting financial profits even though their engineers have known perfectly well for at least four decades that their equipment is producing garbage (greenhouse gas emissions) which is destabilizing the climate and which someone else (i.e. you and I, through our tax dollars) will have to go to enormously expensive lengths to soak up, remineralize, and dispose of.

Maybe we ought to set up a more intelligent subsidy system. Maybe there ought to be a government-funded programme to drill 4 km deep boreholes systematically near all towns and cities, to identify suitable locations for deep-geothermal wells, so that the cost of doing the exploratory drilling is removed from the balance sheets of geothermal power developers. That would almost entirely de-risk the geothermal power generation industry and allow us to rapidly scale it up — and hence achieve carbon-free power expansion very quickly. Now THAT would be a subsidy I could get behind.

It isn’t even necessary to drive the companies out of business that currently extract or burn fossil fuels. We merely need to insist that they change their technology focus. Among other things, we can ask whether suitable locations for deep-well geothermal energy can be found at or near coal-fired power generators, and whether the steam powered generators that have until now run on burning fossil fuels could be adapted to run on geothermal working fluid (like flash-steam butane) instead. This would allow people working in those facilities to keep their jobs.

It’s also noteworthy that drilling for deep geothermal wells uses exactly the same techniques and equipment, and hence the same workers, as drilling and fracking for oil and gas. Deep-well geothermal development would allow re-employing coal and gas workers with minimal retraining. The same companies that currently run coal and gas operations could simply be invited to shift their focus to deep-well geothermal operations, and a financial reward system could be legislated into place to provide a competitive marketplace for them to bid their services into.

The videos embedded in this article are good introductions to deep-well geothermal power. The “Just have a think” videos produced by a nerdy humble English presenter (the first video linked to above is one of these) are a wonderful introduction to just about every clean-energy climate-protective topic, including many you likely haven’t heard of yet. The video below is about a Canadian geologist and her mission to develop deep-well geothermal energy resources in southern Saskatchewan.

A big issue for humanity and the biosphere is where we’re going to get materials for the cleantech future — in particular, where we’re going to get the metals to make batteries and connectors for more than a billion electric vehicles, as we set about replacing the existing fossil-fueled car, bus, and truck fleets. A big part of the answer will hopefully be: From the seafloor.

I wrote this piece for Deutsche Welle Online (click on the link!) briefly explaining why harvesting polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor makes eminent sense from an environmental point-of-view: It will be far less ecologically costly and less greenhouse-gas-emissions intensive than obtaining the same metals via land-based mining, as an assessment comparing seafloor nodule harvesting and land-based mining has shown.

Feel free to post this Medium.com piece or my dw.com article on your Facebook or Twitter feeds. Why should you bother? You should bother because it’s high time to get serious about a rapid global cleantech transition, and that means, among many other things, that it’s high time to get on with seafloor polymetallic nodule harvesting. Posting information about real engineering solutions to the grand challenge of avoiding climate catastrophe helps spread hope, and helps us build the level of energy and determination we will need in order to rise to the challenge.

When you borrow money from a bank to buy a house, e.g. $350,000, you sign a ‘mortgage contract’ with the bank, promising to repay that money over a defined time horizon, e.g. 30 years, and to pay interest on the loan during that time horizon. Many people think that the bank then takes $350,000 worth of savings of depositors, and on-lends them to the borrower; but that’s not really what happens at all. A bank does have to collect some money from investors (people who buy equity shares in the bank) in order to meet certain financial criteria before it can open up for business and start making loans, but it doesn’t have to collect savings from depositors before it can make loans to borrowers.

What happens when you borrow money from a bank is that the bank simultaneously records and debt and a credit, in equal amount, on its balance sheet, by means of double-entry bookkeeping. In this case, the $350,000 mortgage contract you sign is the bank’s “asset”, which it enters into its spreadsheet along with the mortgage term and interest rate information, and the $350,000 it enters into your deposit account so you can buy a house is the bank’s “liability” incurred as a result of the mortgage lending transaction.

In point of fact, when a bank makes a loan to a borrower, the bank creates both credit and debt in equal amounts. As the Bank of England (the British central bank) explained in a paper entitled ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ published in 2014, what we ordinary citizens call ‘money’ is in fact nothing other than bank credit entered as numbers in bank deposit accounts during acts of borrowing.

Most payments are made by transferring electronic digits between bank customers’ accounts. A small fraction, perhaps 3%, of that money is ‘paid out’ as cash printed by the government’s mint; this results in a corresponding decrement to our deposit account (or an increase in our debt to the bank, if we have a credit line or a credit card). But paying out cash doesn’t change the amount of credit in the banking system; it merely transforms it from an electronic digital form to a paper or metal form. This doesn’t change the fact that all of the ‘money’ that people own is ultimately always offset by an equal amount of debt that someone, somewhere, owes to a bank. If you have $6,234 in cash and bank deposits, and no bank debt, that means some other people (or companies) in the country’s banking system owe $6,234 to banks within the system. If all bank debts were repaid in full tomorrow, then at the end of the banking day, there would be no bank debts in the system, but also no money. Bank debt and money (bank deposits plus cash) exist in a 1:1 ratio. (Note that it isn’t possible to repay all the bank debts in the system tomorrow, because the debtors don’t have the money to repay their debts in their possession — other people own that money, namely those who are in the happy position of being net creditors in the banking system.)

Money, in short, is created in the banking system through acts of ‘bank lending,’ and ultimately, banks are simply administrators of vast spreadsheets that keep score of who owes them points in the scorekeeping game we call ‘the monetary system’ and to whom they owe points. The whole thing nets out to zero. It’s a zero-sum game, which results in positive-sum economic value creation because the creation and circulation of credit creates a system of trust in an institution, rather than in individual people; the banking system allows people to buy and sell inputs from perfect strangers without having to trust those strangers’ debt instruments. That’s why the double entry bookkeeping based banking system is perhaps the most important invention in human history — more important, arguably, than the wheel.

Within any given currency system (e.g. the Euro system or the British Pound system), individual banks’ spreadsheets are interlinked, in part through the fact that banks themselves all have accounts at the same bank: namely the ‘central bank’ (in the UK, the central bank is the Bank of England; in Canada, it’s the Bank of Canada; in the Eurozone, it’s the European Central Bank; in the USA, it’s the several regional member banks of the Federal Reserve System). The several dozen central banks of the world, in turn, also have a global ‘central bank’ at which they all maintain accounts to ease transactions between themselves; it’s called the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and it’s headquartered in Switzerland.

Now you know.

There are two reasons why our response to Greta is showing signs of being more powerful than was our response to Severn. One is that the world is more obviously on fire now. The other, perhaps more salient reason is… well, to find out, read on.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki is the daughter of the noted Canadian biologist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki and activist Tara Cullen. Here is a speech Severn gave 30 years ago at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, at the age of 12, calling for action. It’s a pretty good speech.

I’d be surprised if Severn didn’t have a little help as she was writing the speech that she read out at the UN. Severn grew up in a household that is wholly devoted to environmental activism — and I applaud that. I applaud what Dr. Suzuki and Dr. Cullen have been trying to achieve all these years. And I don’t doubt their daughter’s sincerity for a microsecond. Severn has carried on working as a capable and dedicated eco-warrior ever since her UN speech in 1992.

Now here is Greta Thunberg, at the age of 16. Here is a speech Greta Thunberg gave with a similar message at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, in September 2019. Ms. Thunberg has said that she writes all her own speeches, though she solicits input from scientists to make sure she gets her facts straight.

Click on both links, and listen for a few moments. When one compares Severn’s and Greta’s speeches before the UN, I think you’ll agree there’s a difference in immediate emotional intensity that we perceive as they read their prepared speeches. The conceptual content of the two speeches is very similar, yet there is a notable difference in emotional salience and resonance between the two young women’s deliveries. Thunberg’s is more engaging.

Why the difference?

Severn’s delivery feels more like that of a dutiful child in the family business, doing her parents’ will. If we didn’t know she were speaking in front of the UN, we might imagine she’s delivering a homework report at school. And maybe it’s a bit too obvious that someone helped her write her speech. She was, after all, only twelve years old at the time.

Greta’s passion is more immediate. Her words are simpler, yet more powerful, because her emotions are more present. I think it comes from her Aspie clarity of vision and purpose, which gives her an ability to see to the heart of a crucial matter and then to speak to the heart of the matter, without getting sidetracked by social signals of what is desired, accepted, or contextually appropriate social behavior or speech.

Despite the fact that the conceptual content of both speeches is essentially the same, Greta’s shorter, simpler speech feels more authentic and more powerful.

That isn’t to say that Ms. Cullen-Suzuki didn’t believe what she is reading out (of course she did), nor that she was “merely being used” by her parents (whatever level of encouragement, guidance and access her parents made possible, she still had to have the grit and determination to end up getting invited to speak at the UN, amongst many other things she achieved as a young activist). It is, however, reasonable to say that Severn was a relatively ‘normal’ teenager acting on the social signals and expectations of her parents, in conformity with the agenda of the extremely supportive subculture in which she grew up.

Authenticity and ‘Konsekvenz’

Greta is a very different case. Greta is, as she has said, an Aspie with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Severn, in contrast, is ‘normal.’

In the context of what she is trying to achieve, Greta’s characteristics are — surprisingly — a powerful asset.

She didn’t grow up in a household of professional eco-activists, and she wouldn’t be doing what she’s doing if she were ‘normal.’

Greta’s passionate authenticity is obvious to us, along with her intelligence, her righteousness, her commitment, her child’s innocence, her lack of ulterior motive. Normally empathetic people respond to a sincere and passionate child with feelings of protectiveness and nurturance.

We also respond with admiration to the undeniable fact that she is taking on powerful forces with enormous grit and fearless determination.

And we respond to the simplicity of her message: Listen to the scientists.

Among the people who admire Greta’s courage is Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who is now 39 and has two children of her own.

The reality is that Greta nearly starved herself to death in depression over the lack of consequential realism in energy and climate policy — a feature of the world that she was unable to understand, since, as an Aspie, she doesn’t have the dreamworld-unrealism mindstate of “normal” people, who pay attention primarily to social signals, not to scientific facts.

Greta’s parents did not initially support or share her intense concern over the future of the global climate. In their initial view, Greta’s concern over the climate was just an unfortunate focus of attention that had taken hold in their obsessive Aspie child. It took time for Greta to swing her parents round to her perspective — to take the climate issue seriously. And now she’s trying to swing the rest of us round.

Amazingly, unlike her predecessor Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Greta Thunberg may be succeeding.

The difference between Severn and Greta is that they spent their childhoods on opposite sides of the Asch conformity experiment. In carrying out identical missions as child eco-warriors, both of them warning us to act to protect the biosphere, Severn was conforming to the expectations of her parental household and subculture — whereas Greta was a nonconforming member of her parental household, of her age-peer group, and of her national consumerist culture. Despite a lack of initial support, she went of her own volition to what she thought of as the seat of power in her country (the Swedish parliament) and sat down, alone, day after day, with her hand-drawn sign: Skolstrejk för Klimatet.

Her gesture proved so powerful (after it was virally amplified by social media — something that others helped with) that her age-peer group is now conforming with her, rather than the other way round. She has somehow managed to successfully give her generation the signal that it’s okay to care about the future of the climate and the biosphere —the signal that it’s on point to do so, that it’s not embarrassing. She has changed the bias of prevalent social signalling on this issue, at least within an energetic part of her own generation.

And as a side benefit, she has struck an enormous blow for the valuation and respectful integration of Aspies.

We respect and respond to Greta’s uncompromising stance because those of us who aren’t fools understand that the laws of physics are even more uncompromising than is Greta. As she often points out, we cannot negotiate with the laws of physics or ignore them because it’s inconvenient to change our fossil business models, and expect to avoid disaster. We have to get off the goddamn couch. We have to be what in Swedish is called konsekvent — i.e. consequential: hardnosed, real, science-driven, genuinely committed to doing what is necessary in time to solve the problem. We have no time left to piss around. Our failure to stop ourselves from continuing to explode a two-thousand-gigatonne carbon-dioxide bomb in the atmosphere is driving the climate past systemic tipping-points into radical self-reinforcing destabilisation. We need to stop diddling. We have to get real about this.

Really real.

Greta is telling us loudly and clearly, with a simple message that’s both humble and powerful: Don’t listen to me. This is not about me. Listen to the scientists. Unite behind the science.

LISTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS.

And then ACT to implement the measures the scientists say we MUST implement in order to avoid global disaster.

Greta Thunberg is asking us, on behalf of all the children of her own and coming generations, and on behalf of the millions of species who will go extinct if we don’t get off the couch, to stop being weak, useless, cowardly, lazy, reality-denying losers and fools.

She’s telling us to stop letting the nasty people who lie, cheat and steal for the fossil fuels industries to spit in our faces, kick us in the nuts, and vandalise our collective future. She’s asking you to stand up and protect your own and your children’s and grandchildren’s interests and safety.

She’s not asking for us to applaud her. She’s asking us to get up, to look reality in the eyes without flinching as she has done, to behave like responsible adults, and above all, to do what’s necessary.

LET’S GET ON WITH IT.

It’s pretty clear that the European Union needs to evolve further in order to remain stable and retain the loyalty of its nations and citizens. That’s been obvious since long before Brexit.

In the European political discourse, there’s been a long-standing debate between people who want a Europe of Nations and those who want an “ever closer Union,” which is often called a United States of Europe, based loosely on the USA model. There are other visions as well — such as a Europe of regions of similar size and population, which would see 27 nations of hugely varying size and power displaced by hundreds of regions within some kind of United Regions of Europe.

As a European who spent much of his life in Canada until returning to Europe eleven years ago, it has long seemed to me that the Canadian Confederation might be a sensible model for the future of the European Union. I’d like to propose that this model be brought into the discourse of European policy elites and seriously considered.

Canada’s confederation has some attributes that would suit Europe’s diversity well. Canada is composed of ten Provinces of widely different size and population, ranging from tiny Prince Edward Island to mighty Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia, with a few nationally administered, sparsely populated Territories in the far North as well. The phrase ‘provincial governments’ makes it sound like these are weak and rustic entities, but nothing could be further from the reality.

The reality is that Canada’s provinces are extremely powerful entities that govern most aspects of daily life — education, health care, land use, and management of natural resources from forests and waterways to mines, energy systems, and petroleum resources, amongst other things. The federal government has relatively few formal authorities, but the ones it does have are powerful: Defense, foreign affairs, international trade relations, currency issuance, the postal system, coordination of interprovincial trade regulations, management of the federal territories, and management of ocean waters, among other things.

Provincial and federal levels have overlapping legal systems governing criminal and civil laws, with provincial and federal police forces and courts. The interplay between the federal and provincial levels is constant and subtle.

A big part of the federal government’s power derives from its spending powers. The federal and provincial governments each levy their own income taxes and value-added taxes. The federal government uses its ability to subsidise activities in areas that are actually part of the provincial governments’ jurisdiction, including health care and education, using a carrot-and-stick approach; for example, in the 1970s, the federal government passed a law requiring all provinces to adopt single-payer medical insurance systems. That led to ten separate provincial single-payer medical systems, with different rules, all of them benefiting from federal subsidies; to qualify for those subsidies, the provincial systems had to meet certain federally designed criteria.

Canada’s confederal system allows an enormous amount of provincial self-determination. The province of Québec, for example, puts a premium on making independent decisions, and is very nearly a sovereign nation; its provincial Legislature is called l’Assemblée Nationale du Québec, and most citizens of the province consider themselves Québecois, proud members of a Francophone ethnic and territorial nation, as well as contented Canadians — or vice versa: proud Canadians and contented Québecois. There’s room for both. Canadians understand nested identities.

Nested identities will work in Europe, too. There is no need whatsoever to choose between being a proud Sardegnan, a proud Italian, and a proud European, for example. It’s not only possible to be all three at the same time — it’s desirable. And if you’re an Italian who has lived in Denmark for decades, then you can be a Danish Sardegnan Italian European. We all have layered identities. Let’s cherish them. Let’s understand that being more European doesn’t mean — in any way, shape, or form — being less Italian, or less French, or less Polish. A powerful Europe means a more powerful Italy, a more powerful France, and more powerful Poland, not a less powerful Italy, or France, or Poland.

That is the direction Europe could and I believe must move toward. Rather than asking people to give up any of their identities, or stripping the subcontinent’s nations of their powers and moving them to Brussels, the European Union would be well advised to take a look at Canada’s overlapping provincial and federal jurisdictions — and its overlapping, nested identities. For me, there is no either-or in my several overlapping identities: I’m a Swiss-born German-Canadian who spent most of his childhood in a small town in Québec, heavily influenced by US culture as a member of an immigrant minority Anglophone community, before moving to Ontario and then British Columbia, before moving back to Europe and spending three years in the UK and (so far) the past eight years in Germany, the country of my earliest childhood and of all my ancestors.

If you asked me my ethnic identity, the first I’d do is ask you to modify the word so it’s plural. Identities. I’m European, I’m Canadian, I’m American, I’m German, I’m a little bit Québecois. I know from experience that more than anything, I’m first and foremost a human, like you, a child of this amazing, half-crazy, querulous tribe of talking, tool-making savannah apes that emerged in Africa some seventy thousand years ago, and somehow figured out how to make spacecraft and smartphones. There are nearly eight billion of us now, all of us descended from no more than a few hundred common ancestors that lived somewhere in the plains of east Africa before the last Ice Age. We are one extended family, all of us cousins of cousins. That’s not a poetic metaphor; it’s a statement of scientific fact. We need to learn to get along and enjoy our nested identities, to live in peace, to bring our awareness of our common heritage fully into our present awareness. We need to stop playing at the pointless game of war or at ethnic one-upmanship, and join the game of peace and global cooperation. This is what works. It works beautifully.

And Europe, in its diversity, with its terrible and grand history, can show the way, by making the European Union a confederation of powerful cooperation composed of great diversity, a symphony of dozens of distinct voices.

Canada works beautifully, as complex and constantly evolving as it is, never mind the occasional bickering between this or that agency or level of government. Here’s the Canadian-model-influenced European Union I envisage: A Europe with a powerful European Union confederal governance level that has serious spending powers, with the EU confederal government taxing and spending about 10% to 15% of GDP, looking after collective defense, a common currency, major crossboundary infrastructure projects, common technical standards, a shared commitment to global environmental conservation, common standards for civil and criminal laws, and a shared set of commercial laws within a common market in which people who start businesses only need to register once, as a European company, and no country parasitises the Union by prostituting itself as a “tax haven.” There would be systems to coax EU member nations to deliver services at comparable levels, and help them pay for that where necessary. Beyond that, the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ would leave almost everything in regional or national governance domains.

This is not so very far off from where the European Union already is, right now. Yet there are some differences — for one thing, we need a European Parliament with the right of designing and introducing legislation within EU domains of sovereignty and responsibility, in the same way the Canadian Parliament has such legislative rights and responsibilities. And we need to get over the ridiculous limitation now encumbering the EU’s ability to ever become a meaningful power in the world: the fact that the EU has no right of taxation. We also need to let go of the absurd rule against the European Central Bank financing, when necessary, public spending, as long as it stays within the hard constraint of keeping inflation well below 2% year-on-year.

The European Union confederal governance level should spend around 10% of GDP, not on obsolete agricultural subsidies, but rather on the great shared priorities of the subcontinent: Climate stability, shared defense, scientific and engineering research and development, a network of great universities, common infrastructure such as a continent-wide integrated electricity grid... There is so much to be done. Let’s stop getting in our own way, with our petty jealousies and hoary clichés, and make the reforms necessary to empower the European Union institutions within a confederal model that takes nothing away from the regional and national governance levels. Canada has done it, and so can Europe. Let’s go!