I hate war as much as anyone, probably more, especially when they are senseless wars conducted for no other reason than no one was around with the guts enough to stop them or those who started them. With that said, everyone has to know that some wars are simply unavoidable, because a tyrant intent on making war doesn’t give his victim a choice in the matter.

That’s where we find the world in regard to Ukraine and Russia. Putin wants what Ukraine has and so, Ukraine has no choice but fight or surrender and die and even slower death. Already we see prison camps in Russian occupied Eastern Ukraine and their torture chambers.

Tyranny is in the ascendant not just in Russia and China but even the European Union too, which makes it hard to want to side with them on anything; but we still have a chance to turn things around in Europe as the new alt right and populist movements are now taking hold to some degree in places like Germany and France [the U.K. appears it will present much more work].

And so, if we take a more isolated approach that says “this isn’t our war”, it may not be this decade or even two decades from now, but the day will arrive when the United States is left standing completely alone, all its allies absorbed and conquered by the new totalitarian world order headed by who knows what or who and a new, vicious and deadly enemy about to broach our shores and crash our gates, metaphorically speaking. We’ll probably get hit with a withering attack that lights us up in some blazing conflagration caused by some new life ending weapon, unless Trump and his successors actually create an effective “Iron Dome” that is continually upgraded to defend against any and all new weapons technology.

Any way one looks at it, I see a day when we will have to level Moscow, St Petersburg, Shanghai, Beijing and a few other major cities if we hope for our people to live. I hope and pray I’m wrong, but I don’t really believe I am, given what we now witness from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

We’ll know the truth of the matter soon enough. These are definitely interesting and dangerous times. ~ J.O.S.

America Is in a War for World Freedom

President Donald J. Trump has inherited a mess with the Ukraine-Russian War, which has been ongoing for over ten years but expanded considerably after Joe Biden insanely suggested he could tolerate “a minor [Russian] incursion” into Ukraine, after Russian forces were seen gathering along the border in preparation for Putin’s “Special Military Operation”, and President Trump has now stepped in to present himself and the United States as the arbiter of peace in this conflict, in a manner that will never bring a true or lasting peace. He hasn’t got a good grasp of what is actually transpiring or what has transpired in the past, and as he and Vice-President Vance latch onto Russian propaganda that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was sparked by Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, he is enabling Putin’s agenda and ultimate goals to the detriment of America’s allies and America too.

President Donald J. Trump’s current demeanor and tact with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is reminiscent of the days when President Franklin D. Roosevelt plotted the division of the world with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin after WW II at Yalta, and Roosevelt simply and meekly bowed and handed Stalin most of Eastern Europe and even East Berlin, even though Russia initially entered WWII on the side of Hitler and the Nazis. Trump appears far too comfortable with simply accepting America as a diminished power and an untenable geopolitical situation that divides the world somewhat equally between the U.S., China and Russia as the three world superpowers, when Russia, despite its new hypersonic missile, really is a third rate “super-power”. But Trump would relinquish America’s position as the most powerful nation on earth to give way to a multi-polar world, that hands two-thirds of the world over to the tyrants of the world, and in the end, actually works against a secure and safe future for America and places our country in ever increasing danger of attack by these enemies in the not too distant future.

Putin has no such desire to see a multi-polar world. He sees a world eventually controlled and ruled from Moscow, with China simply a convenient partner and tool to take him there. Putin knows that whoever controls Eurasia ultimately controls the world.

We are in a geopolitical hybrid war which will determine the future for no less than the next century. It is a war of civilizations that will either entrench tyranny or freedom as a way of life for the greatest number of people across the world.

People are factually incorrect whenever they suggest the U.S. promoted a “color revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 to oust Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin puppet president. In December of 2013, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland simply noted that the U.S. had provided Ukraine with $5 billion to aid it in growing and strengthening its democratic governmental infrastructure since 1992 to that juncture in 2013, after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union; this was not a lump sum payment made in 2013 to disrupt Ukraine’s society, to pay rioters and oust Yanukovych. The Ukrainian people did that all on their own, after Yanukovych was revealed to be massively corrupt and refused to honor an economic deal the Ukraine Parliament made with the European Union, pushing them to accept Putin’s Eurasian Economic Pact offer instead, which would have kept them forever under Russia’s thumb and influence, severely damaging Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

The loons out there have repeatedly thrown this against the wall as “proof” that the U.S. was behind the chaos that ensued in 2014, however, it was not. Ukrainians had enough of Russian interference in their internal affairs and politics and reacted accordingly and appropriately, culminating in the Maidan Revolution, which started in November of 2013. By February 2014, Putin had invaded Crimea and annexed it. The real violence in eastern Ukraine was the brainchild of Putin who sent in Russian Spetsnaz Special Forces into eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region, in April 2014, to subvert the new government and create more chaos, while he also encouraged and paid some 50,000 Ukrainian citizens and separatists who were ethnic Russians to agitate, riot and generally engage in civil disobedience and acts of violence, in essence to revolt and give Putin the pretense to send in thousands of regular Russian soldiers to hold, take and annex the region for Russia.

Putin barely mentioned NATO during his speech on February 21st 2022 that attempted to justify this war. It soon became apparent without a shadow of a doubt his justification was nothing less than an assertion of a Russian sense of entitlement and Russian imperialism, as he claimed Ukraine was an artificial state and “an accident of history” and offered no proof of any real and existential military threat that required Russia to act in “self-defense”. In essence, Putin had set himself up above the international order of things and even the Budapest memorandum — that the leaders of Russia signed on December 5th 1994, providing a guarantee of Ukraine’s borders and security and existence as a sovereign nation, a sovereignty and legitimacy that Putin now denies.

More than any threat from NATO, this war has always been one aimed at creating dissension between the European allies and the U.S. and creating a situation that makes it possible for Russia to expand further westward. The proof of this is exemplified by the fact that prior to the 2022 invasion, not only did Putin demand that Ukraine must never join NATO, he also demanded that NATO withdraw from Eastern Europe entirely and essentially abandon security guarantees for Poland, the Baltics and other former Russian satellite states sitting on the frontlines. This Ukrainian pretense has always been the initial stage of a broader agenda to reassert Russia’s dominance over its former empire.

Putin’s lie is exposed in that he didn’t invade when Ukraine first sought NATO membership in 2008. He didn’t invade in 2014 when Ukraine brought NATO membership up again after Putin seized Crimea. And he didn’t even flinch when Finland joined NATO in 2023, even though they share an 830 mile border.

Putin’s war is nothing less than a war designed to end with Russia rebuilt and restored as a post-Soviet empire; and, enabled and aided by his new allies China, Iran and North Korea, Putin and Xi primarily are working to fracture the existing economic and security order. Putin has already engaged in a war campaign of subversion spanning the continent, as the Kremlin and Russia’s hardline military leaders have conducted sabotage and political operations intended to punish Russia’s European foes. Western allies suspect Russian agents were behind recent bombings in Leipzig, Germany and Birmingham, England last year, as well as numerous ongoing arson attacks in many European nations, in conjunction with ongoing cyber-attacks and attacks on critical infrastructure from gas and oil pipelines to internet cables.

And no speculation here, German and U.S. authorities stated they stopped a Russian assassination attempt last year against Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, which is a major supplier of artillery shells to the Ukrainian army — all a part of Putin’s new hybrid-war against America and our European allies, as the Kremlin hardliners appear to be slowly increasing the pressure to see what it can get away with, in order to test the limits of NATO’s Article 5 and create uncertainty across its ranks.

President Trump has never been more right on anything than he is in his own demands that NATO and other European nations must take on more personal responsibility and much more of the cost for their own defense. Much of Europe’s people currently live better than Americans, because their governments rely totally on the U.S. for their defense needs and spend all their own money on the wants and needs of their people; and while the U.S. accounts for just a little over four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. taxpayer pays for forty percent of the defense spending around the world, in one glance at Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere across the globe.

Every American must understand that China and Russia are moving in tandem and allied, in order to change the international order established by the U.S. after WWII. They seek to destroy what they view as a “Western hegemony” and replace it with a world totalitarian hegemony all of their own making, where might makes right and the last words of a tyrant are law. Xi and Putin are completely aligned in this mission, as witnessed on March 22nd 2023, when Xi visited Moscow and told Putin:

“Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together … Take care please, dear friend.”

In the meantime, the mere initial framework Trump has presented to the world, in which he suggested Ukraine was at fault for this war, has placed Ukraine at a disadvantage. So too is Trump inhibiting Ukraine’s ability to reach a fair and lasting just peace, by suggesting Ukraine will have to give up some of its land now occupied by Putin’s army. This is no way to obtain a real peace, and it smacks much more of Chamberlain style appeasement and fear than “peace through strength”, since, to date, President Trump has not stated or alluded to anything that would suggest Putin and Russian will pay a cost and some heavy price for invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

Even now, Putin is playing games with the peace process and delaying any meaningful results, because he currently knows he has the upper hand on the battlefield and time is on his side, for now.

Trump may still manage to pull a peace deal of some questionable sort out of his presidential ass, but its doubtful Putin will honor it for long, not with his agenda and all it means on the line. Any ceasefire Putin agrees to would be about as trustworthy as one from Hamas. Russia has regularly violated every treaty it’s ever entered with the U.S. and other nations, whether one looks at Georgia, Syria, Chechnya or Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum.

Trump seems to think that Putin actually respects him, and maybe he does. That’s why Trump says Putin will honor any deal they reach. But this doesn’t assuage or calm any of Zelensky’s and the Ukrainian people’s fears for what comes when Trump is gone in four years, and its why Zelensky has been so adamant that Ukraine must receive some sort of security assurances from the U.S. and Europe, before he agrees to any “peace deal”.

Russia is currently free to wage a total war against Ukraine with little fear of experiencing any counterattacks inside Russia. It holds the advantage, for now, including a much larger and more advanced air force. Ukraine is currently expected to fight this war without adequate air power, which is something no other modern nation would ever consider in conducting any warfare campaign, not NATO, not the U.S.

Bumbling Joe Biden and his regime of incompetents threw money into Ukraine, while tying President Zelensky’s hands and preventing him from fighting in a manner that could have at the very least pushed Russia out of the Donbas. Now we have an idiot Secretary of State in Marco Rubio who has recently stated that there is no military solution. There sure as hell is, if only the U.S. and Trump and Europe grow a spine, give Zelensky fighter jets, long-range missiles, armor, and artillery in large enough quantities in conjunction with dramatically enhanced drone and electronic warfare capabilities, rather than halting weapons and U.S. intelligence as Trump recently did. Turn Zelensky and the Ukrainian Army loose to fight as they must in order to remain free, even if that includes giving them the green light to strike inside Russia, since Russia has hit civilian targets every single day of this war, to make them feel some pain and perhaps withdraw – even temporarily – rather than escalate. And the U.S. and NATO should deliver Potin a message that any use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine would bring them into the war.

The U.S. and NATO must create a powerful means of deterrence to prevent Putin from continuing with this war and/or future such invasions and wars. He must not be allowed to easily rearm and prepare for his next phase of this war against the West and America. Some are thinking the price may be too high, but it won’t be nearly so high as bearing witness to a new totalitarian world order advancing across the globe if Putin’s invasion is allowed to succeed and he walks away with nary a slap on the wrist and a “bad boy” from President Trump.

NATO and the U.S. should adopt a first strike policy with Russia, since Putin has told the world he revised Russia’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons to include a first strike. And then program 50 nukes to target Moscow and Russia’s top ten cities, targeting China, Iran and North Korea in similar fashion, if we haven’t already put some similar plan of action in place. Put us at defense readiness condition #2 and let it be known.

Putin is counting on America and the West being too afraid of his new hypersonic missiles to act in the defense of themselves or any other country. We must make him fear us more, with some real exhibition of strength, or this tactic of his will never end.

Rather than move to make a bad peace deal that will certainly be broken by Putin a few months, perhaps a couple of years down the road, hand Putin and Russia a definitive defeat, similar to the one that forced Russia to leave Afghanistan in 1989.

In a July 2011 presentation to the Joint Forces Staff College, Lt. Colonel Matthew Dooley, a 1994 West Point graduate – speaking then primarily of the existential threat of Islam – spoke of the need for U.S. military leaders to accept that a point might be reached where our nation’s very survival is threatened on one or more fronts and they would need to consider the use of a nuclear weapons first strike in order to save the day, our people and the nation. Not that I want to see us enter such a war, he was not wrong for a litany of reasons, and once again, we have approached a day where this possibility should be considered and left on the table as a very real option when considering what we now face against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

America and Europe cannot afford to delude themselves any further through a flawed assessment and analysis that paints this war as just a Ukrainian-Russian conflict. From many years previous, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s leaders, especially those hardliners still running the Kremlin, have left absolutely no doubt, by way of both words, deeds and affirmative actions, that their ultimate objectives are to regain control of Central and Eastern Europe and restore Europe in the manner it existed after Yalta, when Russia essentially kidnapped a huge chunk of the West for itself. Putin is in fact waging a war against Europe and the West and America, that ends with prison camps and torture chambers for everyone, should he and his allies win.

Anyone in America currently saying “this isn’t America’s war” has another think coming, especially if their way of thinking wins the day with this Trump administration and China and Russia prevail over the West. To place one’s faith in the protection of being an ocean away from the fight – especially in this technologically advanced age – is a fool’s way of thinking in today’s modern age, and going down this path will not ensure world peace, and it will not prevent a coming war with our enemies but hasten it, mark my words.

March 19, 2025

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.