We live in an age of contradictions protected by a bodyguard of strategic incompetence. The evidence is all around us. During the Covid panic experts we trusted told us natural immunity no longer existed. For the right cause burning, looting and rioting is peaceful. Some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet fly thousands of kilometres each year to a ski village in Switzerland and tell the rest of us soon you will own nothing and be happy eating bugs. While in a Cold War with communist China, Western institutions are building CCP-style mechanisms to incentivise net-zero behaviours. Energy requiring more inputs than outputs it produces is green. Now a war in Ukraine that cannot be questioned is about our freedom.  Sadly, for Ukraine, they are the knot between two ends of the rope of great power politics.  It is the third great power war in Europe in a hundred years. Like almost all great power wars, the war in Ukraine is about resources and allies and the fear that others may control them. It is also the first war in history of the globalists, those at the source of the contradictions.

In the History of Peloponnesian Wars, Greek General and historian Thucydides (5th century BC), observed an age of contradictions where, ‘the regular meaning of words changed to fit the state of affairs’. A thoughtless act of aggression was regarded as courage, considering the future was cowardice, and considering an issue from all sides meant one was unfit. Importantly, those with violent opinions could always be trusted, those who questioned became suspect. George Orwell put it best in 1984, with the slogans ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, and ‘ignorance is strength’.

For the globalists, war in the Ukraine is for peace and the fewer critical questions you ask the better it will be for you. Raising questions about Ukraine and empathising with the enemy means you are Putin’s stooge. An enemy of democracy even. Just like questioning masks, untested vaccines and locking down healthy people meant you were an anti-vax, granny-killing member of QAnon. During the Sri Lankan civil war, those suggesting negotiations were labelled ‘peace-mongers’.

Anyone who appreciates the concept of strategy (the art of making power to survive) knows it requires a narrative. A narrative controlled by those at the strategic level of a government’s ability to deliver power and security needs to be taken seriously. Especially if they are incompetent. At the height of the second Iraq war in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction a surreal discussion took place between a reporter and an aide to US President George W. Bush that went something along the following lines:

The aide said that guys like me [reporter] were in what we call the reality-based community. Which he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore….We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will, we act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too. And that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.  Hubris at the highest level.

One of the best examples of the bodyguard of strategic incompetence in the West, is the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. And an expert on creating reality. Milley is the highest-ranking military officer in the US Armed Forces and the principal military advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.  If there was a general who wars should not be left to, it’s this one.

You know Milley. He’s the guy who is worried about something called ‘white rage’. In early January 2020, Milley said he’d give his Chinese counterpart a heads-up if the US was preparing to attack. Milley oversaw the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and in February 2022, said Ukraine would fall within days of the Russian invasion.

Yet when the war failed to enable Ukraine to inflict a decisive blow despite watching the build-up of Russian forces for over twelve months. It was Milley who in 2019, commissioned a U.S. Army War College report on climate change outlining the possibility of blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war due to collapse of the country’s ageing power grid, its food supply systems. It suggested similar impacts on developing countries. Well, we got a lot of that. All self-inflicted courtesy of a bodyguard of strategic incompetents like Milley.

Last week Milley said Russia has lost the war ‘strategically, operationally and tactically’. An incredibly stupid statement. Russia is a nuclear power, its borders have not been compromised and it retains around 15 to 18 per cent of the territory taken from Ukraine, including the Crimea. Then again, the Ukraine is about the control of resources (gas) and allies. Now, Ukraine President Zelensky (who is not blameless) says there will be a ‘world war’ if China provides arms to Russia. But the West is supplying arms to the Ukraine. Wait, if Russia has lost ‘strategically, tactically and operationally’, isn’t it over? Perhaps it’s unfair to pick on Milley because this current generation of US strategic actors are responsible for single-handedly unifying Russia and China.

During the Obama Administration, then vice president Biden was point-man on Ukraine where in 2014 a Western-backed coup unhinged the democratically elected pro-Putin President Viktor Yanukovych. On the ground at the time was US State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who in a leaked phone call told US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt how things would go down in Ukraine. And by the way ‘F..K the EU’. After the 2014 coup, Ukrainian gas company Burisma found it was on the wrong side so put Hunter Biden on its board (smart move) allegedly at a cost of US $50,000 per month. One of Biden’s first acts of his presidency was to remove the sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 (NS-2) pipeline. Now, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nuland said on 27 January 2022, ‘If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, NS-2 will not move forward.’ Wait, what? Never mind, that’s the old reality. This is about democracy. Freedom.

Why is this old reality so important, apart from how we got here? It’s not to reject the right of a country to defend itself. It’s that our future, our real freedoms, are in the hands of a bodyguard of strategic incompetents at one of the most precarious times since prior to the second world war. The stakes are so high.  Once big wars start, they are hard to stop. And no one is interested in stopping this one, just the opposite.