Opinion: Looming War in Europe

How did we get to the brink of war in Europe, with Russian President-for-Life Vladimir Putin threatening to overrun Ukraine, the second largest country by land area in Europe after Russia?

First of all, Putin is a former KGB officer, who loyally served the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and has dreams of restoring the Russian empire to its former glory. This especially means bringing Eastern Europe back under Russian domination, by force if necessary. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, stands in his way. Most Eastern European countries adamantly refuse domination by Russia. Many have joined NATO, Ukraine has remained uncommitted and Belarus has joined with Russia. This process has been largely peaceful. But after Russia seized part of Ukraine (Crimea) to regain its former military bases on the Black Sea, the remainder of Ukraine moved closer to the West and would now like to join NATO. This infuriates Putin, who has no one to blame but himself.

Russia is no match for the United States, with half our population and one tenth our Gross Domestic Product. (GDP). True, they do have a technologically advanced military capable of annihilating any adversary, including the United States. But we have stared down their military for more than seven decades, keeping the peace with what became known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). We can thoroughly obliterate Russia, even if they were to mount a surprise attack on us. One US nuclear missile submarine has more destructive power than all the ordinance used in the Second World War. And we have many of these submarines.

Russia hopes to regain their empire, one country or one part of a country at a time. Ukraine is vulnerable, because they share a long border with Russia and are no match for the Russian bear, if he should mount a blitzkrieg. However, Ukraine maintains the third largest army in Europe, after Russia and France. That means that they could make the Russians pay a heavy price for an invasion, especially with the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons that NATO is now providing to Ukraine.

This is an elaborate game of chess, where the Russians are masters. All previous US Presidents have been astute enough to match the Russians, move for move. Then along came Joe Biden with severe age-related cognitive problems, and all of our adversaries sensed a golden opportunity. What if Joe could not even play checkers, and America blinked, because Joe was not up to par that day?

Fast forward to today and our adversaries observed our disastrous exit from Afghanistan, our disastrous descent into racial strife that tore apart our cities and ignited a furious crime wave, our disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic along ideological not scientific lines, and our disastrous adoption of climate nonsense as scientific fact, thereby crippling the energy sector that drives our prosperity. Opportunities to displace America as the world leader do not come along very often.

The first of these disasters are purely American problems that can be 100% blamed on Biden and his party, as they had no idea what they were doing in the case of Afghanistan and every idea of what they were doing in the case of igniting racial strife to defeat President Trump’s bid for re-election. But there does not seem to be any recognition, even today, that once they opened Pandora’s Box, there was no easy way to close it again. They made huge mistakes that are not reversible, even if they recognize and apologize for them. Great damage has been done to America.

The challenges of COVID and climate are worldwide phenomena that should have been decided on the basis of sound science, not the ideological substitutes that Leftists forced upon us.

To defeat Donald Trump, Democrats needed to use every tool at their disposal, from shouting “racism” when Trump tried to stop the Chinese from exporting COVID-19 to the USA via air travel from Wuhan, to attacking hydroxychloroquine as an ineffective therapy when it was just the opposite, to heavily criticizing the new vaccines that the Trump Administration developed in record time as dangerously experimental when they proved lifesaving for the elderly.

Trump made the huge mistake of trusting Dr. Anthony Fauci to advise his pandemic response, not realizing that Fauci had substantially surrendered his scientific credentials in favor of his bureaucratic ones. Fauci’s ‘Spanish Flu Plan’ was a century out-of-date. Masks and isolation did not succeed against the new virus and caused great damage to our economy. We would have been far better off to follow President Trump’s instincts to reopen America before substantial economic damage occurred, and the government had to print a lot of money to try to avert a collapse. Rampant inflation today is one sad consequence.

If Fauci and Biden had listened to the broader medical community, they would have realized that highly effective therapies were being tested in foreign lands where they did not have access to the massive amounts of cash that Fauci controlled and were sincerely interested in protecting their population from COVID. China chose to go with very inexpensive hydroxychloroquine, as their preferred treatment. India chose ivermectin that they manufacture very cheaply. Ivermectin was spectacularly successful at controlling COVID in one Indian state where it was used extensively.

Tiny El Salvador in Central America initiated a program of distributing, free of charge, ivermectin and other inexpensive drugs, vitamins, and minerals that are known to fight COVID. Today, they boast a death rate one quarter of that of the USA. That is magnificent for them and scandalous for us.

Why did we fail to do as well as many in the Third World? The answer is simple: Anthony Fauci and his boss Frances Collins. They blocked therapies that would have saved at least a quarter of a million American lives, because they wanted vaccines as the only solution.

It should never have been a question one or the other. It should have been ‘every approach that works.’ Figure 1 from the Oregon Health Authority shows how well the vaccines work. And Figure 2 shows the many studies that prove the effectiveness of ivermectin, a multipurpose and safe medicine for which William Campbell and Satoshi Omura received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. Campbell and Omura developed Avermectin to fight devastating parasitic diseases. Ivermectin is the preferred derivative in use today that fights both parasites and viruses. It is far more than the ‘horse medicine’ that ideologues have so tragically denigrated it.

The battle against an imaginary threat, climate change, has further weakened America and the Western world. As with COVID-19, the ruling class long ago realized that they could control their subjects and make vast amounts of money selling various forms of snake oil to combat climate change. But they had to demonize crude oil and other fossil fuels to do it. This meant a war against prosperity, as fossil fuels are the basis of prosperity around the world. As soon as Joe Biden became President, he blocked pipelines and the leasing of federal lands for drilling to decrease fossil fuel production and run up prices. Surprise, it worked! America went from a net exporter of fossil fuels under Trump to a net importer under Biden. Prices doubled. We even import a little fossil fuel from Russia now.

Western Europe is far more dependent on the Russians, as they somehow believe that Russian fossil fuels are more virtuous than their own reserves that are vast and largely untapped. Their stupidity, coupled with our own, leaves the West at the mercy of Russia. Putin may well be able to overrun Ukraine and blackmail Europe into doing essentially nothing. Should the Germans object to events in Ukraine, Putin merely shuts off their natural gas, and they will have a very difficult time making it through the winter.

Many will say “Why worry about Ukraine? It is far from one of our priorities.” That is extremely shortsighted. The Second World War began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, just to the north of Ukraine. China is lining up behind Russia to provide them the economic clout to ride out economic sanctions promised by Biden. They want Putin to succeed, so that they can more easily seize Taiwan by force.

We need to get beyond the pronouns, racism, mask and vaccine mandates, and crippling energy decisions that are making us weaker by the day.

Our adversaries are ready to pounce, if we do not.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He previously worked on strategic war studies for the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency and holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.