Your delusion that your customer service deescalation skill set is a kind of universal joint applicable to all situations is nothing but narcissistic, anti-intellectual hubris. Michael Jordan thought he could play baseball ⚾️ and you think you can formulate geopolitical policy and strategy. How else should readers interpret your claim that you know how to better formulate policy and strategy than Tim Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Stephen Kotkin, BKean who lived for 28 years in Russia and married three Russian women, my British, American and Ukrainian veteran friends in Riga and Kyiv and my UCLA classmate Michael Gelb who studied the Stalin purges in Leningrad in 1983? Of course, your customer service de-escalation skill set counts for more all their years of study, fluency in Russian and lived experience. If you ever need surgery I expect you won't choose a surgeon based on the same criteria you recommend to readers who they should listen to about the Russian-Ukraine War.
Geopolitical conflict is not an interpersonal therapy problem solvable by flipping a forgiveness or reconciliation switch. It's a conflict between irreconcilable opposites and which will have a future and which we'll see only in history books (Greeks vs Persian empire, Jews vs Nazis, Democracy vs Soviet Communism, Franquismo and Salazar's Estado Novo).
Hitler often had great personal charm he used to seduce naive idiots like Lindbergh, the treasonous abdicated Duke of Windsor and his Hitler handshaking wife Wallis. Russia's useful idiots today are no better and similarly deluded. But at least the tiki-torched Tuckers, MTGs, Boeberts and Gaetz of the xenophobic are open in their fascistic admiration for their Satan-fighter in the Kremlin. Only the Code Pinkos of the appeasing faux peacenik left cloak their neo-imperial Russian disinformation assumptions about Ukraine as a weak, corrupt and failed state and society and Ukrainians as helpless pawns of the West in ideologically cross-dressed anti-interventionism and pacifism. The Spanish Civil War should have taught us where these delusions lead.
Your peace is the peace of your prior surrender advice to Ukraine. It is the desert the Russians would create and call peace. Here's the genocidal neo Stalinist alternate reality had Zelensky taken the ride offered by the forecasters of Ukrainian collapse instead of resisting:
"On the eve of the invasion, some American experts advised against offering military aid to Ukraine, on the grounds that the war was going to be over too quickly. Other Americans repeated Russian propaganda, questioning whether Ukraine deserved to exist or whether it deserved to be defended. Some American politicians echoed those views and indeed continue to do so. What if they had prevailed? What if a different president had been in the White House? What if a different president had been elected in Ukraine? Let’s imagine, just for a moment, a world without Ukrainian courage, or American and European weapons, or the unity and support of democracies around the world.
Had the Russian plan been carried out as it was written, Kyiv would have been conquered in just a few days. Zelensky, his wife, and his children would have been murdered by one of the hit squads that roamed the capital city. The Ukrainian state would have been taken over by the collaborators who had already chosen their Kyiv apartments. Then, city by city, region by region, the Russian army would have fought the remnants of the Ukrainian army until it finally conquered the entire country. Originally, the Russian general staff imagined that this victory would require six weeks.
Had all of that happened as planned, Ukraine would now be pockmarked with the concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift prisons that have been discovered in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson, and all the other territories temporarily occupied by Russia and liberated by the Ukrainian army. A generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, politicians, journalists, and civic leaders would already be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian books would have been removed from schools and libraries. The Ukrainian language would have been suppressed in all public spaces. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian children would have been kidnapped and transported to Russia or trafficked farther around the world."
What I gather from your articles is that:
1. You've never left or lived outside the sheltered confines of the USA, a superpower protected by two oceans and energy independence.
2. You've never lived in another culture or learned a foreign language.
3. You've never been to Russia or any other Eastern European country.
4. You've never known closely anyone from Eastern Europe who's lived under foreign occupation or had family that experienced genocidal mass deportation.
But you still believe you possess a de-escalation skill set that will work universally, with no exceptions, including Warsaw 1943 and 1944, Manila 1944-45, Imphal 1944-45, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976-83, Spain 1936-39.....I could list 50 more exceptions, but stop here.
