Demand rules, supply drools

Putin learns it the hard way over Ukraine

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

We have long been told to be in awe of Vladimir Putin’s brain, trained as it was by the KGB back in the (Soviet) day. He was always going to remain several steps ahead of us in the West, his Machiavellian mind just being too awesome.

After all, this is the guy who has successfully captured Trump’s MAGA base, which, frankly, is more than impressive. So too was his government’s successful cyber efforts to dissuade African-Americans from voting in 2016 (Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media) in significant enough numbers to have likely swayed the election to Trump (also factoring in the successful DNC hacking and data dumps through Wikileaks). Add it up and we’re way beyond a few useful idiots and moving into the realm of a serious Fifth Column — body-snatching of the highest order.

Still, Putin has never shown himself to understand economics whatsoever, and, so, with the same sort of idiotic and grandiose self-regard that we may yet someday witness from Xi Jinping re: Taiwan, Vlad decided that letting Ukraine go to the West would just be too big of a loss of face for his regime — sacred Slavic lands and all, and so he bet Russia’s economic future on this literal culture war (Moscow’s go-to Pan-Slavism that has never really worked out well in history).

Putin’s thinking here was pretty obvious: he had Europe/NATO over an energy barrel, particularly in natural gas. Europe wouldn’t be able to engineer any sort of realistic switch, so they’d cave come the first winter cold.