Neocon Dr. Strangelove Tries to Pin Ukraine War Loss on Trump

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The Ukraine War was lost to the Biden administration and its neocon stringpullers from the beginning. As I have detailed in many articles on this site.

But now with Trump taking over from Biden, the neocons are playing the Blame Game – because they don’t want the blame falling on them, where it belongs. Robert Kagan is the neocons’ Dr. Strangelove, setting the Ukraine strategy from the 2014 putsch against the benighted country’s democratic government until 2025.

His wife, Vicky Nuland, even was the operative in Kiev in 2014 actually handing out cookies during what’s called the Maidan, but really was the establishment of a neocon dictatorship, currently led by Zelensky. In the first three years of the Biden administration, thankfully over, she was undersecretary of state in charge of the Ukraine debacle. It’s odd how Kagan gained such ideological sway over most of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, but it happened.

Kagan headlines in The Atlantic, “Trump Is Facing a Catastrophic Defeat in Ukraine: If Ukraine falls, it will be hard to spin as anything but a debacle for the United States, and for its president.” Actually, Ukraine “fell” the in spring 2022, just after the Russian invasion, when Ukraine and Russia came to a peace agreement in Turkey – then Kagan and Nuland convinced Biden to send little Bori Johnson to Kiev to get Zelinsky to cancel the deal. Russia then retreated to defensive lines, as it did when attacked by Napoleon and Hitler, and stood off two Ukrainian “counteroffensives” – stupidly conducted by Biden without air power. It methodically increased its men in uniform and materiel, prepared, and a year ago began its ongoing offensive.

I always bring up nuclear weapons because they’re obviously the most important part of any relationship between the U.S. and Russia, the globe’s two nuclear superpowers. Here’s all Kagan says on that:

Two days after the election, in a phone call with Putin that Trump’s staff leaked to the press, Trump reportedly “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Beyond these veiled threats, Trump seems to think that something like friendship, high regard, or loyalty will facilitate dealmaking.

“Reportedly” was in the Washington Post, which is connected to the U.S. intel community and is thoroughly neocon. Although that could be changing with ultra-neocon hawk Jennifer Rubin leaving to form her own blog with Norm Eisen, supposedly to her “left” even though their views are the same. And for once, Kagan actually is right to assume “something like friendship, high regard, or loyalty will facilitate dealmaking.” That’s now Nixon and Reagan got arms-control agreements with Brezhnev and Gorbachev. More Kagan:

That Trump, the most transactional of men, could really believe that Putin would be moved by such sentiments is hard to credit. Days after the phone call in which Trump “advised” him not to escalate, Putin fired a hypersonic, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine, and he’s been escalating ever since.

That ignorant statement was written by someone who considers himself a combination of Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Napoleon and Dr. Strangelove. Kagan apparently is talking about the new Oreshnik missile, which indeed is hypersonic and nuclear-capable. But before it blew up a Ukrainian arms factory on Nov. 21, the Russians already had launched other missiles that were hypersonic and nuclear-capable, such as the Kinzhal.

What’s unique about the Oreshnik is, although it can be armed with a nuclear warhead, it is so powerful its conventional mode is just as destructive because of high “kinetic” power – its speed, exceeding 7,610 mph. It’s simple high-school physics, which Kagan evidently flunked. In Newton’s Second Law of Motion, simplified, as defined by NASA’s Glenn Research Center:

The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied…. The second law then reduces to the more familiar product of a mass and an acceleration:

𝐹=𝑚⋅𝑎

That is, the faster a Mass Accelerates, the more Force it slams into its target. It’s like how a tornado can drive a straw into a tree trunk. This is highly useful in a war because nuclear bombs not only destroy the target, they generate fireballs. Atomic Archive explains:

The fireball, an extremely hot and highly luminous spherical mass of air and gaseous weapon residues, occurs within less than one millionth of one second of the weapon's detonation. Immediately after its formation, the fireball begins to grow in size, engulfing the surrounding air.

This growth is accompanied by a decrease in temperature because of the accompanying increase in mass. At the same time the fireball rises, like a hot-air balloon. Within seven-tenths of one millisecond from the detonation, the fireball from a 1-megaton weapon is about 440 feet across, and this increases to a maximum value of about 5,700 feet in 10 seconds.

That is, about everything in a mile is wiped out and radiation spewed even further.

The Oreshnik doesn’t do that, sparing the civilians in the surrounding cities and their people.

Kagan:

The thing that Putin has most feared, and has bent over backwards to avoid provoking, is the United States and NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict. He must have been in a panic when his troops were bogged down and losing in Ukraine, vulnerable to NATO air and missile strikes. But the Biden administration refused to even threaten direct involvement….

How does Kagan know what Putin was thinking, supposedly in “a panic”? Direct involvement would have meant the U.S. Air Force bombing Russian positions, leading to the Russians bombing U.S. bases in Europe, leading to nuclear war and we’d all be dead.

The limit all along was the 6,000 nuclear weapons each side wields: the U.S. and Russia. Because Ukraine wasn’t in NATO, and never could be, the U.S. and NATO could not become directly involved. Too bad for Ukraine, which in Slavic tongues means “borderland.” Like the Kurds, the largest people without their own country, it got stuck in the middle of much larger forces. The solution that worked, for a while, was pre-2014 neutrality.

Finally, Kagan downplays the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine regime:

Putin’s stated terms for a settlement have been consistent throughout the war: a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime; “de-Nazification,” his favored euphemism for extinguishing Ukrainian nationalism….

Well, they are Nazis, followers of the psychotic Stepan Bandera, who working for Hitler murdered Russians, Poles and Jews, as none other than the NY Times reported in 2010. Which is odd because Kagan, Nuland and Zelensky are Jewish.

So, what will happen? My guess is Trump doesn’t want the Ukraine mess he inherited from Biden to preoccupy his new administration. He wants to boost the economy, cut inflation, end illegal immigration and Make America Great Again. He also has to get along with Putin on more important matters: arms control, the Middle East and China. Trump may just let the money already allocated to the Ukraine regime run out, then turn it over to the Europeans, who wanted this war even more than Biden, although not as much as Kagan.

Ukraine’s Army also may be on the verge of collapse, letting Russia take over the whole country if it wants to. But Russia probably doesn’t want to absorb the Banderites in Western Ukraine. Instead it will install a compliant, puppet government in Kiev. There will be no treaty with the United States on Ukraine, as Putin wants, and maybe Trump wants, because the hawks in the U.S. Senate won’t go for it. Then the war will be over.

Maybe. In any case, we can hope what some call the Kagan Cult will be pushed out the door of American foreign policy and into the darkness of obscurity with the Banderites.