THE WEST HAS BEEN DEFEATED IN UKRAINE, BUT IS IN DENIAL OF THE FACTS

13 March 2025

Macron proposed a selective ceasefire - just in the areas that hurt the most. (He wants a no-fly zone, protection for the ports and for the energy system.)

Marco Rubio proposes a ceasefire - a ceasefire in military terms, but no agenda for a settlement.

How to explain this ceasefire proposal, coming from the losing side, which is obviously going to be rejected?

How to explain the Europeans turning their gaze away from the reality of defeat and wanting more war?

Chas Freeman captures it nicely, "they are inhaling their own propaganda".

Kaja Kallas put it this way, "victory is preferable to peace". This is doubling down on defeat.

At least America, with its focus under the new administration in Washington shifted from Wall Street to Main Street, to cleaning up the balance sheet and the government's income and expenditure, in other words, taking responsibility for these messes, is waking up to reality. Perhaps Trump can appear as the strong man and blame the West's failure on the Russians all previous administrations.

But the Europeans...? They continue to behave irrationally. They are like the Japanese soldiers hiding in the forest. Except that the Europeans have the evidence that the war is over before them. We cannot understand their behaviour as the product of reason, we can only understand their behaviour in psychological and historical terms.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

A fancy term for a mental state where the afflicted struggles to reconcile reality with deeply held beliefs. The West sees itself as the champion of democracy and military superiority. How could Ukraine - backed by NATO, ISR, weaponry and training - lose to Russia? This is so fundamentally at odds with Europe's self-image that it triggers a collective emotional breakdown. What is happening here? They cannot adjust to reality, they double down on war, they seek any "narrative" (~ fake news) that delays facing the truth, they bolster with more propaganda, they are decoupled from reality. This is cognitive dissonance: they fear to confront reality.

So this is a situation where beliefs are at variance with reality. There is a sort of religious conviction that, through the power of belief, they will be able to bring their vision of the future into reality, they can manifest or express vision into reality. The holder prefers to cling to the belief. A classic example is someone who learns that they are suffering from a terminal illness and refuses to believe this, or thinks herbs will save the day, and clings to the belief that they are still healthy, just as they were before.

The new administration in washington has come through the denial and the anger and is now busy bargaining with Russia. It is trying to restore balance in external payments and receipts through the tariffs, and it is looking to acquire resources from Ukraine, Canada and Greenland as collateral to its debt. This is not fear of loss, this is greed.

GROUP-THINK

That simple triune brain model is helpful - when the going gets tough, reason is the casualty, emotion takes charge. Group-think is bolstering the fantasy view described above. Group-think creates its own narrative or really it is just delusional collective propaganda. 

The Russians are trying to recreate their Empire. The Sixth Coalition are ready to once again to march on Paris. Russia's armies are being supplied by China. They are purely a war economy, an expansionist tube of muscle power funded by oil and gas.

HISTORICAL AND MILITARY PERSPECTIVE

From a historical and military standpoint, this is nothing new. Europe has a long tradition of fighting wars long past the point of reason, from Napoleon’s doomed Russian campaign to Germany’s insistence on total war in 1944–45. 

The West's insistence on continuing the war despite facing defeat echoes the "descent from rational to emotional" described in triune brain theory. Rational planning goes out of the window and gives way to purely emotional responses - fight or flight you might call it. 

Faced with humiliation, European elites react not with pragmatic adaption, but choose to die on the altar of their beliefs. They will first go through the stages of denial, anger, and in this case it looks like they will skip to self-destruction.

The result? A desperate, last-ditch attempt to look strong like in days of yore and to shift the blame onto Russia. This is seen in the repeated carbon-copy framing of the ceasefire proposal as “the ball is in Russia’s court.” ... And when Russia says nyet....?

The implicit strategy is to paint Russia as the intransigent party, keeping Western public opinion engaged in this elite fantasy of victory, rather than the inevitability of peace on unfavorable terms. 

Repeatedly pushing propaganda has discredited the mainstream media in the public mind. There is no longer buy-in to the elite's vision. This explains Trump's victory last November. This explains why the people of Romania are in open revolt against the EU candidate. 

In short, this refusal by the leaders in Europe to negotiate is not about strategy, it is about emotional collapse in the face of defeat, a psychological and political inability to let go of an illusion of enduring supremacy built over the last 500 years. The leadership, fuelled by hubris and vanity, is in denial of the facts. The people are beginning to see through this.

The most intriguing question of all though, is this: who is behind the propaganda? Maybe it is initiated by MI6. But for whom?  Boris Johnson seems to be the fixer, with two visits to Kiev on 10 March 2024 and a few days back to get Ukraine to agree to this 30 day ceasefire. Who is he working for?

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