Hoping To Create The ideal Conditions?

And so ends the unmitigated disaster that has been the war in Afghanistan. There will be absolutely nothing to show for it. But of course, no one from outside has ever won a war in Afghanistan. And as with, for example, the Americans and the Viet Cong, the side that has anywhere else to go will eventually go there, ceding victory to the side that cannot go home, because it is already at home. The only question is when. Joe Biden must be having a moment of clarity.

Biden's decidedly embarrassing ties to Ukraine are a very good reason for him to stay away from that one. Not the only reason. Not the best. But the one that might have to do. In any case, Ukraine is not in NATO. Nor is it in anything else that might place any Western Power under any kind of obligation to it. Nor will it ever be. 

But that is not because it is governed by literal, and utterly undisguised, Nazis. NATO is wholly relaxed about that. It publishes "educational" material that glorifies wartime collaborators as heroes, and it marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day with a statement that implied that the enemy had been the Soviet Union, and thus Russia. That statement was signed by the leaders of several of the collaborators' successor parties.

Pro-NATO demonstrations by people who want their countries to join it feature prominently the flags and other symbols of the collaboration, most recently in Belarus. Latin American caudillos stand on the brink of admission, while, in NATO's own terms, Islamist Turkey is of a strategic importance second only to that of the United States. What Britain is doing in this wretched thing is anyone's guess.

Still, at least neither Britain nor the United States has ever recognised the independence of Taiwan, which it has never claimed. It claims to be the Republic of China, and on that basis it maintains diplomatic relations with 15 states. Only the Holy See is of any importance, and that has to maintain relations with everyone on the WWJD Principle.

Rejecting the authority of the regime in Beijing to resolve territorial disputes, the regime in Taipei lays claim to most of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Myanmar. Between Taipei and Beijing, in either order, then think of having no side between Russian gangsters and Ukrainian Nazis, and multiply that by several hundred.