What's The New Narrative?
I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning : "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?" It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate. As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it , But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’...