Why Russia will gobble up the Ukraine, the West will fail to stop it and China is lapping it all up

PARIS

French President Emmanuel Macron made a fool of himself with his shuttle diplomacy. In his folie des grandeurs, he dreamed of winning a Nobel Peace Prize and boosting his re-election bid in the upcoming French presidential election. What an amateur he is. During all the time the West, a.k.a. the US and the major European powers, "negotiated" with Putin, the Russian Czar took them to the cleaners, gaining time to get his military might in place and, once ready, launching an invasion of the Ukrainian territory.

Russia has decided it wanted the Ukraine (yes, I keep on using the definite article as it has always been the case in English for decades) and I will not enter here in a debate on how justified Russia's grievances are. Suffice to say that once Putin has made that strategic decision the West (meaning America, since the EU is largely useless and ineffective) will not be able to stop it. 

Sanctions? Yeah right!
Apart from the case of apartheid-era South Africa, sanctions never work. Did sanctions and condemnations make Israel change its (mis) treatment of Palestinians? Or prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons? Or stop Iran doing just that? Did sanctions in place against Russia since it took over the Crimea in 2014 make them give it up? And of course we always have the example of the mother of all sanctions, the embargo on Cuba: the Communists are still in power more than 60 years later.

As the 1930s showed, the only way to stop an expansionist power is to meet them force by force. And here the West is not willing to declare war on Russia

Strong with the weak, weak with the strong
When it was felt that Serbia wasn't treating its Kosovo minority in an acceptable manner, the West attacked small Serbia and forced it to accept Kosovo independence. When Saddam Hussein's third-rate Iraq conquered Kuwait, again the West assembled a mighty force to dislodge the Butcher of Baghdad from the emirate. But Russia? Nope, the West won't dare engage it militarily as it is not only a nuclear power but we would be well advised to remember history and how the Russians managed to outlast both Napoleon's and Hitler's armies.

Actually, speaking of nuclear weapons, the Iraqi experience wasn't lost on the Koreans: despite Hussein's boastful threats of using nuclear weapons, it was soon revealed the emperor had no clothes and there were no mass-destruction weapons. Hence Iraq's defeat. The Koreans learned the lesson and now that they have nuclear weapons, nobody dares attack them. Iraq's neighbors, the Iranians, are keenly aware of that lesson too, which explains the games they're playing with the West and its agents like the IAEA. How unfortunate for the Ukrainians that they didn't learn that lesson and when they got their independence following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, they accepted to get rid of their nuclear weapons in exchange for a guarantee of their territorial integrity. What a spectacular miscalculation. When your neighbor is the Russian bear, only a fool would let go of the most effective military deterrent.

Putin is now laughing the West's condemnation ("bad boy, Vlad, you are misbehaving") and additional sanctions all the way to his dacha. He even afforded himself the luxury of invading the Ukraine while "negotiating" at the U.N. Security Council. I told you, my friends, the West is led by incapable fools. And hypocrites as well. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 for no justifiable reason, except that they had WMD which turned out to be untrue, the world ended up accepting it. Even France which opposed it initially ended up collaborating with the US on the Iraqi occupation. The US didn't like Saddam Hussein so they invaded Iraq to carry out regime change, which is exactly what Putin is doing in the Ukraine: he doesn't like the current Ukrainian government, result of the so-called Maidan Revolution, so he's invading it to carry out regime change. What is good for the gander, should be good for the goose, as they say.

In the meantime, in China
The Red Emperor is watching these developments very carefully to see how much Vlad the Devourer can get away with. He has his own Ukraine: Taiwan, which he never made any attempt to hide he wanted to add to his collection of additional territories (after Hong Kong and Macau.) So far, only the fear of getting involved with a military confrontation with the US has stopped China. But once it sees how ineffectual the  West is when a sovereign nation disappears, "What's to stop me from conquering what I never recognized as an independent country anyway?" will Xi Jinping rightly ask himself. And act accordingly.

World War III it ain't - yet. But looks very much like soon we'll have all its trappings and trigger.