What are we to think as the U.S. lets its drones be used by Ukraine to slaughter Russian civilians? Do we figure that a hard-nosed ex-KGB colonel like Vladimir Putin will meekly accept such an outrage? (He has already shot down the U.S. spy drone that made that attack possible. That’s how close we are to open war.)

Do we think Putin’s intimidated by a president who can barely speak coherently, whose administration is full of cross-dressing degenerates, and whose reelection campaign amounts to jailing all his opponents? Do we think the Russians are impressed by our diversity-gutted, trans-obsessed, overstretched military? We have thrown everything we have short of our own combat troops at the Russians in Ukraine, helping to devastate that country, and the Russians still are winning. Short of us escalating to a world-scorching nuclear exchange, they are going to win. If we don’t cut a decent deal to save some of Ukraine, Russia will take it all … or what’s left of it.

Read David Goldman, a sober analyst, on how Russian and Chinese tech advances render many of our tanks, aircraft carriers, and even missiles obsolete. Instead of investing in that kind of tech, we have been waging pointless regime-change wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — then cutting and running after we failed and leaving behind our hapless allies, from the Iraqi Christians to the Afghan interpreters to … next the Ukrainians. The lesson: Don’t ally with the United States. Things won’t end well for you, as the South Vietnamese could have warned you.

How Many Illegals Are Russian Agents? 100? 10,000?

How many sleeper agents have Russia and China embedded in the almost eight million illegals Biden has waved into our country? Do you think the number is zero? Why would you think that? Are the regimes in Moscow and Beijing too morally upright to take advantage of that opportunity? Too clueless? Too incompetent? Think again. So far none of those agents has been activated to commit massive terror attacks, but that doesn’t mean they never will be. (Though you have to wonder about what happened to the Francis Scott Key Bridge, don’t you?)

What will get destroyed, and how many Americans will die, when those foreign agents get the signal to attack? Will they target our electrical grids, or iconic structures such as the Hoover Dam? Maybe you think the FBI will keep us safe in between its surveillance of pro-lifers and Latin Mass Catholics and PTA moms (“domestic extremists”). Though it clearly can’t prevent illegals from Jordan from attacking U.S. Marine bases … .

If our drones are guiding the drones we sold Ukraine to attack Russian civilians, why wouldn’t Putin retaliate in kind? When will he do it? I suspect shortly before the election, to help reelect Joe Biden and keep the U.S. crippled by its current regime of incompetent crooks. A Trump administration, by contrast, would cut a reasonable deal and rebuild American strength, which doesn’t suit Putin one bit.

Gambling with Mass Casualties

Right now, I can’t help thinking of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s. That’s when the Russians decided to rope in our near-neighbor, Cuba, which we’d dominated for a century, into a hostile military alliance complete with nuclear missiles. President John F. Kennedy’s response was to walk right up to the edge of a nuclear war. Our provocation of Russia, by treating Ukraine as a de facto member of NATO and arming it to the teeth, is every bit as reckless as the Soviets’ Cuban gambit. Pray God that this crisis ends with a peace as unexpected, almost miraculous.

During that crisis, Fidel Castro urged Nikita Khrushchev to actually start a nuclear war with the U.S. He knew that Cuba would be completely obliterated, but counted it worth the price to “destroy capitalism.” Today, that role of reckless national suicide bomber embracing the apocalypse is played by Ukraine’s president Volodomir Zelensky. He’s willing to see his country completely destroyed if he can’t claim total victory.

To really get a sense of how close we came to the brink of mutual mass suicide, check out the Kevin Costner movie Thirteen Days (2000). I wish I could strap down our political and military leaders, a la A Clockwork Orange, and force them to watch that film. They might step back from the brink.

They Lied to Us About Everything Else. Do We Trust Them on World War III?

What else can we do but pray, as Western leaders from the British Tory party to the GOP establishment tap dance in the nuclear minefield that is Ukraine, holding all of our lives in their shaky gamblers’ hands? Anyone, such as Nigel Farage, Tucker Carlson, or Donald Trump, who questions the absolute necessity of risking nuclear war with Russia and fighting to the last Ukrainian man, woman, and child over who controls a few godforsaken provinces on the Dnieper, is demonized and labeled a puppet or a traitor.

In case you still have some faint suspicion that there might be some grain of truth in the Official Line put out by our liberal establishment, just remember how recently and how flagrantly they lied to us about:

• The need to lock down our countries to slow the spread of a mostly nondeadly virus, which they were spreading among the most vulnerable in nursing homes by dumping COVID patients there.
• The need for mail-in balloting to keep Americans safe and secure a fair election.
• Donald Trump engaging in collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
• Hunter Biden’s laptop being fake “Russian disinformation.”
• The COVID vax being carefully tested, safe, and essential to save millions of lives.

Shall I go on? I could, you know.

It’s August 1914 All Over Again

Reading the headlines about our futile quagmire in Ukraine, our desperate escalations that provoke Russian responses, and our leaders’ blank, mindless refusal to consider any negotiated settlement brings me back … to August 1914, when reckless and clueless leaders stumbled their way into the apocalypse.

The First World War ruined everything. Literally everything. It killed tens of millions of people directly, and spread the post-war flu pandemic that killed tens of millions more (including my grandmother’s first husband in Croatia, and my favorite painter, Gustav Klimt). It wrecked the economies of every nation involved. It replaced flawed Christian monarchies in Germany and Russia with chaotic pseudo-democracies that fell in succession (in 1917 and 1933) to totalitarian death-cults intent on genocide. It led to mass ethnic cleansing in half a dozen countries, from Ukraine to Turkey to Greece. It made possible the Armenian genocide.

The reckless folly that launched the war and the mindless jingoism that even infected churches helped to discredit all the old, venerable institutions of Western civilization, as Mary Harrington observed in one of the most brilliant essays I’ve read from any author or epoch. A generation of young men were killed, maimed, or crippled by PTSD. Millions of women never married; their would-be husbands lay in mass graves. Crackpot ideologies with little or no basis in fact or genuine wisdom — from Communism to fascism to Freudianism to eugenics — seemed suddenly plausible. At least they hadn’t been implicated in launching that disastrous “war to end all wars,” as the monarchies, the churches, and the democracies all had.

What toll of destruction would a nuclear exchange with Russia cause today? What new mad ideologies would emerge in the rubble? How is risking global war over a few hundred miles of territory which Russia controlled for centuries a prudent or even sane policy for the U.S. to pursue?

Praying to a merciful God for divine intervention is never a bad policy — and sometimes, it’s our only option. Human wisdom, in the form of our so-called elites, has clearly completely failed.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of more than 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.