Needless to say, you don’t invade the Baltics or Poland—to say nothing of Germany, France, the Benelux and crossing the English Channel—on 3.5% of GDP! Not even remotely.
Since full scale war broke out in 2022 Russian military spending has increased significantly to 6% of GDP, but all of that is being consumed by the Demolition Derby in Ukraine—barely 100 miles from its own border.
That is, even at 6% of GDP Russia has not yet been able to subdue its own historic borderlands. So if Russia self-evidently does not have the economic and military capacity to conquer its non-Ukrainian neighbors in its own region, let alone Europe proper, what is the war really about?
In short, it is rooted in territorial disputes and civil strife in lands which have been vassals or integral parts of greater Russia for several centuries. As indicated, Ukraine actually means “borderlands” in the Russian language, connoting stateless areas that were first assembled into a coherent polity by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev by force of arms after 1920.
In fact, prior to the communist takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed. So what NATO’s proxy war actually amounts to is an insensible attempt to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet presidium, as we amplify below.....
It is ironic, therefore, that the historically illiterate Donald Trump has the good sense to dispense with one of the stupidest crusades that the War Party on the Potomac has yet concocted. So doing, he would enable the failed handiwork of communist tyrants to be made right with history—an outcome that can now happen if and only if the Donald gets the Rubio digression back on track.