Nothing like getting your butt kicked in a war to change your outlook. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:
The West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order, Alastair Crooke writes.
More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself”, Professor Helen Thompson writes.
For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction of its market powers: Europe was going to bring down a major power – Russia – by financial coup d’état alone. The EU felt ‘six feet tall’.
It seemed at the time a galvanising moment: “The war re-forged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the West, assuming ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the ‘West’ was rebaptised”, Arta Moeini suggests.
Meanwhile Larry bought an attaché case.
What if they gave a fake green screen war and no one showed up?
All we are saying, is give WAR a chance (?)