Authored by James Howard Kunstler via kunstler.com,

I remind you once again: history is a trickster. Sometimes things turn out, and sometimes they just turn, and these days they're turning hard. Get this: Russia is not our mortal enemy anymore. This is not 1956 or even 1986. It is no longer the so-called Free World against the wicked Hammer and Sickle.

Russia is no longer a weird political science experiment acting in defiance of human nature - that is, of people striving to make good lives for their families. No more sacrificing everyone's happiness to prove Karl Marx's cockamamie theories. No more trying to foist all that on the rest of the world. Russia gave up on that project and opted to become a normal nation, with the full kit of normality: commerce, shopping, banks, enterprise. Things have changed.

Things have gotten strange, too. You see every indication that, for now, Europe has become something of adversary, if not exactly our enemy, yet. Europe has lost its mind. Now, it is Europe's turn to destroy itself in pursuit of idiotic theories - such as: nations don't matter. . . you can have a high standard of living without productive industry. . . carbon is destroying the world.

Europe is now tyrannized by the unelected EU commission, much as the old Soviet Union was tyrannized by its politburo. An Orwellian switcheroo has occurred. When history plays tricks, it plays doozies. So, now you've got the grandmotherly Ursula von der Leyen dictating what all the countries in Europe may do and not do with their farms and factories and the daily lives of their people, just like Joseph Stalin in 1937. And you have the grotesquely weak leaders of France, Germany, and the rest submitting to this.

And outside the EU - which it voted to exit in 2016 - you have our so-called "mother country," Great Britain (the United Kingdom) committing suicide in the most extravagant way, turning over prime ministers like they were jacks in a game of whist, jailing their own people for impure thoughts, while allowing the wholesale rape of its womenfolk by foreign invaders. Most extraordinary, as Dr. Watson might have observed to old Sherlock. Meanwhile, they have the ragged remnant of their old empire to defend, and it's not going so well.

That remnant is all that's left of Britain's economy: its banks, its Wall Street, which they call The City of London, a square mile of hideous skyscrapers by which Britain desperately seeks to maintain financial flows into an economy that increasingly produces nothing. Which is to say, all that's left of Britain's vast imperial power is a matrix of nefarious financial rackets - just as, in the USA, all that's left of the old Democratic Party is its matrix of rackets.

These days, Britain's political apparatus is working hard to scare-up a war with Russia as a last-ditch attempt to salvage its hopelessly wasted economy. Britain's leadership apparently thinks it can summon a war economy and even draft an army of foot-soldiers as if this were 1914 or 1939. It's an insane project, based on an age-old wish to capture the vast natural resources of Russia. They've been at it, like, forever. (France and Germany tried it, too. Didn't work.)

Now we, here in the USA, in our own hemisphere of the globe, far across the salty seas from Europe, had been enlisted in this project to mess with Russia since 1991, and that's not working so well anymore, either. First of all, there is the NATO problem. We're still entangled in that anachronistic treaty, despite Russia having opted to be normal thirty-five years ago. So, you see, the way to get Russia was to stir up a war between it and Ukraine.

And they used us to do it - because the EU+ NATO lacked the mojo for the job. They got our Anglified State department and its NeoCon errand boys, along with our intel cowboys and their "Five-Eye" pardners, to stage the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Kiev, kick out the Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych and, after running through a couple of puppet presidents, installed the former comedian Zelenskyy in the job (who had played a buffoonish Ukrainian president on TV previously, another great prank by our friend, history).

The next gambit was to try to shoe-horn Ukraine into NATO, which everybody knew would provoke Russia to move against Ukraine, which it did in 2022. Russia did not want NATO military bases on its border. That, Mr. Putin declared, loudly enough to be heard in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels, was a "red line." Voila, war! And the USA being the backbone and the bank account for NATO, got dragged into backing Ukraine by the feckless "Joe Biden" - years on Ukraine's bribery payroll, and too out-of-it to not be punked into playing along. Yeah, he said, you can join NATO. The blue and yellow flags busted out all over our land. Slava Ukraini, the useful idiots shrieked.

President Donald Trump, having survived the Ukraine phone call impeachment gambit and many other attempts to put him out of business, was wise to the game, and one of the first things he did returning to power in 2025 was to confab with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Against all odds, Mr. Trump has maintained that working relationship despite having to pretend to support NATO. He apparently realizes that the tricks of history have placed the USA in greater alignment with Russia than with our former World War Two allies, most particularly a desire to avoid the World War Three that NATO is now pushing for.

The President has made it clear that he is done with the weaselly Zelenskyy and all his machinations - his visits to suck-up with King Charles, his nefarious dealings with NATO, his monstrous money-laundering. If Mr. Trump has not yet secretly withdrawn America's remaining support for Ukraine via NATO, he will do so soon, explicitly, and in a way that is liable to be an end to NATO, which trickster-history has managed to turn into a warmonger. The EU and NATO do not have the money to keep that war going. It's as simple as that.

Now, Iran. Americans are badly exercised by this operation, which has so far claimed around twenty lives. Well, there's an election on, and you can be sure that a lot of this discontent is being generated by 1) the desperate Democratic Party and 2) the various characters in what's being called "Woke MAGA." The peeved apostates, such as Tucker, Candace, MTG, and company, might be acting under, shall we say, foreign influence, but they also seem plumb crazy. In the case of Tucker and Candace, of course, the ideas they've been retailing seem garishly insane. Tucker babbles about literal infestations of Satan-sent demons, and sneers Goebbels-like against the Jews, while Candace follows her cuckoo Charlie Kirk vengeance project.

Get this: Iran has lost this war, and badly. And for a good reason: being that they were determined to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them, and President Trump made the reasonable decision that it better not happen. Iran, being run by a lunatic Jihad faction, the IRGC, refuses to come to reasonable terms. The few weeks left before the US midterm election make this an especially delicate period. The Iranians well know this, and are playing it for all it's worth in hopes that a flip of the US Congress will improve their position. It's a bad bet.

The president has made it pretty clear, and consistently so for months. The Iranians can either agree to become a normal nation, even prosperous, happy one, but with no nukes and no more jihad, or we are going to put them out of business - whichever way the midterm election goes. In other words, what you're seeing now in that corner of the globe is not the final disposition of things.

The Europeans apparently have an incentive to do whatever they can do keep feeding the flames in Ukraine and Iran, though they are not advertising it overtly. Our interests have diverged. The Europeans are maneuvering in such a way as to make themselves an adversary to the USA, a very unwise move. It also happens that their countries are going up in flames at the moment. Their citizens are not happy, and they are further belabored by a large force of invading savages. The leaders in charge of those countries might not be in charge a whole lot longer. Think about recalibrating your expectations about where all this is going. And don't be so glum. The odds are in our country's favor, and these wars can be resolved favorably.

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