A View from the "green and pleasant land"

again

I find myself in England once more. I had not intended it this year, but as one of my sons is relocating here, I came to assist with logistical and, if need be, financial contingencies. The first day was rough—a good bit of driving in incessant rain, coming off no sleep during the flight across. Every day since, however, has been better. Once you are out of the urban areas, England can work its charms on you. It is a tight little island, but the way they have stewarded their land should be an example to us. A woodsland trail, or a walk along the moor, is usually within reach. And I am saying this from a charmless town in the Midlands.

There has been no talk of my recent trip to Russia. This son opposed my going there. I will let him find out how wrong he was in his own time, and in his own way. Preaching from me will not help. And no one likes a WIWI.¹

My Russian experience was, however, the topic of conversation last weekend. Every year since 2022, I have met with friends, usually in Yorkshire. Three of them are established authors, and two run a publishing house. Our conversations run along literary, rather than ideological lines. Last year, I met with them on the tail end of my cobbled-together trip around the world. One asked what I intended for the following year. This being the U.K., I whispered, “Russia.” She was surprised to say the least. So, this year, the first question directed to me was, “Did you go to Russia?’

There was keen interest in what I experienced. There are no people more misinformed, ill-informed, or uninformed about Russia than Americans; unless, of course, it is the British. We learned it from them, although we did not really absorb their innate antagonism to all things Russian, going back hundreds of years. But my English friends are not ideologues, and so our conversations proceeded within the context of good-natured banter, along with a certain amount of ribbing. They were taken aback, it seems, by my observations that if the sanctions were hurting anyone, it certainly wasn’t the Russians. The fact that one can purchase anything there that one can in the West was an eye-opener to them. One of them said that that was certainly not the narrative that they had been receiving. I, good-natured, suggested that perhaps he had been reading the British press. I sense that they still have some idea that any trip to Russia must invariably involve something cloak-and-dagger, with surreptitious contacts with the black market. We did not dwell on this however, and moved on to the latest publications that they were involved with.

Traveling like this, thankfully, buffers you from all the “noise” from the world. I was unable to avoid, however, the unfolding of the Putin-DJT summit in Alaska. I had just about given up on the Chaos. Like a Kadinsky painting, the American electorate had chosen Chaos over Control—and I am not unsympathetic to that decision, having grown quite alarmed over the controlling nature of Control. But, I have given Chaos every chance, when suddenly this Putin summit was pulled out of the hat of the Ringmaster.

I have no expectations for this summit. The Permanent Government of the United States, with Lindsey Graham as its spokesperson, opposes it. The EU/UK/Zelensky have already signaled their opposition—not to concessions, but to any concessions. For comparison, imagine Virginia in early April 1865. The noose is closing around Richmond, General Lee is approaching Appomattox, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, about to board a boxcar to Georgia, issues a Proclamation outlining a state’s right to secede, and the right of Southern slaveowners to hold their slaves as chattel under the Fifth Amendment. It is that disconnected with reality.

So many things can go wrong. For starters, Zelensky could gate-crash the summit. If he shows up—even hanging out in another Anchorage hotel lobby giving news conferences—it will illustrate just how weak a president DJT actually is. And DJT desperately needs to spin this as a “win.” For the life of me, I don’t see how he will do it. Ukraine is, believe it or not, a sideshow. Economic pressures on the U.S. will come to the fore later in the year. The weapons the U.S. wants to funnel to Ukraine through the E.U. are on a seven-year timeline. The President’s tariff/sanctions antics have, amazingly, driven India into the arms of China and Russia. Brazil is following suit. Before the end of the year, Netanyahu will try to draw us into his Gaza land-grab. If a weak president allows that to happen, it will signal the end of the U.S. as a “great” power.

For now, I am just happy that an American President is meeting Putin in America. That is something. Hopefully, more talks will follow on a range of substantive issues. But there will be none of the bally-hooed “land swaps.” Russia has been consistent and clear, and even more so now with the Ukrainian front in the early stages of collapse: the four oblasts and Crimea, and no NATO for Ukraine. That is their minimum demand. They have the commitment, the manpower, the weaponry, and the global support² to make it happen.

1. A traveller who begins nearly every conversation with “When I Was In…”

2. We in the West often make the arrogant assumption that “the West” is the same thing as “the world.” It is not. Start with looking at a globe, and then use any metric you want: population, GDP, etc.