Thinking about J.D. Vance
Daily Thoughts 17 Feb 2025 (Free)
I just listened the speech the U.S. Vice President James David Vance gave on Munich Security Conference on Friday. It was like a breath of fresh air blown into the catatonic Europe. I consider the speech of Vice President Vance to be the most influential any American leader has given in Europe, since the “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech by JFK on 26 June, 1963. I especially could not agree more with his analysis that the real threat of Europe comes from within.
I’ve mentioned this few times before, but Russia has become very familiar to me over the years. This is because my relatives worked in Finnish embassies in Moscow and St. Petersburg for decades. I have even visited the Soviet Union two times as a boy (8/9 years old). I’ve read extensively on the history of Russia supported by my mother who’s a retired lecturer of history. Historians living next to a superpower, which Soviet Union most definitely was, tend to focus on that.
My thinking about the current leadership of Russia has followed two guidelines for years:
They seek security.
They seek prosperity.
Soviet Union was a super-power that had plans of conquering vast parts of Europe. Why did they not? Well, NATO was naturally one factor, causing a threat of a nuclear war, but Soviet Union did not conquer Finland, even though we were not in NATO and had invaded parts of Russia alongside Nazi Germany during WWII. Why?
The Soviet Union could have taken over Europe, militarily, but turning it into one of its regions would have been a logistical and economic nightmare. Re-creating modern bureaucratic and economic systems of a conquered countries is extremely costly and cumbersome. Citizens would also not fall in-line with the new rulers, but considerable efforts would need to be taken to crush mutinies. The times of Genghis Khan and ancient Rome, when you could simply ride to a village or a town, setup a flag and declare it to exist under your rule, and ride on, are long gone. Russia invading a country that for most part is ethnically compatible and who’s citizens speak a language not so far from theirs is relatively easy, but even it has still drained a major part of Russia’s economic resources. Modern wars of conquest simply do no exist, or they are strictly limited in scope and breadth.
The above can be simplified to: the threat Russia poses to Europe, is a mirror-image to the threat they (Kremlin) see from Europe. Also in this sense, the speech by VP Vance hit the mark. We are making Russia as our enemy.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been the aim of Russia to become integrated into the (still prosperous) European economic and security structures. For Russia, this has made perfect sense, because European wealth, and security, have been within their reach through commerce. This is essentially also what Kremlin pursued for over two decades, until the conflict in Ukraine upended everything. The conflict was also our own doing, because we let the U.S. Deep State to bring the war to our continent, again. They wanted to break the Eurasian alliance forming between China, Europe and Russia, and they succeeded.
An announcement that Russia and the U.S. will discuss on the future of Ukraine in Riyadh this week, without European nor Ukrainian presence, followed the speech of VP Vance. The response of the European elite was shell-shocked. As I am writing this, an “emergency” security conference has been ongoing in Paris.
I have been warning for some time that the war in Ukraine will be used to establish an “European Defense Union”, which would effectively ensure that the EU becomes a (semi-totalitarian) federation. We have also been warning that the conflict against Russia will simply not allowed to stop, because it’s part of the ‘plan’. There are already rumors circulating on a €3 trillion defense fund, which is essentially our pessimistic scenario (see also this).
I have not decided any of the topics of my Daily Thoughts this week and am now pondering, whether I should explain my thinking on the plan of the elite more deeply. Let’s first see what comes out of Paris.
Have a great start of the week,
Tuomas
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