The starting point for this diary is Moon of Alabama's entry: The U.S. Wars Against Russia And China Have No Economic Logic Attached To Them.

But this title is strange, because certainly if there's any point to the Biden team's activities, it's an economic one. The obvious beneficiary of all of this activity is the weapons industry. Now, perhaps Moon of Alabama means to say that there is no economic logic to the Biden team's activities beyond the obvious subsidy one. The Biden team, as I've pointed out before, is engaged in a Great Game of Pretend, one which drags Europe down and will eventually sink the US if taken far enough. The Biden team wants to believe that they are hurting Putin, and indeed they were hurting the significant number of Russians who were killed by Ukrainians, as well as their families. But overall Putin is getting stronger, Russia is getting stronger, Ukraine is disappearing, Europe is in recession, and the rest of the world is about to join Team China.

So perhaps a better title for Moon of Alabama would be "The US Wars Against Russia and China Are Based On Delusion." Indeed, Moon of Alabama's conclusion fits this title:

I have come to the conclusion that the main actors in this game, the Bindens, Blinkens, Sullivans and their bipartisan supporters, are driven by a blind ideology that has dismissed or replaced global realities with wishful thinking.

The failure of their sanctions against Russia should have demonstrated to them that the real world is by far not the one in which they believe to be living. They however are now repeating their errors by waging a similar war against China.

But why would the Biden team cling to a delusion, to the Great Game of Pretend it's hoodwinked the "collective West" into playing? Why not just abruptly reverse course, sue for peace, and then try to figure out what to do next (given their general tendencies toward warmongering)? The Biden team's course of action goes against any formula one can imagine of the social construct typically called "self-interest." All of that nice money team Biden will be getting from Raytheon et al. will be worth a lot less if the US Dollar is reduced in value by hyperinflation, and the Fed is not going to save said Dollar if the global banks start dumping their dollars and dollar-denominated assets.

My own hypothesis, of course, is that this is a con job gone bad, and that the con artists, namely the Biden team, just can't stop being con artists. But someone as knowledgeable as Moon of Alabama is asking the question of why are they doing this? very late in the game, now, and that should strike readers as amazing.

What's also really amazing are the sheer number of useful idiots the Biden team has generated. It appears the call went out: "hey! Let's all pretend we're making Putin weaker when we're not, and if we keep it up our countries can become impoverished hellholes!" And the misleadership (political) classes of America and Europe said with one voice: "Let's do it!" Even more hilarious is the useful idiots' response to the few dissenters within their ranks who are not into the business of World War III: "Omigod it's the dreaded REALITY PRINCIPLE! Circle the wagons!"

EXCURSUS ON THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY

One important thing one learns to consider when immersed in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) is to think of human development in terms of the imagination. Castoriadis argued:

Simply put, logic is what we share with animals, even with living beings in general. Yet animals have no science. True, we are separated from them by consciousness. But, as I will show below, consciousness does not lead to science, either. Man's distinguishing trait is not logic, but imagination, and, more precisely, unbridled imagination, defunctionalized imagination. (pp. 3-4)

Now, this notion might at first seem exciting -- that of 7.8 billion imaginative beings in the world. The thing is, it leads to the realization of what Castoriadis and others call the "social imaginary," which brings us as thinking beings back down to Earth, to the notion of plain old society. The social imaginary, for those who want a definition, is composed of those aspects of society which must be continually imagined. And this thought, the thought of the social imaginary, is a depressing thought. All this imagination, all those imaginative beings, and the best they can do is to imagine the society we currently have. It's not inspiring. At any rate, in light of the dominance of the social imaginary, our imaginations are nearly always conformist imaginations.

The social imaginary is of paramount importance in our daily lives. Think, for instance, of traffic rules. In order to use automobile transportation, everyone is obliged to imagine the continual operation of the same set of rules. Disruption of this set of rules leads to traffic accidents or traffic tickets or -- as for instance when one travels to the United Kingdom, where drivers drive on the left instead of on the right like they do most everywhere else -- it leads to a new set of rules. Human imagination, then, is almost entirely rule-bound. Charles Taylor's book Modern Social Imaginaries is a discussion of how thoroughly cemented-in-place the social imaginary is in modern society, and of how it took revolutions to change the previous social imaginary to wind up with what we have now.

So this is how the human imagination applies to Ukraine: American exceptionalism in hand, somehow the US has gotten Europe to imagine a "reality" about Russia that doesn't exist, that Russia is 1) weak and 2) that it wants to conquer all of Europe. The fake imagined "reality" has, somehow, wormed its way into the social imaginary, with disastrous results. The resultant social imaginary has made the misleadership classes of the US and of Europe into a class of useful idiots. Moreover, they've gotten Ukraine -- or, rather, what was left of Ukraine after the mass exodus of "refugees" -- to go to its own mass death believing in this "reality."

MEANWHILE, BACK TO WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS

With the possibility of more impending mass death in mind, I can also imagine that, like with ammunition, at some point the supply of useful idiots will have trouble keeping up with the demand. An imagined impending shortage of useful idiots would appear important if one looks at speculation about how the NATO war on the world is imagined to continue. Simplicius the Thinker engaged such speculation four days ago, and here's the speculation:

This is all just part of the slow consolidation of Europe into an increasingly centralized command structure as they are economically gutted out by the global-geopolitical realities stoked by the U.S. The weaker each individual state gets the more servile they will become, scrambling to give up more and more of their sovereignty as the world slowly drifts towards a much wider future European war.

Seeing that Ukraine is now doomed and stands no chance, with options running out, the U.S. intelligence state will push to accelerate the above developments so that they can unify Europe under one rule and then preferably use them as the next fodder with which to attempt to dismantle Russia.

In fact, in his new article, MK Bhadrakumar notes that “CDU’s leading foreign and defence expert Roderich Kiesewetter (an ex-colonel who headed the Association of Reservists of the Bundeswehr from 2011 to 2016) suggested that if conditions warrant in the Ukraine situation, the Nato should consider to “cut off Kaliningrad from the Russian supply lines. We see how Putin reacts when he is under pressure.”

The point being that, slowly, the powers are converging to continue their war on Russia in any way possible once Ukraine is used up and discarded like a wet rag. Unfortunately for them, Russia at that point will be by far the most experienced, powerful, and technologically advanced military nation in the world, having sharpened its teeth on NATO’s latest and best thrown into the cauldron of the Ukrainian war.

I have no idea how the Biden team could get anyone, much less the current crop of useful idiots, to go along with such a continuation (of the Ukraine war after Ukraine's currently impending death). The misleadership (political) class of Europe may like such an idea, but the rank-and-file won't, and their countries could dissolve into chaos (see e.g. France) long before they are served up to the Russian army to be killed. And at that point a revolution will occur, and the Great Game of Pretend will come to an end.