10 Hard Facts about Ukraine and NATO

 I knew back in the 90's when  the Ukraine and Bill Clinton negotiated away the Ukraine's Soviet era Nuclear weapon, their security was guaranteed by the United States, it also was understood that NATO wasn't gonna get any closer to the Soviet er the Russian Homeland, but since then that agreement was broken by the Europeans in NATO with a blind eye by the clowns in Foggy bottom and by self serving idiots on both parties.  Now we are where are.  The Russians invaded the Crimea while Obungler was in Office and the rest of ukraine while Biden was in Office.  I wonder why.

      I ripped this from Townhall.com.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump is trying to force not only Ukraine and Russia to make peace but also the Europeans to carry their own weight in the defense of their own continent. It’s astonishing how angry the establishment is about this. It’s almost as if they want this meat grinder to continue forever and for America to subsidize the Europeans’ bizarre social pathologies forever. But what can’t go on forever won’t go on forever. Change is coming. We have to start accepting some realities. Childish clichés and moral posturing have no place in foreign policy. When somebody starts answering your arguments by calling you literally Hitler and saying that you suck Putin’s toes, you can be absolutely sure they don’t want to contend with substantive arguments. But they’re going to have to. Trump is serious about ending this war and resetting our relationship with NATO. They aren’t going wait him out or shame him into submission.

And let me make something clear at the beginning. I like the Ukrainians. I trained them and they were with us when I deployed. I would like them to be able to win their war. I would also like to have a pony. Wishing doesn’t make things so. It’s time to get hard-nosed and real about what’s going on so we can stop this nightmare before it spins completely out of control. And when two nuclear-armed powers are facing each other, spinning out of control can be really bad.

1. Russia is absolutely in the wrong for invading Ukraine. Nothing Ukraine did excuses or justifies Russia’s actions. But we still need to understand why they did it. They had reasons, even if you and I don’t agree with their reasons. It’s not simply because Vladimir Putin is Mr. Burns, tenting his fingers and planning evil deeds for the sake of doing evil. There is much more going on in this conflict than in the portrait painted by the media and establishment. It involves history, ethnicity, and other factors we Westerners do not and cannot understand. Some of those facts include that Ukraine used to be part of Russia, and Russia believes it should be in the future. Also, there are huge numbers of ethnic Russians, who Ukrainians do not like – Ukrainians get mad at you if you speak Russian to them – in those areas that Putin has captured. Further, Russia is paranoid, and not without reason, about an invasion from the West. Look at Napoleon, look at Hitler. We may not think that it should be upset about Ukraine joining NATO, but Russia thinks it should be. Again, this isn’t to justify what Russia did. We need to understand why it did it even if we don’t agree with its motivations.

2. Ukraine is not going to be able to win the war if the definition of winning the war is recovering all the conquered Ukrainian territory. A continued stalemate will result in many thousands of additional deaths. The idea that somehow, Ukraine, which has been nearly bled dry, is going to come up with the combat power to throw the Russians off its soil is just insane. That’s never going to happen. I would like it to happen, but it won’t. So, we’ve got to deal with the reality we’re facing.

3. Zelensky will have to accept the reality that America will need to be paid back for its aid, which means, as a practical matter, access to Ukraine’s mineral reserves. The establishment has been scandalized that Trump expects to be paid back, but why should America pick up the tab? It’s not our war. Zelensky, who stupidly has gotten himself crosswise with the new American government, stated that he would not require ten generations of Ukrainians to pay America back. So, does he propose that ten generations of Americans pay back the money America has to borrow to give to Zelensky? That’s just not going to fly with normal Americans.

4. Ukraine is an unbelievably corrupt country, and the idea that no substantial portion of our aid money has been stolen is ridiculous. There are going to be a lot of people getting very rich off the American aid, including many Americans. The fact that much of the establishment is so resistant to attempting to audit those funds indicates that they understand this, too.

5. The American people are, by and large, tired of subsidizing Ukraine’s end of this war. They are absolutely against American forces being involved. There is a lit fuse on America’s patience, and trying to stamp it out by shouting that anyone questioning perpetual subsidies of this war is Putin’s pal is not going to cut it. The fact is that Trump is probably Ukraine’s last chance to retain American support. The guy who follows Trump is going to be worse for Ukraine.

6. China is a substantially greater threat to the United States than Russia in the macro. The fact is that right now, we can’t confront both powers. We need to focus on China. That’s the major threat to the United States.

7. The Europeans should be taking the lead in supporting Ukraine and should be taking the lead in defending Europe. They are freaking out about this. It’s hilarious that their answer to Donald Trump telling them they need to step up and take charge of their own defense is to step up and take charge of their own defense to show Donald Trump what for. Typically, a threat involves promising to do something the person you’re threatening does not want you to do instead of exactly what he wants you to do.

8. The campaign to insult critics of past Ukraine policy by calling them Putin’s puppets and so forth is a lie and is going to result in enmity towards the idea of helping the Ukrainians. You cannot insult Americans into obedience. You cannot fail to address their legitimate concerns and expect them to agree with you.

9. Some of our NATO allies are participating in internal repression, including suppression of free speech and the right to organize and participate in elections via non-establishment parties. This dangerously undercuts the moral argument in favor of NATO. Americans have no desire to spend blood and treasure defending countries that arrest people for speaking. And the Europeans refuse to accept the judgment of their people. Just this week, the allegedly conservative German party that came in first in the election after promising to close German borders announced the very next day that it would not be closing borders. That’s bad. Why again should we spend money on these people? I mean, it’s only been 80 years.

10. It is in America’s interest that this war ends. We want to draw Russia away from China and closer to the West. It is not in our interest to have a war going on where our proxy is fighting with a nuclear-armed enemy, regardless of how moral the cause of Ukraine is. The only way this is going to happen is if the United States takes the lead and forces Ukraine to make painful concessions in order to end this dangerous bloodbath. In the harsh calculus of international politics, it’s critical that we bring the Russians into our orbit and get them away from the Chinese.  Putin has an interest in that – the sparsely populated Siberian wilderness is right there north of China, full of all sorts of resources that China will eventually grab. Putin can’t stop it. He needs allies. Yes, Putin’s a bad guy, but this isn’t about good guys and bad guys. This is about protecting America’s interests. And it’s in America’s interest to stop this war and strip China of a major ally.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!

Why Trump is irritated with Zelensky.

I had blogged about why President Trump is irritated with the Ukrainian President Zelensky during the 2024 election cycle. "Rants and Musings 2024" among other pithy thoughts.

    I saw this article on "RedState"

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

The relationship between the Trump administration and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been on the rocks for a while, and things came to a head this week. On Tuesday, in what would prove to be an ill-advised move, Zelensky accused President Donald Trump of "living in this disinformation space." That escalated the war of words, with Trump responding by calling Zelensky a "dictator."

The tensions go back much further than that, though, with the Ukrainian president slamming Trump and now-Vice President JD Vance during the 2024 presidential election, presumably believing Kamala Harris would win. Zelensky also showed up on stage with Democrats in Pennsylvania, essentially campaigning for Harris in the swing state.

In his harshest criticism yet of the Republican presidential nominee, the Ukrainian president also described Trump’s running mate JD Vance as “dangerous” and “too radical”.

“His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice,” Mr Zelensky said of Mr Vance in an interview with the New Yorker magazine before he flew to the US to present his “Victory Plan” to the White House this week. “But I believe that we have shielded America from total war.”

That alone was probably enough to spoil any sympathy Trump ever had for him, but according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a lot more has occurred recently that brought us to this point

    Here is the Twitter Link

https://twitter.com/i/status/1892940019905474872

 

HERRIDGE: When President Trump posts that President Zelensky is a dictator without elections, what are you thinking? 

RUBIO: I think President Trump is very upset at President Zelensky and in some cases rightfully so. Look, number one, Joe Biden had frustration with Zelensky. People shouldn't forget it. There are newspaper articles out there about how he cursed at him in a phone call because Zelensky, instead of saying thank you for all your help is immediately out there messaging what we're not doing or what he's not getting. 

I think the second thing, frankly, is that I was very upset because we had a conversation with Zelensky, the vice president and I, the three of us, and we discussed this issue about the mineral rights, and we explained to them, look, we want to be a joint venture with you, not because we're trying to steal from your country but because we think that is actually a security guarantee. If we're your partner in an important economic endeavor, we get to get paid back some of the money that taxpayers have given, close to $200 billion, and now, we have a vested interest in the security of Ukraine. And he said, sure we want to do this deal, the only thing is, I need to run it through my legislative process. 

I read two days later that Zelensky is out there saying, "I rejected the deal, I told them no way, that we're not doing that." Well, that's not what happened in that meeting. So you start to get upset at somebody, we're trying to help these guys. One of the points the president made in his messaging is not that we don't care about Ukraine, but Ukraine is on another continent. It doesn't directly impact the daily lives of Americans. We care about because it has implications for our allies and ultimately for the world, but there needs to be some level of gratitude about this, and when you don't see and you see him out there accusing the president of living in a world of disinformation, that's highly, very counterproductive, and I don't need to explain it to you or anybody else Donald Trump, President Trump is not the kind of person who is going to sit there and take that. 

He's very transparent. He's going to tell you exactly how he feels, and he sent a message that he's not going to be gamed here. He's willing to work on peace because he cares about Ukraine, and he hopes Zelensky will be a partner in that and not someone who's out there putting this sort of counter-messaging to sort of hustle us in that regard. That's not gonna be productive here.

That certainly adds a lot of previously unknown context as to why the tensions shot up so much. If what Rubio is saying is true, and I have no reason to doubt him given there were reports about this deal being amicable to Zelensky, then the Ukrainian president really screwed up here. 

I understand saying that is going to set some people off because they take an absolutist view about American relations with Ukraine that suggests no matter what Zelensky does, he is entitled to billions upon billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded weapons and aid. Like it or not, though, that is not how the real world works. A president whose country is in such dire straits does not have the leverage to publicly scoff at a mineral rights deal that would make continuing to support Ukraine more viable for American taxpayers. There is nothing wrong with the United States trying to get something in return for all it has spent, and despite some ignorant claims to the contrary, Lend-Lease in World War II was not free. 

Unfortunately, it seems like Zelensky got very used to being able to play the press during the Biden years, to essentially receive blank checks with no real mechanism to ensure Americans are paid back. Believing he could carry over that strategy to the Trump administration was a huge mistake. Donald Trump does not care about pressure from the mainstream media or Europe. He certainly doesn't have any qualms about having a war of words with Zelensky if the Ukrainian president chooses to make unfortunate comments to the press in an attempt to "hustle" the United States, as Rubio described it.

Not that Zelensky listens to me, but I repeatedly warned this would happen. His mouthing off during the presidential campaign was unnecessary and arrogant. To continue that arrogance by expressing such entitlement after Trump's election has only made matters worse. I get that some on the right want Trump to be the bigger man here and ignore Zelensky's sleights, but I'd counter that with this question: Have you ever met Donald Trump? That's not meant as a criticism but as a recognition of reality. That's how he operates, and Zelensky should have been smart enough to not push his buttons. Now, everything is up in the air, and no amount of crying to CNN or the EU is going to help.

"Explaining to Liberals why everything can't be free"

 

This has updated information on our tax code, I remember way back when there was talk from the "occupy crowd " and other lefties about the government seizing all the money and assets from the top 10% of American and distribute it to the others especially since they stole it from everybody else.  I explained back then in 2012 that if the government took everything from the top 10% it would fund the government for only 8 months, and after that, there would be nobody to invest and create jobs. and the others in the lower tax brackets would be planning their exit strategy because they know that the government will cast their eyes further down the list looking for an income stream to supplement the taxes.

   This came from my stash

I shamelessly clipped this from "Bongino Reports"

As we speak, Elon Musk and his team of legendary 20-something math nerds are going over the government’s books with a fine-toothed comb, looking for waste, fraud, and unneeded government employees to cut. According to Elon Musk’s latest estimate, he thinks there’s something like 1.7 trillion dollars in waste and fraud that can be cut. PER YEAR:

On the other hand, Democrats have had a different approach. They don’t think we need to cut anything. In fact, they’re going nuts over cuts to wasteful spending. I mean, “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” level nuts:

Additionally, they keep calling for more and more things to be made “free.”

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been calling for college to be made “free” for years and apparently, Joe Biden agreed with them because he put a lot of effort into waiving off people’s college loans even as the government continued to hand out more college loans.

During RFK’s confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders asked RFK if healthcare is a “human right,” which is another way of saying it should be “free”:

Democrats have called for free childcare, free paid leave footed by the taxpayers after a pregnancy, free sex changes, and giving illegals everything from phones to cash to rent for free. They want as many people on welfare as possible for as long as possible. Their fix for deliberately shutting down the economy during COVID was just to send people stimulus checks in the mail… and we could go on

It’s unbelievable that things have sunk to this level, but to Hell with it, let’s answer the big question.

Why can’t the government just give people whatever they want for free?

Now, you might say, “Well, wait. Can’t they just print money?” Yes, they can. However – I don’t want to spend multiple paragraphs talking about monetary theory here, so I am going to keep this simple – dollars are not “value.” Dollars are just a representation of value. If you increase the supply of dollars without increasing the actual value of the things the dollar represents, you lessen the value of the dollars and you get inflation. That’s exactly what happened during COVID and it’s why everyone is complaining about how much eggs, rent, and cars cost today compared to what they did 5 years ago.

So, just printing large amounts of money ends up being counterproductive.

Ultimately, the same could be said of borrowing money. When the government borrows money, that money needs to be paid back with interest. For a business, that can often make sense. If a business takes a million-dollar loan to buy a piece of equipment that allows them to create 10 million dollars worth of value, they can afford to pay the loan back with interest and have plenty of money left over. Very rarely do the government’s loans pay off in that fashion and taking them out to give people things for “free” is just a loss. We’re already 36 TRILLION dollars in debt and we paid 882 billion in interest alone in just 2024 as a result of doing that.

We also cannot forget that saying, “The government is giving you this for free” is another way of saying, “The government is giving you something paid for by taxpayers.” That’s who ultimately funds the government. You. Me. Everyone who pays taxes.

So, for the government to give a group of people something for “free,” it means another group of people has to have money they earned confiscated by the government so it can be given to those other people for “free.”

How much more of the money that you EARN do you want to give to other people for free? As a practical matter, we know that the typical answer is either “none” or “very little” by the fact that we have such an extremely progressive tax system. The middle class doesn’t want to pay more taxes. If anything, most people think their taxes are already far too high.

“Well, wait,” liberals will say, “what about the rich? We can just have them pay for everything since they don’t pay their fair share.”

Except that claim is a scam, too. Keep in mind, as a starting point, the rich are already paying a wildly disproportionate share of the taxes:

The top 10% of income-earning Americans make up 48% of the gross income, but they pay 71% of the taxes. That definitely sounds like they’re paying their “fair share.”

Still, they have more money, right? Even if we’re soaking them, so what? Why not soak them even more? Well, as a starting point, just as we’ve seen rich people move from states that have their tax burden rise too high, they can also move from COUNTRIES that tax them too heavily. That would be bad because the more rich people we have here, the more taxes they pay here. That’s a good thing and losing that revenue is a bad thing for our country.

Even setting that aside, going back to the famous fairy tale, how much can you take before you, “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Do you really want to put taxes on the richest Americans that are so high you make them retire to a villa in the countryside instead of producing 71% of America’s income taxes? Sane people would say “No” because we already have a large debt and if tax revenues from the wealthy were to drop off a cliff, it would mean the middle class would have to be soaked to make up for it.

However, as we all know, many liberals are not sane and they would say, “Sure! Hit them with a wealth tax! Take it all!” Let’s say we did just that with the richest Americans. Let’s do the full Elizabeth Warren bit and loot EVERYTHING America’s billionaires have. We’ll zero them out, take them off the board and then we’ll have lots of money for “free” projects then, right?

Not so much.

“There are now 801 billionaires based in the United States with a combined wealth totaling $6.22 trillion, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List.”

6.22 trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money. Heck, it is a lot of money. Almost an IMPOSSIBLE amount of money, but it’s not even enough to run the federal government for a single year. In Joe Biden’s final year in office, the government spent 6.75 trillion dollars – and that’s before we add any new “free” programs. Also, again, you can’t forget that we’re talking about wiping all these billionaires out financially, which means the next year, there would be a MASSIVE DROP OFF of income taxes paid. What happens if a farmer eats all of his seed corn and has none to plant for next year? He starves.

America doesn’t even have the money to pay for our current budget without going into debt, so it seems obvious that we can’t afford any new “free” programs. In fact, “free” programs shouldn’t even be ON THE TABLE until we’ve paid off our debt and are running a surplus. Not only is that highly unlikely to ever happen in the first place, even if it did, we’d almost certainly be better off letting people keep more of their own money rather than taxing them on their earnings and giving it away for “free.”

Right now NATO couldn't win a war against Russia

 

I was getting "Red Storm Rising" feelings when reading this article that I saw on Bongino Reports.  Remember that quote, "Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics."  NATO has lost the skill and the manufacturing base they used to have, thanks to the environmental movement that wanted no industry and pollution, so it was either shut down or throttled, and a lot of it was outsourced to the 3rd world because it is ok if they pollute, it is in the name of "equity" or something. as long as the western based world doesn't pollute. Also they have until recently not even met their 2% of GDP as required by treaty obligation because the provincial Americans will do it and defend them, so the Europeans spent their money on their social system and sneered at the backwater Americans.  Now the piper is coming due and they are scrambling.  The eastern Europeans are being serious about it, they still remember the Russian threat, whereas the Western Europeans have forgotten, and viewed the Soviets er the Russians as friends, and started buying their gas from them, thereby financing Putin's war against Ukraine.  Funny that. 

    I shamelessly clipped off "Responsible Statecraft"

   Summer Exercise between American, Polish and Latvian forces (from Duck,Duck,Go)

In 2024, reflecting a popular Western belief, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “NATO is the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Yet just two years earlier in 2022, after a 15-year campaign, NATO was defeated by the Taliban, a rag-tag group of poorly armed insurgents.

How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?

Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.

Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?

The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.

First, unlike Russia, no major NATO nation is industrially mobilized for war, as evidenced by the fact that Russia is still outproducing NATO on 155mm shells for Ukraine. Which, incidentally, gives the lie to the view that Russia is poised to take more of Europe — if we in NATO truly believed this, we would all be mobilizing at speed.

More importantly, it is not clear that NATO could mobilize at the speed or scale needed to produce the levels of equipment, ammunition, and people to match Russia. And certainly not without a long build up that would signal our intent. This is not just about lost industrial capacity, but also lost financial capacity. Of the largest NATO nations, only Germany has a debt to GDP ratio below 100%.

Second, to have the remotest chance of success in this doomsday scenario of a NATO-Russia war, U.S. forces would need to deploy at scale into continental Europe. Even if the U.S. Army was established at the necessary scale — with a 2023 establishment of 473,000, under one third of the current Russian Army, it is not — the overwhelming majority of American equipment and logistics would have to travel by sea.

There, they would be vulnerable to Russian submarine-launched torpedoes and mines. As a former underwater warfare specialist, I do not believe that NATO now has the scale of anti-submarine or mine-warfare forces needed to protect Europe’s sea lines of communication.

Nor, for that matter, would these forces be able to successfully protect Europe’s hydrocarbon imports, in particular oil and LNG so critical to Europe’s economic survival. Losses because of our sea supply vulnerability would not only degrade military production, but also bring accelerating economic hardship to NATO citizens, as soaring prices and energy shortages accompanying an outbreak of war rapidly escalated the political pressure to settle.

Third, our airports, sea ports, training, and logistics bases would be exposed to conventional ballistic missile attack, against which we have extremely limited defenses. Indeed, in the case of the Oreshnik missile, no defense.

An Oreshnik missile arriving at Mach 10+ would devastate a NATO arms factory, or naval, army and air force base. As in Ukraine, Russia’s ballistic campaign would also target our transport, logistics, and energy infrastructure. In 2003, while I was working for the British MOD’s Policy Planning staffs, our post 9/11 threat analysis suggested a successful attack against an LNG terminal, such as Milford Haven, Rotterdam, or Barcelona, would have sub-nuclear consequences. The follow-on economic shock-waves would rapidly ripple across a European continent, now increasingly dependent on LNG.

Fourth, unlike Russia, NATO nations’ forces are a heterogenous bunch. My own experience, while leading the offshore training of all European warships at Flag Officer Sea Training in Plymouth, and later working with NATO forces in Afghanistan, was that all NATO forces were exceptionally enthusiastic but had very different levels of technological advancement and trained effectiveness.

Perhaps more contemporarily important, other than a handful of NATO trainers forward deployed in Ukraine, our forces are trained according to a pre-drone “maneuver doctrine" and have no real-world experience of modern peer-to-peer attritional warfighting. Whereas the Russian Army has close to three years experience now, and is unarguably the world's most battle-hardened.

Fifth, NATO’s decision-making system is cumbersome, hampered by the need to constantly communicate from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to national capitals — a complexity made worse each time another nation is admitted.

Worse still, NATO cannot do strategy. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was shocked to find that NATO had no campaign strategy. In 2022, notwithstanding numerous Russian warnings about NATO expansion constituting a red-line, NATO was wholly unprepared, strategically, for the obvious possibility of war breaking out — as evidenced again by our inability to match Russia’s 155mm shell production.

Even now, in 2025, NATO’s Ukraine strategy is opaque, perhaps best summarized as "double-down and hope.”

In summary, NATO is positioning itself as Europe’s defender, yet lacks the industrial capacity to sustain peer-to-peer warfighting, is wholly dependent on U.S. forces for the remotest chance of success, is unable satisfactorily to defend its sea lines of communication against Russian submarine, or its training and industrial infrastructure against strategic ballistic bombardment, is comprised of a diverse mix of un-bloodied conventional forces, and lacks the capacity to think and act strategically.

An easy NATO victory cannot be assumed, and I am afraid that the opposite looks far more likely to me.

So what? Conventionally, we could now work out how to redress the manifest weaknesses revealed. Strategic audits to confirm the capability gaps. Capability analyses to work out how to fill the gaps. Conferences to decide who does what and where costs should fall. Whilst all the time muddling on, hoping that NATO might eventually prevail in Ukraine, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.

But without unanimous agreement of the NATO nations to increase military investment at scale, we would be lucky to solve these capability shortfalls within ten years, let alone five.

Or we could return to consider — at last — the judgement of many Western realists that NATO expansion was the touchpaper for the Russo-Ukraine War. The Russians warned us, time and again, that such expansion constituted a red line. So too did some of our very greatest strategic thinkers, starting with George Kennan in 1996, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, even Bill Burns in his famous ‘Nyet means Nyet’ diplomatic telegram, and most recently John Mearsheimer with his 2014 forecasts. All ignored.

The truth is that NATO now exists to confront the threats created by its continuing existence. Yet as our scenario shows, NATO does not have the capacity to defeat the primary threat that its continuing existence has created.

So perhaps this is the time to have an honest conversation about the future of NATO, and to ask two questions. How do we return to the sustainable peace in Europe that all sides to the conflict seek? Is NATO the primary obstacle to this sustainable peace?

Steve Jermy

(Ret.) Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy commanded warships in the 5th Destroyer Squadron and Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. He served in the Falklands War and in the Adriatic for the Bosnian and Kosovo campaigns, and retired after an operational tour, in 2007, as Strategy Director in the British Embassy in Afghanistan. He is the author of Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century and now works in offshore energy.