Additions to "Ukraine and the 30 Year's Global War on Terror" for cadets and professors at Mihai's Excellent Intelligence Academy

Abstract

Additions on “Ukraine and the 30 Year’s Global War on Terror” for the cadets and professors at Mihai’s Excellent Academy, 21 October, 2014

1. What can I tell Romanians about the Ukraine? You should know 1000x more than I do about this country on your border. What can I tell you about the mind of Vladimir Putin, who is more dangerous to the greater Black Sea area than to the western hemisphere?

2. Well, I can say your political psychologists should be studying Mr. Putin very carefully! I do that to forecast wars, but be assured, it is not really possible to get into the mind of a leader thousands of kilometers away, with almost all sources of information about them mediated by groups with interests of their own. Propaganda is everywhere, but in war zones it is pervasive and professional. To take another hard intelligence target for example, we don’t even know if Kim Jong Un of North Korea is ALIVE right now, or confined to a hospital, or tied up in a tank somewhere to protect his security services from flagrant craziness with WMDs, and Kim’s affection for killing relatives on short notice, like his uncle. So political psychologists in Romania should study the mind of Mr. Putin carefully, and I will say more about that in a moment.

3. I can also tell you that the “Global War on Terror” declared by my President George W. Bush on 20 September, 2001, while renamed for public relations purposes, is going on briskly and some intend to keep this up for many decades. That has a significant bearing on security calculations by Mr. Putin in Russia, just as it does on calculations by the Saudi’s, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Germans, and many other countries with global interests, like the Turks, who have many boiling issues of their own to worry about. So I will talk about Ukraine and the War on “Terror” simultaneously.

4. It is important to recognize that both Russia and the USA are empires in decline today. There are many technical differences, of course, and some will quibble about the word empire, but the decline is what matters most. Both Putin and Obama want to restore their countries to global dominance of the past, but rivals will block them and combine in unexpected ways, which is why declining empires are more dangerous than stable ones.

5. The “Developing Global Crisis” I mentioned in my first and second lectures here remains extremely relevant. But that is hard to review because it looks at everything all at once, which is difficult for even the best of our tiny little brains, much less for students who are burdened with other tasks like trying to find a long-term job, long-term relationships, etc. But do not forget that all these conflicts occur in the context of tremendous population pressure, significant resource depletion and environmental changes, and phenomenal corruption of governments around the world that limit solutions to these problems.

6. Ukraine and the 30 years Global War on “Terror” are different, but deeply related topics. Romania is a member of NATO now, and what causes the big gorilla of NATO to itch can affect smaller members more. So professional officers of Romanian security should pay close attention to the psychology of both US and Russian Presidents. ISIS (or ISIL, the Islamic State, or whatever the name of the day is for scary terrorists) causes our President many sleepless nights, probably more sleepless nights than Ukraine is today.