You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
And so we're on to a new year.
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Armenian woman kneeling beside her dead child in Syria during the Battle of Aleppo.
Heading into 2025, the big news remains the Russo Ukrainian War. Other wars are going on, of course, including the Middle Eastern War, as we have termed it here, in which the United States is an occasional belligerent.
As the world is just a few days away from the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, there's good reason to be concerned about the impact this will have on various conflicts, the Russo Ukrainian War in particular. Trump has long been a Putin fan boy for reasons which remain very difficult to discern. Over the past three years Russia has proven that it is, at best, a weak regional power. Putin is bankrupting his country and his armed forces have been reduced to such a level that he's imported North Korean forces to aid his, with North Korean being a Stalinist Clown College.
Ukraine has managed to hold on against its much larger neighbor in no small part due to largescale Western support. Europe has actually, at this point, contributed more to Ukraine than the US has. US leadership and support has been critical, but its often missed that the US has used the war to clear out obsolescent stocks of arms and, in fact, could do much more of this if it wished to, and should. Trump, however, has been generally hostile to Ukraine and lovey dovey to Putin. His relationship to the Russian head of state is so peculiar that it has long raised questions about what's behind it.
Trump, of course, who didn't serve in his nation's war when he was of military age, claims to abhor war and he may in fact have that view. He generally doesn't like military men that much, and he's sufficiently wealth and self centered that he frankly might just not grasp that there are people who are willing to fight and die for their country. Be that as it may, however, like many of the populist camp, quite a few of whom are strongly influenced by a certain strain of Evangelical Protestantism, he has an "Israel can do no wrong" view. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that the incoming administration won't essentially give Israel a free hand in whatever it wants to do in the ongoing struggle in the Middle East.
The US, it might be noted, retains a small number of forces in Iraq and Syria. Trump made sounds about pulling US forces out of Syria when he was first elected, but he didn't. He's made some statements about the US having no role in Syria now, but the US forces in Syria aren't sufficient to impact the outcome of the war there, and are there only to address ISIL in the region. There is, therefore, no real way to know how the change in administrations will impact that.
In terms of prognostications, its notable that Russia's 2024 effort in Ukraine have produced no real results. That Putin isn't trying to commit larger forces to the region and is instead allowing his forces to be bled is telling. He probably can't do more. Ukraine, however, remains unable to push Russia out. The situation therefore depends nearly entirely on what the US and Western Europe does.
The commitment of North Korean troops was always boing to be a failure and will be. North Korea is much more of a paper tiger than many suppose. Mostly, a lot of North Koreans will get killed. Those who return to North Korea will have been exposed to a partially westernized Russia. Stalinist have always feared that as it means there's now a population that knows things could be much better somewhere else. Moreover, those returning will be elite troops. They'll be much like French Algerian troops who returned home to Algeria after fighting in Indochina, and that won't be good for the Communist Hermit Kingdom.
Right now, in regard to Syria, there's really no real reason to hope that the country breaks into a western democracy. At least some period of internecine strife appears likely, absent a massive intervention by Turkey, which we really do not want.
January 1, 2025
Russo Ukrainian War
In a sort of odd even in the ongoing war, a deal between Ukraine and Russia which allowed for the transport of natural gas across Ukraine into Europe, in spite of the war, expired this past week and, as a result, Ukraine shut the pipelines down, which makes perfect sense.
This creates, for the most part a less dire situation than a person might suppose. Europe receives 5% of its natural gas from Russia. Another pipeline that does not go through Ukraine does exist.
Unless you are in Moldova.
This is the only way the breakaway Transnistria region gets gas, and the impact there has been immediate.
Last edition:
In this instance, of course, the last edition was, from last year.
