COL DOUG MACGREGOR: Worshipping Dead Horses

originally written by COL Doug MacGregor and appears on The American Conservative.

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, ruled as the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. For those who are unaware, Caligula, the great grandson of Rome’s first emperor, the brilliant Augustus Caesar, squandered the enormous wealth of the Roman State, declared himself to be a god, appointed his favorite racehorse to serve in the Roman Senate, and according to some sources, considered deifying the animal.

After a little less than four years in office, Caligula was removed. Rome’s citizens, as well as its legions, were spared the indignity of having to worship a dead horse. Americans and Europeans are not so lucky.

Determined to fight his proxy war with Russia to the finish, Biden is losing the fight in Ukraine and his favorite, deified horse, NATO, is on life support. The only things sinking faster than Biden’s approval ratings are the American and European economies.

Readers will recall that President Trump wanted to reduce European dependence on American military power—to make Europeans their own “first responders.” Biden reversed Trump’s policy and promised to reinvigorate NATO, in the words of French President Macron, the “the brain dead alliance.”

The problem for NATO is the economic hardship wrought by Biden’s sanctions against Moscow are threatening Europe with economic Armageddon. It’s bad enough when European bond and stock futures plunge and the euro dips below parity with the U.S. dollar, but when Paris, the city of light, shuts off its famous night lights to save energy, things are truly horrific.

Germany, the E.U.’s largest economy and NATO’s keystone state, is struggling. Chancellor Scholz is certainly sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, but not sympathetic enough to impose enormous hardships on the German people that may include industrial shutdowns, increased unemployment, and a critical shortage of energy to heat German homes and schools during the winter. To make matters worse, Berlin’s domestic problems with migrants and refugees only worsened with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

Those who know the chancellor insist that Chancellor Scholz wants to contain the conflict in Ukraine and work for a ceasefire on terms that gain time for negotiation and compromise. Scholz has no interest in rearming Ukraine to make the rump Ukrainian State a permanent and unpredictable threat to Moscow. More important, Scholz does not regard negotiation with Moscow as a reenactment of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich in 1938.

Will Scholz recognize that Germany’s survival and prosperity is contingent on Berlin’s ability to act in its own interests? Certainly not if it acts as an enabler in supporting the U.S. globalist view in NATO. Scholz knows that if he leads the charge in Europe for a ceasefire in Ukraine over Biden’s objections, European support for NATO, and for Biden’s failing war with Russia, will erode quickly.

The question for Scholz is: Will he continue to support Washington’s policy of open-ended conflict with Moscow and risk wider war? Or will Chancellor Scholz risk going the way of Boris Johnson, and more recently, Mario Draghi, if Draghi follows through with his decision to resign as Prime Minister?

Every NATO member state realizes that the longer the conflict last, the more likely the fighting will escalate and spill into NATO’s East European member states. Europeans always worried about Biden’s rush to confront Russia in Ukraine. Now, Europeans see that a collision with Russian military power is a distinct possibility, if not a growing probability. The possibility, however, does not seem to have occurred to President Biden. If so, he should think about it.

The withdrawal U.S. forces from Afghanistan was long overdue, but the timing and the method of withdrawal demonstrated that the U.S. armed forces are not just poorly commanded, the planning and execution of the withdrawal from Kabul was disastrous. To suggest that the U.S. military left a very dead horse on the tarmac in Kabul is an understatement.

The Ukrainians trained, equipped, and enabled by NATO in key areas like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance fought well, but they could not withstand the firepower and determination of a Russian Force that has endured 150 days of continuous combat in an area roughly the size of the United States between St. Louis, Missouri, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is doubtful that U.S. and NATO ground forces could do as well as the Russians have.

To obtain a clear picture, it is vital to understand that all is not well inside the U.S. armed forces. The Biden Pentagon has created a system of intolerance that rewards unquestioning compliance with the Left’s policies and actively punishes dissent and divergence from the left’s prescribed behavior.

Put another way, the lives of Americans in uniform are controlled by ideologically driven bureaucrats who’ve leveraged Covid and the imposition of Critical Race Theory. The Biden administration has chosen the American military establishment as their instrument of social change, or as a new dead horse awaiting deification.

It is an undisguised plan to eliminate any semblance of a colorblind military meritocracy in favor of elevating persons of color and women to dominate the senior ranks. The plan is working. There are good reasons to expect more white men to leave the armed services. President Biden is not concerned, but he should be.

No one in Washington, D.C., ever complained of too many white soldiers (95 percent of whom were cultural, if not religious, Christians) during the Civil War, on the battlefields of the First World War, on the beaches at Normandy and Okinawa, or in the deserts of Iraq. No one complained of too many white men in the skies over Midway, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Biden’s policies are fraught with danger. The basic requirements of warfare do not change to accommodate woke ideology. Officers must cultivate discipline, morale, and esprit, and the officers must themselves be first class soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines of proven character, competence, and intelligence. If Americans in uniform see evidence for racially biased policies, quotas and preferences, America’s best will not enlist. And that is arguably already happening.

Americans and Europeans are becoming impatient with their timid and incapable political leaders. Empty political slogans from the beta males and radical feminists of the ruling political class of globalists are falling on deaf ears. The globalist regime in the U.S. and Europe cannot last. In the long run, fighting always beats submitting to elites that worship dead horses.