Ironic reversal or poetic justice was well known in Elizabethan England…and was often used in comedy and drama. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Scn 4) , the protagonist Hamlet discovers that there is a plot on his life by Claudius and resolves to let the plotter—the “engineer” be “hoist with his own petard”. (A petard was a small bomb or charge that was used by ‘engineers” in war to blow up obstructions such as entrances to buildings or to create openings in stone walls during a siege. To be hoist with one’s own “bomb”(petard) was an ironic reversal and an example of juicy poetic justice. In such a case the instigator of harm is harmed himself.
Joe Biden and his team of incompetents in the White House are now experiencing an ironic reversal of fortune, or poetic justice, as the results of their war mongering in Eastern Europe comes into better focus. Their polices rather than weakening their presumed “enemy” led to scarcity and high prices of oil and gas. The shortage of this essential commodity has caused great harm to themselves and to allied nations. As a result we now all suffer from inflation, and are threatened existentially by a potentially nuclear war that did not have to occur. That foreign policy harm has become a political liability at home which may lead to reversals at the polls. These “engineers’ of disaster created an inflationary spiral, caused an incipient recession and a horrible war in Eastern Europe which threatens to expand, perhaps into a global war.
The poor judgement goes back to the Obama foreign policy team who foolishly helped precipitate the instability in Ukraine. President Obama supported the expansion of NATO to Putin´s front door and encouraged the unseating of a legitimately elected pro-Russian president in Ukraine. Obama using subversive secret agents, supplied with bags of cash, encouraged and paid for an uprising in Ukraine —on Putin’s very doorstep. When the eastern provinces (the Donbas and others ) rejected these pro-western, progressive policies, designed to create an armed-to-the-teeth military outpost, and a liberal pro-American regime, fighting broke out in the east, in regions bordering Russia. After several months of conflict, a peace agreement was proposed in 2014 which legislated policies for Kyiv that would have permitted these mostly Russian speaking provinces greater political and economic autonomy. Kyiv agreed to the peace deal. But with US financial and military support pouring in, their leaders found it more profitable to ignore the agreement they made with the Donbas and the Russians and take the financial offers in cash, bribes and military largess the US was offering— and forget the peace agreement they signed. The abandonment of the Donbas agreement festered in the Russian craw. The Biden team was purposely poking its finger in the eye of the Russian bear. It seemed to many observers a policy unwarranted and dangerous.
In February of this year, Vladimir Putin made a show of military force in an effort to change the status quo.. President Biden did nothing to respond. He ignored his supposed role as senior world diplomat—seeming to welcome the conflict. Instead of acting as world leader, he turned over any attempts at diplomatic solutions to minor actors such as French President Macron—and let the dangerous situation fester. When fighting did break out, and the reality of perhaps a long war and its impact on Europe became manifest, Biden remained out of the loop and further attempts at diplomacy were made by President Macron. In the end, Russians and Ukrainians on their own, did come close to a diplomatic solution—a peace plan agreeable to both. But Joe Biden and his hawkish allies in the EU and UK (specifically Boris Johnson) convinced Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to abandon any diplomatic solution. Biden and Johnson appeared to preferred war to peace.
The Biden team was determined to use the excuse of the Russian invasion as a means to attack and bleed the Russians and to weaken them both militarily and economically.
What could have been the motivation for this seemingly dangerous and foolish action? Perhaps such a response is the standard behavior of all world hegemons, like the USA. World powers will act to destroy any political entity that might some day threaten their own hegemony.
In this case they encouraged a war and used the Ukrainians as“cannon fodder” for war. Their plan was to batter the Russians with a bloody “ram” of Ukrainian young men and women (and Ukrainian citizens). The foolish Ukrainians or their complicit leaders led them into this morass of death and destruction. The US and EU would supply all the military hardware and the Ukrainians would supply the young men and women that would fight and die in this war for the old leaders who sat in plush leather bound seats in DC and Brussels.
Joe, not the sharpest knife in the draw as a young man, is now approaching 80 years old and some observe evidences of mental frailty, but somehow he led the younger and “wiser” leadership in the UK and EU into following his lead like lemmings over the cliff into economic and possible nuclear conflict. Where are the adults over there? Attempting to weaken Russian economically, they found that the result of their acts resulted in the collapse of their own economies. Today, the EU and UK are threatened not only with economic disaster and decline, but with nuclear fallout should Russia feel so threatened that it unleashes its nuclear arsenal—the largest in the world.
This disaster to the “engineers” setting their “petard” is an example of good old poetic justice—or ironic reversal. The instigators of war are now more harmed and impacted by their belligerent acts than their opponent. They have been “raised upon” “(blown up) on their own petard (bomb) as per Shakespeare.
Sanctioning Russian oil and gas…has not worked.
Fossil fuels power 80% or more of world homes and industries. Oil and gas shortages have generated higher prices. Russia is selling its oil and gas to others, its income on its oil and gas is now for sale at the higher prices, caused by Biden’s plan to “sanction” Russia and cut world gas and oil supplies. Scarcity has caused the prices to rise. At home, Joe Biden (after cutting the fossil fuel industry off at the knees on the first days of his presidency) has now attempted to tamp down gasoline prices (and inflation) by dumping 2 million barrels of oil a day into the world market. This Biden oil is not from our own domestic suppliers, it is drawn (illegally and expensively ) from our national oil reserve.
Prices did fall as a result. But OPEC does not like low prices for its “black gold” product. It has in response reduced its own production by 2 million bbl per day. As a result, while the US and Europe shun Russian oil purchases at Biden’s behest, the price of this essential commodity rises The weak and incompetent leaders in the EU, where there are no massive oil reserves to tap, are suffering a massive level of inflation, and drastic shortages of fuel for winter.
The war has even encouraged the reactivating of coal fired plants in Germany and in Poland, overturning the green energy goals for limiting carbon reduction for many years to come..
How could these leaders be so easily hoodwinked by Biden?
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