From Newsgroup: soc.culture.bulgaria

From Kabul to Kiev
The Decent Interval, 2025 Edition
Dr Warwick Powell
Nov 24, 2025

The world is living through the final act of the post-1991 unipolar order.
In Ukraine, the collective West has suffered a comprehensive strategic
defeat at the hands of a Russia it spent three decades dismissing as a
rCLgas station masquerading as a country.rCY The battlefield evidence is no longer ambiguous: Russian forces are advancing along every axis that
matters; MoscowrCOs defence industry outproduces the entire NATO alliance in 152mm and 155mm shells by margins that fluctuate between 3:1 and 10:1; Ukrainian brigades are being rebuilt for the third and fourth time with
55- and 60-year-old conscripts and lightly wounded soldiers discharged
from hospitals. The idea - still murmured in certain Washington think-
tanks and London and Brussels corridors - that one more package of ATACMS,
one more squadron of F-16s, one more billion euros from frozen Russian
assets can yet rCLturn the tiderCY is no longer a strategic assessment. It is a psychological defence mechanism, the last refuge of a policy class that cannot yet bring itself to speak the words rCLwe lost.rCY

rCa

From Saigon in 1975 to Kabul in 2021 to Kiev in 2026, the pattern is identical. The US overreaches, discovers the limits of its power,
outsources the fighting to clients, and then negotiates exits whose
primary purpose is to ensure that no serving president is recorded by
history as the one who rCLlostrCY the war.

The Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War after November 1965 was
fought primarily to manage the optics of defeat. It took seven years. The 28-point peace plan, the Thanksgiving deadline, the throttling of
intelligence feeds - these are the 2025 equivalents. The human cost is
being paid, as always, by the people on the ground whose country was
chosen as the arena.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes with chilling precision.
Kiev is simply the latest stanza.

https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/from-kabul-to-kiev

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