Most people don’t know that Lenin was sent to Russia from his Swiss exile by the Germans in a sealed diplomatic train with the express intent to induce the October revolution and end the hostilities on that front. It was done to the Russians by cynical Germans who still ended up losing WWI.

Churchill deliberately courted the Russians and prevented attacks on them early on in WWII to make it easier for them to switch sides, a very successful tactic which won WWII at the cost of Russian lives.

I’m one of those people who see China as a bigger threat to western hegemony and instead of using Ukraine to give Russia a bloody nose we should have again fermented divisions between Russia and China. It would have been possible to admit Russia into NATO, I know it sounds ridiculous but Switzerland was formed out of a having the bully canton join the alliance of smaller cantons that was expressly formed to defend against it. It can be done and there was historical precedent. Not anymore, China and Russia are now so joined at the hip they might as well be considered a single entity. I think the west overestimated its strength, and even now with the posturing for WWIII with fancy and expensive weapons it appears that the West doesn’t understand that warfare has forever changed. I did hope the Houthi conflict would have woken people up to that reality but somehow we’re holding on to this notion that a WWIII is winnable.

I should note that I lament the cost of these conflicts to human lives on both sides and wish smarter populations governed by astute politicians would have found ways to successfully avoid war, perhaps at the cost of a multipolar world which we’re likely to get anyway. I much prefer the Chinese way of fighting with ‘high tech overproduction’ and wish we could ‘fight back’ with our own overproduction. We would all be far wealthier for it, especially since the alternative is massively destructive.