When politics fails, try geopolitics. To British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is drowning in scandals at home, that means shifting the focus from London to Kiev.
Ukraine doesn't know how thankful Johnson is to the country for providing a welcome distraction. And he couldn't let the opportunity pass. Over the weekend, and late at night at that, he got his Foreign and Commonwealth Office to do an uncommon thing: announce to the world a Russian plot to place a pro-Moscow leader in Ukraine. More like an Anglo-Saxon plot.
Washington didn't wait a second to back up the British insight into Kremlin thinking, having itself "sighted" another plot on Jan 14. We have been here before. When former British prime minister Tony Blair and former American president George W. Bush found the politics in London and Washington too hot to handle, they had geopolitics in mind, too.
strategic-culture.orgBut geopolitics, then and now, has to have a plot. So Bush and Blair thickened it with a lie: Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Is Johnson and Joe Biden doing the same? Watch this space.
Bush and Blair have not been made to pay for their sins, yet Britain and the United States are onto another plot. Is there any truth to the British "insight"? Well, this is a nation that made the world "see" what wasn't there in Iraq. The Bush-Blair public relations exercise to convert a lie into "truth" is now legendary. Another is now in the making.
Once a nation lies so publicly that much credibility must be discounted. Old habits of telling lies die hard. Blair or Johnson makes no difference. Besides, there is nothing to "see" this time. It is the Kremlin mind that is being talked about now. Let's be blunt. The Kremlin mind is no British or American mind. It is far too complex. Let's be blunt again.
We are talking of the mind of President Vladimir Putin. Neither a British nor an American mind can read him. It is elementary, Mr Johnson. A planned misreading is more like it.
Sure, Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine. This could mean one of two things: threat of invasion or a protection of Russia's borders. What does London and Washington expect Russia to do when the US and the UK keep arming Ukraine? Not to mention the West issuing unending threats. Wait for it to attack Russia?
Supplying weapons isn't going to solve Ukraine's problem, just as it won't solve problems elsewhere. Getting rid of symptoms never undid geopolitical problems. Solving root causes do. And the root cause everywhere is the meddlesome West.
Regime change or forcing Western values down the throat of others is the problem, not the solution. End the meddling in the affairs of others and the muddle will undo itself.
Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German navy chief until Saturday, may have been closer to the truth, when he suggested that the Ukraine problem would undo itself if Putin is treated as an equal by the West.
"It is easy to give him the respect he really demands - and also probably deserves," he was quoted by the BBC as saying in a talk delivered in India on Friday. What a strange world we live in. You tell lies, you get to keep your job. You tell the truth, you lose it.