Prime Minister Truss appears not to have understood that the hopeless hero Volodymyr Zelenskyy provides drag rather than lift to her popularity.
Joe Biden turbocharged the NATO response to Russian troops in their 24 February 2022 entry into regions already outside the control of Ukraine for rational reasons. Removing Russian (and as collateral damage, Ukrainian) grain and petroleum resources from the international market would give US oil and grain exporters new and immense avenues of profit. What the Biden team omitted in their calculations was the blowback to not just the poorer nations but to the member-states of NATO from the raft of sanctions that were imposed by members of that alliance on the Russian Federation. When the Treasury Department in the US and EU “top brains” such as the clearly harried Ursula von der Leyen prove themselves unable or unwilling to calculate the actual effectiveness of the sanctions they imposed against “Putin’s Russia”, doubts about their level of competence in their present jobs is understandable. Several months ago, at a conference of Risk Managers of around forty large companies that was held in the restful surroundings of the L&T training facility at Lonavala, this columnist had said that the chill of winter would cool down NATO’s appetite for prosecuting their George W. Bush (circa “Operation Get Saddam” 2003) model war against Vladimir Putin. This has begun to take place, with more and more voters unhappy with the sacrifices they are being asked to make by their elected leaders in order to continue with NATO’s crusade against Russia. On the other side, Xi Jinping is making sure that Moscow has ample financial resources to continue the war, while at the same time coyly smiling at the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance who serially beseech him to stop a war in which Xi is the primary beneficiary. Self-sacrifice may have been the motif of the saintly leaders of India’s freedom movement, but that quality (or, in the view of a few, shortcoming) is not typical of the CCP’s leadership, something that Biden, Macron and Scholz do not seem to have yet understood, possibly due to the relevant memos not reaching their desks.
Enter Liz Truss, the latest Conservative Party occupant of 10 Downing Street. Her party
Thus far, Prime Minister Truss appears not to have understood that the fact that it was the hopeless hero, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who first spoke to the new PM, provides drag rather than lift to her popularity. If she continues on the course favoured by Boris Johnson and continues to ignore reality by accelerating rather than decelerating the Ukraine war, Liz Truss will get replaced. Not by Boris Johnson but by some Tory leader who has shown better sense than Johnson or Truss has in this debilitating conflict.