.It is widely acknowledged that the ongoing migrant invasion
of Europe with its uncontrolled borders was the last straw that set the British
voters to reject their tie to the EU. It would be futile to deny that the
United States too has a problem with uncontrolled immigration, which – along
with globalization and off-shoring of jobs and money– enabled the demagoguery of Donald Trump to
become the driving force to his nomination for president by the Republican Party.

Migration issues in the European Union have become the cutting
edge of criticism of the financial elite on London-Frankfurt Street. These
issues were incubated by geopolitical decisions and wars made by Western powers
and, yes, by the ongoing effects of man-made global climate changes that are now
devastating wide regions all-over the planet and make them unsuitable for
living.

In
“safe” places like in the USA, the ongoing massive forest fires in seven
western states have become repetitive disasters every summer with ugly growing
intensity, wreaking widespread destruction of hundreds of homes and farms.
Horrendous, “historic” floods and rain storms almost every week are destroying
entire towns and are causing havoc in many states in Midwest and southeast,
while droughts and water shortage are turning California into a sand reservation.

U.S. President Barack Obama has
called climate change a top security issue for America. That’s one of the
things he got right, in contrast to the shouting and denying coming from
politicians fronting for big business moguls, who are fixating on the global
economy and global profits.

Unfortunately, President Obama has made at least as many
wrong calls as the right ones, in his domestic as well as in foreign
initiatives. It is no consolation that Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush had
done much worse.

It was President George W. Bush’s circle that shaped the geopolitical
decisions of Western powers concerning Russia and war-making in Mideast and
Afghanistan, with very visible kibitzing from his British friend Prime Minister
Tony Blair, decisions that resulted in huge dislocations of war-torn
populations.

It was Tony Blair’s advice to Bush not to get
involved in Syria (in the absence of “a suitable replacement” of Syria’s
dictator Bashar al-Assad) that enabled Russia’s Vladimir Putin to hang on in Syria and in effect
manipulate the refugee pressure on Europe. Russia has now acquired more
influence on the fate of the EU than President Obama has delivered
by his speeches urging Britain to stay.

The fundamental mistake made by the West after the end of
the Cold War was wishful thinking about Russia’s transformation from an
imperialist into a peaceful country presided over by someone like Boris
Yeltsin. In plain words, the West had underestimated Russia’s power to rearm
and become again a huge threat to its neighbors. Amazingly, Russia was often
ridiculed by Western experts at the beginning of this century as little more
than a gas station with an outdated military arsenal.

NATO was virtually disarmed in the 1990s. What was left was
configured into a minor expeditionary force and diverted into Afghanistan. It
was next to pitiful to see how a grand Western alliance that had won the Cold
War on Ronald Reagan’s watch has become mismanaged and disheveled by his run-of
–the-mill successors. It is no surprise that the West is now militarily
impotent in Europe. Stuck in dozens of military bases of little importance
around the world, the US is in no position to provide the kind of help to
Ukraine that would compel Putin to take Russian troops out of Ukraine — without pulling a trigger
even if such an intent were strong in Washington.

Some inclinations to blame Europe for inability to absorb
millions of migrants from Asia and Africa simply don’t hold water. Every nation
has moral right to try to preserve its traditional culture and not have it
diluted by new arrivals who are unwilling or unable to integrate and modulate
their diverse customs even after several generation, as is for all to see in
France, Belgium and in dilapidated towns in Britain.

Central European nations, from Croatia to Poland and the
Baltics, absolutely refuse to follow the path of diluting their national
identities. Nor will it fly in Ukraine, or in Russia.

Europe’s business elite has been the mainstay of the
European Union with all advantages of a common market. But it has no power to
rescue the EU from disintegration under now existing pressures. It is already
seeking advantages from co-operation with Russia in the form of relaxation of Ukraine-related
sanctions. With the United States now a question mark at least until November
elections, all that Ukraine hears now from the West is Obama’s
speeches about maintaining America’s connections with the UK and the EU.

Oh
yes, it does look like the deployment of 4,000 NATO troops in Poland and the
Baltics is still in play, even though U.S. generals confirm that nothing could be
done to stop a Russian thrust in that region. There is a Ukrainian expression;
“Do choho diyshlo?” What has it come to?