Lights! Cameras! Action! The scene is a heavily hyped but quickly slapped together peace summit in the late summer of this year of our lord Satan 2025. The setting is Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, some relic of the last cold war's apocalypse culture on the desolate outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. Our leading men are one Donald J. Trump, a dayglow corporate-welfare rapist who somehow failed his way to the top of an empire too big to fail without a goddamn apocalypse, and Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded KGB thug who spent the post-Soviet years breaking legs for neoliberal oligarchs before reinventing himself as some kind of quasi-fascist heartthrob for self-loathing, alt-right, closet queens to toss off to between podcasts.
There was a red carpet, a long walk beneath soaring war machines and towering mountain vistas, and a carriage ride in a luxury vehicle designed to withstand the advances of even the angriest of villagers which whisked the two war criminals away to a secluded and presumably candlelit location where the waiting public was promised that no man would leave unmaimed without signing off on a ceasefire to the long raging proxy apocalypse in Ukraine.
The two lovers surfaced hours later, beaming before a live audience of politico paparazzo for a post-coital press conference. Both men, who collectively lounge on more nuclear hardware than the rest of the planet combined and multiplied ten times, took turns lavishing each other's egos with increasingly flirtatious displays of affection bordering on the downright homoerotic. The typically ice-cold Vladimir Putin showed off his sensitive side, paying special attention to his rodeo clown paramour's "precious" devotion to world peace and Donald Trump boasted proudly that he has long had a very special relationship with 'President Putin' before girlishly correcting himself by referring to the strongman simply as 'Vladimir.'
The two psychopaths both appeared to agree that something magical had transpired that day beneath the Northern Lights but then they both unceremoniously fucked off to their own blood-speckled corners of the world stage without their hotly anticipated ceasefire or even a second date on the calendar.
In spite of all the lovey-dovey talk and breathless self-adulation, the war kept raging in Ukraine with half the country under an air raid alert while Volodymyr Zelensky launched swarms of NATO drones deep into the Rostov and Bryansk regions of Russia. None of this stopped the gnashing heads of the liberal media from ripping their hair out and screaming 'Neville Chamberlain!' at the top of their lungs over the mere shadow of a suggestion that maybe dumping more weapons of mass destruction into this death hole isn't the most prudent way to avoid World War III but as far as I could tell, none of the deadly peace that terrifies such imbeciles so much was actually transpiring. Just two foul Caesars sending each other kissy face emojis while they continued to murder each other's children.
'What the fuck just happened here?' I found myself asking the blue screen of a merciless television set. But before I could receive an answer, another hastily slapped together peace summit erupted in Washington three days later. Volodymyr Zelensky, fresh from his latest photo shoot with GQ, practically stormed the White House flanked by a dream team of western oligarchs, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancelor Friedrich Merz, in a united front of NATO solidarity. But the moment these humanitarian crusaders for liberal order found themselves in the same room with Donald Trump, a public make-out session commenced that made the Brokeback bromance in Alaska look tame by comparison.
Each and every NATO superfreak on the scene took turns backing that thing up on Donald Trump's stubby little ego, including Zelensky who had practically been thrown out of the Oval Office by the seat of his pants during his last visit. The freak fest ended in smiles and handshakes and a triumphant announcement by the blushing Donald that Putin had agreed to yet another summit, this time with Zelensky invited to join the menage a troi of peace.
But, once again, something was seriously off about this powwow. While Donald Trump took another victory lap and NATO breathed a sigh of sweet relief, I couldn't help noticing that nothing concrete had actually come out of this long weekend of long-winded summitry. For all the flowery talk of peace still percolating from both of these dueling love-ins, the war was still raging and, in some ways largely neglected by the western media, it had actually gotten worse.
Between blowing kisses across the room to each other, Trump, Starmer and Macron all kept talking about the kind of 'security guarantees' for Ukraine from NATO nations that Russia has repeatedly made clear were a red line for them. All three of these world leaders even suggested that the deployment of European troops on the ground in Ukraine was on the table. The Russians didn't miss these details either. Their Foreign Ministry called the demands a "sharp escalation" that was "categorically unacceptable to Russia." And this wasn't the only detail that made any notion of either one of these summits having anything to do with peace highly suspect.
Just days before Trump's klondike soiree with Putin in Alaska, Germany announced that it was purchasing $500 million dollars of American military hardware for Ukraine. All part of a NATO bait-and-switch scheme to funnel US weapons to the battle front through European third parties while Trump feigns non-interventionism. The name of this scam is the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List or PURI initiative. Other Eurocrats have already pledged a total of $1.5 billion dollars to this growing arsenal and Volodymyr Zelensky made an offer to buy $90 billion dollars of American death machines through this European back channel during the second so-called peace summit.
If you are confused upon exhaustion by all these bizarre backroom hijinks then step in line, grab a brown paper bag to breath into, and put your head between your knees while I attempt to unwrap this for you. Donald Trump spent most of this last summer actually ratcheting up the war in Ukraine, sending an increasingly unpopular Zelensky regime deadlier and deadlier toys and giving Putin strict deadlines for unconditional ceasefire and then drastically reducing the deadlines without explanation. But Donald Trump also spent most of this last summer losing his base over his attempts to bury his 15-year relationship with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein as his overall approval ratings hit rock bottom.
So, Donald Trump did what his old buddy Bill Clinton used to do whenever his sexual predations began to clutter the headlines; he created a highly publicized foreign policy diversion. Bill usually bombed baby formula factories or news stations, but Trump needed to distract an audience that has grown a tad more weary of war crimes, so he set up a shameless but feckless lovefest with his neoliberal rivals' favorite boogeyman, Vladimir Putin, who has his own PR demons to slay, to essentially bait his critics into changing the subject to one he could win his base back with, namely being decried as a 'Putin puppet' for merely hinting at the possibility of detente.
However, Trump picked a hell of a time to play this game. Volodymyr Zelensky's own poll numbers are dropping, and Russia is slowly but steadily taking the Donbass back, village by village. Trump's flirtations with isolationism have never amounted to much more than fishing for another offer he couldn't refuse So, NATO did for Trump what Trump did for Putin; they rolled out the red carpet and greased his fragile ego with sultry gestures and suggestive dialogue, and by the time they were done they had handily transformed a phony photo-op for peace-starved MAGA cretins into another thinly veiled covert arms race.
This is what 'peace' looks like on a planet stalked by bankrupt cannibal empires. Behind every door on every stage is another desperate shakedown with rapidly disintegrating superpowers wrestling each other over which hill to die on. Sadly, this is nothing new for Ukraine which has a long tragic history of hosting these kinds of imperial death matches, whether it's the Ottomans and the Czars or the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. The only good new here is that these wild steppes are usually where it ends before it begins again.
Let's just hope that there's something left standing after the next peace summit.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Peace Sells by Megadeth
* Charm You by Samia
* Game Shows Touch Our Lives by the Mountain Goats
* If You Should Try and Kiss Her by Dressy Bessy
* Hotel Yorba by the White Stripes
* Who Do You Love by George Thorogood & the Destroyers
* Superman by REM
* Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy
* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats
* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes
* I Knew it, I Know it by Gracie Abrams
* El Scorcho by Weezer
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