It starts on Monday New Zurich newspaper (NZZ) the week with an alarmist comment on Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to the USA under the heading “Putin can rejoice.” The hook is the key sentence from the Ukrainian President’s speech in the UN Security Council on September 24th: “Russia can only be forced to make peace.” The NZZ agrees: “Only a determined West can shatter the dream of a new Russian empire.” But Zelensky apparently spoke “against a wall in front of the UN and in Washington,” and only his most convinced supporters met with him in the US Congress want, there were beautiful but hollow words from Joseph Biden. The reality is that “Ukraine is currently on a losing course” and the US President sees no need to reconsider his “all too timid support.” In any case, the West is “not even close to following” Zelenskiy’s “sensible motto”; in fact, “war fatigue” is spreading.
The cry of distress from Zurich was heard in all major German-language media in the following days. The heroes of the desk front only know one maxim: war to the extreme, and if things don’t go as planned – persevere. War drunkenness sees realism as treason and defeat as the end of the world, which is at least justified in this respect: the West’s less than successful wars over the past 30 years are evidence of the decline of global hegemony. The self-reflections become darker and the tone becomes shriller.
On Wednesday the NZZ himself followed an example and castigated the “paralyzing fear of military escalation”. Headline: “The West is weakening itself.” In a sense, the precursor to suicide. Because the West is exposing its “own aloofness and powerlessness” “with its mantra-like demands for de-escalation.” Central sentence: “Sometimes it takes a courageous military strike to decisively weaken an opponent before you can negotiate peace.” Such talkers have been repeating the idea of ”blocking, not spilling” for a long time. Loud NZZ “This realization” has obviously become established in the Israeli government, resulting in “a huge success,” in which Israel’s Western allies, however, had “no visible share” because of their “permanent warnings to de-escalate.” It is similar in Ukraine. That signals weakness.
Under the heading “World Order” will be held on Friday in the South German newspaper whose Brussels correspondent Hubert Wetzel takes the resulting step and looks at the whole thing from that place in the sun for which German corporations have already driven their population into a world war twice. If “Moscow, Tehran and Beijing work together” to “destroy the Western – i.e. American-European – dominated world order,” then Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon are “not separate theaters of war, but just different sections of a long anti-Western front.” Then it’s “about more than a few square kilometers in Donbass or the Levant” and “the threat to Europe is existential.” So far, “one does not have the impression that this insight has already arrived in Brussels regarding the supply chain and charging cables.”
Anyone who thinks as big as Wetzel takes it from them NZZ noted signs of abandonment and self-weakening of the West for what they are: a threat to existence. Russians, Chinese and mullahs are on the verge of Brussels. Bigger things are needed than bunker busters in Beirut. Otherwise the suicide of the West has already been completed.
