The Entente Cordiale may not be at the forefront of your thinking right now. I obviously have too much time on my hands right now, so it keeps popping into my mind as I consider our government bumbling and bungling into another one.

The EC was an agreement between the English and the French that laid the groundwork for the First World War. It wasn’t meant to be such, but the English and French were feeling threatened by the growing economic power of the new German nation (Germany was a region not a nation before 1871), and agreed to certain alliances to check its growing influence.

NATO has become the most recent Entente Cordiale. Its raison d’etre ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but instead of allowing itself to be consigned to the list of no longer useful political-military alliances, it has kept fanning the distrust of Russia that Europeans have harbored since at least the greats, Peter and Catherine. Russia was/is Orthodox and Europe was Roman, and the Orthodox and the Romans have tried to exterminate (or convert) the Orthodox since 1054. (This antagonism between Western and Eastern Europe has a LONG history!)

So, we have the American Empire forming its Entente Cordiale with its weak European client states to check the Russian influence as it challenges the continued expansion of American hegemony.This little snippet of world history is to say that the conflict over Ukraine is rooted in a struggle for power and influence that stretches back over a thousand years, and more recently over nearly four hundred years, and we, the Americans, have joined in this struggle unwisely and unnecessarily.

Entente Cordiales can have catastrophic consequences, and a weak leader like Mr. Biden can stumble us right into another worldwide conflagration. At least that is my studied opinion.