Blain’s Morning Porridge – 18th Dec 2025 – Guest Post: Walking the Sleepwalk of the War Blind
Something different for Morning Porridge Readers this morning, a guest post from my chum David Murrin.
In recent weeks the steady drip, drip, drip of Russian misinformation, distraction and deflection on the Ukraine war has become a deluge aimed at persuading the Trump administration and the financial commentariat that Ukraine is going to lose.
The aim is to persuade the West Russia’s victory is inevitable. The Russian shills and trolls cite the strength of the ruble, the ineffectiveness of sanctions, and blame NATO for the war. A recent comment said: “NATO has been quietly repurposed into a moral delivery system synchronised with Brussels, the Commission and Davos rather than the balance of power reality”. Such articles frame Europe as the despot and neglect Russia as the aggressor.
Personally, I find it extraordinary that otherwise intelligent financiers have bought into the Russian talking points and propaganda so completely. Yet it’s happening, and it’s been boosted by Trump’s transactional approach to the great game of geopolitics and diplomacy. Time to cut through the nonsense. I asked my chum David Murrin, principal of Spitfire Strategic Capital for his thoughts on how the Russian disinformation/appeasement campaign is playing out:
David Murrin:
Despite almost four years of industrial-scale warfare in Ukraine, and the most massive armament program of China, there remains an all-too-familiar pathology of war blindness in Britain and Western Europe—a refusal to recognise the true nature and magnitude of the threats we face or the strategic dynamics shaping them.
The assertion by some that Britain’s intelligence leadership is “sabre rattling” merely for articulating reality is symptomatic of a wider Western inability to accept we are already deep into a systemic and escalating conflict cycle.
Deterrence has failed because too many commentators and policymakers prefer comforting illusions over hard truths and the manifestation of demonstrable courage to face down aggression with hard power.
The same blindness colours the critique of Russian sanctions. They were never applied with the ruthless coherence required to cripple the Russian war machine, mainly because Europe entered this conflict economically entangled with Moscow and psychologically unprepared for confrontation.
The hard reality is that China seeks domination of the world and has encouraged and supported its close ally, Russia, to wage war on Ukraine and Europe.
The suggestion by Putin that Europe wants war with Russia is an inversion of reality. Europe emphatically does not seek war; Russia does. Moscow’s imperial ambitions, not European choices, drive the conflict.
To suggest European “provocation” triggered this war is to echo the very narratives Putin relies upon to justify aggression.
The real challenge is not provocation—it is capability. NATO must rebuild its warfighting capacity rapidly, but the idea that NATO has transformed into some Davos-inspired moral project is intellectually unserious.
NATO’s purpose remains what it has always been: collective defence of democratic Europe. It has been forced back into strategic clarity by Russia’s aggression, not by ideology. If Davos elites truly controlled global events, the rise of a militaristic, expansionist China would never have occurred.
Claims that Europe “cannot fight Russia” are recycled Putin propaganda. Even without U.S. air support, Europe’s combined 4th- and 5th-generation air power would decisively defeat Russia in a conventional fight.
Putin knows this, which is precisely why he has avoided escalation beyond his Shadow war. Trump knows it as well, which is why only Trump seeks to undermine NATO as part of his alignment with Putin.
Assertions that Europe is engineering a war or stumbling toward a Baltic “incident” misread historical dynamics. Western restraint—not aggression—is prolonging this conflict, and victory remains within reach if we choose to act with resolve.
Finally, the claim that America is being dragged into commitments against its own interests ignores the strategic reality: America’s core geopolitical challenge is China, and Russia is China’s indispensable junior partner. The two are inseparable.
Facing down Russia is not a distraction from U.S. strategy—it is an integral part of countering the Sino-Russian autocratic axis.
In sum, these arguments are a patchwork of misread history, echoes of Putin propaganda, and linear thinking.
What is required today is not delusional moralising, denial, or conspiracy rhetoric, but strategic clarity: recognising that we are sleepwalking with the Warblind in an era of escalating conflict, that Russia and China are aligned, that deterrence has already failed, and that only decisive and urgent Western rearmament and unity can prevent the next stage of this war cycle.
David Murrin
Dec 2025
7 Comments
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This is a reply from a reader.
Nem Com:
David Murrins argument is the same as so many, it simply mistakes moral clarity for strategic wisdom. There is little doubt the Ukraine war could have been avoided had NATO membership been taken off the table when it mattered a fact now quietly but absolutely acknowledged by insiders from the Biden administration, and one Russia stated openly in 2022 when it made clear it did not oppose Ukraine’s EU accession. Instead, the West chose escalation by proxy: arming a non-NATO state, freezing and now effectively expropriating roughly $300bn of sovereign Russian assets, and sleepwalking into a conflict framed as existential without the public mandate or industrial base to fight it decisively. The insistence that this is purely about ‘deterrence’ simply ignores political reality: Putin remains one of the most popular leaders globally, second only to Modi, not because Russians are deluded but because leaders are judged on outcomes for their people stability, wages, energy security and sovereignty while Western elites preside over ageing, indebted societies clinging to a post-1990 worldview that no longer exists. Russia does not need land, resources or conquest; it has all three in abundance. What it seeks is strategic depth and respect and the refusal to acknowledge that reality is not strength, it is denial. The tragedy is not that deterrence failed, but that diplomacy was never seriously tried.
Comments like the one above illustrate the real challenge to Western Democracy – the Greek concept “Amathia” : Apparent Intelligence without Wisdom.
That is a shockingly ignorant comment.
Putin is a totalitarian dictator – it is literally impossible to judge his popularity within Russia. For instance, what happens when an opinion pollster rings up a random voter to ascertain what he thinks? 93% of Russians refuse to answer and slam the phone down in panic, for fear of losing their job or worse. And most of the rest say not what they think, but what they think the pollster wants to hear.
From my personal experience most Russians are now in a state of denial about the war – “it’s not my fault, it’s nothing to do with me, nothing I do or say will make any difference, my life is hard and getting harder, please shut up and let me get on with surviving as best as I can.”
Dear Bill,
I realise that you and your mate are talking your own book with Spitfire but the level of projection here and more generally going on in “western democracy” is off the charts.
History, as written outside of countries controlled by the west, will not be kind to us. Many will wonder why we destroyed ourselves and our continent by simply refusing to talk to people.
However, for us in western europe:
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Welcome to 1984
“Talking my own book”.. perhaps… but if the West (well Yoorp, Oz, Japan and Korea) are to remain democracies and not slip under, then they must defend themselves… the way to avoid war is be prepared and intent to fight it. That’s deterrence. If we do it – it will benefit us all. If not… we will not have long to regret it.
BB
Dear Bill,
I can’t argue with your sentiment about deterrence.
I think it might be illuminating to discuss the wider topics over a bottle of wine, but for now perhaps we should let sleeping piglets lie. (whoops, what a giveaway! ;-) )
Wishing you all the best for the holidays.
PB
Seasons greeting to you and yours, and all those at Spitfire planning for the coming conflicts that appear to be headed our way under the moral decay and clown car buffoonery of the t administration. My hope for 2026 is that the EU will finally take “no” for an answer and forget that Article 5 was ever part of the agreement. In plain talk Europe, “get on with your bad self.”