Billionaire plutocrat George Soros has declared that Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is “inevitable” and the world must prepare to move on to its “biggest problem” — climate change.
Taking to the pages of the Irish Examiner, the convicted insider trader penned an article titled ‘Russian defeat is inevitable, and will allow world to focus on our real problem — Climate change’.
Soros emphasised “[big] changes… in the global climate system”, claiming that “because of increased human interference, the separation between the Arctic climate system and the global climate system no longer prevails” — a somewhat strange way of describing the situation, given the Arctic is very much part of the globe.
The financier seemed put out that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was distracting world leaders from these weighty matters — although he did at least refrain from bemoaning the climate impact of war and efforts to ramp up military production — but expressed confidence that the conflict would not preoccupy them for long, with Russia’s defeat being “inevitable”.
“I am aware, of course, that a number of reputable publications have published articles that paint a much more dismal picture of the war’s progress. How can they be reconciled with the upbeat view that I hold? Only by postulating a successful disinformation campaign,” Soros suggested — the possibility that he might be wrong apparently not even entering the equation.
“The defeat of Russian imperialism will have far-reaching consequences for the rest of the world. It will bring huge relief to open societies and create tremendous problems for closed ones. Most importantly, it will allow the world to concentrate on its biggest problem, climate change,” he concluded, in words that might be considered tone-deaf by those in Ukraine who believe that rebuilding their country and supporting veterans, war invalids, war widows, and orphans might be more immediately pressing concerns once the fighting is over.
Much of Soros’s article seemed concerned with burnishing his own credentials as a geopolitical soothsayer, emphasising that “most of the important predictions I made [at the Munich Security Conference] a month ago about the war — including that a powerful Ukrainian spring offensive will decisively turn the tide — are likely to come true,” for example.
Soros was once (in)famous as a major financial backer of leftist causes, either directly or through his so-called civil society organisations, funding multiple district attorney candidates in the United States, the open borders lobby in Europe, and efforts to overturn Brexit in the United Kingdom, among other things.
He was also notorious among his detractors for making various bizarre, megalomaniacal statements, such as his frank admission that he had “fancied myself as some kind of god” from an early in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance — a source of considerable mental anguish until the accumulation of his vast fortune allowed him to live out his “fantasy”.
Now 92 years old, however, Soros is less of a visible presence on the world stage than he once was, with World Economic Forum supremo Klaus Schwab — a relatively youthful 84 — having largely displaced him as the public face of moneyed globalism.