Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it.
After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya.
The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO countries and, to a far greater extent, the United States.
But now, after a reported 1 million combined dead, wounded, or missing Ukrainians and Russians (the actual figure is probably far higher), the war remains deadlocked with no end in sight.
Putin serially threatens to break the static front with tactical nuclear weapons. The Europeans are tiring. And no one in the United States has come up with a strategy to push back the Russians from either their February 2022 demarcation points or their post-2014 occupation of Ukrainian borderlands.
The result is a lot of disconnects, paradoxes, and mysteries about the war, the Biden administration’s role in it, and the general geostrategic landscape surrounding the conflict.
Ukrainian Election Interference?
Americans are demonized by the Uniparty elites for having doubts about their blank-check support for Ukraine. And while the American people are mostly anti-Putin, they are not always pro-Ukraine.
But why is that so?
For one, we know that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.
Even leftwing Politico reported that Ukrainians in the U.S. gathered opposition research on Trump campaign officials and passed it to the Clinton campaign and thus likely her appendages in government.
In August 2016, at the height of that Trump-Clinton presidential race, Ukrainian ambassador Valeriy Chaly himself wrote an op-ed in the Hill attacking then-candidate Donald Trump for his comments about Crimea.
Ukrainian expatriate and U.S. citizen Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was the catalyst and likely source behind the “whistleblower’s” allegations that led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Yet in retrospect, given subsequent disclosures about the Biden family‘s quid pro quo enrichment, Trump likely had reason to worry about feeding the ongoing Biden family Burisma corruption and collusion with Ukrainian oligarchs.
Via Hunter and Joe Biden, the Bidens really were receiving money from Ukraine in exchange for selling their influence. Joe Biden really did leverage $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. He thereby sought to have fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was looking into the extravagant sums Hunter Biden was receiving from Ukrainian interests. And we know this because Biden later publicly bragged about how he threatened to cut off U.S. assistance unless Shokin was fired.
Vindman himself really was an anti-Trump partisan—and later cut a campaign commercial for the Lincoln Project. He likely had leaked a classified presidential phone call to the so-called whistleblower in order to prompt a third-party induced impeachment of a perceived anti-Ukraine Donald Trump.
He refused to disclose all the parties to whom he leaked the call. (Note that Joe Biden himself in May 2004 put a hold on congressionally approved 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, likely due to concerns of losing the Arab-American vote in key swing state Michigan—a better example of a president subordinating the national interest for his own political reelection agenda.)
Vindman was reportedly involved in a family company (as CEO of Trident Support) trying to facilitate repairs of U.S.-supplied military equipment to Ukraine. His wife recently and callously tweeted of the second assassination attempt on Trump, “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.”
Ukraine’s efforts to compromise prominent Americans, interfere in U.S. elections, and use their American contacts to facilitate arms transfers still continue in outrageous fashion.
On September 23, just 43 days before Election Day, the Biden-Harris administration flew in, at taxpayer expense, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and accorded him secret service protection as he visited the critical swing state of Pennsylvania—where the deadlocked election will likely be decided.
Zelensky and Democrat politicos (no Republican counterparts were invited) toured a Pennsylvania munitions plant making artillery shells likely destined for his Ukraine. One subtext of the visit was that Biden-Harris aid for Ukraine—to be continued or increased by a President Harris—results in jobs for Pennsylvania voters.
In an interview with the left-wing, pro-Biden-Harris New Yorker magazine, Zelensky—who himself has canceled both 11 Ukrainian opposition political parties and scheduled elections, suspended habeas corpus, and censored the media—regrettably went further in his \efforts at U.S. election interference. Zelensky trashed Harris’s rival candidate Donald Trump as someone who “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”
The Ukrainian president attacked even harder Trump’s running mate and vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, as “dangerous” and “too radical.”
Too radical for what or whom? The people of the United States or the Ukrainian hierarchy? Amid a firestorm, Zelensky later hurriedly met with Trump, which unfortunately only further highlighted his poor election timing.
One reason why many Americans are skeptical of helping Ukraine is, well, Ukraine itself—specifically its graft and corruption, its oligarchs’ disturbing history of bribing U.S. influential figures, its interference in U.S. elections, and its dictatorial suspension of human rights, political parties, and elections.
On to Moscow?
Strategically, it is understandable why Ukraine wishes to use European and American planes and missiles to strike depots and supply centers deep inside Russia, given Russia does the same to Ukraine—and focuses far more on civilian targets.
But to equip a proxy to attack far inside a nuclear rival’s homeland was always taboo in the Cold War—and for good reason, given the resulting lowered bar of nuclear escalation.
So, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the wars in the Middle East all respected our ancestors’ Cold War rule: neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. in their numerous proxy wars ever used their clients to attack the homeland of their nuclear opponents with either nuclear or conventional weapons.
When Nikita Khrushchev came close to doing just that by equipping Castro’s Cuba with missiles capable of becoming nuclear-tipped, along with nuclear-carrying strategic bombers that could hit the U.S. homeland, the Kennedy Administration went to Def Con 2.
It quickly blockaded the island. Kennedy further warned the Soviet Union that in case of any Cuban-based attack by missile or plane (conventional or nuclear) against the American homeland, the U.S. would retaliate against Russia itself.
So, we are caught in a very dangerous cycle.
Almost weekly, Putin himself, his generals, Russian politicians, or the Russian state media threaten to respond to attacks inside Russia by resorting either to tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine or strategic nuclear strikes against its suppliers.
In response, our retired generals and intelligence authorities, along with pundits and diplomats—and our de facto commander-in-chief at the press room dais, Kamala Harris—discount these threats as empty bombast. They offer no consideration that what has been mere Russian braggadocio in 2022-2023 (when casualties were in the few hundred thousand and no Ukrainians were fighting inside Russia) might not be so vacuous in late 2024 or 2025. Now casualties have soared by over a million. And Ukrainian forces, equipped with a new arsenal of jets and missiles, currently occupy 500 square miles of conquered Russian territory.
In truth, the West and the U.S. have no strategy for a Ukrainian victory over Russia. Much less do they worry much that a quarter of the Ukrainian population has fled the country, and the military is running out of recruits. The default assumption is to keep fueling the 1 million-man meat grinder to the last Ukrainian and hope that Russia tires first—the sort of non-strategy that the left used to lecture was amoral and senseless in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Why the Ukraine-Israeli asymmetry?
Israel, in many ways, is America’s closest ally. It is a constitutional state and the only nation in the Middle East that respects human rights. Its enemies are our enemies. And it is the target over the last half century of nonstop Arab and Iranian attacks.
Not so Ukraine that separated from Russia in August 1991, and yet still has a checkered history of corruption and authoritarianism.
In the present war, Ukraine has likely become the target of some 8,000-10,000 missiles launched from Russia. Yet that number is still smaller than the some 20,000 projectiles sent into Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.
Israel, like Ukraine, was surprise attacked by its neighbor. And like Russia, Hamas started the war without concern for civilians. Or rather, in efforts well beyond Russian brutality, Hamas deliberately targeted civilians for Dark Age-style murder, torture, mass rape, incineration, beheading, and hostage-taking.
It is hard to outdo Russian wartime savagery, but Hezbollah has accomplished that easily. And unlike post-Soviet Russia, it has blatantly murdered lots of American diplomats and soldiers. Hamas still holds American hostages.
So why does the Biden-Harris administration, and many elites in Washington, treat the two wars so differently? Or more specifically, why do they deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel?
Note that Biden-Harris demand Israeli “proportionality” in responding to Hamas terror. But they encourage “disproportionality” for Ukraine to win the war. (Does America believe Russia is eviler than Hamas?)
They call for ceasefires nonstop in Gaza and the Hezbollah war. Yet do they ever commensurately instruct Ukraine to stop the war and negotiate with Putin?
Biden-Harris insist that Israel text or otherwise notify Gazans or Beirut civilians of any impending Israel attack. Do they demand the same of Ukraine when it shoots off missiles, shells, and drones into Russian-occupied civilian areas?
Netanyahu has formed a bipartisan war cabinet and will adhere to regularly scheduled elections. And yet he is still demonized as an authoritarian by Biden-Harris. Neither showed up for his recent congressional speech. In fact, in 1950s-Latin-American-coup-style, the U.S. government has been trying under the radar to remove the elected Israeli government.
Most certainly, Netanyahu would not be flown, Zelensky-style, by U.S. military transport to tour a Patriot battery facility in Pennsylvania or in any other election-year battleground state.
And if he was used by Republicans in such overtly partisan fashion, Netanyahu would be asked by the left to leave immediately—especially if he gave an interview from a swing state and, say, on Fox News, in which he trashed the Harris-Walz ticket.
We are warned by Biden-Harris that the Gaza/Hezbollah war should stop now, lest it ignite a theater war in which a possible nuclear Iran and a nuclear Israel would exchange missiles and blow up the region.
Yet, Russia is no putative nuclear power. It possesses somewhere between 6,000-7,000 deliverable nuclear weapons. And it has threatened to use them far more often than Iran has.
Ukraine is on the doorstep of NATO and any regional war would endanger America’s NATO allies far more than an Israel-Iranian conflict.
Is the Iran-Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis Axis that has emerged from the war more dangerous than the new nuclear Russia/China/North Korea/Iran symbiosis that is fallout from our massive support for Ukraine?
So why are we lectured nonstop about the dangers of Israeli brinksmanship but almost encourage it on the part of Ukraine?
Do we believe that Putin is more rational and restrained and less likely to go medieval than Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei?
Again, what explains the vast difference in the way we oversee our ally Israel’s war and Ukraine’s conflict with Russia?
Is the explanation anti-Semitism?
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim-American voters in Michigan?
The airbrushing of Middle East terrorists unthinkable of Russian thugs?
The sheer hatred of Russia and Russians, but the pass given to Middle Eastern autocrats?
The absence of a large expatriate community of Russians in the U.S.?
Hating Russians?
The left’s hatred of Putin’s Russia is understandable given Putin’s 2022 aggression, but it’s generic nature is now also becoming obsessive. The loathing of all things Russian helps to explain the above paradoxes and obsessions—even in the trivial sense of Joe Biden in his recent The View appearance wearing a U.S./Ukraine flag lapel in a way he would likely not a U.S./Israel flag counterpart.
There is also the shame and embarrassment of left-wing past naiveté about Putin.
After all, it was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who in 2009 gave us the performance art, red jacuzzi button, mistranslated Russian “reset.” All that hoopla was a direct partisan rebuke for the supposedly too-tough prior Bush administration response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.
Recall that in 2013, Obama and John Kerry stupidly invited Putin back into the Middle East, supposedly to help corral Syria’s WMDs, after a near-35-year absence from the region.
It was also Obama, who, in a hot mic exchange in Seoul in 2012, promised that he would give up critical missile defense in Eastern Europe if Putin would just give him space during his last election. (Again, was that gambit impeachable under our new rules, given Obama clearly sacrificed America’s strategic interests to win temporary calm from an aggressive Russia to help his reelection?)
Both fulfilled their bargains: Putin waited until Obama was safely reelected and then invaded Ukraine in 2014, while Obama happily surrendered the nascent air defense project to protect eastern Europe from enemy missiles.
In contrast to Clinton-Obama appeasement of Russia, Trump killed Russian Wagner mercenaries in Syria. He gave previously Obama-banned offensive weapons to Ukraine. He opposed the Nord Stream 2 German-Putin pipeline. He got the U.S. out of an asymmetrical Russian-American missile deal. He jawboned NATO nations to up their collective defense expenditures by some $100 billion.
Trump also nearly bankrupted Russia by releasing oceans of cheap American oil and increased sanctions on Russian oligarchs. He made it clear to Putin that unfortunate things would follow from an invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s was the only administration of the last four when Putin stayed put within his borders.
As far as the 2016 Russian-Trump collusion, even Mr. Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star” partisan “hunter-killer” cadre of lawyers found no such thing—as compared to the Russian-fed Steele dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton to smear Trump.
There was no “Russian disinformation” either in 2020 when team Biden rounded up corrupt ex-intelligence authorities to lie that Hunter’s genuine laptop was likely Russian fabricated.
So why the left’s hatred of Russians—other than the classic projection of blaming others for its own very disastrous appeasement of Putin that the left itself had inaugurated?
One other reason was that Trump endlessly rubbed left-wing noses in their Russian paranoias, joking that Putin might find Hillary’s missing emails, destroyed while in her custody and under subpoena.
When he was accused by Clinton partisans and hacks of being a “Russian asset” or “Russian poodle,” he deliberately bragged about his “deals” with Putin to inflame his critics even more.
In a larger context, Russians have replaced South African or Iranian villains in Hollywood action movies and popular entertainment. The new big-screen bogeyman is now nearly always a large brute with a shaved head, his torso dotted by orthodox Christian cross tattoos, gap-toothed, an exaggerated Russian accent, surrounded by creepy black-suited mafiosi—and full of racist and sexist hatred for liberal America.
In sum, there is an argument to help Ukraine survive Russian attacks.
But that consensus is daily being eroded by the present beltway messianic crusade for Ukraine, in a manner quite unlike our lukewarm and vacillating support for our far closer ally Israel.
The near-hysterical official Ukrainian narrative requires denying or ignoring the escalating dangers of our sophisticated weapons hitting deep inside Mother Russia, the Somme/Verdun-like endless wastage of over a million youths and counting, and the increasingly anti-democratic and election-interfering nature of President Zelensky and his Ukrainian entourage.
We should strongly support Israel AND Ukraine (despite the greater risk).
But what do you mean by “support Ukraine”? There are different kinds of support.
Funds and arms?
Or approving attacks into Russia itself?
I think the Ukrainians need at this point to accept a negotiated settlement. I think that if he wins the election, Trump will get that done.
Trump wll simply cut off funds to Ukraine, and the war will be over, unless EU countries pony-up to continue on for a while. Putin will get Crimea & Donbas, otherwise vacate Ukraine. Ukraine will be a neutral country with the right of self-defense, and it’s military will train with NATO forces (as did Finland & Sweden pre-NATO), as a deterrent to further Russian aggression. Europe will buy Russian oil & gas again with a portion of proceeds used to reconstruct Ukraine. Current situation is unsustainable for all parties.
Couldn’t we instead of supplying UKR materially formally authorize rather than welcome the country into NATO? Certainly an ideal prospect knowing of a likely regime change looming for the United States by November.
And we should all be alarmed and remain skeptical of an administration that conspicuously undermines the relationship or country traditionally and symbolically maintains with a self determined Westernized Israel.
I was mutually agreed many years ago that the Ukraine would NOT EVER become part of NATO, one of the main reasons for this is the fact that if this were to happen, NATO missiles would be installed in the Donbas and Crimea, putting them about as close as the Russian missiles were to major US targets when in Cuba. After years of NATO and US assurance this would NEVER happen, suddenly after the Victoria Nuland coup in 2014, in the Ukraine, this is precisely what DID happen. Russia protested, then took action when ignored: they crossed the border into the Ukraine.
Remember as well that both the Donbas and the Crimea had been continually, socially, religiously, and linguistically, part of Russia for several centuries, and both had open elections to rejoin Mother Russia. Don’t forget that, as the threats increased along the Russian border and Putin promised a reaction if it continued, he made good on his promise. I believe he would have pulled his troops and equipment back into Russian territory as soon as the threatening war materiél were withdrawn. But the threats remained, and increased.
Wnat would WE do if AMLO’s Mexican military began to amass troops and equipment along our boundary with Mexico, say, near Nogales Arizona, and made credible threats to invade Arizona and New Méxijo? Well, funny thing, this IS happening.. not Mexico’s army just their drug cartels, swarming over that boundary and into OUR nation.. which invaders are welcomed as friends and heroes…..
Americans have been told that Russia has been America’s Bogeyman since….
..the race to the Moon
…Vietnam
…Korea
These were during Republican years
Kennedy was going to pull u.s. out of Vietnam.
McCain was an old school die-hard hater of all things Russian.
Putin is a monster.
Zelensky is not.
Lincoln suspended habeas Corpus as a wartime President and jailed dissenting.
Zelensky is u.s. 13 colonies fighting an Empire.
Biden is not his friend.
‘Minor incursions’ are unacceptable to every dead Ukranian.
Kennedy was not going to pull us out of Vietnam. He escalated the war by sending in ‘advisors” and then lied about it. It’s all in the Pentagon papers.
This analysis misses the role of NATO expansion in the Russia-Ukraine dynamic. “U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
It also ignores the significance of US provocation toward the USSR which led up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. A key precipitating event in that crisis was the placement of US Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In public, Kennedy went eye-to-eye with the Reds and the Reds backed down. The secret deal was the US agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey to gain the removal of USSR missiles from Cuba.
In April of 2022 Secretary of Defense did not state the US objectives in terms of Russian withdrawal, but “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Putin responded by calling US intentions the destruction of Russia.
The West bears a lot of responsibility for the current mess in Ukraine.
VERY interesting about our missiles in Turkey and their missiles in Cuba being a tit for tat arrangement. I well remember watching that whole business unravel in the nightly news, we were literally stocking up on supplies and helps to ride out the pending missile lunches into our own nation.
Dad had served during the war, as had nearly all of my uncles and half my aunts. Mom built ships at Bremerton. (she was convinced she had worked with Rosie the Riveter’s real real identity) All of that and this is the very first I have heard of OUR missiles in Turkey.
Thanks so much for that “Missing Link”. Truth be told, I am really NOT surprised, though. How naif I was back when it happened. Starry eyed, even.
When is looks and sounds and smells like anti-semitism (Jew hating), it is.
According to Wikipedia, the US and NATO countries have given over $175 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2022. We picked a corrupt and inept proxy…time to get out.
What bothers one is the collusion of the USA with corrupt criminal organizations such as in Ukraine
Well there are trillions in natural resources in tat part of the world. Who wants to own Ukraine’s Burisma and sell all the energy to Euroweenies. I know I know. Soros and shell and the Atlantic council. We work with the worst elements all over the world. Look a Ryan routh. He worked for the USA for years. That’s why he never went to prison despite multiple serious charges. We use criminals for their plausible deniability and because nobody will care if we waste them or they take the fall and no more investigations!
That bothers this one, as well… but only a little less than the bothering resulting from our own government corruption and criminality
WHO was it designed and implemented the coup d’etat in he Ukraine back in 2014?
And need I bring up again the corrupt criminal operation involving Burisma and the certain family, pére et fils, who so highly profited from that little fleecing operation?
I don’t understand the vitriol for Russia. It does the same things that other nations and militia groups do to protect their interests, including warfare masquerading as “special military operations.” The United States toppled governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, interfered with elections in Egypt and throughout Latin and South America, and actively and overtly is involved in regime change in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and more. Let’s not forget all that the US does in Africa that harms Africans. I don’t see how Russia and Putin are any more or less evil than other governments around the world. Could you make your next opinion piece about the evil perpetrated by NATO? Just for a little balance?
Too many Americans are will to defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. I’d like to see Ukraine win, but I’m not foolish enough to think that’s possible. The slingshot may have worked in David and Goliath, but Ukraine will certainly run out of cannon fodder before Russia. My dad’s family was from the Hungary side of the Ukraine-Hungary border, spoke Russian and were Russian Orthodox, but I can’t see that continued support for the war will benefit anyone–especially Ukrainians.
David was a righteous man, his adversary was a proud and taunting bully bent upon the destruction of Israel.
Zelensky is a proud and corrupt powerplayer, set into position by OUR corruption in the Nuland Coup. Putin is dedicated to keepig HIS nation safe, yes, safe from the threatening missiles of NATO set upon his borders, in contravention of previous assurances and agreements.
There are things nations must do, things they should do, things they might do and things they shouldn’t do. The first duty of government is to do what it must and the US Gov must solve US problems at border, with economy, with crime, with education, and it is not. Until we do the must-dos commitment to rescue the rest of the world from problems they can but refuse to solve on their own should wait.
“eduction” is NOT a mandatef funcion of our federal government. That falls to the states, and individuals on a local basis. The sooner we get OUR of “education” as a federal mandate the sooner our economy and social health will begin to improve. this is especially so when one cnsiders the incredible LOW to which “education” as meddled with by federal money has sunk..
EXCELLENT as always. Following the money beyond the military-industrial-complex and the artillery shells being autographed in the recent political photo-op; is it true that Ukraine has significantly large natural gas reserves? Have American oil companies been involved in potential exploration? Could such reserves free Europe from dependence on Russian oil? Unlike the rest of Europe, Ukraine allows fracking!
Great points by VDH, particularly as it pertains to Israel, but he fails to mention the Budapest Agreement, executed by the Clinton Administration, without Congressional approval, that seemingly obligates the US, Russia and Great Britain to protect Ukraine’s sovreignty in return for Ukraine surrendering its vast nuclear arsenal to Russia which it did. That Putin subsequently welched on the deal in 2014 by invading Crimea and again in 2020 by its invasion of Ukraine proper is indisputable. So here we are embroiled in a dangerous predicament orchestrated by naive State Department egg heads.
quote: That Putin subsequently welched on the deal in 2014 by invading Crimea and again in 2020 by its invasion of Ukraine proper is indisputable.
You forget about a small “event” that also took place in 2014: a coup d’etat arranged and managed by our very own Victoria Nuland that took out of office a duly elected and much loved sitting President, replacing him with a corrupt puppet firmly ensconced in the back pocket of the coup arranger and by proxy our own US government. THAT was the beginning of arms building on the boundary with Russia… to which Putin at first softly but with increasing volume and energy protested. When his warnings continued to be ignored, and the threat to his own nation’s security were no longer acceptable he MOVED. And why NOT?
I well remember following this situation as it unfolded week by week. I wondered how long,until, not whether or not, Putin would respond in kind. I was also amused at the “horror” when he did do precisely what he had promised to do were the “no NATO nukes close to Russia terms” violated. He was just doing the job his electors had charged him to do: Keep Russia Safe”.
Don’t believe me? Go back, dig up, and read the news reports of that time period.
Another great column, written with nothing but facts. I don’t understand why our leaders think that thumbing their noses at Putin in order to prop up Ukraine. I cannot help but think it has a lot to do with blackmail fodder they have on Biden. I also am furious knowing we will also pay for the rebuilding afterwards, as we did in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. For some reason, we believe we have to stick our noses into other countries constantly. We are currently doing everything we can to unseat Orban, even though he was elected by his citizens, because we don’t like his stance on migrants.
Netanyahu doesn’t give a damn what Blinken or Biden says. He will win this war and maybe change the middle east, which we have been unable to do, even with all our meddling.
Thanks, VDH, you are my hero.
Another treasure summary of the issues surrounding aid to Ukraine vs Israel.
Thank you.
If one did not know any better, it would seem obvious from all our inconsistencies to conclude the US is being run by fools. Oh wait….
and the fools that elected the fools, or counted the votes for them……..
I think of Putin as the modern Mussolini, who is charge of only one of the many fronts of the current war.
Putin is working with China. The Chinese and N. Koreans are aiding the Russians. Not one of these countries cares one whit about how many lives are lost.
There is absolutely no argument to help Ukraine. None. It was promised NATO would never be close to Russia. Have you forgotten about the coup to oust the Russia friendly leader? The U.S. continuously interfere in that region and they are doing it again with their proxy war. The U.S. don’t give a rats behind about Ukraine. Like all Americas allies, they are just patsy’s to be used up and discarded. And I’m surprised you don’t mention that Victor.
While you & I are seriously far apart re. Russian culpability for the Ukraine conflict and many of the facts therein, we are in agreement on the inconsistencies. I would add to your mix the Ukrainian shelling of civilians in DonBass 2014-2022, with our total support – actually training and arming the forces killing the 14,000 civilians who died……………..versus shock – horror and call for cease-fire over civilian Gaza’s dead.
There are a couple of wrinkles that might help explain. We massively mis-calculated many things (just about everything I can see) in Ukraine. One of the Biggies was that, in spite of the fact that our economy is largely financialized, with our most important asset being the $ and its supporting systems, we imposed 16K+ sanctions on Russia, confident that it would bring the country to it’s knees. It not only backfired spectacularly, but made it a national security imperative for almost any non G7 country to find a mechanism for trading outside the $. Then we made it worse by threatening to steal their funds or the interest from their funds, within the western system.
Global reaction to the Middle East war is increasingly negative and with recent actions is going exponential. Those not terribly concerned about the civilians, are concerned with the cost of trade & energy disruptions that could result. Since we are viewed by the world as Israel’s partner, this will serve to accelerate the de-dollarization movement. Interesting times.
Biden put a hold on 2000 lb bombs to Israel in May of 2004? A typo no doubt.
Yeah it literally insane the amount of mental gymnastics you have to do convince yourself this war was for ukraines democracy when it has led them to death and destruction of their own country and they will be in forever servitude to our oligarchs and foreign policies as a proxy state. Imagine if russia or even china did what we did in mexico we would invade them faster than you can say no hablar Español. Bidens quid pro joe made zero sense in reason to hold that billion dollar aid to no prosecute someone because they are corrupt and this happened before Trump was in office and why would he be investigating his son if they are trying to get money from our government other than there really is something fishy going on. This all kind of started in 90s when the Soviet union collapse and we set out a nuclear and chemical weapons disarming project basically turning those biolabs into a clandestine outposts for the cia and clandestine missions to spy on russia and control a coup in ukraine in order to exploit their resources but first we had to provoke a war with them to justify our intrest in ukraine without alarming to the world and us citizens of the nefarious nature surrounding the it. Obama set the stage and biden was the fall guy who lit the fuse along with his crack head son who used his father’s influence in government. They will only protect biden till after the election because he ultimately damaged the democrat party and uniparty swamp that belong to the shadow go
Zelenskyy stuck his foot squarely into his big mouth and had to go groveling to Trump in the aftermath. That Trump listened then stood strong on his stance to end the war shows the true conviction of the man we need to elect in November.
If there are two things we have come to be certain of, it is that democrat politicians are hypocrites and liars! I would say the same thing about most GOP politicians, just to a lesser degree in numbers.