Trump obviously spouts a considerable amount of boastful bullshit. Concerning the Ukraine situation, the biggest geyser is definitely that Putin wouldn’t have intervened if he was president back in 2022. It’s true that the intervention happened under Biden, but it was an effort that spanned every presidency since the end of the Cold War.
Clinton provided the false assurances that NATO would move no closer to Russia’s borders, while it continued to expand through the terms of his successors all the way to Finland under Biden. During this time, the NGOs and influence networks recently exposed by the USAID scandal laid the groundwork for the coup and civil conflict that took place in 2014 under Obama.
From there, an outright arming of Ukraine to the teeth by NATO began in earnest which continued through Trump’s first administration. He was probably kept in the dark about just how much was going on and to what end, but this was on his watch.
It was only by early 2022 that NATO had deemed Ukraine ready to take down the breakaway Russian republics in Donbass in order to force Putin’s hand. His reaction was intended as a pretext for sanctions to collapse the Russian Federation’s economy.
Ukraine really just needed to impede the Russian military while the sanctions took effect overnight. This was the military objective behind arming it in the first place. There was such confidence in the plan that the Biden Administration didn’t even wait for it to work before calling it a win. The entire Western media apparatus followed suit. That didn’t age well:
Trump implies that he would’ve deterred Putin, but the whole point was provoking Putin. Biden didn’t genuinely try to deter Putin, either. He had no credible conventional means short of bluffing on World War 3. If Trump had been president, the same timeline would’ve come to fruition, and he’d have nothing more than the same bluff in his toolkit.
Where Trump’s strength lies in this regard is that he never wanted to collapse the Russian Federation so his administration can claim rather credibly that this conflict wouldn’t have happened because he wouldn’t have provoked it. His functionaries can also point out the obvious fact that there’s nothing which can stop the Russian military from prevailing in Ukraine.
Trump is the only major figure outside the bipartisan consensus which had been parroting in unison to the American public a narrative that was utterly detached from reality. This gives him the unique capability of tossing it aside and washing his hands of the disaster. This would be a tricky maneuver for a regular politician who’d been saying that Russia was losing a “full-scale unprovoked invasion” for the past three years.
Western Europe doesn’t have anybody like him waiting in the stable. The political system is stocked with establishment stooges who simply take orders from Washington. They do whatever they’re supposed to do, from opening up their borders to damaging their economies by cutting off invaluable trade with Russia.
They’ve also managed to sacrifice whatever military prestige they had left. Lord Dannatt, the former British Army Chief of Staff, has felt compelled to decry the prospect of even a modest deployment as a farce. Germany has been outed as a boutique producer of military hardware that’s quickly annihilated on a modern battlefield, and French prestige has been so damaged that even the Africans aren’t intimated by them anymore. France’s de facto empire in Africa is falling apart.
The existential problem faced by Western European leaders is that because they’re stooges without a moral compasses or loyalty to their own people, they simply have no feasible plan for what to do now that Trump is dumping the Ukraine debacle and throwing them under the bus.
All they can do is double down on the past three years, but they don’t have anything with which to double down. Sending more money into the black hole and announcing more impotent sanctions? Their position is that Ukraine should have a seat at the table, but they don’t have a seat at the table. Trump’s counterparty is Putin. Everybody else is a patsy.
Starmer is saying that Russia doesn’t hold all the cards, but the UK doesn’t hold any cards. The negotiations are exclusively between the USA and Russia. That’s the hard reality of power. To be honest, I have no idea about how to successfully navigate being one of the fall guys in this situation. I guess I’d just resign and say I needed to spend more time with my family so I could spend more time with my scotch.
This is an interesting vignette that demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of these stooges who call themselves democratic European leaders. If you every find yourself hating your job, take comfort it doesn’t require you to be this reprehensible and pathetic at the same time.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
If the American Empire would have keep Afghanistan together as militarily operation, would the Chess Board have played out differently?
Always put your knights out first on the battlefield!
Excellent articles Tom!
Maybe the orders that the US gives to Europe is actually from Tel Aviv to make it look like we are dictating them.