Ukraine Redux?

Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and major European leaders in an effort to push peace talks on ending the Russo-Ukrainian war. Let me show you what Trump doesn't get about the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

But somehow, Trump managed to give a good show, expressing solidarity with European leaders and getting them to praise him for his relentless pursuit of peace guarantees for Ukraine and added that Vladimir Putin was open to such an idea.

There's just one thing - no one has told Putin that Putin is open to such an idea.

Trump made himself look like the reasonable leader in the room - he even got Zelensky to wear a suit to the White House this time =- and he was in such a good mood, he showed the Europeans his collection of Trump 2028 merchandise.  But all he really did was kick the can down the road - for Putin.  He set up an expectation for peace talks that won't amount to much of either peace or talks.

Little Marco

Quick, answer this trivia question:  Who was the U.S. Secretary of State on August 9, 1974, the day Gerald Ford became President of the United States upon the resignation of President Richard Nixon?

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," you're correct.

Now answer this trivia question: "Who did Richard Nixon appoint as Secretary of State when he became President in January 1969?"

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," nice try, but guess again.

President Nixon, upon taking office in 1969, named Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser but he named former Attorney General William P. Rogers as Secretary of State.  There was just one problem: Rogers had no foreign-policy experience.  He was well-liked in Washington, he was respected, and he was a loyal Republican insider - and, he looked the part.  But Rogers was no diplomat.  That was precisely why Nixon appointed him to head the State Department; Nixon and Kissinger pretty much put themselves in charge of American diplomacy, while Rogers did no more than administer to the State Department's mundane operations.  He was little more than a figurehead.  

Marco Rubio (above) is the William P. Rogers of our time.    

The former two-term-and-change U.S. Senator from Florida has the chops for the job, and after having called Donald Trump a con man in the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign, he had to suck up to the Donald big time to become a serious presidential possibility or, maybe, Secretary of State.  When Rubio was named Antony Blinken's successor at the State Department, many in the diplomatic corps breathed a sigh of relief.  Rubio, a Cuban-American, was a staunch anti-Communist, he was skeptical of Vladimir Putin, and he believed in international alliances.  Certainly he would be a strong foil to Trump's worst impulses.

I used past tense to describe Rubio's qualities for a reason; that Marco Rubio is gone.  He demonstrated that in that awful meeting between Trump, James David Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, being able to only watch as Trump and Vance berated Zelensky and scolded him for acting in bad faith while the United States was trying to get the war between Russia, the aggressor, and Ukraine, the victim, to end.  Oh, and slump in into his seat at the sight of such a spectacle.

Perhaps we expected too much from Rubio.  Bear in mind that Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from international agreements and institutions as soon as he was back in office, before Rubio was even confirmed as Secretary of State.  And once so installed, Rubio was clearly made to understand in no uncertain terms that he was to be an errand boy for the real foreign-policy team in the White House - Trump and Elon Musk.  Small wonder that Rubio and Musk ended up having a shouting match with each other in the White House just recently. 

William Rogers was no more than a pencil pusher at State Department headquarters.  Rubio doesn't appear to be even that.  And unlike Rogers or the avuncular Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State, Rubio doesn't even look the part.  He is indeed . . . Little Marco.  

When Marco Rubio sank into his seat in that fateful- Trump-Vance-Zelensky Oval Office meeting and watched his soul escape, he was no longer Secretary of State.  He was a diplomatic . . . corpse.   

Doom

After Trump and Vance bullied and ridiculed Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday . . .

. . . it was obvious that the wrong president got kicked out of the White House.

They characterized Zelensky as an ingrate for not being thankful enough for aid to Ukraine in their ongoing war with Russia - a lie - and they insisted that he had no leverage to end the war on his terms and so therefore he had to cede territory to their overlord, Vladimir Putin.  Trump says he's acting in the interest of peace.  Let me remind you that even the devil himself sometimes presents himself as a man of peace.

It doesn't matter that Democratic lawmakers - who have even less leverage than Zelensky - all joined world leaders in solidarity for Ukraine and against Trump.  Trump is the one in charge and, to the world, is America.   

Meanwhile, Trump has been gutting Social Security (Martin O'Malley quit as commissioner in the nick of time), has been gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (if New Jersey gets another Sandy, we'll find out too late), got Romania to free the Tate brothers (MAGA extremists involved in human trafficking), caused a rift between himself and the leaders of Britain and France when they visited the White House (on two separate occasions), and "released" files pertaining to his buddy Jeffrey Epstein that turned out to be phone logs put out four years earlier (I can't think of something to write in parentheses here!).

March is certainly coming in like a lion in America.

I don't know how long his blog can go on.  Not because I'm afraid of Kash Patel sending a goon squad to my house to arrest me, but because keeping up my commentary here is so exhausting. 😟

This Is Not Détente

Détente - that charming French word every American knew in the 1970s, which referred to a thawing of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.  While the period of détente is generally thought to have started with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the spirit of amicability between the two superpowers started as early as June 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met at a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey and sought to ease tensions over the fate of Vietnam and to cool tensions in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Israeli Six-Day War.  Once Nixon succeeded Johnson, détente flowered nicely, resulting in a couple of arms-limitation treaties, the Helsinki Accords, and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project space mission.  There was a reason why many of us Generation Xers didn't worry about nuclear war in the 1970s and why even a few of us didn't know anything about nuclear weapons.  Détente was it.

Donald Trump came to power in 2017 in a different era.  The Cold War was over, the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union had split into separate countries, and Russia - the largest Soviet republic and the republic that had more or less created the Soviet Union - had tried democratic government under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, but economic hardships led to the autocratic Vladimir Putin a return of tensions between post-Soviet Russia and the West.  Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in part because he wanted to stabilize Russo-American relations. As Trump himself said, it made sense to seek better relations with the other major nuclear power on the planet.  That is, détente. 

Fast forward to 2025.  The current Russo-American relationship is not détente.  It's more like an alliance.  Trump and Putin are dealing behind and sometimes in front of the scenes to bring an end to the war in Ukraine in a way that benefits everyone but the Ukrainians, hence their absence in the talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to end the Russo-Ukrainian War - a war Trump erroneously claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky started.  The "peace plan" being framed is not a friendly gesture in the way that Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 was.  It's a collaboration, and the objective isn't peaceful space exploration.

At the least, the Riyadh talks parallel the Munich Conference of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was all too happy to let Hitler take over the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakian representatives in the talks - not to end a war but to prevent one, though Chamberlain's goal then was the same as Trump's is now - "Peace in our time."  But at least Chamberlain had no love for Nazi Germany and had no desire to collaborate with Hitler to create a new European order.  The deal Trump and Putin are trying to hammer out would not only give Russia the Russian-speaking Donbass area of Ukraine but entitle the United States to 50 - five-zero - percent of Ukrainian mineral rights to compensate for the money the U.S. has spent to aid Ukraine in the past three years.  This isn't Munich in 1938 - this is Moscow in 1939, when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a nonaggression pact that secretly divided eastern Europe between the Nazis and the Soviets. 

Trump has made it clear - he wants the United States and Russia to be allies, not just partners.  Neither Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, nor Jimmy Carter, whose death two months ago spared him the knowledge of what a Trump Mark Two regime would be like, would recognize this as détente.

They would call it "sleeping with the enemy."  

And Ronald Reagan, whose election not just signaled the end of the seventies but the end of détente, would call it "sleeping with the evil emperor."

Europe Rises, America Falls

Having not experienced an age of antiquity, a medieval period, or a Renaissance, and having broken all ties with our mother country, which has experienced all that, the United States has long lacked the maturity or the wisdom to be a world leader.  This was evident as soon as the U.S. replaced Great Britain and France as the leading power of the West in the late 1940s, when the Chinese Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland to Taiwan and the leading paranoiacs in Washington rhetorically asked, "Who lost China?", as if a country so old even its laundry secrets date back to antiquity was ever ours to lose.  The one thing that gave us legitimacy as a world leader was our values system - our commitment to the rule of law, our generosity to other countries in the form of the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development, and our support for international health and education standards - but most of all our commitment to other countries fighting for their freedom and for their sovereignty.  Yes, we made some blunders - overthrowing democratically elected socialist governments in Latin America, invading Iraq - but overall our commitment to freedom remained strong.

Not . . . any . . . more.

This past week, American leaders, from the Orange Man in the White House to his vice presidential lackey to the drunk running the Pentagon (replacing a brilliant black man like Lloyd Austin with Pete Hegseth to lead Defense is like a '60s oldies radio station playing Sam Cooke records switching to a '90s oldies format that plays Michael Bolton covers of Sam Cooke songs), have made it clear that they will no longer back Ukraine in its fight against Russia.  Not because we can't afford it, or because we care about the carnage in the war, but because . . . we just don't want to.  Our so-called leaders have decided that a commitment to a free and democratic Ukraine and a fair and just peace for Ukraine and for all of Europe is no business of ours.  This is the same country that never recognized the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was one of the original republics (though not by choice).  This is the same country that, until President Biden was gone, continued to commit to helping Ukraine in its fight against Vladmir Putin.  Trump, rather than redouble American efforts to aid the Ukrainians, chose instead to have a summit with Putin for which neither Ukraine nor the European Union were to be consulted, to discuss a peace deal that neither Ukraine nor the European Union support - one that would support Russian claims to Ukrainian territory.  

Oh yeah, and Americans would get the rights to half of Ukraine's mineral resources.  Trump tried to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a document to that effect, but Zelensky refused.  Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth reaffirmed Russian claims to Ukrainian territory and its own regional interests by saying it was inconceivable that Ukraine regain its land from before the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and should not allowed to join the European Union or NATO.  (So, even while Trump and Putin were acting like Ribbentrop and Molotov in pilfering Eastern Europe, Hegseth was appeasing the Russians for peace in our time while in . . . Munich.)

Now the Europeans, with encouragement from President Zelensky and leadership from President Emanuel Macron of France, are planning to combine their military forces to come to Ukraine's aid.  Great Britain - no longer an EU member but still having an interest in Continental affairs - has committed more aid to Ukraine.  The nations of Europe are banding together to help Ukraine because they no longer trust us anymore.  Why should they?  A plurality of us just put Trump back into the White House and he's still getting broad support in the polls.  Not only is America withdrawing from its international commitments, American voters seem to be just fine - happy, even - with that.  The Europeans knew that Trump's return was inevitable, largely, because they've long known what I said at the beginning of this post - Americans are not mature enough and wise enough to lead the world, and the large support Trump enjoys among voters signified to them that we were no longer committed to a value system - the one thing that legitimized as as a superpower in the first place.  

When Joe Biden assumed the Presidency in 2021, he famously said, "America is back!"  To which world leaders replied, "But for how long?"  The answer - four years.  And even if "America is back"  in 2029 should a Democrat be elected President, the rest of the world won't want us back.  We're too unlearned and too foolish, too mercurial and too unstable, The question is no longer whether the European Union should lead the free world . . . they must lead it!   Because not only will Trump not lead it . . . he's too busy working with Musk to make sure we're no longer part of it. 

What the House of Representatives Did This Week

The U.S. House of Representatives continues to be very busy as it concludes the first session of the 118th Congress.  Which is precisely why the House didn't have time to vote on badly needed aid to Ukraine to the tune of $61 billion, despite a live-and-in-person plea from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to House Speaker Mike Johnson, or cut a deal with President Biden on border security.

What was so urgent that they had to put aside such important business? They had to vote on an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, which passed 221-212, based on evidence of . . . nothing. 

I think I'll check my passport now . . ..

Surprise, Surprise!

 The trip that people never said would happen happened.

President Biden left Washington by plane in the dead of night and then, after a stop in Germany, landed in Poland, where the President boarded a train - a favorite way to travel of his - to Kyiv, where he met President Zelensky to stress his and the United States' commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty.  People had pleaded with Biden to make the trip, but the White House insists that it was too dangerous.  So long after everyone gave up on the idea, Biden took the initiative.

It's been a real boost to the people of Ukraine, where they've held off the Russian advance for about four months and are possibly ready to strike in a counteroffensive.  Biden's visit to Kyiv has made it clear that the West's commitment to Ukraine is real and unrelenting.    

To respond to the inevitable complaint from some Republicans that this was a shameless publicity stunt, I recall George Walker Bush showing up in Iraq in a surprise visit to the troops on the first Thanksgiving of the war in Iraq that Bush started.  He also presented a turkey to the servicemen, which, as I recall, was as fake as the reasons for going to war in Iraq.   

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United States last week to confer with President Biden and address a joint session of Congress.  In his speech to Congress, in which he wore army fatigues he extolled the virtues of freedom and vividly illustrated how the people of Ukraine have fought the Russians to preserve Ukrainian national sovereignty and how continued American support for Ukraine would benefit not just Ukraine and the United States but Europe and the entire world, as it would strengthen democracy in the world and also the global order.

"Your money is not charity.  It's an investment," Zelensky said.

You know, this guy can really communicate to people.  If he hadn't gotten into politics, he might have had a good future in show biz. 😉

The speech was well-received by members of Congress, even many Republicans.  But Republicans such as Lauren Boebert - who wanted to know what the money the U.S .was giving to Ukraine was going to and why we couldn't spend the same money to keep migrants out of the U.S. - and Matt Goetz were too busy checking their cell phones for orders from Trump - or Putin.  As far as they were concerned, Zelensky might as well have been reading  a chapter "The Crying of Lot 49."  

Remember, they're part of the incoming House Republican majority that's going to be deciding on future aid to Ukraine.

Putin is licking his chops. 😢

Welcome To the Club

It's official: The once-neutral countries of Sweden and Finland have been invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will be fully initiated in a few months. President Biden was able to get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to agree to the expansion of NATO despite Erdoğan's misgivings about letting them join over concerns of Kurdish terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) living in exile in both countries.  And the Turkish leader gets new American fighter jets in the deal.

Leaving that aside, this is what President Biden would call a big f**king deal.  Sweden, historically neutral, has not been in war since 1814, meaning that none of its veterans are alive today.  There are also dead soldiers in Finland; they're all Russian, causalities of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940.  Their abandonment of neutrality changes things dramatically.  Their proximity to the Baltic Sea will make Russian naval exercises there much more difficult, and now a NATO member - that would be Finland - shares a border with Russia that is 810 miles long, longer than the borders Russia shares with the Baltic States and Poland, all NATO members, put together.  This is precisely what Vladimir Putin did not want.

Oh, yeah, with St. Petersburg at the end of the Gulf of Finland, a body of water situated between Finland itself to the north and Estonia to the south, could make the city's maritime access, umm, complicated. Putin, who calls the city formerly known as Leningrad home, must be glad that the Russian capital has long since been moved to Moscow.

The only wrinkle is that Ukraine - the Russian invasion of which was the catalyst for NATO expansion in Scandinavia - has wanted to join NATO and has been held back, being told that it must go through a process.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that the Ukrainian people have paid for NATO membership with four months of war with Russia.  But, despite more American shipments of weapons to Ukraine, the country will not likely join NATO until after the war is over,  Because an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all, and if Ukraine joined NATO tomorrow, the alliance would be obliged to send troops their to face the Russians.

And you know what would happen after that?  World War III.  

Two Ukraines?

Vladimir Putin, realizing that the war un Ukraine that he started is now going badly (very badly), says that he considers the first phase operations to be a success, and now he's concentrating on what he really wants - two independent states in the eastern separatist region.

So, naturally, he attacked Lviv, which is in the western part of the country,  with missiles.

Now Putin is talking about partitioning Ukraine into two countries, a western republic that could join the European Union and an eastern Republic aligned with Russia.

Yeah, how did that plan work out for Germany?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is hoping to talk directly with Putin, but he has vowed not to cede one square centimeter of territory to the Russians.  Good for him.

And yes, Joe Biden is right, Putin does have to go! Time for another Russian revolution! 

Mr. Moto Risin'

Former National Security Council member Tim Morrison, below - whose name forms the words Mr. Moto Risin' when you re-arrange the letters - was supposed to be the best witness against impeaching Donald J. Trump, in the House Intelligence Committee's hearings, but even though he didn't see anything wrong with Trump's contacts with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, he had to check with lawyers thrice over it.  He also added that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland undercut the usual National Security Council leadership structure was subverted by Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, adding that he "decided to keep track of what Ambassador Sondland was doing. I didn’t necessarily always act on things Gordon suggested he believed were important."  And this was a witness Republicans wanted to have testify to get Trump off the hook.

Mr. Moto risin' . . .

Also, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and Pence aide Jennifer Williams both said at they distinctly heard Trump try to force Zelensky into opening an investigation into the Bidens, and Vindman - an immigrant who made it clear that he was putting country over loyalty to Trump while expressing a heartfelt appreciation for his adopted homeland - said that Trump's actions were "inappropriate" and "likely to have significant implications" for national security. "I couldn’t believe what I was hearing," he said of the July 25 telephone call. "My worst fear of how our Ukraine policy could play out was playing out."

Mr. Moto risin' . . .

Also, Kurt Volker, Mr. Trump’s former special envoy to Ukraine - like Morrison, a witness Republicans asked for - said he was out of the loop with regard to Trump’s dealings with the Ukrainians, saying that he was unaware of "any linkage between the hold on security assistance and Ukraine pursuing investigations." He added that Trump's paranoia about the Biden issue and the conspiracy theory implicating Ukraine for meddling in the 2016 election were "not things that we should be pursuing as part of our national security strategy."

Got to keep on risin' . . .

But, when all is said and done, Trump will not only be acquitted, he will also be re-elected.  Because Mrs. Warren is rising.  Elizabeth Warren is rising in the polls in California and in a dead heat with Joe Biden, perhaps the only Democrat who could beat Trump - at least until Trump smeared him with such fantastic success.  Looks like Warren, while not an L.A. woman, will get the nomination with her own rise in California and lose to Trump badly next November for being way too liberal at a time when the Democrats need a moderate presidential candidate.

America is falling.

Tell Me I'm Not Dreaming!

My, oh my, oh my, what have we here?

Donald John Trump, the man currently calling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington his home, called the president of Ukraine to say that he could get the missiles he wanted for the Ukrainian armed forces provided he try to . . . dig up dirt on a political opponent?  And Trump's bragging about it?

In case you have been under a rock lately, Trump did just that, and a whistleblower who remains anonymous filed a compliant that the Trumpster was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" by trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden's son and especially as to whether the former Vice President inappropriately intervened in Hunter Biden's affairs on his behalf.  Instead of getting Biden in hot water - who was in trouble already because of Elizabeth Warren's surge in Democratic presidential primary polls - Trump got himself into deep rhymes-with-voodoo.  This story was all Nancy Patricia Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, needed to allow a for an impeachment inquiry to go forward.  And although this allows House Democrats to get information they'd tried to obtain before on semi-unrelated matters, Pelosi is keeping the focus squarely on Trump's attempts to have Ukraine influence the 2020 presidential election - because the American people can understand that!

You know Trump is in trouble when even House Democrats from vulnerable swing districts - including my congresswoman, Mikie Sherrill - support an impeachment inquiry.  Thanks to Trump's brazenness, a majority of House members - not just a majority of House Democrats, a majority of House members (though all but one of them are Democrats) - now support the inquiry.  House Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler's investigation into Trump is no longer a sideline.  It's his main business. However, Adam Schiff, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will be doing a good deal of heavy lifting, with this involving national security and all . . .

And we've already found out this much - Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr tried to lock down the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call and remove it from the computer file where transcripts to calls to foreign leaders are stored.

And what does this all mean for Joe Biden?

Well, it depends on how he handles it.  Given that the American people are in no mood for a bold liberal experiment to make the United States more like a European country, with all of the nice things such a country has, Biden, whose most radical policy proposal is to modernize Amtrak, is likely still the best shot the Democrats have to beat Trump.  The stiff challenge he currently faces from Elizabeth Warren is less about his son's business dealings than it is about his own mistakes and missteps.  Bear in mind, though, that there is no evidence that Hunter Biden did anything wrong or that his dad tried to help him or obstruct justice in any way.  It's just a rumor.  And if it is in fact the case that there's nothing to see here, Biden should just come out and say so and then move on.

He didn't do so well, though, when a Fox News reporter asked him about Hunter and the former Vice President tried to do what Trump always does - change the subject.  I winced when he dodged the question, recalling Gary Hart's arrogant attempt to dodge the question as to whether he committed infidelity when reporter Paul Taylor asked it.  And if Biden wants to nip this in the bud, the last thing he should do is respond with a carefully crafted, lawyerly statement - as Hart had done with his sex scandal - because first of all, Biden is incapable of doing that anyway, and second of all, there'll likely be reporters who can find an opening to go after him on, as Paul Taylor did after Hart denied having done anything "immoral" with the future Trump supporter who went into his Washington townhouse.  ("Do you think adultery is immoral?"  "Yes."  "Have you ever committed adultery?"  You know the rest.)

My guess is that Biden will be fine.  After all, there's more evidence against Trump trying to get a foreign government to look into an alleged illegality on the Bidens' part than there is of the allegation.  Just as long as Biden's denial, whatever form it may take, isn't plagiarized from someone else.

Yes, I went there . . .

Oh, was there a United Nations General Assembly this week?