@Twiface
I find what DOGE is doing currently to be highly amusing. The illegalities that are being revealed–like, for example, USAID using the Tides Foundation to launder money for Antifa, violating the Hatch Act and the Dobbs Act simultaneously–are blackly hilarious, but until I see some Senators, former Presidents, and NGO board members doing the perp walk in the shiny bracelets on CNN, it’s just entertainment.
I am more concerned with the direction Trump is taking with foreign policy. I will preface this by saying that our European “allies” in NATO have needed a callout for 50+ years now, and it was well past time for the US to rip off that particular band-aid. If anything I don’t think Vance called them out for imprisoning political dissidents nearly enough times–it’s the sort of thing Russia and the CCP do, and I thought the whole thing about the US is that if we were in the business of propping up dictators and despots we’d be no better than our enemies. As for the EU, it was founded with the intent that its international currency would supplant and replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the currency in which crude oil is sold. In other words its purpose from the very beginning was to wage economic warfare against the US. The US government should have treated it as an enemy from its inception instead of ignoring it until it started cancelling elections in member nations when bureaucrats in Brussels didn’t like the outcome, which is CCP level fuckery.
But I am deeply alarmed by his open hostility towards the Ukrainians, who have so far as I know done nothing to deserve it. You’d think they’d started a war by invading a neighboring country–oh, wait, that was Putin. Worse still are his extortionate demands for mineral rights in Ukraine, for which he appears to be offering nothing whatsoever in exchange, just a gleeful “stick ‘em up, gimme ya wallet, or else.” It recalls the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact. This sudden 180 degree turn against a nation to which a succession of Presidents had made grave and solemn promises makes the US look fickle, weak, and stupid. It makes it clear that no leader anywhere on Earth can trust one word a US President says about anything. If that was his intent he succeeded. If it was not, it was the biggest unforced error in US foreign policy in the past century and I have no idea what motivated it. Okay, I know, Tucker Carlson is telling the world that Volodomyr Zelynskyy is wearing a Hamburgler costume and backing a U-Haul truck up to Fort Knox and ordering cartoon Minions to load it up with gold bars, but that’s straight up Kremlin propaganda. No one takes it, or Tucker Carlson, seriously, and only a tiny number of lunatics even pretend to.
The morality of the conflict in Ukraine is very clear-cut, that Putin is the aggressor is very clear-cut, and in the US, at least, support for the Ukrainians was one of very few issues to enjoy almost universal public support from almost everyone across the entire political spectrum. The only ones who object are Code Pink and neo-Nazis. And no, Russia doesn’t get veto power over the foreign policies of its neighbors–the USSR attempted to conquer and enslave the entire world, they lost, and the Russian rump state got off so lightly that they feel up for a second try.
Trump was inaugurated with widespread acclaim and came into office with more political capital than any President since Reagan, maybe even since Eisenhower. Spitting in the Ukrainians’ faces, when a few short years ago he was happy to begin arming them in the first place, with things like Javelin missiles before the war, and having the Navy help train Ukrainian combat pilots, amounts to piling up that political capital and setting it on fire.
If Trump cuts off aid, and Russia gobbles up Ukraine, the reprisals against the Ukrainian people are going to be Biblical. The Russian newsmedia, all of which is state-owned and state-controlled, all of which is state propaganda, has called for genocide. There have already been discoveries of enormous mass graves, whenever the Ukrainians manage to retake ground. The human cost has already been horrific, and it’s going to get much worse. And Putin is not going to stop. Putin is a psychopath and a war criminal. He has been invading and annexing neighboring nations, and/or setting up complaint puppet governments that conscript their own people by the hundreds of thousands and send them to Russia, where they are handed a rusty hundred-and-twenty-year-old Mosin-Nagant rifle, five rounds of corroded ammunition, and a tattered mismatched set of Soviet surplus fatigues, then cattle-prodded into a frozen ditch in Luhansk to die. Putin has been saying ever since he took power that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was “the greatest tragedy of modern times” and made clear his intent to recreate it. The Baltic States are next on the menu, and then Poland and Finland. And Trump is already telling Europe that they’re on their own.
Every nation in Europe that shares a common border with Russia is certain to start up a nuclear weapons program of its own, if they haven’t already. If they don’t, they’re fools. I don’t think that makes the world safer, or America safer, but Trump did not ask my opinion. This isn’t what I voted for. What the fuck, man?
