Sometimes my sarcasm pencil is not as sharp as it could be and I dive in thinking my pencil is fully loaded when I forgot to change the magazine.
I just want to make sure there is no misunderstanding as to my position on the shift in Europe and NATO towards life without the U.S. No right minded person would want Europe to decouple on defense from the US, it’s not good for either party. Unfortunately, we have reached a point where trust has left the building.
When it comes to European security and the support of an ally against the aggression of an adversary of both Europe and the US, NATO simply can’t afford to take chances. Russia is led by a war criminal indicted for crimes that include murder, rape and the execution of men and young boys. Ukraine is the innocent party and Russia the aggressor. There is no ambiguity, these are the simple FACTS.
The President of the United States implied Ukraine started the war and declared Zelenskyy was a ‘dictator’, by directly parroting the talking points of the Kremlin. This has ushered in a new era where 80 years of peace under the most successful military alliance for defense has been fractured. This for me, defines a potential beginning of the end, for transatlantic military co-operation.
Imagine if Winston Churchill had called the Emperor of Japan in 1943 and claimed America was responsible for bombing Pearl Harbor. Then suggest Japan retain all the Pacific Islands they had annexed? That’s EXACTLY what Trump is doing today behind the preposterous fig leaf of ‘peace’.
Trump is looking at this, not through the lens of appeasement, but rather as purely an economic opportunity. It has nothing to do with peace, it’s about profit with the added bonus of delivering political retribution against the man whose unwillingness to lie about his attempted quid pro quo phone call in 2019, led to his impeachment. Trump continues to protest there was no Russian collusion or interference, despite evidence uncovered to the contrary. This is the man who believed the words of a communist leader of America’s oldest adversary, over his own security services.
There is a constant MAGA drumbeat of attacks insisting Trump wants peace. They act as zombie postal workers for Trump’s betrayal campaign. The reality could not be further from the truth. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with economic opportunity. Trump wants the rare earth minerals and he will do ANYTHING to get them. He doesn’t care how many innocent Ukrainians die. He actually believes the more deaths there are, will provide him with more leverage to force Zelenskyy to agree to his extortion demands.
Trump is a sociopath. He’s simply focused on the economic objective. He even sent a team to meet Ukrainian opposition leaders, in the hope he could organise a political coup to remove Zelenskyy. This is something Putin has been unable to achieve despite numerous assassination attempts since his illegal invasion three years ago.
The claim from MAGA, that Europe wants war is absolute nonsense. What Europe and a coalition of the willing want, is peace through strength. The US could deliver that today. Instead, Trump decided to fight an economic driven proxy war through Russia, in order to extort an ally whose solders died supporting America in their war on terror in Iraq. This is not speculation, it’s a FACT. Once Trump decided to freeze already appropriated military aid and refuse to provide battlefield intelligence, he became complicit in the murder of innocent Ukrainians.
Europe and its allies do NOT want war, but neither are they prepared to allow Putin to absorb Ukraine. Anyone who understands the history of persecution Ukrainians suffered under the Soviet Union, knows the danger of allowing Ukraine to fall.
Aside from the geopolitical shock, the army of refugees it would create would be catastrophic.