Angus has a couple of short posts re: Ukraine over at his blog.
Perennial commenters can cool their fingers: he has blocked comments, to avoid the inevitable anonymous flame war that will ensue, to a metaphysical certainty.
Rabid knuckleheads (you know who you are) can expect similar treatment here.
We link both posts, because he's batting 1.000 on both of them. A+.
Go. Read. Absorb.
What does Ukraine get out of this:
Shafted.
Fucked over.
Devastated and permanently crippled economically and demographically.
Hung out to dry.
A shred of their former existence.
If Russia decides to call a pause, which is by no means certain, nor even likely.
What does Russia get out of this:
Exposed as a paper tiger.
Hundreds of thousands of dead.
Half their ground combat power destroyed, which will take decades to replace.
A century as a diplomatic pariah.
Proof that crime pays.
The knowledge that they can get away with this the next time they're bulked up.
A third of the former Ukraine.
What does the U.S. get out of this:
Peace with dishonor.
Identified worldwide as a buddy-fucker nation who will throw anyone under the bus if it's expedient, diplomatic assurances be damned.
Watching nuclear proliferation become a growth industry worldwide, especially among the nations who really shouldn't ever get one. But we can't unring that bell. You will see this material again.
There's also little reason for Russia to stop now, and it's unlikely either the US or Ukraine will ever swap any minerals out of the ground for cash until - if ever - the war knocks off.
Trump has zero leverage over Russia now, and Putin has every reason to laugh at any "deal" we suggest.
This is what happens when checkers players play geopolitical chess.
They're all about now, and not so much about the next five things that today doesn't just make possible, it makes inevitable.
POTUS' new callsign should be Shaft.
And not in a Richard Roundtree/Samuel Jackson way.
 |
| Well-played, President Chamberlain. The last time someone pulled off a diplomatic coup like this, Czechoslovakia found out they didn't really need the Sudetenland. And that worked out so well down the line, for everyone. |
The argument is that our security assurances to Ukraine were all a PR stunt, with fake provisions and promises.
Okay, it was all a sham.
But you can't have your cake, and eat it too.
Fake agreements have consequences, and Clintonian word-parsing doersn't unring the bell that the U.S. is underlining, in Ukrainian blood, that we're a buddy-fucker nation, with no intention of following through on any promises we make. You can't say to any number of other nations now, "Oh we were just funning around with those Russian puppets in Ukraine, but our assurances to you are totally different, and you can count on us when SHTF. No, really, we mean it!"
Nobody anywhere on the planet would buy that any more than they'd sell the family cow for Magic Beans.
All you're doing is saying Trump's just following through on the lies of Slick Willy, and the failure to act of Obozo. That's a helluva way to make what we're doing okay. It's an option, sure, but generally, you don't double down on bullshit and ineptitude to prove you're doing right by the country.
And if you do, you're saying we're bullshit and lame, and proud of it.
That has consequences.
And BTW, we didn't get Ukraine to hand over their nukes for nothing but a song and dance. We PAID them to do so, on the strength of those bullshit fake promises, and we even hid the fact, because we didn't want to be on the hook to have to pay Belarus for doing the same thing.
And FTR, when you pay someone to do something, and promise you'll do something in return, and then don't do what you promised, that's called perpetrating a fraud. The fact that you promised it with your fingers crossed doesn't undo the fraudulence.
Using the defense later that "we were just being lying crooks" isn't going to cut any ice with other nations whom we expect to honor their agreements with us, with a straight face.
Countries, like people, only get the reputation they deserve.
Ours is as lying backstabbers, and flying that flag proudly is something we're going to pay more for in the long run than whatever it would cost to keep sending military equipment to Ukraine now, for the short-term, with or without a deal for minerals we'll never see.
When Ukraine delivers nothing, because Vlad isn't going to let that happen either, Ukraine is perfectly justified in saying "Hey, we're liars too; you should be familiar with that concept, since it's how you've always dealt with us."
And every other nation has wised up as well. Some will make appropriate preparations, knowing the US isn't going to be there when it counts.
And some of them are going to take Trump at his behavior, not his word, and drift into Russia's sphere of influence even more.
Well-played, President Chamberlain. This is paying dividends on dividends, and will continue to bite us in the ass worldwide for decades to centuries. We elected Trump, and we're getting Clinton and Obozo as a bonus.
Best wishes selling that to the American electorate in 2028. "Vote for the non-Clinton party with extra Clinton filling! Good luck telling us apart!" That'll play in Peoria.
Which, BTW, is why public opinion of Trump's behavior on this point is running heavily against him. Lincoln's comments about not fooling all of the people all of the time are proving extraordinarily resilient, regardless of political affiliation.
Now, if someone wants to argue that our mendacity - however justified currently - isn't going to have major consequences, both at home and abroad, I wish them the best of luck with that argument. My argument all along is that doing the wrong thing - which is now official policy, and maybe always was - is going to be hugely worse than doing the wrong thing. Turns out DOGE isn't the only government entity showing what lying fuck-ups the US government is. POTUS has decided to illustrate the point as well.
I still maintain that the hardest wounds to heal are cleat marks one makes in their own junk.
Proving that probably shouldn't be official US policy, but here we are.
11 comments:
The interesting bit will be, do the Euros play along? They are posturing like it is a NO, but their will to follow thru has not been tested.
Ah yes! Someone said it before, "There will be peace in our time'" That worked out well. I hope someone in Ukraine is getting their ass kicked for trusting the US and Russia to live up to their agreements,
Aesop,
Our country, before Trump's ascension, was terminally fucked. We were in the final stages of movement into a Marxist Utopia. You KNOW this. The damage was/is so deep that minor changes, tweaks and adjustments, would mean little. Trump is our elected kill dozer. Massive changes, huge cultural adjustments...entirely out of the box activity.
Will it do any good? Who the hell knows? In the end, we are all dead anyway. Cut him some slack...or embrace what the country and the World was heading into BT...Before Trump...wars, rumors of wars, cultural insanity, eventual economic destruction, extreme racial enmity. Failed schools, lost generations. Mistakes will be made, omelets will be made and consumed at a banquet of consequences.
I support the chaos 100%,
I knew Trump might go this route, but had hoped otherwise. He probably does honestly think that he is doing the best thing by everyone - US, Russian, and Ukrainian people alike. I suspect that he, like so many others in this country, are still in thrall to the Neo-Rousseauian notion that peace is the default setting for humanity and that war is the aberration, caused mostly by scheming governments. I've always suspected that a lot of the anti-Ukraine sentiment is driven by a reluctance to admit that the Cold War isn't over and a desire to just get back to the heady days of the 90s, when eternal peace was just around the corner holding hands with the new millennium.
To add to my frustration, by the time this all shakes out I will probably be a bit too old to make a serious bid for the position of Local Post-Apocalyptic Warlord. I want my throne of skulls and harem of mostly naked college women, dang it.
-Grey Fox
Pieces in Our Time.
So, this is a Kobayashi Maru situation......There is no perfect solution.
As much as I detest Putin and would like to see him in a glass coffin, I think Zelenski & pals have skimmed a bunch of US aid into their personal portfolios. That's just my personal suspicions...
IIRC, Ukraine has been the "money laundering 'ho" for much of the western world, ever since the USSR broke up.
Isn't this presuming that Putin is silly enough to play along? I don't think he is but that man keeps surprising us. I was sure there would be scores more died of suddenly all through France and Germany but the poison umbrellas seem to have stayed at home this time.
My suspicion is that Putin will play along, but string it out long enough that he gets everything he wants and forces Trump to exhaust his political capital and/or look like a fool on the world stage before the final deal is made. Trump has staked a lot of his political reputation and his personal ego on his ability to make deals - undermining that on the world stage both hamstrings Trump's ability to act decisively elsewhere (both foreign and domestically) and follows Sun Tzu's advice to seek to irritate an opponent that is short-tempered.
-Grey Fox
It's important to remember that when Clinton signed off on the agreement to protect Ukraine's borders, they were a Russian client state.
Russia wasn't going to EVER invade them because they already had their, I won't say puppet, but very agreeable man in charge. So we never planned for the contingency.
Frankly, most of us forgot.
If we're passing out dishonor here, don't forget that the agreement to defend their borders was broken in 2014 under Obama when Russia took Crimea.
And "defend the borders" in the agreement was to take their side at the UN and condemn the invader in the sternest possible phrasing. There was no agreement to sent money, guns or troops.
But nobody read that part.
It was a worthless guarantee when it was signed and lots of people knew it. But nobody cared because none of the signatories had any reason to think that anyone would ever have a reason to invade Ukraine.
Then Hunter got a job for an oil company...
Noted.
And you can say puppet. Every Ukrainian leader before 2014 was a Russian puppet, and the first leader they had that unquestionably wasn't a Russian puppet is Zelensky.
But false promises have consequences, starting with any 50 other nations with whom we have agreements, a great number of whom were counting on the U.S.' "nuclear umbrella" when they signed nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
Throwing Ukraine under the bus after getting them to surrender ICBMs and nuclear weapons trashes all those agreements whether anyone admits it or not, and we'll be paying - figuratively and literally - for that level of geopolitical shortsightedness for decades. And the time will come when folks will realize giving Ukraine ordnance in return for them shellacking Russia as much as they could would have been then ultimate bargain of the century, while Isolationism 3.0 is going to become the boondoggle of the century, costing us 20x-100x as much, in both blood and treasure, in the long run.
Trump's given Putin no reason to go along with his imaginary deal, and given the Ukrainians every reason to rate the US as only slightly less treacherous than Russia, for all time. That's a Yelp review that's going to have legs.
It's also a breathtaking amount of official stupidity.
The Usual Suspect dumbasses keep trying to paint me as some kind of unreconstructed Cold Warrior, but the actual problem isn't what happened from 1946-1991, it's about how this boneheaded bullshit they're pulling now is going to screw over the entire world for the next 50 years, starting with making nuclear conflicts not only possible, but probably inevitable. And they'll figure that out, just about one SPF 30,000 flash too late.
Fox, would a harem of naked mostly college women suffice? Asking for a friend.
Post a Comment