Trump pulled off a great con during the 2024 campaign. He convinced fools like me he would end forever wars and would stop putting sticks in the eyes of the Russian bear and the Chinese drag. Instead, he's just another member of the United War Party.
If Trump wanted peace it would have been easy. Russia was ready to stop the war, but the people who want endless was kept demanding crap like crimea.
It's the same with MAHA and Kennedy... If he wanted to put a dent on the scams, he could easily have stopped the covid emergency that his predecessor easily extended to 2029.
But he still won't and now we have proof of his two faced behavior... They focused on Tylenol in the months long fake study.
It's one thing to be held hostage and afraid to tell the truth.
But both Trump and Kennedy are actively distracting from the truth to perpetuate the IDIOCRACY.
I don't find the people of Compact Magazine fit the description of "Dumb Dumb" podcast crew, they are intellectually quite elevated. But they still published Rubio and people like Sohrab Amhari endorsed Rubio as somehow having fallen off his ass on the road the Damascus and seen the light of anti-war maga...
What's with the quote marks Mickey? Are you suggesting that there is no Russian aggression, or that it is justified?
It's OK if you want the US to stay out of it all, but don't fucking try to sell us lies about Russia's imperial ambitions in East Europe.
US can decide to stay the hell away, but that will be the sign China and Russia need to know that your empire has gone to shit and is worth nothing, and cannot counter other empires and their interests anymore.
This is geopolitics Mickey. There won't be a vacuum. Where the US retreats, something else will take its place.
I guess you should be grateful that random chance has resulted in you being born in an empire with two oceans defending it.
Russian ‘aggression’ was indeed justified. The USA is an anomaly in that if Russia didn’t launch the SMO when it did, Ukraine’s Donbas region would have gone from being a stage 3 cancer on Russia’s border to a stage 4 terminal cancer right on Russia’s most important border region. This was USA’s plan; this is what USA was actively doing; and this was the inevitable outcome unless Russia didn’t what it did.
You have no response to this here, because there is none possible. USA should have listened to realists like Mearsheimer, who understand that states will respond to what they believe to be existential threats in understandably escalatory ways. We even have a record of Obama directly addressing this issue, and outright admitting what everyone with two brain cells understood already: that Russia has escalatory dominance when it comes to Ukraine. There is no sense in which the USA can believably match Russia step for step up the escalation ladder past a certain point. Past a certain point, Ukraine will be annihilated and USA and Europe will do nothing except sanction because they don’t want to risk MAD. Russia does not *want* to go down that path, but both USA and Russia readily understand that Russia will go there, along with understanding that the USA will go no further (and will not risk MAD over Lvov).
You would do well to read more about what you write about here.
Trump did nothing of the sort, he simply tried to get Ukraine to capitulate and surrender all it has lost, while at the same time demanding that the US gets to exploit Ukraine's natural riches.
It was almost a Ribbentrop-Molotov splitting of Poland, it just happened to fail.
You don’t appear to understand. There is NO version of the stick that can be wielded by the USA or Ukraine that doesn’t end up hurting the USA more than it hurts Russia.
The United States is engaged in an operation in Ukraine that Trump will not interrupt, he signifies a continuity of agenda rather than an escalation. While it is undeniable he has done nothing to restrain Ukraine or "stop the killing" from the U.S. side of the contribution to the death, there are certainly signs that the U.S. has hit a break-point in how much it can do. I will list quickly things that the U.S. will continue to do vs. the things we will still refrain from doing and it becomes clear that Trump presides over a continuity of agenda.
The U.S. will continue to -
Sanction Russia
1 Arm Ukraine (ostensibly changed from giving the gear for free to having NATO buy it all)
2 Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance capabilities and information will be given
3 Potentially training new waves of manpower (though this is bottlenecked by Ukraine's inability to produce the manpower)
The U.S. still has not and likely will not -
1 Commit to any kind of "secondary sanctions"
2 Commit to a "No Fly Zone" as demanded by the "NATO close the sky" death cult
3 Commit to NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine
A big question to come - Who will finance Ukraine and how will that financial support be maintained? Will the U.S. provide monetary aid packages or will this come from the IMF and Europe? Where does the money come from, without which, Ukrainian society totally collapses?
Reading the policy level here it seems clear that Trump is essentially using rhetoric and policy tricks to shift the burden onto Europe as the U.S. acts as a backstop but shifts its attention to other parts of the world. This is what Trump deployed Pete Hegseth to tell the Europeans and this is how the policy has played out since then. The policy tricks like refusing to engage in secondary sanctions on Russia (i.e. sanctions on China and India) without Europe doing it first. He is playing chicken with Europe and has potentially called their bluff.
In the end, this is not as much a maximalist escalation as a turning over of responsibility of the war in Ukraine to Europe with hefty rhetorical flair. Of course, it will still be directed and supported by the U.S. but compare this to unlimited free arms forever which was the Biden policy "as long as it takes" or the "NATO close the sky" death cult and you can see that this isn't actually as much of an escalation as it may seem, if at all. It is closer to a staying of the course with some minor adjustments to make them more palatable to Trump's base and Americans generally.
So in other words continuity of agenda as opposed to one of the two main candidates being better than the other. I voted for Jill Stein but that was because I could, because I live in New York and the outcomes are predetermined(so to speak). But if I lived in a 'swing' state, I suppose I would have voted for Trump.
It's important to keep in mind, that the Ukraine special military operation 'happened' under the Biden Administration. And his administration, at least up till now, put in far more money into this war than the Trump administration. The genocide in Gaza 'happened' under the Biden Administration - a.k.s The Genocide Joe Administration. I think Frankenstein Joe is a more accurate term, as he didn't have, in fact never had, the ability to form an independent thought. He was a thinktank machine who during the last years of his political life rusted out(translate: senility).
So both Biden and Trump are putting the world on edge which is quite a bit larger but in parallel to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.
But you called it and you utilized the Vietnam War as a previous example!
I was just hopeful, among many others, that it wasn't going to be continuity of agenda.
I prefer to believe that Trump's Truth Social post was satire. Trump was exposing the Kellogg / EU statements that Ukraine is winning, because the Russian front line gains don't meet Western expectations of what "winning" should be. Meanwhile, Russia continues its war of attrition, eliminating the army of it's soldiers and arms.
Trump is simply using the West's propaganda against the EU warmongers, by saying 'You tell me Ukraine is winning and will regain everything, and perhaps move on deeper in Russia. Now the U.S. can depart and we'll let Europe take credit for Ukraine's glorious victory'.
Then, when Ukraine's collapse finally comes, he can point to Europe and say, "we sold you our weapons and we offered to join you in secondary sanctions, but you refused".
It's the blame game to immunize Trump from the eventual recriminations.
I think Trump was confident and hopeful of getting North Korea to change their ways and he was not able to do so. That is the same thing that happened here with Ukraine. He wants the fighting to stop but he wants it more than Putin and Ukraine does. Ukraine is trying to save their country where Putin is the aggressor. Trump tried. I don't think he lied or was disingenuous, Putin led him along. Trump's problem is he believes countries like North Korea, Russia and even Iran want to be prosperous and have strong economies. He doesn't get those countries want hegemony over the countries around them. The US is a much closer (not perfectly, I agree) to a peace wanting country than the countries run by Putin, Kim, the Ayatollahs.
Trump pulled off a great con during the 2024 campaign. He convinced fools like me he would end forever wars and would stop putting sticks in the eyes of the Russian bear and the Chinese drag. Instead, he's just another member of the United War Party.
If Trump wanted peace it would have been easy. Russia was ready to stop the war, but the people who want endless was kept demanding crap like crimea.
It's the same with MAHA and Kennedy... If he wanted to put a dent on the scams, he could easily have stopped the covid emergency that his predecessor easily extended to 2029.
But he still won't and now we have proof of his two faced behavior... They focused on Tylenol in the months long fake study.
It's one thing to be held hostage and afraid to tell the truth.
But both Trump and Kennedy are actively distracting from the truth to perpetuate the IDIOCRACY.
I don't find the people of Compact Magazine fit the description of "Dumb Dumb" podcast crew, they are intellectually quite elevated. But they still published Rubio and people like Sohrab Amhari endorsed Rubio as somehow having fallen off his ass on the road the Damascus and seen the light of anti-war maga...
What's with the quote marks Mickey? Are you suggesting that there is no Russian aggression, or that it is justified?
It's OK if you want the US to stay out of it all, but don't fucking try to sell us lies about Russia's imperial ambitions in East Europe.
US can decide to stay the hell away, but that will be the sign China and Russia need to know that your empire has gone to shit and is worth nothing, and cannot counter other empires and their interests anymore.
This is geopolitics Mickey. There won't be a vacuum. Where the US retreats, something else will take its place.
I guess you should be grateful that random chance has resulted in you being born in an empire with two oceans defending it.
Russian ‘aggression’ was indeed justified. The USA is an anomaly in that if Russia didn’t launch the SMO when it did, Ukraine’s Donbas region would have gone from being a stage 3 cancer on Russia’s border to a stage 4 terminal cancer right on Russia’s most important border region. This was USA’s plan; this is what USA was actively doing; and this was the inevitable outcome unless Russia didn’t what it did.
You have no response to this here, because there is none possible. USA should have listened to realists like Mearsheimer, who understand that states will respond to what they believe to be existential threats in understandably escalatory ways. We even have a record of Obama directly addressing this issue, and outright admitting what everyone with two brain cells understood already: that Russia has escalatory dominance when it comes to Ukraine. There is no sense in which the USA can believably match Russia step for step up the escalation ladder past a certain point. Past a certain point, Ukraine will be annihilated and USA and Europe will do nothing except sanction because they don’t want to risk MAD. Russia does not *want* to go down that path, but both USA and Russia readily understand that Russia will go there, along with understanding that the USA will go no further (and will not risk MAD over Lvov).
You would do well to read more about what you write about here.
I do have a response.
I think the US should outcompete Russia and give it 1000 Afghanistans, and eventually collapse it to ethnic states, as things should be.
Both US and Russia are decaying, dying empires, weak and pathetic.
SMO lmao
Muh smol tiny speshul military gayops
All these multicultural monstrosities that pretend they are not empires should be absolutely, hmmm, encouraged to come apart.
Trump tried his best to get a peace agreement. Neither party wants it bad enough.
Trump did nothing of the sort, he simply tried to get Ukraine to capitulate and surrender all it has lost, while at the same time demanding that the US gets to exploit Ukraine's natural riches.
It was almost a Ribbentrop-Molotov splitting of Poland, it just happened to fail.
Trump tried the carrot, now the stick.
You don’t appear to understand. There is NO version of the stick that can be wielded by the USA or Ukraine that doesn’t end up hurting the USA more than it hurts Russia.
I don’t want to die in an apocalyptic firestorm under any administration. I am disappointed in the failure of peace initiatives and anxious.
There have been no serious attempts at peace initiatives by the USA or Europe since like 1930.
Was just thinking "what's mt up to?" I feel like I manifested this one
The United States is engaged in an operation in Ukraine that Trump will not interrupt, he signifies a continuity of agenda rather than an escalation. While it is undeniable he has done nothing to restrain Ukraine or "stop the killing" from the U.S. side of the contribution to the death, there are certainly signs that the U.S. has hit a break-point in how much it can do. I will list quickly things that the U.S. will continue to do vs. the things we will still refrain from doing and it becomes clear that Trump presides over a continuity of agenda.
The U.S. will continue to -
Sanction Russia
1 Arm Ukraine (ostensibly changed from giving the gear for free to having NATO buy it all)
2 Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance capabilities and information will be given
3 Potentially training new waves of manpower (though this is bottlenecked by Ukraine's inability to produce the manpower)
The U.S. still has not and likely will not -
1 Commit to any kind of "secondary sanctions"
2 Commit to a "No Fly Zone" as demanded by the "NATO close the sky" death cult
3 Commit to NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine
A big question to come - Who will finance Ukraine and how will that financial support be maintained? Will the U.S. provide monetary aid packages or will this come from the IMF and Europe? Where does the money come from, without which, Ukrainian society totally collapses?
Reading the policy level here it seems clear that Trump is essentially using rhetoric and policy tricks to shift the burden onto Europe as the U.S. acts as a backstop but shifts its attention to other parts of the world. This is what Trump deployed Pete Hegseth to tell the Europeans and this is how the policy has played out since then. The policy tricks like refusing to engage in secondary sanctions on Russia (i.e. sanctions on China and India) without Europe doing it first. He is playing chicken with Europe and has potentially called their bluff.
In the end, this is not as much a maximalist escalation as a turning over of responsibility of the war in Ukraine to Europe with hefty rhetorical flair. Of course, it will still be directed and supported by the U.S. but compare this to unlimited free arms forever which was the Biden policy "as long as it takes" or the "NATO close the sky" death cult and you can see that this isn't actually as much of an escalation as it may seem, if at all. It is closer to a staying of the course with some minor adjustments to make them more palatable to Trump's base and Americans generally.
So in other words continuity of agenda as opposed to one of the two main candidates being better than the other. I voted for Jill Stein but that was because I could, because I live in New York and the outcomes are predetermined(so to speak). But if I lived in a 'swing' state, I suppose I would have voted for Trump.
It's important to keep in mind, that the Ukraine special military operation 'happened' under the Biden Administration. And his administration, at least up till now, put in far more money into this war than the Trump administration. The genocide in Gaza 'happened' under the Biden Administration - a.k.s The Genocide Joe Administration. I think Frankenstein Joe is a more accurate term, as he didn't have, in fact never had, the ability to form an independent thought. He was a thinktank machine who during the last years of his political life rusted out(translate: senility).
So both Biden and Trump are putting the world on edge which is quite a bit larger but in parallel to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.
But you called it and you utilized the Vietnam War as a previous example!
I was just hopeful, among many others, that it wasn't going to be continuity of agenda.
Thanks for the article.
I prefer to believe that Trump's Truth Social post was satire. Trump was exposing the Kellogg / EU statements that Ukraine is winning, because the Russian front line gains don't meet Western expectations of what "winning" should be. Meanwhile, Russia continues its war of attrition, eliminating the army of it's soldiers and arms.
Trump is simply using the West's propaganda against the EU warmongers, by saying 'You tell me Ukraine is winning and will regain everything, and perhaps move on deeper in Russia. Now the U.S. can depart and we'll let Europe take credit for Ukraine's glorious victory'.
Then, when Ukraine's collapse finally comes, he can point to Europe and say, "we sold you our weapons and we offered to join you in secondary sanctions, but you refused".
It's the blame game to immunize Trump from the eventual recriminations.
I think Trump was confident and hopeful of getting North Korea to change their ways and he was not able to do so. That is the same thing that happened here with Ukraine. He wants the fighting to stop but he wants it more than Putin and Ukraine does. Ukraine is trying to save their country where Putin is the aggressor. Trump tried. I don't think he lied or was disingenuous, Putin led him along. Trump's problem is he believes countries like North Korea, Russia and even Iran want to be prosperous and have strong economies. He doesn't get those countries want hegemony over the countries around them. The US is a much closer (not perfectly, I agree) to a peace wanting country than the countries run by Putin, Kim, the Ayatollahs.