The Triumphant, Victorious Return of Winning
The most cowardly president in U.S. history, in one of his new administration’s ceremonial first lies, ordered one of his most prominent and tongue-weary bootlickers, Marco “Yes Master” Rubio (aka Marco the Martian-Hunter), to “pause” all foreign aid, excluding military aid to Israel and Egypt, which is to say including military aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Insult-in-Chief himself, in part of his feverish attempt to build a security buffer three continents wide between his bedroom and all the dangerous bad guys out there, has formally announced to the Danish prime minister his intention to take control of Greenland, by cash or by force — which pretty much makes the cash offer no more than force by other means, as well as playing beautifully into the “national interests at all costs” optics preferred by Trump’s chief role model, Vladimir Putin. To frame such “policies” in the most generous way possible, we may say that Trump is a flaming idiot who systematically mistakes buffoonish blowhardism with hard-nosed negotiating. Remember his first term’s brilliant Nobel Peace Prize-worthy “deal” with his young friend Kim Jong-un?
If you are an American and you voted for Trump, you are either cheering for Russia to win, in which case this aid freeze stunt will excite your hopes that America might finally snatch victory from the jaws of defeat for Putin as the tyrant has been hoping for (and counting on) all along, exactly as Trump is mentally and constitutionally calibrated to do, or you believe in your idol’s fairy tale of miracle deals that will somehow extract America from the world’s crisis points in a way that will not precipitate further aggressive moves by Putin and Xi Jinping, in which case I must ask whether you remember Trump’s brilliant Nobel Peace Prize-worthy “deal” with his young friend Kim Jong-un.
If you are an American and you voted for Trump, you either grew up with the inclination to cheer for the bigger boy against the smaller in schoolyard fights, in which case you yourself are perfectly calibrated to identify with Trump’s style and psyche, which are so manifestly those of a schoolyard scaredy cat who pulls girls’ hair and steals lunch money from small children to ingratiate himself to the school’s real bullies, of whom he is terrified, or you somehow still hope that your idol’s penchant for disregarding and insulting longtime allies in favor of mollifying or sidling up to bloody tyrants is some kind of nine-dimensional chess diplomacy, rather than what it obviously is — as you would already know if you remembered Trump’s brilliant Nobel Peace Prize-worthy “deal” with his young friend Kim Jong-un.
Tulsi Gabbard, an opportunistic Democratic attention-seeker whom Trump has nominated to head the nation’s intelligence community, is herself a potential national security threat, being a consistent apologist and propagandist for Vladimir Putin. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee for director of the federal government’s health policy, is a well-spoken one-trick pony on health issues — the one trick, unfortunately, being so broad-brushed in its approach that its embrace of some healthy skepticism about the influence of pharmaceutical corporations is overshadowed by its wider embrace of every paranoid conspiracy theory from here to Timbuktu. (Oh, and he is also an opportunistic Democratic attention-seeker who has been a consistent apologist and propagandist for Vladimir Putin.)
Turning to the war itself for a moment, I wish to cite an interesting paragraph from an extremely insightful Cold-War-era book that warrants occasional revisitation during these supposedly post-Cold-War times, Jean-François Revel’s How Democracies Perish.
Persuasion is the reverse of deterrence. The less confidence the American deterrent inspires, the more easily Moscow imposes its will on the Europeans without having to use force. The peculiarity and the advantage of military superiority consist precisely in obtaining without going to war the same results that a war would bring. This is, indeed, the only constant law of diplomacy. If we keep it in mind, we are less surprised that European “pacifists” feel threatened not by the Soviet missiles pointed at them, but by the American missiles destined to protect them from the SS-20s. The pacifists know that in life it’s the weaker who is called an “aggressor” by the stronger for attempting to remedy his weakness.1Revel, How Democracies Perish (William Byron, translator), New York: Doubleday & Company, 1983, p. 78.
The only significant alteration required to bring the situation outlined in that paragraph up to date is to note that, due in part to the Kremlin’s removal of its communist ideological mask, and in part to the White House’s removal of its freedom-loving principled heart, it is now Europe itself that has found its backbone against the Russian threat, while America has taken over the role of the appeasing pacifists who bow to the Kremlin’s lies, insisting that any show of defensive strength against Russian thuggery should be condemned as an act of unjust provocation. The result, however, will be more or less the one Revel explained and warned against in 1983, unless the West in general, and America in particular, somehow finds a few leftover bits of Reaganism under the sofa cushions before it’s too late.
I dream, of course. It is almost certainly too late for that.
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