Whatever the future may hold — and seldom does it present such promise and peril as now — Trump and his national-security team set a lot of wheels in motion last week.
NATO meeting of defense ministers in Brussels on Feb. 13. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in Donald’s Trump’s first term, the new president was pushing his case for a restored détente with Russia. Trump went on to summit with Vladimir Putin five times and conducted at least 16 telephone exchanges with the Russian president.
This was the count by mid–2019. After that and until the end of his term, the Deep State — notably the intelligence apparatus, the Democratic National Committee, and the mass media — had Trump bound in the rope of subterfuge so thoroughly that the relationship developed no further.
The neo-détente Trump favored — that Trump was correct to favor, better put — never came to be. Joe Biden and his people, to state the obvious, were by contrast neo–Cold Warriors — mere ideologues, neoliberals wholly incapable of autonomous thought, initiative, imagination, or anything else that sophisticated statecraft requires of its practitioners.
Trump began his second term not quite a month ago, having promised throughout his political campaign to end Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine within a day of assuming office. And it is already evident that his ambitions now run far beyond the settlement in Ukraine he has long promised and the modest détente with Moscow he sought during his first four years in the White House.
The Biden project, from his years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and certainly during his term as Obama’s successor, was to isolate the Russian Federation as completely as possible by way of a poorly conceived sanctions regime, covert operations such as the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, a towering wall of propaganda and what coercions were necessary to secure the allegiance of European clients who were, in any case, already wanderers on the world stage with no clue as to their purpose or even their interests.
Biden’s Russia policy left Ukraine waging a deadly proxy war it cannot win and the Continent well on its way to paupery. Joe Biden divided the world at least as severely and dangerously as it was during the Cold War years.
It is precisely these conditions that assuaged the anxieties neoliberals shared with the Deep State during Trump’s first term and the whole of Biden’s. They succeeded in warding off the threat of any kind of constructive co-existence between Russia and the Atlantic alliance —between West and East, this is to say.
This is a pencil-sketch of the world Trump inherited from his predecessor when he moved back into the White house a month ago.
Russia Out of the Cold
Trump seems to have done a lot of thinking during his four years in the political wilderness. A week of exceptional events, each adding more surprise to those preceding it, indicates that Trump and those around him now propose to transcend altogether the binaries Washington has enforced since it assumed its position of global primacy in the late 1940s. Russia is to come in from the cold and the Atlantic is to grow wider.
In this context, extricating the U.S. from the Ukraine quagmire is more than a footnote but nothing like the main attraction. Assuming all goes to Trump’s apparent plan — and we must make this assumption with unsparing caution — the center-stage attraction is discarding what has passed for a world order since the 1945 victories.
To be noted immediately: Sending the ancien régime into the history texts is not the same as constructing a new order to replace it. At this early moment it is not clear whether Trump and his people have an idea for one; yet more doubtful is whether he or any of his people would be up to a project of this world-historical magnitude.
Whatever the future may hold, and seldom does it present such promise and peril as now, Trump and his new cabinet appointees on the national-security side set a lot of wheels in motion last week. A little oddly — a coordination problem here? — Pete Hegseth, the Fox News presenter turned defense secretary, got them rolling last Wednesday morning, some hours before Trump announced his instantly famous telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin.
At a speech in Brussels before NATO defense ministers and various senior Ukrainian officials, Hegseth followed Trump’s habit of bringing several longstanding unsayables into the sphere of the sayable. Retaking land Russian forces now occupy — Crimea, of course, but also sections of eastern Ukraine now formally incorporated into the Russian Federation — is “an unrealistic objective… an illusory goal.”
In addition — a couple of other big ones — Hegseth said the U.S. will not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO; neither will Article 5 of the NATO charter — an attack on one member is an attack on all — cover the troops of any NATO member dispatched to Ukraine in any capacity.
By the time he said these things, Hegseth had already surrendered U.S. leadership of what is called the Contact Group, a Biden-era creation comprised of 50–plus nations that manages weapons shipments and humanitarian aid — whatever that may mean at this point — to Kiev.
Could the defense secretary’s message — the opener for Trump’s very eventful week — be any clearer? The U.S. is stepping back from Ukraine, Biden’s proxy war, and any thought of a NATO role in it. The Europeans are on their own as they contemplate their course in these new circumstances.
From left: Hegseth, U.K. Chief of Defence Tony Radakin; U.K. Secretary of State for Defence John Healey, Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, at the Ukraine Contact Group meeting in Brussels on Feb. 12. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
There was a kerfuffle in political and media circles back home after Hegseth spoke: He didn’t mean it, he couldn’t have meant it, his speechwriters blew it, he has retreated. We are likely to get a lot of this — denial, in a word — from vested interests that simply cannot manage the thought that an order they have presumed to be eternal is about to prove otherwise.
I read news reports to this effect as nothing more than wishful distortion, of which there is much in the coverage of Trump’s new demarches these days. Hegseth said exactly what he meant to say. In a speech Friday in Warsaw, he said his intent in Brussels was to suggest some “realism into the expectations of our NATO allies.” That is clarification, not disavowal.
Trump, as noted, followed Hegseth by a few hours when he announced last Wednesday, just before noon East Coast time, that he and the Russian president had spent (at some point prior) 90 minutes on the telephone together.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Motherland Monument in St. Petersburg on Jan. 27, the 81st anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege. (Kremlin)
It was remarkable enough that Trump immediately described the call as the start of negotiations to achieve a settlement of the Ukraine crisis. And neither Washington nor Moscow is wasting any time getting talks going. Trump named his team of negotiators not long after he put the telephone down. These are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, and Steven Witkoff, who serves as Trump’s special envoy to West Asia but also dabbles in U.S.–Russian affairs.
These people are to meet Russian counterparts in Riyadh on Tuesday for a sort of preliminary taking of temperatures. This is fast, impressive work suggestive of a determination shared between Trump and Putin. Rubio subsequently had a conversation with Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, during which they discussed the modes by which bilateral relations would be repaired and restored.
This was far more productive than anything Antony Blinken ever got done as Biden’s secretary of state. To be honest, I didn’t think “Little Marco,” as Trump used to call him, had this kind of thing in him.
Conspicuously absent from Trump’s diplomatic team, I am pleased to note, is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and a card-carrying warmonger, who co-authored a paper last June advising Trump to force Moscow to the table under threat of redoubled sanctions — the “maximum pressure” treatment — and vast increases in weapons shipments to the Kiev regime. Bedtime for the neocon-ish Kellogg, let us hope.
It is at writing evident that Volodymyr Zelensky will also be absent in Riyadh. As will representatives of the European powers. The Ukrainian president objects to this, if impotently; so do the Europeans, also to no effect. Pitifully enough, both Kiev and the Euros still insist it is “No Ukraine talks without Ukraine,” the old Biden refrain.
Zelensky at a meeting on the future of U.S.-Ukrainian security cooperation at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 12. (Courtesy MSC, Daniel Kopatsch)
Trump, once again, is merely saying what has previously been unsayable. Zelensky is a classic puppet. It has been a long game of pretend to insist that he and his corrupt, Nazi-infested regime have done anything more than take orders from Washington (along with scores of billions of dollars in unaccounted funds and weapons, of course) since Russia began its military intervention three years ago next week.
Ending Russian Isolation
That seems over now, along with so much else. Cutting out Zelensky is simply cutting to the chase. The Russians, let us not forget, see no point talking to Zelensky until he holds elections — a very fair point — and it is a long time since the Kremlin has seen any mileage in contacts with the Europeans, who have betrayed their word to Moscow every time events require them to keep it.
[See: PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany & the Lies of Empire]
What interested me about the Trump–Putin call as much as the initiative on Ukraine were those items — the dollar, energy supplies and other such topics — that are normally considered mere bric-a-brac in diplomatic exchanges between major powers.
“We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together,” Trump declared on “X” and his Truth Social digital platform. Notably, this remark preceded Trump’s mention of a settlement in Ukraine.
I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects. We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 12, 2025
All efforts to isolate Russia are now over: This is Trump’s unmistakable point, and I count it the overriding significance of his call with Putin. Let us all exhale from the bottom of our lungs. If Trump makes good on this, many wasteful, destructive years of dangerous tension, conjured from nothing more than paranoia and propaganda, will now draw to a close.
The implications of this for Ukraine and, more significantly, for Europe, could hardly be more immediate or more momentous.
Vance Unloads
J.D. Vance dropped more realism, immensely more, on those gathered for the annual Munich Security Conference this past weekend. While those present reportedly expected the vice-president to detail Trump’s plans to negotiate a Ukraine settlement, Vance had little to say on the topic.
“The Trump administration is very concerned with European security,” he allowed more or less in passing, “and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine.”
That was it. Vance then launched into the subject on which he was obviously intent to unload:
‘The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
So began a sort of measured tirade, if there is such a thing, against what is now an openly undemocratic defense of the neoliberal order European elites have mounted in recent years — in the name, of course, of defending democracy.
Vance’s speech was an attack on censorship, on flagrant manipulations of elections, on the incessant frauds of the “disinformation” industry, on the excesses of the wokery liberal authoritarians have so foolishly insisted upon imposing on the more sensible among us.
In a single word, Vance’s speech was an attack on the hypocrisies on which the neoliberal order has come to depend for its survival. These are the remarks, let us not forget, of a political figure, a conservative populist, who has fought all these battles at home.
Vance on the suppression of various populist parties whose influence has lately risen in Germany, France, and elsewhere:
“As President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think… you hear this term, burden sharing,… but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.
But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we’re defending in the first place?… I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important.
But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.
Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”
Vance at the Munich Security Conference last week. (Courtesy MSC, Marc Conzelmann)
Vance on Romania, where, in December, the Constitutional Court abruptly canceled presidential elections that Calin Georgescu, a conservative populist, was almost certain to win, on the specious contention his campaign appeared to have been aided by what may have been — appeared to have been, may have been — some kind of Russian digital operation:
“Now I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too….
Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.
But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
On the disinformation industry and the suppression of dissent:
“Now to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.”
Various commentators have compared Vance’s remarks with the famously stunning speech Putin made at the Munich conference in 2007. Putin’s blunt criticisms of America’s unilateral assertion of its power was an early signal of the non–West’s challenge to the post–Cold War order.
It is said that Vance’s speech is of comparable import — an announcement that the Trump administration has lost interest in the postwar Western alliance and intends to abandon Europe to its own devices. I do not read this in Vance’s remarks. At the very least there is a danger of mis– or over-interpretation.
Attack on Neoliberal Order
Here is a transcript of Vance’s speech. Read it carefully. It is a considerable stretch, in my view, to find in it any suggestion at all that it marks “the beginning of the end of the post–WW2 Western alliance,” to quote one commentator of this persuasion.
Vance spoke vigorously in favor of “our shared values,” or, elsewhere, “European values.” He spoke, in other words, for the West’s continued unity, making his case on the cultural plane, the political plane, the plane of democratic principles.
No, Vance’s offensive was against those elites who have abandoned these values, these political norms, these principles. His was an attack on the neoliberal order as he finds it in Europe — in some respects a more advanced case than he has found it at home.
The Europeans at the Munich conference were in a state of shock after Vance spoke, not least because of his criticisms of how the Germans and others seek to block populist parties from their governments. This was the basis of Olaf Scholz’s spirited refutation of the American vice-president.
“The chancellor said Germany ‘would not accept’ suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy,” The New York Times reported. “‘That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,’” Scholz insisted. “‘Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.’”
Scholz reflected something I am tempted to call “Europanic,” but the term does not fit. Vance assailed not Europe or Europeans, but the corruptions inherent in European elites’ defense of a crumbling neoliberal order. Scholz, as is there in the Munich transcripts, stood in defense of these antidemocratic corruptions.
Zelensky and Scholz at a ceremony at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15 in a ceremony marking their unity and cooperation. (Courtesy MSC, Steffen Boettcher)
The panic easily detected among the Continent’s besieged elites has also been legible, pitifully enough, in the press coverage of Munich and Trump’s various demarches. All I have read in corporate and state-sponsored media on both sides of the Atlantic has been shockingly distorted, featuring more than the usual measure of outright lies.
Vance spoke in favor of neo–Nazi and “far-right” parties. (He went nowhere near the topic.) The Trump–Putin telephone call was all about the Russian leader’s cynical manipulations and Trump’s appeasement. (It was about the restoration of workable bilateral relations.) Trump has opened the door for “Putin” to advance through Europe. (He entertains no such ambition.) “Putin’s” objective is to destroy the European Union and NATO. (Ditto.)
I have not seen hyperbole so extravagant as this in I do not know how long. Panic, like neoliberalism, is a trans–Atlantic phenomenon, we must recognize.
A curious exception to this circus of disfigured and disfiguring coverage of last week’s events turned up in The Times of London’s opinion page Monday under the headline “Keep calm, this isn’t another Munich sell-out.” The subhead is even better: “Putin’s no Hitler, Trump’s no Chamberlain and Zelensky’s no angel.”
Matthew Parris’ lead is better yet. In it he quotes an old friend’s amusing mot, delivered in Latin: “Pro bono publico, no panico.” Exactly so. At this early moment, too much remains to succeed or fail or something in between for anyone among us to panic. Let us leave that to the neoliberals, while the rest of us watch and wait.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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Thanks Patrick your insights are invaluable to true understanding.
As Americans we all must understand everyone else on the planet simply may have legitimate differences of opinion based on their particular predicament.
This article covers the most positive aspects of the apparent Trump foreign policy and does so very well, unfortunately, as positive as this focus is, Mr. Trump’s AIPAC dictated Middle East policy seems as bad as it gets, a balance of sorts, but support of genocide and ethnic cleansing completely “trumps” the positives.
Will it end the long term goal of trying to Christianize the entire wore culture for our profits and control of secular society by the Supreme Court here at home? Will we rebuild the Nord Stream pipeline? And will we stop arms sales to Taiwan? Then there is the plan for 5% of GDP on military spending and Peace through Strength or is it Peace With Honor?
Haha. None of that will change because DT and his people are liars who crave power and are willing to lie to get it. Sad that when the lies they choose to tell (“we’re anti-war!!1″…er, no you’re not as war with China is still war…for example) line up with the desires of certain commentators on the left then it’s right to trough to lap them up.
Nobody reads history. Hitler got victories early on by brashness and boldness. His generals often complained about how weak and exposed they would be if the enemy fought back, but they never did. Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia 1 & 2, Europe appeased Hitler and proclaimed peace in our time.
Then, Hitler went too far. So far, that the world just had to say no. The time was the invasion of Poland (sold as Poland attacking Germany to the homefront). That was when the world declared war and decided that enough was enough. Strategically, there wasn’t much UK and Poland could do for Poland on the far side of Germany. But, they’d had enough. The world just said no. The world war had begun, but Hitler’s doom was also foretold.
When will the world stand up to the bully bully Americans?
Parts already have. Important parts. Russia stood up to the Americans and showed the world that they can take all the punches America can dare to throw. China has stood up in its more quiet and harmonious seeming way. Quiet, but still just a blank face and a no when the American come with their lists of complaints and demands.
Trump appears highly likely to accelerate this trend. Watch how fast the world backs away from an openly genocidal monster who is brash and bold and loves to threaten people. That will go over as well abroad as a President who’s favorite thing to do is raise taxes will go over at home after he crashes the economy. Trump apparently feels that America was great after Hoover’s protectionism created the GreeeeeeaaaaaaaatttT Depression.
Hint, a nation that spend decades de-industrializing for Wall Street’s speculative profits can’t re-industrialize overnight. You don’t build a steel mill overnight. But, Trump can cause inflation with 25% tariffs overnight.
The original term was private enterprise until ’50s propaganda pushed “free” enterprise. A short step from that to capitalism = democracy; the obvious contradiction a verboten subject. So then the neoliberal focus on making the world safe for corporations… uh, “democracy.”
Then add the neocon PNAC and Cheney acolytes to the Biden admin. with their unipolar fantasies. As neolibs, the western Euro Atlanticists went along; maybe relishing visions of their old empires the neocon plans evoked.
But the smug superiority of the neocons and their narrow reality tunnel meant they miscalculated. Cheney and his cabal endorsed Harris. They claimed Trump was unfit,egotistical, dictatorial, etc. Since when in the last 100 years have any of those traits bothered Republicans?! Most likely it was because Harris would keep the neocons at the State Dept.
Thus the neocons made an enemy of Trump. For that the rest of us can breathe a little easier; less chance the nukes will fly. And of course we’re enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing the grossly elitist Euro neolibs scrambling to hold onto their crumbling power, all pretense of supporting democracy unmasked.
“Thus the neocons made an enemy of Trump.”
Huh…well I guess it’s a good thing that Iraq War apologists, Israel-firsters, China hawks and far-right evangelical Christians didn’t. He’d have to appoint democrats to his administration.
How can Patrick, or anyone else, not seem to see that Vance’s speech was monumentally hypocritical? He still insists Trump won the 2020 election and that the January 6 rioters were patriots fighting for democracy, fer cripe’s sake! And then he has the temerity to get up and lecture anyone, let alone the comparatively decent nations of Europe, on democracy and human rights? What he was really trying to do, quite obviously, was to boost the AfD’s chances in the upcoming German elections, and more generally foment turmoil within NATO and the EU so that they won’t stand in the way of the Trump regime’s real goal, which is form a shadow world government composed of their cadre of oligarchs from the US and like-minded oligarch’s abroad, most immediately in Russia. If they succeed, about the only thing you can say for it is that it beats WWIII. For it will also be the end of democratic governance everywhere, and indeed the end of sanity when it comes to dealing with global inequality, climate change, biodiversity, and ultimately maintaining a livable planet. Shared values, my a$$!
Someone has been watching far, far, FAR too much mainstream news …
If you want to know how scary close this is, consider that Elon Musk is right now potentially building the world’s biggest database. At least up there with Google and ATT and other Big Data players. Combine your tax records and your income records with all his social media records and whatever else the world’s richest man can buy plus probably your FBI file. Elon Musk is right now collecting all the US government data. All it takes is a loyal minion sending data up to the cloud the moment they get admin access. And they’ve bragged about how Musk’s people from Twit and Tess have taken paycuts to come serve the Doge.
Big Data is Big Power.
But of course, Elon Musk as a loyal American whom we can all trust would never betray his own people. We all know that Elon Musk is honest and would never tell a lie and would never grab American’s private data for his own benefit. So, we can all sleep easy tonight.
Meanwhile, the Libertarian President of Argentina is in big trouble for his participation in a crypto con scheme. But, never forget that we can always trust anyone who says they are a patriot.
Mr Lawrence is correct on all scores in this article.
For the record, the 2020 election & the accompanying mass censorship (laptop anyone) was so brazen that even the old man in his basement was shocked at his 80 million total votes (average total across both parties in all recent elections has been just under 70 million). The disturbances on Jan 6 – like the comically botched Whitmer “kidnap” plot – were part of an FBI operation (backup pipe bomb plot not needed). In short, the “Our democracy” scam, like the green scam & the USAID scam is done & dusted. As for Europe, “democracy” means cancelling elections when the “right” person is not elected. It just happened in Romania & the EUs’ Breton just threatened German voters the same will be done in their country if the AFD does too well this Sunday. The Netherlands, meanwhile, recently appointed a retired former security operative as prime minister because the man who won the most votes was not permitted to form a coalition.
You don’t need to look far to find what Mr Lawrence calls “authoritarian liberalism”. He is too kind; it’s raw totalitarianism on the rise with the usual tools of propaganda, censorship, repression, and relentless smearing of political opponents via lawfare. Up until now these tactics have “worked”. But the times are a changing. And you can’t fool all the people all the time! In this era of glasnost, I suspect many citizens are going to find out that the “democracy” they thought they had been living in contained many of the characteristics of the ‘extremist, far-right’ ideology which its proponents professed to be fighting against. So 3 cheers for Mr Vance! And let’s hope that Mr Patel gets confirmed as FBI director this week and is able to reveal how certain individuals in our “law-enforcement” agencies have been spending their time these last few years.
Trump and his cabinet members have shown they are completely ignorant about the make up of BRICS and how far along its plans are for a different economic relationship in the non-Western world. Trump thought the “S” in BRICS stood for Spain and wasn’t sure if China was a member. This reveals a dangerous lack of concern for accurate information in the realm of geopolitics. I agree it’s good for the neoliberal world order to face defeat, but I can’t shake the feeling that the ensuing chaos with no one at the helm of US foreign policy who has a good understanding of the world outside our borders could very well lead us to another dark place.
LOL … America is being made Great by people who don’t know the alignments of the world’s second largest and fast growing economy. We are not dealing with grand strategists who’ve examined every piece on the board and thought out potential moves and countermoves and more moves and countermoves. If there is a plan, its scribbled on a big mac wrapper, and worth less than the junk food.
Connect to this dot. The head of Apple laughed at Trump 1.0. Trump one day had the brain flash that all American businesses needed to leave China. Trump The Simpleminded was thinking of jobs. But, the head of Apple laughed at the notion that he would give up his number one sales market. Guess how many iPhones 1.5 billion people buy?
This has all happened before. We saw it with Adolf. A fool becomes brash and arrogant with some success, then does really stupid things that leaves his nation literally in ruins from bombs and shells, and his people as sex workers to an occupation.
The Trump regime appears to be attempting some good things with respect to drawing down the dangerous Ukraine proxy war. I applaud these efforts. Only the most hardened and deluded Russophobic neocon would not.
However, the Trump regime is likely greasing the skids for looming Zio depravity by throwing culture war politics red meat to its base. This is being done to garner support from MAGA for what Israel desires: 1.) totally ethnically cleanse Gaza, 2.) attack the West Bank, & 3.) a probable impending joint Israeli/U.S. attack on Iran within the next couple of years.
But to reiterate, ending the extremely dangerous Washington instigated and supported war on Russia’s western border is of course beneficial and should be fully supported. Soon we’ll have serious work though pertaining to southwest Asia.
Well, at least Hegseth and Vance have crossed the neoliberal Rubicon in no uncertain terms … I don’t think they can walk back such clear statements (nor are they likely to want to). Very much to the good.
I particularly enjoyed Vance’s speech where he talked about what the “west” is for, rather than what against … this have always been the great weakness of the managerial corporatracy: they are against many things and for very little.
So, realizing that reality is far different than rhetoric, but at least for the purposes of propaganda narrative, what is the modern west for if it’s not the old values of limited and popular government, questioning everything scientifically without predetermined socially approved answers, freedom of speech and assembly and action, and national patriotism (as opposed to cosmopolitan empire)?
“All efforts to isolate Russia are now over: This is Trump’s unmistakable point, and I count it the overriding significance of his call with Putin. Let us all exhale from the bottom of our lungs. If Trump makes good on this, many wasteful, destructive years of dangerous tension, conjured from nothing more than paranoia and propaganda, will now draw to a close.” Spot on and about time.
The European leaders are in it only for themselves. Thus their panic. They are the worst; war mongers who promote war to line their own pockets. Of course, other people are supposed to pay and die for their benefit. Not them. With the incredible death and damage they have promoted, in a rational world, they would not now being walking around free. Perhaps that will change too. We can hope.
Lack of any mention by Vance of the treatment of pro-Palestinian voices in Europe (particularly in Germany & the UK). Clearly he’s satisfied that the ‘shared value’ of unstinting support for genocide remains strong.
I keep coming back to Herod’s advice to Claudius: “trust no one”. Except I do trust Presidents Trump and Musk to enrich themselves at my expense while not really trusting Trump’s actions on the international stage. I admit I enjoy the theater of the suggestion that our defense budget be cut in half, but suspect it’s an ultimately a financial shakedown by this “griftocracy”.
Did any US officials publicly call out Macron for his blatant ignoring of the will of the voters in France’s last election? Or support the will of the peasants in Central and South America when they voted in their own interests in elections declared valid by international advisors? Interesting that voting fraud is only invoked when the result defeats USA puppets.
I always say the only politicians worse than the Democrats are the Republicans.
Golf club politics: Establishment fascists versus New-Money fascists.
We’re just here to maintain the course, caddy, murmur admiring words and serve the drinks.
Voluntarily / $7.25 an hour (or local equiv)
“Trump, once again, is merely saying what has previously been unsayable. Zelensky is a classic puppet. It has been a long game of pretend to insist that he and his corrupt, Nazi-infested regime have done anything more than take orders from Washington (along with scores of billions of dollars in unaccounted funds and weapons, of course) since Russia began its military intervention three years ago next week.”
Well said!
In January, the Guardian ran quite a lengthy article “Ukraine’s highest profile combat unit to recruit English-speaking soldiers”.
It was about the Azov battalion but made no direct mention at all about its neo-Nazi history.
As a Romanian, as much as I distrust Trump and Vance (and I distrust any leaders of the major powers), what Vance has said in Munich was spot on.
The horrific coup d’état that has happened on the 6th of December in my country was so obviously evident that even the most progressist Romanian and anti-Georgescu voter could not deny that the annulment of the elections was done illegally.
The Romanian Constitutional Court holds no power for election annulment and, ultimately, no proof of Russian interference was found or shown.
The people in power in Romania are different from their European ideologue counterparts – they are opportunists. They want to hold on to power so strongly that they would definitely become the most staunch Trump supporters if their situation become severely threatened by a weak Europe and by Trump’s future actions (at the moment they are passive-attacking the Trump administration).
The fact that Macron did not invite Romania in Paris for the European Union security meeting did nothing else but to make Georgescu an even more popular man and for the anti-war sentiment to grow even further in Romania.
I sincerely sympathize with you and your fellow citizens. Have endured years of the USA Russiagate debacle which even after being debunked is still the Democratic Party’s boogeyman. Please accept my apologies for its influence in Romania’s election annulment. I despise Trump & Co. But despise Clinton/Biden & Co. too.
Mixed feelings. While Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine project are obviously welcome, one of Trump’s broader aims is likely to attempt to pull Russia into the US orbit and away from China and the BRICS. Meanwhile Vance’s speech was nice, but nevertheless a convenient offloading of responsibility for the whole political cesspool in Europe (and the US) onto the US’ loyal vassals, who were in the large merely following their Washington masters. There is little real evidence thus far to suggest that the US elites have departed from their hegemonic (and neoliberal) goals and thinking, which necessitate the continuation of empire.
That’s right, and there are zero grounds for optimism. We need to keep close in mind Trump’s astounding ignorance and Rubio’s shallowness. What happens when the Russians insist on their goals and timetables for Ukraine? It’s great that Kellogg has been sidelined (his daughter was a Ukraine war profiteer and hawk–maybe that has a little to do with it), but the same US exceptionalist thinking drives every last goddamn one of them. All we can do is wait and see, but we don’t have to wait for the domestic side to reveal itself, do we?
Putin has been burned too many times to trust Trump or any other U.S. president to keep his word. Moreover, it is already obvious that Russia is turning its back on the decrepit west and is looking towards China, India, Iran, and the BRICS consortium as areas of dynamic growth and less belligerence. If there is to be any collaboration between Russia and the United States, it will not be built on trust alone, at least not for a considerable while.