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We Have Effectively Switched Sides in the Russia-Ukraine War | Jim NR
On the menu today: Apologies for the late send, but I’m on my way back to the U.S., and it’s possible that if I return to Ukraine again, it will look quite different the next time. The U.S. government has effectively switched sides in the war. President Trump is pursuing Pentagon budget cuts of 8 percent per year for the next five years, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered an end to U.S. cyber-operations against Russian hackers, and the U.S. voted with Russia, North Korea, and Syria at the United Nations. We now have a foreign policy that is aligned with the Russian state against its enemies. After the infamous Oval Office blowup on Friday, Vladimir Putin is more on track to win this war than to lose it, and the single most important moment in the war may well have been the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The U.S. Government Is Now a De Facto Putin Ally
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Beirut, Lebanon — We’ll get to why I’m in this particular city and country in a future edition of this newsletter. I’m on my way back to the United States, digesting the consequences of the meeting President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance had in the Oval Office with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.
Back in 2022, Vance appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and declared, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
Vance later walked back that statement, but he probably shouldn’t have. His actions, statements, and stances since then confirm that’s what he thinks, believes, and feels. (Recall that Vance’s GOP convention speech had just three vague and brief sentences on foreign policy.) Vance clearly views Zelensky with irrepressibly bristling contempt, a contempt that anyone in this administration — including those with previous hawkish reputations such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — have yet to demonstrate toward Putin.
My colleagues have already weighed in on the Oval Office meltdown — the Editors, Mark Wright, Noah Rothman, Dan McLaughlin. MBD assures us, “In 30 years, nobody is going to be talking about JD Vance interrupting Zelensky at a press conference.” Well, not in English.
You’re going to hear a lot of caterwauling about how “rude” Zelensky was. Could the Ukrainian president have played nicer with Trump? Sure, but I try to cut a guy some slack when he’s been marked for death by the Russians for three years. A lot of people are going to try to let Trump and Vance off the hook by scrutinizing every move Zelensky made and every word he said, in order to insist that the blowup was somehow his fault.
The heart of this dispute is the cold hard fact that Donald Trump trusts Vladimir Putin a lot more than he trusts Zelensky. The president explicitly said so.
The Russian government has broken its promises and assurances in peace treaties in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, as well as the Budapest Memorandum that was supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for giving up the nuclear weapons stationed on its soil. Putin violated the extension of the START treaty that Joe Biden bragged about for a year. Vladimir Putin, and the regime he heads, lies, lies, and lies some more, and he was raised and shaped and came up through the ranks in a system that lied as easily as it breathed. As a KGB officer stationed in Dresden in the 1980s, regularly accessing files over at the Stasi regional headquarters across the street, Putin lied for a living.
As Ronald Reagan said in his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, “Dovorey no provorey — trust, but verify.” At one summit, Gorbachev quipped, “You say that at every meeting.”
But, as far as we can tell, Trump trusts Putin. The American president has demanded no concessions from Russia, no denunciation of its war crimes, not even a peep of criticism. No one in this administration wants to publicly say the obvious fact that Russia invaded Ukraine. This is an administration that fears the hostile dictators who are genuine threats to America and makes up for that insecurity by berating and bullying democratic allies.
That’s our policy now — we side and stand with the aggressor.
“Zelensky wears his military green, and Putin wears a nice suit.” Quite a few people max out their geopolitical analysis capabilities by judging people on their clothes. If you’ve ever thought that a Robin Givhan column, analyzing political figures by their fashion, was shallow and superficial, I don’t want to hear you saying this whole dispute ties back to Zelensky not wearing a suit.
The Ukrainians have never had a U.S. president that really wanted to see them win. As I’ve written and reported and laid out time and again, Joe Biden wanted Ukraine to somehow fight off one of the largest armies on the planet without ever being “provocative” or “escalatory.”
I am sure we will see claims that Trump is being kinder to the Ukrainians than Zelensky is because by cutting off all U.S. assistance and forcing them to captivate on Vladimir Putin’s terms, he’s ending the war more quickly.
This is like claiming if we had refused to help the United Kingdom during World War II, we would have been kind to the British by ending the war more quickly on Adolf Hitler’s terms. In three trips here, I’ve tried to communicate to the rest of the world that as much as Ukrainians hate this war and all its costs, they hate the thought of living in subjugation to the Russians more. They know the atrocities, as described in this newsletter, committed in the occupied territories.
There is a colossal moral difference between the two sides. In Kursk Oblast — the region of Russia that Ukrainian forces counter-invaded last year in an attempt for leverage — the Russians are bombing their own citizens, either because of lousy aim or out of their traditional callous disregard for civilian lives. The Ukrainian armed forces are rescuing little old Russian ladies with crushed legs and taking them across the border to hospitals on Ukrainian territory.
This is William F. Buckley’s metaphor about pushing around little old ladies come to life! Upon hearing the contention that the U.S. invasion of Grenada was the moral equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he replied: “That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around.”
Vance keeps insisting that the war is unwinnable because Ukraine doesn’t have enough shells and doesn’t have enough manpower. Ironically, his analysis is as off-base as that of the U.S. intelligence community that he holds in such contempt. (Remember, when the war began, U.S. intelligence officials were leaking that Kyiv could fall to Russian forces within one to four days.) For three years, we’ve been hearing from the likes of Douglas Macgregor that Ukraine’s military forces are on the verge of collapse, and yet that collapse never arrives.
The Ukrainian forces adapt and make use of what they can find, scrounge, smuggle, and obtain. Five-hundred-dollar drones are destroying $5 million dollar tanks. They add to their ranks through foreign volunteers.
Yeah, there were a bunch of military-age men who fled overseas when the war began — maybe tens of thousands — and some Americans want to look at those guys and conclude that Ukraine is a nation of shiftless cowards. There are about 37 million Ukrainians still there, guys! Nearly a million under arms, the largest army in Europe! And they’re not asking Americans or NATO to come fight their war for them. They’re just asking for the tools to do it.
And the American answer is now, “Nope, you’re on your own.”
This past November, Americans went to the ballot box and made clear they wanted a secure border, a lower cost of living, and a safer world.
So far in the first month and a half of Trump’s second term, we’re getting a wholesale alliance with Vladimir Putin against enemies of the Russian regime. We’ve also gotten canceled contracts for Ebola screening in Uganda, cuts to National Weather Service radar stations, kicking out the Associated Press from White House events because they keep using the term “Gulf of Mexico,” and Andrew Tate is coming to town.
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