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But yesterday, before the world’s gimlet eye, Zelensky shattered that illusion for all time with his own words. His breathtaking sense of entitlement, his arrogant demands for American guarantees, and his utter lack of gratitude all reinforced what so many of us have known for years: Ukraine isn’t an ally. It’s a bottomless money pit of ever-more-reckless demands, managed by a cartoonish madman who thinks he can order the United States around.
Trump’s irate response wasn’t just the latest chapter in a long-running geopolitical drama—it was a long overdue reckoning, a mark of emphatic punctuation. In a single, unscripted moment, Trump and Vance did what no Western leader has so far dared to do: pull back the plush curtain on Ukraine’s war racket.
Thus we arrive at another perplexing aspect of the conflict that stinks worse than mouldy French cheese. Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, it has constently —if not relentlessly— told anyone who would listen that it was willing to meet with the Ukrainians any time, any where. But not only have the Ukrainians stubbornly (and just as relentlessly) refused every single chance to talk, Zelenksy personally pushed through a law outright banning Ukraine from negotiating with Russia so long as Putin remains president.
I am not making that anti-negotiating-law up, although I can forgive you for doubting it, because who would do that?, and especially since the media instantly develops a paralyzing case of Mr. Magoo-like nearsightedness whenever the subject arises.
Why did Ukraine make it illegal to negotiate peace with Russia? They could have rescinded that law anytime. But they haven’t.
This might sound crazy, but think about this. It is well known that Volodomyr Zelenskyy was a slightly-below-average comedic actor who never held a single elected office —not even dog catcher— who in ten minutes microwaved up a brand-new political party (named for the TV show on which he’d played president) and then catapulted himself into the highest office in the land, donning his next costume.
What if, and I know it seems like a stretch, but what if Zelensky is, in fact, a moron? What if he is just a puppet, a Biden-like figurehead installed by squidlike deep state forces? It would explain a lot. First of all, he could never be trusted to negotiate mano-a-mano with Putin, who is notoriously sly and smart.
The reluctance to put Zelensky in the same room with the Russian president would also explain the otherwise inexplicable Ukrainian law forbidding that conversation. They need a reason to keep Zelensky away from Putin. And Zelensky’s intellectual deficit would also explain why his meeting with Trump blew up on the SpaceX launch pad, and why the Old Europeans are racing now to intermediate between Zelensky and the US President.
So long as Zelensky was dealing with Joe Biden, a sympathetic elderly counterpart with a poor memory —i.e., with limited capacities of his own— that was one thing. But now he’s brushing up against something hot in President Trump, a savvy dealmaker on par with Putin. It also explains why Macron and Starmer tag-teamed Trump in the days preceding Zelensky’s arrival—they didn’t trust the gnomelike Ukrainian to handle it by himself.
Let’s call Zelensky’s stupidity a working hypothesis. Either way, the Old Europeans have now shoved themselves into the middle, right as the Trump Administration moves to normalize its relationship with Russia and rewind the Doomsday Clock.
It looks more and more like the Europeans want to draw America into planting a long-term, high-risk footprint in Ukraine. On the other hand, it is looking less and less like Trump wants to have anything to do with it. ...
The European summit showed cracks in its resolve even before it began. One of the favored invited leaders, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, publicly scolded the leaders, asking a fairly obvious question:
See if you can get this straight: So, Keir Starmer says: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland wants to “put boots on the ground and planes in the air” in Ukraine so as to lead a “coalition of the willing” (NATO) against Russia. Sounds a little like the British PM is holding seances at No. Ten Downing Street to channel the spirits of bygone European leaders who launched doomed bear hunts into the vast and mysterious Eurasian east. (Who comes to mind?)
Why is Europe so avid for war? After eighty-odd years of serving as the world’s tourism theme park, languishing in their cafes, maybe they forgot what war is like. The New York Times reports: Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union would fortify Ukraine with economic and military aid, aiming to turn it into “a steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders.” This requires you to fall for the fake idea that Russia seeks to invade western Europe. Notice how much the EU acts like America’s Democratic Party — projecting its own hostile fantasies on its adversaries.
Also, like our Democratic Party, Europe is sinking into oblivion. The animating ethos of the ruling parties in Germany and France is to punish their own citizens with censorship, tyranny, and sponsoring an alien invasion that aims to demolish European culture. Their economic wizards are taking the continent medieval, to a global backwater of defeated peasants eating bugs. I will boldly predict that the likes of Starmer, von der Leyen, and Friedrich Merz will be swept out of power by angry mobs before next Christmas.
In the meantime, Europe has made itself preposterous. Europe does not have the mojo to do a darned thing about Ukraine or Russia. The British army has 74,296 active-duty troops, comparable to Algeria. The UK’s North Sea oil production has declined by approximately 73-percent since 2000. Germany produces around 23,000 barrels-a-day, enough to meet two percent of its domestic oil demand. Anyway, exactly a year ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared, “There will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or NATO states.” So, who’s kidding whom?
Circumstances are driving the USA and Russia into an alliance of necessity. The immediate goal is to stop the insane war provoked by previous non-Trump administrations (and the EU) going back to George W. Bush, that repeatedly promoted “color revolutions” (regime change) in Ukraine so as to drag it into NATO — putting a hostile forward base on Russia’s “front porch.” The idea all along among the most fervidly delusional neocons has been to bust-up Russia in order to seize its oil and mineral assets.
That project never panned out because after a decade of post-Soviet chaos, Mr. Putin put his country back in order, turned it into what used to be the definition of a normal European nation and — too ironically even for Russian literature — made it a bastion for defending Western Civ while the other nations of Europe launched their campaign of collective suicide. History is ever a trickster and the zeitgeist is its consigliere.
Mr. Trump and his wingmen apparently recognize the obvious: that Ukraine is exactly what its name signifies in its Slavic root, Украина" (Ukraina): frontier, borderland, periphery, outskirts. Ukraine is on the edge of Russia. Most of all, it is geopolitically within Russia’s sphere-of-influence in the same way that Mexico is in ours, with similar implications for national defense as laid out explicitly in our Monroe Doctrine. Because Ukraine is mostly a flat plain, it has served historically as the doormat for invasions into Russia, so you may see why Russia was not comfortable with the prospect of NATO perched there, especially in a new age of drones and missiles.
As Europe now flounders impotently and wrecks itself, America and Russia are motivated to avoid being snookered into an unnecessary world war over Ukraine. Mr. Zelenskyy is but an anachronistic artifact of the color revolutions that finally sputtered out with “Joe Biden,” who was himself in the vanguard of a colossal money-grubbing operation in that sad-sack country. While much is already known about how that worked, a whole lot more is waiting to be revealed, including the degree of actual treason it entailed. People around “Joe Biden” will be going to jail over this, or worse.
I’d also venture to predict that W. Zelenskyy will before much longer get removed from his position by his own generals. Ukraine will return to its long-standing status as a borderland that poses no danger to the rest of the world. America and Russia will be poised to defend what remains of Western Civ from ambitious China. And Gawd help Europe if its insane national leaders revert to fighting among each other as they did for two thousand years before 1945, making a slaughterhouse of the region again.
Mr. Trump is correct to avoid getting dragged into that. We have enough on our own agenda for repairing the damage done to ourselves the past thirty years. The good news is that we’re beginning to get that done.
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