Well of course not. He's a Putin agent, isn't he?
This is the reason I could never belong to the same political organization you do - I am still in my right mind.
Trump Zelensky today.....
- Thread starter dr.jb
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This is the reason I could never belong to the same political organization you do - I am still in my right mind.
The US isn't fighting a war on our own soil by an invading country.
And when we did, it was for 18 and up. Not 26 and up, as in Ukraine.
He hasn't.
But it wasn't for lack of trying, or desire on Putin's part. He was stopped - partly by US aid provided by Trump - on the outskirts of Kiev.
I've watched it many times and my observations don't match yours.
Z was explaining that diplomacy hasn't worked in the past with Putin - I think Vance needed to be reminded of that.
You think Vance is the political equivalent of Bob Knight?
We really don't know how dumb Kurt is - he's never posted sober.
I honestly think Trump thinks Russia can keep the contested areas as long as they make a 'deal' with the US for mineral rights in those areas. That would leave Ukraine with the rest of Ukraine and our deal with them for mineral rights.
In other words, Russia would get what they want - parts of Ukraine - for the cost of profit sharing.
A good deal financially, but does nothing to get Russia out of those areas. Ukraine will never go for that.
Didn't we win the Cold War?
Europe and Russia did have mutually beneficial commerce and business. That did nothing to stop Putin from invading another sovereign country.
And he wasn't legitimate, because he wasn't elected during the Revolutionary War.
We have leverage on both of them. He only feels it necessary to exert it on one of them while simultaneously reducing the leverage on the other. Even if you want the shooting to stop and US involvement to decrease to zero, what Trump is doing all falls on the positive side of the scale for Russia. All of it.
I understand the delicacy in dealing with the situation, I don't want to get into WW3 over Ukraine either. I also understand the frustration with Europe. They are asshole teenagers who aren't appreciative of the things we do for them until those things are removed. They are suddenly discussing coming up with $800 billion to fund defense in our potential absence when we have been asking them to do that nicely since W and Obama. The fault in this rupture lies on two sides of the Atlantic and nobody really addresses the underlying issue that all of the MAGA people have with some of this stuff. Go on any major social media site that is visited by an international audience and the main sentiment from Europeans is "screw America and **** conservative Americans in particular". It is much harder to hide their antipathy than it was in the 70's and 80's when most of us had no way to interact with them. They had an issue and boy do they come crawling to the US demanding involvement though.....
That being said, the US is capable of being the single voice on this side that can talk to a Russia or China. We set up the world so that we can herd all of these cats under our umbrella and hopefully deter the kind of mistakes that kicked off some large conflicts in "multipolar" eras of the past. Completely eroding all of that geopolitical power is a collosal mistake. If we are just another of a handful of bullies, we lose what we have built up over the past 70 years. Yes it needed recalibrate and some frank discussions are needed with our allies, but all of this has been a shit show. Which frankly has been the Trump way over the past month. Pick a relevant problem and then choose the worst way to deal with it (other than the border, 100% on board there).
I think we are talking about 2 different parts. I am specifically talking about what I wrote: question asked, Trump responded to the reporter JD, responded to the reporter, Z engaged JD with a question. Z should have been quiet, IMO. No need to start a conversation about diplomacy. Not the right time or place to do that. And to make it worse, Z questions whether diplomacy by Trump is any better than diplomacy by other President's as Russia never honors agreements.
And Z is correct about not trusting Putin. But when Trump, with his ego, is sitting next to you, you don't question his ability to negotiate to bring peace. That's the Knight comparison I poorly made. You wouldn't question Knight's ability to thwart a zone and you don't question Trump's ability to negotiate a deal. And you definitely don't question it in the Oval Office on TV.
Ribbie, important in all this is, in my view, Trump and Zelensky simply don't like each other. Given this, special care must be given to avoid confrontations.
Whoever dreamed up this televised meeting which had the. high probability to turn into a confrontation in front of the whole world should be fired. Interestingly, the culprit may be Trump
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Whatever sense you get from social media, Europeans have consistently held favorable views of America, even during Trump.
Yeah but people live online now. Perception tends to be reality. I know that I tend to have pretty negative feelings about online Euros whenever the US is brought up. Everyone is basically an ambassador for their country these days. I think the Europeans make the mistake of getting too wrapped up in our domestic politics. From where I sit, true or not, my perception is that they tend to love America when a Democrat is in charge and hate it when a Republican is. They are bad about playing both sides of the aisle and it causes our relationship with them to get viewed through domestic political lenses which ends up being bad for them. The Israelis aren't perfect but they are far better at playing both sides of the political establishment. Maybe a little less so with Netanyahu but much better than the Euros have been and that is a problem with Western Europe going back to at least Reagan.
(And to be fair, the Euros probably get tired of, "Well if it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German...." and things of that nature.)
Maybe, but I think some of that is probably two-sided: i.e., Americans view Europe as too liberal and socialist.
For sure. I think blame falls on both sides of the Atlantic. Like I don't agree with how Trump is handling that relationship right now but he didn't happen in a vacuum.
It could have. But we had a president who was very passive aggressive, didn’t understand leverage, and was scared shitless of provoking Putin and causing escalation. Germans had Scholz who was a non- senile Biden.
What would Trump have done that Biden didn't do? This is an honest question because he's going to tariff and sanction them is what Biden was doing, no?
Short of putting troops on the ground, how would he have stopped him.
This was Biden's screw up:
"I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do."
That was too ambiguous and it presented a disunited front in the face of likely Russian aggression. It left ambiguity to the Russians: we can take some land but we just have to calculate how much. That is dangerous because it allows for parties to misread the situation. I think Trump would have said something more like, "If Russian forces cross into Ukraine it would be a big mistake. GET YOUR TROOPS AWAY FROM THE BORDER. You don't want to deal with the hellfire I can rain down on you if you don't cooperate" or something along those lines on Truth Social. If that would have been effective, we'll never know.Now, that being said, I think Trump is making a similar mistake with his rhetoric towards Ukraine. Whether he means it or not, the things he says do carry weight internationally. They have to. So while domestically we can say, "He says crazy uncle shit all the time", when he does this in international relations it can send unintended messages. The Russians right now are reading his rhetoric that they have a sympathetic ear and are in the driver's seat. They WILL take advantage of that. If that wasn't his intention, he is setting his own negotiations up for failure by nit controlling the narrative.
You know I'm less of a Biden fan than you are, but come on - it's not his fault Putin invaded Ukraine.
I hope you're not saying we should allow Russia to keep their gains in Ukraine because Biden was a dope?
I think Trump is playing a bad hand pretty well. Continuing with “as long as it takes” policy does nothing. Zelenskyy needs to understand that days of transferring Putin hate to Zelenskyy love are over. That has been the guiding principle since Russia invaded and it ain’t working.
What would you do differently?
No, see, you have to start from the premise that everything Biden did was wrong and everything Trump's doing is right. Only then can you truly understand.
Agreed that 'as long as it takes' isn't a strategy for us. For Russia, it is.
What our strategy should have been is providing the weapons Ukraine said they needed to win. We slow-walked everything until Russia had a strong position and then put restraints on the use of the weapons we did send.
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The difference between Biden and Trump - and this difference probably accounts for where both of them went/go wrong - is that Biden tried to center everything around keeping the Western alliance in tact, while Trump actively, aggressively doesn't give three shits about the Western alliance.
The first thing we need to understand tgat Trump and Biden are totally different Biden is very passive aggressive in that he says many aggressive things(Putin is a brutal dictator, take Trump behind the barn and beat him up etc.) but he never follows through. Putin knew that. The Afghanistan cluster f—- was a tell.
Biden was scared of escalation. So scared he didn’t meaningfully act. Ukraine had to win the war in the first months or year or it was over. Biden withheld all weapons that could be seen as offensive. Thus no HIMARS until too late. He quashed the F 16 deal. Previously he gave Nordstream Ii the green light. Biden’s sanctions were indeed a joke, they were symbolic and didn’t really hurt Putin’s oil transactions.
Pages could be written in this answer, but I don’t have time
I wouldn't have made the mineral deal public as it makes it look like we are taking advantage of a country in a bad situation. Behind closed doors get agreements to US businesses having first crack at some things. Post-War integrate them into US technological and military agreements. Give us first crack at mutually beneficial extraction contracts. Behind closed doors.
In public, "We believe this conflict has been costly for both of the involved parties and that talks should commence to end the conflict. We are coming to the table in good faith and open to the discussions to be had and we would expect the same of the other parties with the goal being to end the conflict." Behind closed doors, I am willing to talk about little more tough. I think Russia is not likely to be repelled from the Donbas in the short term but I would totally use the Euros willingness to get nuts over this as a bargaining chip. I would like a full withdrawal, I would enter the negotiation with that as a demand. In reality, they keep Donbas, Ukraine isn't in NATO, but a trip wire European force is deployed to Ukraine to ensure further Russian aggression would be more likely to trigger NATO involvement. I would also want seized Russian assets to pay for their theft of Ukrainian territory.
Biden wasn't firm enough and Trump is too firm. The Euros also did not take this seriously enough. Trump was right in his first term in all of his criticisms about how Europe approached Russia and the alliance.
All spilled milk at this point but collectively the West dropped the ball on Ukraine.
Poland is now considering a nuke weapon, the dissolution of NATO is not good for peace. A gigantic nuclear weapons club isn't good.
But for those who think otherwise, should we agree to provide Ukraine with 100 nukes in a peace deal to ensure Putin does not take another bite of the apple?
But for those who think otherwise, should we agree to provide Ukraine with 100 nukes in a peace deal to ensure Putin does not take another bite of the apple?
This post assumes the Western Alliance is at this time and place an effective Putin Counterweight. Don’t forget the Western Alliance is shoveling loads of cash into Russia for energy. Biden was an obvious go along get along guy. Scholz thought he could get the invasion to stop with a Putin phone call. Biden did not change that perception.
The 'Trump is a Russian agent' theorists forget that Trump warned Europe not to rely on Russian energy, stopped Nortstream II, and provided Ukraine with actual weapons - enough to keep Russian tanks out of Kiev. And provided training to the Ukraine military.
Trump is playing this like it's a business deal and it's not. I hope he succeeds, but not at the cost of rewarding Russia for naked aggression.
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No nukes are necessary in Ukraine. Russia isn't going full nuclear war over the loss of some Ukrainian territory.
Clearly Trump was a Russian agent when he warned Europe, prior to the current invasion, to not depend on Russia for energy and stopping Nortstream II and providing Ukraine with arms instead of blankets.
Idiot.
If this is 2 or 3, God help us if he gets to 10. He has done longstanding damage to our relationship with Europe and Canada and he is apparently thinking of doing the same with countries like Japan:
Tokyo responds to Trump remarks on 'interesting' Japan-U.S. security pact
Japan's top government spokesperson underlined the agreement's cooperative element after the U.S. president complained the deal was one-sided.
This kind of thrashing about is stupid and unnecessary. He has been sending the same kind of mixed signals on Taiwan that Biden did on Ukraine. He needs to learn when to STFU and not just start babbling about whatever comes to mind in front of a camera. What he says does matter internationally. These things are unforced errors.
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Good God. Can someone explain to him that we explicitly had written into the Japanese Constitution that they couldn't have offensive weapons?If this is 2 or 3, God help us if he gets to 10. He has done longstanding damage to our relationship with Europe and Canada and he is apparently thinking of doing the same with countries like Japan:
Tokyo responds to Trump remarks on 'interesting' Japan-U.S. security pact
Japan's top government spokesperson underlined the agreement's cooperative element after the U.S. president complained the deal was one-sided.www.japantimes.co.jp
This kind of thrashing about is stupid and unnecessary. He has been sending the same kind of mixed signals on Taiwan that Biden didn't on Ukraine. He needs to learn when to STFU and not just start babbling about whatever comes to mind in front of a camera. What he says does matter internationally. These things are unforced errors.
They were absolutely wrong IMO. That doesn't mean that Trump's current approach is exactly right though. They can both be wrong in different ways. Biden was too eager not to rock the boat and Trump is too eager to rock it with our allies. All of this atuff is a shade of gray and neither of our prior two Presidents have figured out how to thread the needle (and to be fair, herding this many cats isn't an easy needle to thread no matter how you approach it.)
Not a safeguard against Russia going nuke, a safeguard against another bite of the apple. If Ukraine had nukes, do you think Russia would have attacked?
Almost no one says they trust Putin to keep any agreement. Even Mas hasn't said that. So what options are there? A nuclear armed Ukraine would stop Putin, as Poland is considering for themselves.
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