Abandoning Ukraine and NATO
Even as Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger saboteurs bleed federal agencies of skilled public servants and threaten nuclear stockpile security at the National Nuclear Security Administration, Donald Trump is selling out Ukrainian allies to Russia and again trying to shake down NATO. Trump on Tuesday blamed President Volodymyr Zelensky for presiding over a country “that has been blown to smithereens” in a war he falsely accused Ukraine of starting. Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.
Zelensky responded, “Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.”
As do we all.
Nice country you got there
The Telegraph of London reports on the $500 billion “deal” Trump’s agents dropped on Ukraine in exchange for its strategic minerals. The Telegraph obtained a Feb. 7 draft of the offer Trump must think Ukraine can’t refuse:
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
[…]
The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
Paul Krugman calls the move “depraved” and “deeply stupid”:
I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.
In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.
Many of us look at Ukraine and see a nation heroically defending freedom against heavy odds, receiving arms and money from the world’s democracies but doing all the fighting and dying — a nation that deserves our deepest gratitude. Trump, however, apparently thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.
Not to mention, Krugman adds, that if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine, there is no way he’d honor Trump-the-Dealmaker’s deal. That would be the deeply stupid part.
Trump’s vision isn’t even the old-fashioned imperialism of Weimar Germany, but more like “the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.”
And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.
Trump is not simply operating in a disinformation space, or in a 19th century space, or in a depraved and deeply stupid one. He and his broligarch accomplices are operating in a fundamentally un-American one. Over the last century, American troops rode into Europe (twice) and the Pacific in white hats to save the world from the very imperialism and fascism Trump and his red-hatted goons now embrace like Trump’s friends in the Autocrats Club.
Trump has twice sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to uphold its laws, then set about finding ways to subvert them. His effort to elide the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment and strip birthright citizenship from a class of Americans he dislikes is indefensible. Not that conservatives in his thrall won’t try.
The only thing American about Donald Trump is his birth certificate. You can’t even say that much about Elon Musk or J.D. Vance sponsor Peter Thiel.
If Trump wants to revoke birthright citizenship, let’s start with his.
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Have you fought the coup today?