Look, the $34 trillion national debt is a very real thing, indeed, arguably a crisis. Or at least on the verge of becoming one. Interest on the debt will soon make essentials like military preparedness, diplomacy and intelligence, and basic day-to-day operations of anything and everything unfundable.
And LITD has pointed out, with some frequency, that the root cause of this scenario is the unwillingness of any politician, elected or aspiring to election, to say that this is what happens when the Madisonian vision of government's scope is abandoned, and government gets in the business of addressing the two givens of human life: sickness and aging. Taking on those tasks was always going to require wealth transfers dependent on population growth trends that are impossible to control.
So Beltway-focused journalists never have a shortage of continuing-resolution battles to report on, and politicians can demagogue about spending priorities, any one of which is only fundable with money that is only real in the sense that it's borrowed. ("My house is about to be foreclosed on, but I have cold, hard cash in my hand. Shall I buy that Lamborghini?")
But given that that unwillingness drives everything about Capitol Hill and White House conversations, and given that, ever-less solidly, the United States is still regarded as the ultimate guarantor of a world stage in which basic peace and safety is insisted on, we might as well talk about whether we still give a diddly about our leadership role.
Right now that's playing itself out in a tug of war for Mike Johnson's soul - to the extent that an election denier has one:
Republican infighting over government funding has created a minefield for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as he seeks to avert a shutdown this election year without losing his gavel to a conservative coup.
But the deeper threat to Johnson’s Speakership appears to revolve around a separate debate that’s splitting Republicans in increasingly explosive ways: the fight over new spending for Ukraine.
Johnson, since taking the gavel in October, has vowed to support another round of military assistance for Kyiv, where top officials are warning of dwindling supplies in their long-running fight to repel invading Russian forces.
But the notion of sending additional billions of dollars to Ukraine has fallen sharply out of favor among House Republicans — and the party at large — since the conflict began almost two years ago.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is already warning, in no uncertain terms, that she’ll file a motion to strip Johnson of his gavel if the Speaker stages a vote on a Senate-crafted Ukraine bill, which upper chamber negotiators are trying to combine with tougher security measures at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Greene has said she delivered that warning directly to Johnson when the two met in his office last week. And on Wednesday, the Georgia firebrand amplified that threat, telling reporters in the Capitol that the roughly $60 billion in Ukraine aid under consideration in the Senate is not only fiscally irresponsible, given America’s massive debt, but it would be wasted on “a war that is already practically lost.”
“I just told him [Johnson] it’s an absolute no-go,” Greene said. “If he funds $60 billion to fund a war in Ukraine to continue killing a whole generation of Ukrainian men — to continue a war that is a losing war, that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s ready for peace talks — yeah, I would introduce the motion to vacate myself.”
The Very Stable Genius is leaning on the Speaker, too. He'd really rather that Republicans stall until he's in office and can get credit for "resolving" both the border and Ukraine issues.
The drool-besotted yay-hoos are quick to employ high-profile instances of Ukrainian corruption at various points since that country's 1991 independence as justification for letting it be subsumed into a reconstructed Russian empire. So wedded are they to this narrative that they see no significance to Ukraine's 2019 election.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was best known at the time as the star of the situation comedy Servant of the People as well as several comedic theatrical releases. And he turned in some fine work on those projects. But he was a man of depth and erudition. His father was head of the cybernetics department at Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology, and his mother was an engineer. He himself earned a law degree and ran an entertainment company. Servant of the People was prescient in the sense that Zelenskyy's character was a high school history teacher whose online rant about government corruption puts him on a course that gets him elected president. As th 2019 election cycle got underway, people at Zelenskyy's entertainment company formed the political party bearing the television program's name. When Zelenskyy decided to run in real life, he did so on an anti-corruption platform.
The larger point is that, since 1945, the United States has led the effort for international bodies to be driven by one overriding principle: that it is not okay for one nation to invade another without provocation, even if the invader claims that there are unresolved territorial disputes. That held pretty well, with some notable violations, until 2022. What happened then was of a scale the world hadn't seen in eight decades.
With all due respect to the Kissingerian Realpolitik camp, precedents have consequences. Letting Russia get away with what it's done not only gives the finger to the Ukrainian mothers whose children are still in reeducation camps thousands of miles away, and not only hand a significant degree of control to a nuclear-armed rogue state of the global grain trade, it ensures a chaos that will permeate every level of human life.
Civilians must prepare for all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years, a top Nato military official has warned.
While armed forces are primed for the outbreak of war, private citizens need to be ready for a conflict that would require wholesale change in their lives, Adml Rob Bauer said on Thursday.
Large numbers of civilians will need to be mobilised in case of the outbreak of war and governments should put in place systems to manage the process, Adml Bauer told reporters after a meeting of Nato defence chiefs in Brussels.
“We have to realise it’s not a given that we are in peace. And that’s why we [Nato forces] are preparing for a conflict with Russia.
“But the discussion is much wider. It is also the industrial base and also the people that have to understand they play a role.”
Adml Bauer, a Dutch naval officer who is chairman of Nato’s Military Committee, praised Sweden for asking all of its citizens to brace for war ahead of the country formally joining the alliance.
Stockholm’s move, announced earlier this month, has led to a surge in volunteers for the country’s civil defence organisation and a spike in sales of torches and battery-powered radios.
“It starts there,” Adml Bauer said. “The realisation that not everything is planable and not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”
Some 90,000 Nato troops will next week begin the bloc’s largest military exercise since the Cold War.
The Steadfast Defender 2024 operation has more than doubled in size since it was announced last year, and is explicitly designed to prepare the alliance for a Russian invasion.
Britain has committed around 20,000 soldiers, as well as tanks, artillery and fighter jets to the drills taking place across Europe until May.
But senior Nato officials are increasingly concerned that governments and private arms manufacturers are falling behind in preparations on the domestic front.
Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition have been drained by the conflict in Ukraine and will take years to replenish at the current rate of production.
Meanwhile, Russia has tripled its military expenditure to 40 per cent of the entire national budget, while drastically speeding up manufacturing lines.
David Cameron gets it, too:
On Thursday, David Cameron warned against 1930s-style appeasement of Vladimir Putin and promised Britain would keep supporting Ukraine in the “struggle of our generation”.
The Foreign Secretary urged Britain’s allies not to push for peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow, arguing that unifying behind Ukraine was the best way to end the war.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Lord Cameron compared the calls for negotiations to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by prime minister Neville Chamberlain in the lead-up to the Second World War.
“If foreign ministers keep saying ‘Yes, we will support Ukraine but, yes, we must also start a peace process’, they’ll neither get a strong Ukraine nor a peace process,” he told the gathering of diplomats, foreign leaders and executives.
“This is like being a foreign minister or prime minister in the 1930s and fighting that aggression. And what we know from that is, if you appease aggression you get more of it.”
Lord Cameron also nodded as Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, stood up and said: “There is never a shortage of pocket Chamberlains willing to sacrifice other people’s land or freedom for their own peace of mind. We shouldn’t do it.”
If the future these European leaders foresee is preventable, it will hinge on the United States resolving to no longer be silly. The signals that our "allies" are getting do not encourage them.
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