The world waits with bated breath to see how the incoming Trump administration is going to handle Russia's continuing savaging of Ukraine.
At the recent Halifax security conference, representatives of various nations searched for signs of continuity between Biden's policy and Trump's, but one participant says it had more the feel of a therapy session.
I don't know a whole lot about Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), but I'm impressed by the priorities and fealty to the Constitution that seems to be guiding him on this matter:
South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds has dismissed calls for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to honor such an agreement.
"As much as I would like to believe we can negotiate with a tyrant, I suspect we may be deceiving ourselves," Rounds said in reference to Putin at the Halifax Security Forum on Friday.
"Do you believe that this tyrant, if you offer him a part of a free country, do you think he's gonna stop?" Rounds said.
"I wish I could say there's an easy way out, there's not."
The Republican's sentiments stand in contrast with those of President-Elect Trump, who has previously claimed he could end the conflict in one day.
Rounds also bemoaned the restriction placed on Kyiv in its response to Russia's full-scale invasion.
"I just feel so frustrated that we have not been able to provide them all of the equipment that they need, and all of the weapons systems that they need, in order to respond to the absolute tyranny coming from Russia," said Rounds, who did reportedly stress that his views were not those of the incoming administration.
(As a side note, I also dig his recent introduction of legislation to dismantle the Department of Education. Progressives are going to use this to conflate actual conservative policy with Trumpist yay-hoo-ism. And the Trumpists will say, "This is conservatism now." This is why I write my occasional "wheat from chaff scoreboard" posts over at Precipice. )
I have to imagine that he's going to get upbraided by the drool-besotted throne sniffers for showing an independent streak. In fact, that's already started. The disgusting Laura Ingraham tweeted that Rounds was "already undermining" the Very Stable Genius. Sorry, toots, but the legislative branch is independent of the executive.
We. of course, have no idea what the VSG would actually do to achieve this peace in 24 hours he speaks of. Presumably, he's confident that his personal charm would be the deciding factor in a sit-down with Mad Vlad and President Zelensky. You know, like the way the summits and beautiful letters changed North Korea into a legitimate member of the international community.
The Trumpist excuses for not seeing that the Ukraine and Israel situations are morally identical range from "America First" isolationism to the argument that we need to focus all our world-threat attention on the way China is breathing down Taiwan's neck. Another argument is that support for Ukraine drains resources from the effort to seal the southern US border. (The actual truth is that, given our $36 million debt, we don't have the money for anything. But for the world's only superpower ostensibly committed to a stable, Western-oriented world order, expenditures must be made anyway.)
There's also the "start World War III" argument, articulated recently by Joe Rogan and Donald Trump, Jr. who, for good measure, trotted out the hackneyed term "military industrial complex." As if it's okay not to do the right thing because there's some attendant risk.
There's a more sinister line of argument that tries to let Putin off the hook for the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the more general war against Ukraine he commenced in February 2022.
That matters a great deal at present, given the VSG's nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to the DNI director position.
Let's have a look at her track record on this subject:
n the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.
Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.
“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.
It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.
“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”
Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.
In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.
Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.
You will note that peacenik lefties, libertarians and Trumpists all have in common this emphasis on the ickiness of war, untethered to moral considerations.
Within Europe, there's less than a unified stance on the matter. So far in the war, Romania has proven a stalwart supporter of Ukraine, but that looks to change with the probable election of isolationist Calin Georgescu as Romania's president.
Something else to consider: the war in Ukraine is ratcheting up, and eye-opening developments could well occur between now and January 20. That could change some players' calculus.
In any event, let's be clear-eyed about the fact that not everyone wants to see the acceptable outcome - Ukraine's total defeat of Russia - take place.
Lotta variables in a very volatile situation.
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