When President Zelensky tried (and failed) to maneuver President Trump into providing security guarantees for Ukraine, he not only damaged his country's relationship with ours, he also acted as the spark to a fuse that's since revealed all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes information.
First off, it's clear Zelensky was manipulated into acting as he did. A cabal of Senators met with him beforehand, and appear to have assured him that if he insisted on guarantees, Trump would cave in and provide them. Did they do that because they actually believed their assurances, or because they wanted to make President Trump look bad in front of the world's press? I'm betting on the latter - and the fact that he didn't cave in, but stood firm on his original premise, appears to have shocked those Senators as much as it did Zelensky. Francis Porretto put it like this:
Zelensky met with a bipartisan group of Senators before meeting with Trump and Vance. I have yet to see such a report that went into the details of the meeting. How did those Senators advise the Ukrainian? Unclear. Worse, the ABC report concludes with a statement from two Democrat Senators castigating Trump and Vance!
[Minnesota Senator Amy] Klobuchar and [Delaware Senator Chris] Coons came out with posts on X in defense of the Ukrainian president after his exchange in the Oval Office, particularly the moment in which Vance accused Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful” toward his American hosts.
“Answer to Vance: Zelenskyy has thanked our country over and over again both privately and publicly. And our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe. Shame on you,” Klobuchar wrote.
“Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support. We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy — not the public berating he received at the White House,” Coons wrote.
The transcript of the Trump / Vance / Zelensky meeting makes it plain that the backhanding the Ukrainian received was only what his conduct had earned. Why, then, would two United States Senators characterize it in the exact opposite fashion?
Because they [like Zelensky] are animated by hatred.
If there’s anything the Democrat Party despises without limit, it’s a Republican president who refuses to play by their rules. Atop that, Trump is an outsider: one who, by their lights, doesn’t belong in the corridors of power ... They want his hide tacked up on their barn wall as a warning to others who contemplate intruding on their domain.
There's more at the link.
Nor is such behind-the-scenes encouragement limited to politicians. Deep State neocons were part of it too, as Mollie Hemingway notes.
Zelensky repeatedly declined opportunities to sign the deal in Kyiv and Munich, and requested the meeting at the White House. It later came out that [Susan] Rice and Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and Alexander Vindman may have been personally advising Zelensky to do this meeting in the way he did -- that they recommended him to be hostile and to try to goad Trump into blowing up. Even though he didn't, and even though Zelensky's actions horrified many normal Americans, the Obama team went on the airwaves to falsely characterize what happened.
I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the "security guarantee." It was a set-up, in Susan Rice's interesting choice of words.
. . .
As you can see from the hostility of the bureaucracy to any Republican oversight, no matter how reasonable or minor it may be, the entrenched bureaucracy and permanent DC apparatus is quite active. That goes quadruple for the deep state in the Intelligence Community. I'd expect more and more shenanigans and to be prepared so that you don't fall for the next information operation. The post-WWII architecture in Europe and the US needs this war to continue or be settled on "US troops on the ground" type guarantees, even though that's not what Americans want.
Things will heat up here, and it's a very dangerous time.
Again, more at the link.
What steps are being taken to bring charges against those US "advisers" for interfering in foreign affairs? At the very least, they should be registered as foreign agents if they want any say in the matter. If they're not, they've broken the law, and should be charged.
We also see that the so-called "Deep State" isn't limited to the USA, but is an international operation, with "Deep States" (for want of a better term) active in every European nation and in the European Union as a whole. That was made very clear when several European leaders consoled and encouraged Zelensky in precisely and exactly the same words. It was like those news broadcasts we've seen in the USA, where dozens or scores or even hundreds of nominally "independent" TV news stations all parrot exactly the same words and phrases to their audience, clearly reading from the same script. Those European leaders were using a script for public consumption when they encouraged Zelensky. It's as plain as the nose on your face, and demonstrates how forces and individuals behind the scenes are manipulating the situation.
The lack of logic and rationality behind the European approach was illustrated by Polish prime minister Donald Tusk when he pointed out that "500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians." Europe appears willing to fight to the last American to defend Ukraine - and President Trump's not playing that game. Now they have to figure out how to do it themselves, without American firepower to support them - but they've cut their armed forces to the bone in order to pay for entitlement programs. How are they going to do it? The short and simple answer is that, without the USA, they can't. As Divemedic put it:
There is not a reason to spill a single drop of American blood, nor waste a single American dollar on a war that simply isn’t our problem. Let Europe worry about this one. I don’t think that Russia is going to go to war with the European Union unless the EU keeps beating war drums and trying to start one. We need to stop letting France, Britain, Russia, and Germany drag us into the wars that they have been fighting in Europe for over 1,300 years. If they want to keep fighting, let them, but there is no reason for us to be involved.
More at the link. I said much the same thing three years ago.
Finally, the Telegraph advises that there may be "wheels within wheels" on this issue.
The president appeared to make an initial offer to Putin that contained nearly everything the Russian dictator wanted ... But there may well be a more sophisticated logic behind Trump’s seeming madness.
The Trump administration is thought to view China, not Russia, as the gravest threat to the United States and Europe in the long-term, having declared in the 2017 National Security Strategy that it is a “revisionist” power that seeks “to erode American security and prosperity”. China’s Belt and Road initiative is widely seen as a disguised attempt to secure control of future land and sea routes, by laying out massive transport, energy, and telecommunication infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass.
. . .
The Trump administration has every incentive to undo China’s Grand Strategy.
Team Trump may well have concluded that this can only be achieved through radical changes to US foreign policy elsewhere. In the first instance, it necessitates cutting the West’s losses in Ukraine and conserving US combat power to deter Beijing. US officials seem to have realised that Putin is prepared and willing to fight, at almost any cost to Russia, until the last surviving Ukrainian and until the last missile is left in the West’s stockpiles.
. . .
A peace deal in Ukraine might have the benefit of giving Nato members the breathing space – as well as the incentive – to finally re-focus their economies towards defence, so that they can meet Trump’s call for 5 per cent of GDP to be spent on their militaries. On Tuesday, Starmer committed to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, up from 2.3 per cent now. Others are likely to follow suit. A rearmed Nato would serve as a much stronger deterrent against both Russia and China in the long-term, minimising the chances that Putin might attack a Nato country in the future.
. . .
Trump may be preparing to signal to Putin that he is content with Russia serving as the dominant power in Eurasia, as long as it doesn’t invade a Nato country. By having direct talks with Russia and excluding Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, at least for the time being, Trump has already played on Putin’s sense of vanity, Russian national pride, and Moscow’s long-term sense of being a great power that deserves a seat at the table with the big boys.
. . .
Peace in Ukraine, a reshuffle of alliances in the Middle East, and a new settlement with Russia would allow the United States to return to a version of the original Monroe Doctrine, refocusing on hemispheric defence and freeing Washington up to directly confront Beijing. Having renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Trump is signalling to China to get out of the US sphere of influence and strategic security perimeter.
The US would protect the Western Hemisphere – North, Central, and South America, including the surrounding islands. Russia would dominate Eurasia. Europe would look after itself. And with US assistance, Japan, Australia and South Korea would, within a Joint Deterrence Force framework, take the lead in ensuring stability in the Indo-Pacific.
Could this be Trump’s latest Art of the Deal? We may be about to find out.
More at the link (may be paywalled).
The Telegraph is quite correct. President Trump can't allow himself to fixate on Ukraine and its problems. He has to sort out our own country's internal mess and deal with geopolitical issues across Europe, the Middle East, Eurasia and the Far East, all at the same time. Committing too much US effort to Ukraine would force him to short-change all those other areas . . . to the undoubted pleasure of China, North Korea, Iran and other trouble-makers, who would instantly move to take advantage of such preoccupation elsewhere.
I'm very sorry for the people of Ukraine, who find themselves pawns in a battle of nations and alliances and are bleeding and dying while the politicians wring their hands and search for solutions. Ukrainians are the real victims here . . . but nobody's talking about them. They aren't even on the globalists' radar screen. They're the "little people". They don't count.
May God have mercy on them. They're going to need it.
Peter
