My VIPs for this week are President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the best tag team in the U.S.A. and possibly in the world. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visit Trump and Vance and thought that he could steamroll them to get what he wanted rather than to sign the agreement as planned. Trump and Vance showed that they were not about to be rolled by Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy was asked to leave the White House when Trump realized what he was doing. The “brawl” in the Oval Office has been on every news program in the nation and world for the past 24 hours. Some people are siding with Zelenskyy, and some are siding with Trump and Vance. Victor Davis Hanson shared his ten takeaways from the brawl with Zelenskyy.
1) Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
does not grasp – or deliberately ignores – the bitter truth: Those with whom he
feels most affinity (Western globalists, the American Left, the Europeans) have
little power in 2025 to help him. And those with whom he obviously does not
like or seeks to embarrass (cf. his Scranton, Pa., campaign-like visit in
September 2024) alone have the power to save him….
2) Zelenskyy acts as if his agendas and
ours are identical. So, he keeps insisting that he is fighting for us despite
our two-ocean distance that he mocks. We do have many shared interests with
Ukraine, but not all by any means….
3) The Europeans (and Canada) are now
talking loudly of a new muscular antithesis, independent of the United States.
Promises, promises – given that would require Europeans to prune back their
social welfare state, frack, use nuclear, stop the green obsessions, and spend
3% to 5% of their GDP on defense. The U.S. does not just pay 16% of NATO’s
budget but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European
Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes
and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt
Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under
a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.
4) Zelenskyy must know that all of the
once deal-stopping issues to peace have been de facto settled: Ukraine is now
better armed than most NATO nations, but will not be in NATO; and no president
has or will ever supply Ukraine with the armed wherewithal to take back the
Donbas and Crimea….
5) What are Zelenskyy’s alternatives
without much U.S. help: Wait for a return of the Democrats to the White House
in four years? Hope for a rearmed Europe? Pray for a Democrat House and a third
Alexander Vindman-like engineered Trump impeachment? Or swallow his pride,
return to the White House, sign the rare-earth minerals deal, invite in the
Euros …, and hope Trump can warn Putin … not to dare try it again?
6) If there is a ceasefire, a commercial
deal, a Euro ground presence, and influx of Western companies into Ukraine,
would there be elections? And if so, would Zelenskyy and his party win? And if
not, would there be successor
transparent government that would reveal exactly where all the Western
financial aid money went?
7) Zelenskyy might see a model in
Netanyahu. The Biden administration was far harder on him than Trump is on
Ukraine…. Yet, Netanyahu managed a hostile
President Joe Biden, kept Israel close to its patron, and when visiting was
gracious to his host….
8) If Ukraine has alienated the U.S., what
then is its strategic victory plan? …
9) If one views carefully all the Oval
Office tape, most of it was going quite well – until Zelenskyy started
correcting Vice President JD Vance firstly, and Trump secondly….
10) March 2025 is not March 2022, after
the heroic saving of Kyiv – but three years and 1.5 million dead and wounded
later. Zelenskyy is no longer the international heartthrob with the glamorous
entourage. He has postponed elections, outlawed opposition media and parties,
suspended habeas corpus and walked out of negotiations when he had an even hand
in spring 2022 and apparently even now when he does not in spring 2025.
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