More on the Trump/Zelensky/Vance blowup
This is such a big story at the moment that I thought I’d start another thread for it. I’m still basically angry at all three parties, and continue to think that once it got going the much better thing to do would have been to call an end to the photo-op and go behind closed doors to try to iron it out. That way, whatever angry words were said would not be irrevocable because they would not be public, and taking them back wouldn’t be as difficult because it wouldn’t be seen as a public sign of weakness.
I also think that this goes back a ways. The genesis for Trump’s recent previous blowup at Zelensky – that he “started” the war and is a “dictator,” was sparked by the following, according to Rubio. Please watch; it’s only two minutes long. This interview with Rubio occurred about a week ago, and in it Rubio correctly states what the issues were then and what they still are now. When you look back on it you can see how prescient Rubio was about what happened today:
UKRAINE: Zelensky lied to Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio. Trump is now clear he would be an unreliable partner and is insisting on free and democratic elections in Ukraine. Zelensky cannot be trusted. Even Biden admits that.
h/t @AutismCapital pic.twitter.com/QTFffJ5wOd
— @amuse (@amuse) February 21, 2025
Here’s one take on the “who started it” question:
If you watch the full Trump-Zelensky press conference, it is very clear that Zelensky, not Trump or Vance, became the antagonist. Both POTUS and VP were very respectful and cordial until Zelensky very publicly ignited a firestorm.
It all starts at 40:30
1) Zelensky essentially… pic.twitter.com/xrM4cWSPny
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) February 28, 2025
For those who aren’t on X, here’s a transcript (minus the videos, though):
If you watch the full Trump-Zelensky press conference, it is very clear that Zelensky, not Trump or Vance, became the antagonist. Both POTUS and VP were very respectful and cordial until Zelensky very publicly ignited a firestorm.
It all starts at 40:30
1) Zelensky essentially rejects how VP described the mandate of POTUS to conduct foreign affairs, and he insinuates that Trump term one did nothing to stop Putin.
2) He then basically tells Vance that his ideas are faulty and that the administration’s diplomacy won’t work.
These two comments are *deliberately antagonistic.* Everything was all well and good, but Zelensky took two major shots in a public forum, and they had to respond. And respond they did.
Recall, this is the guy who interfered in our electoral politics and called VP “too radical,” and bashed Trump in an interview with New York Mag weeks before the election.
Zelensky is ENTIRELY at fault here. 100%.
Here’s a similar breakdown of the breakdown:
Here my observations on Z’s comments/mindsets:
1. Z says in the first 2 minutes, “No concessions to Putin, he is a killer, a terrorist.”
2. He does not shake his head “yes” when T is talking about getting a deal done as he does when T praises soldiers and UK people.
3. It starts to get dicey when Z says Europe gave as much as US at 12:18.
4. Z starts to be antagonistic at 24:00 when he says that Putin broke ceasefire while T was president.
5. Z says “this document…will not stop Putin” at 26:30 and that Putin, since he started the war, needs to pay for it. (Doesn’t this undermine the whole basis of the negotiation?)
6. “You have big nice ocean, yes…but Putin does not want to stop….your soldiers will fight” at about 32:00.
7. At 40:00 “Nobody stopped him (when T was president)…We signed a ceasefire and Putin still invaded. So, what kind of diplomacy are you talking about (to JD)…Z says “you have the ocean but you will feel it…you will influence.” And, then it all goes to hell and Z continues to interrupt and T loses it…all goes to shit. …Based on Z’s comments, tone of voice, and posture (crossed arms, etc.), I think Z had already decided not to accept the deal. His argument seems to be, it doesn’t matter our current (weak) negotiating position, Russia/Putin is a killer and we want enough money from EU and US affect “defeat” of Russia (which I guess means R out of Crimea and Donbas). I think this is why T thinks Z is not ready for peace. It’s sad.
Personally, I think Russia invading Ukraine at all was terrible, but T can’t rewrite history and end the killing. He can only work with the current situation and get a negotiated peace where, like in any negotiation, no one comes away with everything they want.
This may indeed be a correct interpretation. But it’s not the way half of America – and the MSM, and Europe – will see it. Whatever Zelensky said, Trump and Vance should have kept their anger under check and gone behind closed doors, as I already staated. Not everything has to be transparent and public. On the other hand, there’s plenty of reason to wonder about Zelensky and his motives. He can’t be trusted.
This agreement wasn’t ready to sign. Zelensky’s position today hasn’t changed from when he argued with the Treasury Secretary and demanded security guarantees earlier this week. I had just finished watching the 49 min video of this debacle as you posted this and had the same reaction as those above. Zelensky apparently came today only to keep the money and arms flowing in a war he feels morally obligated to fight to the end. Sad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_YtXWVfkJE&t=15s
“…Trump and Vance should have kept their anger under check…”
Just like the GOPe Republicans did, always caving, always giving in? No, Zelensky made a veiled threat when he said “you have the ocean but you will feel it”. That remark would have earned him a duel in the 1800s. Ukraine supposedly is responsible for the sabotage of the NordStream pipeline:
“The Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up by a small Ukrainian sabotage team in an operation that was initially approved by Volodymyr Zelenskiy and then called off, but which went ahead anyway,” according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.
Of course Zelensky denied it, but the mere fact that he said “you will feel it” after the sabotage he has instigated inside Russia, makes it a threat.
I just listened to the entire exchange again, and I do not hear anything coming from either Trump or Vance which wasn’t warranted. In fact, Vance held back.
So Trump and Vance should have acquiesced to the bullying tactics of Zelensky? To avoid an uncomfortable conversation that Zelensky initiated? Or is it the optics of a publicly displayed disagreement with which you are most uncomfortable?
Trump, correctly in my view, does not concern himself with how “half of America, the MSM, and Europe” see these things. He is our leader concerned with American interests, political and financial, and peace. Zelensky’s choice of a public forum to complain and criticize Trump and America is deserving of an equally public rebuke.
And just like that MAGA comes down on the side of evil.
The Other Chuck; steve walsh:
Please don’t twist my words.
I never advocated fot capitulation. I said, and I repeat – quit the public rages. Cut the photo-op short once Zelensky starts carping, explain why you’re cutting it short, and then go back to yelling behind closed doors. Then kick him out if you want.
You don’t have to take Zelensky’s games. But you can play your own game on a better level that I also think would be more effective. It’s possible this will end up okay anyway; I certainly hope so. It doesn’t look that way to me at the moment, though.
neo: how would that have worked and been better? Once Zelensky initiated the public scolding and complaints I don’t see how Trump could have smoothly escaped without appearing to have capitulated. That is all on Zelensky.
mkent, what an odd thing to say. As President Trump said, he’s trying to mediate an end to the war, getting the best terms possible for Ukraine.
The mineral deal was actually a masterful idea to insert America into Ukraine in a non military way, but at the same time making it hard for Russia to meddle in Ukraine in a military way.
Zelensky is asking for the impossible and refusing to accept no for an answer.
The way this was supposed to work, Ukraine would still have the option of refusing the deal. Now, I’m not so sure there will be a negotiated settlement. So I guess you got your way, at the expense of more Ukrainian lives.
It will be interesting in the coming days and weeks what will be the reaction in Ukraine.
The entire Marco Rubio interview with Catherine Herridge is well worth listening to, I came away from it with a much higher opinion of Rubio.
Zelensky won’t win a war with the second front in the US media. I think he’s counting on the Progressives opening up an impeachment campaign, but has misread the public’s appetite for that, and for supporting his war.
You all are making too much of this. You need to chill.
A post of the entire meeting with timestamps:
https://x.com/thatsKAIZEN/status/1895619010982719659
@The Other Chuck
There’s a difference between caving or giving in (though on this subject I think Trump COULD do to give a little, given the baseless claim Zelenskyy is a dictator).
The logic of that as a threat is dubious, and was similar to a lot of Adams’s own staff (not a foreign actor) about French blackmail.
And god knows the Wall Street Journal has never, ever gotten anything wrong. Especially given the very weak sourcing on that article. Just look at their treatments of Trump. It’s not quite as scientifically illiterate as the much earlier story by Sy Hersh, but it seems to be a moderately source-laundered version of it.
Or a warning of a threat, that contrary to the idea of the Little Americans that something isn’t our problem just because it is an ocean away might not pan out. In any case that’s the benefit of intentional ambiguity and diplomatese. In any case I have far bigger issues with Zelenskyy’s conduct, such as the ingratitude towards the US in general and particularly towards Trump in particular for unfreezing lethal aid.
Also, from what you said on the previous thread that this makes Zelenskyy an “enemy” of the US, what are we supposed to interpret the Kremlin having mouthpieces on a censored media openly fantasizing about nuking the US and/or Europe?
neo: your approach is easy to say now, much more difficult to pull off in real time. This is why I can’t bring myself to fault Trump for how things played out today.
I wonder if there was some strategic reason to have all this televised? It certainly seems like a bad move now. To me anyway.
Another way to put it: Was this outcome one of a few outcomes anticipated by Trump and Vance?
I saw the Ukrainian Ambassadors face. I don’t think I have ever felt as sorry as I do right now for a diplomat in my life. She looked like she was in the middle of a nightmare the way she bowed her head and covered her face.
To me it looked like Zelenskiy was trying to create a new deal in front of the cameras and force the US to go along with it. Trump’s choice was to say nothing and be committed to something that wasn’t agreed to behind closed doors, or repudiate it. Saying “press conference over” and taking it back behind closed doors isn’t a repudiation. Letting Zelenskiy do what he did without immediate pushback is itself a message, one that Trump didn’t agree with and refused to send.
I don’t blame Zelenskiy for trying it, though he should have had a plan B, and I don’t blame Trump for not letting him get away with it.
It seems like even the GOPe doesn’t blame Trump for it either. We’ve heard it now from Rubio, Graham, and Crenshaw.
If it were two publicly-traded businesses who’d negotiated something, and one CEO in the press conference said “and they’re gonna do X Y and Z” which wasn’t agreed to, I’m sure it would have worked out the same way, because the market would react to the thing said publicly.
A post on TruthSocial:
mkent,
If your judgement of evil is not supplying an endless stream of weapons to Ukraine, then be fair and judge the oh so great Democrat Socialist Nations ( if they can still be called nations ) of Western Europe. In Trump’s first term he told them to start investing more in their militaries and to become less dependent on Russia for energy.
They largely failed in that regard.
We have been burned by the last administrations ‘diplomats’ (Blinken). Like “science” they have lost our trust. I am glad to see this played out in real time.
With all due respect Neo, who gives a damn what the Dems and Europe think? Certainly not Trump. They are going to blast him no matter what.
Trump could not sit there and let Zelensky publicly trash him. Once it started, Trump had to face up. Can you imagine what the critics would say about our ‘weak President’.
I sometimes cringe at Trump’s bombast; but I think he did what he had to do.
Zelensky fouled his mess gear as the saying went back in the day. As was noted; he holds no cards. If the U.S. picks up ours and walks away, the Ukrainians might end up giving him a Mussolini style sendoff. Or maybe Zelensky believes in Fairy God Mothers and the EU. Snicker, snicker.
Oldflyer (8:04 pm) writes, “I sometimes cringe at Trump’s bombast; but I think he did what he had to do.“
Exactly, and that applies to both halves of Oldflyer’s sentence.
”mkent, what an odd thing to say. As President Trump said, he’s trying to mediate an end to the war, getting the best terms possible for Ukraine.”
No, Trump is not trying to end the war. He’s trying to negotiate a ceasefire. Let me shout, because my normal voice isn’t getting through: A CEASEFIRE DOES NOT END THE WAR!!! It prolongs it and increases the number of deaths dramatically.
Russia invaded Ukraine in a genocidal war of conquest. Its stated objective is to destroy Ukraine as a nation, as a culture, and as a people. It has raped thousands of Ukrainian women as a matter of policy. It has kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to make them Russian. It has killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men. It has established torture centers and mass graves throughout the occupied territories. It has leveled whole cities to the ground.
It has established “filtration” camps where Ukrainians are taken to be “re-educated” (ie made Russian) and “liquidated” (the terms the Russians used, all) those that refuse. It has destroyed hundreds of Ukrainian power plants, transformers, and home heating plants with the stated objective of freezing millions of Ukrainian civilians to death. It has attacked thousands of Ukrainian medical facilities, grain silos, and grocery stores with the stated objective of creating a famine, both in Ukraine and in Africa. It has used the resulting instability to overthrow the governments of five African countries.
Russia does not dispute this. It discusses these things openly in media owned and operated by the Russian government. That is the side which you are supporting. You are supporting evil on a monstrous scale.
Russia’s stated objective in this war is to expand its western boundary to its natural borders. That means all of Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, eastern Romania, and eastern Poland. All but Ukraine and Moldova are NATO allies. The war and this objective have widespread support in Russia. So a ceasefire will not only allow Russia to continue its rape, kidnapping, torture, murder, and genocide in Ukraine, it will allow Russia to rebuild and modernize its military so it can conquer more territory.
So besides coming out in support of a monstrous evil, you are stacking the deck in support of World War III in Europe. All in support of your messiah.
@mkent:Russia’s stated objective in this war is to expand its western boundary to its natural borders. That means all of Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, eastern Romania
Lol, maybe Kim Jong Un can send ALL the North Koreans to accomplish this fever dream. North Korea has more soldiers than Russia.
eastern Poland
Ukraine already has eastern Poland, they didn’t give it back in 1945.
The back story seems to be that there was a minerals deal which was going to be signed. Then Zelensky went into that public meeting on camera and tried to continue negotiating, pushing for things the US leadership had not agreed to, and won’t agree to. Bad strategy, and it backfired.
Beige Welborn, at Hot Air: “Did no one on his [Zelensky’s] staff alert him that there were two different animals in the White House now? Two thoroughly American alpha males?”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2025/02/28/sorry-yall-i-need-a-cigarette-and-a-cocktail-after-watching-that-oval-office-manfest-n3800297
“I think he’s counting on the Progressives opening up an impeachment campaign,…”
I’m seeing exactly that on the liberal social media. They are totally up in arms even more than they were a day ago. The spectacle has now added a lot of gasoline to the left’s fire. Whether they can translate that into broader public support is another question.
MKent, you surely know that the first necessary step in ending a war is a negotiated ceasefire–unlesa, of course, one belligerent is totally destroyed. Sure that is Trump’s immediate motive. What makes you think it is his end game?
You don’t have to read ancient history to find a larger scale parallel to Russia and Ukraine. It should have been obvious to both sides fairly early in WWI that neither would win. But neither would quit. Because. A general cease fire, giving each side a chance to assess their situation could have changed history. Nearly an entire generation of young men In England, France, Germany, et al paid with their lives for the arrogance. The world, certainly Europe, was radically changed for ever.
Sometimes reality bites; but it is still reality.
The other lesson from that tragedy was that alliances must be formed very cautiously. Most of the combatants in that war had no stake whatsoever in the original dispute except that they were committed by alliance to one or other of the original belligerents. Not to ignore that there were underlying factors to the casus belli, such as an Imperial competition between the Great Powers/
The final lesson, of course, is that when peace is negotiated both sides must feel that it was a reasonable accord–not necessarily fair, but reasonable given the circumstances.
Both the Ukrainians and Russians need to review some basic European history.
To the isolationists, please try to remember one fact:
Russia started a war against Ukraine just over 3 years ago
Ukraine did not attack Russia.
Vlad has a very poor history of abiding with agreements or treaties regarding Ukraine.
I’ve seen and heard very little from President Trump or Vice President Vance that shows recognition that Russia is and has been the aggressor.
Bemoaning the unnessary death and destruction caused by Russian aggression as somehow Ukraine’s fault (because they didn’t agree to be conquered and decimated (in the Roman sense)) is “problematic.”
The trope that Zelinskii was bullying the US is ludicrous.
It seems that J D Vance likes the role of attack dog a bit too much. Not sure if he is ready to be let off the leash.
> Russia started a war against Ukraine just over 3 years ago
No one questions that.
Russia is a problem.
Ukraine is someone we help solve the problem.
Doctors don’t expect cooperation from the disease.
They, however, routinely expect it from the patient.
“The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) reports over 50 countries experiencing some form of active conflict in 2024, a trend likely continuing into 2025. The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) 2024 Global Peace Index noted 56 conflicts worldwide—the highest since World War II—with 92 countries involved in some capacity, often across borders.”
What makes Ukraine special? Assuming a couple other of those conflicts listed are in the Middle East which has lots of commentary, take those out, and what about the other 40 some-odd conflicts with over 80 countries fighting?
I understand no one cares about these other conflicts, but you need to understand to the average American, Ukraine is just like those other 40 conflicts no one cares about. Let them settle it, leave us out. Europe is right there, they’re rich, let them deal with it.
I agree with OldFlyer, Steve, et al. Trump and Vance handled a bad situation about as well as could be expected.
At this point, Zelensky has shown himself to be completely untrustworthy and mendacious. Saying ‘Russia is the aggressor’ (true) and ‘Putin isn’t known to abide by treaties’ (also true) doesn’t change Zelensky completely disreputable character.
Trump and Vance had to respond to this grandstanding and it was better to do it before the press than behind closed doors (where Z could lie himself silly to the media afterward).
No matter what Trump says or does, we know the MSM will portray him as a monster. While it is best not to give them fodder, if it can be avoided, this couldn’t be avoided. Despite his endless jabs and screeds against the MSM in his first term, Trump did seem to care (at least at times) what they wrote about him. This does not appear to be true in his second term. It’s very refreshing
@Oldflyer
Agreed on this much for this scene. My bigger issue with Trump on this subject is what I believe are the flaws and missteps he made leading up to this, such as calling Zelenskyy a dictator but saying he would be “careful” about saying it to Putin, and the lack of any security guarantees with the mineral deal. But it increasingly seems like Zelenskyy tried to pull a fast one on this and Trump and Vance had to step back.
Agreed, though for different reasons.
This I disagree with. For one, he still has one of the best equipped and battle hardened militaries in the world and would continue to do so even if all aid from the US stopped this instant. For two, he also has the domestic track record of at least vis a vis Russia having tried his hardest to come to a peace agreement during the sort of quasi-war from the time he came into power until 2022, including declaring Ukraine would not seek the return of Crimea by force of arms and even proposing a plebicite in which a demilitarized Donbas would vote for which nation the locals wanted to be a part of, at which point the region would be split based on who voted for what. Back in the day Zelenskyy got a LOT of flak for this domestically and from the more hawkish of Ukraine’s supporters abroad (I still like digging out this old English Language Ukraine-focused Soros mouthpiece’s editorial on the matter complaining about it), but the Russian government as far as I can tell never bothered giving a formal response to it.
This is what I think many don’t understand: Zelenskyy is far from the most hawkish camps in Ukraine, indeed there’s a decent chance he represents among the most dovish. I also think that even if Ukrainian conventional fighting strength folded up as some have argued would happen, that this would not mean the end of fighting but instead probably involve a lot of guerilla warfare. There’s been a lot of talk about Ukrainian Fascists or Neo-Fascists and Bandera or Banderaists, but it seems like very few people remember how the original “Banderaists” – namely the UPA-B and OUN-B – sustained a nasty 15 some year guerilla war with a fraction of Ukraine’s total resources and almost no outside support, a full ten years of that being after the Soviet reconquest of the region and the establishment of communist puppet governments that had national and ideological reasons to oppose the Banderaists (I have this one ethnically Polish friend with Dmowskite and Military Lizard Union sympathies who hates Communism who nevertheless grudgingly praised the – still hated – Polish Stalinist Urz?d Bezpiecze?stwa secret police for their success in crushing the Banderaists in Polish territory).
Honestly I think Zelenskyy would be more likely to get the Mussolini sendoff if he is seen as being TOO PLIANT or willing to concede too much to Trump etc. al.
I mean, why not? He has plenty of incentive to at least act like he does. And he certainly has reason to believe Putin is a terrorist and murderer (because he is) and that the Kremlin aims at the effective destruction of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign country (because it does). If you’re in a hole and the Saakashvilli sendoff is one of the BETTER outcomes you can hope for, you might as well start hoping for miracles.
I agree it’s not his end game, but it would be useful to know more.
As a history nerd, I have to say: be careful. Because I have read a lot of that history.
As someone who has studied, wargamed, and outright has credits on some WWI project, I disagree on pretty much every level.
Firstly: Whether or not it “should have been obvious to both sides fairly early in WWI’ that “neither would win”, the fact that becomes very clear if you study the primary sources it that it absolutely *wasn’t* obvious that neither would win. Indeed, they came to believe that the fight was increasingly total and existential, and that one side or the other would win and the other would at a minimum become dependent on the mercy of the other and at more extreme might lose its culture and/or system of government or even flat out cease to exist.
Secondly: To be quite frank I think those observers were absolutely correct that it was obvious “neither would win.” WWI was a much closer fought conflict than is often remembered, but also had far more room for decisive victory than many think, and it’s telling the war was to one degree or another undecided until the final year of the war.
Thirdly: The two sides in WWI didn’t just keep fighting “Because”, though some came there. At rock bottom a bunch of the combatants faced the very real prospect of being wiped off the face of the earth if they lost. This is most remembered with the likes of the Armenians in the Late Ottoman Genocide, but they weren’t the only ones hit by the Ottomans. It’s also forgotten that what might have STARTED as a limited “punitive” war by the Habsburgs and Germans to beat Serbia and Montenegro into a bloody pulpified client state like what Serbia had been under the last of the Obrenovics prior to 1903 quickly morphed into a campaign to try and abolish the very idea of an independent Serbia and partition the depopulated region among Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania in a campaign that saw entire villages hanged to death in the slow, suffocating fashion popular in Eastern Europe, and where the Habsburgs and Bulgarians began paying scalp and head prices to Albanian paramilitaries against the Serbs. Belgium and Luxembourg would probably have been “luckier” in “merely” being ended as sovereign countries and annexed in whole or in part into Germany. And I could go on.
For those combatants – minor as they generally were – there was literally no incentive to give up the fight because the alternative would have been permanent subjugation at best and more likely certain death, be it quick or torturous. And of course even their most powerful allies had to consider both for humanitarian concerns (which were a lot more powerful than we tend to consider) but also the realpolitik things that if – say – Russia or France abandoned Serbia or the Alsatian French in the name of “Peace” they probably wouldn’t be around in the future.
While the Great Powers themselves generally viewed themselves in a mortal struggle to survive. The Central Powers’ leadership believed they were trapped in a cauldron caused by the failure of Bismarck’s system (and also Wilhelm II’s failure with the League of the Three Emperors), with pan-Slavic powers to the East and underfoot, the Western Capitalist Democracies in the West and South, and a hodge podge of democratic, social dem, and “alien” elements underfoot jeopardizing the last Christian Monarchs truly worthy of the title. That their conceptions of Russian and Western economic and technological growth would render them unable to win in a war within a few short years and that ideological subversion would threaten them, and so that if there was to be any chance at all they would have to pick a chance and go in HARD. This is why the Central Powers escalated what had started as terrorist murders in Sarajevo by the equivalent of the JV Team into first a regional “pre-emptive” war and then a World War as the Habsburgs declared war on Serbia and then (contrary to popular conception) Germany responded to Russia mobilizing for war with Austria-Hungary by pre-empting them, lying about Russian troop dispositions, and then declaring war on first them and France first before planning invasions into France. It was also why the Central Powers consistently refused the many ideas of compromise peace up until almost the very end (by which point they had so clearly lost and the Allies bluntly told them it would no longer be acceptable) and why even the Kaiser-King Karl the Blessed of Austria-Hungary had to try and negotiate behind the backs of both his allies and his own military until he was found out and basically put under house arrest.
The Allies in turn could not see any particular reason to give in. After all, what would “peace” look like? How much territory would the Central Powers demand to occupy, and how would that benefit them in any way?
And what I think a great many people overlook is how these views were largely popular and had public support, especially among many of the most affected (who often were living directly under occupation or had been dispossessed because of it or suffered relatives that had it). I find it lamentable that the average school student in WWI is more likely to read All Quiet on the Western Front than they are to read a single inkling of any of the Kaisers’ words (be it Wilhelm II, Franz Josef, or Karl) or to see Storm of Steel.
It would have changed history all right, but probably not in the way many people think. To the Central Powers it would have meant a return to the existing status quo of gradual decay and encirclement that would ultimately se their power broken, and which was no option. For the Allies it would have meant consigning many of their own people into enemy occupation of indefinite and probably brutal nature without guarantees things could get better. In any case it was moot because neither side had any real reason to trust the other on that much, and the Central Powers spelled this out sharply by being the most adamant in rejecting a negotiated settlement or compromise peace.
This I think was one of the key flaws behind Wilson’s cockamanie attempts to broker a compromise peace and why he fundamentally did not achieve much at all. He did not really understand the mindset of either side, and especially the bit players that would be most likely to be sacrificed in some kind of grand bargain. And as our most Germanophillic President in history, he definitely did not understand the ideology in Potsdam, Vienna, or Budapest and the downright contempt he and Americans were held by them in spite of how slavishly and often sickeningly he had praised them and (especially in the Prussian case) tried to emulate them.
Arrogance sure, but not arrogance distributed equally. Also insecurity, sincere conviction (even if based on falsehoods), and the knowledge that many of them would die even if peace.
I also find there to be something remarkably arrogant about trying to act as if we know better in all things than those in the past and to talk about how “obviously” neither side could win WWI (in spite of how that isn’t what happened and how both sides nearly did at both times, until the Allies eventually did).
And it was going to be changed forever regardless of who won or lost WWI, and that was by design and intent on both sides. The issue is how.
I agree.
And the reality is that WWI started as some “damn fool thing in the Balkans” building off of previous near misses and tensions, but quickly exploded into a world war with downright apocalyptic stakes for those involved. In which for a great many nations and groups of people they had to fight and win or they would flatly cease to exist, and a great many *more* nations and groups of people were led to believe they faced the same fate even if that might not have been true (Erich Ludendorff – “the First Nazi” as one of the major works on him is lovingly subtitled – helped spread this around with a propaganda office in the German General Staff, where he argued Germany was in a life or death struggle against Judeo-Masonic Capitalist Democracy and Pan-Slavism, and Germany would either prevail or be enslaved. I imagine a great many people in Berlin during the doldrums of the Great Depression probably still believed he had been telling the truth even a decade later).
Forming alliances is one thing. It’s keeping alliances that are another, and how they are formed and enforced. A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that the main driver behind the outbreak of WWI and its wars wasn’t muh “entangling alliances” (which I would wager fewer than 1 in 100 have read the terms of) but one side or the other declaring war on them.
Yeah no. The Great Powers did indeed see themselves as having a stake in the “original dispute” and were quite candid about admitting it behind the scenes, even if a lot of it tied into “imperial competition” and so on, and in particular the greater ideological tensions in Central Europe and the chronic insecurities of the neo-absolutist Germanophone governments there.
And when they saw no stake in the matter, they were generally quite willing to admit as such. In particular the Italian declaration of neutrality at the onset of 1914 is quite useful because it lays out exactly why Italy would not join the war alongside Austria-Hungary and Germany in spite of the Triple Alliance, namely that A: The Triple Alliance was a *defensive* alliance, B: Austria-Hungary was waging a war of aggression, and C: Italy had no legal or practical obligation to follow Berlin and Vienna into the abyss of an aggressive war because of it.
At which point Italy spent the following year being neutral, arming up for war, and basically being the subject of “bidding” from both sides for possible terms to justify it entering the war on one side or the other (as it turned out the Allies won the bidding war – helped by a lot of grassroots anti-Habsburg and anti-German sentiment – but got only part of what they were promised after the war, which I suppose goes into the importance of making alliances cautiously, but for different reasons than what you argue).
To which I point to the rantings of Wilhelm II, Enver Pasha, and Konrad von Hoetzendorff and beg the question of what is “reasonable” given the “circumstances” of dealing with ideologically fanatical, genocidally zealous and often outright deluded nutjobs.
You know, I’ve shittalked Putin a bunch here and for very good reason, and I’m going to do so a lot again, but of all the many, many flaws and failings I can attribute to him, “failure to review some basic European history” is not one I can attribute to him. He brought up some pretty advanced and nerdy topics that many don’t even realize he was bullshitting on unless they carefully examined the subject. And frankly given how utterly “basic European history” “overviews” have butchered the memory and evidence of WWI, I think there’s problems to be had with that.
I also think that both sides have far more relevant examples to look to besides WWI, such as Georgia and Moldova. Which would hardly inspire Ukrainian belief in the Kremlin keeping its word or some kind of honorable negotiated ceasefire.
Maybe I’m watching too many gangster YouTubes, but Mister Z, you don’t talk to the Don that way! 🙂
More seriously, I saw Zelensky as making a power move in front of the cameras. Trump and Vance had to respond.
Zelensky and Trump history…
– Russiagate had a Ukrainian connection
– second impeachment of Trump was over a call with Zelensky
– Zelensky basically campaigned with the democrats in 2024…
Oldflyer:
I mention Europe for one simple reason: in the context of Ukraine, their cooperation in Ukraine’s future security was supposedly part of Trump’s plan.
Although I suppose that publicly turning his back on Ukraine might also activate Europe’s protective instincts.
My impression is that mkent is some sort of troll.
The Evidence is in this 10:41 minute Video. It is the end of the story.
Sure, people can claim Zelensky made them do it – or that Zelensky caused it to happen, but the evidence on that video proves that Vance started it and Trump later stepped in by raising his voice, verbally bashing and insulting Zelensky. Trump and Vance lost their cool, got angry, Trump’s face turned red from how angry he was, got loud, rude, etcetera – all recorded on video. Zelensky stayed calm throughout.
Rubio’s video is hearsay evidence at best.
Next video from 40:30 shows Zelensky trying to explain how since 2014 thru Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump that Putin wanted more and started killing people—from 2014-2022 people kept dying from Putin’s killing them. Had lots of conversations with America, even signed something with Putin, but Putin broke what ever was signed.
Ukraine gave up nuclear missiles (1994?!) in deal with Russia, American and Ukraine, signed various paperwork including a ceasefire doc, during all this DIPLOMACY from 2014-2022, and Putin broke them all, and kept killing Ukrainians.
Zelensky then asks – my paraphrase: How do you conduct DIPLOMACY with someone like Putin? That is:
How was asking about how to conduct DIPLOMACY with someone like Putin, after going thru it in 1994 (?), and then with Putin from 2014-2022, being the “antagonist”?!?!?!?!?!?
Vance starts around 42:12 (paraphrase) – ‘Talking about the kind of diplomacy to end the destruction happening in your country.‘ Zelensky started to respond, and Vance started blowing up at that time. Why did Vance explode? Maybe he realized his answer to Zelensky’s simple question was ridiculous, especially after Ukraine has been dealing with Putin ‘wanting more of the Ukrainian Pie & killing Ukrainians’ from 2014-2022.
Zelensky was clearly not the “antagonist”…
Baloney! “essentially rejects” – meaning that it does not provide definitive evidence or conclusive proof of what happened. Zelensky asked a simple question…
Ditto on Baloney! “then basically tells” … geez.
Thank goodness there is video evidence of what actually transpired! This is gonna end horribly for Trump and Vance … from the very beginning of these negotiations it was obvious that Trump was outta his depth, and now he has given Putin an even better negotiating position.
I suspect that Trump will have to step away from Putin, and start backing Ukraine and Europe more. He has failed, and best start looking for someone to help him outta this mess he has created.
Niketas; MJR; OldFlyer; huxley; et al:
I certainly wouldn’t suggest that Trump or Vance should have said something noncommittal and then suggested going behind closed doors. What I am suggesting is something that checks Zelensky and makes it clear what he’s doing is not acceptable, and then going behind closed doors if that seems appropriate. And doing it without seeming out of control but seeming in control. For example, something on the order of – as soon as Zelensky started with the re-negotiation bombast – to call him on it by saying firmly that he needs to stop trying to renegotiate the deal. That this grandstanding for the cameras isn’t a good idea and won’t get him anywhere, and that if there is going to be further discussion it needs to happen without such a spectacle. I don’t see that as weakness or capitulation. It shows controlled strength rather than just reactive anger.
Zelensky is a punk. Trump is Trump. And it would have been nice not to have this altercation play out in public. Not cool.
That said–and I may well be wrong here; if so, please correct me–but Trump is being Trump in a context where first Barack Obama and then “Joe Biden” showed weakness and/or incompetence in the face of Putin’s aggression, and where Democratic politicians impeached Trump to cover up the Biden family’s crimes in Ukraine.
There’s no way to prove this, of course, but I believe that Putin would not have annexed Crimea or invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president at those times. And for what it’s worth, and not to say that today’s press conference should not have been better handled, I believe that earlier failures of Democratic administrations to stand up to Putin haunted the interactions today.
You just have to ask who, really are Putin’s b*tches.
@Turtler
> would continue to do so even if all aid from the US stopped this instant
I don’t think you want to test that assumption. Neither do I.
> there’s a decent chance he represents among the most dovish
He represents Ukraine. Democracy is a b**ch; once you are put forward by the polity, you speak for the polity, and your words and actions would be understood as representing the common attitude and point of view.
> quickly morphed into a campaign to try and abolish the very idea of an independent Serbia and partition the depopulated region among Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania in a campaign that saw entire villages hanged to death in the slow, suffocating fashion popular in Eastern Europe
If that were the case, Christopher Clarke would have mentioned it in “The Sleepwalkers”.
My understanding is that it was tit for tat. One trespass by the Habsburgs for one by the Serbians.
Can’t blame the former: the Serbians’ tactic was pretty much imitated by the Russians during the “hybrid war against Ukraine” in 2014-2022.
> To the Central Powers it would have meant a return to the existing status quo of gradual decay and encirclement that would ultimately se their power broken, and which was no option.
Romanian oil. Warm Mediterranean ports. A chance to define the Middle East (like the UK and France did IRL).
> consigning many of their own people into enemy occupation
For a British subject or a French citizen in 1914, calling Serbians “their own” would amount to calling Russians this very name in 2014.
> Austria-Hungary was waging a war of aggression
No it wasn’t. An assassination of a public figure and a politician, aided and abetted by a state sponsor, is an act of war.
P.S. You can tell the Serbians’ character by the rule of Miloševic eighty years later.
Mkent 822pm. Well said. Unfortunately, so many, even those who recognize what you said, give so little weight to it.
OK, I read a lot in both posts, and also skimmed a lot too. I did not watch the video, and only actually saw about a minute of the conference, about the last minute. Trump was angry, yes, and Z was pushing hard, but should not have done so in public. Trying to sway public opinion like that can and does bite you. It did Z. I will add that I only saw one reference in all the comments about Z’s arms folded across his chest. That is a tell – I will not listen, it is my way only.
”What makes Ukraine special?”
If Ukraine falls, World War III is on, and we WILL NOT be able to sit it out, especially once the nukes start flying.
It is now almost certain that Ukraine will pursue nuclear weapons, and likely that Poland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Netherlands will as well. Then probably Canada, Denmark, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and possibly Qatar.
The world became a far more dangerous place today, and many of you are cheering it on.
There have been times when I wished our Presidents had been more frank with Oval Office visitors; however, I understood why that did not happen. But, that does not mean that should never happen – and I am pleased with today’s events for several key reasons.
1) Talk
• Trump taking the lead is enabling the USA to reestablish communications with Russia – and for the USA President to reestablish a relationship with the RU President. And if you believe ‘France has no friends, only interests’, then Putin, not Zelensky, is the interest that needs to be nurtured.
• Zelensky may share some of the same governing characteristics as Putin – Elections, Opposition Groups, Press, etc. – but the Zelensky/ Ukraine relationship does not have the same benefits & impact as the Putin/ Russia relationship. There is significant value to USA Peace & Prosperity goals between the bookends of Enemy & Friend when it comes to Russia.
• I’ll add that Trump has a successful track record at this – see Kim Jong Un/ North Korea.
2) Transition
• Not only did Biden bungle – and “bungle” is me being polite – the runup to this war, he also involved the USA in a manner that was not to “America’s good” – unless you count USA corruption & USA arms depletion as benefits.
• Trump – if he wishes – now has the opportunity to right Biden’s mistakes/ de-facto commitments, and further align Next Steps with his long-term goals – see European Responsibilities.
3) Treasure
• Long before he was ever President, Trump has thought about the financial side of conflicts that the USA has spent blood & treasure on. And truthfully, I cannot imagine any other President even proposing the Ukraine mineral deal – Trump is not breaking the rules, he is just not accepting the boundaries/ limitations others accept.
• But if you think the mineral deal is only about recouping “treasury”, you do not understand how Trump adds value, and recognizes value beyond the literal minerals/ money.
4) Transparency
• I have often felt proud of our Presidents & Government, and viewed myself as an “owner” – stay informed, vote, etc. – but I cannot recall ever feeling so connected. We have a “seat” for the EO signings, DOGE disclosures, Cabinet Meetings, etc. that are conducted in a manner – sizzle AND steak – that is unprecedented in my lifetime.
• And our government – led by Trump’ example – has been willing to talk openly everyday about the 5Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) to both receptive & non-receptive (see Legacy Media) audiences – in front of us.
• Zelensky’s intransigency & agenda did not just start today – see earlier events & reports over past weeks – but as an owner I am 100% pleased that I had a chance to see it for myself – especially the part were Zelensky is trying to use USA blood & treasure to protect his country, and will not take No for an answer.
It’s odd this press conference was held before this preliminary agreement was signed.
If Zelensky really was not going to sign unless there was at least an agreement for “security guarantees” from the US, he shouldn’t have come to the US. He’s certainly not a trustworthy partner. We have to assume he wouldn’t live up to any agreement, even if it had been signed.
So Ukraine is already preparing for foreign investments in Ukraine once the war ends.
According to Grok:
It appears most of the lithium deposits are in territory controlled by Russia.
Just looking at this, it appears the US is taking the biggest risk in this deal.
– Zelensky was a little punk. Trump was a bully. I think they were both being honest about who they are. I agree with neo, Trump and Vance could and should have handled this much better, and that doesn’t mean sitting by silently while Zelensky harangued them in the oval office.
– I think Trump is right on the merits. Short of direct NATO involvement, Ukraine isn’t going to win this war. Other than a few moments, there has never been a time when Ukraine had a realistic chance to win this war.
– I think Zelensky is right that Putin can’t be trusted to honor a ceasefire. Although, Putin and Russia may be more likely to honor a ceasefire if Ukrainian NATO and EU membership are taken off the table and the Crimea and Donbas are recognized as part of Russia – because that eliminates Putin’s identified security concerns.
– I don’t think Zelensky is the man for the moment for Ukraine. I don’t see how Zelensky and Trump will have any working relationship going forward.
– I’ve never liked the idea of receiving mineral rights from Ukraine. I get that this is how Trump thinks about foreign aid, but it’s very shortsighted. Thinking of all of it in terms of quid pro quo gives your enemies a better opportunity to outbid you for allies.
– I think Zelensky has the worst case of “progressivitis” that I’ve ever seen, with a heavy dose of Aaron Sorkin envy thrown in for good measure. He’s right about a few things and very wrong about others. But, as is the style on the modern left, he seems to believe that reality itself will bend to his will if he only “speaks truth to power.” I think that is what he was doing.
I wonder if Zelensky had told President Trump prior to the press conference that he wasn’t signing the preliminary agreement without security guarantees.
That would explain why Trump made the comment that he let the presser go on and then shut it down.
It would explain a lot of what went on.
”I wonder if Zelensky had told President Trump prior to the press conference that he wasn’t signing the preliminary agreement without security guarantees.”
He didn’t have to. He’s been saying for days now that he would not sign an agreement without security guarantees.
”Short of direct NATO involvement, Ukraine isn’t going to win this war.”
Ukraine could easily win this war if it were given sufficient quantities of Western weapons — weapons that America has in abundance.
”Putin and Russia may be more likely to honor a ceasefire if Ukrainian NATO and EU membership are taken off the table…”
Ukraine was and is ineligible to join NATO. To prevent Ukraine from joining NATO all Russia had to do is…wait for it…absolutely nothing. Thus the war is not about NATO.
”Thinking of all of it in terms of quid pro quo gives your enemies a better opportunity to outbid you for allies.”
Or other allies stepping in to eat your cake, as Europe is now doing. In exchange for the mineral rights they are now offering Ukraine a deal *with* security guarantees. So we won’t even get the minerals. Not such a great dealmaker after all, this messiah.
” “…Trump and Vance should have kept their anger under check…” — Neo
Just like the GOPe Republicans did, always caving, always giving in? No, Zelensky made a veiled threat when he said “you have the ocean but you will feel it”. That remark would have earned him a duel in the 1800s.” — the Other Chuck
This isn’t the 1880s. This is a much more interconnected and ‘live TV’ world, and the rules are simply different now.
I agree with Neo, _nobody_ involved in this farce came off looking better for it.
Trump fielded the ball as well as could be expected, the ‘make great TV’ line is classic Trump. Domestically, it’ll probably boost him, at least in the short term. Long term, though, is another matter.
The whole farce should not have been allowed to happen in the first place.
There’s a _reason_ why most public statements at diplomatic encounters between heads of state/government almost always come across sounding boring and fake. That’s because they are, and for good reason. The traditional rule is that the heads of government don’t meet publicly until everything is all worked out and everybody is on board with the public version. Otherwise you risk embarrassing blowups like today’s.
Zelensky is a loose cannon, but Trump frankly needs to shut up about the idea that Ukraine should be ‘grateful’ for ‘peace’. Trump isn’t preparing to deliver peace, except in the sense of a negotiated _surrender_. That’s what we’re talking about, no matter what nice words are stuck on it, no amount of lipstick will make this pig anything other than a pig.
Now negotiating the best surrender possible might well be the best Ukraine can realistically hope for at this point. Both Ukraine and Russia have been horribly damaged by the war, but Russia is still bigger and can _probably_ keep up a war of attrition longer. It may be that the lands Russia had conquered are just lost, and cutting the losses is the least bad option.
But even if that is so, it’s no use expecting, or even asking, the Ukrainians to feel anything but disgust and hatred over it. If someone had conquered half the USA’s land by force, and we were in the position of cutting our losses, we’d have no patience for expectations of gratitude either. Forced surrender is what we’re talking about, and nobody is going to be grateful for that.
The Ukrainians are certainly partly at fault for this mess, in the sense that their government has historically been very corrupt, and instead of acting with sensible prudence as a buffer state, they tried to extract rents. But it’s also true that they gave up the nukes on their soil, foolishly, in return for ‘assurances’ from the Great Powers, including the USA and Russia, that proved to be predictably worthless.
I wouldn’t hold it against them if they end up reneging on any mineral deals or the like, either. From their POV, such deals are extracted under leonine compulsion.
Zelensky should have known better, but Trump and Vance are, intentionally or not, ‘rubbing it in’ when they talk about forced surrender as some great peace deal.
Vance’s attitude plays _very_ well at home. I think he was a fantastic choice as veep, and I agree with 85-90% of what he says. But at the same time, international affairs is a different ball game with different rules. For ex, I agree with just about everything he said a few weeks ago about values and free speech in Europe…but it was probably the wrong venue, and probably best said privately.
Trump _needs_ the diplomats, whether he likes it or not. But he _can’t trust_ the current crop of State Department functionaries. But that doesn’t mean he can dispense with diplomacy and not have it eventually blow up in his face, it means he needs new diplomats who can be trusted to put America first while doing a necessary job.
“No one questions that.
Russia is a problem.
Ukraine is someone we help solve the problem.
Doctors don’t expect cooperation from the disease.
They, however, routinely expect it from the patient.” — LXE
Disease is a poor analogy to the mess we’re in.
Ukraine doesn’t consider themselves a patient, they consider themselves an assault and attempted murder victim. They don’t want to ‘help us deal with Putin’, they want their land back. They probably won’t ever get it, but they’re likely to emerge from this thing hating Russa and bitter at the West.
Trump likes to say that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he had been President instead of Biden. That might well be true…but one of the key turning point that led to Ukraine was America’s surrender in Afghanistan. The whole world saw it. Biden (or rather Biden’s handlers, Biden just signed what they put in front of him) did it, and the Biden Adminstration never recovered its credibility either domestically or internationally.
But there’s a germ of truth to the Democratic defense that Biden was following Trump’s plan there. Only a germ, it’s mostly false, but Trump wanted out of Afghanistan badly, and had he been able to pull out, the same subsequent bad effects would have followed.
(I have no doubt Trump would have handled the retreat more competently, it wouldn’t have been a charlie foxtrot at the detail level the way it was with Biden, but the major results would have been the same.)
I support Trump/Vance, esp. in comparison to the GOPe and the Dems, but one thing that’s worried me about them both since they came on the scene is that I’m not sure they fully realize how much everything interconnects globally. America’s surrenders in Iraq and Afghanistan encouraged Putin, and caused China to look hard at Taiwan. They very likely contributed to October 7. Forcing Ukraine to surrender to Russia might actually be the least bad option, morally and practically, but there’s no way to keep it from looking like an American/Western retreat in the face of Russia and China.
You simply can’t treat all these different fronts and conflicts in isolation, not in today’s world. It won’t work.
Most commenters here have a great respect for Victor Davis Hanson.
His analysis of the days events.
Victor Davis Hanson: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is No Winston Churchill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVG4YWw3Fqo
“It’s odd this press conference was held before this preliminary agreement was signed.” — Brian E
Yes. And a classic example of why You Don’t Do That.
Trump is not the first President to get burned that way. One of the rules of the game is that you don’t publicize your involvement until you have the outcome nailed down, if you possibly help it. Brag all you want after you know you succeeded.
Back when he first got elected, Barack Obama went to the International Olympic Committee to make a personal appeal for Chicago to get the 2016 Olympics. He failed. It was a minor embarrassment for a new President who had been coasting on a meaningless rep for competence.
Now personally, I’m glad he failed, not because I oppose Obama but because I’m a native of Illionois, and the Olympics are a mega-scale white elephant that almost always leave the host city and country with tons of debt, useless facilities, and other issues. Chicago and Illinois were better off for Obama’s failure, but it was still an embarrassment for Obama.
The Nobel Prize Committee made a comparable error by awarding Obama to Peace Prize in 2009. They basically did it to reward him for not being GWB, but later he did a lot of stuff they didn’t approve of, leaving them kind of embarrassed.
Well, Tuttler you certainly deconstructed my post and demonstrated that my knowledge of history is lacking.
I am properly chagrined.
Although I never would claim to be an authority on WWI,I thought that I had a reasonable understanding–for an American.
I blame my Germanic Professor of European history. He clearly spent too much time extolling the glories of the Panzer Corps and obviously neglected other aspects.
Nevertheless, I see certain parallels, and believe that without intervention this war will bleed both sides terribly; much like WWI did. But especially Ukraine in this case.
(Oh, and Tuttler you said one side actually did win WWI-if yoiu could call it that. I assume that you don’t believe that the American intervention was decisive. My Uncle who paid a price from gassing would be disappointed to know that.)
I will not fault Trump this time. As Rubio clearly stated, Zelensky gave every indication that he was pleased with the offered deal; and then he publicly blindsided Trump. I suppose that Trump could have been a better diplomat in the moment; but the American people did not elect him for his diplomatic skills.
As I commented at the beginning, I doubt that Trump gives a damn what people here or in Europe say. I also doubt that he would suffer greatly with the people who matter; i.e. the American electorate if the deal falls through and he breaks ties with Zelensky and company. I believe the appropriate phrase to the EU would be, “the ball is in your court, chaps”.
Zelensky, on the other hand, may have some regrets.
\
@LXE
I wish I were so sure of that given the likes of Tucker Carlson and so on.
Ideally. The issue is how you do that.
I have to agree with HC68 that this is a poor analogy. Moreover, if you believe the doctors are providing a poor treatment for your disease (one that might leave you worse off) you are probably going to cooperate with them less. “Trust the Experts” is not a bulletproof approach to life, and if we are going to dive in to WWI analogies I would point out the contributions of a different but in some ways parallel Putin – or rather Rasputin, – to helping Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich live as long as he did in the face of the best (if utterly misguided) modern medical knowledge of the time which would have called for treatments like blood thinners that would have been the exact opposite of what you’d want to do.
We’ve already seen that assumption tested multiple times over. There is still low level frontier killing in Georgia even years later, it just tends to be brushed over because it isn’t in the interests of anyone to highlight (including for the most part the victims on both sides). We also saw a lighter version of it in the immediate aftermath of Minsks I and II in Ukraine with guerilla ops going on behind the lines.
Maybe this time will be different. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Sure, but he also represented a particular camp of political thought in Ukraine that helped get him there.
Which makes this all the more jarring, precisely BECAUSE if anything that would indicate Zelenskyy and by extension his party would be expected to be on the more dovish side of the Ukrainian political spectrum at least around the time of his election. Which does not bode well given how badly things turned out on that score.
It would take a heart of stone for me not to laugh utterly at this. There’s a reason why The Sleepwalkers helped greatly undermine my faith or trust in Clark’s work, in spite of having some achievements there. It also shows the problem of cropping your sources in order to create a given impression, and in particular Clark’s over-reliance on sources sympathetic to the Central Powers (mostly those written decades after the fact by the defeated trying to justify their conduct and atrocities and avoid the gallows).
The sources of the Central Powers at the actual time were much more sanguine and relatively honest (if often still deluded and bloody-minded). It’s just that for various reasons we didn’t get access to them for decades later due to them being sequestered away in neutral or even hostile hands. Of particular note I point to the Prussian State Archives that we only gained access to after the reunification of East Germany, which helped flatly lay out how deeply criminal the Dreibund’s actions had been during the early stages of WWI and indeed the years up to it.
The likes of Wilhelm II, Prinz Phillip von Eulenberg (who was out of government by then but had served as Wilhelm II’s svengali and possible lover as well as a shrewd – if self-interested – observer of politics who recognized and praised Wilhelm and the cabinet for lying about Russian intentions), Konrad von Hoetzendorff, and a host of others told different. Especially if you compare what they said and did (including in private) to what their opponents (and particularly the Serbians that Clark spends so much time obsessing over, with some justification but with so obvious and dishonest an agenda that it isn’t funny and which manages to be more anti-Serbian than the fucking NAZIS in their unsuccessful attempts to use their wartime occupation to pin responsibility for WWI on the Serbs ). In particular the fact that the left-wing Republicans tended to put a damper on French revanchism (which was seen as a particularly royalist or at least right wing republican bent) and also overlooked the close ties between “Willy and Nicky” (and in particular how and why the latter was so utterly blindsided when his cousin, friend, and former quasi-ally accused him of planning mobilization to attack Germany in a move we now know was fabrication).
I have a whole host of problems with Fischer (in particular he exaggerates and over-blames Bethmann-Hollwigg) but his work pre-empted and crushed a lot of Clark’s claims decades before they were made. But for a more up to date and cutting rebuttal of Clark’s claims come from the likes of Marvin Benjamin Fried and his Austro-Hungarian War Aims in the Balkans during World War I (which showed how the KuK largely went into the war with open eyes and until very late in the game remained committed to the poisoned chalice of Habsburg domination in Eastern Europe and in particular the Balkans) and Isabel V. Hull, especially in her “Scrap of Paper.”
Ultimately I feel that Clark gave his game away when he tried to play up the “democratic” or “multinational” elements of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and to be fair those did exist) while pointedly ignoring both their limits (such as their ultimate dependency on the Kaiser-King’s say so and the warring courts of Franz Josef and his would-be successors like Franz Ferdinand and Karl) and what they would be used to sanction (hence the government sponsored and issued propaganda like the lovely jingle “All Serbs must Die”). Like in his “Iron Kingdom” about Prussia (which I found to be largely good until the latter part) where he gushes about how progressive and modern Germany and Prussia were (And with good reason) without realizing how it was often that very progressive bent that helped give rise to things like Neo-Absolutism, “Kriegsocializmus”/War Socialism, and Wilhelm II ranting about how his army had to take no Chinese prisoners and be prepared to gun down their own families if they dared oppose the Kaiser’s power.
If people think democracy is a biotch, it turns out that autocratic administrative states with a dim view of democracy, capitalism, and constitutionalism are even worse.
It’s easy to get that understanding because – as I and a few colleagues (including probably one of the world’s foremost English language experts on WWI Allied cavalry and sub warfare) concluded – Clark generally downplays or avoids detailed analysis of military campaigns, battles, or policies in general, and is ultimately a whitewasher of the Central Powers (probably not coincidentally, because the more in depth you look the worse it gets). And in the end this involves overlooking the population. Namely, that a higher proportion of the Serbian and Montenegrin population died in WWI than did in WWII, in spite of the presence of the Nazis, the murderously anti-Serb Croat Ustasha, the not-very-gentle Hungarian occupation of Vojvodina and Bulgarian forces in Macedonia, fratricidal fighting of the various anti-Axis resistance movements, and the hunger, deprivation, and mistreatments.
Granted, a massive pre-occupation typhus epidemic in WWI that hit Serbia before the conquest was finished (and which was a major reason for the Serbian position breaking down in 1915) skews the proportions a fair bit, so it’s not like literally all the deaths were due to Central Powers policies. But that was not for lack of trying. And in particular you flat out do NOT get a roughly 10% death toll for the population (including disproportionate deaths for women and children) just by accident, which is confirmed by things like the indiscriminate head tallies paid by the KuK’s military administration and the instructions to their Aviation Troops (due to them lacking a proper air force) to bomb and strafe columns of retreating Serbs indiscriminately. Their Bulgarian allies under Tsar Ferdinand I managed to be even worse, with a far-reaching idea of absorbing occupied Eastern Serbia into a “Greater Bulgaria” and eradicating Serbian culture and language, but the KuK and Germans knew of this and at best objected to minutae such as the occupation boundaries (such as foreign minister and Hungarian patriot Tisza’s jaw jawing with them about the Iron Gates and the Danube Locks on national grounds).
https://www.academia.edu/3793769/Reporting_Atrocities_Archibald_Reiss_in_Serbia_1914_1918
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/04/12/serbia-under-bulgarian-occupation-documenting-wwi-crimes/
Now, FAR BE IT for me to claim Serbia dindu nothing wrong. One reason the Albanians were so eager and willing to collect Serbian scalps was due to how Serbia and Montenegro had treated their people in the years leading up to this during the Balkan Wars, and in the immediate prelude to WWI the Serbian government (and its supposedly impeccable constitutionalist and democratic mold) fought a *VERY* Dirty, atrocious war against Bulgarian Macedonians and Albanian and Turkish Muslims in Macedonia that killed dozens of thousands, and the Serbian Chetniks were more than capable of plying similarly brutal and atrocious trades in WWI.
Which makes it all the more jarring when you realize that for all of its many sins the Serbian government and military never openly or officially condoned – let alone called for – the level of atrocities the Central Powers did on both the low level (again, publicizing and translating things like “All Serbs must Die” in a time of intensified wartime censorship or dictating quota based reprisal killings).
I absolutely can blame the former when their actions went beyond even what was acceptable by the KuK’s own rather lax laws. And they weren’t really “imitated by the Russians” (they developed separately). In any case by pointedly downplaying the unpleasant parts of the Austro-Hungarian government’s policy assessments on Serbia and the documentation involved while avoiding how the ramifications are clear even from the most macro of pre-and-post-war population counts, Clark is at best guilty of lying by omission on a truly grand scale. How much of the roughly 10%+ mortality rate for the entire population was caused by the Central Powers illegally or by them “legally” or due to other things like the Typhus epidemic are questions I leave to greater experts, as is the question of how much of the illegal death toll was explicitly genocidal in nature (as some of it obviously was as we can tell from Tisza and Hotzendorff’s writings and by the indiscriminate policy of awarding bounties for dead Serbs during the 1915-16 campaigns) and how much of it was “incidental” (due to abusive requisitioning leading to starvation or disease, or deportees being treated like cr@p in forced labor like everyone else was).
But ultimately it doesn’t matter that much. All of those possible outcomes were acknowledged and accepted by Austro-Hungarian, German, and Bulgarian leadership as tolerable or even desirable, which is why the death tolls in Serbia and Montenegro of the executed, died of overwork, and so on were about an order of magnitude greater than the much more publicized Rape of Belgium.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/atrocities-1-1/
(And frankly I believe the article here is underselling it precisely by focusing only on the 11,500-12K executed by the KuK admitted by the Finance Minister, because most of the deaths happened more unofficially by hunger, overwork, and by atrocities from reserve units or Habsburg allies like the Bulgarians or Albanian Paramilitaries. But it’s a decent floor.)
Romania spent half the war trying to draw a middle ground, and so it was by no means certain that an independent Romania under its Hohenzollern monarchs would be habitually pro-Central Powers (and indeed the Hohenzollern King ultimately accepted public outcry and joined the war against the mother dynasty in 1916, to catastrophic effect). And even after the occupation, Allied sabotage in front of the Central Powers advances crippled Romanian oil output for the duration of the war and the Central Powers lacked the resources and know how to get them working again (especially since in this era oil tech and expertise was more of an Anglo-American-French commodity even as far afield as Russia and Iran, and while not TOTALLY absent among the Central Powers was a lot harder).
https://europecentenary.eu/sabotaging-the-german-war-machine-the-destruction-of-the-romanian-oilfields-in-november-1916/
https://roconsulboston.com/pages/infopages/commentary/ww-i
This was not WW2, where Romanian public opinion (especially after the fall of France in 1940) was far more pro-German* and where the Germans had decades of investment in the Romanian oilfields.
(And even in WWI it should be said that Pro-French/anti-Hungarian and Pro-German/anti-Russian sentiment were rather evenly balanced for much of the leadup to and duration of WWI and is one reason Romania joined the war so late.)
True, but which are heavily vulnerable and capable of being blocked in by the British and French, even without Italy (and if/when Italy is on the other side as well…. well there’s a reason Captain von Trapp and Admiral Horthy didn’t leave the Adriatic often).
German attempts to do so and modest successes in that front actually helped doom the Ottoman Empire, especially when coupled with the empire’s genocidal internal campaigns of extermination against troublesome minorities. In particular it helped push the Sharif of Mecca to defect to the Allied side due to fear of German-sponsored Turkish railways to Mecca and Medina (which helped create the impetus for Lawrence of Arabia’s famous train raids).
I Wasn’t referring to British or French nationals calling Serbians “their own.” I was referring to Serbian, French, and Belgian nationals calling *their own countrymen* their own.
Including such “lovely” things as reprisal killings based on real or bullshit accountings of guerillas, forced requisitioning, deportation, the use of civilians as human shields run in front of advancing troops (mostly Western Front Germans) so that Allied troops trying to defend their position would risk gunning down their own people, and so forth.
https://warontherocks.com/2014/08/warchives-germanys-violation-of-belgian-neutrality-in-1914/
https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2023-03/23866-Original%20File.pdf
I know that Clark doesn’t go into these matters in *nearly* the depth he should, but that doesn’t change the fact that they happened. So the idea of “freezing the front” or a “negotiated truce” would by definition have meant many of the continental allies consigning large numbers of THEIR PEOPLE to inhumane and often criminal enemy occupation.
YES, IT ABSOLTUELY WAS.
The Italians spelled it out in precise and exacting detail, admittedly largely as an excuse to avoid joining the war automatically and instead “Gibs Me Something”, but the moral and legal metrics are no different. Also the Austro-Hungarian and German leadership were again far more sanguine on the matter in private, especially since they (and particularly Hoetzendorff) had loudly considered “pre-emptive war” against Serbia for years beforehand.
Correct, but the Serbian State DID NOT SPONSOR SAID TERRORIST MURDERS, AND NEITHER THE CENTRAL POWERS NOR ANY OF THEIR AFTER THE FACT APOLOGISTS SUCH AS THE NAZIS WERE ABLE TO PROVIDE ANY PROOF THEY DID.
(Which is one reason Clark has to use a lot of guilt by association and often debunked claims – especially regarding how aware Pasic was of the Apis/Dimitrijevic Network, “Unification or Death”, and its various spirals, while also downplaying how “JV Team” and disreputable “Young Bosnia” with Princip and co were to the hardened terrorists around Dimitrijevic, Tankovic, and so forth, and how they very obviously did not expect the attempt on Sarajevo to amount to much hence their decision to cheap out on supporting the Young Bosnia team at basically every opportunity.
If as most people – and even the fucking Nazis who went into this subject expressly LOOKING to condemn the Serbians – concluded Pasic, the King, and the Serbian government as a whole were not aware of the depths of Dimitrijevic’s terrorist connections and their actions and did not approve of them, then the murders in Sarajevo stop being sponsored by the Serbian State as a whole but become the actions of an explicitly renegade terrorist deep state that by the end of the war would get caught and executed for trying to coup the Serbian government itself. Meaning that the Austro-Hungarian government sped into a war of aggression and extermination against an entire nation – in contradiction of Serbia’s acceptance of most of the ultimatum – in a grotesque case of Communal Guilt by Association).
Moreover, we know the response to the terrorist murders in Sarajevo. it came in the form of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum (which was viewed even at the time as egregious, overreaching, and an attempt to provoke a war, which we know from Habsburg archives *IT ABSOLUTELY WAS*, and which IIRC even Clark admits). Which the Serbian government responded to by agreeing to all of its demands *except* for the one demanding a Habsburg police occupation of Serbia proper in contravention of its constitution.
Which the Austro-Hungarian government seized upon to declare war anyway with German support and backing in a move of utmost brutality and what we now know was criminal and genocidal in nature.
But sure, Clark doesn’t mention it because he’s too focused on talking about how progressive the Second Reich could be (without apparently factoring in how that could be a bad thing) and Austro-Hungarian Imperial representation as a precursor to the European Union.
(To which I would point out “exalting the anti-nationalist, unresponsive, technocratic dynastic autocracy split between Austro-German supremacist melting pot, Hungarian Ethnonationalist and Classist estates, and quasi-separate Croatian banovate, all of which are replete with corruption, censorship, racial and ethnic identity politics and administrative prejudice, and headed up by “the last monarch in the old school” as monarch and the maddest of mad dogs of war as military administrator is not the sterling endorsement for the EU that Clark seems to think it is.”)
What the horseshit is this supposed to mean?
“You can tell the Serbians’ character by the rule of Milosevic eighty years later”?
Mate, I’ve been used to lecturing on the crimes and atrocities of Milosevic and his protege/spindoctor turned quasi-dictator in his own right Vu?i?. As well as others such as Serbia’s dirty ears in the turn of the last century (which manage to make even the Yugoslav Wars look relatively paltry in comparison). I am not a shill for Serbian ultranationalism or “Serbian Socialism”.
But I’m also not one for this kind of bullshit communal blame gaming on the genetic and hereditary level.
Also, “You can tell the Germans’ character by the rule of Merkel 90 years later.”
“You can tell the Austrians’ character by the rule of Sascha van der Bellen…”
“You can tell the Hungarians’ character by the rule of Viktor Orban…”
This is not a good or winning argument.
And moreover, it does fuck all to invalidate the points I make and that Clark pointedly tries to gloss over (in large part because he cannot address things like Eulenberg’s acknowledgement of how his pupil the Kaiser and the OHL had conned the Reichstag with a fake Russian invasion threat to get war credits or the criminal nature of Austro-Hungarian deliberations during the July crisis and their reprisal policies without gutting his agenda).
I do not think many sane people would try to argue that the somehow immutable and consistent spirit of Milosevic in the Serbian public would justify Austria-Hungary and Germany trying to escalate a crisis with an intentionally nasty ultimatum, responding to Russian mobilization against Austria-Hungary by defrauding their own legislatives (especially in the case of Germany) and declaring war on Russia first, and then driving a bunch of Belgian and French civilians in front of Allied machine guns and picket lines so their troops can advance further while hanging something like a minimum of 12,000 Serbian civilians in the first couple years of the war, padded out by many thousands more killed by bayonetings, shootings, purposeful overwork, or conduct by their allies.
Geez, reading all this stuff about Europe in WWI makes me appreciate why the Founders wanted to avoid “foreign entanglements”. Hope it doesn’t turn me into an isolationist …
@Oldflyer
No worries, and sorry for that. Unfortunately WWI is so badly misunderstood and understudied even many “experts” don’t have a good grasp of it.
Agreed, though ironically with intervention the bleeding might be even more grandiose and terrible (and that might be in the US’s practical interests, given Russia). In any case this has turned into a nastly way.
My sympathies for your uncle. And as for American intervention being decisive, my best answer would be “Yesn’t”, “Nes”, and Kinda. In terms of the military intervention and boots on the ground in Europe, it really wasn’t nearly as much and I think this becomes pretty clear when we look at time line and the fields.
Outside of the Eastern Fronts (which the Central Powers won in this war), basically all of the fronts and all the other CP members were caving in slowly or not so slowly by 1917-1918. This gets particularly evident looking at the Ottoman Empire but even in other areas the Central Powers were reduced to basically looting the areas they occupied dry, and had begun to run the risk of cannibalizing each other (with Vienna’s city authorities deciding to seize Danube food barges taken from Romania destined for Germany to feed themselves, and this nearly causing a war scare with Ludendorff threatening to invade and occupy Austria-Hungary, and an outright combat between German and Georgian troops on one side and the Ottomans and Kurds on the other in the Caucasus, with separate Armenian and British troops on the sidelines).
By 1917 even the chronic optimists in the German OHL who had successfully closed out the war in the East were under no illusions this situation was sustainable, and so they basically took as many troops as they deemed possible to free up from the newly occupied territories in Romania and the former Russian Empire and threw them at the Western Allies in Italy and France/Belgium, and also issued orders rescinding the Sussex Pledge and returning to unconditional submarine warfare, in the hopes they could obtain military victory over the Western Allies (or at least those on the continent namely Italy and France) before Bulgaria and the Ottomans failed. Which also involved bringing the US into the war due to unsurprisingly trampling on US neutral rights and interests on top of other things (like Zimmerman’s attempt to encourage a Mexican invasion of the US and the failed coverup of that).
US troops began arriving in Europe far earlier than many think -with the first units in 1917 – but it took until early Spring 1918 before they started forming into units.. And even then we were mostly in numbers in France, not the other fronts or subfronts (Italy was the other area that saw active combat and IIRC we had a regiment – the 332nd – there as well as various aerial squadrons; we also had some troops in Northern Russia but we didn’t face combat there until towards the very end of the war and it was against the Bolsheviks.)
https://armyhistory.org/viva-lamerica-the-332d-infantry-on-the-italian-front/
The first serious US combat units came in at the very tail end of the German/Habsburg Summer Offensives, and helped hold Paris and counterattack, but even then we were decidedly supporting actors. Of the 58 divisions that got thrown at the Germans at the Second Battle of the Marne, 8 were American. Now to be fair those divisions were A: Almost entirely fresh, and B: Double the size of most other divisions, so the real proportion is something like at least 16 parts out of 66. Big and significant but not really decisive.
So I’d say the troop intervention we had was quite important in the margin of victory, but not so much in deciding it.
That said, the reason the Central Powers risked getting the US into the war in the first place was because of how decisive American financial and industrial might was for the Western Allies, as well as the ideological dimension of it (where the Central Powers saw us – rightfully or given Wilson wrongly – as a bastion of Judeo-Masonic Capitalist Democracy. So they basically figured that they needed to attack us to try and totally shut down the Trans-Atlantic transit and supply routes to Britain/France/Italy/Greece/Belgium/etc in order to have *any* hope of winning the war, even if it meant openly provoking a war with the US, because they figured out military couldn’t do as much damage as our economy already was.
So there ya have it.
Agreed there.
Agreed there. It’s regrettable and I blame Trump to some degree for what i view as failures leading up to this, but Zelenskyy pushing in this way I think helped make things worse.
@FOAF
Oh yeah, there’s a reason the Founders had a deep love-hate relationship with Old Europe. And above all feared and were terrified of it. With a side issue of the Barbary States and the Ottoman Empire. Foreign entanglements are utterly dangerous, terrifying, and possibly deadly.
The issue is I think they badly overestimated how possible it would be to avoid them in a global age. And in particular the risk of foreign entanglements coming overseas to entangle them. But I don’t think it’s controversial to say that we have gone too far the other way and badly mismanaged things to boot, like USAID trying to teach Sri Lankans to avoid gendered words.
So many words here!
Zelensky actively campaigned for Harris—it’s dumb to not try to apologize to the 77 million Trump voters.
To Zelensky, Peace that includes giving up territory to invading Russia is immoral, as so many other elites also claim. Such critics are not joining the fight in large numbers to kill Russians.
Is fighting to the last Ukrainian, and then having Russia win, really more moral Peace with some territory loss?
War is Hell—and immoral.
So many elite EU folk will hate Trump—but will they impose 3-4-5% GDP to defense and send their EU resources to Ukraine? They haven’t been doing so for the last 10 years.
500 mln Europeans angry at 330 mln Americans who aren’t protecting them enough from some 100 mln Russians who are having difficulty in conquering 30 mln Ukrainians.
One likely result is that more EU leaders will call for more real defense. And they should.
Via X.com:
Hungary’s Victor Orban on the Oval Office fracas, predictably praises Trump:
“Strong men make peace, weak men make war,” Orbán wrote in a post on X. “Today President @realDonaldTrump stood bravely for peace. Even if it was difficult for many to digest. Thank you, Mr. President!”
Joel Pollock explains the totally bad advice Democrats gave Zelenskyy before meeting Trump and Vance: “Democrats inflated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s sense of arrogance and entitlement before Friday’s disastrous Oval Office meeting, with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) even calling Zelensky the real leader of the free world.”
(https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2025/02/28/democrats-never-trumpers-inflated-zelenskys-arrogance-before-oval-office-disaster/)
MORE MIRTH to taunt our enemies with is making social media rounds:
President Donald Trump should change the name of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the “Department of Conservation,” making Lee Zeldin the “Secretary of Conservation” and correcting the department’s core mission.
@that guy
Fair, and I agree there are times when there should be franker conversations. But I am the opposite of pleased here.
Yeah, I don’t see it. At all.
Re-establishing communications or a relationship are one thing, but I don’t believe for a second we ever fully dropped comms with the Kremlin, especially given the emergency comms. It’s just that we realistically only have so much to talk about, especially now. I don’t have much to praise the Biden Junta on but I think that even they realized that this was a problem (and Trump towards the end of his second term did too).
Communications may be important for a functional relationship but it is far from
enough to guarantee one. And frankly we’ve been chasing the dream of the great Russo-American Alliance for longer than I’ve been alive, and with dismal results. Most of which I think can be firmly placed at the feet of the entrenched post-Soviet administrative and security “organs” that helped spawn Putin and led to bullshit like the Transnistrian War and the blood libel against a US Submarine for the Kursk Sub Disaster.
At a certain point in time we need to ask ourselves if we have basically exhausted everything fundamentally worth talking about with the current Russian regime – at least regarding foundational alignment – and it is time to reel things in. That doesn’t entirely mean we need to abandon the hopes of better relationships or even alliance with Russia altogether, but it does mean we probably will not have them under current circumstances, and probably not with the current regime barring “regime change.”
God give me strength.
Putin has been a dictator for almost the entire time I’ve been alive, and for the vast majority of that he’s ruled over a pro-PRC, anti-Western, Islamo-appeasing dictatorship with regular assassinations, Stalinist propaganda, and so on. Zelenskyy may or may not be corrupt but he is a democratically elected President who hasn’t tread on the Ukrainian constitution, and indeed has cancelled elections precisely *because* of the Ukrainian Constitution forbidding them during a time of war (I view this as one of several defects in the Ukrainian Constitution but the fact remains it exists).
Moreover a lot of the “banning” of opposition parties only extended to some, and was often incredibly weak (with some very superficial changes by the likes of “Opposition Platform” being enough to dodge the bans).
Correct, but not in the way you act. The Zelenskyy/Ukraine relationship has seen Ukrainian troops fight and die alongside us in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, does not seriously compete with us for influence in Europe like Russian hydrocarbon politics does, has not threatened to nuke NATO or seize Gotland or “Denazify” Poland, and so on.
A bird in hand is worth two or three in the sky. As comparatively modest as Ukrainian resources and benefits are compared to Russia, the fact is we actually can and do benefit from them in actuality and have done so in a provable fashion, as opposed to benefits from a magical hypothetical detente or alliance with Putinist Russia that has not manifested and almost certainly never will.
And fuckall of them have manifested under Putin, and that is unlikely to change. Moreover, I don’t see how or why shorting the Ukrainians of Budapest Memorandum support would encourage any post-Putinist government to respect us more as a possible partner, especially when the Kremlin and most of the other organs are heavily tied to the PRC.
Fair, but if Kim Jong Un is an example of a successful track record, it’s worth pointing out how very finite the concrete benefits of that success were. North Korea still hates us, still demonizes us, still defrauds us, and is still aligned with the Kremlin and especially the CCP. Even a miracle worker is limited by what the other side wants to have happen.
Mostly agreed, though as for USA Arms Depletion that needs to be balanced against the arms (and manpower, and credibility) depletion of the Russian military, one of our major strategic enemies and which the present government has consistently opposed to us going back to at least the Kursk Sub Incident. So there’s a balance to be had there in humiliating one of the major malcontents in the world and an ally of the Number One (PRC or Iran, depending on your view).
Also as much as I like shitting on Biden this problem predates his puppet presidency; the Crimeaschluss and start of the Donbas War happened on Obama’s Watch (and indeed Trump had to unfreeze lethal aid to Ukraine after Obama canned it), and Georgia happened as a sucker punch during Dubya’s lame duck period.
You are not the first person to believe we could “realign” our interests with Putin’s Russia, and we have suffered grievously for it due to the predictable rug pull from Moscow.
Agreed, but in general I view his first term stances as more appropriate here, namely trying to push the European members of NATO to see to their own defense like the Eastern members were, and also supporting Ukraine against further Russian aggression.
And I say this as someone broadly supportive of the mineral agreement and most of his stances.
Also, for the record while I agree with Steve Walsh I view “The Other Chuck” as frankly terminally naive and suffering from Ukrainian Derangement Syndrome. Not so much because I believe there are not other subjects on the table in the “Peace Talks” but because prior track records, *Including during Trump’s first term*, give me almost no confidence in Putin or whoever replaces him following through with commitments.
Agreed, and that is one reason I voted for him and why while I quibble with the Mineral Deal (in particular the lack of enforcement or mutual defense) I do like the premise of it.
Agreed, which is also why I viewed it as likely a way to ensure a backseat defensive integration and also to provide financial justification to fund the liberation of more of the Donbas. But I think the problem is whatever the backdoor intentions, Zelenskyy still has to sell the on the face terms of it to the public.
Agreed there. I am generally sympathetic to Zelenskyy’s plight but he made this a partisan issue, was the one to short charge Trump with the Burisma investigation and ensuing impeachment, was the one to campaign with Kamala, and so on. Trump has a justification to be miffed at him. But I believe both are past the point where this kind of squabbling is helping either side.
And above all I have no reason to believe why seeing this would prompt Putin or the others to push away from their anti-Western, pro-CCP alignment. Indeed Putin went so far as to have his Foreign Minister praise Russo-Chinese ties publicly soon before this. And if we are weighing Ukraine and how much to involve ourselves -or whether to walk away – I think we need to do so with a realistic evaluation that Putin and whoever replaces him will probably reject Trump’s offers of a relationship and backstab him, like they did to him in his first term and like they have done to most US admins in my life.
Either Zelensky has come to believe all the fluff and puff pieces written about him in the Western (anti-Trump/anti-American) press or he is simply delusional. An example of the hubris/nemesis dialectic so favored by V. D. Hanson. If, and it is likely that he was given instructions on how to “handle” Trump, they came from polluted sources, both domestic and foreign. It should also be kept in mind that before this encounter, Trump had to deal with Macron and Starmer, two Euroweasels whose goal was quite clearly to try to set Trump up for a big cave in his meeting with Zelensky. By the time Zelensky showed up, Trump and Vance already had it up to there and were in no mood to be lectured by a guy who, just a few months ago, actively supported the democrat candidate while standing on American soil. Talk about election interference! At any rate, yesterday’s boil lancing was good; now the pus can drain from the abcess that is our involvement in Ukraine. Let the brave Europeans deal with this strictly European problem. Let them squander blood and treasure on the most corrupt country on their continent. Never forget that the corrupt ties between the former administration and Ukraine were made manifest when Joe Biden publicly proclaimed that he had personally intervened in order to ensure that Burisma’s payments to his son Hunter would not be interrupted by something like an investigation by the Ukrainian prosecutor he demanded be removed.
As people have pointed out in other forums, one possible reason for the public meeting is that the last time Trump had a private conversation with Z, Trump was impeached.
Additionally, the more I think about this, the more it seems like an op by Zelensky, backed by EU leaders and American democrats to undermine Trump. The EU folk tweeted the exact same words in chorus right after the meeting. See https://x.com/rente83678/status/1895628025179619612?s=46
They’re very angry that Trump is attempting to turn off the USAID spigot. If they can’t have our money, they’ll take our total isolation. Total annihilation would be fine, too. Are they betting that after watching this (pre planned) event go down exactly the way they wanted, Putin will take the gloves off with Ukraine and destroy them (with much more powerful bombs, possibly nukes) and then Trump will really be sorry? Never mind that Z will be laughing comfortably in Paris, and Ukraine and the world will be in ruins. They showed that Trump.
After watching President Trump and VP Vance in full negotiation action yesterday, I finally understand all of the holobalu over The Ugly American book many years ago. Never read it so know nothing about it, but the title always gave me wonder what it was about—tho certainly not enough wonder to care what other countries thought.
When did the following happen? Was this part of the reason Vance blew-up and accused Zelensky of not showing more respect?
Zelenskyy’s Attire Sparks Debate at White House
I don’t own a suit, and I don’t even live in a War Zone. Have never seen Zelensky in a suit. WTF!?!
For those people guffawing about zelensky’s response (to digs by reporters) that he would wear a costume for the next visit to the oval office, he really meant he would wear a suit. The word ‘kostyum’ in ukranian literally means suit.
MrsX: 100%!
neo: If it’s possible, please tell me how to search for comments by particular commenters. For example, how could I search for more comments by MrsX. (I tried the search box at the top, and searching MrsX, found only one comment, by someone else, in which “MrsX” was mentioned.) Thanks!
P.S. I tried searching on duckduckgo.com for site:thenewneo.com “MrsX” and got only one hit.
I’ll put this on the Open thread once it opens up as posts here at the end of this long discussion often go unnoticed. Since late last night and into this morning, literally all of “normal” democrat friends I follow have posted this picture, often as their new profile picture. This is to give you a sense of what those people are doing. From the pic, too bad Zelensky isn’t dead, as they’ve already made him into a “martyr”. Note the Soviet-esque style of the picture:
https://scontent-atl3-3.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/480060593_10161217359743020_7125660443914339770_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_p526x296_tt6&_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=833d8c&_nc_ohc=e4-TvpOwAKYQ7kNvgGMWl8G&_nc_oc=Adho6UywxWyzJ-cUtC9NBSik5UMAqpzaTV1ciOW77buUuU6kaD9ou94_k_fL1qRnUFs&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-3.xx&_nc_gid=AgnQZlkmfS7rG2OIISjF293&oh=00_AYAeGOO_BEtRuYKZrEPwQhOoNN_mGggzFCOUkDJG0gCWlg&oe=67C8DFFA
Trump fanatic Media puppet – Brian Glenn, – should be banned from the Oval Office and the President’s plane. Glenn makes Legacy Media reporters look like American Patriotic Saints.
Haven’t seen a video of a few seconds before Trump allows Glenn to ask what seems like a setup question about not wearing a suit.
Poll result at the right-leaning Daily Mail article: “Zelensky’s savage explanation for not wearing a suit to the Oval Office after he was branded ‘disrespectful'” shows – Should Zelensky have worn a suit?: Yes @ 32%. No @ 62%. Maybe 6%.
Trump’s actions in this are a disaster, and even right-wing polls are showing such…
Trying to follow who did what to whom and said whichever about it in the leadup to WW I is absolutely nuts. You have to ask, why didn’t….pick a name…get off the stupid bus and just stay home?
But then it started as some damned foolishness in the Balkans. So what? Happened before.
But Germany, which had no beef, decided to get into the game and used its resources and central position to turn the thing into an unimaginable horror. Checked filing cabinet, “Hey, it says here we get to invade France, too!”
Very few wars, with the exception of some civil wars, have been won as completely as WW II. With this as the standard, consciously or not, few solutions are going to seem satisfactory.
And the European Usual–lot of young guys die, shove the borders around some, Big Shots don’t miss a meal (the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns are still duking and princing, making the society pages, marrying money and don’t need a 9-5 to keep bread on the table–might be the only answer to the current issue. Unless you want to do a WW II on Russia?
So, now what? The minerals would be an interesting issue; American development in the area might look like an informal security guarantee. Our money doing it. Money for the goodies to Ukraine instead of to China. More dependable.
Putin thinks, in his way which doesn’t depend on conferring with Turtler, that he “won” and might try again.. Or he doesn’t. But if Ukraine is stable and the surrounding countries are getting back up to their max NATO strength along with some new members or at least good friends in the area–for starters–it’s possible that what Putin thinks won’t be as impressive to his associates this time around.
The alternative is shoving Russia clear out of Ukraine and getting reparations. See Versailles.
Having said this, I think that if Trump had kept his fool mouth shut, Z could have looked even worse. Interrupting and disrupting the train of discussion made things a bit unclear. When a guy’s hopping around, drawing a bead on his other foot…. Stand back. He’s not listening, anyway.
Then you explain things.
You won’t surrender your position by using complete sentences.
I was hoping Ukraine would be able to push the Russians back further to the east, but it does not look like that will happen.
That being said, since the Democrats have TDS so bad, if they are going to try to impeach Trump again, I hope they are crazy enough to try over this.
They can say we are impeaching him over not helping an ” ally ” enough and we can say why are those Western “Democrat Socialist” you democrats are always saying we should be more like not doing more for Ukraine?
One good thing about WW1 is that it weakend the Ottomans, of whom we have collectively forgotten was Western Civilizations worst enemy for centuries.
Even Jefferson’s Barbary Pirate war was against The Ottomans financial tributaries in North Africa.
“In the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, 25 civilians were killed, over half of them from mines and unexploded ordnance.” to illustrate the immorality of making ‘deals’ which include ruSSia keeping the loot and the ability to start again.
Oh, but guarantees would be in place to prevent that? Rhetorically speaking, would that include Europe (not the USA of course) going to war with ruSSia because if not Ukraine wouldn’t be supported more than it has been before now, and no longer by the US, so completely irrelevant, and if so Europeans (and that includes me) would be better of giving direct military support (like full air support) now as opposed to a future with a demoralized (for having to fight a war with the criminal invader getting away with the loot) Ukraine. Anyway, Trump’s idea of a ‘deal’ which doesn’t restore the full sovereignty of Ukraine is that much immoral BS. Of course Trump’s morality qua Ukraine has already been indicated by;
– “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” (Putin only proposed ‘deal’ being Ukraine committing national suicide) and now
– ‘Zelenskyy is not yet ready for peace with Russia, adding that the Ukrainian president could return when he is prepared to engage in peace talks.’ (the woman is still fighting her rapist instead of just taking it)
Some other things;
Braindead ruSSian propaganda and especially Western braindead targets for it.
Examples (whether trolls or just targets);
– ‘Ukraine already has eastern Poland, they didn’t give it back in 1945.’
hint, Ukraine wasn’t an independent state in 1945 – see ‘Uncle Joe’
worse because just evil:
– ‘ Putin will take the gloves off with Ukraine and destroy them (with much more powerful bombs, possibly nukes) and ‘Z will be laughing comfortably in Paris’
– ‘Let the brave Europeans deal with this strictly European problem.’
hint: law and treaties mean nothing to us
– ‘ Ukraine supposedly is responsible for the sabotage of the NordStream pipeline:’ and following
hint: its BS in itself but even so it happened in September 2022. Something else happened in that year, 24 February anyone.
Consequences for this;
When this invasion started I thought of it, and still do, as the equivalent of 9/1939. I never would have thought it would be exactly a substantial minority of the Republican party which would support Putler, actively or passively, like a Carl Tucker (also one I previously admired) who has no problems with a Putler (of a ruSSia were mentioning ‘the war’ was enough to get you years in prison). As for Trump, I didn’t care or followed since the media are not to be trusted and Trump does have ‘foot in mouth’ disease. Anyway it should have been what the Biden administration was up to, what it did good or bad, for those did care about Ukraine.But now Trump IS president and it is no longer TDS. The democraps managed to sabotage Trump’s first presidency with BS like the long running ruSSia hoax (there with the complicity of the Republican party itself) and later with George Floyd, COVID, etc (ruSSian propaganda could learn a few things from the democraps). I used to admire Trump but I don’t matter and perhaps you think outside the USA doesn’t matter anyway but the loathing Trump is engendering certainly will at some point and the material democrap propaganda will be able to use will be of a much higher quality then, so to speak.
Richard Aubrey
The more comments I read here, and the updated news articles elsewhere – the more that it seems that this may have been a Setup Photo op to get Zelensky.
Commenters have wondered why the interview happened before the normal ‘Signing of the Doc’ photo op. Big lead up of Zelensky coming to America to ‘SIGN’ the Deal, and this interview comes first?!?
Interview ‘Format’ now seems to have been a possible setup—with focus on “deserved” Respect for the Oval Office and U.S. President – vs – Zelensky’s “disrespect” and attire__such attire that Zelensky has been know to wear since Russia’s reinvasion in 2022.
A Setup that Backfired?
Not sure it backfired. And, if the other side’s position is known, you don’t have to fake him into it. Or admitting it.
I can see a kind of juvenile–although excusable–resistance on Z’s part to swapping some of Ukraine’s sovereignty–mineral rights–if only a seen-as instead of a commercial deal.
But he’s in charge and supposed to do the best he can for his country,
But I do think that there is no way he could explain resistance to the deal, no matter how few interruptions there were, which wouldn’t have offered many openings for Trump.
Instead, you have to study this, time-stamp it, re-run parts of it, to make sense of a noisy argument. Not everybody wants to do that.
This sad shambles is just another display of the red and blue sides of the US seeing things as it suits them.
From an Anglo-European perspective this just looks like more evidence of the US meaning exactly what it says about “America First” and MAGA.
We are looking at the end of internationalism and a return to competing power blocks with spheres of influence.
The bits I do not understand is the unwillingness of Trump to criticise Putin or directly state Russia started the war. They did. All these cheap comments about the Russians having something on him thrive because it is difficult to see what more he could do to help them.
We are looking at the end of internationalism and a return to competing power blocks with spheres of influence.
==
There have always been competing power blocs. The disputes have been less intense the last 35 years than they were previously. They’ll grow more intense the more various revanchist segments are able and willing to wreak the revenge they fancy they deserve. Trump is a nuisance problem to Europe. China is not.
One more addition to my thoughts above.
5) Template
• One of the reasons I am so hopeful right now is because Trump has attracted a governing collation that is also not willing to settle for the boundaries/ limitations others accept – in all aspects of governing.
• That includes their ability to use a different approach to respond to what does not fall within the “normal” boundaries – see Zelensky Oval Office.
• Have never had any problem with Trump the executive expressing “whiteboard ideas” because I understand he is both challenging the Status Quo/ Conventional Wisdom, and stimulating the collective Thought Process – in order to address the Need.
@that guy
On that we agree, and it is one reason why I voted for Trump and still trust him more than most. But some boundaries and limitations others accept aren’t just because that’s the way things are done or how the grift works. I can appreciate Trump not being walked over or dazzled by stars like many others do, but I remember his first term and am leery of his ability to actually sway the Kremlin or Putin. He tried and failed before and he isn’t the first or even the fifth one to try and fail.
@Turtler
Many thanks for your efforts to explain the tortuous ins and outs of the First World War and the power politics leading up to it.
I would appreciate a link to a comparison of Clark and Fischer on the question of German War Guilt. I have read some of Clark, and I thought he does a good job of making all the Great Powers strategic actors in the lead up to the outbreak of war in 1914. He is subtly (or not so subtly) a revisionist in addressing the role of French finance and diplomacy in activating the “Balkan Inception” scenario as the best chance for French success against the German Empire. If I ever read Fischer, it must have been a very long time ago.
In addition, the British contributed in a couple of ways. First, they have a long history of appeasing major powers that dates back to appeasing the US in the 19th Century. Second, the British Liberal Government changed British policy from being a protector of the Ottomans against the Russians to coveting Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, especially from the perspective of the subordinate strategy centers in Cairo and Delhi. This was the 1907 starter’s pistol for the Ottoman collapse that de-stabilized the Balkans.
I don’t recall Clark addressing or apologizing for Central Power conduct of the war, but that could be my memory failing.
One more consideration for the difficulty stopping the First World War once it got going properly: all the major powers fought on credit. A peace without reparations from the other side would mean national bankruptcy. At a certain point, it became a financial doomsday machine.
I don’t void an idea or observation or statement just because it came from someone I don’t like or from an Outlet I don’t like…try not to anyway. I missed this, at very beginning of video: Putin invaded Ukraine…. Did you catch it? David Axelrod did…
Obama’s political guru reveals the major moment from Trump’s Zelensky meltdown that everyone missed
Smoke shows up at 2:18 in the “Putin invaded video” above. Hell broke out at 3:21.
Axelrod:
they got to get better material,
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2025/03/01/lib-media-meltdown-compilation-proves-trumps-meeting-with-zelenskyy-angered-all-the-right-people-n2409163
back during the obama period, when axelrod was his boss, was when putin took his first round, right after the winter olympics,
now the cognitive dissonance was such that current zelensky hagiographer, simon schuster, pretended not to realize the invasion, dismissing the power of tanks and soldiers,
obama did not provide lethal assistence in that
interval on the advice of fiona hill, danchenko’s mentor, the man behind the steele dossier,
Ma’am,
Too many ignore the long-time beef Putin has with the EU & NATO. “We” promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand towards Russia. It did. Then some more. Then some more. And then it came to “Let the Ukraine join NATO!”
Sometimes, even evil bustards have a valid point they can leverage towards what they want.
Ukraine in NATO means US troops vs Russia. That’s how so many “Great Powers” got yanked into WWI. It *highly* raises the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Well, screw that!
Bring the US Troops home. Time for Europe to grow-up, man-up, and take care of themselves with out us risking nukes on .
… name your favorite city.
((Had it in “less-the” & “more than” symbols that got read as HTML tags. D’Oh!))
… name your favorite city.
((Had it in “less-the” & “more than” symbols that got read as HTML tags. D’Oh!))
The bits I do not understand is the unwillingness of Trump to criticise Putin or directly state Russia started the war. – David Clayton
David Clayton, how does that advance any negotiations between the US and Russia? At this point, as Rubio has made as clear as possible, we don’t know if Russia even wants to stop the war. Yes President Trump has indicated that Putin want to– but on what terms?
Lavrov has said what Russia would accept, which might be a bridge too far, even for President Trump that wants to see the killing stopped.
Trump had been hanging back on directly criticizing Putin at this time because, as he said, you don’t bad-mouth someone and then turn around and ask how the negotiations are going. If Zelenskyy and the European powers (??) don’t want a cease-fire, then there is little negotiating for Trump or anyone to do.
This is a brutal time for Europe to realize it has to take care of itself and of its own, considering Europe is being hollowed out from within by its own insane immigration-without-assimilation program and its own insane climate policies.
@BrianE Trump makes a big deal about being a tough negotiator but refused to blame the Russians for starting the war and gave away potential negotiating points, such as NATO membership, as his opening gambit.
Yet he is happy calling Zelensky a dictator and publicly berating him.
I just don’t get why.
”The more comments I read here, and the updated news articles elsewhere – the more that it seems that this may have been a Setup Photo op to get Zelensky.”
It’s pretty clear that this was a planned ambush of Zelensky from the start. There’s no other reason to have TASS there streaming the event live in Russia. Zelensky had been saying publicly for a week that he wouldn’t sign such a lopsided deal. So the press conference should have been bland and ordinary, not worth broadcasting live all over Russia. But it was.
So the event was planned so as to browbeat Zelensky into signing a deal in which he meekly gives up everything Trump wanted in return for nothing, thus humiliating him and setting the stage for his further humiliation when he capitulates to Russia in Trump’s so-called peace deal. But Zelensky didn’t capitulate to Trump. And so now he must suffer.
Considering Zelensky didn’t capitulate when Russian tanks were bearing down on Kiev nor did he during the days that followed when Russia made seven different commando raids to assassinate him, I don’t know why people are surprised he didn’t capitulate to a blowhard. Maybe they are not surprised; they just don’t like it.
@Oblio
It is the least I can do, and thanks.
I wish I had one, but I don’t really have a single clean and easy link that can do it.
I feel he does a good job making the Great Powers strategic actors in the leadup, but he does a mediocre to poor job portraying their actions well. And in particular the amount of whitewashing he does for the Central Powers (at least when you know where to look) is something I find downright repulsive. And I’m far from the only people to believe so.
In particular one can lie by omission just as much as by commission, and what Clark leaves out is damning. In particular he tries to paint Sir Edward Grey as a Germanophobic extremist in British politics and a “loner.” That’s at best half-true. He was a loner, both by inclination and by stance. But what Clark “conveniently” ignores is that he was increasingly a loner *because of how the British conservative and labour opposition and increasingly his own Liberal party viewed him as being too soft and appeasing to German demands.*
He also does a grotesque job whitewashing German and Habsburg war aims, ideology, and imperial and colonial policies (especially in places like Bosnia-Herzogovinia and Morocco). and the blunt admission we now have from Wilhelm II’s intimates (including crucially Prinz von Eulenberg) that the German cabinet and general staff blatantly and knowingly lied about Russian military objectives and mobilization in order to obtain a declaration of war on Russia and war credits.
On this much I largely agree with him, as the role of French finance and diplomacy in the Balkans and Eastern Europe is one of the great understated factors in pre-WWI Europe, and helped cement the “Entente” between France, Russia, Serbia, and Montenegro that would be the foundation for the Allies. However, I think that makes his “curious” omissions all the more jarring, especially given the successes the French had literally right next door in Italy (and to a lesser extent in Greece) in helping to ween Italy off of the animosity it had towards France from the “Rome Question” and its Triple Alliance leaning, and in helping to recreate a powerful pro-French lobby in Greece while helping to lay the foundations for Russian industrialization.
However, I think Clark particularly downplays the reasons why this was. French desperation to avoid being isolated and forced into another war and another devastating defeat like they were in 1870-3. And that their reasons were ANYTHING but irrational, given how Bismarck spent much of the latter part of his life in power trying to provoke another war with them (with the most infamous being the “War in Sight” Crisis of 1875, which was notably muted by the Russians threatening to declare war on Germany if it attacked France).
Understandable. I think Fischer is one of the greats, but I do think he has aged in many ways. In particular I think he over-focuses on Bethmann-Hollweg and the September Programme, which as many revisionists correctly point out was never official policy, but “conveniently” ignore how official Central Powers policy met or *exceeded* it and how B-H himself was ultimately kicked out of power due to losing faith in victory and seeking a compromise peace, which was viewed as something just shy of treason in midwar Germany, where the militarists believed they were winning.
I’d say earlier, at least to the ill fated Jacobite appeasement of France. If not earlier.
Clark “conveniently” glosses over why this was. Firstly: the waves of genocides and sectarian bloodshed that while arguably originating with the Russians in the Caucasus quickly got taken up by the Ottoman government in the Balkans and Caucasus in the late 19th century, laying the foundations for decades of horror and ultimately the WWI era genocides of Armenians, Greeks, and others. This put very hard caps on how sympathetic or protective the British could be of the Ottomans.
Secondly; The role German policy played in encouraging Russian misbehavior even into 1905 (where Wilhelm II famously supported his cousin the Tsar against Japan and Persia). This was what Disraeli feared when he predicted German unification would lead to a war beyond scale; a Russian-German alliance (which would be a continuation of the Prussian-Russian alliances from the 1850s onward), and which helped inform British policy in both London and Dehli long after the fractures between Russia and Germany began to mount.
Thirdly: German attempts to secure oil in the Middle East in order to help fuel the grandiose naval plans.
Not really. I’d say the uprisings and massacres of the 1870s probably started the process. The British disgust and distrust of Abdul-Hamid II helped intensify that.
Not so much your memory failing so much as what he doesn’t say is just as damning as what he says, and if you don’t know what he isn’t saying you will probably view his take much more favorably than if you do (such as “conveniently” leaving out the private writings of Moltke, the December 8th 1912 German War Council where the Kaiser and the General Staff concluded war was inevitable and that Germany must seek to fight and win it ASAP, the oppressive nature of Habsburg garrison rule in Bosnia, and so on .
I think some of the best single sources I have for this are Annika Mombauer’s “Guilt or Responsibility? The Hundred-Year Debate on the Origins of World War I” which sort of tries to create a more balanced and overview treatment of the conflicts and disagreements (which will go over both Fischer and Clark), and
Milos Vojinovic’s review of “The Sleepwalkers” (which perhaps unsurprisingly given the author’s name is a much more dedicated and critical take on Clark’s magnum opus).
I agree to a point, but most countries involved were used to a point on fighting on credit. This proved particularly telling in the greater Thirty Years’ War (and even precursors like the 80 Years War – where the Dutch largely revolutionized financing and credit to help fund their war with the first global empire – and the Italian Wars of the Renaissance). It’s also worth noting I think that one of the core problems the Central Powers had was the degree to which they *couldn’t* rely on credit but had to rely on a mixture of inflationary money printing and seizures.
This is particularly evident in German fiscal policy, where in early 1914 the German government began forcibly confiscating specie like gold in anticipation of a coming war (Even before the murders in Sarajevo), and why hyperinflation in Germany and Austria-Hungary began soon after war did, even if it was largely hidden by vast amounts of seizures from occupied territory to get stuff for the inflating new money to “chase.”
(Which also helps explain the sharp financial collapses after the war, even with renewed trade, as you had hugely inflated money supplies without adequate credit and no more ability to take goods.)
”Too many ignore the long-time beef Putin has with the EU & NATO. ‘We’ promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand towards Russia. It did. Then some more. Then some more.”
You must be new here. This claim has been debunked many times on this blog.
The short version: James Baker, the man representing the West during these negotiations, claims no such promise was ever made. Eduard Shevardnadze, sitting across from Baker and representing the Soviets, also claimed that no such promise was ever made. Mikhail Gorbachev himself also claimed to his last dying day that no such promise was ever made. Conclusion: no such promise was ever made.
”And then it came to ‘Let the Ukraine join NATO!’”
The 1997 Russia / Ukraine Friendship Treaty, signed by the Russian government and ratified by the Russian duma, specifically recognizes Ukraine’s right to join any bilateral or multilateral organization it wishes. That would include NATO and the EU. So everyone agrees that Ukraine has the right to join NATO, including Russia.
Well, not everyone. Under NATO rules Ukraine was and is ineligible to join NATO, so NATO doesn’t agree. Thus to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO all Russia had to do was absolutely nothing. It didn’t have to start a genocidal war. It could have prevented Ukraine from joining NATO by just sitting on its ass. Pity it didn’t take that route.
But the point remains: by binding international treaties, Russia recognizes Ukraine’s right to join NATO. It’s NATO that doesn’t.
Yep they tried to assassinate President Trump twice in 2024.
FJB tried to convince Zelinskii to bug out when Vlads army and airborne forces attacked. Funny how many seem to forget that, but staying in Ukraine and resisting Vlad is the mark of a cheap commedian or dictator, or both?
Information warfare.
Have seen some commenters here, and right-wing news ‘n blog sites claiming that Zelensky traveled to Pennsylvania and campaigned for Kamala Harris against Trump.
Have searched the internet for a video showing Zelensky actually campaigning there for Harris – not the ones of him being there, but one that will show him verbally campaigning for Harris against Trump.
Anyone here have a link to such a video – or is this just false accusations?
If someone else posted this I missed it, but it has a bearing on the claims that Zelenskyy was “set up” by Trump et al. to be bullied into signing a deal he didn’t agree to.
This article claims that he did agree, or at least his advisors did, and that they pressured him into going to America, whereas the US envoy thought that would be a bad idea (for good reason).
The situation, then, was that the document was sitting on the table (or back-stage) lacking only the signatures, which they were going to do as a flourish to the photo-op.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/28/us-news/top-zelensky-adviser-pushed-for-oval-office-mineral-deal-signing-against-trump-envoy-kelloggs-advice/
More to the point, regardless of whether or not Kellogg thought he was giving Trump a document that was all done but the signatures: if Zelenskyy had not agreed to it, why did he come to Washington in the first place?
On the face of it, he may have thought he could indeed talk Trump into more concessions face-to-face. If that is the case, as others have said, he didn’t know Trump very well.
However, I’m willing to cut him some slack on that one.
Not a lot, but at least a recognition that he should maybe start reading Neo and some of the conservative media that are getting a spot in the WH press pool now.
My guess is that he has not ever had an independent view of Trump’s character and abilities, but that everything he “knows” has come through the MSNBC/Regime Media circuit, amplified by the Democrats he dealt with for four years.
See the Breitbart post that TJ linked.
He clearly thought that Harris was going to win, so why not butter her up a bit more?
It’s very doubtful that Biden Inc. was sharing their internal polling with him.
So, he assumed he was facing a venial, corrupt, convicted felon ex-showman without any principles or integrity that he need respect.
This despite getting aid from Trump 45 — I don’t remember how much he and Trump interacted regarding that.
And I agree with MrsX that Trump did NOT want to talk to Zelenskyy without copious witnesses, given the Vindmann Gambit.
Who set up whom? as Lenin might say.
I’m waiting another few days for all the claims and counter-claims to get settled a bit more.
under a different regime, Yeltsin or whoever was running the country around 97, a similar arrangement to the Scranton clan, did sign this accord, to many rank and file Russians the deals struck by Kozyrev, were too pro Western, although around that point, they had reverted to an Old School oprichnik, Primakov a patron of Saddam, or perhaps vice versa, I do vaguely recall these matters,
the deal was struck with Kuchma another Old School Mudzik who had reinvented himself, for the average Russian people, it would be charitable that democracy did not look very good, as it was tagged with the social strife of the gang wars of the early 90s, when the Bratva came upon the people, like wolves against the sheep, and the Oligarchs, the latter was largely due to the advice of Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Summers, all through out the post Soviet landscape
thats the perspective of the 90s, you should look at, the Oligarchs were given free reign and much of our foreign aid money,
@ Logan > “The word ‘kostyum’ in ukranian literally means suit.”
Thanks for that insight.
I have books for several languages that deal with the bear-traps set with “false friends” — the words that look like some English word, but mean something very different.
Note to huxley: I hope you have one of those books for French!
@ TJ > “President Donald Trump should change the name of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the “Department of Conservation,” making Lee Zeldin the “Secretary of Conservation” and correcting the department’s core mission.”
As long as we’re renaming agencies (and I like the one you suggested), I’ve seen a meme making the rounds that DOGE should have been named the “Federal Agency for Financial Oversight.”
Karmi:
It’s not at all difficult to find information on Zelenksky’s September 2024 visit to Pennsylvania. It took about 5 seconds.
For example, there’s this:
Then we have this joint press conference with Harris on September 26:
Also, Democratic Governor Shapiro welcomed Zelensky.
From the New Yorker interview with Zelensky around the same time:
Gee, I can’t imagine why Trump and Vance might not be overly patient with Zelensky, who seems to have counted on a Harris victory.
“It’s pretty clear that this was a planned ambush of Zelensky from the start.”
Mkent, several sources I read said that it was Zelensky and the Ukrainians who insisted on the visit. (The US was lukewarm about it because, as Rubio said in the Catherine Herridge interview, he, Z and Vance had agreed previously to a deal that Z immediately renounced.) This doesn’t necessarily preclude the planned Z ambush theory, but it makes it less likely IMO.
If I were Tiawan I would be very concerned with this US/Ukraine fiasco, and start putting together a few nukes. Now how does Tiawan give Xi that news?
Geez, neo!?! Here’s what I asked:
Here’s what I wrote just before that:
Yes, plenty of written and opinionated news about it, but I want to see Video Evidence of such right-wing accusations. Apparently there is no such evidence…Thanks anyway.
More like a “planned ambush” on the part of Zelensky and his Democratic Party pals.
Comrades to the end….
“…Disaster in the Oval Office: Dems lead Zelensky, Ukraine off a cliff with pressure to reject mineral deal”—
https://nypost.com/2025/03/01/opinion/dems-lead-zelensky-ukraine-off-a-cliff-with-pressure-to-reject-mineral-deal/
It seems Zelensky is unwilling to give up territory to Russia for Peace. But is willing to fight & have Ukrainians die, and kill Russians, for the UN principle that territory cannot be gotten thru military conquest by a stronger force.
I like the UN principle, and prefer that Ukrainians fight for it until they decide they’re ready to lose territory for peace—Trump is wrong to push it, now.
Elites of other countries who like the UN principle, like Macron, should show it by giving more, far more, military support to the Ukrainians. Including non-NATO troops, like a French Foreign Legion, or German. Or any ex-NATO fighters willing to risk death in Ukraine for that principle.
At least part of Trump’s position is to reduce Ukraine aid from the US, which I believe has often gone to corrupt Ukrainians & US grifters.
@Richard Aubrey
Well for the most part because they didn’t see themselves as being on “the stupid bus.” Indeed, a lot of them figured that NOT lining up to join the war would in fact be “the stupid bus”. The Habsburgs and Germans figured that their window for breaking strategic encirclement was dwindling and needed to be seized as soon as possible, with the Sarajevo murders providing a convenient opening to fight more or less the war they intended. The Serbs of various shades had compromised on much to try and maintain peace and agreed with every term in the Habsburg ultimatum except one, figuring that if they compromised any further they’d lose their country and be subjected to foreign occupation again. The Russians saw the prospect of caving in to a Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia again as a fatal weakness that would end their influence in the Balkans and leave them lopsided if the Central Powers came after them. The French were well aware of German war plans and that they were on the target list, and figured that fighting alongside allies like Serbia, Russia, and (99% sure at the time) Britain was the best possible prospect for avoiding a painful defeat and occupation like 1871, let alone actually winning and reclaiming places like Alsace-Lorraine. Belgium simply got jumped with an ultimatum and had to give up its sovereignty or fight. And so on.
Those that didn’t see themselves as so mortally bound to interests to join the war, didn’t. At least at first. The Italians cited the text of the Triple Alliance and included themselves out in the hopes of getting a better deal from one side or the other later, before joining the Allies when they thought they did. The Bulgarians sought to replay their fight with Serbia from the Second Balkan War but win this time, and had to deal with the Habsburgs not wanting them involved due to that meaning they’d share the spoils. And so on.
As horrifying and bizarre as it may be, it tended to be terrifyingly logical, at least when you understand what passed for “logic”.
Sure, though it had also been stopped from happening before there.
To be fair it did have a beef, at least an indirect one. Its leadership viewed itself as committed to the Habsburgs and also in a mortal struggle against Slavs, Capitalists, Democracy, Masons, Gypsies, and so on and that if it did not strike while the iron was hot and the moment opportune it would be eaten away from both sides. They had known (from Conrad von Hoetzendorff’s regular-like-a-clock rantings and proposals of a “preemptive war” in Serbia) that the Habsburgs were looking for an excuse to attack Serbia and figured the the Sarajevo murders were as good an opportunity as any to either kick off the great war or more ideally to fight a more limited war against Serbia and/or Russia alone that would give them better positions and resources to go after the West. So they sent the blank check and when the Habsburgs proceeded to war and faced Russian mobilization, Wilhelm II first tried to talk them down and when that failed accused them of planning to attack Germany to get a declaration of war, and then widened this to declaration of war on France and then an ultimatum to Belgium for transit.
Agreed, and WWII of course saw only one side with nukes.
Agreed. Though I do note that while the Habsburgs and Hohenzollern still make the society pages, they pointedly do not make direct government policy any more. In part due to the protracted blockades and economic sanctions that cut them off from meaningful global trade coupled with the failures to score knockout blows on their enemies.
I view regime change in Russia as ideal, but likely not to be obtained by direct force of arms. All the Kremlin really needs is one set of people willing to follow orders with WMD deployment and this cascades into something really, really nasty, as you can probably guess. It’s why while I do view something like the Croat and Bosniak defeats of Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars as ideal, I can understand we can’t stake the future of the world on that outcome alone.
Agreed, and that’s why I can appreciate what Trump proposed and think It was a good concept, even if one that didn’t go quite as well. I think Trump focused too much on trying to make the hard, strong sell to Zelenskyy and not enough trying to butter him up and badmouth Putin.
Agreed, but I also think that at this stage of the game we have to face the fact that Putin isn’t operating alone. Mark Steyn and others sussed out his pro-CCP alignment decades ago and that has only gotten more overwhelming as time goes on. Likewise his ties to Iran through the “Axis of Resistance” means that if I think it was ever possible or plausible to pry him from his pro-Red China policy, it isn’t now. So he might go at Ukraine or others simply to fulfill his real/perceived obligations and to maintain his occupations in Belarus and parts of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, even if his hand is weaker.
And at this stage there’s also the fact that he won’t be around forever, meaning that even if he thinks a certain way that’s only going to be so important as sooner or later he’ll die, and the question is who replaces him, whether they’ll be better or worse.
And while he doesn’t have to consult me on what he views victory as, I can at least try and study and guess what he considers victory to be, as well as the issue that he’s also riding a tiger of heavy military spending and the costliest war in his rule of power. So he is probably not the only one there.
Which would be ideal to me but I think unlikely, given how unlikely it is the Kremlin to agree to pay reparations directly as the Germans were forced to after both world wars. So that largely involves indirect reparations. Still, I do think it is at least possible – if extremely costly – to retake enough territory using Ukrainian and volunteer manpower and firepower and inflict enough casualties that the Kremlin loses face and feels it has to withdraw.
I can understand there, but Trump is Trump. He also was the host and I think also had to try and uphold the dignity of the office and not be seen to be pushed around. But I do think having this be public was a mistake, in part because the left dominated media would be so quickly to jump down his throat and make him the bad guy, regardless of the truth.
Tom Grey:
What part of exestential threat do you understand? What part of Soviet and Russian history are you aware of. It largely predates the United Nations.
What part of Russian war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine have you paid attention to?
It seems none.
Not too clever.
Ask your spouse about the good old days;1968 in Czeckoslovakia.
President Donald Trump should change the name of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the “Department of Conservation,” making Lee Zeldin the “Secretary of Conservation” and correcting the department’s core mission.
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Disagree. Conservation is the mission of the Interior department. Posit that as an alternative to the current set up, grant distribution by EPA ends and the environmental works projects are transferred to the Interior department along with a fragment of the regulatory function. The residue left with EPA would be the authority to compose and enforce health-and-safety regulations.
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IIRC, agencies (or subagencies) whose function is health-and-safety regulation are about 15 in number. You might assemble them into one department which might have several appended commissions as the ultimate rule-making and adjudication authority over different sorts of issues.