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“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
Wittingly or otherwise, the MAGA online right started to absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine: that it isn’t a real country, that the Ukrainians aren’t a real people, that if they are a real people then they are uniquely corrupt. On and on it went: that Ukrainian soldiers are ‘literal’ Nazis, that Zelensky is constantly buying villas and yachts in the south of France, that the whole war is one big money-laundering operation, that Ukraine’s war to push the Russians back is unwinnable because of the great might of the Russian army – and that the whole thing is a giant waste of US taxpayers’ money.
– Douglas Murray (£)
To all the people holding a vitriolic hated, anger & haranguing Zelenskyy,
Whom remain completely silent over Putin, as if he doesn’t exist – despite the fact that he’s the tyrant that started this invasion & could stop it whenever he wanted to – you’re a pro-Kremlin shill.
– Andreas Koureas
Then there is one other thought. If you are getting praise from the Kremlin, you aren’t on the right side of the argument. Much of what I’ve heard from people with whom I usually align politically has been Kremlin propaganda without a hint of nuance or consideration that invading another country is morally repugnant and indefensible. An internal conflict is not a justification. The popular uprising that overthrew Yanukovych, which some attribute to the CIA—as if they have that level of power (they don’t)—does not justify an invasion. There was never a justification.
The deal on the table is a shitty one for Ukraine and a good one for Russia. I always felt that the least bad outcome would be the one that would have to happen, but sucking up to Putin and pretty much rewarding him for his invasion is going to backfire. The accusations of NATO expanding eastwards begs the question, why do those countries want to join if Russia is such a peaceful neighbour? Zelensky’s point, clumsily and inappropriately made, is that diplomacy hasn’t worked so far and he is right. Moldova, Estonia, Finland and Sweden are getting twitchy and with good reason, they know how this is likely to pan out, hence the point Zelensky was making about security. Without that, no deal is worth signing, for the bloodshed will merely be delayed.
– Longrider
There is a legit argument over what support we should give Ukraine. But I don’t understand how so many conservatives convinced themselves that Ukraine committed an unforgivable offense by getting themselves invaded.
– Megan McArdle
I will forever remember that it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that made me realise the political right is as retarded as the political left.
– Tim Newman
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?”
It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news.
So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion.
How to tell if the people in Europe making predictions of doom if Trump wins actually believe what they have been saying:
Europeans defence expenditures go to 4%+ (i.e. Polish levels) within the next few months.
Otherwise it’s just so much verbal flatulence.
If Trump does indeed abandon Ukraine and tries to force a de facto surrender of occupied territories on them, and Europe still does not rapidly ramp up defence expenditure, then maybe Trump and the USA was never the problem.
And yet, once the Ukrainians ask for long-range fires, all of a sudden their importance is downgraded and minimized. There was the widely-discussed piece in Foreign Affairs by Stephen Biddle which recently kick-started this argument—but it was an argument greatly amplified by Defense Secretary Austin a few days ago.
During the latest Ramstein meeting of Ukraine’s partners in Germany Austin basically said long-range fires were not that important. As it was relayed by PBS:
After the talks, Austin pushed back on the idea that long-range strikes would be a game-changer.
“I don’t believe one capability is going to be decisive and I stand by that comment,” Austin said. The Ukrainians have other means to strike long-range targets, he said.
Its hard to know what to make of that extraordinary claim. Is he saying that the US Army’s number 1 priority for modernization is not nearly that important? That would be bold of him—but more than likely he is desperately searching around for an argument because he knows just how important long-range fires are in war.
– Phillips P. OBrien (£)
I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
“Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!” Apart from introducing the president of Ukraine as the president of Russia and referring to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”, Joe Biden got through the NATO summit just fine.
The Democrats have got themselves into a bit of a pickle, haven’t they? It is not as if there were no warning signs. Why, the Guardian’s Washington Correspondent, David Smith, compiled a long list of them called “Warning signs: a history of Joe Biden’s verbal slips” only a week ago.
Only a week ago. That is the problem. The first item on the list of warning signs dates from March 2021. The Guardian‘s article attempts to explain why it took so long:
Biden’s team came down hard on reporters who questioned whether the oldest president in American history – now 81 – was still fully capable of doing the job. Journalists also wanted to avoid the accusation of ageism or that they were helping to elect Trump.
“It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote on the Semafor website this week.
While it was a “super hard story to report”, she said it could have been done. Instead, Abramson said, the American press failed in its duty to hold those in power accountable. Here are some of the dots that, with the benefit of hindsight, could have been joined sooner:
Or you could have read a proper newspaper like the New York Post or the Daily Mail and learned about them at the time. The Guardian‘s selection of “gaffes” is skewed towards things that, although they happen to Biden more frequently than average, could happen to anyone, such as Biden’s literal stumbles and his accidental substitutions of one word for another. The only really damaging items in the list compiled by David Smith are Biden calling out “Jackie, are you here?” to the recently deceased Jackie Walorski, and one of several claims he has made that his son died in Iraq. None of the charming anecdotes that he habitually makes up out of whole cloth were included. The New York Post was flagging this habit of his back in 2021. Nor does the Guardian‘s list include any of Biden’s frequent descents into meaningless gabble. Remember how he came out with “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilise trunalimunumaprzure” at a campaign stop in Luzerne County, PA, back in October 2020? Of course you do, because you read a proper newspaper, such as Canada’s National Telegraph, from where I got the link. The article by Gerry Kaur, includes a line saying that we need to talk about the “massive problem” of Joe Biden’s “lowering cognitive agility”. It was published on November 3rd, 2020. The Democrats, their friends in the media, and the left in general could have started that conversation four years ago and been in a much better position now, but they preferred to suppress the story. The trouble with hiding the truth from other people is that you end up hiding it from yourself as well.
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