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The Great Betrayal
All the wonderful words about how we should not get involved with Russian imperial ambitions of seeking a European piece. Yet we are willing to sell other nations into Russian slavery, something that a former US President did at Yalta. A former President who was not much more than the current President when it comes to mental health.
As inconvenient as the suffering of Ukrainians might be to our own way of life and the lofty rhetoric from the Founders who could never imagine that there might come a day when hypersonic missiles would negate the five or more days that it would take for sailing vessels to appear off the American coast is rather odd.
Perhaps we should remind Putin that we are trying to do him a favor. That favor would be we are trying to keep him away from the Polish border. Poland is more than capable and has a good reason to kill Russians. If Putin thinks that killing Ukrainians is a rough business, he has no clue that Poland will be where the new Czar’s dreams will die.
Never forget.
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Published in History
This is such flawed thinking, in my view.
Other nations are not ours to sell.
And our Founders were not fools. We have been the fools, since Wilson launched us on this course.
Yet we sold them in Yalta.
There was also a Battle of Warsaw in 1920 during the Polish-Soviet War in which the Poles defeated the Soviets with the Battle of Warsaw being the turning point.
Yes, the Miracle of the Vistula on August 15th, The Feast of Assumption and the prayers of Poland were answered
Um, so we are obligated by our Founders to get entangled in foreign affairs .
I am so tempted to make a “seeking a European piece” joke.
I hope to get around to reading Norman Davies’ book on that subject soon.
There was that “Adopt a Ukrainian” meme.
Nope. They weren’t ours, and we weren’t even occupying them, nor expecting to.
I used to think as you do, Doug. I’ve come to believe that defending other countries is not our job. I understand the temptation to do so, when we may have the power. In the end, though, it leads us to dangerous and costly overreach, and an obligation to make war continually until the Utopia has arrived.
Avoid the Greenpiece!
And – i think the proposition that “the Founders didn’t anticipate ___” is specious. We don’t now have, nor have ever had, the ability to anticipate any manner of things. In the example of hypersonic weapons: new technology has inconveniently interrupted existing modes of warfare at regular intervals. Henry V at Agincourt; fire arms generally and then rifling; the Gatling gun; V1 and 2 rockets – others know better than I the full list. But I think that’s secondary to the principle of how far the US can (if it actually can) and should go to determining the political fates of other countries by military means. Humans have been living day to day, mostly thinking tribal, employing trial and error for a long time.
It seems to me that the Ukraine action in particular points out the difference between taking action against attack on our homeland and genocide elsewhere (as against Germany in 1930/40’s) compared to the pursuit of our own (unacknowledged) interests. I admit to the cynical view that the action in Ukraine is largely in defense of yet to be determined prior and ongoing corruption by the sitting President.
We accepted their help in winning the war and then sold them to Stalin. FDR made nary a squeak that would have displeased Stalin. He thought the UN was more important.
We have been farming Ukraine for political dollars and we are now sending them arms -selling them arms in a cynical plan to degrade Russia and keep a stalemate so the grift can continue. For every dollar we send to Ukraine, 25 cents goes to the allies of Hillary and Biden and some of our neocon Never Trumpers pockets, another 25 percent goes to the corporations who manufacture weapons and ammo, another portion goes to Ukrainian oligarchs and it’s all paid for by you and me, now or later.
You want to see the world through the lens of right and wrong. Putin bad! That’s your first problem. The second is that you are getting emotional and full of talking-tough bluster 7,000 miles away.
Americans are enslaving ourselves by these policies.
We aren’t betraying anyone.
The American people were not willing to go to war against the USSR.
They wanted to come home.
It would help if you would show your math.
The Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home Army was promised support, to include encouragement from the Russians. Some help arrived too little too late. The Russians never had any intention of supporting the AK and blocked any support for the Polish fighters.
Perhaps we should be more honest and simply say that we will make promises to you that we have no intention of keeping.
We will use your Polish pilots in the RAF who had the best combat stats against the Germans in the Battle of Britain. We will use your Polish soldiers to take Monte Cassino in Italy. We let them fight and die for us, but we will sell your country to Stalin and forty years of Russian occupation. Freedom is for us, not for thee.
Make no mistake we might sell you again if given the chance. We are little busy right now selling ourselves out in our own country, but we will always have time to move you to the front of the line.
FDR was worse than the American people.
The fate of the Ukraine has almost no impact on our country. I am sympathetic, but they are not our responsibility. They had the responsibility to defend themselves. I’m sure they are kicking themselves for giving up their nuclear weapons. That was rather foolish, or so they’re thinking now. If they still had nukes, Russia would not be threatening to use nukes against them.
I would agree with part of your comment, but it appears that the Ukrainians are putting up a pretty good fight against Russian forces.
With our money, our weapons. We have the most amazing weapons ever created. We gave a ton of them away. Why? They cost a lot of money.
Indeed, with our weapons but never underestimate the Russian ability to kill civilians. They run from soldiers but are very good at raping and killing civilians.
That’s how they get paid.
If you promise something, you should deliver on the promise if you want people to trust you or even respect you.
Edited
Not all our weapons. There’s a lot of captured Russian materiel and European stuff. But yes, many of our amazing weapons are used by the Ukes. As with Gulf War 1, a periodic demonstration of capabilities can be instructive pour encourager les autres.
Pour encourager les autres to what? Wait for the next weak-minded, corrupt Democrat to get “elected” as “leader” of the free world?
This is what I don’t get about the desire to “demonstrate” American military power in affairs (conflicts) between other nations. It’s not that there aren’t worthy causes outside our borders. It’s that anyone who’s been alive and observant over the last three or four decades might consider the cost. “There are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” — Thomas Sowell
Putin waited for Trump to be deposed. He knew he didn’t have to wait long since all the institutional powers in the US were aligned against the duly elected president. But now that he’s taken the opportunity, do you really want to invest American lives and treasure in an ongoing conflict under the leadership of those who are the cause of (or at least excuse for) the problem in the first place??
I don’t trust Democrats or their apparatchiks in the military and intelligence community to competently and honestly run a lemonade stand, let alone a war. Why do you?
Selling them arms? Not even RT thinks that- we are giving them arms. So how is that money they are not spending going to the Clintons et al. Time to stop furthering conspiratorial delusions.
addendum- “enslaving” them? By helping them preserve their freedom? So you think they will have more freedom under Putin- while being tortured & raped in basements in Izyum & Bucha? Where do you get these ideas? We don’t enslave ourselves by preserving the security of our allies.
If you want to see corruption look to Russia:
Always have been. Read Solzhenitsyn’s account of his time in the battles in eastern Europe and Germany.
Putin/Russia has neither the desire nor the ability (the former is a function of the latter) to invade Poland (or any of the other Baltic countries, for that matter), so the notion that “we should remind Putin that we are trying to do him a favor. That favor would be we are trying to keep him away from the Polish border …” is utterly moot.
The “Unless we stop Putin/Russia in Ukraine, he/it will keep on rolling westward until all that was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union is regained” is sheer hyperbolic nonsense, designed for Western consumption. Similar to Putin’s hyperbolic nonsense about “de-Nazifying Ukraine” as one of the reasons for the invasion that he sold to his public.
This conflict, as so many (most, I would say) are, is about natural resources. In this case, the undersea oil/nat gas reserves in the northern part of the Black Sea, most of which are around … the Crimean peninsula. That’s why Putin took it back, to which the Ukrainians responded by cutting off Crimea’s sole source of fresh water in an effort to depopulate it of the Russian ethnics there and re-occupy it themselves at some point, to which the Russians responded by building an aqueduct bridge from the east. And so on.
That’s, basically, at the bottom of the 20 year or so struggle between the US and Russia over which one gets to install a friendly government in Kiev. Russia finally lost that contest in 2019. I have little doubt that the invasion would have happened in 2020. However, … COVID. So, with a 2 year delay, here we are, possibly slouching toward finding out what tactical nuclear weapons look and feel like when they go “boom”.
Ugh.