Does the Trump Administration’s Reversal on Ukraine and Russia Mean Business as Usual?
The Russo-Ukrainian War has remained a stalemate over the last several months, resulting in a few large drone strikes back and forth that occasionally made headlines, but regardless, President Donald Trump’s position has seemingly changed from his campaign promise of ending the war on “day one” (yes, saying that it would be on the first day is obviously hyperbole, but to walk back what he said entirely is something else). Are some of the same forces holding the Jeffrey Epstein case over his head and blackmailing him preventing him from achieving peace?
Russia has been ramping up its long-range attacks against Ukrainian cities, including in Kiev, Kharkiv, and Sumy, and Ukraine has launched its own drones and missiles at Russian territory, including in Zelenograd (just outside of Moscow), at a couple of Moscow’s airports, and in the Kursk region. Both countries have successfully eliminated many of each other’s drones, but much damage has been taken by Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure. As Russia strikes, sometimes close to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) borders, Poland, Romania, Italy, and Sweden (the latter two of which do not even border Ukraine) have deployed fighter jets to ensure that Russian aircraft do not cross the line into their respective territories or those of their allies, and this seems like a recipe for disaster and an incident waiting to happen. Though the war is largely stagnating (Russia has controlled about twenty percent of Ukraine for quite some time), if Russia does increase its military operations to secure the four oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia (the former two of which have in the past voted for independence from Ukraine) before a peace deal is reached, Russia will have a huge bargaining chip.
As Russian drones and missiles “pummel” Ukraine, the corporate media is having a field day doing the bidding of the military-industrial complex and attempting to get Americans to rally around the blue and yellow flag once again. I still see quite a few Ukrainian flags hanging outside of houses and businesses, sometimes without an accompanying American flag, so it would not be difficult to manipulate Americans into having sympathy for Ukraine once again, leaving out the part where the Ukrainian government spent years bombing, with the aid of the United States, Donetsk and Luhansk and forcing them to remain under a unitary government that the people there were not happy with.
President Trump has appeared to lose patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin and throw out the concept of “madman” to describe someone who he just months earlier said was a man who wanted to seek peace, and the president said that “We're very, very unhappy with them [Russia]” and that Putin is a “tough guy” who has “fooled a lot of people.” This seems to be a complete one hundred eighty-degree turn from when the president told Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky that he did not “have the cards” and that he was “gambling with World War III.” Now President Trump is going after Russia, even reversing a brief pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine and creating a new plan to flood additional equipment into the country.
The new transfer plan includes the United States selling weapons, such as Patriot missiles, to NATO and having the alliance then send those weapons to Ukraine instead of the United States directly doing it. In theory, this would allow the European Union to “step up” and leave out American taxpayers from footing the bill (if we must engage in this pointless conflict, Europeans should have to “pay their fair share” as any good billionaire under a democratic socialist country would). This sounds great on the surface, and it is surely better than the alternative, but it does not take away from the fact that it perpetuates the cold war against Russia using Ukraine as the proxy. Americans voted in Trump to end the war, not find ways to engage in it differently. Keeping the status quo of propping up the military-industrial complex and attempting to involve the United States in military conflict against another nuclear-powered nation is not in the best interests of Americans, and dressing it up differently does not make the situation better. At the end of the day, he is continuing President Joe Biden’s (and Barack Obama’s) war.
In addition to that, President Trump has given Putin a fifty-day window to make an agreement to end the war, and if that is not achieved, the executive branch (not Congress) is going to impose “severe tariffs” (ranging from 100% to what Senator Lindsey Graham said would be 500%) on any country (enemy or ally) that does business with Russia, including buying gas and oil. This tariff threat is not only attempting to punish Russia, but it is also meant as a deterrent for any other country that wants to trade with Russia. As we know from World War II, isolating other nations (like Japan before the Pearl Harbor attack) often leads to war, so if the Trump administration is interested in bringing us into World War III, this is a great plan. Plus, this is a form of economic terrorism by using intimidation as a tool to dissuade every nation on earth from engaging in any economic deals with an enemy country. If you do not do what I want, you will be punished. Bullying may work with weaker countries, but Russia has clearly moved on from its past position of shying away from conflict with the United States and refraining from influencing neighboring countries. Russia is now defying the American Empire’s hegemony, and officials in the United States are not pleased. Like President Trump’s other tariffs, this could simply be a bargaining chip that gets renegotiated or abandoned in time, but regardless, threatening countries into making peace deals is not exactly the most diplomatic approach.
Will President Trump end up choosing peace over appeasing his buddies in the deep state? Time will tell. However, it is looking like another set of peace deals will be hyped up to give the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base something to be proud of, but then, it will likely fall apart in the end, leaving the Trump administration to continue shipping weapons to Ukraine and perpetuating a war that was concocted by elites to last for several years. The theater of propping up Trump as this fake prince of peace is just to get people’s hopes up so that they believe that diplomacy is achievable, but the powers that be do not want the war in Ukraine to end. War is profitable, and it keeps Russia busy and distracted from challenging American interests in other arenas.
I hope that I am wrong and that there is a successful peace deal tomorrow, but that is not where the trend seems to lie. Trump has caved to the deep state in other areas, so why would this be any different? He seems to be just another puppet, and his populist rhetoric was just to get conspiracy theorists and right-wing pundits and audiences on board with the elites’ policies, and it has been successful so far (even Alex Jones has pacified and led his audience toward almost blind obedience of Trump, with the exception of the Epstein case). MAGA will compromise its previous values in order to line up with Trump’s direction, and the war in Ukraine is shaping up to be no different.
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.