He’s absolutely, magnificently right, and he’s right in direct proportion to the hysteria his Nashville remarks brought forth from the Global Liberals. Hillary Clinton told the London Financial Times the same day that Trump’s possible re-election was Vladimir Putin’s only possible path to victory. Clinton bears the lion’s share of the blame for the horrific bloodshed now underway in Ukraine: As Secretary of State, Clinton and her chief Europe aide Victoria Nuland helped stage-manage the Maidan Coup in Ukraine that set the present war in motion.

It is revolting, but not surprising, to see the leaders of the Republican Establishment try to out-shout the Democrats over Ukraine. The consensus echo chamber generates a stream of chatter so deafening that it takes a big voice to boom over it, and Donald Trump is the only American politician with a voice that big. Thank God we have him.
He was wrong about many things but right about one overriding big thing: The United States has no business starting wars to make the world safe for democracy.


That’s why the Deep State went after Trump with a vengeance, claiming that he was in cahoots with Putin to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Andrew McCarthy, Lee Smith, and others have published book-length exposés of this egregious fraud.

There are a dozen small reasons to oppose Trump and one big reason to support him: The existence of civilization just might be at stake as a result of the fanaticism and incompetence of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. I would favor Ron DeSantis as the 2024 Republican candidate, but if the estimable Florida governor wants a shot at the top slot, he has to take a stand on the Ukraine disaster.

Russia has been the White Whale of the Global Liberal/Neoconservative cabal since the Fall of Communism. We expected Russia to turn into a liberal democracy after 1990. But the “free market” policies we pushed onto Russia (I was part of the first wave of neo-con economists to visit Russia in the early 1990s) allowed oligarchs to loot the corpse of the Soviet economy and plunge Russia into chaos and bankruptcy. Putin emerged as the capo di capi, the boss of bosses who rationalized and limited the looting and allowed Russia to get back on its feet. He’s the Lucky Luciano of Russia. There’s nothing to like about him.

But Russia remains a state with interests, and Russia will no more tolerate the expansion of NATO up to its Ukrainian border than we would tolerate Russian missiles in Mexico.

Trump would not have pushed Putin into a corner. He’s a deal-maker, and he would have found a formula to avoid war. Russia, after all, proposed the Minsk II framework in which Ukraine would remain neutral, and the Russian-speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine would have autonomous rule within a sovereign Ukraine. Washington and London encouraged Ukraine to junk the Minsk framework and helped it to re-arm.
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/06/19/auto-draft-73-n1606391

Frank wrote on Aug 9^th, 2022 at 11:08am:

When Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union by taking Russia out of it, he did not reckon on losing Ukraine. Yet, in a referendum in 1991, the Ukrainians voted by a large majority to go their own way.

The American ambassador in Moscow, Robert Strauss, a savvy newcomer to international politics, saw the implications at once and reported:

"The most revolutionary event of 1991 for Russia may not be the collapse of communism but the loss of something Russians of all political stripes think of as part of their own body politic and near to the heart at that: Ukraine."

The Baltics eventually became members of both the European Union and Nato. But to this day neither organisation has dared to welcome Ukraine.

At nearly every page of this outstanding book one comes back to the same question. Was Nato expansion worth the risk of enduring Russian resentment and hostility? The answer is: probably. The Kennan/Kissinger view assumes that an unprovoked Russia would have been more benign, and this seems unlikely. Russia has been a predatory autocracy for three centuries. It has always had a strong sense of entitlement in eastern Europe. It grabbed Poland and the Baltic states in the 18th century. It brutally suppressed successive risings in 19th-century Poland. It posed as the protector of the Slav regions of south-eastern Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It was constantly beating at the gates of Ottoman Turkey. It conquered all of eastern and central Europe in 1944-5 and imposed satellite communist regimes on them for the next 50 years.

When, in a now notorious essay written at the end of last year, Putin invoked the ghost of the expansionary 18th-century Tsarina Catherine the Great, he was asserting Russia’s inherited rights over eastern Europe. This fantasy no doubt derived its intensity from the humiliations of the 1990s, but it had much older and more fundamental origins. It would not have gone away, however Russia had been handled after 1989. ‘Great empires do not go gracefully into oblivion,’ observed the ever shrewd Strauss from the Moscow embassy.

More cautious statesmen than George Bush and Bill Clinton might have rejected the pleas of the central European states for Nato membership. But it would have been a grotesque essay in great power politics to condemn a third of Europe to indefinite Russian domination. It is what the wartime allies did at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945. But there was no alternative then, whereas the West had a choice after 1989.

The consequences of leaving former Russian satellites at the mercy of their old master became painfully clear in the next three decades. Those which had no Nato guarantee foundered. Chechnya was reconquered. Georgia was dismembered. Belarus was bribed, and its democracy ‘managed’ out of existence. The Crimea was annexed. Ukraine is now engaged in a desperate struggle for survival in the face of Russian brute force. ‘To hell with that,’ Bush replied when the risks of extending Nato’s reach were pointed out to him. It may have been the wisest judgment.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-ultimate-gamble/

Berlin had the first city-wall to defend against its people leaving.

Vietnam was a dud but the west didn't invade Saigon. Although North Korea said it defeated the US invasion of south K. Most sensible Russians and NK believe everything the dictatorship TV tells them.

That's tints in the tent and reds under the bed.

'This is an example of the loony racist right, or 'the Right' in general'.-random.

Probaly the last post was about me. Correct?