The enemy has spoken.
This morning on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump “made clear that he does not understand the largest war in Europe, what started it, or why it continues,” Tom Nichols writes. “Worse, insofar as he does understand anything about Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, he seems to have internalized old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.”
“... The war, Trump said, started because of Crimea and NATO. Considering his commitment to being a ‘peace president,’ Trump was oddly eager to castigate his predecessors for being weak:
Crimea, he said, was handed over to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Barack Obama ‘without a shot fired.’ (Should Obama have fired some? No one asked.) Crimea, you see, is a beautiful piece of real estate, surrounded by water—I have been to Crimea, and I can confirm the president’s evaluation here—and ‘Barack Hussein Obama gave it away.’ Putin, he said, got a ‘great deal’ from Obama, and took it ‘like candy from a baby.’
“Trump did not explain how this putative land swindle led to Putin trying to seize all of Ukraine. But no matter; he quickly shifted to NATO, echoing the arguments of early Kremlin apologists and credulous Western intellectuals that Ukraine existed only as a ‘buffer’ with the West, and that Putin was acting to forestall Ukraine joining NATO. Russia was right, Trump said, not to want the Western ‘enemy’ on their border.
“This might be the first time an American president has used Russia’s language to describe NATO as an enemy. Perhaps Trump was simply trying to see the other side’s point of view. He then added, however, that the war was sparked not only by NATO membership—which was not on the table anytime soon—but also by Ukrainian demands to return Crimea, which Trump felt were ‘very insulting’ to Russia.
“Trump is a bit behind on his pro-Kremlin talking points. The Russians themselves long ago largely abandoned any such blather about NATO and Crimea. Putin claimed early on that Ukraine was infested with Nazis—in the case of Zelensky, apparently Jewish Nazis—and that even if it weren’t for NATO and Nazis, Ukraine is organically part of Russia and belongs under Kremlin rule. For three years, Putin has been slaughtering Ukrainian civilians to make the point that his Slavic brothers and sisters need to either accept that they are part of Russia, or die.”
news.gallup.com
Facebook
Twitter