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ukraine war
The Key to Peace in Ukraine Remains What It Has Always Been
Neutrality resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution.
Jan 13, 2025
President-elect Trump said on January 9th that he is planning a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. He said “Putin wants to meet,” because “we have to get that war over with.” So what are the chances that a new administration in Washington can break the deadlock and finally bring peace to Ukraine?
During both of his election campaigns, Trump said he wanted to end the wars the U.S. was involved in. But in his first term, Trump himself exacerbated all the major crises he is now confronting. He escalated Obama’s military “pivot to Asia” against China, disregarded Obama’s fears that sending “lethal” aid to Ukraine would lead to war with Russia, withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, and encouraged Netanyahu’s ambitions to land-grab and massacre his way to a mythical “Greater Israel.”
However, of all these crises, the one that Trump keeps insisting he really wants to resolve is the war in Ukraine, which Russia launched and the U.S. and NATO then chose to prolong, leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties. The Western powers have until now been determined to fight this war of attrition to the last Ukrainian, in the vain hope that they can somehow eventually defeat and weaken Russia without triggering a nuclear war.
Trump rightly blames Biden for blocking the peace agreement negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in March and April 2022, and for the three more years of war that have resulted from that deadly and irresponsible decision.
Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.
While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine: Clinton launched NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe, against the advice of leading American diplomats; Bush promised Ukraine it could join NATO, ignoring even more urgent diplomatic warnings; and Obama supported the 2014 coup that plunged Ukraine into civil war.
Trump himself began sending weapons to Ukraine to fight the self-declared “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, even though the Minsk II Accord’s OSCE-monitored ceasefire was largely holding and had greatly reduced the violence of the civil war from its peak in 2014 and 2015.
Trump’s injection of U.S. weapons was bound to reinflame the conflict and provoke Russia, especially as one of the first units trained on new U.S. weapons was the infamous Azov Regiment, which Congress cut off from U.S. arms and training in 2018 due to its central role as a hub for transnational neo-Nazi organizing.
So what will it take to negotiate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine? The answer has been hidden in plain sight, obscured by the rote repetition of deceptive rhetoric from Ukrainian and Western officials, claiming that Russia has refused to negotiate or that, if not stopped in Ukraine, Russia will invade NATO countries, such as Poland or the Baltic states.
The agreement that had Ukrainian negotiators popping champagne corks when they returned from Turkey at the end of March 2022 was referred to by all sides as a “Neutrality Agreement,” and nothing has changed in the strategic picture to suggest that Ukrainian neutrality is any less central to peace today.
A neutral Ukraine means that it would not join NATO or participate in joint NATO military exercises, nor would it allow foreign military bases on its territory. This would satisfy Russia’s security interests, while Ukraine’s security would be guaranteed by other powerful nations, including NATO members.
The fact that Russia was ready to so quickly end the war on that basis is all the evidence an objective observer should need to recognize that Ukrainian neutrality was always Russia’s most critical war aim. And the celebrations of the Ukrainian negotiators on their return from Turkey confirm that the Ukrainians willingly accepted Ukrainian neutrality as the basis for a peace agreement. "Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” Zelensky declared in March 2022.
Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.
While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine
Biden justified endlessly prolonging the war by stressing territorial questions and insisting that Ukraine must recover all the territory it has lost since the 2014 coup. By contrast, Russia has generally prioritized the destruction of enemy forces and NATO weapons over occupying more territory.
As Russia inexorably occupies the remainder of Donetsk oblast (province) after three years of war, it has still not moved to occupy Kramatorsk or Sloviansk, the large twin cities in the north of that oblast where 250,000 people live. They were among the first cities to rise up against the post-coup government in 2014, and were besieged and recaptured by Ukrainian government forces in the first major battle of the civil war in July 2014.
Neither has Russia pushed further westward into the neighboring oblasts of Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk. Nor has it launched a much-predicted offensive to occupy Odesa in the south-west, despite its strategic location on the Black Sea, its history as a Russian city with a Russian-speaking population, the infamous massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters there by a mob led by Right Sector in May 2014, and its current role as a hotbed of draft resistance in Ukraine.
If Russia’s goal was to annex as much of Ukraine as possible, or to use it as a stepping-stone to invade Poland or other European countries, as Western politicians have regularly claimed, Ukraine’s largest cities would have been prime targets.
But it has done the opposite. It even withdrew from Kherson in November 2022, after occupying it for eight months. NATO leaders had previously decided that the fall of Kherson to Ukrainian government forces would be the chance they were waiting for to reopen peace negotiations from a position of strength, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley argued they should “seize the moment” to do so. Instead, President Biden put the kibosh on yet another chance for peace.
When Congress approved another $60 billion for weapons shipments to Ukraine in April 2024, Senator and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance voted against the bill. Vance explained his vote in an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that the war was not winnable and that Biden should start talking to Putin.
In explaining why Ukraine could not win, Vance relied heavily on testimony by NATO’s top military commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, to the House Armed Services Committee. Vance wrote that even the most optimistic projections of the impact of the weapons bill could not make up for the massive imbalance between Russian and Ukrainian armaments and forces. Cavoli told the committee that Russia already outgunned Ukraine by 5-to-1 in artillery shells, and that a European push to produce a million shells in the past year had yielded only 600,000.
While Ukraine was desperate for more Patriot missiles to intercept 4,000 Russian missile and drone strikes per month, the U.S. could only provide 650 in the next year, even with the additional funds, due to the massive amount of weapons being shipped to Israel or already promised to Taiwan.
Both Russia and Ukraine have covered up their casualties with propaganda, underestimating their own casualties and exaggerating their enemies’, to mislead their own people, their allies and their enemies alike. General Cavoli testified under oath that over 315,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and wounded. But he went on to say that, by calling up reserves and conscripting new troops, Russia had not only made up those losses but increased its overall troop strength by 15%, and was well on the way to building a 1.5 million-strong army.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has a recruitment crisis, due to an underlying demographic shortage of young men caused by a very low birth-rate in the 1990s, when living standards and life expectancy plummeted under the impact of Western-backed economic shock treatment. This has now been severely compounded by the impacts of the war.
Ella Libanova, a demographer at Ukraine’s National Academy of Science, estimated to Reuters in July 2023 that, with so many people leaving the country and building new lives in other countries as the war drags on, the total population in government-held areas might already have fallen as low as 28 million, from a total population of 45 million ten years ago. It must surely be even lower now.
Based on huge imbalances in artillery shells and other weapons, Ukrainian and U.S. claims that Ukraine has suffered much lower casualties than Russia are frankly unbelievable, and some analysts believe Ukrainian casualties have been much higher than Russia’s. The declining morale of its troops, increased draft resistance, desertion, and emigration from Ukraine have all combined to shrink the available pool of new conscripts.
Vance concluded, “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.”
In his press conference on January 3rd, President-elect Trump framed the need for peace in Ukraine as a question of basic humanity. “I don’t think it’s appropriate that I meet [Putin] until after the 20th, which I hate because every day people are being—many, many young people are being killed, soldiers,” Trump said.
More and more Ukrainians agree. While opinion polls soon after Russia’s invasion showed 72% wanting to fight until victory, that is now down to 38%. Most Ukrainians want quick negotiations and are open to making territorial concessions as part of a peace deal.
In recent interviews, President Zelensky has been softening his position, suggesting that Ukraine is willing to cede territory to Russia to end the war as long as the rest of the country is protected by a “NATO umbrella.” But NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians, and so the 2022 neutrality agreement instead provided for security guarantees by which other countries, including individual NATO members, would guarantee Ukraine’s security.
Trump’s peace plan is rumored to entail freezing the current geographical positions and shelving Ukraine’s accession to NATO for 20 years. But continuing to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine, as the U.S. has bullied NATO into doing since 2008, is a root cause of this conflict, not a solution. Neutrality, on the other hand, resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution.
There are many things we both disagree with Donald Trump about. But the need for peace in Ukraine is one thing we agree on. We hope Trump understands that Ukrainian neutrality is the key to peace and the best hope for the future of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Europe, and, in fact, for the survival of human civilization.
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2024: A Century in a Year
As much as anything else, the election of 2024 was a referendum on four decades of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism lost.
Dec 31, 2024
In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Scaling that up, 2024 was a year where a century happened.
The Sykes-Picot Accords that laid out the contours of the modern Middle East were signed in 1916. This year, 2024, they were overturned as the nation state of Syria was destroyed by a wolf pack of at least a dozen terrorist militias supported by Turkey, Israel, Qatar, and the United States. That is the definition of an epochal event.
It also reveals the U.S.’ preferred modus operandi in the world: its people won’t tolerate dead soldiers coming home in body bags, so it hires terrorist mercenaries to do its dirty work. Think of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS after Iraq, Boko Haram in North Africa. But back to 2024 as the year that was a century…
In 1917, Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, penned the infamous Balfour Declaration, stating that the British Government viewed favorably the establishment of a homeland in Palestine for Jews. That endowment was actualized in 1948, when Zionist Jews seized 79% of Palestine and declared the establishment of Israel. But their ambition was always for more.
The century-old Zionist vision of Greater Israel will require taking Lebanon (underway), Syria (underway), most of Iraq (underway), Egypt east of the Nile, Jordan, and a large swath of Saudi Arabia. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotich, publicly calls for taking this “little by little.” As of 2024, there is no doubt that the process is well underway.
This follows as Israel revealed itself in 2024 to be a murderous, genocidal state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinians, most of them women and children, in order to steal their land. That is not even a judgement. It’s a clinical statement of fact.
In July, the British medical journal, Lancet, stated that “186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” By now, more than six months on, that number is much, much higher. It is the most conspicuous, public genocide since the Holocaust during World War II. That makes 2024 an all-the-more remarkable year.
The U.S.’ breathless, unrestrained support for the genocide marked a huge turning point for its reputation in the world. No more can it credibly claim to be a champion of human rights, a defender of Democracy, a supporter of international law. In 2024, the U.S. destroyed untold reputational capital it has spent centuries accumulating. It will never be recovered.
The year 2024 can also credibly be considered the start of World War III. Consider the eerie parallels to World War I, begun in 1914.
World War I occurred because Germany was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading industrial state. If Britain did not do something about it, it would be eclipsed as the global hegemon. Today, China plays Germany, blowing by the U.S.’ Britain.
In the lead-up to that first World War, the sides sorted themselves into blocs, the British, French, and Russians (joined, later, by the U.S.) forming one bloc, the Triple Entente. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the other bloc, the Triple Alliance. Today, NATO and the West form one bloc; the Global South-based BRICS alliance, led by China and Russia, form the opposing bloc.
Finally, both wars were/are about who will control the oil-rich Middle East.
The Germans had befriended the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of what, at the time, was called “West Asia.” They had begun building the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad, which would have given them control of most of the world’s then-known oil. That posed a mortal threat to the British, who had just finished converting their global navy from running on coal to running on oil.
So, besides being the year that Sykes-Picot was undone, and in which Israel and the U.S. revealed their genocidal natures, 2024 will be remembered as the year in which World War III began. There was one more, important international matter in all of this.
Russia quit its former ally, Syria, leaving it to the mercies (such as they are) of the terrorist cabal that had beset it, in 2011. But, there was a quid pro quo: the U.S. could have Syria but it would close down its decades-long menacing of Russia through its U.S.-allied proxy, Ukraine. It is a good deal for both sides.
For the U.S., Ukraine has long been lost. It has long been out of money, weapons, and men. Now, the U.S. gets to cut those losses and refocus its sights on what it perceives as its real adversary, China. For Russia, it stops the bleed on its southern border. This, too, goes back over a century.
It was in 1919 that the U.S. invaded Russia to try to overturn the Russian Revolution. That White Counter-Revolution failed, and the U.S. and Russia remained bitter rivals for the next century. This current predation on Russia was carried out by Ukraine, with the U.S. as its puppeteer.
It was Bill Clinton who began moving NATO and its nuclear-tipped missiles right up to Russia’s borders. The U.S. knows very well the panic that results from such menacing, having lived through and survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, not only has Russia defeated the U.S. militarily in Ukraine. It has defeated it economically, diplomatically, politically, and strategically as well. These are astonishing, highly damaging setbacks for the U.S. The U.S. public hasn’t gotten the memo, yet.
Economically? Remember when Joe Biden declared that “the strongest sanctions regime in the history of the world” would “reduce the ruble to rubble”? In fact, Russia’s economy has proven much stronger than the U.S. economy, growing faster, with lower inflation, and lower debt.
It has won diplomatically, as well. Most of the world’s nations refused to join the sanctions on Russia demanded by the U.S. government. And, the U.S. shot itself in the foot by stealing $300 billion of Russian assets held in Western banks. More nations will avoid dollars to prevent such banditry being carried out against them when they don’t bow to U.S. dictates.
Russia won politically, too. A major impetus of the U.S. aggression was to effect regime change in Russia, dealing it a “strategic defeat,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it. Vladimir Putin was to be replaced with a more pliable leader. In fact, it was the U.S.’ leader, Joe Biden, who was replaced in the November elections. Do you suppose he appreciates the irony?
Finally, strategically. Only in Democratic Party circles, fronting as it always does for the weapons makers, does it make strategic sense to drive your two greatest adversaries into each other’s arms. Those would be China and Russia and that is exactly what Ukraine has done. That’s part of why the Democrats were handed their heads in the 2024 presidential election. Speaking of which…
It was 95 years ago that the Great Depression began. Capitalism on its own could not generate enough activity to employ all of the economy’s resources. So, Franklin Roosevelt modified capitalism to work with stabilizers from the state: federal work programs, unemployment insurance; tighter banking regulation; and more.
That fix served pretty well until 1980, when capitalists decided (as capitalists are wont to do) that they wanted more of the economy’s output for themselves. So, we began the regime of Neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan. That meant fewer regulations, lower taxes on the wealthy, jobs shipped abroad, the government helping to structure the economy with monopolies.
As much as anything else, the election of 2024 was a referendum on four decades of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism lost. A plurality of people would rather burn it all down than endure the assured, steady degradation of their life prospects that they’ve come to suffer for the last generation.
Unfortunately, the Democrats were the party in power when the referendum was held, in November, so they got stuck holding the turd. And it’s not like they didn’t deserve it.
Bill Clinton, the original Democratic Neoliberal, passed NAFTA, helping ship millions of good paying, Midwest metal-bending jobs to Mexico. He deregulated the banks, setting the economy up for the Great Recession. He helped the media industry become the fetid oligopoly that it is.
Barrack Obama enlisted Clinton’s economic team, en masse. When that Great Recession hit, Obama bailed out the banks that had caused it while letting 10 million families lose their homes to foreclosure. People remember.
The Democratic presidential campaign itself was a catastrophe, a debacle, a master class in narrative inanity, focal fluidity, and bumbling amateurism.
The Democrats couldn’t defeat the most notorious, noxious dirtbag ever to beslime American culture. A 34-time convicted felon. A man the Washington Post said was a rapist. Someone who carried out the most grievous assault on the State and the Constitution since the Civil War. A catastrophically failed former president whose signature ineptness caused more than a million excess deaths in the COVID pandemic. The Democrats couldn’t lay a glove on him.
Consider just one set of facts.
Donald Trump was the first president since the Great Depression to leave office with fewer people employed in the nation than when he entered. Joe Biden oversaw the creation of more than 16 million jobs, the greatest job creation record in history. And the Democrats couldn’t put together a coherent sentence about the economy. Can you remember one?
There’s a lot of hemming and hawing and navel-gazing and retrospective rationalizing about the election, especially in elite Democratic party circles. The most salient fact is this: more than 7 million fewer people voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024 than voted for the one in 2020. And that’s with the huge headwind of Dobbs at their back. Not even their own people believed in them.
Simply put, 2024 was the year we realized that the Democratic party is a spent force, not a competent, reliable party to represent the interests of the working and middle classes. It is the party that gave us Donald Trump and all of the leprous, anti-democratic, plutocratic agendas that he represents. Without being hysterical, it may be the end of democracy in America. Thank you, Democrats.
The party has no message, no messenger, no mechanism, not even an agenda that says anything to the working people of this county who are abandoning it in droves, and with good cause. It has allowed Republicans to brand it the party of inflation, elitism, transgenderism, and genocide. Can you see why it didn’t sell, even with the nose-bleeding $2 billion they spent trying to peddle it?
One last word on an important innovation that emerged in 2024. It has to do with the intersection of technology and culture and how that plays out in politics.
The first television broadcast was 97 years ago, in 1927. It allowed the top-down dissemination of received narratives about what was going on in the world. It allowed elites to control what the nation knew, and thought.
In some important measure, 2024 saw the overthrow of that thought control regime. Yes, television is still broadcast, but it is less and less influential in setting the national dialogue on almost all issues.
Instead, we see the rise, even the pre-eminence, of social media, much of which emerges from the bottom up, or at least without the editing filters that allowed elites to manage national perceptions.
More than anything else, it was Trump’s mastery of social media, and his use of it to propagate his lies, fear, conspiracies, and rage that accounted for his win in the 2024 election. It’s important to understand why that worked.
Social media monetizes the very worst elements of our individual and social psyches. It titillates our amygdala, our lizard brain. More money is made through more clicks, and more clicks are generated by delivery of more outrageous content.
But, the process satiates, so it demands ever more outrageous content, and then, still more, yet, until all that is being vended out is garbage, lies, conspiracy, indignation, and innuendo. And the more that is vended out, the more money is made.
It is impossible to contrive a more culturally auto-destructive techno-social dynamic than one that makes more money by vending more garbage into the culture. But that is what we have become.
Two centuries ago, the Enlightenment gave us the idea that Truth could be discerned through a process of Reason. No more. Indeed, there is no such thing as Truth, and no need for such a bothersome path through Reason. There is only a preponderance of clicks and the outrage or docility that such preponderance endows, like turning out pissed off voters.
We have constructed a Golden Calf of the demons of our baser nature and it is that Calf which we now idolize, because it makes the most money. The proof is that tens of millions of people worship at the feet of the most degenerate pathological liar the country has ever known, and fancy him some kind of Messiah.
They are going to follow his carnival barker hawkings until they are shorn of all of their dignity, all of their money, and all of their freedoms. And we, of ours. They’ll still imagine it a patriotic sacrifice and congratulate themselves for their courage in sticking it to the man.
Indeed, 2024 was a year for the ages.
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Trump Should 100% Take Jimmy Carter's Advice
Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. A repeat of that must not be tolerated.
Dec 30, 2024
With President Jimmy Carter’s passing and Donald Trump about to return to the White House, it’s a good time to recall a phone conversation that Carter had with Trump during his first term. Carter’s advice would serve Trump well if he really wants to fulfill his campaign promise to Put America First–something he failed to do in his first term.
In April 2019, Jimmy Carter told his church congregation in Georgia that President Trump had called him for advice about China. Carter said he told Trump that China was economically overtaking the United States as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy because the United States had spent decades wasting trillions of dollars to fight endless wars, while China had instead focused on economic development and lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of extreme poverty. “China has not wasted a single penny on war,” Carter said, “and that’s why they’re ahead of us, in almost every way.”
The next day, the White House confirmed that the two presidents “had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics.”
Some of Trump’s statements during the election campaign suggest that he hasn’t forgotten Carter’s advice. At the very least, he got the message that peace would be good for America, and that a lot of Americans understand that. Majorities of Americans have long supported a ceasefire in Gaza, and a plurality now support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, too. Trump promised to deliver on both. He even said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, based on his good relations with leaders in Russia and Ukraine.
Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.
Americans may be more worried about problems closer to home than the Middle East or Ukraine, but President Carter connected the dots between U.S. war-making and our quality of life in America.
“And I think the difference is, if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover,” Carter explained to his congregation. “We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”
What Carter described to Trump is the classic choice between “guns and butter” that faces every society. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States was a rising economic power, like China today. Europe’s imperial powers destroyed each other in the First World War, leaving even the victors, Britain and France, with multibillion dollar debts to J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Treasury. The United States’ economic success made it the world’s banker and industrial leader and gave it a decisive role in the history of the 20th century.
Today, it is the United States that has an unprecedented national debt of $36 trillion, and our military budget consumes 56% of federal discretionary spending, putting the squeeze on all our other needs. But we can still enjoy shared prosperity and a brighter future if Trump can do as Carter advised him and wean our government off its addiction to war.
So why are we not reassured by Trump’s promises to make peace and put America first? There are three things that worry us: his first-term track record; his second-term cabinet picks; and his aggressive rhetoric since the election (as opposed to what he said on the campaign trail).
Let’s start with his track record. Despite loud promises to tackle the entrenched interests of the “Deep State” and to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. In FY2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, Trump spent an average of $292 billion per year on Pentagon “investment” accounts, or payments to weapons makers and other military suppliers. That was a 24% increase over Obama’s second term.
Trump’s record tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies was not balanced by any cuts in military spending, which was as much of a sacred cow to him as to Bush, Obama, and Biden. This toxic combination blew up the national debt, leaving nothing in the kitty for improving education, healthcare, public transportation or any of our society’s other critical needs. That tax cut will expire in a year’s time, but Trump has made it clear that he intends to give even greater tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.
Trump deserves credit for not starting any new wars during his first term, but his escalations of Bush’s and Obama’s wars made his first year in office in 2017 the heaviest year of U.S. and allied bombing since the First Gulf War in 1991, dropping more than 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia.
As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America.
Many Americans remember Trump’s shocking statement that “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” What the U.S. corporate media swept under the rug was that the Iraqi forces who captured the bombed out ruins of Islamic State’s stronghold in Mosul’s Old City took Trump at his word and killed all the survivors, including women and children, just as Israel is doing in parts of Gaza today. Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.
When it comes to Trump’s new cabinet picks, he might have jettisoned some of the worst hawks in his last coterie, such as John Bolton, but some of his nominees for top foreign policy jobs are awful, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.
Tulsi Gabbard is a more encouraging choice as National Intelligence Director, but as a House member, she voted for two thirds of Obama’s and Trump’s military spending bills, and was always a pushover for expensive new weapon systems. As we asked when she ran for president in 2020, which Tulsi Gabbard will we see in her new job? The one who opposes regime change wars and the new Cold War with Russia, or the one who couldn’t say no to nuclear-armed cruise missiles in 2014, 2015 or 2016? And who will Trump listen to? Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, who is more non-interventionist, or warmongers Rubio and Waltz?
We don’t want to place too much stock in Trump’s often contradictory public statements, but he has sounded very hawkish lately. If you believe everything Trump says, he wants to buy Greenland, invade Mexico to fight immigrants and drug gangs, annex Canada as the 51st state, put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and seize the Panama Canal and close it to China. In Trump’s last term he badgered NATO countries to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GDP, but now he is calling on them to spend a staggering 5 percent, far more than the 3.1 percent of GDP that the U.S. spent in 2024.
This is a test for the American people. Do we want a showman, tough guy president, playing ringmaster of the corporate media circus? Do we want a leader who threatens to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama (again) and Greenland, like an American Netanyahu dreaming of a Western Greater Israel? Or should we demand a president who really puts America First? A president who makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East? A president who finally starts bringing our troops home from those 800 foreign military bases all over the world? A president who can look at a map and see that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the Golan Heights are in Syria?
As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America. The Democrats have had their chances to do right by the American people and they’ve blown it so many times we’ve lost count. So the ball’s in Trump’s court. Will he follow Carter’s sage advice?
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