The Return Of Trump Dubya

The least-noticed development of the midterm elections' aftermath is this one:

Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia https://t.co/aI0uXJt4sX

— CNN International (@cnni) November 11, 2022

CNN continues at greater length in a story:

The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

This will be the first public discussion between Zelensky – whose participation will be virtual – and the former president, following a private meeting they had earlier this year. After that initial meeting Bush called Zelensky the “Winston Churchill of our time.”

Both Dubya and his father have scrupulously followed the traditional protocol whereby former presidents maintain a low profile and don't normally engage in political dialogue after leaving office. Here, Dubya is pushing that adherence to the limit by very visibly endorsing a particular foreign policy that's been controversial at home. On one hand, I find this reassuring; at least in comparison to both Trump and Biden, Dubya, for all his faults, is much closer to a functional adult at this stage.

But let's see if we can peek behind the scenes at what this really means. Although Dubya is as close as we have to an adult, he isn't eligible to be reelected to the presidency and probably isn't interested in any other office. He's standing in for someone or something else. On the other hand, his chief proxy, Liz Cheney, daughter of his vice president, is a lame duck at the end of her own political career. For whom is he acting, then?

The answer is fairly clear, he's acting on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky, the only consequential leader now on the world stage. Biden is on a whirlwind tour of climate conferences, the US election is uncertain with no clear Republican leadership, the UK conservatives are in a muddle, the Putin state is in crisis, and every other European leader has been upstaged by Zelensky, who de facto controls NATO and EU policy without being a member of either.

Let's consider as well the effect Zelensky has had on the US political environment. In summer 2021, Biden singlehandedly ordered the Kabul debacle. Had the Russian invasion of Ukraine not developed the way it did, the 2022 midterms might have been very different. By not fleeing Kyiv in a US C130 as Biden offered, Zelensky saved him from another disaster and created not just a distraction but a whole new issue that quietly saved the congressional Democrats. They were aligned with Winston Churchill; the Republicans wanted to appease Hitler. Joe Kemp apparently lost his House race in WA-03 over just this question.

Dubya is copacetic with this. Not only that, but we may be sure this public conversation with Zelensky has the tacit approval of Secretary Blinken, if Blinken himself wasn't the instigator. But wait a moment -- Dubya's foreign and defense policies were neoconservative, and neoconservatives have been out of favor since public frustration with the Second Gulf War helped defeat Republicans in 2008. The Obama policy, which had been the default for Biden as well, was to draw down from Iraq and Afghanistan, de-emphasize Israel, and build up Iran as the regional power broker. How's that working out?

At the same time, Trump, who has made few specific comments on the Ukraine war other than to say it wouldn't have happened if he'd been president, had a policy of treating Russia as a near peer of the US, granting it autonomy over a sphere of interest that included Ukraine provided it didn't rock the boat. The problem for Trump is that this policy has been overtaken by events; Russia did rock the boat big time. The best estimate we can make is that Biden's Kabul debacle led Putin to miscalculate and believe Biden, a weaker figure than Trump, would not react to a renewed invasion and annexation of Ukraine.

The miscalculation left Zelensky out of the equation, but neither did Putin figure in his own military incompetence. The political consequences for Russia are yet to be determined, but the political consequences for the US are beginning to emerge, especially a return of neoconservative foreign and military policy. This has most visibly taken the form of the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, led by the prominent neoconservative Frederick Kagan, becoming the chief articulator of US Ukraine strategy, unabashedly pro-Zelensky. Zelensky is an authentic figure, as Dubya says someone at the Winston Churchill level, whom I don't think either Biden or Trump can easily relate to or appreciate. But as of yesterday, the ISW clearly expresses what has been, and according to Dubya will continue to be, US policy:

Ukraine has by no means liberated the minimum territory essential to its future security and economic survival even with the victory in western Kherson, finally. The city of Melitopol and surrounding areas, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, land on the east bank of the lower Dnipro River, and territory in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are all vital terrain for Ukraine, as ISW has previously argued.

. . . Ukrainians and the West must bend every effort toward enabling the liberation of those lands as rapidly as possible before worrying about what lies beyond them. Momentum is an important factor in war. Ukraine has it now. Kyiv and its partners must make the most of it.

Dubya is back. The neoconservatives have in fact been back since February. At this point, I think both Biden and Trump are irrelevant, but we don't know what else will come, except that the real leader of the free world has turned out to be the former actor and comic Zelensky.