Is This The Best Case Against Trump's Ukraine Strategy?

Yesterday I linked to a comment by Michael McFaul, a Stanford Political Science professor, Obama advisor, and US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014. Wikipedia calls him "the architect of the so-called 'Russian reset policy'". He has been both a prestigious supporter and an architect of the Biden Ukraine policy. At Wikipedia,

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, McFaul and Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak headed an expert group called the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which developed an individual sanctions roadmap with plans to tighten sanctions against Russia.

McFaul debated the Russian invasion with John Mearsheimer in May 2022. McFaul has taken a position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine identifying Putin as a culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine against the position of Mearsheimer that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO.

While this post isn't about Mearsheimer, it's worth pointing out that Mearsheimer's views, which seemed even somewhat bizarre against the initial optimism over the war, have aged very well over the past few years. McFaul, on tne other hand, has continued to make the case for the foreign policy establishment, most recently at The Atlantic:

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

. . . Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort.

I'm frankly puzzled that he claims NATO expansion was "announced in 2002 and completed in 2004". NATO expansion began with the reunification of Germany in 1990, with the former DDR gaining NATO membership via the existing BRD membership, an expansion that was recognized and negotiated at the time. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, which is apparently the "NATO expansion" McFaul feels was announced and completed -- but then Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, while Montenegro joined in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

For fairness, we'll leave out the accessions of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, after the start of the Ukraine war. But It's hard to avoid the impression that McFaul is somehow trying to minimize the fact of NATO expansion over more than three decades. I've already noted here that NATO apparently ceased to become a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991 and had effectively stopped exporting world revolution well before then. So why was NATO expanding? Prof Mearsheimer made this point in 2022:

Given the sad state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

So as far as I can read McFaul's argument in The Atlantic, he's trying to give the impression that NATO expansion has been minimal, it just took place over a two-year period, but Putin isn't concerned about that anyhow, he's just an enemy of democracy or something. Frankly, I think Mearsheimer has the stronger argument. McFaul stresses throughout that Putin's opposition to democracy is at the root of his own expansionism:

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule.

. . . In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

. . . Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world.

. . . After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world.

. . . Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

. . . After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe.

. . . The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

I think it's just as possible to argue that the "liberal West" is hardly a bastion of traditional democratic ideals -- in Canada, an unpopular prime minister "resigned" in a lengthy process by which he was replaced with a doctrinaire Eurocrat who never won an actual election. In NATO member Romania, following annulment of a 2024 wlection, the most popular candidate, a conservative, was banned from participating in the May rerun. In the US 2024 presidential election, the Democrat incumbent candidate was forced to withdraw via an extraconstitutional process and replaced with the vice president, who was never nominated as a candidate by any existing procedure.

Ukraine itself, of course, has indefinitely delayed its own elections. It's hardly a model for liberal democracy; in the very best case, it's simply a mirror image of a corrupt Russian oligarchy.

McFaul wants to repeat the losing 2016 and 2024 Democrat strategies by somehow claiming Trump is "undemocratic" and is doing Putin's bidding. But in the process, he seems to feel he can bypass any strategic reason for continuing the Ukraine stalemate. In effect, he's falling back on the idea that we should continue the war because Trump wants to end it, which is absurd.

But apparently this is the strongest case a member of the foreign policy establishment can make for continuing the war -- not doing it is a "threat to our democracy".

"They Have All The Cards"

Trump talked about who has the cards again on Friday:

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump urged Ukraine to "get on the ball and get a job done" as he expressed frustration over Kyiv's position over peace talks, saying he found it "more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine."

. . . "As you know, we're meeting in Saudi Arabia on, sometime next week, early, and we're talking - what I find that in terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards," Trump said.

When asked whether he believes Putin when the Russian leader says he wants peace, Trump responded, "Yeah... I believe him."

"I think he wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he's hitting them harder than he's been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now," Trump said.

He referred again to Ukraine, saying "They don’t have the cards", the same thing he said to Zelensky a week earlier, while he also said in February

he believes Russia has "the cards" in any peace talks to end the war in Ukraine because Russia has "taken a lot of territory".

On the other hand,

U.S. President Donald Trump is "giving away his cards" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

McFaul was an Obama advisor from 2008 to 2011 and Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 20l4. He has been generally aligned with Democrat establishment policy on Ukraine, and it isn't entirely clear what cards he thinks Trump holds. (Nor is it clear why McFaul resigned as ambassador in February 2014, concurrent with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.)

But this brings me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style, part of which I linked yesterday:

Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent” (Trump 2009b).

This advice reflects Trump’s belief that he is a keen interpersonal observer, unusually effective in assessing the power resources of his counterparts (Ferguson 2018). He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities. “Know thy adversary” may be a well‐accepted bargaining principle (e.g., Raiffa 1982), but Trump’s emphasis on this aspect of negotiation preparation is notable: “You’ve got to know what the other side wants and where they’re coming from,” he wrote in Why We Want You to Be Rich (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). And, Trump advised his earlier television audience regarding potential negotiation interlocutors, “when they’re on the other side of the table, that’s what they are – they are an opponent” (Trump 2009b, emphasis added). Competition is central to Trump’s conception of the negotiation process.

. . . Understanding one’s counterpart’s fundamental “interests” as opposed to their publicly stated “positions” in order to negotiate a deal based on achievement of mutual gains (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello 2000) is critical to cooperative negotiation approaches (e.g., integrative, interest‐based, principled, mutual‐gains). But Trump’s orientation is distinctly more coercive: “Learn your adversary’s strengths and weaknesses: Find out who your adversaries are, what resources they have, who is backing them, how much they want, why they want it, how much they will settle for, and how much they will pay or insist on receiving” (Trump 2006: 62). Trump does not empathize with his opponents; he sizes them up.

I think we can speculate on what Trump must see in Putin's position: he continues to occupy the parts of Ukraine that he seized in 2014, especially Crimea. He now occupies additional parts of eastern Ukraine, and the battle lines there are in stalemate. Ukraine has no prospect of regaining this territory, which the failed counteroffensives of 2023 demonstrated. These are several key cards.

Ukraine's best prospects are in continuing the stalemated war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, with compensatory incursions into neighboring Russia-aligned areas like Kursk, hoping this may somehow eventually force Putin to change his mind. However, the US is now unwilling to provide indefinite continuing support for the meat grinder or additional incursions and drone attacks into Russia, withdrawing targeting intellgence and curtailing weapons aid.

This is because Putin holds an additional card: he himself appears to be capable of feeding the meat grinder indefinitely, or at least for longer than the US is willing. However, there are some constraints: his initial objective in 2022 was to seize Kyiv quickly and take over the whole country, something he's unlikely to accomplish now under nearly any circumstance. Thus the cost-benefit of the meat grinder is marginal if all it will do is continue the current standoff.

What, in Trump's view, does he think Putin will settle for? Trump seems to think Putin is sending messages that if he can get a recognition that the territory Russia currently holds in Ukraine is effectively Russian, plus maybe more to sweeten the deal, the US will force Ukraine to stop the meat grinder and the incursions and drone attacks. Both countries then get to return to other business without the meat grinder.

Nevertheless, Putin's cards still include the territory he has, plus the ability to continue the meat grinder. Trump fully recognizes those are powerful cards -- as he put it, "I think probably anybody in that position would be [hitting them harder] right now". So he's teasing other possibilities:

President Trump suggested that Ukraine might not be able to survive against Russia even if the US forged ahead with full-blown support for its fight.

Trump’s remarks came while defending his decision to draw down support to Ukraine in the face of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s and others’ concerns that Europe lacks the might to prop up Kyiv without the US.

“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“We have some weaknesses with Russia,” Trump added. “It takes two. Look, it was not going to happen — that war and it happened. So now we’re stuck with this mess.”

As Trump currently sees it, Zelensky's wish, supported by the EU, to continue the meat grinder indefinitely in the hope that maybe Ukraine can outlast Putin is unrealistic, and Trump is now trying to convince them that there's a bigger downside: the meat grinder won't go on indefinitely, but Putin will last it out longer even if the US continues to support it -- and the outcome down the road could well be worse.

But, as former Ambassador McFaul put it, what cards does Trump have to give away so unwisely? As far as I can see, it's little more than maintaining an appearance that he's willing to support the meat grinder a little longer. But that's just another way of saying do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. Those aren't cards, that's insanity.

Trump Teases Leaving NATO

Via NBC News:

Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of calibrating America’s NATO engagement in a way that favors members of the alliance that spend a set percentage of their gross domestic product on defense, the officials said.

As part of the potential policy shift, the U.S. might not defend a fellow NATO member that is attacked if the country doesn’t meet the defense spending threshold, the officials said. If Trump does make that change, it would mark a significant shift from a core tenet of the alliance known as Article 5, which says that an attack on any NATO country is an attack on all of them.

This comes as the administration increasingly distances itself from involvement in any Ukraine peacekeeping force, especially any attempt by NATO countries to draw the US into a wider Ukraine role:

Stating that the U.S. does not believe NATO membership for Ukraine would be a "realistic" outcome of any negotiated peace settlement with Russia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, today, called on NATO allied countries to increase their defense spending and take the lead in providing for Ukraine and Europe's security.

. . . As an alternative to granting Ukraine NATO membership, Hegseth said that any security guarantees for Ukraine "must be backed by capable European and non-European troops."

"If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5 [of the NATO treaty]," Hegseth said, adding that there must also be robust oversight of the line of contact from the international community.

"To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine," he said.

Most recently, over the weekend,

The United States has told its allies that it does not plan to participate in military exercises in Europe, according to reports.

The move, the latest in Donald Trump’s pivot away from the bloc, would see America pull out of exercises beyond those already scheduled for this year.

The withdrawal concerns exercises that are on the “drawing board”, according to Swedish newspaper Expressen.

It means that Nato countries will be forced to plan exercises without the participation of the US military, the largest in the alliance.

It seems pretty clear that the ongoing trend of expanding NATO has led to some actors, including the US intelligence community, into reckless schemes like staging a coup in Ukraine with the ultimate goal of bringing it into NATO. This has been a major departure from the original idea of NATO as a defensive alliance against Soviet expansionism:

[W]hen the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, East Germany was reunified with West Germany and Secretary of State James Baker made a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for German reunification, we would, quote, maintain a presence in Germany that is part of NATO.

But there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east. Did that happen? Well, let's fast forward and take a look at what's happened with NATO over the last several years.

. . . The operative part of NATO begins after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1999, NATO did begin its expansion under Bill Clinton to the east.

It welcomed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. But importantly, in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO, many of those sharing direct borders with Russia. In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined in 17 Montenegro.

In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, again sharing a border with Russia, Finland joined NATO. And last year, NATO welcomed in Sweden.

It's been argued that no matter the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin or anyone else, they would see this expansion of NATO to the east as a threat to their security in Russia. So who is the one instigating this war? Who contains or maintains the moral high ground?

In other words, NATO has been pursuing expansionist policies that Russia views as provocative while insisting that the US maintain its posture as the guarantor of an anti-Soviet defensive alliance. But times have changed; there is no longer a Soviet Union trying to foster world revolution. At the same time, major NATO members want the benefits of having the US as the guarantor of their defense without paying the cost, especially when they favor the continued provocation in Ukraine:

President Trump suggested Thursday that members of the U.S.-led NATO transatlantic military alliance would not come to the aid of the U.S., should America come under attack. NATO members are bound to back each other militarily in the face of any aggression under the collective defense clause in the alliance's founding treaty.

"Do you think they're going to come and protect us? Hmm. They're supposed to. I'm not so sure," Mr. Trump said as he addressed reporters at the Oval Office.

. . . President Trump was speaking in response to a question about whether the U.S. would defend NATO partners if they were not paying what he deems to be their fair share toward their own defense.

The president has long argued that the U.S. carries an undue burden, spending more to help ensure Europe's defense than the NATO members on the continent, and he's pushing now for those members to boost their domestic defense spending to at least 5% of their respective GDPs.

Trump here is displaying a negotiating strategy that's been recognized in business literature:

Trump has exaggerated commonly used negotiation approaches to maximize his dominance over his counterparts. For example, the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable “walk‐away” option (Trump 2016c). But Trump the performer has taken it a few steps further, advising negotiators to feign disinterest to determine just how desperate the other party is to strike a deal. “To speed up negotiations, be indifferent. That way you’ll find out if the other side is eager to proceed,” he wrote (Trump 2008: 168).

In The Art of the Deal he described how he employed this tactic when making the case to the New Jersey licensing commission that he should be granted a casino license. He wrote: “Much as I wanted to build a great casino on the great site I’d assembled, I said, I had a very successful real estate business in New York and I was more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time‐consuming” (Trump 1987: 207).

In addition to flaunting his ability and willingness to “walk away,” Trump the performer also anchors high – i.e., makes the first move and asks for a maximum possible value to get the most out of the negotiation. “My style of deal‐making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want” (Trump 1987: 45). For example, “I went in and asked for the world – for an unprecedented tax abatement – on the assumption that even if I got cut back, the break might still be sufficient,” Trump wrote, describing one of his negotiations with the New York City government (Trump 1987: 131).

With NATO, he's identifying the members' vulnerability -- they need the US umbrella -- and stressing his willingness to walk away. Then he aims high -- 5% of GDP for defense. He may not get precisely that, but he'll get something. This is all classic Trump.

There's A Great Deal We Aren't Being Told About Ukraine

There've beern several stories over the past week about Hunter Biden being broke, for instance:

According to court filings in California, Hunter's attorneys claim he "has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range." Imagine that; when daddy's no longer pulling the strings from the Oval Office, the money well runs dry faster than Hunter can say "Where's my crack pipe?"

Like most of these stories, this one misses a much bigger point:

Remember Hunter's illustrious "art career"? You know, the one where anonymous buyers totally weren't paying for access to the White House? Those sales have crashed harder than Hunter after a bender. From selling 27 pieces at an average of $54,481.48 each, he's now managed to sell just one piece for a measly $36,000.

The art career comes very late in the saga. Hunter's connections with his then-senator father almost certainly got him into Yale Law, and after graduating, jobs with the MBNA bank, for which his dad had done a great deal to facilitate its move to Delaware. His subsequent career was based entirely on his connections with Joe, but there wasn't much of an overall direction -- he had a job in the Clinton Commerce Department, then he founded a lobbying firm, then Joe put him on the Amtrak board.

In 2006, he and Uncle Jim struggled to take over the international hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors, but that didn't turn out well. It wasn't until Joe was elected vice president in 2008 that things began to turn around; in 2008-2009, he began his dealings through Seneca Global Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Partners. However, it appears that his addictions always stood in the way of success; by 2013, Joe had to get him a job in the US Naval Reserve, but he failed a drug test on his first day of work.

Here's where Ukraine enters the picture, and things start to get puzzling. I've brought up the 2014 Maidan Revolution here, in the context of allegations that it was a coup sponsored by the US intelligence community:

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible US mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

I've never seen a good explanation for how quickly the Bidens got involved after these events:

Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in May 2014, less than three months after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power and fled to Russia in the culmination of the massive, monthslong Euromaidan protests over official corruption and his decision to scrap plans for a trade agreement with the European Union and pursue closer ties with Moscow.

Hunter Biden's business partner, Devon Archer, had joined a month earlier, when the U.K. froze a Burisma bank account holding $23 million amid suspicion of money laundering.

At the time, Joe Biden was the U.S. vice president and President Barack Obama's point man for Ukraine, which was battling Russian and Russian-backed forces in a war fomented by Moscow in the eastern Donbas region following Yanukovych's departure. Russia had also seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

According to NPR, European governments and international institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were concerned about the country's endemic corruption:

Obama made then-Vice President Biden the point man, and he became a frequent visitor to Ukraine. By his own count, Biden says he went there about a dozen times from early 2014 through early 2016.

. . . In the spring of 2014, as Joe Biden began his trips to Ukraine, Hunter Biden took a position on the board of the country's largest private gas company, Burisma. He was reportedly paid up to $50,000 a month.

The question of a possible conflict of interest — with Hunter Biden profiting in a country where his father was actively working with the government — was raised publicly at the time.

Joe Biden said that he followed government ethics regulations and that his son was a private citizen who made his own decisions.

This brings up the question, another one that hasn't been much pursued, of what Obama actually thought of Joe. It looks as if Ukraine was a front-burner issue for the intelligence community, and eliminating the appearance of corruption was at least theoretically high on the priority list in order to maintain the prestige of the new regime. And it looks as though Joe's dozen trips to Ukraine as "point man" over the two years between the revolution and his departure as vice president reflect that apparent urgency.

But what did he actually accomplish? And what was he actually doing on all those trips? We've never had a good account. All we know is that Hunter and his partner were on the Burisma board and making big bucks, at least until Joe left office as vice president and Ukraine point man:

The Ukrainian energy company that was paying President Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year cut his monthly compensation in half two months after his father ceased to be vice president.

From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show.

But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director’s agreement and informed him “the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate.”

The only reasonable conclusion is that Hunter was paid by Burisma as a kickback to Joe, who was there to control the corruption, or something like that. But then we have the whole issue of Trump's call to Zelensky:

The scandal came to light when a whistleblower report revealed that President Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019 to investigate Joe Biden, Trump's political opponent in the 2020 presidential election, his son Hunter Biden, and company CrowdStrike, to discuss these matters with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. . . Trump acknowledged he had told Zelenskyy "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." According to the whistleblower, the call was part of a wider campaign by Trump, his administration, and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens, which may have included Trump's cancelling a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking Trump was aware of the degree of the Bidens' involvement in Ukraine corruption, and in fact I suspect that as president, he knew much more than has ever been publicly revealed. In fact, I would go so far as to wonder if what Trump knew then has been behind Trump's current Ukraine policy -- among other things, curing the corruption will involve getting rid of the whole post-Maidan regime. There's a reason Joe pardoned Hunter for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

But what got me started on this train of thught was the story that Hunter is broke. Let's get real, Hunter has always been broke. Only months before he got the Burisma deal, Joe had tried to get him a job with the Navy, but he failed the drug test. We're talking desperate straits; given his addictions, Hunter was useless to anyone, and I've been saying all along that none of the Biden family's get-rich-quick schemes ever seem to have paid off.

Except Ukraine. That had at least a chance. But two things killed even that: Joe was apparently told not to run for president in 2016 in favor of Hillary -- but when Hillary lost, that cut off any sort of gravy train. By 2020, Joe was too out of it to try to cash in, Hunter was too much of a basket case to help out, and then Putin invaded. It isn't just Hunter who's broke, it's the whole family at this point.

I'm convinced that what's been revealed so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

What's Going On In Ukraine?

We sorta-kinda know Trump has "paused" military aid to Ukraine, but we know very little beyond that.

Trump was expected to further outline his plans for Ukraine and Russia in the speech to Congress, but did not reveal any further details on how he plans to end Europe's biggest conflict since World War Two.

Trump said Ukraine was ready to sign a minerals deal with the U.S., which Washington says is crucial to secure continued U.S. backing for Ukraine's defense.

Four sources told Reuters that the Trump administration and Ukraine plan to sign the deal in return for military aid, which Trump has paused. But later on Tuesday U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News, "There is no signing planned," according to a post on X by a Fox reporter.

Trump gave no further details on the minerals deal, leaving its fate unclear.

And precisely what has been paused? CNN calls it "shipments", but what does that involve?

President Donald Trump is ordering a pause on shipments of US military aid to Ukraine after his heated Oval Office argument with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, a White House official told CNN Monday.

The halt in aid, which came after Trump held a series of meetings with top national security officials at the White House, could have dire effect on Ukraine’s war-fighting abilities, officials and analysts said. It will remain in place until Trump determines Zelensky has made a commitment to seeking peace talks, one official said, essentially forcing Ukraine to a negotiating table by threatening further losses on the battlefield.

But it's not just "shipments". As of Wednesday,

The Trump administration appears to have ordered at least a partial halt to the crucial intelligence that the United States shares with Ukraine to defend against the Russian invasion, according to a US military official and public remarks made by top Trump administration officials.

Statements from national security adviser Mike Waltz and CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday morning indicated that a pause in intelligence sharing is in place but the extent of the limitations was not clear. Both officials also suggested that the pause may be short-lived if the president can be satisfied that Ukraine has taken steps towards negotiations to end the war – a controversial effort that appeared to be derailed after Friday’s fiery Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“We are pausing, assessing, looking at everything across our security relationship,” national security adviser Mike Waltz told CBS News, asked directly about intelligence-sharing with Kyiv. The Trump administration had already announced a freeze in weapons deliveries to Ukraine, part of the White House effort to attempt to pressure Kyiv into a swift end to a war it didn’t start.

The UK Telegraph reported,

Ukraine’s most powerful missiles were left frozen on Wednesday after the US cut off intelligence-sharing and demanded fresh talks with Volodymyr Zelensky.

Kyiv was forced to agree to reopen negotiations with the White House, and Mr Zelensky said a new summit could begin next week, after he met European leaders on Thursday.

. . . Crucial intelligence for long-range missiles such as Himars, which have been key to holding back the Russian offensive, went dark at about 2pm on Wednesday.

White House officials said the US would only lift the ban on sharing the data if it could “nail down negotiations” with Ukraine, which are expected to cover the minerals deal that was put on ice after the clash in the Oval Office last Friday between Mr Zelensky and Donald Trump.

Diplomatic sources, however, suggested Mr Zelensky may have to offer additional concessions to get talks back on track.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is among the few analysts who are covering these developments.

When President Trump stopped “intelligence sharing” with Ukraine, what he technically did was stop allowing Ukraine to use exclusive USA targeting systems controlled by U.S Intelligence, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

These terrain mapping systems, the missile and drone targeting systems, are what military forces inside Ukraine need to carry out offensive drone and missile attacks against Russian forces.

. . . In essence and material reality, the elements in Ukraine who are conducting war, and this includes U.K and U.S special forces, the CIA and various NATO allied military operators (not Ukraine military) can no longer effectively hit long-range Russian targets, without the U.S. targeting system that identifies it.

. . . Effective immediately without targeting system access, ATACMS, HIMARS, Storm Shadow and Taurus missile systems are no longer functional to those Ukraine operators (remember, those operators are not necessarily Ukranian).

. . . All of the intellectually honest researchers know that it is the USA (special forces) and to a lesser extent the collaborating U.K (special forces) who have been operating these systems.

. . . ♦ From the Russian Perspective – In the mind of Putin he now sees President Trump stopping NATO/EU/CIA/UK forces from being able to reach Russia with any attack system.

They don’t need to discuss it, and likely would not, but Putin’s people clearly can see that Trump’s people have stopped the West from their ability to hit Russia with anything.

An unspoken trust is being established through actions, not words. That’s a radical shift, and pretty cool all things considered.

Clearly some people are beginning to see what's going on, at least from the intelligence establishment's point of view:

President Donald Trump’s decision to pause American military aid to Ukraine is handing Russia’s Vladimir Putin the upper hand on the battlefield and in geopolitical negotiations, former officials and experts warned Tuesday.

. . . Michael McFaul, Washington’s ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, likened the move to President Franklin D. Roosevelt losing “the 1940 election to an America Firster who then had the U.S. switch sides in World War II. ... We’d all be speaking German now.”

“That’s why this current moment feels like,” he wrote on X. “Three years into a war between an imperialist dictatorship with autocratic allies and a democracy, Trump just switched sides.”

The problem continues to be that realistically, Ukraine has never been anything but a puppet of US intelligence, something Secretary Rubio acknowledged earlier this week:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Wednesday interview described the war in Ukraine as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, as he sought to explain on the Oval Office blowup last week between Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump and Vice President Vance.

“I think an important thing to understand about last Friday is not last Friday. It’s everything that led up to it,” Rubio said during an interview on Fox News’s “Hannity.”

“It’s been very clear from the beginning that President Trump views this as a protracted, stalemated conflict,” Rubio said. “And frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers, the United States helping Ukraine, and Russia.”

Ukraine has been a US pawn since the Maidan Revolution, which Russia always viewed as a provocation. A resolution of the conflict can only be achieved via a direct agreement between the US and Russia.

LA Mayor Karen Bass Recall Movement Moves Haltingly Forward

Via KTLA:

A movement is underway to recall Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass over her handling of January’s deadly and destructive Palisades Fire.

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that paperwork had been filed with the Los Angeles Ethics Commission after it was initially filed with the state of California last week. The filing allows opponents of Mayor Bass to raise money so they can put a recall on the ballot.

. . . Critics blasted Bass for not being in the city -or country- when the Palisades Fire erupted on Jan. 7. The massive blaze burned out of control for several days, scorching roughly 24,000 acres and destroying nearly 7,000 homes, businesses and other structures. The wildfire also claimed the lives of 12 people.

The mayor previously said she had not been told about the severity of the fire weather conditions before she left for a diplomatic mission to Ghana. She cited that as one of the reasons for firing L.A. Fire Chief Kristen Crowley.

However, the issues surrounding the Pacific Palisades Fire and the Bass recall aren't simple. The biggest inflection point up to now has been Bass's firing of Kristin Crowley, the LGBT Los Angeles fire chief, on February 21.

[Bass's] decision comes after reported turmoil between the mayor and fire chief following the Palisades Fire that broke out on Jan. 7. The two put on a united front after speculation of the chief's firing days after it erupted.

Bass made it clear she was not going to make a decision to remove Crowley while the city was experiencing an emergency with the fires and the rainstorms that followed.

About a month before the Palisades Fire broke out, Crowley sent a memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners that budget cuts "have adversely affected the Department's ability to maintain core operations." Budget cuts and the department's ability to fight the fires were points of contention while the fires were burning.

In the wake of the fire, there was an initial wave of opinion that called Crowley a "DEI hire":

On Monday [January 13], Crowley received an unsigned letter, purportedly from her own current and former chief officers, echoing claims that had filtered from right-wing commentators and social media as her interviews made the rounds through the national news over the weekend. The letter excoriated her for taking TV interviews while the city burned.

But that was quickly overtaken by other voices, including the public employee unions, that supported Crowley's insistence that budget cuts hampered the fire department's ability to respond. The fact that Crowley is a lesbian almost certainly drove Bass's initial reluctance to remove her immediately after the January fire; gays are part of the uneasy coalition of Latins, blacks, and Hollywood-Westside elites that voted Bass in as mayor.

But cracks within the coalition emerged when Crowley told the media in almost as many words that Bass had betrayed her:

“Three years I’ve been in this seat, I’ve sounded the alarm — we need more,” Crowley told Fox LA’s Gigi Graciette during an extended live spot. “We are screaming to be properly funded so our firefighters can do our jobs. My job as chief is to make sure my voice is heard.”

“Did the City of Los Angeles fail you?” Graciette pressed her until almost 13 minutes into the interview, when Crowley drew a deep breath, flashed a bemused smile to the camera and finally said it: “Yes.”

Opposition to Crowley within the department quickly evaporated:

[T]o the firefighters with boots on the ground in the Palisades, her “outburst” cemented Crowley as a folk hero.

“In the LAFD it went viral,” said Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the union representing the department’s rank and file. “Everyone was very shocked, but very happy and excited. They support her 110%.”

“This is the only fire chief that has spoken up against the people who appointed her,” said Capt. Chuong Ho, another union leader. “If that doesn’t show courage, I don’t know what does.”

The Palisades Fire hasn't disappeared as an issue, and over more than a month since the fire, Bass has faced continued criticism for being on a junket to Ghana when the fire started. A change.org petition demanding that Bass resign was started by mid-January, and by January 17, it had reached 152,000 signatures. Although this has no legal effect, continuing talk of a Bass recall must have been behind Bass's eventual firing of Crowley on February 21.

The now-formal recall effort that began this week has begun to attract serious funding:

Nicole Shanahan, the Silicon Valley philanthropist who helped fund Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign and served as his running mate, has a new cause: recalling Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Shanahan is listed as a major funder of the effort in a disclosure on the campaign’s new website and had previously met with proponents of Bass’ ouster. Opponents of the mayor see her as more vulnerable than ever due to her handling of the January wildfires in Los Angeles, which ignited when she was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana.

. . . It will take a flood of funding to take out Bass, even as she has taken flak for the Ghana trip and for sacking the fire chief who was in charge during the response effort. Her opponents would have to collect around 330,000 signatures, representing 15 percent of Los Angeles’ registered voters, in four months to initiate a recall. Her term ends in 2026.

They will also have to overcome associations with the Republican party in a heavily Democratic city.

Paperwork filed with the city on Monday indicated that several backers with ties to the GOP are involved in the attempt, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Bass's supporters are already taking the line that the recall is a right-wing effort, but even there, the political factions aren't conventional -- the public statements from recall supporters tend to stress their support for Crowley, the lesbian fire chief. But as of now, this isn't a winning issue -- last week, Crowley appealed her firing to the LA City Council and lost in an overwhelming vote:

After a lengthy and at times heated discussion, the panel voted, 13-2, to deny the appeal. The two council members who supported reinstating the former chief were Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park. Park's district includes Pacific Palisades, the area within the city where the fires that ignited in early January were most devastating and deadly.

Crowley needed votes from 10 of 15 council members to overturn Mayor Karen Bass' decision to fire her.

Of the two council members who voted to reinstate Crowley, Traci Park was elected to her seat representing Pacific Palisades and nearby areas in 2022 on a platform opposing the city's homeless policies. However, other affluent parts of the city continue to elect council memhers with progressive policies on crime, homelessness, and migration, and their continued support for Bass is reflected in the reinstatement vote. The other council member who supported Crowley, Monica Rodriguez, represents a working-class Latin area and appears to have based her support on an alliance with public employee unions. At the link,

Leaders of the firefighters union urged the council to reinstate her, saying she was the only chief in recent years to speak about the need for more resources at the Fire Department.

“The men and women of our great Fire Department support Chief Crowley because she stood up, she spoke out, and she had our backs,” said Chung Ho, a director with United Firefighters of Los Angeles City.

Union President Freddy Escobar said “her honesty cost her her job.”

Rodriguez, a supporter of Crowley whose council District 7 includes Pacoima and Shadow Hills, said the mayor has promoted “falsehoods” around the ex-chief’s failure to perform.

“It's sending the wrong message to every city employee and general manager that it's safer to stay silent than to call out what’s wrong,” Rodriguez said.

While the recall Bass movement reflects to some degree the much more visible tendency across the country for the previous Democrat coalition to break apart, with wealthy elites, labor, Latins, and gays beginning to have second thoughts, the LA City Council vote on reinstating Crowley suggests much more will have to happen in California to bring about real electoral change.

"How'd That Work Out?"

"How'd that work out?"

President Trump on weaponizing the government against him. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/rMQVbKVChw

— Turning Point Action (@TPAction_) March 5, 2025

I was expecting a very different address to Congress from the one I saw last night. For one thing, if we watch a State of the Union at all, my wife and I put extra wine in reserve, expecting it will be needed to make it through the whole tedious experience. Last night, even though Trump spoke at record length, we didn't need the extra wine. But also, we were both expecting a more usual Trump stream-of-consciousness speech, but this one was structured and focused. In Mark Halperin's words at 9:10,

[H]e just gave an extraordinary performance, and you can hate Donald Trump and still have to acknowledge it was an extraordinary performance, talking for a hundred minutes, not boring, high energy, and really used the luxury he had of an opposition which came in saying the focus was going to be on the real lives of real people and instead engaged in a performance unlike any I've ever seen. You don't want to cheer for Donald Trump saying he shut down the border, because you think his border policies aren't good? OK. But it is not human to sit there while that little boy cancer survivor is waived into the Secret Service and then hugs the head of the Secret Service. That is not human. . . . It's not about patriotism, it's not about politics, it's about humanity and judgment.

His point that the opposition was a "luxury" is insightful. Rep Al Green might have been scripted by Trump's own people, an elderly (age 78), unattractive, bitter figure yelling incoherently, shaking his cane at Trump, refusing to sit down after repeated warnings from the Speaker, and finally being escorted out by the Sergeant at Arms. But Nancy Pelosi's cameo appearance was just as providential:

On Tuesday, Trump delivered a wide-ranging and politically charged address to a joint session of Congress. During it, he said, "America is back," while celebrating the flurry of executive orders he had signed since being inaugurated as president for the second time on January 20.

This included the order Trump signed on February 5, titled 'Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports,' which banned transgender athletes from competing against women and girls in educational institutions and grassroots sports.

During these remarks, a television camera briefly focused on Pelosi, who slowly moved her head from side-to-side while appearing crestfallen and holding a walking stick.

A 14-second clip of this was reshared on X, formerly Twitter, by Savanah Hernandez, a Turning Point USA contributor, and it went viral with over 2.2 million views and more than 29,000 likes.

Just so we’re all aware, this was Nancy Pelosi’s reaction as Trump was discussing men not being allowed to play in women’s sports pic.twitter.com/8E4LKxjYpw

— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) March 5, 2025

She also chewed on her dentures, never a good look. The camera at one point briefly pulled back to show Rep Steny Hoyer, age 85 and like Pelosi retired from leadership but still in the House, looking, if possible, even more cadaverous than Pelosi. Another great moment was from Sen Elizabeth Warren:

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was interrupted from reading her phone by President Trump when he called out Warren by her Trump-given nickname when he was talking about ending the war in Ukraine.

President Trump said, “You wanna keep it (the War in Ukraine) going for another five years? Yeah. Pocahontas says yes”. Warren’s reaction to being singled out for wanting to keep the war going? She started applauding.

A bizarre reaction for someone just made fun of by the President during a televised address broadcast seen around the world.

Well, she wasn't paying attention, was caught off guard, didn't fully grasp what was happening, and simply doubled down on the mistake. But the whole evening was like that:

The Democrats did significant damage to their brand, although by now, I’m not sure there is anything left of their brand. What do they even stand for anymore? Certainly not for the kid with multiple surgeries on his brain given an honorary appointment to the Secret Service. They sat there, stone-faced and entitled, and looked like petulant little brats in a rage because they couldn’t have ice cream before dinner.

They humiliated themselves and made Trump look like a hero. Now, some might say the Democrats set Trump up in the meeting with Zelensky and that Trump paid them back by setting them up here. He knew they wouldn’t stand and clap for anything, so why not make them an offer they couldn’t refuse? But still, they fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

I've thought for a while that their main problem was that Nancy Pelosi became the de facto party leader sometime in the early 2000s, but as she's aged out, there's been no replacement. The party simply wants to keep on with the Pelosi formula, and part of that problem is that Pelosi is still all too visible.

But beyond that, good grief, Trump is a year older than I am, and I couldn't have put on that performance ten years ago, let alone now.