“…Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he never would have allowed Vladimir Putin to run circles around him, which is what Putin has done to hapless Joe Biden. And he certainly would not have appeased Putin and given the Russian president everything he asked for from the START treaty to greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, without getting something in return. All Biden got from Putin was grief. Trump is a businessman and that is what businessmen do. They do not give things away without getting something in return. He is also a bully who knows how to deal with other bullies…”
Democrats seem to think that being a member of a group (NATO, or Western Europe) where everyone thinks alike, and everyone reinforces your opinions, and outwardly at least everyone likes you, is important in international negotiations and affairs. The events of the last few weeks show that this false. It is hollow talk. It melts at the first shot. Russia saw weakness in the west (in the U.S. mostly, not much else matters). The Russian dictator moved his forces into place over months. There was no significant backlash except talk, talk, talk. The U.S. and our European allies thought that Putin could be deterred by shaming him into acting appropriately. There was no call up from NATO countries. There was no military response from the U.S. No attack helicopters were sent over. No advanced fighters were sent. No armored divisions were massed nearby. No U.S. forces of any size were assembled and sent. The only response was mindless, exhausting talk from dishwater bureaucrats more concerned with equity, gender fluidity, virtue signaling to other western leftists, and climate change. The dictator decided it would cost him nothing to take what he wanted. So he is in the process of doing that. Sanctions will last for awhile, nasty talk will last for awhile, then everything will go back to something like normal. Russia will own Ukraine and will sell gas and other products to the Euro-weenies like nothing happened.
To deter Putin from additional aggression we need the men and equipment in place in Eastern Europe to quickly establish air dominance in any confrontation. We need the men and equipment in place to destroy mobile armored attack columns. We need men and equipment in place to serve as a highly mobile ground blocking force of enormous and overwhelming strength. Short of these requirements we are dependent on Russia to stop the aggression when their appetites for land are satisfied.
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The Ukraine debacle showcases Joe Biden’s many failures
“…Speaking of economic matters, do you remember the good old days when America was energy independent, nay, when it was producing so much energy that it was actually a net exporter? Probably you do. It was was recent as 2020.
Then came the Biden administration. One of their first acts was to shut down the Keystone Pipeline, a major source of energy production, not to mention thousands of jobs in the US. At the same time, they green-lighted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring gas from Russia to Germany. In response to Putin’s excellent adventure in Ukraine, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, suspended certification of the pipeline, but since Germany, having shuttered its nuclear power plants, is heavily dependent on the gas supplied from Russia, it is anyone’s guess how long German resolve will last.
I bring in gas in order to present you with this cheery data point. In 2020, when Donald Trump was president, the price of natural gas was $4.36 per 1,000 cubic feet. In 2021, with Joe Biden presiding, prices more than doubled, averaging $9 per 1,000 cubic feet. Not only does that mean that it costs more to heat your house this winter. It also means means that the US is helping to fund Russia’s military adventurism.
I am not sure that most Americans could locate Ukraine on a map. And the truth is our interest in the region is negligible. It has been important to Hunter Biden’s cash flow, it is true, and it has furnished Joe Biden with an opportunity to display his thuggishness on television, but it is a thoroughly corrupt state that is teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Some cynical commentators think that the media and The Committee are riveted on Ukraine as a way of distracting attention from such things as runaway inflation, the stock market disintegration, and the institution of police tyranny in Canada. Sounds plausible.
In any event, as my friend Roger L. Simon observed, the crisis in Ukraine is entirely on Joe Biden. We’re told that Biden’s approval rating is down to 39 percent. That’s the official number. The real number, I suspect, is in single digits…”