Trump’s interest in rapprochement with Russia and his annoyance with Ukraine, embodied by last week’s Oval Office shouting match, has corporate pundits and politicians freaking out. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky made him “ashamed for my nation”—something he’s never said about Guantánamo or torture or invading Iraq or even racism.
Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era.
Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era.
Putin aims to “absorb Ukraine, all of it, and likely the other former states of the Soviet Union, too,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail claimed in 2022.
“Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” Mitt Romney wrote in 2022. Um—Afghanistan? Iraq? Panama? “It echoes Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia and his lust for Poland. But even more, it reflects Putin’s drive to reconstitute the Soviet Union—or at least its dominant sphere of influence.”
“Putin saw the invasion of Ukraine as a key step toward rebuilding the Russian Empire,” Mark Temnycky of the Atlantic Council wrote in 2023.
Dire warnings of the Russian threat have been around for a while. It’s not just Ukraine! They’re coming for YOU!
“[Putin’s] next move will be to invade the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. When this happens, the United States will need to move armored forces quickly to Europe, via Poland, in order to prevent NATO from being checkmated, and it’s going to have a problem doing that. Note that I said ‘when’ Putin invades rather than ‘if,’” Jerry Hendrix of The National Review wrote.
That was seven years ago, in 2018. We’re still waiting.
No one can predict the future. All we can do is consider data and evidence, calculate the odds of the likeliest scenario and prepare accordingly.
When you consider the issue objectively, without emotion, the odds that the Russia hawks are right—and that Putin is planning to invade Europe or, as Zelensky warns, that he plans to cross our “nice ocean” to attack the United States—are infinitesimal.
Finish article on Substack.
No one can predict the future. All we can do is consider data and evidence, calculate the odds of the likeliest scenario and prepare accordingly.
When you consider the issue objectively, without emotion, the odds that the Russia hawks are right—and that Putin is planning to invade Europe or, as Zelensky warns, that he plans to cross our “nice ocean” to attack the United States—are infinitesimal.
Finish article on Substack.