“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "The president is getting bored," David Ignatius on the war in Ukraine.

 

Our top diplomat, Marco Rubio, says U.S. will decided in days if the end to the war in Ukkrain is “doable.” On MSNBC David Ignatius said he thinks “the president is getting bored” with the war.

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as he departed meetings in Paris. The following is from The New York Time’s article on this:

“It is not our war. We didn’t start it,” Mr. Rubio said. “The United States has been helping Ukraine for the past three years and we want it to end, but it’s not our war.”

He added: “If it’s not possible — if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen — then I think the president’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, well, we’re done. We’ll do what we can on the margins." He described Mr. Trump as feeling “very strongly” about this.

This is the subtitle of The Washington Post article on the same subject: “Rubio’s remarks appear to reflect the president’s frustration with the difficulty of achieving peace in Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.”

The president is frustrated. Poor baby! We dare not have a presdient who is frustrated.

I wish someone would remind Rubio, who I assume knows a bit of history, that we didn’t start World War I or World War II either. Rubio says he wants to see if winning the war is “doable.” Doable!?!? 

While two other presidents must have had dark days of uncertainty during wars we were fighting to save the democratic world, the country never heard Woodrow Wilson or FDR going public saying that they wondered whether winning either war was “doable” and say they would stop helping our allies because it wasn’t.

On MSNBC David Ignatius1 interpreted this as “the president is getting bored.”

The Washinton Post doesn’t have proof that Trump is frustrated. David Ignatius doen’t know for a fact that the president is getting bored, but I think both are making educated guesses based on an accurate assessment of Trump’s personality.

The war in Ukraine, while obviously not a world war, is the closest war to a world war we’ve been engaged in since World War II. It is a proxy war between the forces of democracy and the forces of totalitarianism. It is a war against the most powerful evil country in the world which invaded its neighbor. 

Russia invaded Ukraine to overthrow its pro-Western government and reassert control over Ukraine, which President Putin views as part of Russia's sphere of influence. The invasion aimed to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine, reflecting a distorted view of Ukrainian identity and history. (Reference) Putin’s goal was more modest than Hitler’s, but that shouldn;t make a difference. 

Even so, the president of the United States is getting bored with it the war and doesn’t want to be bothered thinking about it. 

Add to this, to the extent he cares about being called “Putin’s puppet” and having people suggest another strongman is pulling his strings, if the United States pulled out of the war he wouldn’t have to deal with this.

At least he wouldn't unless Russia defeated Ukraine and instituted a reign of terror and revenge there which Trump would be blamed for. Then again, Trump probably wouldn’t care because he’d be consulting with Putin at the White House about how to dump our traditional allies and become a partner with Russia.

Thanks for reading Hal Brown's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. 

Read my previous Substacks.

1

David Reynolds Ignatius (born May 26, 1950) is an American journalist and novelist. He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He has written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film. He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program from 2017 to 2022

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

by Hal Brown 

I used for a background this natural-color image which combines cloud-free data from over 500 Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) orbits with shaded relief Digital Terrain Elevation models from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and other sources. It shows an astonishing diversity of geological features, ecological systems and human landscapes. I meant it to show how from space there are no state lines.

I'll start with the comment I put on the following David Ignatious column in today's Washington Post (subscription):

The parallels between Russia under Putin and what the of MAGA part United States has become struck me. Even if Trump never gets a second term his MAGA cult will remain with us. They envision a United States chillingly similar to those who want Russia to be an imperial fascist country. The equation to describe these segments of the two countries looks like Russian First = America First. The remedy is the kind of transformation that occurred in Germany after World War II.  I don't know how this can happen without the resounding military defeat the NAZI regime suffered. It will require not only a victory of morality over immorality for both countries, but a moral awakening among a large portion of those who adhered to the belief that ultra-nationalism was their credo.

These are what I thought were the most important observations in the column. As you read them substitute how the Ukrainians view Russia with how you view MAGAmerica and how you think these MAGA cultists want the United States to be.

Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.

“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee. “If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos.” He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.

The word "rebirth" below jumped out at me:

For me, thinking about how this war ends juxtaposes two conflicting lessons of the 20th century. Historians generally agree that the punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I helped bring on the vicious Nazi quest for revenge. But historians also agree that the decisive outcome of World War II, with Germany and Japan pounded into unconditional surrender, allowed the miraculous postwar rebirth of both countries.

I would rephrase the last paragraph...

Surely, this is a war worth winning. I don’t want to see Russia destroyed, and I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong. But the ideology that Putin represents, and that many Russians embrace, must be defeated.

 ... in this way:

Surely, the war against MAGAmerica a war that Democracy loving Americans must win. MAGAmerica can't be literally destroyed the way NAZI Germany as a military machine was. MAGAmerica is currently a country within a country. I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong.  But the ideology that Trump and his cult represents, and that many Americans embrace, must be defeated. Those who "reside" in MAGAmerica can't be exiled. They have to be rehabilitated.

This will be a long arduous process which would ideally follow the kind of Democratic Party win in November which Michael Moore predicted (and I wrote about here). 

It would be too much to hope that Rupert Murdock fired his Hitler-Mini-Me money makers, in particular Tucker Carlson. It would certainly help if these ultra-nationalists didn't have a major television platform. 

Obviously it would help the most if Donald Trump, probably reinstated on Twitter, would at least develop severe chronic laryngitis.

We can't be naive. If Trump was indicted, tried, and found guilty of any crimes, and even sentenced to prison or home confinement this would have a huge backlash as his cult would believe he was a victim of the "deep state" and would make him into a living martyr. 

No matter what the January 6th Committee reveals, no matter whether that have incontrovertible proof as to Trump's culpability in more than inciting the attack on the Capitol but being part of a felonious conspiracy it won't matter to these MAGAmericans. They will take this as his being the most patriotic of all patriots.

Liberals like us see articles like this (top) and this (bottom) and hope for eye-popping revelations.

It won't matter because for the MAGAmericans "fascist" is simply a word describing the country they want to live in and the promotion of violence is laudable as long as it is their violence.

We see articles like “Utterly devastating”: Legal experts say DOJ filing “pulverizes all of Trump’s arguments” to SCOTUS on Salon but while this news pleases us, it hardly matters because show me a resident of MAGAmerica who reads Salon or even follows news about the legal peril Trump is in and I'll show you a  Where's Waldo where some prankster decided not to put Waldo in the picture.

By chance as I completed this David Ignatius was being interviewed about this column on Morning Joe. There's a good chance that if you are reading this you are a regular viewer of MSNBC and you may even read their website but we can't delude ourselves that any warnings about what Donald Trump's American fascism would look like in reality are even heard by residents of MAGAmerica. I summarized the David Montgomery Washington Post Magazine article "What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out" here. 

What is horrifying is that diehard MAGAmericans want the country to look like this.

Main blog page

The blog archives are on the right at the top of the page. Here are the last three editions:

• The horror of a second Trump presidency
• Could Michael Moore be right again? Is he Carnac t...
• What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor...