At War With Eurasia— Again
Why Trump's foreign policy is ruining the world, and how it's enabled by media technology
I have a rule of thumb with political developments in other countries: whenever super loud Americans with agendas hyperfixate on them, I assume it’s a psyop. Some key context, some nuance that changes the whole picture, has to be missing. This usually serves me pretty well, and some degree of skepticism of anything you see in other countries is necessary in today’s digital world. Foreign leaders like Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, and Viktor Orban play characters to get rises out of movement conservatives politically active American who aren’t very good at critical thinking. Germany’s AfD, the U.K.’s Reform Party, and many others are actively courting the support of Trump and Elon Musk. Genocides are incited on Facebook and high-ranking Sudanese officials sponsor whole departments to manipulate the American internet.
Being skeptical of crazy news stories from other countries has always been smart, but now it’s almost a necessity in public life. This is why I’ve always tried to avoid glazing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just because this is a war where Zelenskyy has a very active interest in manipulating my perception of him. But on the other day, February 28th, I finally got it. Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy on live TV, nuking their own mineral deal over Zelenskyy’s lack of gratitude towards them personally. Whatever else he is, Zelenskyy is the leader of a country unjustly attacked by its far larger neighbor, who also happens to be America’s #1 or #2 geopolitical rival. His people have suffered extensively because of the War, and the ones currently under Russian occupation are faring even worse, subject to arbitrary detentions and torture, summary execution, and forced Russification. After Trump and Vance, the two most cowardly, soft, immoral men in global politics wormed their way into office, Zelenskyy had to crawl to Washington and kiss the ring. When he, very unwisely, decided to ask Vance how they would stop Russia from attacking in the future in the event of a ceasefire, things went south and his whole country might be screwed as a consequence.
There’s a whole lot to dig into here. I want to start by (to the best of my abilities) recounting the short, awful tale of Trump 2.0 and Ukraine.
November 5th, 2024: Trump wins the 2024 Presidential election.
January 20th, 2025: Trump takes office.
Wow! What a ride! In less than a year, Trump bounced around and took almost every position possible, and then some that aren’t even possible at all! He started off wanting a ceasefire, then seemingly got convinced Russia needed its ass kicked a little harder, then went back to the original ceasefire plan, then seemingly became willing to do more or less what Biden was doing if he could shake down Ukraine for a half trillion, then got talked down to a much smaller sum, and then changed his mind on live TV after Zelenskyy and reporters kept bugging him about how he’d actually hold up his end of the deal. The rare materials probably won’t even cough up what Trump wants out of them to begin with. Any returns would only come after many years of harvesting, and since that area is so dangerous there’s a good chance the rare materials aren’t in Ukraine’s hands in the near future anyway.
And of course, Trump’s loyal flock has nimbly followed him through these peculiarities. When Trump makes up a pathetic lie to get himself out of a jam, like saying he’d resolve the war before taking office, or suddenly reverses his “plan” midway through executing it, this doesn’t become evidence he is a lunatic dominated by his basest instincts. Instead, like any good story, the writers riff on these new developments and work them into the plot. At first, Trump was going to very graciously save Ukraine with his Strong Leadership and Terrific Relationship with Putin. Then the plan became pure realpolitik. Trump would take Russia’s side, which would force Europe to cough up for N.A.T.O.’s defense and get Americans access to Russian oil. After that it became realpolitik for the other side: Trump would let those Slav barbarians murder each other if America’s government could take a bunch of money. As of now we’ve fallen back on the plan right before that, with hardened neocon politicians and the kinds of guys on the internet who post sigma edits of the Russian Armed Forces generally united in praising Trump’s vision. By the time you’re reading this there’s fair odds we’ve performed yet another reversal, perhaps doubling back to the rare materials scam, or maybe Zelenskyy will have resigned.
It got me thinking: what if Zelenskyy didn’t fall for Vance’s bait? What if the deal went through? Ukraine’s position in the War would be about the same as it was last week, and the U.S. would also have a stake in rare materials investment (something it was poised to have without Trump). Trump would tell everyone he was a genius dealmaker, and we’d see a lot of headlines like “Ukraine Gives Trump Rare Materials” from the mainstream outlets he hates so much. Why am I so confident saying this? Because we’ve played this exact game a whole bunch of times before, when more human variables like live-TV crashouts were removed from the equation. Take the saga of Trump and Colombia, which I’ll also (very briefly) go over:
Trump also got to post this picture on the internet, subtitled “THE DEPORTATIONS HAVE BEGUN”:
It’s a similar story with the Trade War Trump initiated with Mexico and Canada. It started with Trump slapping both countries with severe tariffs that went into place at the beginning of February, and then an emergency deal postponing them to the beginning of March, a.k.a. the day after this is published, went into place (Trump has contradicted himself, sometimes saying they’re still on this week, sometimes saying they’re off until April). The deal involved Mexico and Canada reiterating commitments they’d already made and were honoring under Biden, and Canada creating a position called “fentanyl czar”. And what did the headlines say?
“Canada Follows Mexico in Reaching Deal to Delay U.S. Tariffs”. Well, would you look at that? Trump’s tariffs may have been a failure diplomatically, but they got him what he wanted domestically.
I have a nasty suspicion another off-ramp will be created after this is published, or maybe before, and when that does happen we’ll get more headlines about how Trump made a deal— in other words, how his strategy succeeded. His sheep will effortlessly go from praising tariffs to praising Trump for not doing them, and we’ll all move onto the next thing. This isn’t a problem because it could help Republicans in the next election, although there’s a possibility it could. I don’t think beating Trump’s goons in a midterm or whatever is all that hard, and I think just because of prices climbing Vance could lose 2028 to Kamala Harris. What worries me more is this getting normalized. Trump behaving like this is completely inevitable and we’re just stuck with him for four years or so, but if the public becomes convinced this kind of thing works, we’ll probably end up with some other wily conman doing this stuff again.
Which could mean, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this, the fall of U.S. soft power and a dark age for worldwide freedom. The U.S. Empire is the backbone of what we know as the free world, and if it can’t be trusted to keep its word on any meaningful level or advance freedom across the world with soft power, then that tilts the balance in authoritarianism’s favor by a lot.
Who Hates Ukraine?
Why do conservative Republicans, who cheered us into every single war we’ve found ourselves in the past fifty years, object to sending Ukraine tanks we’re not using?
It would be easy to say there’s been a shift in the Party itself, and to an extent there has been. But also, these are the same people who salivated at bombing Qasim Solemani in 2020 and re-introduced the Maximum Pressure campaign on Iran this year. They have clamored for a harder line on China than Biden’s historically hard one, and are giving Israel, an even smaller country than Ukraine just as far from the United States, a blank check of weapons to do whatever it wants to the Arab world with, even though we get almost nothing out of this and accrue lots of risks such as international marginalization, terrorist attacks on Americans, and oil market disruption. Let me put it like this, if U.S.-Israel relations stayed where they were in the 1960’s, 9/11 probably would not have happened, and neither would the various oil crises of that period of time. Republicans have gone a step further, and flirt with potential invasions of Panama, Greenland, Mexico, and even Canada. So, Republicans aren’t the antiwar Party, or even the isolationist Party, they obviously aren’t the anti-spending Party, and they sure as hell aren’t for helping the legions of homeless veterans money is being snatched from to give to Ukraine.
So what’s got them so worked up?
You could be generous and say they’re coming at it from the “realist” perspective, articulated by Tucker Carlson when he asked a GOP Representative why America couldn’t ally with Russia against China. That’s a ridiculous idea, of course, because global hegemonic empires tend to compete with each other, but Tucker’s stated logic falls apart under scrutiny, too. Why can’t we just decouple ourselves from that pesky Israel and ally with Iran against China? Hell, why can’t we cut out the middleman and just ally with China against Russia? We could go even further and ally with both! No strategic competition with China and Russia would sure save us a lot of money for the homeless veterans back home. If we remove the assertion that Russia can be our ally from the equation, the case against Ukraine becomes even weaker. Ukraine is a country in Russia’s backyard that has humiliated Russia’s military. No American soldier has died, but thanks in to U.S. aide, our #1/#2 strategic enemy is bogged down in their own sphere of influence, and the entire world is uniting against them— and with us, which has resulted in multiple vulnerable countries joining N.A.TO. Biden even got Sweden to break its neutrality streak, which endured through both World Wars.
I think the best way to explain Trump’s issue with Ukraine is with a few select lines from Trump and Vance at Friday’s catastrophe:
Trump: That’s why I kept this going so long. You have to be thankful.
Trump: I gave you Javelins. I gave you the Javelins to take out all those tanks. Obama gave you sheets. In fact, the statement is Obama gave sheets, and Trump gave Javelins.
Vance: And do you think that is respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Their main beef, really, is that Zelenskyy wasn’t deferential enough to them personally. Trump, in his twisted, amoral brain, actually believes he’s entitled to favors from Zelenskyy because Trump gave him javelins and Obama gave him sheets. They don’t oppose war, they just scoff at morality in geopolitics. The right-wing intelligentsia does not care if the Russians overrun Kiev, or the rest of Eastern Europe. They sympathize ideologically with Russia and want America to be governed the way Russia is. Russia is closer to their ideal state than America. They don’t think countering Russia’s imperialism is a valid use of tax dollars because they don’t support the goal of countering Russia’s imperialism at all. On the other hand, they do think Christian holy wars in the Middle East are excellent uses of tax dollars, as is raging at the press because of their refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico. That’s because they think America should be in a religious war with much of the Arab Muslim world, a war unconstrainted by concerns like democracy and national determination, and because they perceive patriotism as flexing over America’s smaller neighbors, no matter how pointless doing this actually is.
And discrediting this is about more than beating the Republicans in an election, because now the entire world knows no matter how off the walls they behave, they still can win if prices are high. Which, of course, will be bad for the United States, because on some level you can’t separate the health of a state from right-and-wrong, even if it just comes down to being a reliable partner in the Machiavellian sense. Russia is not a reliable partner because it’s a self-interested rogue state engineered around one man’s ambitions and its own foolhardy nationalism. Losing our neighbors and our traditional strategic partners will hurt far more, because those are the ones we actually rely on and trade with. We can be sure that the overthrow of the liberal world order, which is (on some level) built on universal concepts of justice and right and wrong will weaken the United States, and create a less stable, less predictable, less safe world. It will be the Age of Alpha Males— where the Elon Musk’s and Vladimir Putin’s of the world are powerful like physical gods, and everyone else is their serfs.
Creating a compelling alternative to this is going to be very hard work, because Democrats and Americans in general will have to synthesize protecting laws and human rights abroad with putting the welfare of Americans first and acknowledging how destructive politicians who think they’re freeing a country they’ve never visited can be. It’s a tough rope to walk, and requires no small degree of intellectual humility. It will also require very patiently explaining things to people in an era where public action figures are uniquely incentivized to not explain things, and instead tell people whatever will make them most emotionally engaged with their content. In other words, for Democrats to win in a permanent, lasting way, they’ll have to restore the concept of right-and-wrong to politics. This probably strikes you as swimming against the tide, but this last year proved nothing is written. Democrats may be in a very good position in four years just because of how disastrous the Trump Presidency is for the normal people who voted for him, so one very important part of the next four years is getting good, well-read people who care about this stuff on the frontlines.
Here’s an excerpt from a speech Robert Byrd gave on the eve of the Iraq War:
What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?
Why can this President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?
People got sick and tired of Bush-era unilateral intervention, and we’re still feeling the aftershocks of our mistakes today. We’re going to get tired of what Trump’s doing, too. It might happen next week or it might happen when Russia captures Kiev, but it will happen. He was elected to make the world calm again and lower prices and he’s done neither. This method of running the world is vastly inferior to liberal democracy, which I very firmly believe we can reinstall if we make the right moves. But they do have to be the right ones— because there’s only so many times a country can transition away from democracy before it becomes permanent.