Connexion
There are problems money can’t fix.
On April 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the long-delayed $61 billion aid package for Ukraine. The package quickly passed Tuesday night through the Senate on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, where it will quickly be signed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly reversed course and led the aid package through the House in part because, during intelligence briefings, he came to “believe the intel” that without the “lethal aid,” “Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”
That Ukraine is a stepping stone in Russia’s march through Europe has long been a key argument in justifying continued aid for Ukraine. Johnson should not have so readily believed it. Aside from the not unimportant question of whether Russia even has the ability to invade Europe and engage in a war with all of NATO, there is no evidence that this is Putin’s intent. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2 that she “really want[s] to be clear” that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory.”
Nor does the historical record suggest waging war on NATO and conquering Europe has ever been Putin’s intent. Putin’s claim that the decision to go to war was motivated by the security necessity of keeping Ukraine out of NATO has been verified by NATO and Ukrainian officials. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we…committed that we would not join NATO.” Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky called the promise not to join NATO “the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and said that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement… was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”
If Ukraine was a member state of NATO and tried to take back Crimea militarily, then Russia and NATO could find themselves at war. If Putin went to war to prevent this scenario and avoid a war with NATO, as he has stated a number of times, then it would seemingly make little sense that he would launch a war against Ukraine as a stepping stone to war on NATO.
But aside from the question of whether Johnson should have been convinced of the need to aid Ukraine, there is the question of whether the $61 billion will provide the aid it is intended to give.
There are five things the aid package will not do for Ukraine. It will not provide enough money. It will not provide the badly needed weapons, nor deliver them on time. It will not provide the even more badly needed troops. And it will not provide victory.
Though $61 billion is a massive amount of money, it is not massive enough to defeat Russia. Ukraine accomplished little but the loss of life and the most advanced weapons during its centerpiece counteroffensive when it was receiving even more.
“$61 billion will not change the outcome of this war,” Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhodes and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, told The American Conservative. “In order to change the outcome, much, much more money is needed. Just how much more? We know, because just talking about it is one of the things that got the head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, fired in February. In an interview in December 2023, Zaluzhny pointed out that a mere 61 billion USD would not suffice to liberate all of Ukraine. That, he said, would require five to seven times that amount, or $350-400 billion.” There is the additional danger that future aid packages might all be smaller.
Even if the money was sufficient, it would not provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs because the weapons are not available for purchase. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities, agrees that the $61 billion “is fairly small in terms of the overall need.” But Davis adds that “even if you get the money, you’re not going to have the number of artillery shells, interceptor missiles for air defense. You can’t make the artillery shells any faster than we are right now. It’s a matter of physical capacity: we can’t do it.”
And even if the West could produce the weapons, there is the question of whether they could deliver them to Ukraine on time. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Bruce Slawter, who served as attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow and spent 25 years working on government assignments in Russia and Ukraine, agrees that there is an “inability to produce weapons that have already been used up in the war” but adds that “any additional funding for Ukraine will take many months, if not a year or more, to have any effect on the battlefield.” And that may be too late if Russia launches a summer offensive as some expect.
Even if the West could provide Ukraine with the weapons on time, the “big problem for Ukraine,” Davis says, is not the provision of weapons, but the “manpower issue.” Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, to death and injury, have left Ukraine with a bigger manpower problem than artillery problem. A close aide to President Zelensky told TIME magazine in an interview published in November 2023 that, even if the U.S. gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.”
For all these reasons, the $61 billion aid package will not provide the promised victory. The one thing it will do is prolong the war and continue the loss of Ukrainian life and land.
“The $61 billion will not change the outcome of this war, which is now decisively turning in Russia’s favor,” Petro told TAC. The best the aid package can do, Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute, told TAC is “help Ukraine to defend its existing lines – though not ensure that it will be able to do so successfully. What it will not do is to enable Ukraine to break through Russian lines and recover the territory that Ukraine has lost. Given the strength of Russian defenses and the imbalance of numbers and ammunition favouring Russia, that looks militarily impossible for the Ukrainians.”
Though the aid package “is extremely unlikely to have any meaningful impact on the eventual outcome of the war,” Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told TAC, it “will certainly prolong the bloodshed.” Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork, agrees that the aid will just “prolong Ukraine’s agony.” He told TAC that “Ukraine will lose more people, more territory and its viability as an independent state.”
“This decision will only prolong the agony of Ukraine and Europe,” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told TAC. But, he added, “It also raises the stakes, and pushes the world one step further towards a cataclysm the likes of which we have never seen. Now is the time to start de-escalating, and to outline what it would take to start a diplomatic process of some sort.”
Hill said that if the U.S. wants to help Ukraine “it would be pushing for meaningful negotiations that would include not only territory, but also the future nature of the Ukraine-NATO relationship, with the aim being to facilitate a lasting peace.” Roberts agreed and added that the $60 billion would be better spent on “aiding Ukraine’s postwar recovery, not its further unnecessary destruction in pursuit of the West’s proxy war with Russia.”
In trying to help Ukraine, the aid package will in fact prolong its tragedy.
The post What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do appeared first on The American Conservative.
The American brand will suffer so long as Washington pretends its capacities are limitless.
It is an axiom of warfare that it is always desirable to have friendly territory beyond one’s own borders or the capacity to prevent the buildup of significant military power in neutral territory for an attack against one’s own territory. When it lacked the military strength to do much, the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine with a similar purpose in mind.
When Moscow sent Russian forces into eastern Ukraine in February 2022, it did so without any plan of conquest or intention to permanently control Ukrainian territory. As Western military observers pointed out at the time, the Russian force that intervened was far too small and incapable for any mission beyond limited intervention for a brief period. In fact, Western observers predicted Russian forces would soon run out of ammunition, equipment, and soldiers.
The rationale for Moscow’s limited military commitment was obvious. Moscow originally sought neutrality for Ukraine as a solution to Ukraine’s hostility toward Russia and its cooperation with NATO, not territorial subjugation or conquest. Moscow believed, not unreasonably, that a neutral Ukrainian nation-state could be a cordon sanitaire that would shield Russia from NATO and, at the same time, provide NATO with insulation from Russia.
Nearly three years of Washington’s practically limitless funding for modern weapons and support in the form of spaced-based surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance for a proxy war designed to destroy Russia makes this approach laughable. Chancellor Merkel’s admission that the Western sponsored Minsk Accords were really designed to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military power is enough for Moscow to reject Western promises to ever respect, let alone enforce, Ukrainian neutrality.
When questioned on January 19 about the potential for negotiations with Washington and NATO, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “We are ready [for negotiations]. But unlike the Istanbul story, we will not have a pause in hostilities during the negotiations. The process must continue. Secondly, of course, the realities on the ground have become different, significantly different.” What do Lavrov’s words mean?
In 1982, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, argued that control of the Rhine River would determine the outcome of any future war with NATO in Central Europe. There is little doubt that Russia’s senior military leaders have already concluded that Russian control of the Dnieper River is essential to Russian national security.
In addition to annexing historically Russian cities like Odessa and Kharkiv, Moscow will almost certainly insist on a modern demilitarized zone from the Dnieper River to NATO’s eastern border to prevent the reemergence of a hostile military force in Western Ukraine. Whether the Poles, Hungarians, or Belarusians decide to engage Moscow in discussions regarding Ukrainian territory with historic connections to their countries is unknown, but the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces will no doubt inform such discussions.
Washington’s strategy toward Moscow, if it can be called a strategy, consisted of organizing coercive measures across the Atlantic Alliance—economic, diplomatic, and military—to harm Russia fatally and destabilize its government. Washington’s unrealistic approach failed, and NATO, the framework for its implementation, is now fatally weakened, not Russia.
As a result, Washington’s brand has been grievously diminished, even enfeebled. Washington’s belief that with the combined might of NATO’s scientific-industrial power it could achieve a strategic victory over Russia by arming Ukrainians to do the fighting for them backfired badly. Like FDR in 1939, who expected the Germans to end up in a stalemate with the Anglo-French Armies on the model of the First World War, Washington did not consider the possibility that Ukraine would lose the fight.
During the 1930s, FDR became trapped in a debt spiral of “special interest” spending. In defiance of logic and affordability, FDR opted for more Federal spending until he realized that it was not working. With the onset of war in Europe, FDR saw the opportunity to extricate American society from the Depression by steering the United States into war. FDR’s scheme worked. The Second World War reinvigorated the American economy and ended America’s chronic unemployment. At the same time, America’s physical insularity kept American infrastructure and the American People beyond the reach of its enemies.
President Biden and Congress are on a similar course with profound consequences, but today, horrifically destructive modern weapons make the war option suicidal. Put another way, 21st-century problems cannot be solved with the use of 20th-century plans and policies. Instead of framing another false narrative to justify funding for a corrupt Ukrainian state that is collapsing, Washington and its allies should question the rationale for a new, costly cold war directed against Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and a host of countries with world views that diverge sharply from our own.
Business schools teach their students that good brands have the power to sway decision-making and create communities of like-minded people. It isn’t just companies that need brands; countries need them, too. When asked about Washington’s ability to cope with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Biden said, “We are the most powerful nation in the world, in the history of the world. We can take care of both of these [wars].” Biden was and is wrong. America’s resources are not limitless. Our power is constrained.
In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the American brand has been damaged. Americans need (and should demand) a sober-minded analysis of the facts from the men who want to be president. They should be compelled to identify the United States’ true national interests; a process that should also identify the political and cultural realities that are not Washington’s to change.
The post Is It Game, Set, Match to Moscow? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democrats could save Speaker Mike Johnson, but they once again find themselves in a can’t-lose situation.
The House has passed House Speaker Mike Johnson’s $95 billion foreign aid package.
The House took several votes on the foreign aid package. As The American Conservative has explained, Johnson chose a procedural maneuver called a MIRV to consider the foreign aid package, which meant the House passed one rule to govern the process over each part of the four-part foreign aid package. As Johnson had to rely on Democratic support on the Rules Committee to advance the package to the House floor, Johnson once again found himself relying on Democratic support.
The House passed Ukraine aid 311 to 112, with 210 Democrats and 101 Republicans supporting the legislation. One hundred twelve Republicans voted against. As for Israel aid, 173 Democrats joined 193 Republicans in voting for the legislation. The final tally was 366 to 58. Indo-Pacific aid, mostly directed towards Taiwan, was the least contentious of the bills considered, and passed 385 to 34. The final part of the legislation, the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, passed 360 to 58.
While Democrats saved Johnson’s foreign aid package—not out of the goodness of their hearts but because it favored their priorities—it remains to be seen whether Democrats will save Johnson’s speakership. Yesterday, Rep. Paul Gosar came out in favor of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate. Between Green, Gosar, and Massie, Johnson’s critics could have the votes at a moment’s notice to invoke privilege and oust Johnson. Massie told the press that he does not expect the anti-Johnson operation to be taken today, but the clock is ticking as the House enters a week-long recess.
It’s a can’t-lose for Democrats.
Allowing Johnson to be ousted, once again throws the GOP into chaos, well beyond the House. Former President Donald Trump has claimed he supports Johnson and some within Trump’s orbit have reportedly said Mar-a-Lago is unhappy with the divisiveness in the House. Ousting Johnson throws Trump into conflict with some of his biggest supporters in the House. The GOP controlled House will once again seem incapable of governing, this time even closer to an election. The risk, however, is that there are enough Republicans in the conference angry enough at Johnson’s handling of appropriations, FISA, and foreign aid that they’ll replace Johnson with a more conservative speaker with a reputation for being a fighter—someone like Rep. Jim Jordan. Nevertheless, it feels unlikely; if Johnson is ousted, someone cut from the same cloth will probably replace him.
But Democrats could also save Johnson by voting against the motion to vacate at large enough margins to overcome Johnson’s conservative objectors. This also makes sense. Johnson has given Democrats almost everything they’ve asked for and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t have a chance at becoming speaker, so why rock the boat? The question becomes: Has Johnson run out of things to give Democrats to incentivize keeping him in the House’s top spot? If so, then the last thing Johnson can give Democrats in his brief tenure is to create another crisis in Republican ranks on the way out.
The post What’s Next After the Ukraine Mistake? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democrats have saved Speaker Mike Johnson’s foreign aid package. In doing so, they also may have just sealed his political fate.
This is a developing story.
Democrats have saved Speaker Mike Johnson’s foreign aid package. In doing so, they also may have just sealed the fate of his speakership.
Just before midnight, Democrats on the Rules Committee sided with Republican supporters of the aid package to overcome the objections of Reps. Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, and Ralph Norman—the conservative representation on the Rules Committee. Johnson rushed the rule to the House floor on Friday morning, where Democrats once again sided with the Louisiana Republican. The rule passed on the floor by a vote of 316 to 94, with a majority of yes votes coming from Democrats (165 of them, in fact). Meanwhile, 55 Republicans objected to the rule. Any number of them could join Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Massie on a motion to vacate.
Rep. Warren Davidson was among the 55 Republican objectors. “My constituents in Ohio’s Eighth District are tired of broken promises by Speaker Johnson,” Davidson told The American Conservative in a written statement. “They know Republicans promised to fund a secure border and a smaller government. The Speaker must understand that passing more foreign aid without legitimate border security legislation hurts America. Speaker Johnson must do what he already promised to do.”
Johnson’s betrayal of his own conference is historic. As Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute told TAC yesterday, “It’s one thing for a rule to pass with Democrat support on the House floor. But it’s a different thing to force it out of Rules with minority votes. I don’t think that’s ever happened.”
“This is worse than John Boehner. If you consider John Boehner the peak level of violence against conservatives,” she added.
“If he forces a rule out of the Rules Committee on the backs of Democrats to fund a war that his conference doesn’t want to fund,” Bovard said, then “nobody’s in charge at that point. You don’t have a majority party at that point.”
Fitting, then, that if there is no majority party that there may soon be no Speaker of the House. If Johnson remains, it will be because he is once again saved by Democrats.
The post Democrats Save Johnson’s Military Spending— But Will They Save His Speakership? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Johnson’s foreign aid will cost the American taxpayer $95 billion. Conservatives are at their breaking point.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has finally unveiled his foreign aid package. His plan to get it across the finish line, however, remains less clear.
There are three main bills in Johnson’s package that will provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific respectively. Although the supposed urgency for this aid package stems from Iran’s strikes on Israel, the bulk of the package’s funding, just over $60 billion worth, is aimed towards Ukraine. Israel receives quite the chunk of change, however: $26 billion courtesy of the American taxpayer. The Indo-Pacific region gets just over $8 billion. This brings the total price tag of Johnson’s foreign aid bonanza to $95 billion. Sound familiar?
The resounding answer for conservatives in the House is yes. Johnson’s future hangs in the balance, and his conservative wing is nearly out of patience.
“This latest ‘America last’ package is just another failure of leadership,” Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The American Conservative in a phone interview. “We’re going to borrow nearly $100 billion that we don’t have to further exacerbate our debt situation to defend Ukraine’s border, along with other countries, to pass this with predominantly Democrat votes.”
The package, Good said, “[does] not to do anything for America, not to do anything to keep us more safe and secure, not to keep our promise to fight for border security.”
The first bill, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, provides Israel “$26.38 billion to support Israel in its effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies,” per a readout from House GOP appropriators. The U.S. will provide $4 billion to replenish the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems, $1.2 billion for the Iron Bram defense system, $3.5 billion for procurement of more advanced weapons systems, $1 billion for artillery and munitions production, $2.4 billion for U.S. operations in the region, and $4.4 billion to replace weapons provided to Israel from U.S. stockpiles. Finally, a sweetener for Democrats: $9 billion is directed towards humanitarian relief.
The second is titled the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. GOP appropriators claim that $13.8 billion will be directed towards “the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services”; another $26 million will be for oversight of U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Then there is $11.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region. But what are those operations? Have the nature of these operations been made clear to members of Congress? If so, why haven’t legislators talked about them? This fraught question might have something to do with it: What kind of U.S. personnel are involved?
The Ukraine supplemental also provides for $23.2 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles, which is far short of the investment necessary to bring U.S. stockpiles back to pre-war levels. A large amount of the money appropriated for U.S. weapons procurement, however, is transferable to other limited purposes should the executive branch deem fit. To make matters worse, the alleged replenishment of U.S. stockpiles is predicated on providing even more aid to Ukraine. The Ukraine supplemental increases the presidential drawdown authority from $100 million to nearly $8 billion for fiscal year 2024.
Johnson seems eager to give Biden the unilateral authority to continue America’s involvement in two foreign wars. Both Ukraine and Israel supplementals include identical increases to the presidential drawdown authority.
The Ukraine supplemental also provides nearly $500 million for refugee entrance and assistance.
Furthermore, most of these appropriations creep well into 2025, potentially limiting a future Trump administration’s diplomatic options, just as Sen. J.D. Vance warned in this magazine’s pages.
“We ought to not be passing legislation that impacts past early in the year once the Trump administration gets the opportunity to get their team in place and their appointees confirmed and on the job and running,” Good told TAC. “President Trump obviously has a very different view of Ukraine than President Biden or even half of the Republicans in the House.”
Sadly, from Good’s point of view, “apparently Speaker Johnson seems to want Ukraine [aid] as much as Democrats do”—even if that means handcuffing a future Trump administration.
Trump, trying to avoid literal handcuffs in a New York courtroom over the next few weeks, posted on Truth Social,
Why isn’t Europe giving more money to help Ukraine? Why is it that the United States is over $100 Billion Dollars into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us as separation! Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America in order to help a Country in desperate need? As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us! GET MOVING EUROPE! In addition, I am the only one who speaks for ‘ME’ and, while it is a total mess caused by Crooked Joe Biden and the Incompetent Democrats, if I were President, this War would have never started!
Finally, the Indo-Pacific Security Supplemental Appropriations Act would provide $3.3 billion for submarine infrastructure, $2 billion for Taiwan and other regional partners, $542 million to strengthen U.S. capabilities in the region, and $1.9 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles.
But that’s not all—there are two other bills the House might take up.
The fourth bill, titled the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, is a grab-bag of middle-of-the-road GOP foreign policy items. This bill includes REPO provisions for the seizure and use of Russian assets to fund America’s involvement in Ukraine, the TikTok sale or ban, and a litany of sanctions targeting Iranian leaders, Iranian industries, and proxies throughout the region.
The fifth bill is a watered-down version of HR 2, the border security bill passed out of the House earlier this Congress.
At first glance, it might appear that Johnson is attaching real border security to Ukraine aid. While Johnson wishes the GOP base to believe that, the facts are less compelling.
“The fifth bill, that’s the pretend, weakened, border Security, so to speak, but it’s not going to have any leverage attached to it,” Good said. “The Senate will just ignore that fifth bill of course and not take it up. It’s showmanship, it’s theater. I think this further diminishes the speaker before the Republicans across the country.”
Much remains up in the air on Capitol Hill, but Johnson seems to be pursuing a procedural maneuver that leaves border security on the outside looking in, as Good suggests. Johnson’s idea is to pass two rules. One will govern the House’s consideration of the border security bill. The other rule will lump together the first four bills—Ukraine aid, Israel aid, Indo-Pacific aid, and the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act. That rule will govern how the GOP considers these pieces of legislation and will probably result in whichever of these four bills that pass on the House floor getting bundled together and presented as one bill to the Senate, a procedural maneuver known as a MIRV (for “Multiple-Impact Reentry Vehicle,” a type of multi-warhead missile payload—this is what passes for humor among parliamentarians).
“The MIRV process is just completely ridiculous,” Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute told TAC.
That is why House conservatives seem to be trolling the amendment process. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has offered an amendment to Israel aid that would fund “space laser technology on the southern border.” Greene is also toying with an amendment that would “conscript in the Ukrainian military” any member of the House who votes for Ukraine aid.
Democrats are having fun, too. Rep. Jared Moskowitz proposed an amendment to name Greene, “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”
“[The MIRV] is an interpretive dance, basically, because it allows different coalitions within the House to pass each section. Ukraine can’t get enough votes by itself; Israel, because the Democrats probably can’t get enough votes, doesn’t pass by itself,” Bovard told TAC. “Different components of the legislation pass with different factions. But nobody votes for the final bill.” This Frankensteinian piece of legislation will then be handed over to the Senate.
“This is worse than John Boehner. If you consider John Boehner the peak level of violence against conservatives, Mike Johnson is about to leap that hurdle,” Bovard claimed.
“This is new for me,” Good said of the MIRV. “In my first three years here, I’ve not seen this before. Now I have learned that it’s been used sparingly a few times in recent history over the last 20 years or so. The bills will come under the same rule as separate votes, but then they’re packaged together, the four of them go to the Senate. And so you’ve got Ukraine picking up the lion’s share at $60 billion.”
Border security is unlikely to be attached to one of the foreign aid bills or covered in the MIRV. It looks as if GOP voters’ number one priority will again take a backseat to the border security of a foreign nation.
“It’s the same song, second verse, isn’t it?” Good said, likening Johnson’s foreign aid package to the Senate’s $95 billion package passed in February.
The text of the rule that will govern this process is not publicly available yet. Currently, the House Rules Committee is deadlocked. The conservative contingent of the Rules Committee, Reps. Chip Roy and Thomas Massie, refused Wednesday evening to go along with passing a rule for the border security bill because it would not be attached to the foreign aid package.
The event revealed the true priorities of some GOP House members.
“The three members who refuse to support the Speaker’s agenda should resign from the Rules Committee immediately,” Rep. Mike Lawler tweeted. “If they refuse, they should be removed immediately. They are there on behalf of the conference, not themselves.”
“Sorry, not sorry, for opposing a crappy rule that is a show vote / cover vote for funding Ukraine instead of border security,” Roy replied.
Getting rid of Roy and company on the Rules Committee is easier said than done. “Because the House approves committee assignments, changing them also requires a vote of House,” Bovard told TAC. “Johnson could try. He’s made his alliance with hawks and appropriators, so maybe they help him.”
On the other hand, getting rid of Johnson might prove relatively easy.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a motion to vacate primed in the hopper. All the Georgia Republican has to do is ask for privilege to trigger the motion, and leadership has a 48 hour window to give Greene’s motion a vote. Greene has courted a key ally in Massie, who previously announced he’d cosponsor the motion after Johnson caved on warrant requirements in FISA reauthorization.
“If [the motion to vacate] is triggered, after everything has just gone on, there’s going to be conservatives who will have a hard time not supporting it if the vote is put in front of them,” Bovard said.
“The battle lines were very clear at the end,” an unnamed GOP lawmaker told the Washington Post. “It was very clear [the motion to vacate] will be brought if the speaker’s plan proceeds.”
Yet Johnson might use the MIRV process to change the rules on the motion to vacate. As it stands now, a single member can file a motion to vacate the speaker, a concession conservatives squeezed out of the ill-fated Kevin McCarthy in the speakership fight at the beginning of the current Congress. Johnson and some of his allies are reportedly considering using the rules that govern the foreign aid package to change the number of members needed to trigger a motion to vacate. Alternatively, Johnson might also consider changes that limit the motion to vacate to members in leadership. Then there’s what Bovard described as “completely nuclear”: “It’s possible that they turn off the privilege [for the motion to vacate] in the rule.”
“Speaker Johnson plans also to kill the motion to vacate procedural device, with Democrat votes, IN THE PENDING RULE,” Rep. Dan Bishop tweeted. “No Republican who is not an avowed double agent will survive politically after voting for that rule.”
Yet Johnson announced on X, formerly Twitter, that he would not be changing the motion to vacate rules. “Since the beginning of the 118th Congress, the House rule allowing a Motion to Vacate from a single member has harmed this office and our House majority,” the speaker’s tweet read. “Recently, many members have encouraged me to endorse a new rule to raise this threshold. While I understand the importance of that idea, any rule change requires a majority of the full House, which we do not have. We will continue to govern under the existing rules.”
If the speaker changes his mind, don’t expect House conservatives to be surprised. They’ve come to regard Johnson as a flip-flopper. “Previously, the speaker was for paying for supplementals. Now he’s against paying for them. He was for using the Ukraine supplemental to leverage border security. Now, he does not want to do that. He was for paying for Israel aid as a standalone. Now, he does not want to do that. So here we are, again, letting down the American people,” Good told TAC. “We said the border was the hill we would die on. Now we’re just dying politically for the Democrat priorities.”
If Johnson does stick to his promise, don’t expect conservatives to thank him either. Johnson will need to do a lot more to assuage their concerns with his leadership.
Where does that leave Johnson, then?
Johnson could decide to side with his own conference to pass the rules and the bills that fall under them. If he does that, he will have to attach border security to Ukraine aid, separate the foreign aid bills out, and be willing to let the legislation die in the Senate (adding border security to Ukraine aid would effectively kill the legislation).
The other option, siding with Democrats, is more likely. It won’t be the speaker’s first time doing so. So far, Johnson has denied courting Democratic support. “I have not asked a single Democrat to get involved in that at all. I do not spend time walking around thinking about the motion,” Johnson said, according to POLITICO.
Siding with Democrats would almost guarantee the motion to vacate would be triggered. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable position,” Good said of Democrats saving the Republican speaker, POLITICO reported. Massie agrees: “They will doom him.… They won’t save him. How is that sustainable?”
“If his speakership depends on Democrats it becomes harder for [Republicans] to vote for him in subsequent motions to vacate,” the Kentucky Republican added.
Despite Johnson’s assurances, Good told TAC he expects Democrats to get this legislation over the line. “I think the Democrats will provide as many votes as are needed to pass the rule. They will overwhelmingly vote for the ultimate supplemental package,” Good said. This process “represents the worst of Washington.”
“It’s one thing for a rule to pass with Democrat support on the House floor. But it’s a different thing to force it out of Rules with minority votes. I don’t think that’s ever happened,” Bovard claimed.
“The Rules Committee is an incredibly partisan committee—the minority always votes against the rule, the majority always supports it,” Bovard explained. “Now, we’re in a situation where the majority doesn’t support it. How Johnson handles this, I don’t know. If he forces a rule out of Rules Committee on the backs of Democrats to fund a war that his conference doesn’t want to fund—”
Bovard paused. “Nobody’s in charge at that point. You don’t have a majority party at that point.”
In Bovard’s estimation, it’s nearing “Joe Cannon levels of tyranny.”
“The Joe Cannon parallels here are creepy,” Bovard explained. “Joe Cannon was the most tyrannical Speaker the House has ever seen. They called him ‘The Czar Speaker.’ In 1910, he basically ran the Rules Committee, ran the house, members had no rights, and the only thing that saved the House from Joe Cannon was a revolt of the members.”
If Johnson doesn’t change course, Bovard told TAC he’s headed for “utter destruction of House practice and tradition.”
The post What is Johnson Thinking? appeared first on The American Conservative.
It is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion.
NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory and end this unprovoked aggression,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2, “because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
Smith is not the first to warn that Ukraine is the dam that is holding back a Russian conquest of Europe. U.S. President Joe Biden told Congress on December 6 that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that, “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” On March 28, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, insisted that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.”
“If Ukraine loses the war,” he said on April 7, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”
Aside from the value these warnings have in convincing the public—and the U.S. Congress—to continue sending money and weapons to Ukraine, the insistence that Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine but have their sights on Europe is based on two historical myths.
The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”
Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.
The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease.
The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.”
The same selective use of quotations is applied to Putin’s comment that “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster.” Though quoted as proof of Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and his desire to reestablish it, the strategy requires lifting the quotation from a context that makes it clear that the disaster Putin is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”
There are at least three points that need to be factored into Western calculations of Putin’s ambitions that should temper the confidence of the forecast that he is bent on conquering Europe and on war with NATO.
The first is that there is no evidence for it. After her warning that Russia will “keep going,” Smith admitted that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory, and I really want to be clear about that.”
The Baltic countries complain that their warnings of the expansionist threat posed by Russia have been dismissed by the West. “For years,” Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski says, the West was “patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.’” Estonia’s former President Hendrik Ilves complained that the West does “Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia.”
Smith responded, “I don’t want to give our friends in the Baltic states the impression that somehow war is coming to NATO territory overnight. We take it seriously, but we do not see this to be an imminent threat.”
The second point is that the Western statements of Putin’s ambitions are not consistent with the historical record of Putin’s statements of his ambitions.
Putin has said that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those fundamental principles have consistently included a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO, a guarantee that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian bridgehead on its border, and assurances of protection of the rights of Russophile Ukrainians.
There is nothing on the historical record to suggest that conquering Europe or confronting NATO have ever been among the stated goals of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This point has been conceded by Ukraine and by NATO. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” He says that a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. Most importantly, Zelensky has said that the promise not to join NATO “was the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement…was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”
The third point is that the historical record suggests that Putin went to war in Ukraine, not as a step toward war with NATO, but to prevent a war with NATO.
“Listen attentively to what I am saying,” Putin said just three weeks before the invasion. “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary…. Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member…. Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.”
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine “to prevent NATO…close to his borders” may have been motivated by concern that a Ukraine in NATO that attacked Donbas or Crimea would draw Russia into a war with NATO.
Just three days before launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin said that “the reality we live in” is that if Ukraine is “accepted into…NATO, the threat against our country will increase because of Article 5” since “there is a real threat that they will try to take back the territory they believe is theirs using military force. And they do say this in their documents, obviously. Then the entire North Atlantic Alliance will have to get involved.”
If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO.
Since the claim that, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Putin will keep going and bring war to Europe and NATO, is wielded to justify continuing the fight instead of encouraging a diplomatic solution, it is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion. The frequently made warning rests uncertainly on myths and misreading of the historical record that, when examined, recommend a less confident forecast of Putin’s intentions.
The post Is Putin Bent on Conquering Europe? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The days of free and cheap riding are numbered.
The wailing is getting louder across Europe. Elites in Brussels and national capitals are clutching their pearls as they view American opinion polls. Their U.S. friends, the usual Masters of the Universe who dominate political and economic affairs, are reacting similarly.
Although the presidential election is more than six long months away and much can happen before November 5, they all are sharing nightmares featuring Donald Trump. Such is the consequence of spending the last eight decades treating Europe’s protection as America’s responsibility.
Europeans are only slowly waking up to reality. For instance, the British historian and journalist Max Hastings observed, “Some of us have repeatedly asserted that without America the Ukrainians could become toast. That proposition looks like it is being tested.” He didn’t blame America. Rather, he admitted that “there is also a realization that the United States has tired, probably forever, of leading and largely funding the defense of Europe.”
Then he criticized Europeans for lagging despite their professed fears of Russian aggression. He wrote “The Germans have discovered a €25 billion shortfall in their defense spending plan, overlaid on national economic stagnation. President Macron is shipping 100 howitzers, but these cannot make good his earlier refusal to back Ukraine.” That’s not all; leading states such as Italy and Spain still can’t be bothered.
Hastings was even tougher on his own nation, citing the ugly truth about its disappointing efforts: “Though successive British prime ministers have professed to embrace Ukraine, which is essentially our proxy in facing down Russian aggression, they have done almost nothing to sustain the supply of munitions, once the army’s cupboard was emptied.”
Indeed, he added, “since the end of the Cold War it has been the all-party fashion to treat defense not as a vital element in our polity but as an optional extra to the main business of government.” He targeted the Conservative Party, the home of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: “Since 2010 the Tories have refused to make the necessary defense spending commitments.”
Also credit Hastings for admitting that the Europeans were warned about Russia’s likely response to NATO expansion: “It was recklessly insouciant to take no steps to prepare ourselves, both morally and militarily, to fight if the Russians responded with force.” He called for Europeans to step up: “Europe must send Kyiv yesterday every gun and shell it can purchase—we cannot manufacture the hardware ourselves in real time.”
Finally, and most important, he acknowledged that the continent’s residents must work hard to protect themselves: “If we wish to avoid having to fight another big war we must create a credible military deterrent in which nuclear weapons are the least relevant, though still necessary, component. Even granted the will, which is problematic, Europe requires a decade of enhanced spending to make itself remotely capable of self-defense, in the absence of the U.S.”
Still, the situation is a bit less dire than Hastings suggests. He overestimates the danger facing Europe. Although Russia’s Vladimir Putin is ruthless, the latter has shown little interest in conquest during his quarter century in power. Indeed, he began his presidency friendly to the U.S. and Europe; he was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and gave an accommodating address to the German Bundestag shortly thereafter.
Moreover, Putin’s much-cited remark about the Soviet collapse did not suggest recreating the Russian empire, as commonly claimed. He declared,
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Far from backing the return of the Soviet Communist Party, he contended that “the time that our young democracy…was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” His discussion of how “to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state” looks ironic in retrospect, but nothing in the speech suggested reconstituting the USSR.
Of course, his attitude hardened over time, but for obvious reasons reflected in his famous talk at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. He highlighted what faithless and dishonest allied officials subsequently sought to deny, Moscow’s displeasure over NATO expansion and Washington’s aggressive military policy. U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state knew that they were recklessly crossing a red line for Putin and most of Russia’s top political leadership. For instance, in 2008 intelligence officer Fiona Hill, more recently with the Trump NSC, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, currently CIA Director, warned the George W. Bush administration that NATO expansion was likely to spark a violent response.
Two years ago, Putin made the decision for war, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. Yet he is no Hitler. Russia has not found Ukraine easy to conquer. It would be difficult for Moscow to swallow its victim whole. Moreover, Putin acted out his explicit threats, not the West’s imagined fears. Never has Putin or the rest of the leadership shown interest in conquering the Baltic States, let alone more of Europe. The question would be, To what end? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal, but he did so for reasons known in the West for decades. What would he gain from attempting to overrun the rest of Europe? When asked by Tucker Carlson if he might invade Poland, Putin replied, “Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest.”
Of course, Europeans should not trust Putin with their continent’s peace and stability. However, they—not America—should make their security their priority.
An important issue raised by Hastings is whether Europe should develop a continental nuclear deterrent. The U.S. promised to use nukes to defend Europe during the Cold War and the Soviets never tested American resolve. Whether or not the continent was worth the risk to the U.S. then, it is not now. Observed the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Would an American president, especially a re-elected Donald Trump, be willing to risk nuclear war for Helsinki, Tallinn or Warsaw? And if not, could Europe’s own two nuclear powers—France and, to a lesser extent, the UK—provide enough deterrence of their own?”
Both Paris and London have nukes, but their forces are national and independent. Germans have begun to debate contributing to a European arsenal or developing their own. Even the Poles might be on board with a Eurobomb. Friendly proliferation has obvious drawbacks but may be the best practicable option. Today Russia relies on nuclear parity to make up for conventional inferiority compared to America. Europe could do the same vis-à-vis Moscow.
Nevertheless, as the Europeans move ahead, they also should seek a future in which they will be safer and more prosperous, which means reaching an understanding with Russia over a new security structure. Although European officials routinely demonize Putin, they share responsibility with him for the war. Fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian is not the best means to establish long-term stability and peace.
Kiev’s determination to battle on is understandable and, indeed, courageous, but Ukrainians should remember that the allies have consistently played them false. NATO made a commitment in 2008 that no European government and no subsequent US administration was prepared to keep. For 14 years, every alliance member along with the Brussels bureaucracy lied to Kiev, falsely insisting that they looked forward to Ukraine joining the alliance. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continued the deception when he visited Kiev in late 2021 in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion. At the same time, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Moscow when a commitment not to include Ukraine might have kept the peace.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion Washington and London apparently discouraged Kiev from negotiating with Moscow over the same issue, when the conflict might have been ended with relatively modest casualties and destruction. Moreover, NATO members continued to promise alliance membership to Kiev; at last July’s NATO summit Austin said that he had “no doubt” Ukraine would join. Yet the allies steadfastly refuse to enter the war when their support is most needed.
A couple weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken reassured Kiev, “We’re also here at NATO to talk about the summit that’s upcoming in the summer in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
But no one expects a formal commitment this year or next; realistically, Kiev shouldn’t expect one this decade or next. Ultimately Ukrainians will have to make their own deal with Russia. And that will turn out better if done sooner rather than later.
It is Europe’s turn. Observed Hastings: “If Putin or China’s President Xi today demands: ‘How many divisions has Britain?’—or, for that matter, Europe—the truthful answer deserves the scorn it must inspire in both tyrants.” Europeans should act like grownups and take over responsibility for their own defense.
The post Europe is Starting to Wake Up to Needing Defense—Including a Nuclear Deterrent appeared first on The American Conservative.
If you’re going to make an end-run around your own party, shouldn’t you at least give us a reason?
What’s the point of Mike Johnson?
The House GOP decided Kevin McCarthy needed to go. Fine. There were plenty of good arguments for that decision, including the very fundamental point that McCarthy’s mouth wrote checks to the party that Frank Luntz’s body couldn’t cash. That’s no way to run a railroad. Sayonara, Mac.
Who could forget the tragicomedy of the efforts to replace him? The placeholder speaker, Patrick McHenry, a little man in bowties and a really heartrending victim of tailoring malpractice, waving the gavel around like a kid at the carnival high-striker. The parade of proposed replacements: Steve Scalise, sort of the presumptive next in line save for the facts that he’s a moron and has got blood cancer. Tom Emmer. Jim Jordan. Mike Johnson was picked after Jordan lost his third round of votes. He was a perfect unity candidate: He had never said or done anything of note. (To quote some wise men discussing another political tabula rasa: “We have no inkling of his past!” “Correct, and that is an asset. A man’s past can cripple him.”)
Johnson seems like a nice man. (A difference from the visibly cretinous McCarthy.) He seems like one of the handful of national politicos who actually takes something approaching orthodox Christianity seriously, which has earned him plenty of ire (much of it very weird) in the mainstream press. He has borne up gracefully under all that, and, for that, we’re cheering him.
Unfortunately, while the absence of a past can be an asset, the absence of the present and future is not so good. As you might infer from the conditions of his elevation, things are a little contentious in Congress right now. A sizable portion of the Republican caucus has noticed that we’re spending rather a lot of money, and thinks maybe we should spend less, and is (for the first time in quite a while) willing to kick up a ruckus about it. Our southern border has undergone Aufhebung. The Fourth Amendment, which underwent Aufhebung quite some time ago, is up for grabs again with FISA renewal. Through our clients abroad, we are running a couple of wars of decreasing popularity and unclear value.
In the face of crisis, division, and uncertainty, you need a leader of men who can articulate a forceful program—or at least can mollify everyone a little by looking like he knows what he’s doing. Has that been Johnson? Well, not really.
Take his stance on military aid, the item at the top of everyone’s mind this week. Johnson is anxious to get the money out there to our foreign clients. In this, he is hardly alone—but also hardly unopposed. We’re a little leery of rubber-stamping anything touching the fisc, but might excuse it in cases where an expenditure is completely uncontroversial. (So far as we can tell, not much of the country is clamoring to stop funding military salaries or highway maintenance.) As of February, roughly half of his own party’s voters thought the U.S. was sending too much aid to Ukraine in particular.
Are there perhaps deep principles behind Johnson’s position? Does he, statesmanlike, think he’s doing the right thing, and damn the torpedoes? If he is, he’s doing a very good job of keeping it quiet. Johnson took the gavel last October. His congressional office has issued, by my count, 17 press releases since then, including the announcement of his speakership; the speaker’s office has issued 111 press releases. Not a single one has laid out the speaker’s case for sending military aid to other supposedly sovereign nations: not a good argument, not a bad argument, not even a pro forma argument; not for Taiwan, not for Israel, not for Ukraine. (There is, however, a precis of a fact sheet justifying his recent flip-flop on FISA—a real polishing-the-turd exercise for his comms staff, to whom we extend our real sympathies.) Hiding behind the fiction of “loans” is no remedy. In fact, it makes it worse: It shows embarrassment and the attendant desire to pull a quick one. Do you call this leadership?
The point of a party system is to give voters a choice—not necessarily a very large set of choices, but at least the bare binary of “X” versus “Not X.” When a speaker uses opposition support to pass through legislation against half his own party’s wishes—and against his own promises—something has gone badly wrong in the system. When he does it without even articulating his position, well, that’s something worse than badly wrong.
In Britain’s 1972 push to join the European Economic Community, which was in short order transmogrified into the European Union, a sinister compact developed between the leadership of the Conservative government and the Labour opposition to move through the membership vote outside the courses of debate appropriate for such a weighty and controversial decision. (This effort was opposed primarily by two members, the Tories’ Enoch Powell and Labour’s Michael Foot, an unlikely combination on the face of it.) The European Communities Bill affair left a bad taste in the voters’ mouths, and they punished the Tories for it (among other sins). The consequences of that skulduggery have bedeviled British governments for the 50 years since. Johnson is inviting a similar dysfunction into our own public life, and without even making his case to the American people.
Government by men with bad ideas and even bad morals we can endure; government by invertebrates is intolerable. So again we ask: What’s the point of this guy?
The post Mike Johnson Should Grow a Spine or Leave appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Marjorie Taylor Greene is no longer alone—she gained a crucial ally on Tuesday in her campaign to oust Johnson. The Speaker may not last the week.
Rep. Thomas Massie has announced he will be cosponsoring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m cosponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by @RepMTG,” Massie posted on Twitter. “He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.”
Just prior to Massie’s Twitter announcement, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News scooped Massie’s support of the motion to vacate. According to Sherman, “[Massie] told Johnson in front of the entire House Republican Conference that he should clean the barn and resign or else he’ll be vacated.”
NEW — TOM MASSIE said in a closed House Republican meeting that he’s going to cosponsor the motion to vacate, per several sources in the room.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 16, 2024
Previously, after Johnson jammed through a $1.2 trillion, 1,000-page minibus that funded the government through fiscal year 2024, Greene filed a motion to vacate. While that motion has so far remained in the hopper, Massie’s endorsement of Greene’s motion means she could trigger the motion by asking for privilege on the House floor at a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile, Johnson is planning to pass four different foreign aid supplemental spending bills under a single rule, a procedural maneuver called a MIRV. If Johnson goes with a MIRV, the House will vote on the rule, then vote on the four different packages. Then the packages that pass will be bundled together in a single bill presented to the Senate.
Meanwhile, Johnson has (for now) told House GOP members there will be an amendment process. Conservatives are going to test just how open that process will be, however. Last night, Rep. Matt Gaetz said he’d like to offer HR 2 as an amendment, which would effectively kill the legislation in both chambers—Johnson, once again, is relying on Democratic votes to get legislation out of the House. Without such an amendment, the aid package will not address border security—the number one issue thus far in the 2024 campaign cycle.
For now, Capitol Hill is playing the waiting game: What exactly will each one of these bills include? Text is expected to be circulated today. What amendments will Johnson allow? Members of Congress simply don’t know.
Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson maintains that he will not be stepping down:
JOHNSON JUST NOW: "I am not resigning."
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 16, 2024
It’s fitting that Massie invoked the name of former speaker John Boehner. Boehner’s slow downfall started with a MIRV on trade legislation. Johnson’s swift downfall could end with one.
The post Massie Kicks Effort to Oust Speaker Johnson Into High Gear appeared first on The American Conservative.
The White House has rejected an Israel standalone bill. Will the Speaker send one out anyway?
The House, under the leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, could vote in the coming days on an aid package to Israel. But will Ukraine aid be attached?
If the White House has its way, the answer is yes. “We are opposed to a stand-alone bill that would just work on Israel,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told members of the media Monday. Johnson, however, reportedly told House Republicans at a conference meeting Monday evening that Ukraine and Israel aid should be separated. Is Biden willing to use the veto to get his way, and if he is, will that force Johnson to reconsider?
“House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel,” Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. Previously, the House had advanced two aid bills for Israel—in fact, Johnson’s first legislative act as Speaker was passing a stand-alone aid bill for Israel.
“We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together. Right now, we’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues,” the speaker continued, signaling an openness to keeping aid to Ukraine and Israel bundled.
Over the weekend, Iran launched a strike with more than 300 missiles and drones in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed 13, including senior military officials. Very few of the Iranian missiles and drones ended up hitting their targets; Israel, with assistance from the U.S., Britain, and France, shot down most. The Jordanians, critics of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, also shot down drones and missiles that entered its airspace. Iran gave ample prior warning of its retaliatory attack and used slow-moving drones, suggesting its actions were meant to be non-escalatory in nature. Despite the apparent scale, Iran expected most of its projectiles would be shot down.
After the Senate failed to strike a deal that would provide supplemental aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific in exchange for border security, the Senate passed a $95 billion aid package without border security provisions in February. Johnson has refused to take up the legislation, but has repeatedly stated he wants to create an aid package for Ukraine and Israel that won’t cost him the speaker’s gavel.
On Sunday, in the wake of the Iranian attack, Johnson spoke with President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The group urged Johnson to bring the $95 billion supplemental, nearly two-thirds of which is funding for Ukraine, to the floor.
But Johnson would most likely have to bring the $95 billion package to the floor under suspension of the rules, and it’s unclear whether two-thirds of the House would be willing to sign on. While the weekend’s attack has added urgency, Johnson faces a House GOP growing increasingly skeptical about America’s involvement in Ukraine and a House Democratic conference that increasingly questions U.S. support for Israel. Threading the needle, and doing so while keeping his job, is going to be difficult for Johnson.
For its part, the Senate has refused to consider House-passed aid packages too. The first Israel aid bill Johnson passed out of the House offset the costs via spending cuts, most of which from Biden’s IRS expansion.
In the past few weeks, Johnson has been flirting with various ways to offset future expenditures on the war in Ukraine for his future aid package, such as providing Ukraine aid in the form of a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets.
“I think these are ideas that I think can get consensus, and that’s what we’ve been working through,” Johnson said in the wake of a Friday meeting with former President Donald Trump, who is more comfortable with the idea of Ukraine aid as a loan. “We’ll send our package. We’ll put something together and send it to the Senate and get these obligations completed.”
While Johnson’s decision to separate Israel and Ukraine aid is aimed primarily at shoring up support from the more conservative wing of the conference, some House Republicans, such as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, believe the conflicts are intertwined. “What happened in Israel last night happens in Ukraine every night,” McCaul said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
What happens with the impending aid package remains to be seen. That doesn’t mean Johnson’s House will be idle, however. Johnson is preparing a legislative barrage against Iran in the coming week. The speaker is putting 17 bills about Iran and Israel on the floor—11 of which will proceed under suspension of the rules.
The post Will Ukraine Actually Be a Part of Mike Johnson’s Aid Package? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mike Johnson is mired in a political minefield. What is most likely to cause the House GOP to implode?
“Mike Johnson, he’s literally turned into Mitch McConnell’s twin and worse. He’s a Democrat…. There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point.” Harsh words from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Currently, Greene has a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership in the hopper. Greene filed her motion to vacate on March 22 when the house was forced to vote on (and passed) a 1,012-page minibus with a price tag of $1.2 trillion. House members had less than 36 hours to read the bill or be blamed with a partial government shutdown. Just 101 Republicans, far short of the majority of the conference, voted for the minibus.
“Remember, last Congress we were all complaining: ‘We can’t even read these thousands of pages before we have to vote on them.’ We’re now back to the House of hypocrites, and I’m so sick and tired of it,” Greene said before filing her motion to vacate. “Why throw out a speaker for supposedly breaking the rules, and now we have a new speaker that is really breaking all the rules. So like, what changed?”
Certainly, a lot could change in the next few weeks if Greene decides to force a vote on the motion to vacate. Between FISA Section 702 reauthorization and Ukraine aid, Johnson finds himself in a political minefield—one false step, and Greene could blow up his speakership.
But where are the mines, exactly? They’re difficult to sniff out, but Greene provided a window into her thinking on a potential motion to vacate in a Dear Colleague letter circulated to Republican House members on Tuesday. “I will not tolerate our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them achieve their policies that are destroying our country,” Greene wrote. “He is throwing our own razor-thin majority into chaos by not serving his own GOP conference that elected him.”
“I will not tolerate this type of Republican ‘leadership,’” Greene continued. Making reference to the fights over FISA and Ukraine aid, Green claimed, “This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority.”
“And no, electing a new Republican Speaker will not give the majority to the Democrats,” Greene wrote, preempting rebukes if she does decide to go forward with the motion to vacate. “That only happens if more Republicans retire early, or Republicans actually vote for Hakeem Jeffries.”
Neither the FISA or Ukraine aid fight seem to be trending in Johnson’s direction. On Wednesday, 19 Republican lawmakers went against Johnson in a procedural vote to move forward on FISA reauthorization legislation.
The vote against FISA came in the wake of a Wednesday post on Truth Social from former President Donald Trump: “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” on his Truth Social account. Though Trump’s campaign was spied upon using a different FISA authority (not 702) and some members of the corporate media are claiming that the 19 Republicans who stood against the vote to proceed are blindly doing so at Trump’s behest, the battle lines were clearly drawn much earlier in the week. Surely, Trump brought further attention to the issue and put Republicans in the pocket of the intelligence agencies on the back foot by forcing them to answer hard questions from the grassroots, but by no means was Trump’s weighing in on the topic the deciding factor. (Side note: see how the intelligence agencies, corporate media, and establishment work together?)
Johnson has been working for months to reconcile the divide over 702 in the GOP conference, embodied by the House Intelligence and House Judiciary Committees. The House Judiciary Committee wants reforms to increase transparency and accountability in the FISA process, as well as provisions that would require FISA warrants for agencies to sift through information of U.S. citizens caught up in foreign surveillance and ban the government from buying U.S. persons data from private companies.
Johnson tried to split the baby by taking a FISA reauthorization bill from the Judiciary Committee’s Laurel Lee, a representative from Florida, with some but not all of the reforms. First, Johnson prevented, and would prevent any future amendment, on banning data sales from private companies to the U.S. government—a red line for the Intelligence Committee headed by Rep. Mike Turner. FISA warrant provisions, arguably the biggest priority of the Judiciary Committee, were also made part of the amendment process and not included in the bill’s text.
Johnson, before he was speaker, was in favor of FISA reforms, like warrant provisions, that the House Judiciary Committee proposed. As now-Speaker Johnson devised this plan, he seemed ambivalent at first, but has increasingly soured on warrant provisions. Eventually, Johnson came out fully against warrant provisions, claiming classified briefings given to him as speaker by the intelligence agencies gave him a “different perspective.”
Speaker Mike Johnson elaborates on his FISA flip flop from when he was a rank and file member of the House, explaining that after receiving classified briefings he has a “different perspective.” pic.twitter.com/mrLj9ouEji
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) April 10, 2024
No warrant provisions guaranteed, no deal, House conservatives suggest. Leaving the warrant provisions up to the amendment process with an adversarial speaker is too big of a risk. Now, its leg-fare against Johnson’s FISA proposal. House conservatives are trying to force open the amendment process to loosen Johnson’s grip on the process.
“The Speaker of the House put his finger on the scale, against the amendment. And that pretty much is the story,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told POLITICO.
Johnson is running out of time to find a deal before Section 702 expires on April 19. Without a deal, Johnson will likely bring a clean reauthorization, which will find broad uniparty support, to the floor. Another vote that potentially courts more Democratic support and less than a majority of the GOP conference could imperil Johnson’s speakership.
But it seems there has been a provisional agreement between the pro- and anti-FISA factions. Johnson has negotiated with conservatives a FISA reauthorization that would expire in two years. They’re betting on Trump becoming president in November. The next FISA renewal will need his signature.
Greene was not among those who voted no on the procedural vote, but she has hinted her support for the final FISA reauthorization is contingent on warrant provisions.
“We do not believe in warrantless spying on the American people, especially when this bill carves out the ability for Congress to be notified when a member of Congress is going to be looked at through the FISA court,” Greene told members of the media. “That’s completely unfair. The same thing should apply for the American people. But Mike Johnson doesn’t have the trust of the conference. That’s become very clear.”
Johnson’s new two-year FISA reauthorization plan does not include warrant provisions.
Greene met Johnson on Wednesday afternoon—the first time the pair met since she filed her motion to vacate. “I got a lot of excuses,” Greene told members of the media after leaving the meeting. “We didn’t walk out with a deal.”
What’s more likely to cause Greene to trigger her motion to vacate Johnson, however, is if Johnson decides to go forward with Ukraine aid.
If Johnson moves forward with Ukraine aid, it would be one of “the most egregious things he could do,” Greene said. Currently, Johnson is working on an Ukraine aid package expected to be worth $60 billion—the same level of funding for Ukraine provided by the Senate’s previously passed supplemental. Johnson, to maximize Democrat votes, is toying with decoupling Ukraine aid from aid to Israel. But to keep some Republican votes so that a majority of the GOP conference supports the package, Johnson is exploring making some of the aid a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets to fund further U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Chances are any Ukraine funding Johnson hopes to bring to the floor will also be under suspension of the rules. In this case, it’s a guarantee that Johnson fails to secure a majority of the House GOP’s support and a majority of the support for the package comes from Democrats.
“Let me tell you, when he forces that vote, again, under suspension with no amendments, and funds Ukraine and people find out how angry their constituents are about it, that’s going to move the needle even more,” towards a motion to vacate, Green said. “I’m not saying I have a red line or a trigger, and I’m not saying I don’t have a red line or trigger. And I think that’s just where I’m at right now. But I’m going to tell you right now: Funding Ukraine is probably one of the most egregious things that he can do.”
Johnson might have an unexpected savior, however: Donald Trump. On Friday, Johnson and Trump are expected to give a joint news conference during an election integrity event hosted at Mar-a-Lago. Trump is reportedly displeased at Greene’s maneuvering against Johnson. One MAGA world insider even went so far as to say Greene’s motion to vacate is “100 percent distraction. Unwanted. And just stupid.”
“We’re not going to get trapped into this cycle of bullshit that comes out of members of the House,” the Trump insider claimed.
“It’s fair to say we don’t think she’s being constructive,” another person close to Trump told POLITICO. “It’s no way to run a party; it’s no way to run a House. You can’t work in that environment.”
The bottom line: “The internal fighting is not appreciated by [Trump].”
So, Johnson is heading to Mar-a-Lago to not only beat the war drums for Trump’s reelection effort. The two are expected to talk FISA and Ukraine, and potentially do some horse trading on these issues to protect Johnson’s speakership. Over the course of his 2024 campaign, Trump has balked at being labeled “conservative,” opting instead for “common sense.” The former president has always been a pragmatist and dealmaker at heart—his pragmatic streak has been on full display when it comes to the issue of abortion as of late. But is he willing to make a deal to protect Johnson when two of the former president’s key issues—war in Ukraine and the weaponization of the federal government—are on the line and the biggest—border security—goes unaddressed?
Even then, will it be enough to save Johnson. Greene says maybe not; she’s “not backing off at all.”
This story has been updated with information about the prospective two-year reauthorization deal.
The post Inside MTG’s MTV appeared first on The American Conservative.
As NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary, the U.S. should tell Europe it is on its own if it provokes a war with Russia.
NATO is celebrating its 75th year as its members fight a brutal proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. The alliance marked its anniversary in Brussels last week and will hold a formal summit in July in Washington.
That session could be contentious. Fears of a Ukrainian collapse are increasing, and an increasing number of policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic believe the alliance should go all in for Kiev, assuming away the risks of a broader conventional and potential nuclear war.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron played the Napoleon card, suggesting that allies deploy troops to Ukraine. While meeting with his European counterparts, he opined, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.” When criticized, he doubled down: “For us to decide today to be weak, to decide today that we would not respond, is being defeated already.”
Macron imagines that putting allied troops in Ukrainian cities would immunize the latter from attack, deterring Moscow without war. He drew support from officials in Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. More serious governments, including the Biden administration, rejected the idea. After all, Americans would bear the principal burden and pay the greatest cost of a broader war.
Nevertheless, as Warsaw pointed out, some members already have deployed troops to Ukraine. Others are threatening to act on their own. Reported the Wall Street Journal: “Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico told a televised briefing that preparatory materials he had received for the summit sent shivers down his spine. The documents, he said, suggested that a number of NATO and EU countries were considering sending troops to Ukraine. Fico added: ‘I cannot say for what purpose and what they should be doing there’.” The author Edward Luttwak helpfully offered detailed military missions for the transatlantic alliance:
NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat. The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops—both small elite units and logistics and support personnel—who can remain far from the front. The latter could play an essential role by releasing their Ukrainians counterparts for retraining in combat roles. NATO units could also relieve Ukrainians currently tied up in the recovery and repair of damaged equipment, and could take over the technical parts of existing training programs for new recruits. These NATO soldiers might never see combat—but they don’t have to in order to help Ukraine make the most of its own scarce manpower.
Whether or not such personnel went mano-a-mano with Moscow’s troops, they would be actively involved in the war and thus valid targets. Given Russia’s extensive missile and drone attacks, allied casualties would be inevitable. In that event, Macron said, neither the U.S. nor NATO need be involved, but that is easier said now than done then, with bodies being shipped back to European nations and possibly America. An expanded conventional and possible nuclear war could scarcely be avoided.
Others freely advocate direct intervention in combat, though for nominally defensive purposes. For instance, retired Col. Alexander Crowther suggested sending personnel to run anti-missile batteries: “You’d have to be really clear to Putin [and] say, ‘We’re sending people to Ukraine, they’re not going to be doing offensive combat against you’.” Alas, Moscow isn’t likely to respect that distinction. Allied troops would be actively engaging Russian forces and could scarcely be ignored by Moscow. In that case, Crowther would be inviting massive retaliation.
Yet some European and American officials would go even further. They have urged deploying aerial and naval armadas to sweep the skies and seas of Russian forces, intervening more broadly “to decisively turn the military tide,” and even employing nuclear weapons against what they appear to perceive as the Mongols reborn. These would risk World War III, putting thousands and perhaps millions of lives in the balance. Proponents of such measures appear more than a little deranged.
Indeed, what ties such proposals together is that only Washington has sufficient power to overcome Moscow. NATO members which barely pretend to field a military are currently plotting how to effectively borrow U.S. forces. The very structure of the transatlantic alliance, treating all members as equals, encourages dangerous flights of fancy by ivory tower warriors across the continent. Consider the complaints of Eastern Europeans that they deserve to fill NATO’s top spot, the secretary generalship, for which the Netherlands’ former Prime Minister Mark Rutte is the strong favorite to replace retiring Jens Stoltenberg. Both Estonia’s prime minister and Romania’s president considered running. The former asked, “Are we equals or are we not equals? So these questions still remain.” Artis Pabriks, former defense minister of Latvia, complained that “we feel that we were not consulted enough.”
Estonia may be a lovely tourist destination, but with only 7,100 men and women under arms it is but a rounding error in any conflict with Russia. Tallinn shouldn’t oversee anything military in NATO, except maybe providing an honor guard for visiting dignitaries in Brussels. Latvia has even less credibility with just 6,600 people under arms. At least Romania, which fields a military of 69,900, is more serious.
In fact, few governments in Europe look good. The former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves asked of Rutte, “What moral credibility does this guy have?” Rotterdam has chronically failed to hit NATO’s two percent of GDP target. Moreover, the Netherlands fields fewer than half as many soldiers as Romania. Italy and Spain have sizable economies but risible militaries. Germany’s long-term commitment is uncertain at best.
Even the United Kingdom, with Europe’s best military, is not ready for war with Russia. London is shrinking its army as it trims plans to increase military outlays. Sky News’ Deborah Haynes observed that “the armed forces would run out of ammunition ‘in a few days’ if called upon to fight”; “the UK lacks the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring”; and “it would take five to 10 years for the army to be able to field a war-fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and helicopters.”
Only slightly less reckless than entering the war are proposals to bring Ukraine into NATO—which most members have continued to reject despite the 2008 Bucharest declaration endorsing the inclusion of Kiev and Tbilisi. Indeed no one in NATO wanted to defend either country, so members lied for the next 14 years about their willingness to invite the two governments to join. Alas, having previously been misled about NATO expansion, Moscow took the prospect seriously, which ultimately animated Vladimir Putin’s invasion decision. Even then the alliance wasn’t prepared for nuclear war over Ukraine and stayed out. Nor are most members prepared for such a conflict today, despite the increasing attempt by Eastern Europeans to drag America into the war.
Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken continues to encourage Ukraine while refusing to act, declaring: “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.” But if Kiev isn’t worth risking mass casualties and destruction today, it won’t be worth doing so tomorrow. With some Europeans nevertheless pushing to deploy troops to Ukraine and risk war with Russia, Washington should tell Europe to put up or shut up.
Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible for invading Ukraine. For that Moscow bears responsibility for mass death and destruction. Nevertheless, the U.S. and European states did much to encourage the conflict and share blame for the resulting horror.
That makes it even more important for the allies to step back from the abyss. Washington long ago recognized that Ukraine matters little for America’s defense. Kiev spent most of US history as part of the Russian empire in one form or another. Washington never considered going to war over who ruled Kiev. It should not do so now.
The Biden administration should make very clear that if European meddling in Ukraine leads to war, America’s allies are on their own, NATO notwithstanding. There is no alliance obligation to rescue those joining someone else’s fight. Washington also should forthrightly reject Kiev’s NATO aspirations. No one has a right to join. Alliances are supposed to increase security. Accepting a country at war with Russia would yield conflict not peace.
Instead of prolonging the Russo-Ukraine war, Washington and its allies should work to bring hostilities to a close. Doing so won’t be easy, but the ongoing proxy war risks expansion and escalation. Ukraine is not worth that risk. To properly celebrate NATO’s 75th anniversary, the Biden administration should end today’s proxy war.
The post If Europe Pushes Putin, America Should Tap Out appeared first on The American Conservative.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, reiterated that Ukraine will one day join NATO. It is a meaningless, almost theological gesture—practically pagan hymn-chanting at this point. Blinken knows his promise to be untrue. European allies know it to be untrue. The majority of Americans either don’t care about Ukraine or are actively opposed to further engagement in Europe. The Republicans are a changed party, as evident from thunderous responses from Republican senators. Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance tweeted, “This is completely irresponsible. Ukraine should not join NATO, and to invite them during a war is to invite our nation into war. Do you want American ground troops in Ukraine? If not, we must push back against the idea that Ukraine should join NATO.” Senator Lee echoed the sentiment, tweeting (with a link to an op-ed published in these pages), “NATO can have Ukraine. Or the U.S. But not both.”
It is, of course, deeply cynical to dangle the NATO carrot in front of Ukraine especially, when NATO did not let them join after the Bucharest summit and will not in future. The argument goes that NATO members will welcome Ukraine only once they have solved their existing security issue, i.e. join a defensive alliance when the need for defense is over. To any sane person, that sounds absurd—that would mean the security issue will not be solved in this lifetime, and it will continue to be a frozen conflict. Russia has no incentive to end the simmering conflict in Ukraine unless Ukrainian neutrality is legally guaranteed, and will continue to bleed Ukraine dry until there are no men left to fight.
To argue against unlimited expansion of NATO and the EU goes against liberal theology and the current raison d’etre for both the organizations. To say openly that there will be no expansion and the club will remain closed, because (despite weakness) Russia is a major power and Russian tacit veto in her backyard matters, will be tantamount to admitting that norms are nonsense, the world is anarchical, realism is still the best path to equilibrium and great power peace, history hasn’t ended, and only great powers matter in foreign policy—which is to say, all is as it has always been.
To admit that publicly is verboten, regardless of how true it is. Hence all this incoherence from an administration that argues that the U.S. will not send troops to Ukraine and start a third world war, while arguing that the U.S. will be treaty bound to defend Ukraine someday and risk a third world war. It makes no sense, but such is the current grand strategy of the preeminent great power of the world.
Naturally, this nonsense is purely for domestic consumption. Yet the result is a continuation of false hope for Ukraine and Georgia, one that may lead to their extinction as states. There will not be any NATO cavalry over the hills (although not for lack of trying by some). The best we can do is seek a compromise making Ukraine and Georgia neutral buffers, similar to Austria during the Cold War. But for that, Washington needs bolder leadership to admit some hard truths and render some strategic coherence.
The post Antony Blinken Plays Politics with Ukraine’s NATO Membership appeared first on The American Conservative.
While normal people were celebrating Easter this past Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson was on Fox News to tout the upcoming push for Ukraine aid in the lower chamber. The particulars are still vague, but no less disturbing for that.
The point I’d like to fix on here is that Johnson seems to think structuring the aid as a loan is a live option. I guess it’s manuring season in Louisiana. As we’ve written before, a zero-interest waivable loan is just a grant by another name—a name that, lawmakers hope, will bamboozle the American people into thinking they’re not really handing out more money to Ukraine.
“Once Ukraine gets back on its feet, they will be an economic powerhouse because of their access to mass deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas,” claimed Sen. Lindsey Graham in support of the idea.
If any poor booby in Congress thinks this will be a bona fide loan, I advise that he exert the supreme effort to use his noggin. If Ukraine is such a prospective powerhouse because of its natural resources and human capital, why wasn’t it a massive European success story before the outbreak of the war? If the good senator from South Carolina proves to be wrong, the loans will be a significant drag on Ukraine’s fisc—as every war loan and indemnity in history has been, from the settlement of the Haitian revolution up until now. Forcing Ukraine to continue payments will keep it weaker and less able to defend itself without American help, the Ukraine boosters, now hard-headed realists, will argue. Why not give them a fighting chance with the forgiving stroke of a pen?
This is, frankly, goofy. It’s also insulting. As I wrote when the proposal was first floated, I think further Ukraine aid is not a good idea; I think it is out of step with the priorities of the American people; I also recognize that sometimes, in a representative democracy, your position loses. Fine. But trying to get around the “representative democracy” part by pulling a fast one instead of making the case for the policy you really want—that should be punished.
If Republican leadership allows this to go through, there should be consequences—ultimately from the voters, but also from any legislators who have something approaching a principle. The House motion to vacate rule is still there. Why not give it a spin again, for old times’ sake?
The post Ukraine ‘Loans’ Are Still a Rip-Off Job appeared first on The American Conservative.
Macron’s comments about boots on the ground may hold more than meets the eye.
Russia’s “Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Area of Nuclear Deterrence,” a high-level strategic document, says that Russia “hypothetically” could allow the use of nuclear weapons only “in response to aggression using WMD [weapons of mass destruction]” or if there is “aggression using conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is threatened.”
Responding to France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s February 6 statement that “no option should be discarded” in ensuring the defeat of Russia, including “troops on the ground” in Ukraine, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that “we are ready to use any weapon, including [tactical nuclear weapons], when it comes to the existence of the Russian state and harm to our sovereignty and independence. Everything is spelt out in our strategy, we have not changed it.”
Macron replied that France is also a nuclear power. “We must first and foremost feel protected,” Macron said, “because we are a nuclear power.” He then added, “We are ready; we have a doctrine [for the use of nuclear weapons].”
France is ready to send troops into Ukraine “to counter the Russian forces” and even to prepare for nuclear war. In a March 19 opinion piece in the French paper Le Monde, General Pierre Schill, Chief of the French Army Staff, declares that “nuclear deterrence safeguards France’s vital interests.” Reminding the world of France’s “international responsibilities” and “interests” and “defense agreements,” he says that “the French army is preparing for the toughest engagements, making this known and demonstrating it.”
But what do the French really mean by saying they are “preparing for the toughest engagement” and that Europe must be “ready” to have “troops on the ground” in Ukraine?
Macron has said that NATO must not discard the option of “troops on the ground” to ensure that “Russia does not win.” But win what? Does Macron want to ensure that Russia does not defeat Ukraine for Ukraine’s sake, or does he mean that Russia should not win in Ukraine for the subsequent defense of Europe?
Macron said that the time was coming “in our Europe where it will be appropriate not to be a coward” and that it is time for a “strategic leap.” He pressed Germany to send their long-range Taurus missiles, reminding them that they once said, “‘Never, never tanks; never, never planes; never, never long-range missiles’…. I remind you that two years ago, many around this table said: ‘We will offer sleeping bags and helmets.’”
When it came to the option of sending troops into Ukraine, Macron said that anyone who advocates “limits” on how the West helps Ukraine “chooses defeat.” He insisted that “if the situation should deteriorate, we would be ready to make sure that Russia never wins that war.” Europe must be “ready,” he said, “to reach the means to achieve our objective, which is that Russia does not win.”
It sounded as if Macron was talking about Russian victory in Ukraine again when he considered the threshold for sending troops. “We’re not in that situation today,” he said, but “all these options are on the table.” Following a March 7 meeting with parliamentary parties, Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party, reportedly said that “Macron referenced a scenario that could lead to intervention [of French troops]: the advancement of the front towards Odessa or Kiev.”
Macron’s objective again seemed to solely be Ukraine when he said in a March 14 interview, “We are doing everything we can to help Ukraine defeat Russia, because I will say it very simply: there can be no lasting peace if there is no sovereignty, if there is no return to Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including Crimea.”
But, against all these apparent narrow references to Ukraine, Macron’s subsequent discussions of the threshold for troops sounded more as if they were about the defense of Europe than of Ukraine. He said that “war is back on our [i.e. Europe’s] soil” and that Russia is “extending every day their threat of attacking us even more, and that we will have to live up to history and the courage that it requires.”
On March 14, Macron, again expressing his position that sending troops from NATO countries is an option that should not be discarded, said that “to have peace in Ukraine, we must not be weak.” This time, he gave as his reason that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “existential for our Europe and for France.”
He proceeded to say that “it wouldn’t be us” who would trigger such a move and that France would not lead an offensive into Ukraine against Russia. “It would be Russia’s sole choice and sole responsibility,” he said. And then he added, “If war was to spread to Europe,” it would “be weak, to decide today that we would not respond.”
But even if Macron means defending Europe from Russia, does he mean from an actual attack or simply a potential attack?
With several of his aforementioned statements, Macron sounds like he means that Europe must be ready to defend against an actual attack from Russia after it defeats Ukraine. Yet elsewhere, Macron sounds like he is referring only to a potential attack, saying that Russia must not be victorious in Ukraine because that “would reduce Europe’s credibility to zero” and would mean that “we have no security.”
Interpreting Macron’s motives may be even more difficult than ascertaining his statements’ bare meaning. Why would Macron express the previously inexpressible and risk crossing the red line of a third world war?
It is of course impossible to know Macron’s mind, so any analysis is speculative. But there are at least three possibilities.
The first is that the intended target of his comments is not Russia at all, but the U.S. and Germany. With American war funding struggling against a congressional dam and Germany refusing to send Taurus long-range missiles, Macron may be trying to apply psychological pressure to his allies to send Ukraine more money and weapons assuming they would find that option more palatable than going even further and sending troops.
The second is that the intended target of his comments is Russia. In this possibility, the goal is to create “strategic ambiguity.” The purpose would be, as explained by one French diplomat, so that Russia, as it advances west in Ukraine, cannot rely on the assumption “that none of Ukraine’s partner countries will ever be deployed” to Ukraine.
The French newspaper Le Monde reports that “Macron’s office explained that the aim is to restore the West’s ‘strategic ambiguity.’ After the failure of the Ukrainian 2023 counter-offensive, the French president believes that promising tens of billions of euros in aid and delivering—delayed—military equipment to Kyiv is no longer enough. Especially if Putin is convinced that the West has permanently ruled out mobilizing its forces.”
The third possibility is that the intended target of his comments is Europe. Europe must prepare for the possibility of a Trump administration weakening its commitment to Europe and NATO. That would leave Europe with more responsibility for the defense of Ukraine and of itself. While Germany has been the economic leader of Europe, France has seen itself as the security leader.
One diplomat told Le Monde that while Germany “is afraid of escalation…. France wants to give the impression that it isn’t afraid.” Macron “may have wanted to make it clear to Scholz that their two countries are not in the same league” as Macron positions France to be the security leader of Europe in a post-Biden Trump-led world.
Macron has opened the door to the discussion of Western troops on the ground in Ukraine. With the risks that come with opening that door, it will be important for everyone to clarify both Macron’s threshold and his motivation for sending troops to Ukraine.
The post Is France Ready to Fight Russia? appeared first on The American Conservative.
American officials should unashamedly act for the American people.
Could someone please tell Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate’s premier warmongers, that “we” are not at war with Russia? Ukraine is.
The grandstanding warrior wannabe recently visited Kiev. The Zelensky government is under pressure to expand conscription to bulk up its army. Graham enthusiastically backed the effort. Reported the Washington Post: “‘I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27,’ he told reporters Monday. ‘You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving—not at 25 or 27’.” He insisted: “We need more people in the line.”
We? When did Graham accept Ukrainian citizenship and enter the Ukrainian Rada?
Graham is one of many witless American officials who seem to believe that they are to represent foreign countries dealing with the U.S. rather than the U.S. in dealing with foreign countries. This isn’t a new phenomenon. People often have been devoted to other nations reflecting their ethnic or religious background, supporting everything up to military intervention by Washington, often to America’s great disadvantage. A commitment to ancestral homelands accounted for significant backing for NATO’s ill-fated expansion up to Russia’s borders. (So did the desire of the merchants of death to open new markets for weapons sales.)
Graham appears to have a bizarre enthusiasm for sending others off to war, here, there, and almost everywhere. Send is the key verb, at least until now. If we really “need more people in the line,” he could join Ukraine’s forces. After all, Kiev is calling on foreigners to bolster its defense. Several already have died fighting for Ukraine. Graham could finally put his life, rather than the rest of our lives, where his mouth is.
Ukrainians would welcome the move. Many Americans would as well. Graham could demonstrate that he isn’t just a showboating blowhard pretending to be tough, finally fighting in one of the wars into which he desperately sought to plunge the U.S.
The overriding duty of American officeholders is to serve the American people. Indeed, that is why the national government exists. Washington’s foreign policy should focus on U.S. national interests, particularly protecting America’s people, territory, prosperity, and constitutional system.
Of course, the means adopted should reflect the rights and interests of others. Washington has often fallen short of that ideal. Support for a murderous medley of repressive regimes during the Cold War was terrible but at least understandable. Underwriting mass killers and oppressors in such nations as Egypt and Saudi Arabia—particular favorites of dictator fanboy Graham—today is less forgivable.
At least Ukraine deserves our sympathy, in contrast to such ruthless autocracies. Nevertheless, even Kiev’s fight is more complicated than commonly presented. Ukraine is hardly a Western-style liberal democracy. Freedom House rates Kiev only “partly free,” hardly a ringing endorsement. The latter’s leaders indulge in demagoguery and demonization against foreigners who don’t kowtow and back their demands. (Russia, of course, is more oppressive and its brutal invasion, which has wreaked such carnage for both countries, was not justified, despite the West’s reckless and belligerent behavior. Primary blame for the war remains with Moscow.)
Nevertheless, for Washington, Americans’ interests should remain central. It is one thing to wish Kiev well. It is quite another to launch a global nuclear war on its behalf, as proposed by Mississippi’s reckless, even unhinged, Sen. Roger Wicker. Those pressing to arm Ukraine irrespective of consequences and undertake the most aggressive ends—retake Crimea, overthrow the Putin government, and break up the Russian Federation—are only slightly less foolish. The U.S. already is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers. With a nuclear arsenal that matches America’s, Moscow can respond forcefully, and with a military doctrine that relies on nuclear weapons to cover its relative conventional weakness is likely to do so if it fears defeat.
Nothing about the Russo–Ukrainian conflict warrants risking war with Russia.
Of course, the Ukraine lobby puts forth several reasons why Washington policymakers should put Kiev’s desires first. None are persuasive. One is that if victorious, Putin’s legions aren’t likely to stop, but would surge westward. A new evil empire would be born.
It is difficult to articulate what Moscow would hope to gain from assaulting the rest of the continent. Indeed, Putin, noting such hysterical claims, responded, “The whole of NATO cannot fail to understand that Russia has no reason, no interest—neither geopolitical, nor economic, nor political, nor military—to fight with NATO countries.” Of course, nothing he says should be taken on faith, just as it would be foolish to trust U.S. and allied officials who have violated their commitments and lied about their plans.
Nevertheless, while Putin is not a gentle liberal, he also isn’t a militaristic lunatic. Indeed, he originally hoped for a positive relationship with the West, telling the German Bundestag in 2001: “No one calls in question the great value of Europe’s relations with the United States. I am just of the opinion that Europe will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent center of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defense potential.”
Nothing Putin has said or done since suggests he is interested in European conquest. His military assaults, while lawless, have been limited to Georgia and Ukraine, and do not make him Hitler reincarnated. Even now President George W. Bush is responsible for far more civilian deaths. Moscow always viewed Tbilisi and Kiev differently and made clear NATO expansion could trigger a violent response. In 2008, CIA Director William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, expressed what today would be dismissed as Putin talking points: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players…. I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Equally important, who imagines that the Russian army, which in more than two years of war in Ukraine has suffered severe losses while making only modest territorial gains, would go on to conquer the Baltics and Poland, march down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, sweep past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and reach the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean? Even over the long-term Moscow’s military potential remains limited. Europe possesses a much larger economy and population than Russia; the European governments already spend far more on the military. The key to Europe’s defense is Europe, not Ukraine.
Much is made about the supposed malign precedent set by a potential Russian victory. Then authoritarians everywhere—meaning China, North Korea, and Iran, after which the list of expected evildoers and aggressors runs out—would take note and launch their own bids for world domination. Yet this claim also makes little sense.
Aggression almost always reflects local conditions. Iran’s conventional military is weak; Tehran’s main ability is to strike out unconventionally, which it already is doing. Ukraine is meaningless as a precedent for the Korean peninsula, where the U.S. previously defended the South, and with which America retains a defense treaty and troop tripwire
Beijing knows that the U.S. would provide weapons and training to Taiwan since Washington is already doing so. In Ukraine Europe has already demonstrated its willingness to impose restrictions on commerce and finance. Privately, Chinese officials indicate that their government already expects an American military response to any attack, especially since President Joe Biden has several times said that he would intervene. From Beijing’s standpoint, Ukraine is a welcome distraction for Washington. The conflict also drives Russia closer to China.
Finally, advocates of perpetual war argue that failure in Ukraine would hurt America’s credibility. Washington has survived multiple mistakes, disasters, and crimes over the years. Despite Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Iran, Poland, Somalia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Hong Kong, Venezuela, and Afghanistan, foreign governments, including Ukraine and Taiwan, continue to flock to Washington begging for money, arms, treaties, and promises. After nearly 80 years punctuated by frustration and disappointment, the Europeans still put their defense in Washington’s hands, whining and wailing at the slightest suggestion that the U.S. might leave them responsible for their own defense. America would survive failure in Ukraine.
In short, the conflict, though a humanitarian horror, is not a vital security interest for the U.S. It does not warrant fighting an endless proxy war. There is no “we” when it comes to the Russo–Ukrainian war. America’s interests stand apart.
The U.S. retains a stake in a stable and peaceful Europe. Washington also prefers Kiev’s survival as an independent and sovereign government, with its people free to make their own political and economic choices. The best way to achieve both these ends would be to engage Russia over a revised security order. Reaching a workable compromise wouldn’t be easy. Nevertheless, with Ukraine as the battlefield, it is in Kiev’s as well as America’s interest to end the conflict sooner rather than later.
Foreign governments long have sought to influence the U.S. government, distorting American foreign policy for their benefit. Graham and other members of the Washington War Party have been only too willing to do the bidding of favored foreign interests, confusing “them” with “we.” American officials should unashamedly act for the American people.
The post U.S. Officials Believe That ‘We’ Are at War With Russia appeared first on The American Conservative.
The more-than-1,000-page, $1.2 trillion minibus dropped just before 3 a.m. Thursday morning. Will anyone finish reading it before Congress votes on it?
In what has been a long, drawn-out appropriations process for fiscal year 2024, Congressional leaders believe they’ve finally come to an arrangement on the final six spending bills. Will legislators have the time to finish reading the leadership’s back-room deal before it comes to the floor, let alone the opportunity to amend it? Legislators on the Hill doubt it after leadership dropped the 1,000 page bill just before 3 a.m. on Thursday morning, less than 48 hours before a partial government shutdown.
The 1,012 page bill is six appropriations bills clumped together in what’s being called a minibus (short for “mini omnibus”). Legislators in both chambers will have just hours to read through the minibus that carries a $1.2 trillion price tag before likely voting on the package that is set to be rushed through both chambers, despite a rule in the House that promises members 72 hours to review legislation. In an email to The American Conservative, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas put it this way: “House Republicans believe they will inspire Americans to polls by jamming through almost $1.2 trillion in over 1000 pages of open-border funding nonsense with about 24 hours to read it? Situation normal….” The Texas Congressman encouraged TAC to finish the sentence.
Nevertheless, House leadership and GOP appropriators took a victory lap. “House Republicans have achieved significant conservative policy wins, rejected extreme Democrat proposals, and imposed substantial cuts to wasteful agencies and programs while strengthening border security and national defense,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger said the package “funds our highest national security priorities—it invests in a more modern, innovative, and ready fighting force, continues our strong support for our great ally Israel, and provides key border enforcement resources.”
“At the same time, we made cuts to programs that have nothing to do with our national security and pulled back billions from the administration,” the GOP appropriations lead claimed.
Senate leadership has been quiet. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer continued his public dispute with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been silent on the bill so far, presumably as he deals with the bizarre death of his sister-in-law. Both point to a confidence that this bill, given the constraints and potential consequences, will sail through.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah could be making a victory lap of his own: His prophecies about the minibus have all come true. “I made a few predictions earlier in the week,” Lee told TAC. “I predicted that the bill would be more than 1,000 pages. It is. It’s 1,012 pages long. I predicted that it would contain hundreds of earmarks. It does. And I predicted that it would do nothing to address the massive deficit debt that we face. It doesn’t. And I predicted that it would do nothing to force the Biden administration to secure the border and stop the invasion at our southern border. And it doesn’t.”
Lee called the maneuver and the bill “insulting” in a phone interview with The American Conservative. “They’re giving it to us literally the day before the government is going to shut down? And they’re saying, ‘Sorry, there’s no more time to do it. You have to pass this now, or shut down the government and be blamed for the consequences’?”
Lee has taken to calling leadership in both chambers “the firm” as it negotiates massive spending deals behind closed doors. “What they’re saying [in this bill] is that the firm matters more than the people. That the firm’s interest in making sure that only the firm’s language, the firm’s earmarks, that the firm is blessed, is more important than allowing the American people through their elected lawmakers in Washington to have a say in how they spend the people’s money. Trillions of dollars’ worth.”
“No Republicans should vote for the bill for several reasons,” Virginia’s Rep. Bob Good, the House Freedom Caucus chair, told TAC over the phone. “One, it’s got thousands of earmarks for billions of dollars, which is a reason to vote against it to begin with. But of course, some Republicans are benefiting from those. Secondly, we don’t have time to read it to even know what we would be voting for—which is easier for me, since I knew I wasn’t going to vote for it anyway. But if I was going to own everything in that bill, I might want some time to read it to know what I have to defend after I vote for it.”
“At some point, having $35 trillion in debt is going to have an impact, and it’s not going to be sustainable,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida told TAC in a phone interview. “I don’t know when that will be, but something’s going to happen because our interest expense now exceeds defense, exceeds Medicare. And inflation will not come down as long as we run massive deficits.
“In 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government in total spent $4.4 trillion. But Biden is budgeting an increase of basically $3 trillion over that for fiscal year 2025. This year, we’ll probably have a 56 percent increase in terms of total outlays. Discretionary spending has gone up 41 percent since 2018. Our population has grown at probably less than 2 percent, and discretionary spending is up 41 percent, total spending up 56 percent,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin explained to TAC.
“What’s really gross is that this is being reported like it’s austere. I don’t think this is an austere budget,” Johnson added. “How can anybody justify that when we are running trillion and a half dollar deficits every year?”
The six-part minibus funds the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Homeland Security. The DOD will receive $886 billion, a 3 percent increase compared to last year. While DOD accounts for two-thirds of the package’s price tag, the biggest difficulty in spending negotiations since October, whether its base appropriations or supplemental funding, has been DHS, given the chaos on the southern border. At the 11th hour, the Biden administration encouraged congressional leaders to pass a full appropriations bill for DHS rather than another stopgap. Congressional leaders obliged.
$1.2 Trillion.
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) March 21, 2024
~216,000 words.
The #SwampOmnibus spends $5.5 million for every word.
~32 hours before the vote.
That’s 112 words a minute just to finish reading (not real analysis) before the vote…
That’s signing off on over $600 million per minute.
Is Pelosi in charge?
It’s no surprise, however, after McConnell’s recent maneuvering to ensure any border deal made during this Congress would be toothless, that the border security provisions of the minibus will do little to restore order on the southern border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) receives $19.6 billion, which is $3.2 billion more than fiscal year 2023 and amounts to a nearly 20 percent increase in funding. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will receive $9.5 billion, which amounts to about a 14 percent increase compared to FY23.
The southern border is one of the few places where it currently makes sense to boost federal spending, but what is nearly $30 billion buying American taxpayers in border security? Republican appropriators boast that the money provides for 22,000 additional border patrol agents, “which is consistent with H.R. 2.” For a $2.273 billion price tag, GOP appropriators said DHS will add another 7,500 detention beds to increase the total to 41,500. There is also $283.5 million in “new border security technology,” $10 million “for task forces dedicated to countering the flow of fentanyl,” $3.4 billion for custody operations (including the additional beds), and $721 million for removal operations.
It’s $30 billion of lipstick on a pig.
At first glance, more border patrol agents sounds nice. So do more detention beds, when the alternative is catch and release. In the minibus, the GOP completely adopts Democrats’ framing on immigration: It’s simply a process and optics problem. The minibus affirms Democrats’ immigration narrative by providing “$160.1 million for refugee processing, asylum, and work authorization backlog reduction” amid $281.1 million for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), $29.9 million for family reunification, and 12,000 additional Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans.
Further, while GOP appropriators boast these provisions are in line with HR 2, the legislation does not include any provisions that leverage these resources to ensure the Biden administration enforces federal law. What good are 22,000 more CBP agents when the Biden administration orders them to sit on their heels or to rush illegal immigrants into the country as quickly as possible? ICE will, however, be compelled to publish crucial detainee data online, such as the number of transgender detainees.
“It doesn’t matter how many more. We could have 100,000 border agents, but when you have a White House that’s not going to secure the border, they’re just going to process people faster,” Scott told TAC. “There’s nothing in here that’s going to require him to secure the border. This president has made his decision that he’s going to completely be lawless.”
Not to worry, says Republican appropriators—$117 million will be directed towards the Emergency Food and Shelter program for sanctuary jurisdictions struggling to handle the massive influx of illegals. “Well, that’s a huge incentive,” Johnson said in response to more sanctuary jurisdiction funding.
“It contains nothing that forces the Biden administration to stop the invasion, and the chaos, and the humanitarian crisis at our southern border,” Lee told TAC of the supposed border security provisions.
“My concern would be they’re increasing spending for detention and more CBP officers—is that how it’s actually going to be used? Or is it going to be used, as I suspect, to become more efficient at encountering, processing, and dispersing,” Johnson told TAC. “How do you force this President to use the authority he has to secure the border? No matter what agreement we would reach with this guy, you can’t trust him. So now we’ve reached agreement on an appropriations bill. What kind of enforcement mechanism does it have? Can you trust him?”
Johnson reflected on the appropriations and supplemental negotiations since October of last year that led to Republicans being on the back foot. He said that “what was so disappointing in what was masterminded by McConnell, the secret negotiations within our conference” was that “we were looking for an enforcement mechanism” that McConnell, it was later revealed, prevented from the outset.
“What we really need is something that forces action. Because right now, he’s using his discretionary authority to just leave this stuff wide open. We need things that would remove some of his discretionary authority. And we also need things that would force outcomes or condition funding on the achievement of operational control of the border,” Lee said. “This bill doesn’t do any of those things. This is a fig leaf! They’ve offered a fig leaf in favor of border security, and nothing more.”
“The bill does not address any issues we have right now,” Scott claimed. “It’s not addressing the two biggest issues. It’s making inflation worse, and it’s not addressing the border crisis at all.”
Good told TAC that actual border security measures are “essentially non existent” in the bill. More border patrol agents and beds “are both intended by this administration to allow them to more quickly process more illegals into the country,” Good added. “We’ve got a willful, purposeful facilitation of the invasion by this administration who has done this on purpose and obviously doesn’t want any border security.”
Speaker Johnson has admitted as much: “While these changes are welcome, only a significant reversal in policy by the president to enforce the law can ultimately secure our border,” a statement from the house speaker read.
Congressional leaders and appropriators don’t seem to care much about America’s borders, but the minibus does provide millions to protect Ukraine’s borders. The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative will receive $300 million, and another $335 million will be directed towards “U.S. allies and partners facing Russian aggression.”
“Yet again, we’re fetishizing Ukraine’s border security issues, while ignoring our own,” Lee told TAC. “It is criminally reckless.”
“There’s so many questions that remain even unasked, much less unanswered, throughout this appropriation process,” when it comes to Ukraine, Johnson said. “I’m just getting repulsed by it quite honestly.”
This $635 million for the war in Ukraine, which some lawmakers apparently believe is much broader than the administration currently acknowledges, is likely just the tip of the iceberg. “Our foreign policy experts suspect the hundreds of millions for Ukraine is actually billions, due to various slush funds and gimmicks,” one senior Senate Republican staffer told TAC.
The minibus also provides $200 million for a new FBI headquarters—the FBI that has trained its sights on parents at school board meetings and Catholics who attend the traditional Mass. “Obviously, the FBI headquarters issue is a real big disappointment to a lot of Republicans,” Lee said. “This has become a symbolic and a substantive issue for many Republicans and with good reason. Democrats got huge wins with earmarks like that.”
The new FBI headquarters isn’t the only earmark conservatives should deplore, Lee suggested. He started rattling off earmarks in the minibus:
$1.8 million for a hospital in Rhode Island that performs late term abortions. It gives $475,000 for an activist organization that’s curriculum and materials are put together for kids ages two through five and introduces kids to “a wide variety of gender expressions and family structures,” whatever that means. $676,000 for an organization that has been actively supportive of Black Lives Matter. $2.8 million for an institution that released an inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility charter in 2020. $500,000 for a radical activist organization that hosts training workshops on implicit bias, social inclusion, inequity, decolonization, and land acknowledgement. $450,000 for a child care initiative that is being established to give childcare for immigrant families—so instead of securing our border, we’re using our taxpayer money not to secure the border, but to create welfare programs for illegal immigrants who have invaded our country at the invitation of President Biden.
Democrats also secured another billion in climate change funding.
“We ought to at least get something out of it if we’re going to spend this ungodly sum of money on these ridiculous earmarks and all the other bloated spending that this provides,” Lee added. “On border security, and we get nothing—nothing!”
Scott also expressed his disdain for the amount of earmarks in the bill. “We are in $2 trillion dollar deficits, and they’re doing special projects so somebody can brag that they brought money back home and act like that’s free?” Scott asked rhetorically. “It’s not free, somebody has to pay for it.”
Democrats not only boasted about getting their earmarks. They also claimed to have blocked a number of Republican “poison pill[s],” which certainly relate to the most pressing issues facing Americans today. Democrats declared victory over Republican attempts to block funding for “diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community,” prohibit the government from being the arbiters of misinformation, and prevent flying the pride flag over some federal buildings, to name a few.
Leadership in both chambers are expected to jam the bill through as to get the president’s signature before Friday’s end. The House will likely vote on the bill under suspension of the rules around 11 a.m. Friday morning. There’s not much House conservatives can do to stop it.
In the Senate, however, things could get interesting. Lee explained how conservatives might put up a fight in the amendment process:
The majority leader has a tool by which he can effectively block out amendments. He can effectively forestall other senators from having their amendments become pending, and, therefore, making sure that they are addressed, that they get voted on, or are dealt with in some meaningful manner. That procedural tool is colloquially referred to in the senate is “filling the tree.” Once he fills the tree, that power is significant, but a Republican minority, as long as we have at least 41 votes (and currently we have 49 Republicans in the Senate), can push back on that.
The pushback that you give to a majority leader who fills the tree and thus blocks amendments is to, as we say, hold 41. If you hold 41 votes to oppose cloture, that is to vote “no,” on a motion to bring debate to a close, then you can effectively force the majority leader to reconsider and to allow some amendments. Normally, what happens, especially if they see that we have the ability to hold 41 and that we intend to do so, the majority leader will become a lot more gracious, a lot more hospitable, to the idea of having an amendment process, and he will schedule them. So that’s more or less what we’re looking at.
What such a delay can accomplish remains to be seen. “It is fascinating to me that we can’t have a robust amendment process,” Scott told TAC. “If I cant talk somebody into it, that’s my problem, but if I don’t have a chance to talk to people about my ideas, that’s a leadership problem. So this will just be another failed exercise for Republicans, but a great exercise for Democrats where they get exactly what they want, and we get no wins.”
Sen. Johnson would like to see amendments, too. “I think it’s important to have amendment votes because we should be highlighting how Democrats will oppose sending back criminals who are in this country illegally. They will support sanctuary cities getting funding even though sanctuary cities refuse to cooperate with ICE in detaining, or even providing notice when they’re going to release somebody that’s a criminal in this country illegally.”
But Sen. Johnson isn’t optimistic that amendments can stave off the inevitable for long. “Unfortunately, because of this process, it’ll be probably passed within about 48 hours, or something like that, then we’ll move on, we’ll forget about it,” he said. “That’s the well-known process of mortgaging our children’s future.”
The post What Can $1.2 Trillion Buy In Washington? Nothing Good. appeared first on The American Conservative.
The more-than-1,000-page, $1.2 trillion minibus dropped just before 3 a.m. Thursday morning. Will anyone finish reading it before Congress votes on it?
In what has been a long, drawn-out appropriations process for fiscal year 2024, Congressional leaders believe they’ve finally come to an arrangement on the final six spending bills. Will legislators have the time to finish reading the leadership’s back-room deal before it comes to the floor, let alone the opportunity to amend it? Legislators on the Hill doubt it after leadership dropped the 1,000 page bill just before 3 a.m. on Thursday morning, less than 48 hours before a partial government shutdown.
The 1,012 page bill is six appropriations bills clumped together in what’s being called a minibus (short for “mini omnibus”). Legislators in both chambers will have just hours to read through the minibus that carries a $1.2 trillion price tag before likely voting on the package that is set to be rushed through both chambers, despite a rule in the House that promises members 72 hours to review legislation. In an email to The American Conservative, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas put it this way: “House Republicans believe they will inspire Americans to polls by jamming through almost $1.2 trillion in over 1000 pages of open-border funding nonsense with about 24 hours to read it? Situation normal….” The Texas Congressman encouraged TAC to finish the sentence.
Nevertheless, House leadership and GOP appropriators took a victory lap. “House Republicans have achieved significant conservative policy wins, rejected extreme Democrat proposals, and imposed substantial cuts to wasteful agencies and programs while strengthening border security and national defense,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger said the package “funds our highest national security priorities—it invests in a more modern, innovative, and ready fighting force, continues our strong support for our great ally Israel, and provides key border enforcement resources.”
“At the same time, we made cuts to programs that have nothing to do with our national security and pulled back billions from the administration,” the GOP appropriations lead claimed.
Senate leadership has been quiet. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer continued his public dispute with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been silent on the bill so far, presumably as he deals with the bizarre death of his sister-in-law. Both point to a confidence that this bill, given the constraints and potential consequences, will sail through.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah could be making a victory lap of his own: His prophecies about the minibus have all come true. “I made a few predictions earlier in the week,” Lee told TAC. “I predicted that the bill would be more than 1,000 pages. It is. It’s 1,012 pages long. I predicted that it would contain hundreds of earmarks. It does. And I predicted that it would do nothing to address the massive deficit debt that we face. It doesn’t. And I predicted that it would do nothing to force the Biden administration to secure the border and stop the invasion at our southern border. And it doesn’t.”
Lee called the maneuver and the bill “insulting” in a phone interview with The American Conservative. “They’re giving it to us literally the day before the government is going to shut down? And they’re saying, ‘Sorry, there’s no more time to do it. You have to pass this now, or shut down the government and be blamed for the consequences’?”
Lee has taken to calling leadership in both chambers “the firm” as it negotiates massive spending deals behind closed doors. “What they’re saying [in this bill] is that the firm matters more than the people. That the firm’s interest in making sure that only the firm’s language, the firm’s earmarks, that the firm is blessed, is more important than allowing the American people through their elected lawmakers in Washington to have a say in how they spend the people’s money. Trillions of dollars’ worth.”
“No Republicans should vote for the bill for several reasons,” Virginia’s Rep. Bob Good, the House Freedom Caucus chair, told TAC over the phone. “One, it’s got thousands of earmarks for billions of dollars, which is a reason to vote against it to begin with. But of course, some Republicans are benefiting from those. Secondly, we don’t have time to read it to even know what we would be voting for—which is easier for me, since I knew I wasn’t going to vote for it anyway. But if I was going to own everything in that bill, I might want some time to read it to know what I have to defend after I vote for it.”
“At some point, having $35 trillion in debt is going to have an impact, and it’s not going to be sustainable,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida told TAC in a phone interview. “I don’t know when that will be, but something’s going to happen because our interest expense now exceeds defense, exceeds Medicare. And inflation will not come down as long as we run massive deficits.
“In 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government in total spent $4.4 trillion. But Biden is budgeting an increase of basically $3 trillion over that for fiscal year 2025. This year, we’ll probably have a 56 percent increase in terms of total outlays. Discretionary spending has gone up 41 percent since 2018. Our population has grown at probably less than 2 percent, and discretionary spending is up 41 percent, total spending up 56 percent,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin explained to TAC.
“What’s really gross is that this is being reported like it’s austere. I don’t think this is an austere budget,” Johnson added. “How can anybody justify that when we are running trillion and a half dollar deficits every year?”
The six-part minibus funds the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Homeland Security. The DOD will receive $886 billion, a 3 percent increase compared to last year. While DOD accounts for two-thirds of the package’s price tag, the biggest difficulty in spending negotiations since October, whether its base appropriations or supplemental funding, has been DHS, given the chaos on the southern border. At the 11th hour, the Biden administration encouraged congressional leaders to pass a full appropriations bill for DHS rather than another stopgap. Congressional leaders obliged.
$1.2 Trillion.
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) March 21, 2024
~216,000 words.
The #SwampOmnibus spends $5.5 million for every word.
~32 hours before the vote.
That’s 112 words a minute just to finish reading (not real analysis) before the vote…
That’s signing off on over $600 million per minute.
Is Pelosi in charge?
It’s no surprise, however, after McConnell’s recent maneuvering to ensure any border deal made during this Congress would be toothless, that the border security provisions of the minibus will do little to restore order on the southern border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) receives $19.6 billion, which is $3.2 billion more than fiscal year 2023 and amounts to a nearly 20 percent increase in funding. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will receive $9.5 billion, which amounts to about a 14 percent increase compared to FY23.
The southern border is one of the few places where it currently makes sense to boost federal spending, but what is nearly $30 billion buying American taxpayers in border security? Republican appropriators boast that the money provides for 22,000 additional border patrol agents, “which is consistent with H.R. 2.” For a $2.273 billion price tag, GOP appropriators said DHS will add another 7,500 detention beds to increase the total to 41,500. There is also $283.5 million in “new border security technology,” $10 million “for task forces dedicated to countering the flow of fentanyl,” $3.4 billion for custody operations (including the additional beds), and $721 million for removal operations.
It’s $30 billion of lipstick on a pig.
At first glance, more border patrol agents sounds nice. So do more detention beds, when the alternative is catch and release. In the minibus, the GOP completely adopts Democrats’ framing on immigration: It’s simply a process and optics problem. The minibus affirms Democrats’ immigration narrative by providing “$160.1 million for refugee processing, asylum, and work authorization backlog reduction” amid $281.1 million for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), $29.9 million for family reunification, and 12,000 additional Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans.
Further, while GOP appropriators boast these provisions are in line with HR 2, the legislation does not include any provisions that leverage these resources to ensure the Biden administration enforces federal law. What good are 22,000 more CBP agents when the Biden administration orders them to sit on their heels or to rush illegal immigrants into the country as quickly as possible? ICE will, however, be compelled to publish crucial detainee data online, such as the number of transgender detainees.
“It doesn’t matter how many more. We could have 100,000 border agents, but when you have a White House that’s not going to secure the border, they’re just going to process people faster,” Scott told TAC. “There’s nothing in here that’s going to require him to secure the border. This president has made his decision that he’s going to completely be lawless.”
Not to worry, says Republican appropriators—$117 million will be directed towards the Emergency Food and Shelter program for sanctuary jurisdictions struggling to handle the massive influx of illegals. “Well, that’s a huge incentive,” Johnson said in response to more sanctuary jurisdiction funding.
“It contains nothing that forces the Biden administration to stop the invasion, and the chaos, and the humanitarian crisis at our southern border,” Lee told TAC of the supposed border security provisions.
“My concern would be they’re increasing spending for detention and more CBP officers—is that how it’s actually going to be used? Or is it going to be used, as I suspect, to become more efficient at encountering, processing, and dispersing,” Johnson told TAC. “How do you force this President to use the authority he has to secure the border? No matter what agreement we would reach with this guy, you can’t trust him. So now we’ve reached agreement on an appropriations bill. What kind of enforcement mechanism does it have? Can you trust him?”
Johnson reflected on the appropriations and supplemental negotiations since October of last year that led to Republicans being on the back foot. He said that “what was so disappointing in what was masterminded by McConnell, the secret negotiations within our conference” was that “we were looking for an enforcement mechanism” that McConnell, it was later revealed, prevented from the outset.
“What we really need is something that forces action. Because right now, he’s using his discretionary authority to just leave this stuff wide open. We need things that would remove some of his discretionary authority. And we also need things that would force outcomes or condition funding on the achievement of operational control of the border,” Lee said. “This bill doesn’t do any of those things. This is a fig leaf! They’ve offered a fig leaf in favor of border security, and nothing more.”
“The bill does not address any issues we have right now,” Scott claimed. “It’s not addressing the two biggest issues. It’s making inflation worse, and it’s not addressing the border crisis at all.”
Good told TAC that actual border security measures are “essentially non existent” in the bill. More border patrol agents and beds “are both intended by this administration to allow them to more quickly process more illegals into the country,” Good added. “We’ve got a willful, purposeful facilitation of the invasion by this administration who has done this on purpose and obviously doesn’t want any border security.”
Speaker Johnson has admitted as much: “While these changes are welcome, only a significant reversal in policy by the president to enforce the law can ultimately secure our border,” a statement from the house speaker read.
Congressional leaders and appropriators don’t seem to care much about America’s borders, but the minibus does provide millions to protect Ukraine’s borders. The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative will receive $300 million, and another $335 million will be directed towards “U.S. allies and partners facing Russian aggression.”
“Yet again, we’re fetishizing Ukraine’s border security issues, while ignoring our own,” Lee told TAC. “It is criminally reckless.”
“There’s so many questions that remain even unasked, much less unanswered, throughout this appropriation process,” when it comes to Ukraine, Johnson said. “I’m just getting repulsed by it quite honestly.”
This $635 million for the war in Ukraine, which some lawmakers apparently believe is much broader than the administration currently acknowledges, is likely just the tip of the iceberg. “Our foreign policy experts suspect the hundreds of millions for Ukraine is actually billions, due to various slush funds and gimmicks,” one senior Senate Republican staffer told TAC.
The minibus also provides $200 million for a new FBI headquarters—the FBI that has trained its sights on parents at school board meetings and Catholics who attend the traditional Mass. “Obviously, the FBI headquarters issue is a real big disappointment to a lot of Republicans,” Lee said. “This has become a symbolic and a substantive issue for many Republicans and with good reason. Democrats got huge wins with earmarks like that.”
The new FBI headquarters isn’t the only earmark conservatives should deplore, Lee suggested. He started rattling off earmarks in the minibus:
$1.8 million for a hospital in Rhode Island that performs late term abortions. It gives $475,000 for an activist organization that’s curriculum and materials are put together for kids ages two through five and introduces kids to “a wide variety of gender expressions and family structures,” whatever that means. $676,000 for an organization that has been actively supportive of Black Lives Matter. $2.8 million for an institution that released an inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility charter in 2020. $500,000 for a radical activist organization that hosts training workshops on implicit bias, social inclusion, inequity, decolonization, and land acknowledgement. $450,000 for a child care initiative that is being established to give childcare for immigrant families—so instead of securing our border, we’re using our taxpayer money not to secure the border, but to create welfare programs for illegal immigrants who have invaded our country at the invitation of President Biden.
Democrats also secured another billion in climate change funding.
“We ought to at least get something out of it if we’re going to spend this ungodly sum of money on these ridiculous earmarks and all the other bloated spending that this provides,” Lee added. “On border security, and we get nothing—nothing!”
Scott also expressed his disdain for the amount of earmarks in the bill. “We are in $2 trillion dollar deficits, and they’re doing special projects so somebody can brag that they brought money back home and act like that’s free?” Scott asked rhetorically. “It’s not free, somebody has to pay for it.”
Democrats not only boasted about getting their earmarks. They also claimed to have blocked a number of Republican “poison pill[s],” which certainly relate to the most pressing issues facing Americans today. Democrats declared victory over Republican attempts to block funding for “diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community,” prohibit the government from being the arbiters of misinformation, and prevent flying the pride flag over some federal buildings, to name a few.
Leadership in both chambers are expected to jam the bill through as to get the president’s signature before Friday’s end. The House will likely vote on the bill under suspension of the rules around 11 a.m. Friday morning. There’s not much House conservatives can do to stop it.
In the Senate, however, things could get interesting. Lee explained how conservatives might put up a fight in the amendment process:
The majority leader has a tool by which he can effectively block out amendments. He can effectively forestall other senators from having their amendments become pending, and, therefore, making sure that they are addressed, that they get voted on, or are dealt with in some meaningful manner. That procedural tool is colloquially referred to in the senate is “filling the tree.” Once he fills the tree, that power is significant, but a Republican minority, as long as we have at least 41 votes (and currently we have 49 Republicans in the Senate), can push back on that.
The pushback that you give to a majority leader who fills the tree and thus blocks amendments is to, as we say, hold 41. If you hold 41 votes to oppose cloture, that is to vote “no,” on a motion to bring debate to a close, then you can effectively force the majority leader to reconsider and to allow some amendments. Normally, what happens, especially if they see that we have the ability to hold 41 and that we intend to do so, the majority leader will become a lot more gracious, a lot more hospitable, to the idea of having an amendment process, and he will schedule them. So that’s more or less what we’re looking at.
What such a delay can accomplish remains to be seen. “It is fascinating to me that we can’t have a robust amendment process,” Scott told TAC. “If I cant talk somebody into it, that’s my problem, but if I don’t have a chance to talk to people about my ideas, that’s a leadership problem. So this will just be another failed exercise for Republicans, but a great exercise for Democrats where they get exactly what they want, and we get no wins.”
Sen. Johnson would like to see amendments, too. “I think it’s important to have amendment votes because we should be highlighting how Democrats will oppose sending back criminals who are in this country illegally. They will support sanctuary cities getting funding even though sanctuary cities refuse to cooperate with ICE in detaining, or even providing notice when they’re going to release somebody that’s a criminal in this country illegally.”
But Sen. Johnson isn’t optimistic that amendments can stave off the inevitable for long. “Unfortunately, because of this process, it’ll be probably passed within about 48 hours, or something like that, then we’ll move on, we’ll forget about it,” he said. “That’s the well-known process of mortgaging our children’s future.”
The post What Can $1.2 Trillion Can Buy In Washington? Nothing Good. appeared first on The American Conservative.
If the GOP does an end-run around its own members, there should be consequences.
Americans seem to have, for the most part, signed a pact to forget about the Covid-19 era. A prominent exception: the hardworking prosecutors at the Department of Justice, who are still busily hunting down the enterprising citizens who were perhaps not entirely honest in their applications for economic relief, particularly Paycheck Protection Program cash. The Small Business Administration thinks it got ripped off to the tune of $200 billion, which is a number that still moves the needle in Washington, D.C.
This is not much of a surprise; having gotten some PPP money myself amid the apparent death-throes of a startup I was working at in 2020, I can say first-hand that the oversight was not rigorous. My memory of the application for forgiveness is that the form more or less asked you politely whether you were ripping off the SBA; when you said no, you received an almost instantaneous congratulatory message about your loan being forgiven.
So we might be excused for some skepticism about the latest idea for sending American resources to Ukraine: “waivable loans.” As part of the ongoing effort to relive the last war we felt really good about, pro-Ukraine Republicans are floating the idea of giving Kiev aid on a zero-interest “loan” basis, with the lending instruments written such that someone (presumably Congress, perhaps the president) can squelch the loans at a future date. This idea was floated in a speech given in South Carolina by, surprisingly, Donald Trump. (That classic Trump foreign policy technique, agreeing with the last person he spoke to, seems to be fully operational.)
It’s called a loan. Give them the money, and if they can pay it back, they pay it back. If they can’t pay it back, they don’t have to pay it back because they’ve got some problems. But if they go to another nation, they drop us like a dog, like a female drops a male after a date because he doesn’t like her. If that happens to our country, then very simply we call the loan. And we say, ‘We want our money.’ Because we give money, and then they go to another side. As an example, let’s say we give all this money. We’re already into Ukraine for over $200 billion. And they could make a deal with Russia in the next three weeks, and all of a sudden they don’t want to deal with us anymore. We’ve given hundreds of billions of dollars. And why are we at over $200 billion and the European nations are, if you add them up, it’s a very similar-sized economy, they’re at $25 billion.
Sen. Lindsay Graham, an implacable warhawk, took up this recommendation and ran with it (although without any mention of Trump’s inventive, if not clearly practicable, desire to use debt as leverage). In his upbeat post boosting the idea on Twitter, he speculated, “Once Ukraine gets back on its feet, they will be an economic powerhouse because of their access to mass deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas.” (Of course, if that were the case, you have to wonder why the place was such an economic backwater before the war.)
Per multiple outlets, much of the congressional GOP thinks that this is the way out of the impasse over Ukraine aid. POLITICO reports that the specific idea being floated is that the portion of Biden’s $60 billion that is going to the American defense industry to arm Ukraine will be a grant—the GOP has few qualms about corporate welfare for the military–industrial complex—and the $12 billion in cash aid will be a loan. This will allow the Republicans, who have been suffering their first serious attack of fiscal responsibility since the Gingrich era, to eat their guilt and face constituents who are growing skeptical of the gravy-train routine.
In other words, they’re banking on the American people being utterly stupid and letting them off the hook. For the first time in my life, I am compelled to agree with Illinois’s Sen. Dick Durbin, who commented, sneeringly but entirely fairly, “I also would like some waivable loans.” Is there any doubt that this is just grant aid under another name? If the president is the relevant waiving authority, it’ll get written off by Biden. If Congress is the relevant waiving authority, it’ll get written off by the Democrats and GOP warhawks. Functionally, this is a way to slip through a grant despite the ongoing legislative impossibility of a grant.
In a representative democracy, you win some and you lose some. The whole business here is that our legislature argues it out and makes law based on debate and horse-dealing. I, personally, think sending more free money to Ukraine is a pretty dubious affair. I realize there is a risk that this may not be a majority position in the legislature, and I will lump it if my position loses. That’s how these things work. What I resent is another end-run around actually doing the business of the legislature, the debating and horse-dealing part, and instead passing the thing through on what is patently a fig-leaf pretense.
If Republican leadership allows this to go through, there should be consequences—ultimately from the voters, but also from any legislators who have something approaching a principle. The House motion to vacate rule is still there. Why not give it a spin again, for old times’ sake?
The post ‘Waivable Loans’ for Ukraine Are Just Grants appeared first on The American Conservative.
The wisdom of LBJ’s resident contrarian George Ball is as relevant today as it was in the Vietnam era.
The phrase “the Wise Men” referring to the American postwar foreign policy elite was popularized by the authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas nearly 40 years ago, in a book of the same name.
Isaacson and Thomas chronicled the lives of “six friends” who, they claim, shaped American foreign policy in the postwar era. Yet of these 20th century giants, perhaps the wisest of their number received second billing. Indeed, I would argue today that George W. Ball (1909–1994) is among the least heralded of that generation of diplomats and policymakers. But Ball, who came to be known as “the Devil’s Advocate” within the Johnson administration for his tenacious opposition to the American war in Vietnam, deserves another look—especially today, with the Biden administration leading the country into a proxy war against Russia, a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and military action against the Yemeni Houthis, among other foreign misadventures.
Ball’s career in public service spanned half a century, from the 1930s to the 1980s. And everywhere one looks, from the New Deal to Lend Lease, from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to the birth of the European Steel and Coal Community, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Vietnam, one will find George Ball.
Such was the esteem with which Ball was held by his contemporaries that by 1980, our country’s wisest diplomat, George Kennan, was expressing to the era’s most famous historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., his wish that Ball be named Secretary of State. But that exchange took place nearly 45 years ago, and in the intervening years, Ball has fallen quite unfairly into obscurity alongside other giants of the era, including Charles “Chip” Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson.
As early as 1961, Ball warned President John F. Kennedy that, with regard to Vietnam, “Within five years, we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” To which Kennedy responded, “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”
So who was George Ball, and how did he foresee that things would go so wrong before everyone else?
Ball, a brilliant, self-assured product of the American Midwest, was part of the wave of bright young New Dealers who came to Washington in the middle 1930s. Initially posted to Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, he came to represent a species of Democrat that has nearly vanished, a foreign policy hand who intuitively understood the interplay of power, of interests, and of nationalism in an anarchic world. His early forays into foreign affairs came through his work on Lend Lease, the Strategic Bombing Survey, and then, fortuitously, through his work with the architect of the European Coal and Steel Community, Jean Monnet. Needless to say, the French experience in Vietnam in the 1950s, during which time Ball served as the French government’s chief legal counsel in the U.S., was not a happy one. In his memoir, The Past Has Another Pattern, Ball recalled that he
had listened to innumerable French military and civilian experts discuss their nation’s plans, fears and doubts…. From that experience, I concluded — and have never ceased to believe—that we should rigorously avoid land wars in Asia.
President Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam met immediate opposition from Ball, who was by then serving as undersecretary of state. The series of memos and briefings put together by Ball throughout the mid-1960s were so prescient that years later the journalist and author David Halberstam observed that, “Someone reading his papers five years later would have a chilling feeling that they had been written after the fact, not before.”
As early as 1964, responding to the argument that American “credibility” was on the line in Southeast Asia, Ball wrote to the president that “what we might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgment.” We were, in those years, in constant danger of, in Ball’s words, “becoming the puppet of our puppet.” The national security advisor McGeorge Bundy felt that what was really at stake was the country’s image abroad, or as he put it, “the confidence of America’s allies and America’s self-confidence.” Looking back on that period, when all of the president’s top advisers, including Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk counseled greater American involvement on that basis, Ball noted,
America had become a prisoner of whatever Saigon military clique was momentarily in power. Like a heroine in an eighteenth century novel who gets her way by fainting if anyone spoke crossly, each clique understood how to exploit its own weakness. If we demanded anything significant of it, it would collapse; so we never made any serious demands.
Does any of that sound familiar?
The arguments from the pro-interventionists of the Vietnam era are eerily, indeed, wearingly similar to those advanced in our own time in favor of further U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Rusk and the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., advocated for more boots on the ground on the basis of their belief that if we failed to stop the Communists there, there was no telling how far they would go. President Biden’s warning in his recent State of the Union address that, “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” is simply a warmed-over recitation of the Domino Theory, which remains, all these decades later, nothing so much as a fantasy—and one that that becomes all the more dangerous the more one believes it.
Given the risks as laid out so cogently, so painstakingly by Ball, why did Johnson and his men insist on moving forward? Why didn’t McNamara, who for years privately expressed grave reservations, step forward and challenge the escalatory policy of the President?
Part of the answer lies with the fact that the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy was driven by the fear of an influential foreign lobby. In a 1968 interview with the pioneering oral historian Jean Stein, Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland found it “amazing” how
all of the top persons were deceived in Vietnam each time they would go over. It was partly the holdover atmosphere from the McCarthy era…the people in the State Department who should have been speaking out were scared to death. No one except George Ball seemed to question and speak out against our policy. They’d seen the power of the China lobby…the young, inquisitive objective voices in the State Department were so scared by what happened…and by the purges by Dulles, Congress, and others during and after the McCarthy era.
Today, the role of ideological enforcer is played not by the China Lobby but by the Captive Nations lobby, led, of course, by the most fanatical interventionists in Washington. Anyone doubting that such a lobby exists might refer themselves to the current controversies roiling the Helsinki Commission on Capitol Hill. In such an atmosphere, where even relatively meek expressions of dissent are drowned out and condemned by pro-interventionists, one must wonder how many within the administration or on the Hill are dissuaded from speaking out by a fear of being smeared as apologists for Russia.
Johnson’s last secretary of defense, Clark Clifford (who emerged as a voice of dissent once Ball left State in September 1966) shrewdly observed that “individuals sometimes become so bound up in a certain course it is difficult to know where objectivity stops and personal involvement begins.” Clifford’s analysis applies with equal force to the current coterie of new cold warriors who seem to place foreign interests well before the interests of the United States.
Ultimately, however, one must concede that Ball’s opposition to Vietnam was ineffective: By the end of 1968 the US had 549,000 troops in Vietnam. Ball later wrote that he had “no inflated view” of the effectiveness of his advocacy. “I like to think that I somewhat slowed down the escalation,” but even so, “I provided no more than a marginal constraint on the momentum.”
The temptation, then, might be to say: So what if Biden does or doesn’t have a Devil’s Advocate of his own?
Given the risks involved, it is far better to have a truth-teller like Ball on the inside, even if he, as Ball was, is faced with insuperable opposition. After all, the pressure on the President to escalate remains immense. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has in recent weeks repeatedly signaled his determination to send boots on the ground should the Russians break through the current line of contact. The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, who has deep ties to the American political establishment, recently expressed his view that “the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine is not unthinkable.” And within the U.S. establishment the war drums beat as loudly as ever, with articles in organs like Foreign Affairs urging the president to send military advisers to Ukraine.
Indeed, the U.S. has been a co-belligerent in all but in name for some time; after all, three weeks prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, national security reporter Dan Dorfman reported that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets.” And more recent revelations from the New York Times indicate that US involvement on the ground has been more robust than often assumed.
In the end, the absence of a Devil’s Advocate, means, inevitably, as Ball put it, “no restraints and no alternatives.” And alternatives to war are needed now more than ever.
The post Where Is Joe Biden’s ‘Devil’s Advocate’? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Ukraine Aid Transparency Act will clarify who is on the side of an unelected technocracy and who is not.
The American Conservative reported earlier this week on a bill proposed by Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio that would compel the fullest accounting to date of American aid rendered to Ukraine, including via third-party nations. The proposal would address the ongoing problem of mystery spending on our proxy war with Russia: the president’s broad discretionary powers, which, when used as they have been, defy ordinary accounting and undercut the congressional power of the purse. Hence, the Vance legislation cuts to the core of the Ukraine dispute, which isn’t about the prudence of arming Kiev or the nature of American interests in Europe or the size of the American deficit (which is still a concern in some quarters). It has become a conflict over our form of government.
It’s difficult to tell at this late date, but the American constitutional order is built around a robust form of legislative supremacy. The composition of the Senate is the only unamendable section of the Constitution; the Senate is also, via the impeachment mechanism, the nation’s highest court. (“Supreme Court” is in some sense a bit of a misnomer.) We have no office of dictator, no constitutionally recognized states of exception; we have no notion of “the Crown in Parliament.” The powers of ordering peace and war ultimately and without reservation reside in Congress and are devolved at its sufferance.
The Claremont Institute’s Chairman Tom Klingenstein has written and spoken about the American “cold civil war”—how our public life is no longer merely a deliberative back-and-forth over particular policies but a dispute over the actual form of government and, particularly, the grades of the franchise and its consequences. One group is, broadly, un- or anti-American, thinks that the structures of the American state are corrupt from inception or that the American people are too stupid, racist, or otherwise venal to be trusted with self-government, and consequently supports rule by enlightened technocrats, who by nature reside in the executive branch. The other group is, broadly, committed to the occasionally ugly hurly-burly of American representative democracy.
U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict has become one of the defining flashpoints of this cold civil war. There are good-faith arguments—arguments I happen to agree with—for limiting aid to Ukraine. There are also good-faith arguments for continuing or expanding it, even if I find them unpersuasive. Yet, rather than relying on the strength of those arguments, the Ukraine hawks have made it about whether there should be a debate at all. The Ukrainian cause has been subsumed into the technocratic cause.
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” said Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina in February. Michael Brendan Dougherty, our brother in journalism at National Review, rightly points out that this sort of rhetoric is rooted in the premise that the voters are stupid. It is true that we are a republic, not a pure democracy; there is, floating around, the vague residual sense that our politicos ought to have the practical wisdom to be the pilots of the ship of state rather than mere errand boys. Yet the main part of the Ukraine party wants to short-circuit the entire deliberative process. They are insisting on less accountability from the executive and less power for themselves—see the resistance to establishing a special inspector general for Ukraine support. In short, they are passing the buck to the technocrats.
This state of affairs is not the exception; the valorization of the executive at the cost of the legislature has become the norm. Rule by camarilla and administrative cabal is our lot. The Department of Homeland Security has single-handedly suspended the southern border, even as it continues to chew away at the rights of citizens. (This is why the impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is important—it is a reassertion of congressional supremacy.) The Department of Justice looks more and more like a political police. The Pentagon, so far as anyone can tell, does whatever it wants.
Nevertheless, in certain respects, the picture is brighter than it has been for some time. Last May, Congress repealed the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force in Iraq. Legislators of both parties have expressed concern about the unauthorized use of military force in Yemen. There is a real appetite—particularly concentrated in the right flank of the House Republican party, but in some way shared by members of both parties in both chambers—to restore some muscle to the central organ of American national government. It is not efficient, and it is often not very pretty, but tooth-and-nail fights about budgets are the system working as designed; extensive debate about just how much we want to get involved in other countries’ wars is the system working as designed. These powers reside in Congress because it is “inefficient”; it is an organ that discourages rashness.
Vance’s bill not only gives the legislature and the American people a needed tool for deliberating our involvement in this war. In the opposition it draws, it will smoke out the members of the technocratic party—and, in a civil war, cold or not, it’s always helpful to know who is on which side.
The post Vance’s Weapon in the Cold Civil War appeared first on The American Conservative.
The cast may change, but the play is the same.
News came last week that, after a long and storied career, Victoria Nuland resigned as undersecretary of state for political affairs at the U.S. State Department. Over the years she gained a reputation as a neoconservative hardliner, having, among other roles, worked as a top aide to the anti-Russia hardliner Strobe Talbott; as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; and as spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nuland’s reputation also derived partly (and perhaps unfairly) from the family into which she married. So there is an understandable temptation on the part of advocates of realism and restraint to breathe a sigh of relief over her departure from government service.
But one has to wonder: Does Nuland’s figurative defenestration actually matter?
Nuland deservedly got a lot of criticism (not least from this writer) for inserting the U.S. front and center into the geopolitical squabbles afflicting Ukraine. It is widely believed that before, during, and after the Maidan Revolution, she steered both the Obama and Biden administrations toward a more hawkish course than was advisable. But this perhaps inflates her influence; after all, both Obama and Biden have been plenty hawkish on their own on issues outside of Russia–Ukraine; just consider their actions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine.
Informed speculation as to the import of Nuland’s resignation requires us to consider at least three questions:
In the end, it would be a triumph of hope over experience for us to expect too much (if anything) of Victoria Nuland’s departure from government service.
The post Does Victoria Nuland’s Departure Matter? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Accounting problems in the European theater raise the perennial question: What are we doing here?
Last month, with little coverage, the Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve released its first quarterly oversight report of American aid to Ukraine.
Ukraine is entering its third year of war against Russia, and the United States has been there every step of the way with billions of dollars in weapons, military training, humanitarian aid, intended oversight, and more. Thus far, Congress has appropriated a staggering $113.4 billion for Ukraine aid.
Even as we sympathize with Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, we must recognize the significant problems with an open-ended flow of American resources to Ukraine while we face increased dangers to troops in the Middle East and rising threats in the Pacific. But this most recent report raises concerns about how Ukraine funding is managed and used.
A cursory glance at the one-page brief shows “poorly maintained and not fully functional” pre-positioned U.S. weapons, sensitive equipment and weapons “not consistently inventoried,” and Army service contracts in Poland including “lax oversight of logistics.”
A deeper dive into the full report tells of “incomplete shipping manifests” during weapon transfers and poor logistical support resulting in “increased risk of loss or theft” of weapons.
The Defense Department admits to dropping the ball on getting items into their tracking system before they’re even shipped to Ukraine, making the inventory system outdated almost immediately. They have managed to cut down slightly on those delays, but DOD confesses the inventory will never be fully current given the war’s chaos.
Further, the OIG noticed U.S. officials often had no clue where some very sensitive U.S.-origin equipment ends up once it’s in Ukraine.
U.S. European Command is optimistic, claiming there is no evidence of unauthorized transfers of defense articles in country. Yet they also note over a quarter of these items weren’t checked on time. USEUCOM claims this alarming figure as an improvement, hardly reassuring given that in February 2023, an utterly dismal 24 percent of weapons were not properly inventoried.
Sending high-tech gear into a black hole and hoping for the best is a dangerous game.
There is limited training on these highly sophisticated weapons and weapons systems being transferred to Ukraine, calling into question whether Ukraine’s military can use them effectively. Providing the weapons training often puts U.S. troops dangerously close to direct contact with Russian forces, which could mean a wider war involving NATO and nuclear escalation.
The effort to track defense articles highlights the absurdity of thinking we can keep a neat ledger of lethal aid another country is using amid the chaos of conflict. The reality on the ground, where Stinger missiles can swap hands for whiskey, makes the official optimism seem ridiculous and disingenuous.
Meanwhile, the Senate passed another aid package with an additional $60 billion for Ukraine just last month. Congress continues to throw our money into Ukraine aid, while the DOD provides nothing but a figurative shrug when asked for a full accounting.
For those of us who have been in a war zone, this report is a harsh reminder of how disconnected the Washington elites are from how war works on the ground and what missions are effective. Spoiler alert: “Anti-corruption programs that focus on institutional reform” aren’t the most effective missions for the United States in Ukraine, or any country.
You’d think 23 years of nation building in the Middle East would have taught lawmakers that at least. Over and over, we’ve seen the results of pouring so many resources into economies that the aid itself becomes a vector for the corruption it hopes to reduce.
The warfighters know many of these efforts are losing battles with no clear strategy that waste taxpayer dollars, but policymakers with no skin in the game will continue to demonize anyone who dares pull back the curtain, or even suggests a peek behind it.
The president and lawmakers have a responsibility to the American people, first and foremost. The very least they can demand is a complete accounting of every cent, bullet, missile, and piece of aid being sent overseas. Simultaneously, Washington can think about what’s good for America, and what serves her best interests, before thinking about supporting demands from President Zelensky, Ukraine, and Europe.
American troops are under fire in the Middle East and the China threat grows in the Pacific; handing billions of dollars to Ukraine as the tradeoffs mount should not be America’s highest priority.
The post Poor Oversight of Ukraine Aid Is Only the Start of the Problems appeared first on The American Conservative.
Sen. Vance’s bill calls for “a detailed accounting of all United States government-wide expenditures for Ukraine and countries impacted by the situation in Ukraine since February 24, 2022.”
How much money has the United States actually spent supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia? It is quite possibly the most basic and pressing question surrounding America’s continued involvement in the war; yet the Biden administration continues to be cagey with the answer. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio hopes to fix that through a new piece of legislation that will be introduced on Monday afternoon.
The bill, named the Ukraine Aid Transparency Act of 2024, seeks to demystify the current and future cost of Ukraine aid to the American taxpayer by changing reporting requirements in the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in December 2023. While the FY24 NDAA required a report from the administration on U.S. assistance to Ukraine, its language would have allowed the administration to leave out key pieces of information. Not only would the legislation compel the Biden administration into providing Congress with a real dollar value of Ukraine aid—which could currently be undervalued to the tune of billions of dollars—it would reveal how much aid the U.S. has given to other nations in the pursuit of supporting Ukraine while juxtaposing America’s price tag to that of our allies.
“The American people deserve a full and honest accounting of the tax dollars we’ve sent to Ukraine. Biden administration officials have spent years trying to hide the ball on Ukraine spending. As a result, we still don’t know how much U.S. aid to Ukraine will end up costing Americans, how much the Europeans have actually contributed, and more,” Vance told The American Conservative. “This bill is an important step towards ensuring Americans receive the information that Joe Biden owes them.”
The bill’s text, provided to TAC, calls for “a detailed accounting of all United States government-wide expenditures for Ukraine and countries impacted by the situation in Ukraine since February 24, 2022.” The Biden administration would also have to disclose the amount of aid it has yet to execute and provide “a detailed accounting of any outstanding or anticipated costs to be incurred by the United States in relation to United States assistance for Ukraine and countries impacted by the situation in Ukraine.” These “anticipated costs” include replenishing America’s stockpiles of weapons and munitions.
Replenishing America’s stockpiles, which will likely take years, is an increasingly expensive proposition due to increasing variable costs associated with defense acquisition and production. A substantial amount of U.S. aid to Ukraine has been provided through gifts of equipment from the Department of Defense’s stocks through presidential drawdown authority (PDA). Because replacement costs are much higher for new equipment to replace the old (likely $1.5-2 dollars in replenishment money for every $1 dollar of PDA aid), there is a deficit between the amount of Ukraine aid disbursed via PDA and reinvestment in America’s stockpiles. That deficit represents additional American expenditures on Ukraine—eventually, stocks have to be replenished to their pre-drawdown levels. Therefore, even if the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow, the financial impact of the war in the U.S. budget could last long after the cessation of hostilities.
Vance’s bill would also require the administration to compare U.S. aid to Ukraine with allied partners in dollar figures and specific materials, including “a detailed list of all weapons and weapon systems sent to Ukraine” by country.
The legislation would also force the Biden administration to provide legislators with the specific authorities used for the dispensation of Ukraine aid, and to which countries the aid has actually gone to. In some of its previous communication with Congress, the Biden administration has not specified which countries it considers “impacted by the situation in Ukraine” and are thus eligible for aid.
For the first time since the war began, the administration would be compelled to show that the war in Ukraine is worth its weight in gold.
The post EXCLUSIVE: New J.D. Vance Bill Would Reveal True Expense of Biden’s Ukraine War appeared first on The American Conservative.
European discussions about sending troops obscures the fact that several NATO countries already have boots on the ground.
The war in Ukraine has reached that long-feared fork in the road. Ukraine is losing the war, and no amount of arms or aid is going to change that. The West has to either accept that assessment and nudge Ukraine to the negotiating table or send more than arms and aid. It is going to have to escalate its support and send troops, risking direct confrontation with Russia and the disaster scenario it has tried to avoid since the first days of the war.
This realization has sparked a bitter debate in Europe. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said on February 26 that “a number of NATO and EU member states are considering that they will send their troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.” That same day, the French President Emmanuel Macron said that, though “there is no consensus today to send troops on the ground in an official, accepted, and endorsed manner…no option should be discarded.”
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz shot back that the consensus was “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil who are sent there by European states or NATO states.” Germany, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg all said there was no plan to send troops to Ukraine.
Macron replied that the time has come for a “Europe where it will be appropriate not to be a coward.” The German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “talk about boots on the ground or having more courage or less courage…does not really help solve the issues we have when it comes to helping Ukraine.”
The debate over sending NATO troops to Ukraine may be masking the need for more immediate debate about NATO troops already on the ground in Ukraine.
The transcript of an intercepted February 19 conversation between senior German air force officials discussing the possible transfer of German Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine says that the Germans “know how the English do it…. They have several people on-site.” The revelation that the UK has troops on the ground has now been confirmed by the British Prime Minister’s office: “Beyond the small number of personnel we do have in the country supporting the armed forces of Ukraine, we haven’t got any plans for large-scale deployment.”
The transcript says that “the French don’t do it that way,” but Scholz has hinted that they do. On February 26, the German Chancellor defended his decision not to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine by saying that it would require the presence of Germans in Ukraine to match their British and French counterparts. He explained, “What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany.” He worried that “a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.”
The transcript also cryptically alludes to an American presence on the ground. Wondering whether Ukraine would be able to do targeting on their own, one of the officials says, “It’s known that there are numerous people there in civilian attire who speak with an American accent.”
And there are numerous American civilian officers in Ukraine. On February 26, a New York Times report revealed in greater detail than ever before the extent of CIA involvement on the ground in Ukraine. In the days before the war began, U.S. personnel were evacuated from Ukraine—except for a small group of CIA officers whom CIA Director William Burns ordered be left behind, and the “scores of new officers” who were sent in “to help the Ukrainians.” They helped them by passing on critical information, “including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.” The CIA officers provided “intelligence for targeted missile strikes.” And they provided “intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.”
These recent intercepts and reports suggest that the U.S., UK, and France already have troops or operatives on the ground in Ukraine. Russia has long claimed the presence of a large number of Polish fighters in Ukraine.
Other NATO countries appear open to such direct involvement. Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said that “everything” is on the table when it comes to helping Ukraine, that “I think it is also the signals that we are sending to Russia, that we are not ruling out different things.” Referring to Macron’s comments that sending troops to Ukraine should be an option that is not discarded, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis agreed that “nothing can be taken off the table, no option can be rejected out of hand,” adding that “I very much welcome and encourage the discussion that has started.”
And other NATO countries are considering sending troops to Ukraine in noncombatant roles. The Czech President Petr Pavel says that Ukraine’s Western partners should “not limit ourselves where we don’t have to,” including potentially sending troops for “non-combat engagement” like training missions.
Canada’s Defense Minister Bill Blair says that Canada already has a small military presence in Ukraine to protect diplomatic staff (though it had been reported that Canada evacuated its diplomats at the start of the war). He says that Canada has “no plans to deploy combat troops” to Ukraine, but that some Canadian training of Ukrainian troops has been “challenging because it’s difficult to get people out of Ukraine to do the training.” So, he says, there was “discussions that, could we do it more efficiently, and is it possible to do it in Ukraine?”
The West has arrived at a fearful dilemma. Doubling down and sending troops to fight in Ukraine is a dangerous option that could lead to direct confrontation with Russia and an unthinkable war. But it is not the only road that can be taken. The West can also turn off the path of war that has benefitted no one, not send troops to Ukraine and, instead, explore the diplomatic road.
The post What NATO Country Doesn’t Have Troops in Ukraine? appeared first on The American Conservative.
A treaty commitment to Ukraine is a dangerous liability with no upside.
Marking the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg proclaimed that “Ukraine will join NATO…. It is not a question of if, but when.” Fortunately for the United States, the admission of Ukraine into NATO cannot be forced upon us by the unilateral dicta of global elites. Nevertheless, Stoltenberg’s shocking display of hubris and blatant disregard for sovereignty reminds us exactly why a nation should not be added to the NATO alliance without weighing the risks.
Historically, decisions to expand the alliance in the backyard of a nuclear-armed adversary is a dangerous game of chicken. Despite what the Biden administration and the foreign policy establishment would claim, Russia’s decision to pursue military objectives in Ukraine was due in large part to the prospect of further NATO expansion for both Ukraine and Georgia, a redline that Vladimir Putin drew as far back as 2008. Rather than taking such warnings seriously, the U.S. and European capitals continued to beat the drum of expansion by touting the foolish desires of the “rules-based international order” above realism. Western allies have gone so far as to keep the option of allied troops deploying into Ukraine on the table. Believing the Kremlin will simply accept such provocations is folly.
Although its recent behavior would suggest otherwise, NATO is not a social club. At its inception, NATO is a military alliance rooted in shared security interests in the transatlantic area of responsibility. NATO is not a catch-all, feel-good get-together of democratically inclined nations. Admittance is not a stamp of global approval or a reward for good behavior—a framework antithetical to a military alliance. In fact, at this point, the alliance neither needs nor should seek additional members to achieve its stated “defensive” aims. We should consider new members only when they bring demonstrable and credible hard power, promote greater burden sharing across existing member states, and conceivably reduce the chances of sending allied troops into war. This is the only standard by which collective defense may work.
Ukraine is incompatible as a member on all fronts. What strategic value would Ukraine bring to the alliance? But for the goodwill of international donors, Ukraine would still be operating with Soviet-era weaponry and bygone military doctrine.
So much for credible hard power or meaningful burden sharing.
The entire premise undergirding NATO is that when you are under attack and your resources and capacity run low, your allies come to your aid. An ally wholly dependent on others for training, equipment, and financing is hardly an ally. As for lowering the specter of conflict, admitting Ukraine—a country of historical and strategic significance to its nuclear superpower neighbor—seems nothing less than a gamble with the lives and treasures of the alliance’s members.
Somewhere along the way, our leaders talked themselves into thinking of Ukraine as a de facto member of the alliance, despite no vote being held or change in treaty ratified. Our leaders looked Russia’s red line in the face and stepped right over it, gambling with our own security against a nuclear-capable adversary. This mistake has drained American taxpayers of $113 billion to date, with war hawks in Congress currently fighting to send another $60 billion.
Putin continues to warn us that Ukraine in NATO could be the match that sparks WWIII. As a constitutional realist, it seems to me that when the enemy gives us a clear warning, we should act with a degree of prudence, not double down without a second thought simply to anger the bad guy.
If Ukraine is in NATO, the United States should be out, plain and simple.
A decision that could trigger the next world war cannot be made by transnational elites, unaccountable to any country or its citizens. As the body tasked with providing advice and consent on additions to the North Atlantic Treaty, the road to Ukraine’s NATO membership runs through the U.S. Senate. If we are serious about preserving U.S. hegemony, at no point can our nation be forced by a dependent Europe to accept the risk of nuclear escalation. We must draw a redline with NATO: You can have Ukraine or the United States. If allied boots hit the ground in Ukraine, we should walk away from NATO entirely.
In the meantime, perhaps someone should remind Jens Stoltenberg that his job is to be a steward of the strategic interests of NATO’s dues-paying members, not a shill for Ukraine. As the largest financial backer of the alliance, it is time the U.S. prioritizes participation in NATO according to our core strategic interests. WWIII is not on the agenda, and it is far past time for the United States to close NATO’s open door.
This op-ed has been updated to reflect the current debate over NATO troops entering Ukraine.
The post NATO Can Have Ukraine or the USA—Not Both appeared first on The American Conservative.
In his State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden implied World War III has begun. The enemies are both foreign and domestic.
President Joe Biden delivered a shouty State of the Union on Thursday night. Whether the best is yet to come or the worst is still ahead is difficult to say based on Biden’s speech, both the intelligible and unintelligible parts.
Biden wasn’t without those looking to steal the spotlight. Throughout Thursday night’s speech, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP candidate, was rebutting and reacting live via posts on Truth Social. Per usual, the Republican party organized a State of the Union response, delivered by Sen. Katie Britt. But, no disrespect to the Alabama Senator, all eyes turned to Tucker Carlson in the aftermath of Biden’s speech. For the first time since leaving Fox News, Carlson hosted a live broadcast reacting to the president’s words.
After taking the night off Super Tuesday, Thursday night might have been Biden’s single best opportunity before election day some eight months away to convince Americans he does not only deserve to serve another four years, but that he’s actually capable of serving out a second term. Despite—or maybe because of—whatever drug cocktail was put in Biden’s ice cream Thursday night, Biden failed.
Prior to the speech, the White House promised a speech that would show “the president’s vision for the future is very optimistic,” in the words of White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients. What Americans heard as soon as the president opened his mouth, however, was a hawkish president stammering down the warpath at home and abroad. He began every sentence shouting into the microphone hoping to project vigor, only to find himself incapable of maintaining the volume and clarity of speech.
“That was quite an experience watching that,” Carlson said to begin his broadcast. “That was possibly the darkest, most un-American speech ever given by an American president. In fact it wasn’t a speech. It was a rant entirely lacking in decency or generosity to his fellow Americans.”
“The whole thing was weird,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Even on the ultra-rehearsed lines the Biden White House released ahead of time, Biden couldn’t deliver. When it came to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Biden said, “Look, in it’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect justices, ‘women are not without electoral… electoral power… Excuse me, electoral or political power.’ You’re about to realize just how much you….” The president’s words became indiscernible.
What the president meant to say, per the White House:
In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote “Women are not without electoral or political power.” No kidding. Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again in 2024. If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose I promise you: I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
When the House Sergeant at Arms announced the arrival of the president, a beleaguered Biden entered the House chamber—and he was late. Trump was quick to make note of Biden’s tardiness. “The President is very substantially late,” Trump said on Truth social. “Not a good start, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure he had very important things to do, but he is just now getting into the car. They will have to drive very, very quickly, you just don’t want to be late to the State of the Union. They will need Mario Andretti to be at the wheel of the Limo.”
Biden’s lateness was the least of his worries, however. His approval rating is just 36 percent with a net favorability 25 points underwater. Less than a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. Biden trails Trump in the polls in every major swing state, and by a 5-point margin, Americans say they’d vote for Biden’s rival over him—which is why an even wider margin, 9 percent, think Trump will win in November. Nearly three-fourths of Americans simply believe Biden is just too old for the job.
Biden’s central pitch to keep his current address of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? He’s a wartime president. World War III has already begun, and his presidential campaign is the America’s campaign to take democracy all over the world by force.
“In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, ‘I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.’ Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world,” Biden opened. Today, “it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” Biden claimed. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
And though Americans tuned in to hear the state of Union, they first heard a speech on the state of Ukraine—a country whose borders Biden evidently cares about more than his own.
“Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” Biden said. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.”
The president then claimed that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine,” even though there are. When Biden told Americans he’s “determined to keep it that way,” one wonders what he means.
“Assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world,” Biden continued. “I say this to Congress: we must stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill. History is watching. If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk, emboldening others who wish to do us harm.”
Behind the president, House Speaker Mike Johnson nodded.
Carlson called Biden’s Ukraine-centered opening “deranged”:
We’re doing this not because it helps us, but because foreign interests are demanding that we do it. America is being used, as we so often have been, and the result of all this is that the world is now closer to nuclear war at this moment than at any time in history, closer than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We have no idea where this is going. You never do once people start to die once wars begin.
The sentiment Carlson expressed is why Americans are increasingly skeptical of the claim that continued involvement in Ukraine—to the tune of billions of dollars and thousands of weapons, shells, and other pieces of military equipment—is in America’s interests. Even the Biden administration seems to have its doubts—the line has quietly shifted from “as long as it takes” to “as long as we can.” Biden seemed to reverse himself again: “We will not walk away [from Ukraine],” said the president.
“This is crazy talk,” Carlson said. “There’s no explanation of what the goal is here. There’s lie after lie. Ukraine can stop Russia. No, it can’t. This has gone on for over two years. NATO was stronger than ever. No it’s not. NATO is on its way to collapse, as is the economy of Western Europe. For not one sentence did Joe Biden explain what the goal of this exercise is, when we’ll know we’ve won and what the future should look like.”
An hour would pass for Biden to address the second war America finds itself entangled in—and the one that poses the most significant challenge to Biden’s Democratic coalition.
The White House may very well have delayed the state of the union speech hoping to have a ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Gaza war in hand. Negotiations in Cairo are ongoing, but Biden is struggling to balance the pro-Israel Democratic establishment with the pro-Palestine progressive base. As of late, the Biden administration has leaned towards the progressives, with Biden, Harris, Blinken and other top officials meeting with Netanyahu’s rival, Benny Gantz—a move that reportedly infuriated the Israeli government—telling Gantz the conditions in Gaza are “unacceptable and unsustainable.”
Nevertheless, throngs of pro-Palestine protestors took to the streets of the nation’s capital to condemn Biden’s Israel policy; thousands more have cast protest votes over the same issue in the Democratic primary in key states.
When Biden came to address the Middle East, he first took a strong pro-Israel line. Biden said the war started because of “a massacre by the terrorist group Hamas” and that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.”
“Israel has an added burden because Hamas hides and operates among the civilian population,” Biden said before a strong pivot. “But Israel also has a fundamental responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.”
“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” the president claimed, citing 30,000 Gazan dead. “Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.”
Then Biden unveiled he’s directing “the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”
“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” Biden continued. He affirmed, however, that “No U.S. boots will be on the ground.” If that’s the case, one wonders how the pier will operate and who will be operating it.
“Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure that humanitarian workers aren’t caught in the cross fire,” Biden implored.
“This is so reckless that it qualifies as suicidal,” Carlson said of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. “And maybe they are, but the rest of us aren’t.”
While Biden made it clear his first priority is the state of Ukraine and not the state of the Union, the president suggested World War III isn’t just a foreign war but a civil war, too. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” Biden claimed.
“History is watching,” Biden said in reference to Ukraine aid, “just like history watched three years ago on January 6.”
“Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy,” Biden claimed, calling January 6, 2021 the “darkest of days.”
Biden didn’t only declare war on his opponent and opposition party. He declared war on the Constitution, America’s republican form of government, its checks and balances and the other branches of government. “Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” Biden asked rhetorically.
“In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ No kidding,” Biden claimed. “Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America. They found out though when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again, in 2024.”
“He is so angry and crazy!” Trump said on Truth. “THIS IS LIKE A SHOUTING MATCH, EVERY LINE IS BEING SHOUTED,” the former president said in another.
Despite supposedly fatal flaws in the American system and a nation teetering on the brink of Civil War, Biden shouted into the microphone, “The state of our union is strong and getting stronger.”
“It doesn’t make the news but in thousands of cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. So let’s tell that story here and now,” Biden said. “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, investing in all of America, in all Americans to make sure everyone has a fair shot and we leave no one behind!”
The president turned to the economy to make the case. “I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world!”
“I believe in America! I believe in you, the American people. You’re the reason I’ve never been more optimistic about our future!”
The jury is out as to whether the American people believe in Biden, however—especially when it comes to the economy Biden was so keen to boast about.
Just 26 percent of Americans say the economy is performing excellent or good, while 23 percent think economic conditions are fair and 51 percent believe it is poor. Inflation has slowed, but remains higher than the increasingly-nostalgic Trump era. The most fundamental goods—housing prices, healthcare costs, gas, groceries—have put a real pinch on Americans with families or hoping to start one. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says unemployment is down and non-farm payrolls are up, 5 million workers are still missing in the post-Covid labor market. Full-time job growth remains flat. More Americans—60 percent of whom are living paycheck to paycheck—are picking up second or third jobs to make ends meet. Real hourly wages lag behind pre-Covid levels. Household income follows the trend.
Where are the Biden economy’s jobs going? To millions of migrants who have poured into the country, legally or illegally, across the southern border, of course. Foreign-born employment is up 2.8 million from pre-Covid levels, and even the BLS has had to admit its figures indicate at least some infiltration by illegals of the American labor market. It’s almost a sure bet the BLS is underestimating the impact of illegal migrant labor.
In Trump’s words: “Why doesn’t he bring up East Palestine and the other Towns all throughout America that he has left behind, and destroyed with Inflation?”
But Biden was more concerned with potato chips and Snickers than the southern border. “Snack companies think you won’t notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer chips in it,” the president shouted. “Pass Senator Bob Casey’s bill to put a stop to shrinkflation!” His predecessor was quick to make note: “Biden talked about the SNICKERS Bars, before he talked about the Border!”
Biden lost steam half way through his speech. “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!” Trump claimed.
Under the strain of the lengthy speech, the president simply couldn’t manage to organize his thoughts on immigration—the current number one issue for Americans. Biden would have the American people believe the border has never been more secure. “Unlike my predecessor, on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, secure the border, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more,” the president claimed. Then, an unexpected surge of urgency: “We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now!” Biden shouted.
“It took him over 40 minutes to get to Immigration, and then said nothing about it!” Trump truthed. Another: “His Border Bill is a Disaster, it would let at least 5,000 Migrants in a day, and that is one of the better aspects of it!”
“The most interesting fact of the speech was the emphasis,” Carlson said. “There was not a meaningful word for the entire duration about the things that actually matter to people who live here, like crime, or inflation, or fentanyl, or the foreign army now occupying our country. But Biden doesn’t care. There was no upside for you in any of the things that he said.”
“To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be,” Biden said. “Tonight you’ve heard mine.” The president shouldn’t be so sure. That didn’t stop Rep. Jerry Nadler, a man who has had his own problems with aging in office, from telling Biden after the speech, “nobody’s going to talk about cognitive impairment now.”
To which the president replied: “I kind of wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired.”
The post Biden’s State of the Union Was a Declaration of War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Leading the Ukrainians down the garden path does nothing to foster peace in Eastern Europe.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron once preached about the dangers of humiliating Russia in its war in Ukraine. Now he’s trying to cement himself as Europe’s preeminent Russia hawk. During a recent 20-country meeting in Paris that aimed to consolidate the West’s support for Kiev, Macron generated headlines by suggesting that European troop deployments to Ukraine shouldn’t be ruled out. He doubled down about a week later, emphasizing that Ukraine’s allies in Ukraine couldn’t afford to be “cowardly” in the face of Russian aggression.
Macron’s initial comments caused a firestorm in Europe. For many, the French president’s proposition was a non-starter. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, rejected the idea. Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholtz stated bluntly that “there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil” from NATO or the European Union. The Biden administration reiterated that there are no plans to deploy the U.S. military to Ukraine.
The aspiring leader of Europe wanted to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a message of strength: A Ukrainian victory is of such strategic importance that the West will do whatever is necessary to achieve it. But in reality, Macron and the pushback he received inadvertently delivered the opposite: Ukraine’s success isn’t so important to the West after all, particularly if it could bring the U.S. and Europe into a direct conflict with Russia, the world’s largest nuclear weapons power. The entire kerfuffle demonstrates just how hollow NATO’s perpetual open-door policy to Ukraine is, and why it’s far past time to bolt the door shut.
Ukraine has long viewed NATO membership as a top foreign policy priority. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pressed the matter with the Biden administration. Once the war kicked off, NATO membership was more urgent for the Ukrainians; in September 2022, Zelensky formally submitted an application to NATO, and the alliance agreed to accelerate what is typically a years-long review process. Kiev’s campaign has persisted ever since, a journey which has no doubt been frustrating for Zelensky. During the 2023 NATO heads-of-state summit, Zelensky went so far as to lash out at the Alliance’s reluctance in giving Ukraine a firm entry date.
It’s easy to see why Zelensky was upset. True or not, he remains convinced that Putin wouldn’t have dared launch his invasion if Ukraine had already been under the NATO umbrella, which includes a military superpower and three nuclear states. Zelensky also believes that NATO is Kiev’s best deterrent to another Russian attack in the future. You can’t fault the Ukrainian president for any of this.
The United States and its NATO allies, however, can and should be faulted for keeping the possibility of membership on life support for so long. Washington and Brussels have treated Ukraine like a hamster on a wheel. The carrot of NATO membership has dangled in front of Kiev, seemingly in view but in reality out of reach. Instead of being honest with Ukraine—the West has no desire whatsoever to get into a war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf—it chooses to keep Ukraine’s hopes alive through a combination of rhetorical gymnastics, hand-holding, and virtue signaling.
While NATO members, both individually and through the alliance, are undoubtedly Ukraine’s biggest military backers, the last two years of war have shown that this support has strict limits. The Biden administration has reiterated on countless occasions that U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine must not be used against Russian targets on Russian soil; quickly dismissed calls for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine early on in the conflict, lest U.S. and Russian fighter pilots begin shooting at one another; stressed that a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces will be avoided to the maximum extent; and modified the pace of weapons deliveries to Kyiv to decrease the probability of Russian escalation. Washington isn’t alone. Germany’s government continues to withhold the long-range Taurus cruise missile from Kiev over escalation concerns—a position backed by the Bundestag.
Ukraine, of course, isn’t a NATO member, so the Alliance has no obligation to defend it. But given NATO’s refusal to enter the war directly today, where combat with Russia would be deadly and immediate, it’s difficult to see why Putin would believe NATO would do so if Ukraine was brought into the alliance after the war was over. NATO membership entails serious, consequential commitments to those countries in the club, up to and including a willingness to escalate to the nuclear level—and fight a nuclear war—in order to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its members. Can we say with enough certainty that the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, and France would risk their own national security to save Kiev? And knowing the lengths to which NATO has gone to avoid a clash with Russia, would Putin find such a threat credible in the first place?
Deterrence isn’t magic. It needs to be backed up by sufficient military capabilities, seriousness of purpose, and an assurance that NATO’s full weight will be brought to bear on an adversary if absolutely necessary. If any of these ingredients are missing, then deterrence will fail. Macron’s remarks, and the uproar it caused, only adds further doubt in Putin’s mind that any NATO defense guarantee to Ukraine would be credible.
If NATO is unwilling to fight for Ukraine today, it’s unlikely it will be willing to do so tomorrow. Putin knows that. Closing NATO’s open door will ensure that Ukraine does too.
The post NATO Should Be Honest With Kiev appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has a resolution that aims to block a weapons sale worth $23 billion to Turkey.
On Thursday afternoon, the Senate will vote on a resolution from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky that would block a sale of F-16 fighter jets and other military supplies.
President Joe Biden’s administration approved the sale last month in what Paul described to The American Conservative in a phone interview as a “quid pro quo” between Washignton and Ankara for Sweden’s accession into NATO. The package, worth $23 billion, would provide Turkey with 40 F-16s, which would increase Turkey’s supply of fighter jets by nearly 50 percent.
For Paul, however, it’s less about the price or number of planes. “I think you quantify it in terms of the strategic possibility that in gaining new F-16s with new software and new technology on them, that these F-16s could be used to somehow test the S-400 Russian system [the Turks] have, and either find weaknesses of the F-16 against the S-400,” Paul told TAC. The biggest worry is that Turkey could “share that information with the Russians.”
“If any of this information is given to Russia it would be deleterious,” Paul stated. “It wouldn’t be good for our national security.”
Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, has also come under pressure from NATO allies over the last eight years for courting Russian defense systems and Russian energy. The way Ankara and Washington see the world has increasingly diverged since the attempted coup in 2016.
“I think that there’s many reasons to still be suspect of Turkey’s fidelity to the alliance, and Turkey’s fidelity to the west, frankly. And I think that their human rights record leaves much to be desired as well,” Paul claimed. As for Sweden’s entrance into NATO, Paul said, “I don’t think the trade off is really that great. I’m not sure Sweden adds much to defending Europe or defending NATO or defending us at all. It’s not that I’m against Sweden. I’m a big fan of a lot of things about Sweden, but I don’t think they add to our national security at all.”
Nevertheless, after 20 months of negotiations between Turkey, America, and other NATO allies, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed off on Sweden’s entrance into NATO. Previously, Turkey resisted adding Sweden into NATO because Sweden harbors groups that Erdogan’s Turkey considers “terrorist organizations.” Turkey has been critical of Sweden’s support for followers of the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen (whom Erdogan blames for the attempted coup in 2016) and Kurdish militant groups like the PKK and the YPG.
Turkey’s relationship with Russia isn’t the only relationship that complicates the United State’s relationship to one of its oldest NATO allies. Turkey also has a working relationship with Hamas that’s potentially broader and deeper than Hamas’s relationship with Iran.
Turkey provides financial, intelligence, and military support to Hamas. In 2012, for example, Hamas received a $300 million donation from Turkey as it set up operations in Turkey. NGOs with relationships to the Turkish government have been used as pass-throughs to take cash from Ankara to the Gaza Strip. In July 2023, Israeli authorities claimed 16 tons of seized explosive materials enroute to Gaza were sent from Turkey. Furthermore, there are claims that a Turkish private military contractor, SADAT, assists Hamas in military procurement and preparation.
“Any of their support for Hamas, obviously, will hurt them,” Paul said of Erdogan’s government. “There will be some in our caucus who vote against them for their support of Hamas,” he said of the impending vote.
Paul thinks voting in favor of the sale could follow Senators home. “I think this is one of those things where you go back to many of the red states and try to explain why you’re first selling F-16s to Turkey, which supports Hamas, has terrible human rights abuses in our country, and isn’t really a country that has free elections—there’s a lot of reasons not to be too excited about selling arms to Turkey,” Paul explained. “So I think this won’t be as popular of a vote as people think it will be at home. I think the position I’ll take will be the popular one at home.”
Nevertheless, Paul told TAC “winning is a long shot.”
Yet, the sale brings up crucial questions about the durability and usefulness of the NATO alliance. “There’s always the real question of whether Turkey is a reliable ally or not. And I think there’s a great deal of argument that they are fair weather friends, they’re sometimes with us and sometimes opposed to us,” Paul explained. But beyond questions of Turkey’s commitment to the alliance, Paul pointed out, “we also should be concerned because, even though many countries are paying a little bit more for their national defense, NATO still remains primarily funded by the U.S. Most of those countries in Europe that are now in NATO are small countries without much national defense. I think they serve more as tripwires to get us involved in regional squabbles, as opposed to actually being countries that would meaningfully defend us if the U.S. could be attacked.”
Furthermore, the weapons package could undermine Turkey’s ability to be a mediator in the negotiations that could put an end to the war in Ukraine, according to Paul. On Wednesday, Erdogan announced, on principle, it supports Ukraine’s 10-point peace plan and that Turkey is working with the United Nations to ensure the safety of commercial ships in the Black Sea. “I think it makes them less influential in any kind of peace agreement,” Paul said of the arms sale. “I think the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine is more likely to happen if there is some sort of interlocutor that is of a more neutral mind, but it’s hard to find countries like that anymore.”
The post Paul to Force Vote on Biden’s Sale of F-16s to Turkey appeared first on The American Conservative.
If this is what American “timidity” looks like, could we survive American courage?
Ukraine appears to be losing its war with Russia. It is America’s fault, according to many of Kiev’s advocates. If only the U.S. had tossed caution and prudence aside in backing the Zelensky government, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his barbaric hordes would have been put to flight. The lion would have lain down with the lamb.
Two years ago, Ukraine surprised even its friends by rebuffing much of Russia’s initial invasion. Many of Kiev’s backers convinced themselves that Ukraine could win the war. Fantastic schemes were proposed for Kiev to reclaim the Donbass and Crimea, and perhaps even oust Putin and break up the Russian Federation.
These hopes have gone dark after Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive and Moscow’s recent battlefield gains. The Ukrainian people are paying a terrible price. President Volodymyr Zelensky recently offered a number for his nation’s dead, 31,000, that no serious analyst believes. Apparently, U.S. officials privately estimate 70,000. Recent experience, as well as the admission of others in the Kiev government, indicate far more casualties, perhaps a half million dead and seriously wounded overall.
While it would be foolish to presume a Russian military victory—Putin’s authoritarian rule offers the opposite of inspired leadership—Kiev faces a daunting path forward. It is resource poor, with its economy under siege, and its defense industrial base enfeebled. The Ukrainian army has been impressing middle-aged civilians off the street and tossing ill-trained conscripts into battle. Internal political and military divisions have widened dramatically.
Moreover, the American and European peoples are growing more reluctant to continue their governments’ open-ended financial and military commitment to Ukraine. This very hesitation, contend Kiev’s propaganda stalwarts, is placing the otherwise inevitable Ukrainian victory in doubt. Indeed, if only Washington had not been so hesitant to join the European murderfest, Zelensky might even now have been enjoying a victory parade through his capital’s Independence Square.
Wrote the Financial Times’ Martin Sandbu: Ukraine’s “concrete shortcomings are the result of western leaders’ early denial of Kyiv’s appeal for fighter jets or their failure to match a promise of ammunition with the urgent action needed to produce it.” He accused “Ukraine’s Western friends” of maintaining “a timidity that all the support and contributions they have extended are insufficient to hide.” Indeed, he insisted, “more decisive action two years ago would have left Ukraine, and the west, in a much better position today.” So too with sanctions: “Earlier enforcement would have been better.” Finally, Russian financial reserves should have been confiscated and sent to Kiev.
Western timidity. That’s the problem! Wrote Sanbu, “The lesson on both the military and the economic side is the danger of believing in the virtue of caution when that in practice means delay.” It’s time for bold action! Don’t look before you leap! “Evil benefits, too, when good people are too cautious. Don’t keep making that mistake.” Forward, march, irrespective of the consequences!
Passion on Ukraine’s behalf is understandable. Although the allies did much to trigger the current conflict—recklessly expanding NATO to Russia’s border despite a multitude of warnings against doing so—Putin’s aggressive war is monstrous morally and horrendous practically. Ukrainians are entitled to choose their own future.
Nevertheless, neither the devastation nor the injustice of the Russo-Ukraine war is unique. The Saudis and Emiratis spent years killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians, with U.S. assistance. The Western world ignored years of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which may have killed more than 5 million people. Washington’s own illegal invasion of Iraq based on false WMD claims resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. American attempts to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al Assad aided radical jihadists of various stripes, while current sanctions policy impoverishes the Syrian people for no good reason. There’s a lot of villainy to go around, often worsened by Western—and especially American—action as well as inaction.
Moreover, no war should be casually fought. The list of expected quick victories that turned into lengthy catastrophes is long. All the major powers expected the First World War to be short, “over by Christmas.” Both North and South thought the Civil War would be settled by a quick decisive battle or two. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq planned to make short work of Iran’s revolutionary regime. America’s invasion of Iraq was to be a cakewalk. The allies’ Afghan campaign was “won” in a few weeks. The list goes on.
Ukraine is far more dangerous. None of these other campaigns were waged against a nuclear power. Today, Washington is leading the Europeans in a brutal proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The fight could get worse—much worse. Moscow views Kiev’s status as a vital interest, one obviously important enough to justify war. Indeed, over the last two decades numerous American officials, including then-ambassador William Burns, current head of the CIA, warned successive administrations that turning Ukraine into a NATO outpost could lead to war.
With so many nations stirring the geopolitical pot, a broader war could result from accident, carelessness, or design. For instance, the Putin government might expand or escalate. Tens or hundreds of thousands of Russians are believed to have died so far. American and allied weapons, meaning the U.S. and European governments, are responsible for many of these deaths. Moscow would be fully entitled to retaliate against the West for making the conflict its own. Remember how Russia’s domestic critics, led by presidential candidate Joe Biden, demanded a response to what turned out to be the false claim that Moscow was paying the Taliban to kill U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan? Russians probably want to exact a much greater price.
So long as Moscow believes that it is winning, it has reason not to act on threats to strike NATO members or use nuclear weapons. Should momentum shift, however, so might the former’s policy, especially if Russian territory is threatened. Moreover, Ukraine wants America and European nations in. Zelensky desperately attempted to lie NATO into the war by claiming that a Ukrainian missile strike on Poland came from Russia. Western officials collectively held their breath until Kiev’s responsibility was established.
Yet Sandbu dismisses Western “timidity” before jumping into the Ukrainian imbroglio.
Although the Biden administration has foolishly enmeshed America in a conflict not its own, its relative caution, at least, in escalating that involvement deserves credit, not censure. It is easy for ivory tower warriors, especially those living in Europe, to demand decisive action against Moscow. Even some government officials, such as France’s President Emmanuel Macron, casually talk about sending troops to Ukraine. If events went badly, those same people would besiege Washington, wailing about the horror of it all and demanding that America race to their rescue. The contretemps over Donald Trump’s recent crack about delinquent European governments caused Washington’s allies to admit how far behind they were. Everyone knows who would be expected to battle Russia.
Sandbu and other war advocates are careless with the money and lives of others. Perhaps they should join their respective armed forces. Then they could at least share the consequences they would have others risk suffering.
Ukraine has preserved its sovereignty and independence. Yet the war is destroying that nation’s future. Of course, Ukrainians are free to fight on, forever if they desire. But they are not entitled to American support to do so. Washington has spent two years funding war. It is time for Washington to emphasize establishing peace.
The post Ukraine Propagandists Demand U.S. Abandon Caution, Go All in on War appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The case that departing Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell should step aside from the Senate entirely.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced he will be stepping down from his perch atop the Senate GOP after what will be the longest tenure as a leader in Senate history.
“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” McConnell wrote in prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”
Some Senate Republicans have given conciliatory responses to McConnell’s departure. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate GOP number two, said, “[McConnell] leaves really big shoes to fill .. We’ll give you more insight into what we’re thinking. Kind of wanna just today honor him.” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said, “[the leadership] election is nine months away, and there’s a much more important election between now and then. And that’s the election we need to take the presidency and the Senate and the House and that’s where my focus is.” Thune and Barrasso are two of the three Johns (Senator John Cornyn of Texas is the third) expected to launch bids to replace McConnell.
Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott of Florida released a statement suggesting McConnell’s departure offers a big opportunity for the Senate GOP. “I have been very clear and have long believed that we need new leadership in the Senate that represents our voters and the issues we were sent here to fight for. As everyone knows, I challenged Leader McConnell last year. This is an opportunity to refocus our efforts on solving the significant challenges facing our country and actually reflect the aspirations of voters,” Scott said.
After news broke, McConnell took to the Senate floor and said, “I still have enough gas in my tank to thoroughly disappoint my critics and I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm with which they’ve become accustomed.”
Surely McConnell does have the capacity to “thoroughly disappoint” his conservative critics in his time as a lame duck. While Thune and Barrasso want to give the conference the space and time to appreciate the man who has been cutting off his own members at the knees, a push for McConnell to exit his role immediately after this round of shutdown negotiations comes to an end is warranted.
As the late Senator John McCain sided with Democrats on almost every important issue on his way out the door, McConnell may have just unencumbered himself from even pretending to answer to any of his conference’s demands. Even before he announced his resignation, McConnell reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House that the biggest thing on Johnson’s plate is Ukraine aid and not the looming government shutdown—the purpose the two GOP leaders were summoned to the White House in the first place.
As Senator Ron Johnson told The American Conservative in a phone call yesterday, “I cannot tell you how often he reminds us how many hundreds of millions of dollars he raised for the Senate Leadership Fund last cycle, and how much he’s raised this cycle.” At Senate luncheons during the border negotiations, McConnell would suggestively make remarks about campaign fundraising before turning the floor to Senator James Lankford. Because McConnell is staying until November, he’ll still have control of at least some of the purse strings. And while McConnell might boast about the way he raised money for the 2022 cycle, the way he spent it shut the door on the GOP’s chances to take back the majority.
“[McConnell is] not about governing. He’s not about getting a result. He’s not about fighting for conservative principles or pushing back on the radical leftism destroying this country,” Johnson told TAC yesterday. “He is about being majority leader.”
Now McConnell is no longer about being majority leader, what will he be about in the eight months before he steps down?
The post Why Is Mitch McConnell Remaining in the Senate Until 2027? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Western nations claim they will not send troops to Ukraine, but several already have troops there.
French President Emmanuel Macron made a faux pas while talking to reporters this week on the sidelines of meetings in Paris with two dozen other European leaders regarding the state of the Ukraine war.
“We should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of deployment,” Macron said. “But I’ve told you very clearly what France maintains as its position, which is a strategic ambiguity that I stand by.”
The French president admitted there is “no consensus” on the circumstances where Western nations might send troops to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reaffirmed the position of NATO and the West regarding troop deployment has not changed. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said, “support does not include the presence of troops from European or Nato states on Ukrainian territory.” When documents outlining the topics of discussion for the Paris meeting circulated, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico broke his silence. “These topics,” he said, “imply that a number of NATO and EU member states are considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.” It’s enough to “send[ ] shivers down your spine.”
The White House released a statement saying, “President Biden has been clear that the U.S. will not send troops to fight in Ukraine.” U.S. diplomats were also present in Paris this week.
The Kremlin responded to Macron’s remarks, suggesting that such brazen involvement would guarantee a wider war. “In this case, we would need to talk not about its likelihood, but about its inevitability,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
But Russia has been relatively patient with the West’s involvement in the Ukraine war, considering the circumstances. Leaked documents in April 2023 revealed that a number of Western countries have special forces on the ground. At the time, the U.K. had the most special forces personnel, 50, on the ground. Latvia had 17, France 15, and the U.S. 14.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense cried misinformation: “Readers should be cautious about taking at face value allegations that have the potential to spread misinformation.” Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into the leak. “We will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it,” Austin claimed. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. arrested Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Nearly a year later, Russia has Ukraine on the ropes. Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed. It has burned through nearly all its young men—the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is in the forties. Yet, western aid has continued to flow. How many more service members have accompanied that aid?
The post How Many U.S. Soldiers Are in Ukraine Right Now? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The war’s developments are at this point predictable, and favor Russian objectives.
The former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, assessed on November 1 of last year that Ukraine would lose the war. It had reached a “stalemate” that favored Russia because such attritional wars are “beneficial to one of the parties to the conflict” and, in this case, “it is the Russian Federation” because of its superiority in numbers of both men and weapons.
That was also the fate Zaluzhny assessed for the town of Avdiivka. In December 2023, Zaluzhny said that the battle of Avdiivka would ultimately favor the larger side and that Russia “has the ability to concentrate its forces…. And they can make it so that in two-three months the town will have the same fate as Bakhmut,” which had already fallen to the Russians. Zaluzhny favored prioritizing the lives of his soldiers and withdrawing to more defensible positions.
That was not what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to hear from his top general. Zelensky favored staying on the offensive, advancing every day and holding Avdiivka at all costs. Zelensky demanded that the armed forces reclaim all Ukrainian territory lost since 2014, not lose more.
That disagreement led to Zaluzhny’s firing. Though there were likely other reasons, some of them political, Zelensky’s desire for “the same vision of the war” was a key one.
The same vision of the war was shared by General Oleksandr Syrsky, who had led the battle of Bakhmut—the very battle Zaluzhny invoked when predicting the fate of Avdiivka. Zaluzhny saw the stubborn fight for Bakhmut as a strategic miscalculation that was too heavy in losses of equipment and, more importantly, in lives.
Syrsky has a reputation as a commander who is close to Zelensky and who is less likely than Zaluzhny to challenge his orders. Bakhmut and other battles had also given him the reputation as a commander who is “willing to engage the enemy, even if the cost in men and machines is high.” His reported willingness to put “his men in danger to reach his military goals” has earned him the nicknames “Butcher” and “General 200,” 200 being the code for a soldier’s corpse.
Zelensky’s choice of Syrsky over Zaluzhny was a choice to maintain and repeat the Bakhmut strategy that Zaluzhny had rejected in Avdiivka.
Zelensky reportedly ordered Syrsky to prevent the Russian capture of Avdiivka as he left Kiev to attend the February 16 Munich Security Conference. On February 11, just three days after assuming command, Syrsky ordered that city’s reinforcement and defense. Syrsky sent in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, one of the best armed, best trained, and most successful brigades in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Yet events unfolded exactly as Zaluzhny had feared and foretold. The military analyst Stephen Bryen reports that some of the brigades Syrsky sent to Avdiivka gathered and organized in the nearby town of Selydove. Bryen says the Russian military discovered they were there and struck with missiles, killing between 1,000 and 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers before they even arrived in Avdiivka.
When the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade did arrive in Avdiivka, they found a situation that was desperate. The Ukrainian soldiers were trapped under heavy bombardment and under skies in which Russia had attained complete air superiority. The elite assault brigade reportedly discarded Syrsky’s orders and retreated. Some reportedly surrendered.
On February 17, Syrsky ordered the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Avdiivka. “Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen,” he said, “I decided to withdraw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines…. The life of military personnel is the highest value.” That’s exactly what Zaluzhny had advised Zelensky to do.
Bryen reports that Zelensky was furious and that “there were angry phone calls from Munich to Syrsky.”
The ordered withdrawal did not go well. Zaluzhny had requested a planned and orderly retreat. Zelensky and Syrsky’s doggedness had not allowed for such a plan, and now the withdrawal was executed in disarray. The already costly loss became a disaster.
Russia’s Defense Minster Sergei Shoigu reported to President Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian armed forces “retreated in a hasty and chaotic manner” and that “they left behind many wounded soldiers who became our POWs.” He added that “a lot of weapons were left behind as well.”
Confirmation of that report slowly trickled out in the Western media, and then became worse. CNN at first reported that the withdrawal had been “relatively controlled.” But they then added that, although “the withdrawal was carried out in accordance with the plan that had been developed,” as Shoigu had told Putin, “a number of Ukrainian servicemen were taken prisoner at the final stage of the operation, under pressure from the enemy’s superior forces.” There were “indications,” CNN reported, that “not all Ukrainian units were able to escape an ever-tightening noose.”
Days later, the extent of the disaster was becoming clearer. That “number of Ukrainian servicemen” was now numbered in the hundreds. The New York Times was reporting that senior Western officials were saying that “hundreds of Ukrainian troops may have been captured by advancing Russian units or disappeared during” what they now were calling “Ukraine’s chaotic retreat from the eastern city of Avdiivka.” The Times called it “a devastating loss.”
But even “hundreds” may have been underreporting. Further down in the article, the Times states that “soldiers with knowledge of Ukraine’s retreat estimated that 850 to 1,000 soldiers appear to have been captured or are unaccounted for.” There are unconfirmed reports of even higher numbers of dead and wounded.
Ukrainian officials say these numbers “appear to be exaggerated,” claiming the number of soldiers taken prisoner is “closer to 100.” They acknowledge, though, that “the situation is still severe, with many left behind.”
Some Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials say “the Ukrainian withdrawal was ill-planned and began too late,” according to the Times. They say that “a failure to execute an orderly withdrawal, and the chaos that unfolded Friday and Saturday as the defenses collapsed, was directly responsible for what appears to be a significant number of soldiers captured.” Ukrainian soldiers said “that some units pulled back before others were aware of the retreat. That put the units left behind at risk of encirclement by the Russians.”
We know that Zelensky replaced Zaluzhny with Syrsky. Less reported is that, at the same time, Zelensky replaced his entire general staff. This turnover included the appointment of a new Chief of General Staff for Ukraine’s Armed Forces and new deputy chief positions on the general staff. The replacements seem to have signaled a decision to stay the course, stay on the attack and fight for every inch of land. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the decision to maintain the same strategy has led to the same results. Ukraine is losing the war at a great cost of lives.
On February 26, the next village fell as the Ukrainian armed forces withdrew form Lastochkyne, a village to the west of Avdiivka.
If Ukraine is to attain its goals—independence, security, freedom to turn to the West and join the European Union—it may need to change more than generals. It may need to cashier generals for diplomats.
This article has been updated to reflect the fall of Lastochkyne.
The post Ukraine War: What Really Happened in Avdiivka? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Disingenuous accounting does not change the fact that the U.S. is the main underwriter of this war.
In the course of the debate over President Biden’s most recent request for an additional $60 billion in “emergency” taxpayer support for Ukraine, a new argument has emerged: This aid package, while the largest requested so far, is actually not a disproportionate burden on America given how much Europeans have donated in both military and civil society support. Rather than trying to guilt the U.S. Congress into rubber-stamping this assistance, some of our European NATO allies would do better to come clean about their own contributions and accounting.
This line of reasoning ignores the simple fact that the United States remains the biggest contributor of military aid to Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, the United States has given $46.33 billion worth of bilateral military donations to the Ukrainian government.
Germany is the second-biggest military donor to Ukraine. It has given $19.42 billion—almost half the total for all EU members, but still less than half what the U.S. has contributed. France, Italy, and Spain (respectively, the second, third, and fourth largest economies in the EU after Germany) have contributed very little. France’s military aid to Ukraine stands at about $700 million, Italy is at $730 million, and Spain is at $360 million. In comparison, Poland alone has given more than $3 billion in military aid despite being only the sixth-largest economy in the EU. Some European politicians are demanding America spend more on a war in Europe when France, Italy, and Spain have contributed about the same as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Some who support the United States sending more aid to Ukraine prefer to measure contributions as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). America’s total bilateral commitments to Ukraine’s defense come in at 0.32 percent, behind 15 other NATO members. By contrast, Estonia’s total bilateral contributions (military and non-military) are roughly 3.55 percent of its GDP, Latvia’s are 1.15 percent, and Lithuania’s are 1.54 percent. Critics praise these three for their substantial contributions, while claiming that the U.S. and Germany have done very little to help the Ukrainians.
But this argument only makes sense from the point of view of a politician, not that of a military analyst or an economist. Smaller countries like the three Baltic states may have had larger contributions to the defense of Ukraine when considered as a percentage of GDP, but their economies are only fractions of the economies of the wealthy Western European nations or the United States. Their assistance, while admirable, is not going to be on the scale required to defeat the Russians. (Incidentally, using this metric, France, Italy, and Spain all stand at 0.07 percent.)
As stated before, the United States has contributed $46.33 billion of military bilateral commitments and Germany has contributed roughly $19.42 billion of military aid to the Ukrainian military. No other NATO member’s contributions even came close. Estonia comes in at $980 million. Given Estonia’s size, this is substantial and reflects the degree of support for Ukraine within Estonia. Nevertheless, this support has had comparatively little military effect when considered against the massive amounts donated by the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Germany). In the sense that matters most—the contribution of military aid in absolute terms—the United States is doing the most in Ukraine. Ukraine’s military would probably not have been able to hold against the Russians over the last two years without the massive amounts of military aid sent by the United States, and anyone making a military or economic argument about the biggest contributors must recognize this fact.
These numbers represent bilateral commitments to the government of Ukraine—that is, money or equipment given directly to the government of Ukraine. The total for the U.S., both military and non-military, is $75.4 billion. This fails to include tens of billions of dollars the U.S. has spent in support of Ukraine, including operational and training expenses. Other countries such as Poland have also spent significantly more than the total bilateral commitments suggest, for similar purposes.
Those who believe that Europe has in fact been doing considerably more than America in terms of supporting civil society and humanitarian causes in Ukraine are missing a critical fact of accounting. Every dollar the United States has given to Ukraine has been in the form of a grant with no expectation of repayment. $65 billion of what European Union institutions have pledged to Ukraine in financial bilateral commitments, however, are in fact loans. In terms of grants, the United States has given more to Ukraine in financial support, having contributed just under $26 billion in financial bilateral grants, whereas European Union institutions have only given Ukraine about $18 billion in grants.
The United States cannot care more about a European war than Europeans do, and has in fact contributed more than its “fair share” already. Meanwhile, the primary threat to American interests lies in the Pacific, a theater routinely downplayed by the foreign policy elites in Washington. While Russia is an opportunistic power that may seek power and advantage episodically, it is far less of a threat to U.S. national security interests than China.
China is the only power with the desire and capability to overturn the current global system and establish itself as a regional hegemon in Asia, with an eye towards becoming the global hegemon. As such, it poses a clear and immediate challenge to the United States in a way that Russia does not. Our defense spending should be focused on deterring China, and while we can continue to play a supporting role we should not be emptying our magazines against what is, if we’re being honest, a secondary threat against which the Europeans should be able to take the lead.
The post Yes, America Is the Biggest Military Donor to Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.
Regardless of what happened to the dissident, the case for ending the war remains the same.
On Friday, journalists reminded President Joe Biden of his threat to Vladimir Putin three years ago that Russia would face “devastating consequences” if Alexei Navalny died. The president assured them, “We’re looking at a whole number of options.”
Biden should hesitate to pile any more sanctions on top of those already in place. When the dust settles and we have more clarity on what exactly happened to the jailed dissident, no matter what we learn, Russia will still be there. It will be the same country, with the same interests, with which we have to deal one way or another. Navalny’s death has not changed the fundamental facts.
One of those facts—an inconvenient one—is that Russia is far less vulnerable to sanctions today than it was back in 2014. Tucker Carlson has been mocked for his video on Moscow grocery stores, but surely it is fair to be surprised to see such abundance and affordability in a country that is supposedly under crippling sanctions.
I was in Moscow in the summer of 2014, just after the first round of sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea, and their effects were evident. My husband ordered lamb at a restaurant and was told the dish was canceled due to sanctions. Australia and New Zealand had been big exporters of meat to Russia, and that supply was abruptly cut off and could not easily be replaced.
Now Russia exports lamb to other countries. A Harper’s journalist who visited Kazan was told by his lunch host that “before the war I would have been eating ‘sh*t lamb from New Zealand,’ but that this meat, tender and tasty, was Russian.” The same is true of other food products, especially meat and dairy, that were previously imported and now are produced domestically.
Russia’s increase in food production is not accidental. Putin has made the agricultural sector a target of policy since his first term, with state investment, debt relief, and subsidies for inputs such as fertilizer, high-yield seeds, and farm machinery. Russia was still a net food importer as recently as 2013. Today, it is a net food exporter, and has in some recent years been the world’s largest exporter of grain.
So, yes, the high quality of Moscow grocery stores is something Americans should pay attention to: not as evidence that their system is superior, but as confirmation that our efforts to harm Russia economically are not working.
Navalny’s death does not need to be something Americans ignore. We should simply be prudent in how we react to it—especially when it is not clear exactly what happened to him.
Obviously, the Russian state does have people killed. There was confirmation of that just this week with the death in Spain of Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian military pilot who defected last year when he landed his helicopter on Ukrainian territory. (His two fellow pilots were shot dead.) Kuzminov was found in a parking garage with six bullet holes in his body.
But even if killing Navalny is the kind of thing the Kremlin would do, it is not clear that it’s something they did do. The timing was hardly propitious. Quite the opposite, between the congressional deliberations over further funding for Ukraine and the Munich Security Conference, the timing could hardly have been worse for Russia.
Was Navalny a threat to Putin sitting in prison? Yes and no. His popularity among Russians was quite low—single digits according to reliable polls. The only chance Navalny had of becoming president was if he rode into office at the head of a Western-sponsored color revolution. He seems to have reached the same conclusion himself, which is why in his latest incarnation as a liberal reformer he avoided cultivating allies in the Russian elite, which he would need if he wanted to build power domestically; instead he courted fans abroad.
Alas, as long as there are people in the U.S. State Department scheming to make a Russian color revolution happen, that revolution’s presumptive president-in-waiting will pose a threat to Putin—even a man who wouldn’t stand a chance against Putin in an election. The questions are whether that threat was sufficiently neutralized with Navalny in prison, and whether there was any upside in his death for the Kremlin at all, much less an upside that outweighs the penalties they will now face.
Regardless of who killed Navalny or whether he was deliberately murdered, there are many Ukraine hawks trying to use his death to derail any prospect of peace talks with Russia. That is a lamentable bit of opportunism on their part. The case for sitting down with Russia and negotiating an end to this war has nothing to do with our opinion of Russia’s leadership. It lies in the fact that Ukraine has no path to victory. Every day the war is prolonged, people will die, even if they never get glowing obituaries in the New York Times.
The post Don’t Let Navalny Derail the Effort for Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: A flailing and miffed Nikki Haley attempted to justify her continued participation in the presidential race on Tuesday.
Nikki Haley told a small group of media and supporters on Tuesday in Greenville, South Carolina that she feels “no need to kiss the ring” of former President Donald Trump.
The Haley campaign had announced that the former South Carolina governor would be giving remarks on “the state of the presidential race” four days out from the South Carolina primary. Some speculated that Haley could be suspending her presidential campaign to save what is left of her reputation in the Republican party. Since overperforming in the open New Hampshire primary early this month, Haley lost a Trump-less Nevada primary (which did not bestow GOP delegates) to “none of these candidates” by more than a two-to-one margin. But it was not a resigned, humbled Haley that took the stage. While Haley sought to project command and calm with her tone, she seemed bitter and desperate on stage Tuesday.
Surely speculation that she would be dropping out did not help Haley have the effect she intended—it’s not ideal for a candidate to have to justify staying in a race, much less that they can still win it. Haley sought to quickly dispel the speculation. “Some of you—perhaps a few of you in the media—came here today to see if I’m dropping out of the race. Well, I’m not. Far from it. And I’m here to tell you why,” she said at the beginning of her remarks in Greenville.
Haley’s main point in the pitch that followed was that most voters don’t want to see a Trump–Biden rematch. “The majority of Americans don’t just dislike one candidate. They dislike both. As a country we’ve never seen such dissatisfaction with the leading candidates,” Haley said.
As evidence of this dissatisfaction on the right, Haley pointed out that “despite being a de facto incumbent, Donald Trump lost 49 percent of the vote in Iowa. In New Hampshire, Trump lost 46 percent of the vote.”
“That’s not good,” Haley continued. “We’re talking about almost half of our voters. What does it say about an incumbent who’s losing nearly half of his party? It spells disaster in November.” If losing nearly half of GOP voters in a primary spells disaster in November, what about losing over 80 percent of the vote in Iowa, nearly 60 percent in New Hampshire, and refusing to compete in the delegate-granting caucus in Nevada?
Haley is free to do the math for herself. Surely, her campaign and a bevy of dead consensus consultants have run the numbers and relayed their findings over and over and over again. Which is probably why Haley can’t help but seem so frustrated and spiteful.
Though Trump has “gotten more unstable and unhinged,” and is “getting meaner and more offensive by the day,” Republican voters and politicians are hopping aboard the Trump train. Why is that? Haley suggested that “in politics, the herd mentality is enormously strong.”
At other points in the speech, Haley implied she was once a part of that herd. “There are those who will try and paint me as Never Trump. That’s not who I am,” Haley said, touting her Trump administration credentials. “I’ve said it many times. I think Donald Trump was the right president at the right time. But times change and so has Trump.”
If given a herd, where would Haley lead it? Towards further globalization (she complained that Trump “wants to put a 10 percent tax hike on every single American” through tariffs); towards Social Security reform, an issue that has doomed Republicans for decades; and towards war with Russia and Iran.
On Tuesday, Haley promised to keep running, but will her herd follow when she runs off a cliff?
The post Nikki Haley’s Desperate Search for Relevance appeared first on The American Conservative.
“If the $61 billion of supplemental aid to Ukraine goes through, I have to be honest to you, that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield,” Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio said to a shocked crowd in the Munich Security Conference. “Munitions matter a lot in warfare, but what we haven’t talked about is manpower. And we know the Ukrainians are very limited on that. This will end in a negotiated peace. The question is when and what that looks like.”
The usual crowd at MSC is obviously not used to such assessments. Their traditional scope of analysis ranges from thunderous virtue signaling from small East European protectorates to hagiographic interviews of of the Ukrainian president, without any serious counter-questions. Within that range, Zelensky can blame Ukraine’s failure at Western (i.e., American) lack of support, money, and weapons, without mentioning anything about dwindling manpower in a war of attrition, or his shell ratio deficit. Zelensky does not explain, for example, how he will attempt to use American “air defense” systems to offset the 1:10 artillery shell shortage.
There are already signs of a concerted effort to blame the debacle of Ukrainian counteroffensive on growing American fatigue and increasing Republican restraint, an attempt to portray that this was due to lack of material, weapons, and cash. Of course, it’s not. It is a coping mechanism at best, and the beginning of a future “stab in the back” myth at worst.
The real unmentionable is that this was always going to be a war of attrition and manpower. The Ukrainian brigades that collapsed in front of the Russian advance in Avdiivka suffered from “lack of rotation, heavy attrition, shortage of soldiers, difficulty moving at night, chronic health issues, the 40–45 average age of soldiers, and few remaining fortifications.” Their counteroffensive failed because the Ukrainians had around nine Western trained brigades (around 45,000 troopers) deployed in four axes instead of in a single thrust; these went into meat grinder battles like that at Bakhmut against entrenched and fortified Russian defenses with around 320,000 Russian troops. It has only gotten worse since.
The reality is that Vance is right, there must be a negotiated settlement, and we just don’t know what that will entail; although some have thought about it a bit further ahead than others. No number of magic weapons will change the balance of power in the theatre if the two sides are so unevenly matched in aggregate power and asymmetry of interest, unless NATO actively joins a war against Russia or the Ukrainian foreign legion increases by 15-fold. Anyone advocating helping Ukraine should immediately pack his bags and head east. The Ukrainians need meat more than tweets.
This is not a war between Gatling guns versus the assegais. This is near-peer weaponry. Russians have 15 times the manpower in the theater, and 10 times the shell advantage. Ukrainians should have listened to General Mark Milley in November 2022 and negotiated. One wonders it is already too late, and that window is lost.
The post Senator Vance Mentions the Unmentionable at Munich appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Biden administration’s Ukraine PR campaign echoes messaging on the Vietnam War beat for beat.
That the tide of the war in Ukraine has turned in Russia’s favor is now too obvious to ignore—unless, that is, you are a high ranking Biden administration official, in which case 2024 will likely lead to some sunlit upland of victory and prosperity for Ukraine.
Consider the comments made a week apart at the end of January by the then-Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and one of her successors in the office of the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, James O’Brien. Upon her departure from the Ukrainian capital, Nuland (who is believed by many to be among the principal advocates behind the decade-long proxy war between the United States and Russia) declared, “I leave Kiev tonight more encouraged about the unity and the result, about 2024 and its absolute strategic importance for Ukraine.”
“I also leave more confident that,” she continued, “as Ukraine strengthens its defenses, Mr. Putin is going to get some nice surprises on the battlefield and that Ukraine will make some very strong success.”
Around the same time, at a talk given at the German Marshall Fund, O’Brien expressed his optimism about the future for Ukraine: “We believe Ukraine will be stronger by the end of 2024 and in a better position to determine its—its future.”
Nuland and O’Brien’s statements are the Beltway equivalent of happy bedtime stories the establishment tells itself in order to keep the wolves of reality, conscience, and failure from the door. They are highly improbable accounts of the current situation on the ground where, according to former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine has suffered 500,000 dead in its war with Russia, losing “30,000 people a month in the war as killed and seriously wounded.”
Even the New York Times, which has been among the administration’s most dutiful accomplices, has reported on what it describes as Ukrainian “suicide missions” across the Dnipro River. According to a December 16, 2023 report, “several soldiers and marines spoke to journalists out of concern about the high casualties and what they said were overly optimistic accounts from officials about the progress of the offensive.”
These reports fly in the face of the repeated insistence on the part of the president and high administration officials that the Russians are not just losing, they have lost.
We see President Biden telling reporters in July 2023 that “there is no possibility of him [Putin] winning the war in Ukraine. He’s already lost that war.” Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, in a meeting with NATO defense ministers a year ago this week, declared that “Russia has lost; they’ve lost strategically, operationally and tactically.” That very same week, appearing on CNN, national security adviser Jake Sullivan likewise declared that, “Russia has already lost this war.”
The media, as usual, was only too eager to play along. Thus, the New York Times columnist David Brooks told his readers, “The war in Ukraine is not only a military event; it’s an intellectual event. The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea.” Almost exactly a year ago, January 2023, readers of the Washington Post were informed by reporter Liz Sly that, “if 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year—or at least enough territory to definitively end Russia’s threat, Western officials and analysts say.”
David Bromwich, a Yale University Professor and author of The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke, has written,
The greater the improbability of an official explanation, the more pressing is the need to shore it up with unchecked reiterations, confirmations, enhancements. So the kingdom of untruth expands, without boundary or restraint. An officially sanctioned account of this or that event is affirmed by bureaucratic oversight and announced to the populace by a cooperative press and media. A consensus is thereby established that floats free of any concern with veracity.
If we are being lied to about the progress of the war—and we are—what do you suppose are the odds we are also being lied to about the causes of the war?
The war, we are serenely and repeatedly informed, was neither caused by NATO expansion nor by Ukraine’s post-Maidan ethno-nationalist agenda, nor by its refusal to implement the Minsk Accords, nor by Zelensky’s threat, made in Munich in February 2022, to acquire nuclear weapons—but by Putin’s revanchism.
This is a point reiterated even in irrelevant contexts. In a speech on October 23, only two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, Biden declared, “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.”
Strobe Talbott, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and president of the Brookings Institution, believes that Putin’s “endgame” is to recreate “the Russian Empire with himself as tsar.” Kathryn Stoner of Stanford is of the opinion that “this is a war on Ukraine’s democracy and has nothing to do with Russian fears of it one day joining NATO.” While readers of a recent article in the New Republic would learn that “Putin has actually made it pretty clear why he invaded Ukraine: He wants to force the country to rejoin Russia, in an effort to reestablish the Soviet Union.”
If we are being lied to about the causes of the war, are we also then being misled about what is at stake in eastern Ukraine? Probably. Here the parallel with the government’s mendacity during the war in Vietnam period becomes too obvious to ignore.
Recall in the first case that the template, that of the Cold War, is essentially unchanged, even in some of the particulars, not least in the comparisons of Ngo Dinh Diem and Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill. The South Vietnamese government (avaricious, corrupt) had the right to American arms by virtue of its right “to determine [the nation’s] future.” The Ukrainian government (avaricious, corrupt) likewise has the right, we are endlessly told, to be allowed to “shape its own destiny.”
Thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Domino Theory, long derided in the years following Vietnam, has made a comeback. Thus, President Biden’s declaration on December 6, “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going…. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops,” echoes that made by President Johnson in July 1965:
This is really war. It is guided by North Viet-Nam and it is spurred by Communist China. Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism. There are great stakes in the balance. Most of the non-Communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist the growing might and the grasping ambition of Asian communism.
Following the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed during the Vietnam era, “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy…but was destined chiefly if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.” Two years on, we citizens have been serially lied to by the Biden administration and the media about the war’s causes, its stakes, and its progress. The question that should, but of course will not, be addressed in the aftermath of this latest American misadventure abroad is: Will we ever learn?
The post The Ukraine War Runs on Prevarication appeared first on The American Conservative.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia can’t stay out of the news.
Anti-Putin crusader Alexei Navalny died on Friday at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a three-decade prison sentence, Russian authorities announced. Navalny, a Russian nationalist who nonetheless came to be the global face of the opposition, was 47 years old.
At the Munich Security Conference, Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said she did not know what to believe because “Putin and his government…lie incessantly.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who met with Yulia at the Munich Security Conference, said, “His death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built.”
President Joe Biden was more direct. “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden told reporters at a White House press conference. “What has happened to Navalny is even more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled.” In June 2021, Biden claimed there would be “consequences” that “would be devastating for Russia” if Navalny died in Russian custody.
According to the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Navalny began to feel unwell after going for a walk around the penal colony. Soon after, Navalny lost consciousness and died. Resuscitation attempts by the prison’s medical team were unsuccessful.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas remembered Biden’s threat well. “Alexei Navalny died as he lived: a champion of the Russian people and a brave voice of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” Cotton tweeted after news of Navalny’s death went public. “President Biden pledged ‘devastating’ consequences should Navalny die in prison; now he must follow through. America can’t afford another erased red line.”
But it is also possible the language of sheer force contributed to Navalny’s death.
A lawyer and blogger by trade, Navalny rose to prominence in the early 2010s by speaking out against the “crooks and thieves” ruining the country. His anti-corruption crusade quickly made him a darling of the Western media. Beyond his anti-corruption positions, however, Navalny held political beliefs that the media would consider extremist if they were held by anyone in the West.
In truth, his politics were often heterodox to the point of unintelligibility. But, over time, he drifted towards the establishment left. In his early days, Navalny flashed anti-immigrant sentiments and cozied up with the hard right. By 2020, Navalny was supporting Black Lives Matter protests in response to the death of George Floyd.
As Navalny was getting his start, he became co-organizer of the “Russian March” parade, which embraced slogans such as “Russia for the Russians” and “Stop feeding the Caucasus.” Navalny’s activism became such a headache for Yabloko, the liberal reform party that he was involved in, that the party expelled him.
Navalny supported the Russian war in Georgia and used racial epithets for Georgians while calling for all Georgians to be expelled from Russia in blog posts. Navalny later apologized for using the epithet, but stood firm on his other positions regarding Georgia. He also published a YouTube video in 2008, Navalny likened people from the Caucasus to “cockroaches.” Someone needs to call an exterminator. Navalny said he “recommends a pistol.”
Regime change in Russia is a quixotic concept. Regional destabilization in the wake of the Cold War and more recently American recklessness throughout the Middle East ought to have made that clear enough. Still, the death of Navalny (murder? negligence?) raises the question of just how reckless the Russian state itself has become. That, in turn, makes the imprudence of uber-hawkishness in this part of the world even more disquieting.
The post The Distressing Death of Alexei Navalny appeared first on The American Conservative.
Rep. Mike Gallagher was one of the GOP’s rising stars. Now, he’s not seeking reelection after voting against impeaching DHS Secretary Mayorkas.
When Mike Gallagher was elected to Congress in 2016, he was pegged as one of the future faces of the Republican Party. Eight years on, Gallagher announced he is leaving Washington, D.C.
Princeton educated. A Ph.D. in international relations from Georgetown. An Iraq War veteran who served as an intelligence officer for the Marine Corps and spent seven years on active duty. Rep. Mike Gallagher was everything establishment Republicans in the mid-2010s wanted in a rising star of the Republican party. But Gallagher came to office the same year Donald Trump won the presidency and completely reshaped the party. Gallagher is a free trader and a hawk; Trump ran on protecting American industry and getting out of foreign wars.
Gallagher has been walking this tightrope for eight years, managing the tensions between his views and the views of the GOP base incarnate in the former president. Striking that balance, however, has now become untenable, and Gallagher has announced he’s not running for reelection in 2024 on the heels of a major vote against his Republican House colleagues.
As House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, moved to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the conference knew it was working with razor thin margins. Two Republican Congressmen, Reps. Tom McClintock of California and Ken Buck of Colorado, had already come out against the GOP’s attempt to impeach Mayorkas. The pair claimed that the Articles of Impeachment filed against Mayorkas did not make clear that Mayorkas had engaged in “high crimes or misdemeanors,” despite the fact that the phrase in Article II, Section 4 had a long history in British common law and its use extended to not only crimes, but the unwillingness to enforce the law in violation of one’s oath of office.
Gallagher withheld from publicly weighing in on the vote. Instead, he reportedly told conference colleagues in a closed-door meeting that impeaching Mayorkas could open “Pandora’s box.” When the vote came to the floor on February 6, Gallagher voted against impeachment, against his Republican colleagues, and against his constituents back in Wisconsin’s heavily-red eighth district. A number of GOP House members swarmed Gallagher: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Green, Jodey Arrington, and Dusty Johnson, among others.
Not yet time to panic—Republicans had three votes to give. With three defections, the predicted outcome was 215–214. That was, until Democrat Rep. Al Green of Texas burst onto the House floor in a wheelchair from a medical procedure and cast the tying vote. House members pleaded with Gallagher to change his vote, but Gallagher crossed his arms and shook his head. The House would eventually vote to impeach Mayorkas on Tuesday over Gallagher’s continued objections, but that will do little to change the perception that the 118th Congress has been defined by rogue GOP members sabotaging the party.
Blowback was swift. Calls started pouring in for Gallagher to resign his position as chairman of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on social media. The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell noted in a tweet that there might have been some horse-trading happening between Mayorkas and Gallagher. China is responsible for producing most of the fentanyl that is making its way across the border and into the U.S. Two weeks before the impeachment vote, Gallagher sent a letter asking Mayorkas to increase enforcement on textile imports, which Mayorkas did two days after Republicans filed their articles of impeachment.
Chinese nationals crossing the border:
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) February 8, 2024
FY21 – 450
FY22 – 2,176
FY23 – 24,314
FY24 – 19,600+
This trend poses a significant threat to national security and shows the CCP taking advantage of Biden's dangerous Open Borders.
The night of the failed vote, Gallagher published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “Impeachment not only would fail to resolve Mr. Biden’s border crisis but would also set a dangerous new precedent that would be used against future Republican administrations,” Gallagher wrote. “It would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.” But, undercutting the point, he noted that Democrats impeached President Donald Trump twice “though they couldn’t produce evidence [Trump] had committed a crime.” By his own admission, the box is already open.
While Gallagher is not as well-known to the Republican base as some of his 2016 classmates like Reps. Matt Gaetz, Liz Cheney, or Mike Johnson, Gallagher and his staff have a reputation for efficient day-to-day operations. His most prominent role in the party was bequeathed by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who appointed him the chairman of the House Select Committee on China when the 118th Congress began.
Over the past year, the committee has held a number of high-profile hearings and gatherings to workshop legislative proposals. In December 2023, the committee unveiled 150 policy recommendations, which particularly focus on changing the nation’s economic relationship with Beijing due to national security concerns.
The Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts said the proposals would have put U.S. policy in “an overly protectionist stance, when we should be making investments in the basics and pursuing more trade and investment ties with the world.”
Gallagher generally disagreed with Democrats’ concerns. “There are certain things that require a machete…and then there are things that require a scalpel,” Gallagher told POLITICO in an interview. America “must use both in order to successfully prevent a war with China in the near term, prevent China from controlling the commanding heights of critical technology in the midterm and win this new Cold War over the long term,” he added.
Nevertheless, as negotiations on the 150 proposals continued, they were softened to make them more amenable to Democrats on the committee. It made Gallagher seem competent and the committee seem committed to finding real solutions. Gallagher’s esteem grew in the eyes of his committee colleagues.
“There is tremendous momentum that is being built behind actual legislative proposals,” Rep. Dusty Johnson previously claimed. Auchincloss seems to agree. “I literally have a list of three dozen pieces of legislation that have been recommended by the committee or by other committees of jurisdiction that can move in a big China bill,” Auchincloss told POLITICO. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, went so far as to say the committee “may offer a model for how you do business in Congress.”
Previously, Gallagher said he was hoping to move forward on “a big China bill” in 2024. Whether his betrayal of his Republican colleagues will endanger what Gallagher surely hopes will be his crowning legislative achievement remains to be seen.
The day following the failed impeachment vote, reports speculated that the political strategist Alex Bruesewitz, a Wisconsin native currently residing in Palm Beach as a member of Trump’s inner circle of political advisors, was considering a primary challenge against Gallagher. Bruesewitz had reportedly considered a run in Wisconsin’s Eighth last year, amid speculation at the time that Gallagher might challenge Tammy Baldwin for her senate seat.
Bruesewitz, in a phone interview with The American Conservative, said that he was “honestly shocked” by Gallagher’s vote against impeachment. “That is a no-brainer vote for somebody that represents a R+20 district,” he said. “The district that knows the effects and the impact of illegal immigration, and that part of the state has been hit hard by drug deaths and an overdose and fentanyl.”
Bruesewitz told TAC his phone started blowing up after Gallagher’s no vote. “Immediately I was getting calls and texts from members in Congress and people in the President’s orbit saying, ‘Hey, man, would you consider running against this guy?’”
“They must have read that article back in April,” Bruesewitz said, because “those that reached out to me said, ‘now you can primary, we’ve got your back.’” Some of the House members, Bruesewitz told TAC, are in House leadership, are chairmen of committees, and are very close with Trump. “If I got in this race, I would have a coalition that would be almost impossible to beat in a Republican primary.”
Bruesewitz gave it some thought and decided he would casually start exploring a run against Gallagher. Word started to get out, and Bruesewitz started receiving calls from constituents in the district. “Different GOP chairs called saying ‘we’d love to host you at events,’” Bruesewitz claimed.
“Let’s just say that if I run, I will have the full support of the MAGA movement behind me,” Bruesewitz said.
The grassroots also applied pressure on Gallagher. “It’s our hope that Trump-ally Alex Bruesewitz enters the primary race because we trust that he will always put the safety of Wisconsinites and the American people FIRST,” a statement from the Wisconsin College Republicans read. “Alex is a son of Wisconsin and grew up in the birthplace of the Republican Party, Ripon, WI.”
Ken Sikora, the GOP chair of Oconto County in Wisconsin’s Eighth District, sent a letter to other GOP county chairs in the district encouraging other GOP chairs to support Bruesewitz’s potential primary challenge. The Brown County GOP, the largest county in the eighth district, also came out and condemned Gallagher’s vote against impeaching Mayorkas.
Bruesewitz addressed the reports in a statement posted February 8 on Twitter. “I’m sure many of you have seen the reports that I am considering running for Congress in my home state of Wisconsin against [Gallagher],” Bruesewitz tweeted. “I am NOT CONFIRMING a run at this time. I have NOT made a decision on this yet. But I will be taking a STRONG LOOK.”
“During this time period my main focus will continue to be on getting MAGA Republicans elected to the house and senate and OF COURSE [Donald Trump] back in the White House!” Bruesewitz concluded.
By February 10, Gallagher announced he would not pursue reelection. “The Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives. Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old. And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided not to run for re-election,” Gallagher’s statement read. “Thank you to the good people of Northeast Wisconsin for the honor of a lifetime. Four terms serving you has strengthened my conviction that America is the greatest country in the history of the world. And though my title may change, my mission will always remain the same: deter America’s enemies and defend the Constitution.”
Some grieved upon hearing the news. Rep. Ashley Hinson called it a “huge loss for Congress.” The former Michigan lawmaker and Senate candidate Peter Meijer tweeted that he “can’t overstate the loss this is to the House’s ability to smartly counter China and lead from the front on AI/cyber.”
Gallagher’s announcement was “disappointing” to Bruesewitz because Gallagher “backstabbed his constituents on the way out of office.”
“He pulled an Adam Kinzinger,” the Never Trump former congressman from Illinois, Bruesewitz said. Bruesewitz added that he did not want to “attack [Gallagher’s] character.”
“He seems like a nice guy. He seems like he loves his family,” Bruesewitz added. “But he’s not the type of Republican that we need in office right now.”
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Gallagher denied that the fallout from his impeachment vote had anything to do with his decision to not seek reelection. “I feel, honestly, like people get it, and they can accept the fact that they don’t have to agree with you 100 percent,” Gallagher told the Sentinel, “the news cycle is so short that I just don’t think that stuff lasts.”
He may well hope. Bruesewitz speculated that Gallagher could run for governor of Wisconsin in 2026. “I feel much more comfortable with Gallagher in a statewide position like governor because governors aren’t in charge of foreign policy,” Bruesewitz said.
“Keeping the hawks out of Washington D.C. needs to be priority number one for America First,” Bruesewitz stated. “For the future success of the party and country, we need to get these people out. The people that are trigger-happy, the people that want to run around the halls saying ‘we got to go assassinate Vladimir Putin,’ those people are unserious individuals who are responsible for tens of thousands if not millions of deaths across the globe.”
Losing Gallagher, Bruesewitz claimed, “was a big loss for the Bush wing of the Republican Party that is shrinking by the day.”
Gallagher joins three other Republican House committee chairs that will not be running for reelection (so far). House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry, and Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers have all previously announced they are retiring from public office. Record numbers of retirements across both parties ensures a lot of new faces will be in the 119th Congress. Retirements could also make more House races competitive and result in a shift in the balance of power in Washington.
One thing is clear to Bruesewitz with the elections upcoming: “We cannot go back to the policies of the Bush era. We cannot go back to that party.”
“The American people widely reject what they sell,” Bruesewitz continued. “The future of the Republican Party is obviously an America First foreign policy,” of President Donald Trump.
The post MAGA vs. Mike Gallagher: The Inside Story appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Notorious Trump apostate John Bolton just gave away the game on efforts to quash NATO reform.
“John Bolton Is Certain Trump Really Wants to Blow Up NATO”; at least, according to a Politico headline.
Politico recently interviewed Trump’s uber-hawkish former national security adviser, which appears as part of a campaign to drum up some sales for his 2020 Trump White House memoir titled The Room Where It Happened—now with a new foreword!
“We have been telling NATO allies for decades that they had to increase their defense spending. And those of us who have been doing this for a long time have done it to strengthen NATO so that the U.S. can be more flexible around the world,” Bolton told Politico. “When Trump complains that NATO allies are not spending enough on defense, he’s not complaining to get them to strengthen NATO. He’s using it to bolster his excuse to get out.”
At a recent rally in South Carolina, Trump said “NATO was busted until I came along.”
When Trump entered office, “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
One unnamed European president, according to Trump, asked the then-president if the U.S. would defend their country if they didn’t pay. Trump claimed he replied, “No, I would not protect you.”
“In fact, I would encourage [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Trump is a New Yorker, and that kind of talk is quintessentially New York. He’s busting their chops. Of course, this kind of talk is completely lost on smarmy European centrists. Nevertheless, it worked. Almost every NATO country increased their defense expenditures over Trump’s tenure. But don’t just take my word for it. More Bolton:
The commitment that all this turns on — at the NATO summit at Cardiff, Wales, in 2014 — was that over a 10-year period, all NATO members would end up spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product or more on defense, and that hasn’t happened. Spending has increased in recent years. And a good part of the reason for that is Trump.
Yet, Bolton says Trump’s effort to get NATO countries to pay up is “to lay the groundwork to get out.” What Bolton is really doing here is telling NATO partners across the Atlantic to avoid increasing defense expenditures in an attempt to “keep the Americans in,” as Lord Ismay once observed. If Trump becomes president again, there will be scores of Bolton types—left, right, and center—doing the same exact thing.
But ask any New Yorker, especially any involved in real estate—eventually, all bills come due, and someone comes to collect.
The post The Establishment Plan to Handcuff Trump to NATO appeared first on The American Conservative.
Fresh off the Senate floor from his talking filibuster, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky spoke with The American Conservative.
Conservative senators are not rolling over in the face of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to jam billions of dollars of Ukraine aid through the legislature’s upper chamber.
On Saturday, Senator Mike Lee of Utah occupied the Senate floor for nearly four hours in a talking filibuster. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio pulled back the curtain on McConnell’s motivations for forcing through the $95 billion supplemental in a Monday piece for The American Conservative. “Nearly a year away from an election that could give Trump the presidency,” Vance wrote, “Ukraine-obsessive Republicans have already given the Democrats a predicate to impeach him.”
On Monday afternoon, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky launched a talking filibuster of his own. “Open the champagne, pop the cork. The Senate Democrat leader and the Republican leader are on their way to Kiev. They’ve got $60 billion they’re bringing. I don’t know if it will be cash in pallets, but they’re taking your money to Kiev,” Paul said in his speech that lasted over an hour. Fresh off the Senate floor, Paul spoke to TAC.
Paul explained what is motivating him and his senate colleagues engaging in this talking filibuster. “We have so many problems to deal with in our country and along our border that we shouldn’t be prioritizing another nation’s border without first fixing our own border,” Paul told TAC in a phone interview.
Shortly after Paul’s time came to a close, Vance took the baton to continue the talking filibuster, which has now spanned over 120 hours.
Paul, like many of his conservative colleagues, is concerned about the national debt as well. The Kentucky senator noted the U.S. is currently running a deficit of $1.5 trillion annually. While $95 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the $34 trillion debt, it is exactly this kind of uniparty spending and governance over time that has made sending $95 billion overseas seem inconsequential.
“Our debt is rising at an alarming rate,” Paul explained. “The Federal Reserve Chairman this week said it’s urgent that we do something about the debt, and yet the urgency falls on deaf ears. The urgency to Schumer, McConnell and Biden is to send another $100 billion overseas, when in reality that just makes our debt problem worse.”
“Shouldn’t we try to fix our own country first?” Paul asked his senate colleagues on Monday. In Sunday’s vote, 18 Republicans joined 47 Democrats and two independents to shut down further debate and advance the legislation. The final tally was 67–27 with all the no votes coming from the GOP conference.
Nevertheless, senate rules triggered a 30-hour clock for speaking on the floor after the senate voted to advance the legislation Sunday. “We have 30 hours of speaking, but the rules in the senate are very specific. Each senator can only speak for one hour.” Paul explained over the phone.
That makes organizing a speaking filibuster tricky. “We have a string of speakers speaking up to an hour. Mike Lee and I spoke earlier. We have a few minutes left. I think he has eight minutes left and I have 17 minutes left. If there’s a lapse in the floor and the vote hasn’t been called, both Mike Lee and I will go back to the floor and speak again.”
If there is a lapse in the talking filibuster before time is set to run out at 8:00 pm Monday, Democrats will move to end the filibuster and end debate. Nevertheless, that vote will trigger yet another 30 hour period. “It becomes a little tougher at night because you still get your one hour, but you got to get as many senators as you can to speak through the middle of the night,” Paul said.
Paul and his colleagues are fully aware they are not going to be able to permanently stop the Senate from passing the $95 billion supplemental.
“The reason for the talking filibuster is not that we’re going to win. They have the votes to win,” Paul said. “We’re causing them to ultimately expend seven days. We’ve made them be here on the weekend if they want to take our money and ship it to another country. The punishment we can inflict is we keep them here on the weekend; we keep them from campaigning; we keep them from fundraising.”
Because the Senate has been forced to work over the weekend, the talking filibuster isn’t winning the conservative objectors many friends. Some, Paul said , have been “hateful in private.”
“Some will come up to you and insinuate you’re doing this for unclean reasons, or you’re not doing this for any kind of moral reason, or you’re doing this to grandstand,” Paul said. “Then there’s all kinds of accusations you’re doing this to raise money.”
While the talking filibuster is unlikely to cause senators to change how they are voting on the supplemental, Paul suggested it could become a rallying point for the grassroots. “I think the vast majority of Republicans and conservatives across the country disagree with Mitch McConnell on this,” Paul added. “They would be horrified to find out Republican leaders are sending their money overseas while ignoring their own border.
Paul claimed this was the “uniparty” at work in his Monday speech. “Really, there only is one party when you get down to it,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “This is a secret you’re not supposed to expose in Washington.”
“The reason they’re trying to get this done is Chuck Schumer has a trip planned to Kiev. They’re going to crack champagne with Zelensky and celebrate with pallets of cash,” Paul told TAC. “I’ve sort of sarcastically said, ‘I wonder who’s paying for the champagne.’ I guess we’re paying for the champagne, too.”
After a few more procedural votes, the Senate is expected to pass the $95 billion supplemental on Wednesday, but there are no guarantees that the Republican-controlled House decides to take up the legislation. TAC asked Paul what his message is for the House GOP members who will likely be considering the supplemental very soon. “Don’t!” he replied.
What can voters do? “They all need to call Speaker Johnson and their congressman and say, ‘Do not vote on this monstrosity. Do not send our money overseas and fix our border first.’”
The post Inside Conservatives’ Effort to Stop Another Ukraine War Package appeared first on The American Conservative.
The inside story of how Congress is pursuing endless war in Ukraine—and trying to stop a Trump election.
This weekend, Senate Democrats (joined by a few Republicans, including most Republican leadership) forced through a “security supplemental” that spends close to $100 billion, most of it on Ukraine. It was the culmination of months of secretive negotiations on border security. Those negotiations produced a border security product unacceptable to most Republicans, so then Republicans voted it down, and then an hour later we were debating a security supplemental with border security stripped out.
The quick pivot, refusal to negotiate another round on border security, and immediate shift to blame Trump confirmed one thing: Republican leadership wasn’t serious about border security. They cared most about Ukraine funding and saw the border negotiations as a distraction. This extinguished any hope of real border security before the negotiation began.
The story our leadership tells is that the “politics of border security” had changed because of Donald Trump. James Lankford dutifully negotiated a bipartisan border product. Conservative Republicans encouraged this negotiation. When the product took shape, Donald Trump demanded conservatives walk. Trump argued that Joe Biden didn’t need a border security package—which was true—so Republicans should ask simply that Joe Biden do his job. This intervention allegedly killed a great piece of border policy.
This is a fairytale that makes conservative senators and Donald Trump look bad, perhaps by design. In truth, the demands conservative senators made at the beginning of the negotiation went like this: Joe Biden can fix this problem, but he refuses, so we must make him do his job. This posture came along specific demands from senators ranging from Ukraine aid supporters like Marco Rubio to Ukraine aid skeptics like me, and those in the middle like Ron Johnson. We argued that we could condition further Ukraine aid on decreased illegal border crossings. In other words, Congress would appropriate money to Ukraine in stages: if Biden refused to drive down border crossings, he wouldn’t get his money for Ukraine.
The deal, as envisioned by conservatives, was apparently never on the table. According to both Democratic colleagues and some Republicans, this is because Republican leadership—specifically Mitch McConnell—refused to push the Democrats on this issue. Other Republicans have argued instead that even if Mitch McConnell empowered Lankford to make this demand, Democrats would have never agreed.
Obviously, this latter view reflects more favorably on Mitch McConnell, but only by a little, because it suggests a massive asymmetry in negotiating leverage. If Democrats are desperate for Ukraine aid, and Republicans—at least the negotiating Republicans—are also desperate for Ukraine aid, border security would inevitably land on the chopping block.
Did Trump oppose a deal? He certainly opposed the deal that was on the table. It would have done little to secure the border in the future, would have been a massive political gift to the Democrats, and would constrain Trump’s border enforcement if he was ever elected president. This last point deserves extra emphasis: these bipartisan deals always seem to contain provisions that would put the next president, whoever that is, in a box.
Given its substance, it is hardly surprising that he opposed the deal, but most Republicans opposed the deal well before he weighed in—publicly or privately. In fact, the only conversation I had with Donald Trump about the border deal was a day after the text came out, well after I had opposed the bill’s headline provisions. “Why do you guys want to give these people such a gift? It’s stupid.” It was an accurate point, but it didn’t change anyone’s mind because most of us already agreed with the former president.
So the deal fell apart, and the way it fell apart was the height of political malpractice. The text—370 pages of it—dropped late Sunday, February 4. We had a Republican conference meeting on Monday, well before anyone had time to digest major provisions. McConnell left the meeting and praised the bill but criticized the changing political dynamics. He blamed Donald Trump. He blamed the House of Representatives.
It’s hard to imagine a more damaging political message: Hey everyone, we’ve got great bipartisan policy, but we’re going to kill it because the knuckle draggers don’t like it. It was a gift to Democrats and everyone knew it. Senate candidates across the country, many of whom are allies of Mitch McConnell, called me to complain bitterly of the predicament created by leadership in Washington.
Normally, spending bills go through months of review, committee markups, and hours of debate. The text of the Ukraine supplemental was distributed to Hill staff on Wednesday, February 7, and the first procedural vote was taken less than a day later. On February 5, many senators had emphasized the importance of doing something on the border before action was taken on Ukraine. Two days later, at least some of them had decided that fighting for border security for an hour had checked the box, and they were ready to move on to their real priority: funding for Ukraine. The bill will pass, albeit by a tiny margin, with a majority of Republicans opposing the bait and switch.
This current episode is finished, at least in the senate, but there will be many reruns. The form of this debacle will replay itself, to the great detriment of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. Three facts are important. First, voters range from ambivalent to outright hostile of further Ukraine aid. Second, a subset of Republican senators are obsessed with Ukraine aid, caring about this issue more than any other. Third, a majority of House Republicans oppose further Ukraine aid, and demand strong border security measures regardless of the details of a Ukraine package.
It’s easy to sketch out how these facts will manifest themselves in our political reality. The senate Ukraine bill goes to the House, where leadership there cannot bring it up to the floor without endangering House Speaker Mike Johnson. So the House will either refuse to vote on the Ukraine bill, or will attach a strong border security bill (like HR2) and then send it back to the Senate. In public and private, Senate Republican leadership will undermine the House leadership and the Republican presidential nominee.
Democrats could try to force House leadership to bring up Ukraine aid with a discharge petition, an approach that would hand control of the House floor over to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with the aid of a few House Republicans. Speaker Johnson could fight this maneuver aggressively. If he does, he will be attacked by Senate Republican leaders, at least privately, and will face another negative news cycle. If he doesn’t, his own conference will turn against him. The cycle will replay over the government funding deadline in March. It will replay over the omnibus debate that follows. It will replay any time the U.S. Congress must actually do something.
Whatever shape this takes, the basic game will be the same. The media, obsessed with any story that makes Trump look bad, will blame him and “MAGA Republicans” in the House. They will blame Trump for the chaos. They will blame Trump for “extremism.” They will refuse to report on Biden’s failings and instead focus on internal Republican division. They will point to Republican senators attacking Donald Trump and House Republicans, just as they have over the last week. Democrats will run advertisements: “See, even Mitch McConnell thinks Trump is being ridiculous.” And they will rinse and repeat this narrative all the way to the November election.
This is how you save Joe Biden’s presidency: By taking the chaos of Joe Biden’s tenure and making it about Republican chaos being even worse. By taking the extremism of Democrats and making it all about the crazy right-wingers in the House and Mar-a-Lago.
To be clear, this doesn’t assume malice. The Republican establishment of Washington is so obsessively committed to Ukraine that they will use every tool at their disposal to apply pressure to other Republicans to write that big Ukraine check. The problem is that every time they apply pressure, they create an opening for Democrats and the media to tank our nominee.
For months, I have been confident that Donald Trump would be reelected as president. But this is how you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Republican establishment is going to war for more Ukraine money. They don’t care if a second Trump term is collateral damage.
But, of course, they have an insurance plan even if Trump pulls it off. Though few have noticed, buried in the bill’s text is a kill switch for the next Trump presidency. The legislation explicitly requires funding for Ukraine well into the next presidential term. The Washington Post has already reported this provision was added to control Donald Trump.
It gets worse. Back in 2019, Democrats articulated a novel theory of impeachment, based on Trump’s refusal to spend money from the USAI—Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. Five years after impeaching Trump for refusing to spend money on Ukraine, they have drafted a new law that again requires Trump to spend money on Ukraine. If he negotiates an end to the war, as he has promised to do, they will undoubtedly argue that he has broken the law. We are nearly a year away from an election that could give Trump the presidency, and Ukraine-obsessive Republicans have already given the Democrats a predicate to impeach him.
Slava Ukraini, America be damned.
The post The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.
Foreign policy, and politics generally, is not primarily about good feelings.
Anyone who watched Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin and saw only Kremlin propaganda is like a moviegoer who wants to join the Mafia immediately after seeing The Godfather or Goodfellas. They saw the cars, money, and glory, but somehow missed that nearly all the characters wound up dead or in prison by the end.
Of course, there are plenty of people who watch mob films and come away admiring the mobsters. And there is a small subset of conservatives who venerate Putin as the Ronald Reagan of Viktor Orbans, or at least a Tony Soprano–like antihero telling the globalists to fuggedaboutit.
Anyone who paid close attention to Carlson’s interview with Putin came away seeing the Russian leader as a ranting maniac who, whatever his concerns about NATO expansion, has some expansionist fantasies that are in part driving his costly and brutal war in Ukraine. This was done without Carlson engaging in the histrionics of an MSNBC personality grilling a Republican senator, who, to that audience, is nearly as bad as Putin himself.
Carlson’s critics shifted the goalposts afterward. They predicted he would not press for the release of imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. When Carlson did exactly that, they said he did it too late in the interview or mocked him for appealing to Putin’s “decency.”
Carlson did not advocate for Gershkovich in a way that was most emotionally satisfying, but he did so in terms that had some small chance of actually securing the reporter’s release. That ought to count for something if the objective is obtaining Gershkovich’s freedom rather than feeling good about oneself. And Putin does not come off well in the exchange.
But the people most incensed about Carlson’s interview do not watch mob movies. They instead think the West Wing is a documentary and wanted Carlson to be the Martin Sheen of Ronald Reagans, delivering a cinematic denunciation of Putin that would make them feel good even if it accomplished nothing.
This is the problem with U.S. policy on Ukraine in general. It is more concerned with high-minded moralist rhetoric than determining what is in our national interest or actually happening on the ground in Ukraine. It is no feel-good story, regardless of Putin’s resemblance to a villain out of central casting and Volodymyr Zelensky’s to a Hollywood leading man.
Nikki Haley says we can support Ukraine indefinitely at a minimal cost to ourselves, a preventive war to prevent all wars. “This is about preventing war—it’s always been about preventing war,” she said at a Republican presidential debate. “If we support Ukraine, that’s only 3.5 percent of our defense budget.” But there is, in fact, a war going on right now.
President Joe Biden has sounded a similar refrain, suggesting he can perfectly thread the needle between confronting Russia without getting dragged into the war ourselves. Yet as Nucky Thompson in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire was admonished that he could not be “half a gangster,” it is difficult to be half a wartime president.
Sometimes proponents of this policy seem confused about the objective. Is it about liberating Ukraine and defeating the Russian invaders? Or is the point a protracted fight that degrades Russia’s military? Is there not some tradeoff between these two goals that can be measured in Ukrainian lives?
Is it really true that what we are currently doing makes a NATO war with Russia less likely rather than more? Would admitting Ukraine to NATO make such a war more or less likely?
There are useful things that can be learned from talking to Putin, but these are questions that need to be asked of Biden. Someone should, but he is apparently not taking many interviews at this time. Enjoy the Super Bowl!
The war in Ukraine has become a quagmire for a few simple reasons. Ukraine matters more to Ukrainians than it does to a ragtag band of Russian conscripts; Ukraine matters more to Russia, and certainly Putin’s government, than it does to the United States and its allies arming Kiev.
Until these basic realities are accepted, it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation about Ukraine policy. Does anything Russia has managed to do in Ukraine make it seem like Moscow could realistically threaten NATO territory? If the answer is no, but its nuclear arsenal must be taken seriously, what are the limits of what the U.S. and its allies are willing to do for Ukraine? And what does a realistically attainable and just peace for Ukraine look like?
That may not make for good television, which is why a small number of contrarians would rather watch the Putin Show and most of the people who actually make decisions in Washington prefer the Zelensky Show. But it is the beginning of a realistic, rather than feel-good, foreign policy.
The post Russia Hawks Missed the Point of Tucker’s Putin Interview appeared first on The American Conservative.
The intellectual bankruptcy of fanatical Ukraine war supporters is laid bare in their wacky equation of Russia and Hamas, and right and left skeptics alike.
“To call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.” So said California’s Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi recently, before proceeding to call for FBI investigations against pro-Gaza ceasefire protestors.
One may be inclined to dismiss this unsubstantiated claim as the ramblings of an octogenarian Democratic politician, one advancing yet another Russiagate absurdity.
Yet signs suggest it may be part of a broader trend. Recently, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, in a secret meeting with AIPAC donors attributed the pro-ceasefire positions of some progressive lawmakers to misinformation from “TikTok and China and Russia and our other adversaries.”
This is not only relegated to Democrats with Putin Derangement Syndrome. The GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley actually suggested that Putin was “the happiest person in the world” after Oct. 7 (his birthday), and has since “held hands with Hamas and said they were friends.” Not only that, that Russian intelligence “is what helped Hamas know how to get through [Israel’s] barrier.”
This new conflation of Russia and Hamas and the extension of the Putin-supporter smear to skeptics of Biden’s Israel policies demonstrate the psyche of the foreign policy establishment in the current moment. Deviations from the orthodoxy—that is, questioning whether unconditional support for Ukraine and Israel’s current war on Gaza are actually in the U.S. national interest—are now reflexively met with disdain by Pelosi, Gillibrand, Haley, and the like.
Rather than considering the merits of the arguments put forth by those opposed to continued U.S. patronage in either conflict, it is McCarthyism that prevails. Just consider the unhinged response to Tucker Carlson’s sighting in Moscow to interview Putin. “He is a traitor,” tweeted the former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican. “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” Bill Kristol tweeted.
It need not apply strictly to conservatives though. In addition to the Gaza protestors, Ukraine war dissenters on the left have also fallen victim to the McCarthyism crusade to the point of criminalization. As covered extensively by Glenn Greenwald, four members of the African People’s Socialist Party—a long-standing anti-war party on the left—are now facing considerable jail time on accusations of serving as Kremlin agents. Noticeably, the “Putin fan club” has become quite the diverse, equitable, and inclusive posse.
This irony aside, dissenters on both Israel and Ukraine represent a deeper, more substantive threat to Washington’s war party by asking a simple question: How does bankrolling these appalling conflicts help the United States? Displaying an unwillingness and incapacity to answer this question and self-reflect on their own policy stances, the War Party instead turns to name-calling in a manner meant to gate-keep permissible foreign policy discourse.
Such a tactic has been commonplace in the Blob’s rhetorical toolbox for years. Those on the right skeptical of American military adventurism have long been maligned as “isolationists,” clearly to evoke pre-WWII fascistic connotations. Such language is alive and well, even in describing those opposed to fanatical neocon calls for bombing Iran.
One must ask if this speaks to electoral machinations, both as a cudgel to enforce Democratic conformity around Biden’s policymaking and as a means of scaring Democratic voters ahead of the primaries and general election. Such an approach was clearly employed by Biden in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, in which he linked Republican ideology to “semi-fascism’’ and MAGA with authoritarian movements in Europe and Putin.
Yet with Biden’s approval rating at the lowest point of his presidency and the majority of Democratic voters having supported a ceasefire for months, such an approach now seems questionable. Pelosi’s accusations have been met with considerable criticism from progressive and anti-war organizations, highlighting the deep intra-left tensions surrounding the war in Gaza. It is clear to many that Democratic leadership is seeking to gatekeep and enforce conformity to silence dissenters among their progressive ranks by any means possible.
One may ask, too, whether this speaks to an internalized pathology that has come to plague much of the D.C. establishment, that of an all-encompassing Russiaphobia hindering sober analytic reasoning.
Accepting this assessment, it is easier to understand how one may come to the conclusion that a Putin fifth column exists in the United States, one composed of Muslim pro-Palestinian advocates, rural Trump supporters completely disillusioned with endless war, and everything in between. These sudden fellow travelers couldn’t be bound by a common distaste for reckless American warmaking. No, it must be pro-Russian isolationism.
While Biden will feel increasingly pressed to pursue a peaceful end to the war in Gaza, it appears unlikely that this general line of reasoning will subside. The McCarthyite pathology is fully ingrained in the uniparty psyche—perhaps incurably.
The post The ‘Putin Supporter’ Slur Has Jumped Shark appeared first on The American Conservative.
The most anticipated interview of this century so far is out. It will take a while to listen to the two-hour marathon and digest the full 25-page transcript. Superficially, here are the most striking points.
First, Putin seems genuinely worried about the CIA. Second, he thinks Zelensky is powerless against domestic neonazis and is essentially a puppet who cannot defy them; therefore there is no point in talking with him anyway. He thinks America will have major problems from mass migration and economic implosion due to debt, much faster than anyone can anticipate. He genuinely cannot think that China will ever be imperial or have ambitions in the north. He is very vocally signalling about MAD and deterrence going both ways. He doesn’t want a full NATO–Russia war.
This is perhaps the most important exchange in the whole interview.
“Can you imagine a scenario where you send Russian troops to Poland?” Tucker asked.
“Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia,” Putin replied. “Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat-mongering.”
“It is absolutely out of the question,” he added. “You just don’t have to be any kind of analyst. It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war and a global war will bring all humanity to the brink of destruction. It’s obvious.”
A man who is worried about a humanity-destroying war isn’t, for all practical purposes, an irrational crusader. If he understands that nuclear deterrence goes both ways, perhaps we should try to relearn that lesson too.
The post Tucker Interview Shows Putin’s Rational Side appeared first on The American Conservative.
An increasing number of Republican senators believe it is time for Mitch McConnell’s ousting as GOP leader.
When Senate negotiators unveiled their 370 page supplemental funding bill Sunday night, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer planned to schedule a vote on the legislation Wednesday. How things have changed in less than 72 hours. The bipartisan-negotiated supplemental is dead. It’s dead not because of Senator James Lankford, the head Republican negotiator, but because of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. With the Senate now set to consider a stand-alone supplemental for Ukraine, a country whose border security McConnell values more than his own, one can’t help but wonder if this is what McConnell wanted all along.
Since September, a revolving group of senators have been negotiating behind closed doors on a supplemental funding bill that would tie Ukraine, Israel, and Indo-Pacific aid to border security. For months, members of the Republican conference were asking for more clarity and detail on what was going to be included in the overly-hyped border deal. Claims made in various statements, leaks, and reports on the negotiations—which primarily involved Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut—were wide ranging. One day, reports would claim talks were heating up or progress was being made. The next, negotiations were on ice and negotiators were at an impasse, particularly when it came to the president’s parole powers, which ultimately were not addressed in the final version of the bill.
All of a sudden, negotiators dropped the full text of the bill like an atomic bomb on Capitol Hill. The final product spanned 370 pages and would cost American taxpayers $118.3 billion. Sixty of the $118.3 billion supplemental was directed towards supporting Ukraine. Another $14 billion was for aid to Israel, and $20 billion was to ostensibly secure the southern border.
Despite receiving about a sixth of the supplemental funding, immigration and border security provisions received the most language. The provisions were utterly toothless—especially when it came to provisions that would require the use of a “border emergency authority” to stem the tide of migrants entering the United States. Beyond its inefficacious provisions, the legislation would have codified a parallel asylum system that the Biden administration has already implemented via regulation (though the legality of this system is dubious at best) to bring millions more migrants into the United States, as well as a massive expansion in visa and working permits.
Several senators previously told The American Conservative the bill was worse than they ever would have expected. How was this the final product?
“We were open to funding for Ukraine to secure the border,” Senator Ron Johnson told TAC in a phone interview. “That’s what I thought the marching orders were, that’s what we thought McConnell had agreed to, but we have to secure the border and it can’t be a sham. It’s got to be real border security.”
To ensure real border security, “I pushed for making the Ukraine funding contingent on actual border metrics,” like threshold and performance measures over a number of months, Johnson told TAC. “We definitely had a majority of our conference support that.”
“The only way you can get border security with a lawless administration is you have to tie it to something they want,” which was aid for Ukraine, Senator Rick Scott of Florida told TAC in a phone interview. “So a lot of us, and Ron Johnson was probably the most vocal on this, said we’ve got to have metrics and the numbers need to come down to the Trump numbers, or you don’t get the Ukraine aid over a period of time.”
In an exclusive interview with POLITICO published on Wednesday, McConnell insisted that “The reason we’ve been talking about the border is because [the bill’s critics] wanted to.”
“There are a number of provisions in this bill that if they were made better and actually forced Joe Biden to do his job, we’d all vote for it,” Ohio Senator J.D. Vance said in defense of GOP senators rejecting the bill. “I’m maybe the biggest skeptic of Ukraine aid in the United States Senate. I care much more about the American southern border, but I’m not going to vote for a border security package that doesn’t do any border security.”
“This idea that we signed a political death compact, where we wanted to negotiate for border security, so we’re therefore committed to supporting any package that comes out of these negotiations is ridiculous,” Vance later added.
The reason the bill failed to secure the border, however, is because McConnell, after deputizing Lankford, prevented the senator from Oklahoma from attaching Ukraine aid to any real, concrete metric of bringing down the number of migrants entering the United States.
“Without telling anybody, apparently, McConnell, on his own, told Lankford that’s not even on the table,” Johnson said. Later, “we had that confirmed by Sinema, who said that James never asked for that.” For Johnson, it was “a breach of [McConnell’s] leadership position” by blowing off the consensus view of the conference.
After “McConnell told Lankford he couldn’t do that,” Scott decided to ask leadership if those were the marching orders leadership gave Lankford at a Senate GOP conference luncheon. “It’s my understanding that that leadership has decided that they will not allow metrics to be tied to Ukraine aid,” Scott said, paraphrasing his remarks at the luncheon. “Nobody said it wasn’t true.” With an exasperated tone, Scott repeated himself: “I brought it up and nobody said it wasn’t true.”
“James is a good person. He’s a hard worker. I think he was always optimistic that he could get something done, but it was a suicide mission,” Scott told TAC of Lankford. “He didn’t have what he needed.”
“It’s not James Lankford’s fault. It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told POLITICO.
It’s not the first time McConnell has bucked his own conference for the sake of Ukraine aid. The Senate supplemental negotiations began after McConnell, at the behest of President Joe Biden, failed to convince the Republican conference to vote for a continuing resolution negotiated by a leadership-deputized group of Senate appropriators in September 2023. McConnell ally Senator Susan Collins headed up the negotiations with her Democratic appropriations counterpart Senator Patty Murray. The Senate version of the continuing resolution would have provided $6 billion of aid for Ukraine while funding the government through mid November. Senate Republicans shut him down while the Republican-controlled House warned at the time it would be dead on arrival.
If some Republican senators thought previous negotiations between appropriators were shrouded in secrecy, recent border negotiations were even more opaque. “It was completely secret. They weren’t telling us about the components,” Johnson said. At another point, Johnson called McConnell’s negotiation strategy “fatally flawed.”
The conference should have functioned like a board of directors of a company in the midst of negotiations, Johnson suggested. The conference should have established “red lines,” but “all those decisions,” such as divorcing Ukraine aid to real border metrics, “got made by McConnell,” Johnson continued. “This is the way McConnell operates. I mean, even his people in leadership have no idea if he’s got a strategy or what it is—he keeps everything close to the vest.”
“Coming from the private sector, it’s just such a foreign way of having a leader,” Johnson told TAC. “In the private sector, you have mission vision statements, you have annual goals. People understand their roles, where it’s appropriate, you have to try and get consensus of the managerial team. That doesn’t happen here at all. We’re all supposed to be equal. It’s just that there’s one a whole lot more equal than the rest of us.”
“You see the result,” said Johnson. “The result is a debacle.”
Now, McConnell is trying to brush his failure under the rug. “The reason we ended up where we are is the members decided, since it was never going to become law, they didn’t want to deal with it,” McConnell told POLITICO. “I don’t know who is at fault here, in terms of trying to cast public blame.”
“He’s realizing that he doesn’t want to get blamed for this travesty, and so now he’s just trying to shift the blame so that he doesn’t have to accept the blame of a completely flawed negotiation strategy on an issue where the vast majority of Americans agree with us, not Democrats,” Johnson explained. “So why in the world would you enter secret negotiations on an issue when the public is squarely behind your position?”
“These were real tactical errors that he’s made,” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told POLITICO of the Senate minority leader. “I think his public opinion polls show it.”
Johnson, Scott, and their allies in the Senate GOP conference are now trying to ensure the $118.3 billion supplemental stays dead while also killing the clean supplemental for Ukraine and Israel because Congress still has not delivered border security for the American people.
Pivoting from one failed supplemental to likely another makes it “obvious that Mitch’s top priority is to provide aid to Ukraine—to secure Ukraine’s border before ours,” Johnson claimed. As for the Senate, Johnson says “this is not the world’s greatest deliberative body. We hardly deliberate at all.”
Vance called McConnell’s pivot “a huge surprise” in an interview with Steve Bannon on Wednesday. “The establishment, combined with the Democrats, are then going to cut out the border piece of this package, which leaves Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel funding and try to jam it through today.”
“I have no idea why we’re doing it except for this: Senate leadership is obsessed,” Vance told Bannon. It’s “a borderline fetish with getting Ukraine money and they’re willing to give away all of our leverage to get it. Everybody needs to say this is a no-go. Vote no on this package. It is the single most important thing to kill in the U.S. Senate since I’ve been here. The worst piece of legislation, I think, in the U.S. Senate since I’ve been here and we’ve got to absolutely get it out of here.”
“For three months it’s been nothing but border and Ukraine, border and Ukraine, border and Ukraine. I don’t know how many speeches I’ve heard…and now all of a sudden, it’s: ‘We’re not going to do that,’” Hawley said, per POLITICO. “It just seems like total chaos to me.”
“I am hoping my colleagues are really taking a close hard look and asking themselves, ‘How did we get in a position where we’re being blamed for a problem that was 100% caused by Biden and his Democrat allies in Congress?’” Johnson said. “McConnell led us into that.”
“This wasn’t good for him. This wasn’t good for any of us,” Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said of McConnell’s management of the supplemental negotiations. “I’m not gonna say he’s the total cause of it, but we got to have a better plan. This didn’t work out for us.”
“There needs to be a change in how we manage and govern the conference,” Scott said. “Everybody I talk to basically agrees. I don’t know people who don’t agree with me that we have to govern the conference a different way.”
“Leadership really screwed this up,” Vance said at a press conference. “They knew, or at least should have known, that this bill was never actually going to get there.”
Nevertheless, “one of the leverage points that McConnell has, and he reminds us of it all the time, including last Wednesday at lunch,” is campaign funds, Johnson claimed. McConnell “reminds everybody how much he has raised for the Senate Leadership Fund. That ends up apparently being pretty powerful leverage for most members.”
“Doesn’t impact me in the slightest, as you can tell,” Johnson added.
The post McConnell’s Leadership in Jeopardy After Sending Lankford on a ‘Suicide Mission’ in Border Negotiations appeared first on The American Conservative.
A deal spearheaded by Senator James Lankford seemed to prioritize Ukraine’s security over the honeycombed U.S. Southern border.
A bipartisan group of Senators on Sunday released the text of a supplemental funding bill that purports to secure the southern border in exchange for Ukraine and Israel aid.
For months, the bipartisan group of senators have attempted to negotiate a border security deal that would also provide supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel. Throughout the process, Republicans, especially members of the GOP-controlled House, have been skeptical of whatever the bipartisan group was cooking up behind closed doors. With the 370-page, $118.3 billion bill now public, it appears their skepticism was warranted. Shortly after the text’s release, GOP members of both chambers—including some who have been more sympathetic to providing more aid to Ukraine—tore apart the deal’s immigration provisions, which were shrouded in obscurity for months during Senate negotiations.
Yet perhaps the most shocking part of this so-called border deal is that a majority of the funding, $60 billion, is not directed towards the southern border, but to Ukraine. When it comes to supplemental funding bills, the main subject of a piece of legislation is the cause that gets the most cash, and not necessarily the subject that receives the most language.
Beyond the $60 billion for Ukraine and a measly $20 billion for the border, which will likely be wasted due to the Biden administration’s outright refusal to enforce the laws already on the books, another $14.1 billion is allocated for Israel and another $10 billion is directed towards humanitarian aid. Though the true intent of the Senate’s negotiated “border deal” is to provide $60 billion for Ukraine, it is certainly worth getting into the specifics of the “border security” provisions since they reveal just how low the establishment will stoop to fund its wars of choice.
One of the key provisions Senate negotiators are relying on to secure the border is providing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary with a “border emergency authority” to prevent migrants from entering into the United States. The legislation mostly leaves the authority to the “sole and unreviewable discretion” of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom the House is currently considering bringing articles of impeachment against for his unwillingness to enforce the law. It adds that the secretary, at his discretion, may declare an emergency if “there is an average of 4,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day” over a seven-day period.”
The only circumstances in which the secretary is forced to use the emergency authority is when there are on average 5,000 migrant encounters over a seven day period or 8,500 migrant encounters in a single day. For the border to re-open, encounters have to fall to 75 percent of the stated threshold over a seven-day period. Could the Biden administration direct its agents to simply stop encountering migrants to meet these thresholds? It need not come to that because, while the mandatory activation of the border emergency authority sits at about half of the average daily encounters of migrants, according to Customs and Border Patrol data, the bill provides language that ensures the Biden administration can always circumvent triggering the emergency authority.
First, the bill creates massive carve outs in the application of the emergency authority for large swaths of migrants. One exemption for example, is for migrants whom immigration officers determine “should be excepted from the border emergency authority” in consideration of the “totality of the circumstances” and “operational considerations.” If the Biden administration determines a migrant should be let in and let go, that’s that.
Even when the border emergency is in effect, DHS must “maintain the capacity to process, and continue processing…a minimum of 1,400 inadmissible aliens each calendar day cumulatively across all southwest land border ports of entry in a safe and orderly process developed by the Secretary.” The bill also places a cap on the number of days the emergency border authority can be in effect during a calendar year. In the first calendar year, the cap is 270 days; in the second year, 225 days; and the third, 180 days.
In circumstances where Mayorkas either chooses or is compelled by law to use the border emergency authority, President Biden can simply overrule him. The president can order the DHS secretary “to suspend use of the border emergency authority on an emergency basis” if the president deems an open border “is in the national interest,” the bill states. If the president does so, “the Secretary shall suspend the border emergency authority for not more than 45 calendar days within a calendar year.” When that clock runs out, nothing prevents Biden from resetting it.
“The whole section about declaring a border emergency is intended to get Republicans to go along with something that is chock full of democratic wish list items and would almost certainly make the border situation worse,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The American Conservative in a phone interview.
In the words of Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the Democratic Senate negotiators who discussed the bill in a Twitter thread Sunday, “the border never closes.”
The bill also expands the number of immigrant visas through 2030. For example, the family-sponsored immigrant visa cap is upped from 480,000 to 512,000 with an increased floor of 258,000 (the current figure is 226,000). The employment-based immigrant visa cap is increased from 140,000 to 158,000. In total, the bill would create at least over 250,000 new visas over the next five years.
Furthermore, all migrants allowed into the United States by the Biden administration via asylum claims “shall be issued employment authorization,” the bill states. To make matters worse, the bill does not compel the secretary to strip work permit privileges if the migrant fails to appear for status reviews. In a Twitter thread endorsing the deal, Mayorkas claimed the bill “would expedite protection and work authorization for those with legitimate claims.”
Senator Rick Scott of Florida put it simply in an email to TAC: “It also allows illegal aliens to take U.S. jobs that would otherwise be filled by Americans and funds lawyers for illegal aliens.”
The bill also stipulates certain migrants seeking entrance into the United States will be provided legal counsel paid for by the American taxpayer. These provisions do not only cover unaccompanied child migrants, but also adults deemed incompetent by an immigration judge. The bill allocates $36 million “for representation for certain incompetent adults,” and provides another $2.334 billion in grants to nongovernmental organizations that can provide migrants with legal and case management assistance among other services.
Krikorian told TAC that providing taxpayer funded lawyers for migrants is “currently prohibited by law.”
“Every illegal alien in proceedings has the right to bring a lawyer,” Krikorian explained, “but it specifically says it must be at no expense to the government. This [bill] changes that.”
It’s quite surprising, then, that the New York Times and other corporate media outlets have claimed the bill makes it more difficult to obtain asylum. While the legislation does change the credible-fear standard from “significant possibility,” which is left up to the executive branch to determine, to a “reasonable possibility,” which is statutorily linked to a well-founded fear, it essentially decentralizes asylum authority and informalizes asylum legal proceedings. In what should come as a relief to the New York Times, the combined effect of the bill’s asylum provisions is that it “creates a whole new parallel asylum system,” that heavily advantages the migrant seeking asylum, Krikorian told TAC.
“In effect, [the bill] codifies what is called the asylum officer rule that this administration did by regulation,” Krikorian said. “What that means is, asylum officers, who are the initial screeners under the current system, can now just give asylum to people. They can actually make the grant of asylum, which is illegal, but this administration is already doing it by regulation.”
“The reason that’s bad—and the reason the administration’s current asylum officer rule, which this is basically based on, is bad—is that there’s no cross-examination,” Krikorian continued. “There’s nobody representing the United States trying to poke holes in an asylum claimants story. It’s just an interview with a guy who, odds are, was a social worker before he came to work for the government.” The predictable consequence of this system, Krikorian claimed, is that “without an ICE lawyer there to try to poke holes in a story and without an impartial judge to assess what’s going on, you’re going to have much higher rates of asylum grants.”
The creation of this parallel asylum system, combined with automatic work permits and expanded visa system, plus the lack of any measures to ensure the Biden administration enforces laws already on the books have led Republicans to claim the bill is, in effect, an amnesty.
“While the language does not officially declare an amnesty in so many words, it continues to leave countless enforcement questions up to the discretion of President Biden, who can invoke ‘emergency’ exceptions any time he wants,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah told TAC in a statement. “His non-enforcement of our border and immigration laws are simply open borders and amnesty by another name, and this bill expands his ability to skirt existing law.”
“This bill is worse than I could have imagined,” Scott told TAC. “Nearly two million people will still illegally enter the United States every year if this becomes law,” Scott continued. “THAT IS NOT BORDER SECURITY,” Scott wrote in all caps.
“The Biden-Schumer-McConnell supplemental bill not only fails to secure our southern border, but it makes the Biden border invasion policies like catch and release the law of the land,” Rep. Bob Good of Virginia told TAC in a written statement. “It also incentivizes ongoing illegal entry by handing out immediate work permits upon release.”
“Meanwhile, Secretary Mayorkas is being impeached for intentionally facilitating the border invasion,” Good continued. “Senate Republicans should not hand him a ‘get out of jail free card’ by voting to weaken our immigration laws and provide a rubber stamp for his failure to keep Americans safe.”
Beyond the policy particulars, the overarching problem with the legislation is that Senate Republican negotiators decided to fully embrace the Democrats’ framing of the border crisis. “The whole bill is based on not just Democratic agenda items but the democratic perception of the problem,” Krikorian said. Democrats and the Biden administration believe the problems at the southern border are merely a matter of optics.
“They don’t see the problem as huge numbers, potentially unlimited numbers, of people using asylum as a gambit to enter the United States,” Krikorian explained. “The issue for the Democrats is to try to manage the optics so that people don’t get pissed off.”
Senate Republicans played right into Democrats’ hands. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Oklahoma’s Senator James Lankford, who headed up the Republican side of negotiators, “want the Ukraine money so bad” that they are “like the guy walking into a car dealership who has his eyes so set on getting a sports car that he gets suckered into all sorts of add-ons,” said Krikorian.
There is certainly plenty for Ukraine in the bill. Not only will the $60 billion go towards providing Ukraine with weapons in a multi-year campaign to “hasten Ukrainian victory against Russia’s invasion forces,” nearly $8 billion is direct budgetary support for the Ukrainian government to prevent it from going bankrupt. Ironically, $300 million will go towards the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service and the National Police of Ukraine. Only $8 million is directed towards the inspector generals tasked with ensuring American taxpayer dollars are used appropriately in Ukraine.
“Mitch McConnell’s weak caving to Democrats has created a bill that spends Americans’ tax dollars to hand Ukraine $60 BILLION – not just for weapons but so it can pay its government workers and run government programs,” Scott claimed.
In a statement released Sunday night, McConnell did not seem confident in the deal. Nevertheless, the Senate minority leader said “the Senate must carefully consider the opportunity in front of us and prepare to act.”
“This bill would completely fail to stop the crisis at our southern border,” Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio told TAC. “Throughout this process, the Republican establishment has been more focused on securing tens of billions in aid for Ukraine than on reducing illegal immigration. Their foreign policy goals have clouded this entire debate, and because of that the border bill is a total disaster that no Republican should support.”
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted that “from the squandering of your money to the fake border reforms, it’s safe to declare this bill as anti-American. I’m a NO.”
While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is moving towards having the Senate consider the legislation later this week, it seems to have no path forward in the Republican House.
“I’ve seen enough,” House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted Sunday night. “This bill is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created.”
“America’s sovereignty is at stake,” a later statement from Johnson and the rest of House GOP leadership read. “Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.”
The post Inside a Betrayal: Hill Reacts to Senate-negotiated Border and Ukraine Deal appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The scene at the address from NATO’s secretary general, in front of a skeptical audience at the Heritage, demonstrated the headwinds for the cause of open-ended war.
On January 31, the Heritage Foundation hosted an event called “NATO Secretary General on Modern Needs of the Alliance 75 Years After Its Founding.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was present to deliver a message on how NATO is a vital security organization for not just the United States, but the world.
Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, opened the event with a short speech to contextualize Stoltenberg’s upcoming remarks: “It’s time for our NATO allies to step up to the plate so that NATO, this great and noble organization of security and peace, can flourish.”
He emphasized the need to address the “elephant in the room,” Ukraine. Roberts said that the United States should never put a foreign border ahead of its own, and that endlessly funding the war in Ukraine was not feasible, especially if U.S. military funding continues to not be matched by NATO European nations. “Our constitutional and moral obligations,” he said, “compel us to prioritize the interests of the American people.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, began his own speech by stressing that “these are dangerous times,” highlighting Russia and China as significant threats to international security. He claimed that China poses itself as the most serious long-term challenge to global peace, as the communist nation seeks to dominate and bully their neighbors and enemies. Nevertheless, Russia, Stoltenberg said, is the “most immediate threat” to the United States and its allies.
Part of combating Putin’s desire to expand Russia’s “sphere of influence” is, according to Stoltenberg, a continued collective effort to support Ukraine to the end of the line. He said,
We need to remain decisive and strong in our defense and support of Ukraine. Make no mistake—that is where we are being tested right now. Ukraine must prevail, and it can, but it needs our continued help.
He added, “Supporting Ukraine is not charity. It is an investment in our own security…. Supporting Ukraine is in America’s own interest.”
He finished his speech by declaring that, “NATO is an incredibly powerful idea that advances U.S. interests and multiplies America’s power…. NATO makes the U.S. stronger and all of us safer.”
Of course, it is to be expected that the secretary general of NATO would defend the organization he works for, but the online audience for the talk especially did not seem to take his comments lightly. “NATO and the US are the aggressors. This warmongering idiot is talking rubbish,” one user wrote in the Live Chat. “Nobody wants to fight in your wars anymore,” said another. “NATO can go straight to hell and take the WHO, UN, and their masters in Davos right with them!”
There seems to be a breakdown of communication between NATO and the taxpayers who so disproportionately support it. Stoltenberg’s comments and the crowd’s response show little movement toward an accommodation.
The post NATO on Trial at the New Heritage Foundation appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: It depends who the embattled President Zelensky names to replace him.
Rumors have been swirling that Valery Zaluzhny, commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, will be dismissed by President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sources told the press on Monday that Zaluzhny had been fired, but the Defense Ministry and the president’s office issued statements saying he hadn’t. Now CNN says two sources confirm that Zaluzhny’s firing will take place within days.
The earlier rumors came primarily from Zaluzhny’s allies, which suggests that the premature announcement was a tactical ploy to get Zelensky to back off. One ally said Zelensky had to “consult foreign partners” before making a final decision. Perhaps he hoped to forestall Zaluzhny’s firing by making Zelensky afraid it would look like he did it at a foreign power’s request. (Victoria Nuland did visit Kiev on Wednesday.) It was worth a try, but it seems these gambits have not worked.
Whether Zaluzhny’s firing is a good or bad development will depend on who is named as his replacement. One candidate is Kyrylo Budanov, director of the Defense Main Intelligence Unit. This would be a very bad development.
Budanov’s greatest contribution to the war so far has been his aggressive, showy attacks on targets within Russia, including drone strikes on energy infrastructure and targeted assassinations of so-called “Russian propagandists,” such as novelist Zakhar Prilepin and commentator Daria Dugina. When asked about the assassinations last summer, Budanov boasted, “We’ve already successfully targeted quite a few people.”
Budanov revels in his reputation for non-traditional attacks, according to journalist Simon Shuster, who also says Budanov’s “confidence verge[s] on the messianic.” If this is who Zelensky wants in charge, it could signal Ukraine’s intention to lash out against Russia as its battlefield fortunes continue to wane.
Zaluzhny was promoted over the heads of several more senior commanders shortly before the Russian invasion, because Zelensky liked him and the two men had a good rapport. More recently, the relationship was strained by differences in military judgment, with Zaluzhny showing greater willingness than Zelensky to admit the failure of the counteroffensive and the likelihood of a stalemate.
Another source of tension was Zaluzhny’s growing popularity among rank-and-file soldiers and the Ukrainian public. For several months last year, the office of the president kept Zaluzhny away from the media in order to reduce his public profile.
“The young people are for Zaluzhny. The best and brightest are for him,” says one Ukrainian quoted by Shuster. “People out there keep asking me: Are you with the president or with Zaluzhny? It’s one or the other.” Zaluzhny could challenge Zelensky for political power in a future election.
This personnel change is unlikely to change the outcome of the war. Budanov’s signature risky attacks have mostly been ineffective from a military standpoint, serving as morale boosters but not at actually degrading the enemy’s capabilities. Nevertheless, his promotion would be a victory for those who would prolong this war and a setback for those seeking peace.
The post What It Will Mean If Ukraine’s Top Military Man Is Fired appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 