Another alarming thing is that even though Trump won, the Biden administration has shown next to zero interest in sending a massive surge of arms aid to Ukraine before the orange tyrant takes over. Sure, they gave Ukraine permission to hit a bit of Russia with ATACMS, but it’s really been lackluster.
The Rs may be outright opposed to Ukraine, but the Biden Ds aren’t exactly interested either. Just trickle-dripping aid when the fire needs a huge hose.
“President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and Jan. 20,” when President-elect Donald Trump is due to be sworn in, Blinken said.
Nope. Putin wants a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO so Trump will apply pressure to ensure that that is what happens.
It’s just “Ukraine” these days. No “the”.
Well… The US and Russia aren’t the only nuclear powers involved in Europe. But I have no idea what the UK or France would do if Putin started nuking Ukraine.
As for hunting down the survivors - as the incident with Russian troops digging trenches in the Red Forest demonstrates, Putin has no problem with irradiating his own troops. Or at least not informing them of the dangers they will face.
Yeah, about that … I’d expect the opposite of withdrawing to happen. Putin wants to (re)build an empire. At the very least he wants the Baltic republics. Probably more.
Nope. Well, maybe for the younger crowd, but Reagan’s victory over Mondale was a genuine landslide and far, far more decisive since Reagan won every state except Wisconsin. As just one example. Please don’t listen to propaganda, Trump’s recent victory was not a “landslide” or anything particularly remarkable. And as usual he lost the popular vote.
On the other hand, I think Regan actually gave a damn about the nation, even if some of us disagreed with the details of how he went about his job. Trump… well, Trump is for Trump.
That because in 1991 Ukraine traded its nukes to Russia in return for guarantees that their borders would be respected. Well, see how that turned out. That betrayal has only fueled the desire of nations to start their own nuclear programs, and no one will ever give up those weapons ever again.
Not just this, but the consistent deference shown to nuclear-armed nations has given every other regime in the world incentive to get nukes. If you show respect and fear to those who have nukes, and let them get away with aggression and violations that a non-nuke nation wouldn’t be permitted, you’re inviting proliferation. The international community keeps saying “no nukes” with its lips while rewarding proliferators with its actions.
Well, to be fair “no nukes” with their lips and bank accounts.
(Hijack…)
But yes strategically, it looks like the best thing for a nation to do from a defence POV is to just ignore the treaties and sanctions, and get to a state where most other nations think you probably have nukes, and you can stop there. (Missile tests invite further sanctions; the ambiguity is enough).
No he didn’t.
He did not win a majority of voters, but he did have more voters than Harris.
Well, that’s winning. He did lose the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.
Trump will end up with a higher percentage of the popular vote than Clinton got in 2016, as “Other” did much better in 2016. Biden got 51.3 in 2020.
It’s pretty common in recent history for the winner to be under 50. Bill Clinton was below 50 percent popular vote both times he won due to Ross Perot being a significant third party candidate; his 43 percent in 1992 is the lowest popular vote take by a winner in the last century, barely edged by Nixon in 1968. Both Bush 2.0 and Gore were under 50 in 2000. Ronald Reagan in 1984 was the only candidate since Nixon to get over 55.
The fact such a horrible human being got damn near 50% of the vote is more evidence that a country’s real Constitution isn’t what’s written down, it’s what people agree to live by.
Even if Europe were to massively step up and replace the US contributions in munitions, which is unlikely, they would be unable to make up for the contributions in intelligence. Intelligence has been a key component in what has allowed Ukraine to fight off a much more powerful foe for all these years – the entire US defense intelligence apparatus is giving Ukraine what amounts to the highest quality military intelligence during wartime in history. They know where the Russian generals are, where the attacks are coming from, what the logistical routes are, where the ammo depots are. This war is something that will go into military history as a demonstration of the power of intelligence in wartime.
The Ukranians lose that on day 1 of the Trump presidency. He doesn’t need congressional approval or anything like that - he simply orders to defense intelligence agencies to stop helping, and as CinC, he can do that. And that alone is likely to be a fatal blow.
Europe simply doesn’t have the intelligence assets that the US has and cannot replace it.
In addition, it is likely that Trump will begin actively aiding the Russians with intelligence against Ukraine. Sure, he’s too incompetent to do it himself, but like how he ordered a list of our intelligence agents in the field to be collected, had some off the records meetings with Putin, and then our intelligence agents worldwide started dying (it’s fucking amazing how this is not a bigger story), he’s going to leak what we know about Ukrainian military information to the Russians. This alone – completely independent of any sort of weapons and funding aid cuts – is enough to swing the war against Ukraine.
A little higher? Fallout reaches the stratosphere, man.
Is this written up anywhere in more detail?
So I’m having trouble finding a journalistic source that lays out the whole thing. Maybe it’s not as obvious or solid as I remember. I’m also hitting paywalls on a lot of articles that might shed some light on it.
So we know that Trump violates all sorts of protocols to have private meetings with Putin without the normal support staff and record keeping that would happen during such meetings. There are no records of what these meetings were about.
He had one of those private phone calls with Putin on July 31, 2019. And 4 days later, he asks for a list of people who are on the top salary for intelligence work. That’s not the same as a list of intelligence assets, though, so that may not be as damning as I thought.
A couple of years later the CIA put out a memo about a concerning number of intelligence assets and informants were being killed.
We also know that many of the top secret documents he stole had information about human intelligence assets.
The fact that I can’t find one high quality source that puts this all together makes me think it’s not as solid as I remember and that it’s mostly circumstantial evidence, but it’s plausible and consistent with the facts and Trump’s behavior. There has to be some explanation for the high rate of death of CIA assets around the world in recent years and this certainly offers a good one.
I thought about deleting the middle part about the call and the request for intelligence agents because I’m starting to think that doesn’t make the connection I remembered. I do think the stolen documents including human sources combined with the deaths of American agents and informants pretty strongly points to an intelligence leak that got our assets killed.
We all know Trump doesn’t actually give a shit about intelligence briefings or the job of being president. There was absolutely no reason for him to request documents with lists of human intelligence assets. This is a guy that would skip his daily intelligence briefing and the people who prepared the briefs learned to use his name a lot and use short bullet points and pictures just to get him to pay attention for 5 minutes. And this guy is going to request very sensitive, detailed documents about things that have nothing to do with anything he’s doing? The fact that he had those documents almost guarantees that there was some nefarious purpose because there’s no way he had any legitimate interest in them.
Thanks for putting together those sources. I mean, it’s not a secret that Trump leaked classified info like a sieve, but I would’ve hoped just on the basis of general incompetence (bad enough as that is). Maybe some enterprising investigative type will eventually come out with the whole story, provided it’s how things appear to be.
By definition its going to be difficult for journalist to get inside information about what is going on inside the intelligence community, since even announcing the existence of problems makes those problems easier for foreign interests to exploit. FOIA requests are going to be rejected, and leakers can face years behind bars. The CIA announcing an increased loss of assets means things must have gotten really really bad.
But how do we know that the US is integral to intelligence efforts against Russia? There are lots of nations in Europe with the resources and motivation to have advanced intelligence on Russia. The UK, France & Germany have large economies to fund intelligence agencies, but the Baltic states and the Scandinavian nations have a lot of incentive to make Russia their top intelligence priority.
By comparison the US is focusing on intelligence issues all over the world (China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Yemen, etc). if anything I would assume that europe, especially ex soviet states, made Russia their top intelligence priority.
As I understand it, Trump is dead set against the use of long range missiles on targets in Russia. I’m not sure if that applies to Crimea. Russia can (and is) launching massive strikes from their own territory and Ukraine will not be able to respond. Trump is throwing his friend a life line when he needs it.
Regarding Crimea - is the Kerch bridge not a suitable target for ATACAMs? Too well defended? Weapons not accurate or powerful enough? I believe its in range, right?
Not powerful enough. Also, maybe not as critical a target as others on their list. I believe Russia has built up a pretty robust ferry system to resupply over the Kerch strait and there is still road access to Crimea. I think destroying air assets still in range, ammo depots, and air defense are probably priorities.
Had their 2023 counteroffensive actually pushed through into Tokmak or Melitopol so they could range the road access to Crimea, then the Kerch bridge would be much more important, but I think taking back that territory by force isn’t realistically on the table anymore.