Trump and his enablers want you to believe that, if he were still president, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. These are the easiest kind of lies to tell because they are impossible to fact check. We can't go back in time for a do-over to see what Putin would have done if the former guy was still in the White House.
Of course, we can go back in time to remind folks about how Trump treated NATO. He constantly berated both the alliance and individual members. For example, he once told NATO's president that Germany was totally controlled by Russia. Angela Merkel, who was the German Chancellor at the time, shot back.
"I want to say that I have experience of when a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union," she told reporters.
"I am very happy that today we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions.
"That is very good, especially for people in eastern Germany."
That same week Trump took a swipe at British Prime Minister Theresa May.
In the midst of a week that has seen Mrs. May parrying threats to her hold on power, Mr. Trump criticized her strategy on cutting ties to the European Union, cast doubt on whether he was willing to negotiate a new trade deal between Britain and the United States and praised Mrs. May’s Conservative party rival, Boris Johnson, who resigned this week as foreign secretary, as a potentially great prime minister.
We can speculate about whether it's a coincidence that Trump chose to attack two women heads of state, but that could be a topic for another day.
A clear pattern emerged during Trump's presidency. He consistently sowed division between the U.S. and our NATO allies. But it was even worse than that, as the New York Times reported in 2019.
There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.
Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.
Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance.
Trump's national security advisor John Bolton wrote in his book that Trump repeatedly talked about wanting to quit the alliance, saying "I don’t give a s--- about NATO.” John Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff was also described as saying that “one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.”
In his letter resigning as Trump's Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis identified his own values that were in conflict with the president's.
One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies...NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America.
After meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Trump and Tucker Carlson questioned whether the United States should follow through on our NATO commitment to defend a member who was attacked.
So in public, Trump was sowing divisions with our NATO allies, and in private, he continually expressed a desire to pull the U.S. out of the alliance. All of that has been known for years. It is safe to assume that, at minimum, Putin was cheering Trump on from the sidelines.
Trump's treatment of NATO is especially important as it becomes the major bulwark against Russian aggression in Ukraine. One of the many ways that Putin miscalculated is that he obviously assumed that the divisions Trump had sown would keep the alliance from coming together against his invasion. He couldn't have been more wrong. Even Condoleezza Rice said that Putin has managed to unite NATO in a way that she hasn't seen since the end of the Cold War. Of course, Putin's actions have been the reason for that unity, but President Biden deserves a tremendous amount of credit for working to heal the divisions that Trump created.
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ReplyDeleteAfter the 2016 election, my new senator, Kamala Harris, would send questionnaires to find out what issues were most important to her constituents. Every time, I ranked foreign policy #1. I figured whatever damage Trump could inflict domestically would be something we could fix in future years. But if he succeeded in destroying the international order -- our alliances with other democracies, organizations such as NATO, etc. -- the future of the world would be bleak and perhaps never recover.
ReplyDeleteThe current crisis shows how important those alliances -- and American leadership -- are. We'd be in unimaginably worse shape today if Trump had been more successful in doing Putin's dirty work, or if he were still president today.
I did not foresee that the many strained relationships that Trump left behind could recover so quickly. The worldwide solidarity we're now seeing may be the brightest thing to come out of this crisis. It helps to have a president who knows what he's doing.
This piece from Timothy Noah is worth reading:
The State of the Biden Presidency Is Strong
Ignore his lousy approval numbers. Biden is handling the Ukraine crisis with astonishing skill.
https://newrepublic.com/article/165545/state-union-biden-ukraine-economy?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=EB_TNR&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1646166079
As John Farmer had done, I too have read Timothy Noah's piece. Following the Biden first SoTU speech last night, it was even more clear that Biden has the skills and determination to continue to draw together the nations in NATO and the rest of Europe in an alliance against Russian aggression. I shedder to consider the intentional damages that tramp could have done to the entire world by acting on his spoiled child mentality. Once he would have destroyed these important alliances, they would never have come together again, and Putin would be sitting atop Europe for quite a long time. And, for what it's worth, Zelenskyy is an unexpected hero to many in Europe, as are his fellow Ukrainians.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of you, only I'm afraid that the poor polling is hard to ignore. Scary really. Feels like he and the Democrats are getting a raw deal on every front, and it's shaping media coverage and public opinion.
ReplyDeleteTroubled me that the NY Times yesterday invited four of its columnists to imagine what Biden could do with the SOTU address. They choose their three most consistently conservative columnists, who of course advised Biden to admit how awful he's been and ask for forgiveness (and the fabled "restart," a word he did end up using). The fourth was Gail Collins, who as usual was cutesy-poo, allowing her to start with Biden's admitting his age.
Not that he's a huge influence when it comes to politics, but a tweet by Jerry Saltz condemning the U.S for looking on and doing nothing about the Ukraine caught me eye. In the SOTU, Biden devoted about 1,000 words to what we've been doing, which was quite a list, forcefully expressed. That's a lot more length and depth than any of Saltz's writings on art.