sincere?
he said that, if he was elected, the war would be over before he was inaugurated.
why are we still talking about this?
alasdair
I never thought I'ld apply the word "sincere" to Donald Trump. But I do think he genuinely deplores the carnage. He's a builder, not a destroyer. I don't doubt that some of what he's up to will turn out badly. (I'm thinking of his turning Musk loose to rampage through the governing infrastructure.) However, if he finds a way to wind up this war and stop the obscene squandering of lives, he will have earned no small measure of decent regard from me.
50,000 American lives were thrown away in Vietnam for n o t h i n g. When I was a child, I believed that fighting for a principle was noble, even when you lost. I've grown up. There is nothing noble about a leader offering up the cream of his country's youth in a blood sacrifice for an unattainable goal because he's determined to stick to a "principle." Sometimes in this world, you have to cut your losses.
Zelenskyy was on the verge of settling things with Russia in a way that seemed reasonable to me. It involved more autonomy for Eastern Ukraine, reflecting the agreements outlined in the Minsk Accords, which were sensible. Right at that point, Boris Johnson showed up with a message from Joe Biden. He told Zelenskyy that he shouldn't concede anything to Russia because, massive Western support was available to his country, which would allow Ukraine to prevail in an armed conflict. I don't think Zelenskyy is a bad person, but nothing in his life prepared him for the responsibilities he took on. Biden and Johnson have made a complete fool out of Zelenskyy, and they've used Ukraine in the most cynical fashion. I voted for Biden and personally benefitted from some of his policies. He turned out to be a man of extraordinary shallowness and stupidity. I don't think he could help that. He never was a man of any depth or wisdom. (Back some years ago, Lindsey Graham said that God never made a better man than Joe Biden. I was actually impressed by that and thought it signaled something very good about Biden. It didn't. Biden, according to some pundits, was put on the ticket with Obama "to reassure white, Southern voters." Biden and Graham are both descended from slave owners.)
Trump is not a man burdened with many "principles." That gives him a certain mental flexibility that - right now - is letting him see further than the view from America's obsolete, Cold War stance and mentality. Sometimes it takes a rather simple-minded man to grasp what evades the more sophisticated of his contemporaries. Smart people can sometimes be a-little-too-cute-by-half. Donald Trump says he wants "to stop the killing." I believe him . . . much to my own surprise.