Twice this week, Donald Trump blurted out some important truths.
On Friday, he met with Voldymyr Zelensky. The meeting was private, so we can’t know exactly what was said. We do know that earlier in the week Trump described Ukraine as “demolished” and its people as “dead” and said that “Any deal - the worst deal - would be better than what we have now.” Judging by Zelensky’s appearance after the meeting, I strongly suspect Trump laid out three important truths to Zelensky:
Your ‘Victory Plan’ is delusional; you’ve already lost the war.
You need to make the best deal you can with Russia, as quickly as you can.
Every day you delay, thousands more Ukrainian soldiers will die, more of Ukraine’s electrical grid and industrial base will be destroyed, and Ukraine will lose an even greater amount of territory to Russia in whatever agreement eventually ends the war.
Wow! Full points for telling it like it is, Donald. (For those of you who get most of your news from the mainstream media and still believe Ukraine might somehow win the war, my homework for you would be to watch either the Military Summary channel or Weeb Union on Youtube for a week. You’ll notice that the hosts of both channels bend over backwards to be scrupulously neutral. Every day now they report Ukraine losing significant chunks of territory.)
Don’t stop there, Donald. There are more truths to be told here:
The war in Ukraine came about entirely because of decades of machinations by the US State Department, who had this fantasy they could weaken Russia, perhaps even cause Russia to collapse. Homework for anyone who disputes this obvious truth is to listen to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Jeffrey Sachs. (Yes, I know it is two and half hours, but if you still think Russia caused the war in Ukraine after all this time, you can consider it a form of penance.)
Two years into the war, Russia’s army is battle-hardened, and has doubled in size. It will soon be the second largest army in the world, after China’s. Russia’s production of tanks, drones and hypersonic missiles now dwarfs anything NATO can produce. Whatever threat the Russians represented to America three years ago, the threat today is an order of magnitude larger.
In the past three years, Russia has been pushed into establishing new military alliances, first with China, and then with both Iran and North Korea. There is now a very real chance that if America goes to war with any one of those countries, it may well find itself at war with all four.
In trying to punish Russia by stealing its foreign reserves, the United States has made countries all over the developing world reluctant to hold US dollar reserves and to trade in dollars. This was an incredibly stupid thing for a country so massively in debt to do. At what point will the supply of US Treasuries outstrip supply, causing interest rates on American bonds - and interest charges already North of a trillion dollars - to go higher and higher?
Russia’s economy hasn’t collapsed. In fact, Russia’s economy will grow robustly this year while virtually all of Europe languishes in recession. And Russia now makes for itself a ton of products it imported only three years ago.
America has now burned through something on the order of two hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money to create the above bad outcomes of the Ukraine war.
Go for it, Donald. Bring more reality into American politics!
P.S.: That’s enough for today. More Trump-truths tomorrow!