News stories say Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to Vlad Putin this week and learned that Putin intends to take all of Ukraine. Of course he does; I hadn’t realized that wasn’t obvious. And it will take several more days, at least, maybe weeks. And a lot of people will die horribly. And it is all so pointless. Putin may win in the short run, but I don’t see how he can win in the long run.
On the American Right, you’ve got your hard-core nutjobs who still stand with Putin, and you’ve got your old-school national security hawks who never liked Putin anyway. In between are a lot of people who may or may not be making adjustments. Greg Sargent writes that Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance are having a moment of self-doubt over Putin, in which Tucker once again shows off his spectacular talent for being an asshole:
“The invasion of Ukraine already is a legitimate disaster for Europe and the world,” Carlson told his viewers. “We’ve been taken by surprise by the whole thing. We’re not the only ones who were. But we’re willing to admit it.” …
… But then Carlson blamed Vice President Harris for his mistake. His logic: If the Russian threat were all that dire, President Biden wouldn’t have sent Harris abroad to handle diplomacy!
Carlson then launched into a creepily obsessive segment of cherry-picked clips meant to portray Harris as stupid and unprepared. But never mind that garbage. More notably, Carlson has little to say about what the administration actually did do in the run-up to the invasion.
This was a few days after Tucker had called for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT Score. And apparently he gets his feelings hurt when people call him a “racist.” Poor baby.
Oh, and J.D. Vance has had to tap-dance around a lot of recent comments to the effect that Ukraine just isn’t important. We should only care about our own borders, especially the southern one where brown people get through. America First! Now he’s having to admit that, well, okay, Russia’s invading Ukraine was bad.
Jennifer Rubin hopes that the Ukraine crisis will bury America First!, because people will see that what goes on beyond our borders is important. Considering that World War II didn’t bury isolationism completely for all time I am skeptical. But Rubin wrote,
Donald Trump and his allies (even the crowd that joined the administration by rationalizing their expertise would prevent debacles) believed, in particular, that international organizations impeded our sovereignty, sucked up our resources and helped the enemies of the United States. They told us we had been played for “suckers” and would do better when we did not need to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate with others. …
… Then came Ukraine.
Never before has the value of NATO been so apparent. The same Republicans who used to whine that NATO allies did not shoulder their obligations now appear to be peeved that Europe is “leading.” (The accusation is disingenuous, of course, because President Biden was the one to revive and energize the alliance.)
Meanwhile, a whole lot of “freedom” truck convoys are still headed to D.C., but they aren’t getting covered on national news that I’ve seen. You can track them only through local news coverage. Hint to truckers: Nobody cares. You’re old news. Go home.
Among the hard-core nutjob Right, I read that not only is Vladimir Putin still admired; they’ve figured out the Real True Reason anyone cares about Ukraine. This is from Mother Jones:
Anti-vaccine influencers claim that the United States owns a network of secret biolabs in Ukraine where dangerous infectious disease research takes place. For them, it’s just obvious that Biden is sending aid to Ukraine in order to protect those assets.
Sure. Some of the nutjobs claim there are “reports” that Putin is targeting the biolabs. Here’s another one:
Sherri Tenpenny, the anti-vaccine activist who has claimed that Covid shots make people magnetic, suggested in a Monday post to more than 150,000 followers that Jews were using the Ukraine conflict to distract the world from a meeting in Europe about pandemic preparedness.
And, of course George Soros figures into this somehow. Can’t leave him out.
On the Left, the “blame America first” crowd had a field day blaming the CIA and the United States and NATO for making Putin attack Ukraine. I’m seeing a bit less of that as the attacks go on, but then I’ve unfriended a few people. The most common accusation from Lefties is that NATO broke an agreement about not expanding NATO eastward, so Putin had no choice but to attack, because NATO was threatening him. And it was Ukraine’s fault that Russia attacked it because Ukraine wanted to join NATO. They should have been neutral, see, instead of pro-western. What was Putin supposed to do?
This argument is right up there with telling women they won’t get raped if they just stay home and keep their doors locked. But then I remember reading a news story about a rapist who got into a house by climbing a tree and removing a second-floor window air conditioner.
NATO doesn’t “threaten” anybody who isn’t a threat to others, but never mind. If you hear the one about the agreement, know that there was never any such agreement. There was discussion way back when, before the Soviet Union broke up, but nobody ever agreed to anything. If there had been an agreement, it would have been with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists.
I agree with Rubin that Putin is demonstrating why NATO is still important. Just think — if Ukraine had been admitted to NATO, would Putin be attacking it now? I rather doubt that. I suspect Estonia, Latvia, probably Lituania, would have been crushed by Russia already were it not for their NATO membership. But heaven forbid that countries bordering Russia would have sought out the protection of a mutual defense alliance.
