https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2025
"The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.
A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels,
Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for
Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly
threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic”
to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that
Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s
membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual
security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since
1949.
Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark
strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily
focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump
spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and
came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social
media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the
two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to
Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels,
Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to
operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than
Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found
ludicrous.
Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S.
and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since
1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He
warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the
threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality
before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating
women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian
men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization
in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz
and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that
has been associated with neo-Nazis.
While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on
Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace
talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had
no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke
on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently
needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy.
The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin
and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be
“reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as
“the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
