Tag: Ukraine

Trumplandia & The Fate Of Ukraine

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is difficult not to see the ultimate end-game of Donald Trump’s Russophila eventually being a strategic sell out of Ukraine. It just seems as though soon enough Putin will use whatever leverage he has on Trump to get what he really wants — land.

Of course, it will be dressed up any number of different ways. Trump will say he’s making America great again through strong bi-lateral ties with Russia after a face-to-face meet and greet. But the cold hard reality will be that Putin will be given a free hand to attack Ukraine in an unprecedented manner.

Given that even if collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia is proven the Vichy Republicans won’t blink and eye, it makes total sense that they would also lie down should Trump shake Putin’s hand and nod that it’s ok for the Russians to eat a third of Ukraine.

I don’t know the exact way this would go down, of course. It might be that Trump would incite a war with the DPRK and in the subsequent confusion the Russians would attack Ukraine and then we would have something marketed by the American press as World War 3. That’s how serious all of this is.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of NATO. What would happen if any of the Baltic states were attacked by Russia and yet Trump sat on his hands if they invoked Article 5 which requires all NATO members to defend each other if one is attacked? That is some pretty momentous stuff That is the kind of stuff that kind of boggles the mind.

We’re in the midst of pretty astonishing events on a geo-political level. There now is an enormous power vacuum on the world stage and different nations are jostling to figure out who gets additional power. It goes without saying that such confusion and uncertainty is how wars start.

All of this is even more staggering for me, a child of the Cold War when it was the Republicans who accused the Democrats of being soft on Russia. The idea that Republicans would be so callow, so absolute in their desire to obtain and retain power that they would, in effect, become Vichy Republicans is tragic, to say the least.

What’s worse is there doesn’t seem to be any easy way out. The Republican Party is now at a rhetorical dead end. There doesn’t seem to be any way for them to get out now that they have decided to follow Trump anywhere he leads them. The power of the Trumplandia base over the Vichy Republicans is seemingly so absolute as to be surreal.

Hence, I don’t have much hope when it comes to the fate of Ukraine. Things are kind of calm right now in eastern Ukraine, but that could change at any moment. And, really, the only thing that makes me reluctant to think the Russians won’t strike against Ukraine in a general war is how small the Russian economy is. It is, as I understand it, smaller than Italy. So, it would be difficult for Putin to use hard power on Ukraine in a way whereby he could not only obtain a big chunk of Ukraine, but keep it long-term.

The reason why I say this is, much like what happened in the 1980s with Afghanistan, if Ukraine was invaded by the Russian army in a big way, the country would be flooded with arms from all over the globe, even if, sadly, they did not come from the United States.

Of course, if Trump was to hide in his Fortress of Solitude and not use America’s traditional moral leadership to inspire the Ukrainians, everything would be significantly more complicated. Really, our only hope at this point is to flip Congress in 2018. That is by no means assured, so we’ll just have to wait and see. I would be lying to you if I didn’t see this, from a geopolitical standpoint, as pretty scary stuff.

But hopefully everything will work out in the long run. There are no assurances it will, but you have to have hope.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Germany No Longer Trusts America Because Of Trump: What Could Go Wrong?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The news out of Europe today is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europe can no longer rely upon the United States and that it must go it alone from now on.

This is pretty earth shattering stuff in the context of the last 70 years or so. Of all the possible outcomes of Trumplandia, this is got to be up there with worse case. So not only is Donald Trump trying to establish something of an autocracy domestically, internationally he’s managing to fuck things up pretty well, too.

I always thought that things would go down like this: Trump would meet with Russian President Putin at some point and Trump would lift sanctions on Russia while giving Putin the go-ahead to make a major landgrab in Ukraine, if not elsewhere.

While that’s still a possible outcome, it looks as though there was another possibility that I did not imagine: our allies themselves would get fed up with Trump and decide that they could no longer trust the US to back them up on a strategic level.

This may be looked back upon as the moment when Trumplandia force some serious shifts in public policy in ways that none of us could have expect. There is now the very real possibility that there will be no need for Putin to meet Trump face-to-face. Putin could challenge NATO in a major way — first in Ukraine, then elsewhere — knowing Trump will be so busy talking about crowd sizes and leaks that he won’t have the time, nor the inclination, to do anything about it.

Not to get too bombastic, but the entire liberal post-WWII order is beginning to have a few bolts pop off. This is the first real demonstrative sign that the world is now a lot less safe in the age of Trumpandia. It is possible that Putin will feel so embolden by all this that NATO states in the Baltics may be gobbled up without the United States blinking an eye.

I really don’t what to make of all this. This is one of those events that is so heady and potentially significant that we can’t fully comprehend what it all means right now. We’re going to need some time to digest all of this, see how it plays out.

And, remember, we still haven’t had a major international crisis during the age of Trumplandia. It will interesting to see what Trump does — or doesn’t do — when he actually has to be the leader of the free world. My fear is he will totally not be up to the task and what could otherwise be managed with some proactive diplomacy will devolve into something significantly more serious.

Right now, Ukraine and North Korea are the places I am most concerned about. Ukraine, in particular, is a place where the conditions are now ripe for a major land grab by Russian forces. Maybe I’m being too alarmist about that, but history would suggest otherwise.