My friend and co-author at The Racket News, Steve Berman, recently opined that Donald Trump is endeavoring to keep his promises. For me, that’s a large part of the problem. When it comes to keeping campaign promises, the rule of garbage-in-garbage-out applies.
Steve’s first example was the Ukraine war. Yes, Trump is trying to end the war, but as George Orwell supposedly said, “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” The real trick isn’t ending the war; it’s ending the war in a way that discourages Putin and other aggressive dictators in countries like China from repeating the strategy.
Donald Trump only has a few levers to pull with respect to the Ukraine war. He could add more sanctions and economic pressure to Russia or he can withhold aid (again) to Ukraine. As realistic options go, that’s about it. Which one do you think is more likely? There is a hint in the fact that Trump has repeatedly blamed Ukraine for getting invaded and not rolling over and conveniently dying.
Trump can’t force Vladimir Putin to abandon his war of aggression and seems to have no interest in trying to do so. After all, so far his talks to end the war not only exclude our European allies but Ukraine itself. That’s not a recipe for peace. That’s a recipe for giving Vladimir Putin breathing room to rearm and rebuild his shattered army for a second try.
And what of Gaza? The Gaza war seemed to be effectively over months ago. As with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II, the war has reached a point where the Israeli military has largely run out of targets. That war is ending with or without Trump.
But I’m more concerned with some of Trump’s other promises. Promises that I would rather he did not keep. For example, he’s well on his way to keeping his promise to use his office to take revenge on his political enemies. That promise violates presidential norms of all shapes and sizes and isn’t good for America. And I’m not talking about prosecuting people who have broken criminal laws (like Trump himself), I’m talking about taking revenge on people who were doing their jobs but were deemed insufficiently loyal to the new old president.
His promise to engage in mass deportations is being kept. To a point, that will be popular. Illegal immigration has been a decades-long problem, but mass deportations won’t be the solution.
Illegal immigrant labor is now woven throughout our economy. Removing illegal (and sometimes legal) immigrant workers is going to result in a labor shortage pretty quickly. Farms and construction will be two segments of the economy that will be hit, and the rising prices from both will contribute to inflationary pressures.
So the mass deportation promise is going to conflict with another promise, that of lowering consumer prices. Donald Trump may not get legitimate blame for the bird flu’s impact on egg prices (and it isn’t Biden’s fault either), but when it costs more to hire workers to pick crops and build houses because Trump deported much of the labor pool, it will be his fault.
As I said, illegal immigration is a problem, but a better solution would have been comprehensive reform. We should make allowances for current illegals who are plugged in with good jobs and good records while focusing deportation on violent criminals. We should make legal immigration more streamlined and attractive than walking across the border. In exchange, everify should become the law of the land, the asylum system should be reformed, penalties for illegally crossing the border should be made stiffer, and border security should be funded adequately. See? I just solved the immigration problem in one paragraph. You’re welcome.
And speaking of rising prices, the tariff war is another promise that I’d prefer Trump didn’t keep. Some tariffs have been delayed, but the trade war is coming and it won’t be good for the economy. We know this because we saw it just a few years ago.
Initially, tariffs may goose the economy because a lot of consumers and companies will increase their inventories and make big purchases before the trade taxes kick in. Before long, however, prices go up and the impact of rising costs ripples throughout the economy. Again, the tariff promise contradicts the promise to lower prices, but guess which one will be kept.
The tariffs of Trump’s first term led to a manufacturing recession and a net loss of American manufacturing jobs. There’s no reason to expect a different result this time.
And the tariffs aren’t likely to help the favored industries that they are designed to protect. When Trump slapped tariffs on steel imports in his first term, the initial effect was to raise prices for domestic producers. After all, that’s what tariffs do. They make foreign imports more expensive so that domestic producers can charge more and/or be competitive with prices that are already higher. Steel stocks initially soared.
But by 2019, it was a different story. Steel buyers bought a lot of steel in the early days, concerned about rising prices and supply problems. Increased domestic production outpaced the drop in imports and the price of steel crashed like, well, like a steel girder dropping. A year after the introduction of the tariffs, both steel prices and the stocks of steelmakers fell sharply.
Trump’s bad promises aren’t just limited to foreign policy and the economy. Yesterday, RFKJR was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Congratulations, America, it’s an anti-vaxxer with a brainworm in charge of federal health policy. Another promise kept. Another promise I’d prefer he broke.
And RFK is far from the only dangerously unqualified nominee. He’s just the worst. (Probably.)
It’s the promises that he isn’t going to keep that I’d prefer that he did. For instance, when Trump promised unity we all knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Mar-a-Lago that this vow would be fulfilled. This is another promise that is at odds with most of what Trump has said and what he really intends. The unity promise was forgotten as quickly as it was made.
In a lot of cases, I could easily forgive Donald Trump for not keeping his promises. What I can’t excuse is following through on bad ideas.
He’s definitely keeping his promise to drain the swamp. Tens of thousands of probationary federal employees are being fired as I type.
The only problem is most of them don’t sit in DC. Which means there will be real impacts elsewhere.
To say nothing of the economic devastation being wrought by ending grants and clawing back infrastructure funding.Report
I appreciate the attempt to defend a neocon position with a George Orwell quote.
Only problem is that there is no evidence he ever said or wrote that sentence – or anything like it.Report
Only problem is that there is no evidence he ever said or wrote that sentence – or anything like it.
Not only is this an actual Orwell quote, but it’s from a fairly well known Orwell essay, one in which he discusses one of his major influences for the ideas in 1984, James Burnham, a man who was a frequent contributor to the National Review, and an influence on American neoconservatism, though like Orwell, the early neoconservatives disagreed with him on many points, and Burnham was himself openly critical of neoconservatives, as was pretty much required back in the day to publish in National Review.Report
Sorry, meant to link to the essay, and somehow didn’t:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/second-thoughts-on-james-burnham/
I’m genuinely curious about what made you so confident that he hadn’t said it. Not only is it on his Wikiquote page, with the source, but it’s from a pretty well-known Orwell essay, at least among people who actually read Orwell beyond the two books everyone’s read. Hell, the essay has its own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thoughts_on_James_BurnhamReport
Thanks for sharing this. Great essay.
To answer your question, I read the quote and thought – that’s a curious Orwell attribution and wondered about the context, because it didn’t sound particularly Orwellian.
I Googled but couldn’t find the source. I asked ChatGPT a couple of ways and its response was: The quote “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” is attributed to George Orwell, but there is no clear record of him writing or saying it in any of his known works. It does not appear in his books, essays, or journalistic writings.
I prompted Gronk, and it had a similar output.
Hence my confidence. Lesson learned.
In my defense, Thornton did write “but as George Orwell supposedly said” – so I’m not the only one here unfamiliar with this essay. And as I suspected, having now read the essay, the context of the Orwell quote doesn’t actually support the OPs neocon argument.Report
Fair enough. Subtract a point for ChatGPT on that one.Report
One of the best dark comedy moments from his 45 term was actually moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
He said he was gonna do it and, by gum, he did it!
And no one will ever be able to use the whole “we’re gonna move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem!” applause line in a campaign speech ever again.
Well, until the Dems move it back.Report
Which, obviously, they won’t do.Report
The eternal question is “is a war continuing a worse moral failure than it ending on terms you don’t like?”
And if the war doesn’t end, we can ask it again next year.
“This is all well and good, but why do we have to keep sending funds to keep the war continuing?” is a good question to ask and, to be fair, I have received a handful of good answers to the question.
“We have a moral obligation to make sure that the war ends on our terms and not their terms.”
“We’re getting real-time feedback on the quality of the weapons we’re sending Ukraine and that means that our weapons will be even better next time.”
“Russia messed with us during Vietnam, now we mess with them. Payback is a best served cold.”
And next year is just 10 1/2 months away!Report
“Russia messed with us during Vietnam, now we mess with them. Payback is a best served cold.”
I thought we got them back much sooner, in their “Vietnam.”
Hopefully this time our payback doesn’t produce villains who will haunt us for decades and result in our being mired in an endless war on a concept like the last one.Report
If you’re obviously in the right, that doesn’t happen.Report
I think you’re being too reductive, which may well be downstream of the politics created by the Biden admin’s apparent lack of strategic thinking.
The question facing the US is whether any settlement with Russia at this moment can result not just in a temporary halt to hostilities but in sustainable peace. If we cut off support to Ukraine and Russia rebuilds and comes back in a few years, like what’s happened previously, then it wasn’t really peace to begin with. And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff. That position is a no win whichever direction we go because we’re either in a hot war with a nuclear armed adversary or we’ve removed ourselves from relevance as a major world power.
So while we need to be cautious about escalations the idea that we can just walk away from this isn’t born out by the strategic realities.Report
So we have to be there indefinitely, giving them money indefinitely, until… what?
If the answer is “until we’re relatively certain that it won’t happen again the second we stop looking”, I’d like to know how we’re going to measure that.Report
Give them some nukes. Problem solved.Report
The endgame needs to be to force Russia into a status quo antebellum peace – i.e. Ukraine returns the Russia it is occupying, and Russia returns the Ukraine it is occupying. Since Russia and Ukraine signed a treaty in 1992, it’s easy to identify which bits of land are which. And Russia needs to understand that fi they won’t accept this peace that the US will not only continue giving its cast-off munitions to Ukraine, it will also stop requiring that Ukraine not use them to strike into Russia itself. Russia’s economy is falling apart, they’ve burned through most of their Soviet-era munitions and the people they can conscript without causing problems. By contrast, the US’s contributions in treasure are minimal, and in bool are nil. This US can bankroll this conflict forever if it has to, but it won’t have to because Russia will collapse if it keep this up for much longer. And then, as you say, re-evaluate every year or so.
After that, start inducting Ukraine into NATO so Russia can’t try again without risking war with the US because there’s no way Russia will want to do that.Report
This is a nice thought but it will almost certainly never happen, or if it does, the timeline will be similar to Finland’s entry into NATO.Report
The timeline between Finland wanting to join NATO and Finland joining NATO was pretty short, I’d by happy with a similar timeframe.Report
Technically, so long as Ukraine claims sovereignty over the Donbas (or Crimea), but doesn’t control those areas, Ukraine is not eligible for NATO membership. Basically, you can’t join if you’re already in a situation where you could make an Article V claim. No one should be surprised the treaty was written that way.Report
Oh indeed, which is why peace has to come first, then NATO membership.Report
I think the time between when they wanted to join to when they felt they actually could (or maybe had no choice but to make it official) was around 70 years.Report
In some ways, we’ve already destroyed NATO – or, I should clarify – the effective deterrent that was once NATO. So, arguing for an expanded NATO really means arguing for a diluted and less effective NATO. Compared, that is, to what NATO originally intended.
That’s ok, I suppose, as long as we realize that extending and diluting NATO makes challenging NATO and the risk of NATO failing in its obligations that much larger.
As I said at the top… I think NATO is already deprecated ever since we included the Baltics (2004). There’s no chance we invoke the Nuclear Umbrella for Vilnius; and there’s almost no chance we put boots on the ground for Estonia. That’s a fundamental deprecation of what made NATO so effective. There was no doubt that invading Germany by Russia would trigger a massive retaliation – quite likely nuclear.
So… what is NATO now? It trades on a security promise that we no longer believe; it’s a sort of UN Security force that works on paper, but isn’t really the thing we imagine (and want) NATO to be.
So to that extent… sure, let’s keep expanding NATO, but it isn’t going to do what we think it will do… and we shouldn’t be surprised when it fails in the predictable ways we know it will fail.
We should have kept NATO as the anvil of security for Europe and created secondary and tertiary treaty organizations. We can feel better and blame George Bush and the Neo-Cons (like McCain) if we want to know where we went wrong… but I’d rather we NOT invite Ukraine into NATO (such as it is) and instead create non-NATO strategies that have plausible deterrent factors, plus the ability to localize, or scale-up, and/or strategically reatreat from when needed. That’s not NATO.
The key tldr here is expanding NATO weakens NATO… we should build layers of security frameworks, not break the ones that work.Report
I think there’s a good possibility that if European security wasn’t ‘NATO or bust’ then maybe this doesn’t happen. However now that it has I agree that the path to resolution needs to be something short of NATO that still creates a serious deterrent to future Russian incursions.
This is where I will be kind of mean to what IMHO is a serious deterioration in the realism of the Realist community. Just like it was always 1938 for the Neocons I think the Realists have entered a similarly current events agnostic cul-de-sac where it’s perpetually 2002.Report
That’s not what I’m suggesting. I don’t care about Russia’s security or their feelings about their security. My point is that we’ve deprecated NATO’s effectiveness… for what? I’m not sure.
I was explicit that we should have multiple layers of treaty obligations *in addition* to NATO… but each layer shifts primary obligations to local/regional actors with US support.
Just because we’ve made bad decisions in the past, doesn’t mean we have to keep making them… Ukraine in 2025 shouldn’t be a NATO project, it could and should be the start of a new project.Report
Nah I wasn’t accusing you personally of that, sorry it came off that way. Big picture I agree with you about the deterioration of the NATO deterrent due to untenable expansion.
Read my previous comment as frustration about the state of the debate. I don’t think NATO membership was ever a plausible solution to Ukraine but I’m also pretty convinced that neither Vance nor Hegseth appreciate the perils of getting Ukraine wrong (ironically based on a kind of Greenwaldian/Gabbardian inability to understand that different situations call for different strategies) and I think there’s a decent chance that’s about to happen.Report
Yeah, I agree with the original comment, and that’s why I wanted to add an explicit rationale for *why* expanding NATO isn’t the right path for Ukraine.
NATO membership restricts our options and it’s just bad strategic thinking to reduce our options while simultaneously expanding our obligations and reducing effectiveness by weak countries like Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics.
To paraphrase the intertubes, the best time to pivot was the 90s, but the next best time is now.Report
I don’t know about indefinitely, but you have to create a plausible long-term deterrent. I don’t know if it was due to age or just lack of vision but the best time to push for something was probably just before Ukraine’s failed counter offensive.
Anyway at this point it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to negotiate. It does mean though that the deal can’t be something like ‘Ukraine gives up its east and everyone promises to play nice from now on.’ It might be something like there’s a demilitarized zone and Rheinmetal builds a bunch of arms factories on Ukrainian soil, all of Europe and in particular Poland is allowed to export indefinite weapons (Ukraine can of course build its own too) so long as those arms don’t cross whatever line, and the US is permitted to install a modern air defense system and provide ammunition and logistical support for it.Report
a plausible long-term deterrent
Every year, every billion, makes the whole thing more irritating and more and more people are asking “why is this my obligation, again?”
“Because it’s good and right!”, say the people who don’t provide a whole lot of billions but a lot of moral authority.
It’s not a situation that will create a plausible long-term anything.Report
I think the chances of people complaining about selling weapons is low, especially if a lot of them are made here. At the end of the day that’s what this proposal would come down to.
But sure there are a lot of really naive people in America who think we can have all of the upside of Pax Americana and none of the costs. At best they’re penny wise pound foolish.Report
I’m sure you’ve seen the footage of Zelenskyy asserting that only half of the $177 Billion given to Ukraine ever actually made it there.
Peace sells, I guess.Report
All I can think of is the baseline to the Megadeth song.
But bigger picture and beyond whatever happens with Ukraine, the US and the West generally may need to re-arm. We got a 30 year break which was nice even if we kind of squandered it. I’m not sure anyone is taking the situation seriously from a fiscal or strategic perspective. We’ve got all this bitching and moaning about giving away a bunch of old, obsolete kit gathering dust when the real problem is that projections suggest we’d run out of ammo for basic weapons systems in days or weeks in the event of a conflict with a real adversary.Report
Haven’t we _always_ had to defend the world against aggressive countries indefinitely? Was there some timeline we were going to stop?
And I say that as someone who isn’t really a fan of that, but the option to doing it is…not doing it, and watching the world get conquered by whoever.
And even if we don’t care about that for some reason (Pretty sure we should), that already threatens our allies, so are we going to stop having allies?
And…won’t that eventually that threaten us? There’s not some imaginary world where we live safely with a nation that makes it clear it wants to conquer the world. You can’t give people 11 inches and expect them not to take the entire foot.
Of course, the ideal situation is that no country wants to behave that way, then we don’t have to defend anyone, and that _used_ to be the ultimate policy goal of the US, which we did with soft power and the little bit of threat of hard power.
…well, until very recently, where Trump has made it clear that expansionism was good, actually.Report
And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff.
Some days, I’m inclined to the position that the EU has 5x the population of Russia and 10x the GDP, so why does the EU need us for military assistance at all? (Note that the EU treaties include mutual military defense. If NATO were dissolved today, France and Germany and Poland and Italy would still have a mutual defense agreement.) My answer on some of those days is they regard the US nuclear umbrella, the US military-industrial manufacturing complex, and the US Navy’s ability to keep the Atlantic open for a massive one-way military logistics flow, as a public good. Trump’s position is fundamentally that they are not a public good, and the EU ought to be paying a bunch for those services.Report
Part of the quandary is that, contra what the Trumpkins say, Putin has given no concrete indication he’s interested in even stopping the war on terms that Trump is suggesting (an essential draw). He’s still demanding a demilitarized Ukraine which, of course, the Ukrainians would never, ever, agree to even under threat of America cutting off all aid.Report
I guess that if he hasn’t given that indication, we should send another couple billion to Ukraine in the hopes that one of the billions actually makes it there.
Or else we’re bad people.Report
What is your position on what US strategy should be? Something other than indefinite support is understandable and hey I’d agree with that. But are you saying we just concede it as Russia’s sphere of influence? Something similar?Report
“Spheres of Influence” and political realism worked for a century or so. I’m not sure “Moral Authority” is working out.
It seems to have created a whole bunch of perpetually adolescent countries incapable of defending or feeding themselves.Report
I’m not quite sure that’s right. I would say we had something like 50 years of nationalistic expansionism and consolidation followed by another 50 years of tense mostly peace underwritten by coherent mutual defense alliances and mutually assured destruction. We then had about 20 years of US unipolarity. Now we have to figure out what comes next.
I think the natural first order results of a sphere of influence approach is that a dozen or more countries immediately develop nuclear weapons as their only guarantee of continued sovereignty and a couple dozen more involved in some low intensity ethnic and/or territorial conflict or another rationally conclude this is their moment to strike so they’d better take it. If that’s what we’re nevertheless going to say is the best option then we need to be really, really confident we’ve thought through how all of that plays out. I am not convinced anyone has.Report
Ukraine, specifically, would have no trouble feeding itself. As for defending itself, it gave up the greatest deterrent it had in 1994 in exchange for what turned out to be a bunch of empty promises from Russia and the United States.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170312052208/http://www.cfr.org/nonproliferation-arms-control-and-disarmament/budapest-memorandums-security-assurances-1994/p32484Report
My understanding is that the launch codes were always in Moscow and that while the weapons were stationed in Ukraine the Ukrainian state never had the ability to use or maintain them.
I think what we’re seeing now is the testing of those agreements that from Russia’s perspective were made under duress. Some level of revanchism was probably inevitable even after nominal independence. Our own wasn’t totally secure for decades and decades after we had it on paper.Report
Yep. I stand corrected.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2024-01-25/clinton-yeltsin-moscow-summit-january-1994Report
That’s a curious new assertion- that Ukraine isn’t getting the aid and it’s being siphoned off elsewhere?Report
This is the claim.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-has-received-less-than-half-of-us-assistance-allocated-during-full-scale-war-zelensky-says/
I haven’t seen anything with better context but I read it as being about shortcomings in either US logistics or procurement, not necessarily corruption.Report
It’s more complicated than that. It’s more that, by one measurement, the US has sent $177 Billion. But of that $177 Billion, about $100 Billion was non-monetary aid like weapons and training and ammo and stuff where the aid money changed hands before Ukraine saw a benefit.
Siphoned off?
I’m sure that everybody’s getting fair market value.Report