Walt Zlotow blogs at heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/ and serves as president of Chicagoland’s West Suburban Peace Coalition. CAPA is grateful to him for permission to repost his essay.
Most esteemed observers put Ukraine’s dead and wounded at north of a half million in their lost war with Russia. Several million young Ukrainian men have fled conscription while stragglers are rounded up like stray dogs to be thrown into the meat grinder of warfare they’re totally unprepared to fight.
But the war is much more than Ukraine defending itself from a Russian invasion. It’s America’s proxy war to weaken, isolate Russia from Western European political economy. Its origins go back 17 years when the US pitched NATO membership to Ukraine to achieve that senseless goal. It virtually guaranteed war after the US engineered the 2014 coup against Russian friendly Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. It ignited a civil war between the Kyiv government and the Russian cultured Ukrainians in the Donbas on Russia’s border. Russia tried diplomacy for 8 years to no avail before invading both to keep Ukraine out of NATO and end protect the beleaguered Donbas Ukrainians. Just before the invasion the US stupidly told Russia that NATO membership for Ukraine and Russia’s security concerns were not subject to diplomacy.
America’s best laid plans to prevail failed spectacularly. Now Ukraine will never join NATO but Donbas Ukrainians are largely safe and thrilled to be under Russian protection from the terrors imposed by Kyiv. Ukraine’s fate was sealed once Biden announced he’d only waste US treasure for weapons but not one drop of US blood for Ukraine’s defense. Three and a half years and over $200 billion in US/NATO weapons have simply put Ukraine on US/NATO life support.
Biden was able to keep Ukraine in the fight for nearly 3 years, squandering a half million of its finest, so he could pass the war on to successor Trump. After being eviscerated by the US national security class for his admitting defeat and withdrawing from the 20 year Afghan war, Biden was loath to incur another defeat on his watch. So he loaded up Ukraine with tons of weapons in his last months to ensure Ukraine would not collapse before his leaving.
Even before retaking office, clueless Trump bragged he’d end the war in one day. He tried to browbeat Ukraine President Zelensky to negotiate war’s end, even humiliating him before the world in the Oval Office. One hundred seventy-five days in Trump is facing his own Afghanistan style defeat as Ukraine nears collapse.
To stave off impending defeat he reversed the Pentagon’s withdrawal of new weapons based on US stockpiles running low. But all he could sputter was that he’s releasing “defensive weapons” only which will do no good with Ukraine running out of cannon fodder to fire them.
For Trump that’s A-OK. ‘Fight on Ukraine…I’ve only got three and a half years to keep this going till I can pull a Biden and pass it on the next clueless idiot trying to defeat an undefeatable Russia.’ The real issue is not whether Trump will succeed. He can’t. The ominous issue facing the US, indeed peoplekind, is whether Trump’s plan to avert defeat will lead to nuclear war that has been a possibility every day in Ukraine for the past three and a half years.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL