WASHINGTON - U.S. President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday the NATO alliance should weigh throwing Spain out of its membership ranks over a dispute about the Western European nation's lagging military spending. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read more at straitstimes.com.
sorry, maybe my English is not clear, I meant to say that the war in Ukraine has been looked forward by the US
Uh… no…?
Before the war started, Biden’s administration executed one of the most shrewd and incisive applications of intelligence sharing and publication to categorically disprove not only Putin’s smoke screen of “we’re totally not planning on invading Ukraine”, but also pretty much their entire casus belli.
After the war started - and before the current regime took power - there was a frustratingly long period of time where the US more or less hung Ukraine out to dry, and we only started seriously supporting them (in a similarly frustratingly piecemeal and nannying fashion) pretty far into the active phase of the war.
There’s an argument to be made that the Biden admin’s policy towards the war was aimed at bleeding Russia out; while I agree that there’s something to that with regard to the outcome of that policy, I honestly think Jake Sullivan (Biden’s NS advisor) being such a categorical limpdick with infuriatingly outdated worldviews, particularly with regard to Russia, was the primary driver of why things were so stingy and halting for so long. The attrition was much more an effect of that hemming and hawing, and much less the actual intent - at least, until towards the very end of the administration’s tenure… at which point leaning into the attrition strategy was blindingly fucking stupid, considering the incoming regime’s obvious predilections.
I don’t think it’s coherent to try to tie the Biden admin’s policy - frustrating, myopic, and stuttering as it was in many ways - to how the current regime is trying to orchestrate things, for several reasons:
The war in Ukraine didn’t start during the Biden administration, it started in 2014 with the Euromaidan, where both Russian and Western assets certainly played a role in the events, resulting in the annexation of Crimea and the “civil war” in Donbas where Russian paramilitaries and unmarked actual militaries operated.
I support the Ukrainian peoples’ right to self determination and reject war as tool to settle disputes, but saying the US has no responsibility in starting the war is just dishonest. If they wanted they could have assuaged Russia, it’s not like they actually care about Ukrainian people, but it was in their interest for this war to happen, so they stoked the fire. Is it solely their responsibility? No of course, Russia is the one actually waging war, but please let’s be objective.
Oh - I didn’t by any means intend to say the US has no culpability in the war. We absolutely do. A huge contributor to the active phase kicking off in 2022 was the US and the UK essentially abrogating their parts in the Budapest Memorandum - specifically, their guarantees of territorial integrity and sovereignty to Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine surrendering their nuclear weapons to Russia (which Russia repaid by, of course, doing a shadow invasion in 2014 and an active/open invasion in 2022).
I blame Obama and Merkel for doing fuck-all in 2014. I believe Obama was interested in doing more, but Merkel dug in her heels because of that sweet, sweet oil from Nordstream I (and the at-the-time potential for NS II). She is never to be sufficiently damned for being a core enabler/useful idiot in this clusterfuck of a war that Ukraine is being subjected to. There are not a lot of politicians who fell further in terms of my respect for them than Merkel.