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.
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.