A King, A Dictator, and Black Boxes
As Trump remonstrates with Ukraine instead of Russia, the remains of hostages are returned to Israel.
Trump is king. Zelenskyy is a dictator. And the Bibas children are no longer with us.
The idiotic political rhetoric and the power games we play couldn’t be more obviously insidious distractions from the reality of the world than they are today.
Could it be that the honeymoon period for Donald Trump’s presidency is over that quickly? Has his foreign policy acumen that he lauded over his political opponents been revealed to be wanting?
Only a small contingent of the American Right are extant, blatant supporters of Putin’s Russia in its war against Ukraine; however, Trump’s first real attempt at ending the war between the two countries looks much more like an appeasement of Putin than it does playing hard-to-get with a peace deal.
The President has been strong with Israel but has been a little tight-lipped about his strategy to achieve peace in Eastern Europe. This week, leaked documents showed Trump will be demanding 50% of Ukraine’s rare-earth mineral industry, additional access to its ports, and first right of refusal to purchase new mining licenses. But if America takes 50%, what will be left for BlackRock?
After all, Uncle Sam contributed quite a few billions to the Kyiv war fund, and only the most naive of us thought that was a charitable donation — though half of one Ukraine’s most lucrative business seems like a steep price to pay for a country that’ll need every penny kopiyok if they’re serious about reconstruction.
It’s also worth noting that Zelenskyy has stated that Russia is currently occupying at least half of Ukraine’s rare earth mineral deposits, which would complicate matters of extracting repayment, no?
Obviously, the Biden Administration backed the current one into a corner with its tepid, neither-here-nor-there support for Ukraine. Biden was weak on Putin before the invasion and was only rhetorically strong, condemning the Kremlin’s actions but only sending the minimum amount of aid necessary to keep Ukraine from instant capitulation to its invaders.
Because your predecessor did a terrible job doesn’t mean you have to as well.
Trump called himself king (either of the US, Manhattan, or the world, who knows) then derided Zelenskyy as a dictator (which is objectively untrue) and accused Kyiv of starting the war. Look, I’m no fan of the guy or of the way the war has been prosecuted by either side, but, literally, none of those things are true.
If one were particularly sympathetic to Russia, one could argue that NATO encroachment poked and prodded the ex-Soviet Bear until it lashed out. In fact, one doesn’t have to be a Russophile to make that argument; NATO has been playing footsie with Russia’s border countries for years.
Obama supplied non-lethal aid to Ukraine, which led to the invasion of Crimea. Trump approved the transfer of American-made lethal weaponry to Ukraine in his first term, and Biden played dead for four years.
The Democrats have been soft on Russia (while accusing it of stealing our democracy) through the last several administrations, but the MAGA ideology has adopted Reagan’s philosophy of peace through strength. At a minimum, the United States’ alternating posture (and its deleterious results) towards the embattled nations over the last decade show that the disparate policies championed by the two major parties are so incoherent and inconsistent that they are rendered dangerous and destructive.
Arming Ukraine in 2017 after the capture of Crimea under Obama’s watch was probably the right tactic to ward off further Russian intrusions, but Biden was unable to walk (literally and figuratively) the game that Trump talked.
So, yes. Admittedly, the current administration has been dealt a losing hand, and it may be that Trump’s deep pockets of negotiation tactics have nothing to offer from a losing position, but dragging your ally in public, leaving them out of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, and effectively ceding to key Russian demands before negotiations begin in earnest may not be the best way to achieve lasting peace in the region.
The President told the EU that it has three weeks to accept the terms of Ukraine’s surrender to Russia or the United States will pull out — this a direct response to the perception that the European federation hasn’t pulled its weight in a conflict in its own backyard. This makes sense as an isolated ploy, but again, daring your allies to call your bluff in front of an armed competitor isn’t likely to suddenly grant you the upper hand.
We all know that Trump likes a winner; maybe he just forgot he’s allied with the losing party of this war. Ultimately, his promise of ending the conflict in 48 hours was a bluster and no substance, but ending a three-year armed altercation will likely require his administration to move slower than it has domestically.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has a clear path to unmitigated victory, and wars that have no victor historically take an elongated time to resolve. World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all took years to negotiate a resolution. Woodrow Wilson himself spent six months bargaining for peace in 1919 and eventually won a treaty that neither achieved Senate approval nor a lasting peace (WWII, heard of it?).
I didn’t expect to be comparing Trump to Wilson, but here we are. Wilson’s tunnel vision for his desire of the League of Nations and idealism could very well have prevented a lasting, workable solution to the ‘Germany problem’ in 20th Century Europe. Good intentions aside, if Donald Trump is set on handing the keys to the Donbas over to the Kremlin while declining Ukraine entrance to NATO in exchange for a ceasefire, I’m taking the under on how long that lasts.
A negotiated ceasefire that looks like that is more like taking a raincheck for a future invasion rather than nixing the idea completely. But who knows? It might be time for America to do a heel turn, sick of being spurned and taken advantage of by our international allies; kings, dictators, and despots unite, Alaska is the gateway to Russia’s cold, frozen heart.
Let our love and gifts of wheat and Russian-speaking Ukrainians thaw Moscow as it welcomes a free speech carousel in Red Square. Let a thousand red, white, and blue flowers bloom.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where do bad intentions get you?
Somewhere worse, one would hope.
The Bibas family, Yarden and Shiri, and their little boys, Ariel and Kfir, were stolen from their home in Southern Israel on October 7th.
The boys and their mother, Shiri, became symbols to the Israeli people and the international community of the desperate effort to free the hostages taken by Hamas and other Gazan factions.
Yarden was held in captivity separately from his family and, before his release earlier this month, was filmed by Hamas as the barbarians told him his wife and children had been killed. The hostage video was released for the world to see. There were no campus protests. No rallies on the Capitol. No viral social media campaigns.
Still, there was some hope. Hamas had lied about the condition of hostages before; some were released alive after the terrorist organization had proclaimed them dead at the hands of Israeli air strikes. It seemed irrational to think that one young boy and one baby could have survived over a year in the tunnels of Gaza, but if you don’t have hope, what do you have?
Thursday morning, whatever glimmer of optimism the public had for the Bibas family was extinguished as Hamas paraded the caskets of the young family through the streets of Gaza and onto a stage for a crowd to see. Shortly after, their remains were handed over to the Red Cross to fulfill Hamas’s obligatory hostage exchange to satisfy the ceasefire conditions.
As if the horror and depravity hadn’t already challenged conceptions of the upper bounds of human cruelty, officials stated that autopsy results showed the boys had been ‘brutally murdered’ sometime in 2023. Worse still, the IDF confirmed that the remains that were supposed to be Shiri Bibas were unidentifiable and did not belong to any known hostage.
They tore them from their home, killed them, and couldn’t be bothered to send them back with their mother. Surely, there is no fate too cruel for these monsters.
The Nazis were ashamed of their camps, and did their best to conceal from the world as the Third Reich collapsed. Hamas has the temerity to fly their flags in victory over the bodies of women and children and blame Israel for their deaths. Some Germans hid or smuggled Jews to safety, yet the brainwashing or stranglehold Hamas has on Gazans has yielded no such stories.
The border conflict in Ukraine and Russia far exceeds the death toll between Israel and Gaza, the stakes are lower. There will be no genocide if Putin plants a flag in Kyiv. The Russia-Ukraine War is a convention of humanity, one that is several layers deep concerning things like dominion and sovereignty. To be sure, there have been gratuitous acts of cruelty and injustice on that front, but its violence is of a different kind than that of Gaza.
The West’s true enemy isn’t Russia or Ukraine. It’s the death cult of radical Islam and those who support their efforts. It’s the people who will hear the story of a mother separated from her children in life and death, who watched a father learn of their deaths on camera, who watched a people march through the streets with their caskets and said nothing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the ‘line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,’ and those who defend the actions of Hamas belong to the latter half.
The rest of us aren’t good because we’re moral. We’re good because of our love of life. Our enemies are evil because of their veneration, celebration, and desire for death.
May we always fight them and never become them.
To a better next week,
~FDA