You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
Boy, the Masters of War are really afraid of losing their biggest money-spinner in decades. They’d been on a good run, with the Middle East, ending with an $80 billion clearance sale for the Taliban, courtesy of Joe Biden. Luckily for the military-industrial complex, another market opened up with serendipitous timing. A backwater squabble between two corrupt former Soviet provinces became the biggest cash cow they’d seen in decades.
The $8 trillion that had poured into the coffers of Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer and Moderna (yep, the latter two are in the top ten US defence contractors) over the two decades of George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s wars was going to take some beating. In just a year, Ukraine has been a $100 billion dollar lifeline thrown by the Democrat war-hawks.
Now, just as that spoil-sport Trump piked the war-mongers’ party, the likely next Republican candidate is threatening to do the same.
Naturally, the legacy media camp-followers of the Masters of War are throwing a fit.
Ron DeSantis is sketching out a presidential campaign based on his manifest governing success in Florida and as a fearless fighter for principle who ignores the polls. Then how to explain his puzzling surrender this week to the Trumpian temptation of American retreat?
Because, as Trump did, he realises that Americans are sick and tired of playing world policeman, and sacrificing their blood and treasure to save feckless foreigners from themselves?
That’s not too strong a way to describe his decision to call the war in Ukraine a “territorial dispute” that isn’t a vital US interest.
Because it isn’t, and never was.
He told Fox News that giving the Ukrainians long-range weapons and fighter jets ought to be “off the table,” invoking the prospect of nuclear war with Russia.
And he called for “peace,” albeit without explaining how to avoid making it a peace of the grave for Ukrainians if the West withdraws its support while Vladimir Putin advances.
Fancy not wanting to go to the brink of nuclear war! Such a thing hasn’t been countenanced since John F. Kennedy provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As for the so-called “peace of the grave”, the Biden administration is overseeing graves a-plenty in its proxy war. While the Democrats are plainly determined to fight to the last Ukrainian, maybe it’s time to realise the bitter truth that people make peace with their enemies, not their friends.
The argument goes that Mr DeSantis is reading the political mood: About 40 per cent of Republicans say the US is providing “too much” support for Ukraine, up from about 9 per cent in March last year. Yet some of this is a function of polarised US politics. Many Republicans oppose helping Ukraine because President Joe Biden is doing it, and the mirror image is Democrats from the antiwar left putting Ukrainian flag stickers on their electric cars.
No, the “antiwar left” are the ones slavering for war. Far from “polarised US politics”, it’s middle America sick to death of its sons and daughters and taxes being sacrificed to foreign wars, while the US is invaded from the southern border, and the fentanyl crisis kills more Americans than the Russian bogey-men ever have.
Mr DeSantis has a point that Mr Biden doesn’t have “defined objectives” in Ukraine – other than giving it enough arms to resist but not enough to drive Russia out of the country. This is a recipe for extended conflict. The Governor also rightly warns about the threat from China and dwindling U.S. weapons arsenals.
The Australian
It’s not a “point” — it’s the bitter truth. Even the Biden administration is belatedly cottoning on that they’re leaving themselves disastrously weak in the Pacific — which is where any real threat to American interests lies.
If American voters had to make a choice of which war to fight, I suspect they’d rather throw American might behind a free, liberal democracy at the gate of the American lake (the Pacific), than a corrupt former Soviet province on the outskirts of Eastern Europe. To paraphrase Field Marshal Montgomery, Europe keeps expecting the rest of the world to save it from itself.
Maybe it’s time to leave them to sort out their own mess.
