sábado, 1 de março de 2025
A Day of American Infamy
Opinion
Bret
Stephens
A Day of
American Infamy
Feb. 28,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/a-day-of-american-infamy.html
Bret
Stephens
By Bret
Stephens
Opinion
Columnist
In August
1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin
Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s
Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the
world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world.
Among its
key points: “no aggrandizement, territorial or other”; “sovereign rights and
self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”;
“freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; “access, on equal terms, to
the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their
economic prosperity.”
The charter,
and the alliance that came of it, is a high point of American statesmanship. On
Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr
Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to
sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom,
security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners
from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the
White House.
If Roosevelt
had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork
over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American
security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky.
Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by
failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or
to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations —
this was a day of American infamy.
Where do we
go from here?
If there’s
one silver lining to this fiasco, it’s that Zelensky did not sign the agreement
on Ukrainian minerals that was forced on him this month by Scott Bessent, the
Treasury secretary who’s the Tom Hagen character in this protection-racket
administration. The United States is entitled to some kind of reward for
helping Ukraine defend itself — and Ukraine’s destruction of much of Russia’s
military might should top the list, followed by the innovation Ukraine
demonstrated in pioneering revolutionary forms of low-cost drone warfare, which
the Pentagon will be keen to emulate.
But if it’s
a financial payback that the Trump administration seeks, the best place to get
it is to seize, in collaboration with our European partners, Russia’s frozen
assets and put them into an account by which Ukraine could pay for
American-made arms. If the United States won’t do this, the Europeans should:
Let the Ukrainians rely for their arms on Dassault, Saab, Rheinmetall, BAE
Systems and other European defense contractors and see how that goes over with
the “America First”-ers. Hopefully that could serve as another spur to
Europeans to invest, as quickly and heavily as they can, in their depleted
militaries, not simply to strengthen NATO but also to hedge against its end.
There is a
second opportunity: While Trump’s abuse of Zelensky might delight the MAGA
crowd, it isn’t likely to play well with most voters, including the almost 30
percent of Republicans who, even now, believe it’s in our interest to stand
with Ukraine. And while most Americans may want to see the war in Ukraine end,
they almost surely don’t want to see it end on Vladimir Putin’s terms.
Nor should
the Trump administration. A Russian victory in Ukraine, including a cease-fire
that allows Moscow to consolidate its gains and recoup its strength before the
next assault, will have precisely the same effect as the Taliban’s victory in
Afghanistan: emboldening American enemies to behave more aggressively. Notice
that, as Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine in recent weeks, Taiwan
reported a surge in Chinese military drills around the island, while Chinese
warships held live-fire exercises off the coast of Vietnam and came within 150
nautical miles of Sydney.
Those are
points honorable conservatives should press: Can Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska — two Republicans who haven’t
sold their souls on Ukraine — lead a delegation of like-minded conservatives to
Kyiv?
More so,
this should be an opportunity for Democrats. Joe Biden was right when he called
this a “decisive decade” for the future of the free world; he just happened to
be too feeble and cautious a messenger.
But there
are tough-minded Democrats with military and security backgrounds —
Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, Representative Seth Moulton of
Massachusetts and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan come to mind — who can
restore the spirit of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the Democratic Party.
It’s a message of toughness and freedom they might also be able to sell to at
least some Trump voters, who cast their ballots in November for the sake of a
better America, not a greater Russia.
Still,
there’s no getting around the fact that Friday was a dreadful day — dreadful
for Ukraine, for the free world, for the legacy of an America that once stood
for the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
Roosevelt
and Reagan must be spinning in their graves, as are Churchill and Thatcher.
It’s up to the rest of us to reclaim America’s honor from the gangsters who
besmirched it in the White House.
Bret
Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy,
domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.
Opinion
M. Gessen
Putin Is
Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.
Feb. 28,
2025
M. Gessen
By M. Gessen
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/putin-trump-ukraine.html#
Opinion
Columnist
Washington
and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to
the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After
meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the
Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to
“eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent
chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought
what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.
Of course,
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a
bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about
Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize
the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin
D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February
1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last,
Trump is handing him the knife.
How do I
know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre
of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta
for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin
addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it
culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.
His
reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the
once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement
those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic
States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later
securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of
Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and
security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and
prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official
Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.
This week,
Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin
with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long
interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin
affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to
reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy
only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the
very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and
denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies
applied to Germany in Yalta.
On X, where
Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up
to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy
Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist
friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists
are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)
President
Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine understands the enormity of the threat, not only
to his country but to Europe, for which Ukraine has served as a deadly buffer
zone. But on Friday, when he tried to talk about this threat during an Oval
Office meeting, Trump and Vice President JD Vance became furious. They yelled
at him, demanding that he acknowledge his powerlessness and grovel in
gratitude. The talks collapsed.
What happens
to Ukraine now? Before Zelensky’s visit to Washington, the best-case scenario
was for Russia to agree to a cease-fire in exchange for the roughly 20 percent
of Ukrainian territory that it currently occupies. That would leave millions of
Ukrainian citizens — those who live in the occupied territories and those who
have been displaced east — under the rule of Russian totalitarianism. Now that
outcome, which was never likely to begin with, appears all but impossible. We
are now in the realm of the worst-case scenario, in which it is possible to
imagine Putin launching a renewed offensive against Ukraine, aimed at total
domination, this time with the active assistance of the United States.
Putin
doesn’t just want a return to the 20th century. He already resides there, and
that is where anyone looking for what could happen next should turn.
Specifically to 1938, when the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who
fancied himself a brilliant negotiator and an expert in all things, brokered an
agreement that gave Hitler Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia. In exchange,
the rest of Europe would, ostensibly, be safe from German aggression. A year
after the resulting Munich Agreement was signed, of course, Germany invaded
Poland and World War II officially began.
When Trump,
fuming, threatened Zelensky with the potential for World War III, he may have
been drawing a more accurate historical parallel than he realized.
What happens
if Russia unleashes its aggression against Europe, unchecked or even aided by
the United States? The exact contours of the looming catastrophe are impossible
to predict. It will not look like the bipolar world of the second half of the
20th century. But just as certainly, it will not look like the world in which
we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy
countries have felt safe.
I am
reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German
Jews and Communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world
reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be antifascist flipped
overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace.
French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside
Germany. As antifascism was marginalized, antisemitism became mainstream.
Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.
Most days
now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are
experiencing a terrifying sort of déjà vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our
American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, like
The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Trumpism, and
how the air itself seems to change, until suddenly it’s Zelensky, with his
cleareyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.
We’ve seen
it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked: We’ve seen how it
ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the United States.
We thought that our countries were particularly vulnerable to political warping
because of their decades-long histories of totalitarianism. “It was nice to
know that there was one country where the people in charge were, if not
likable, then at least sane,” is how the young Russian exile Ksenia Mironova
put it. More than that, it was nice to think that the society was sane.
A
26-year-old journalist who was forced to flee Russia in the middle of the night
three years ago, whose fiancé is in a prison colony serving a 22-year sentence
for high treason, who passed through six countries before finding shelter in
New York in a film program, Mironova used to think it was just her bad luck to
be born in Russia. Now, increasingly, it looks like this world was an unlucky
place to be born into. At the start of her spring semester, Mironova received
an email informing her that her funding had been cut off as a result of one of
Trump’s executive orders. Where should she go? Returning to Russia is not an
option. If Trump sides with Putin the United States won’t be, either.
“And even
Mars is going to be colonized by Musk,” Mironova said.
M. Gessen is
an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion
writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is
History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book
Award in 2017.
How JD Vance emerged as the chief saboteur of the transatlantic alliance
Analysis
How JD
Vance emerged as the chief saboteur of the transatlantic alliance
Andrew Roth
in
Washington
Vance snaked
his way in first to the row between Trump and Zelenskyy, his second intrusion
this month after Munich
Sat 1 Mar
2025 07.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/jd-vance-volodymyr-zelenskyy
JD Vance was
supposed to be the inconsequential vice-president.
But his
starring role in Friday’s blowup between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy –
where he played a cross between Trump’s bulldog and tech bro Iago – may mark
the moment that the postwar alliance between Europe and America finally
collapsed.
Trump and
Vance teamed up to goad Zelenskyy into a feud in the Oval Office. But it was
Vance that snaked his way in first, riling up the Ukrainian president by
telling him that he was leading “propaganda tours” of the destruction wrought
by Russia’s invasion.
“I think
it’s disrespectful to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in
front of the American media,” Vance said, his voice rising. “You bring people
on a propaganda tour, Mr President … Do you think that it’s respectful to come
to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the
administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”
“During the
war, everyone has problems,” Zelenskyy replied. “But you have nice ocean and
don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future.”
“You don’t
know that,” Trump interjected angrily. “You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what
we’re going to feel.”
The rest, as
Trump would later call it, was “great television”. By design, it was disastrous
for Ukraine.
This was
Vance’s second great intervention this month. His Eurosceptic worldview came
into focus in Munich, where he accused shocked European leaders of stifling
free speech telling them that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters,
there is nothing America can do for you”.
At the time,
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said: “Listening to
that speech … they try to pick a fight with us and we don’t want to a pick a
fight with our friends”.
But on
Friday, Vance finally got his fight. The US vice-president is quietly
assembling a foreign policy team with a deeply skeptical view of Kyiv’s value
as a future ally. And European officials have lined up to back Zelenskyy,
saying that the Trump team’s performance in the Oval Office indicated that the
US was truly siding with Vladimir Putin in the war.
“Now is the
moment to stay calm, but not carry on,” wrote Camille Grand, a distinguished
policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and former assistant
secretary general for defense investment at Nato. “The US ally has now
officially decided to take a stance inconsistent with our traditionally shared
interests and values. This might be temporary or lasting but this will have
profound and enduring consequences.”
There is a
thing in Washington that many people understand but that few will say: that the
Trump administration was looking for a pretext to ruin its relationship with
Ukraine, and that the canned messaging that followed the Oval Office feels
oddly coordinated and premeditated.
“That was a
train wreck by design,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at
King’s College London. “The quiet conversation since Munich has been about
setting Ukraine up for a fall. If a real deal was going to be unattainable,
right, that somebody would need to take the blame for it, and it would likely
be the Ukrainians, right?”
By Friday
afternoon, the Trump administration was briefing reporters that it was so
offended by Zelenskyy’s conduct that it would consider cutting all military aid
to Ukraine, including ammunition, vehicles and missiles awaiting shipment. The
official told the Washington Post that the conflict with Zelenskyy had not been
premeditated.
But the
commentary from party allies was oddly formulaic and repetitive. Lindsey
Graham, who had posed for a photo with Zelenskyy just hours earlier, tweeted:
“America was disrespected and the deal is off. I have never been more proud of
President @realDonaldTrump and Vice President @JDVance for standing up for
America First.”
Marco Rubio,
the secretary of state, who has been one of Ukraine’s strongest backers up
until his confirmation, tweeted: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America
in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before. Thank you for
putting America First. America is with you!”
Keith
Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, tweeted: “Was honored to be with @POTUS,
@VP, and [Rubio] in the Oval today during the bi-lateral with President
Zelensky. As the President has ALWAYS done-he stood for America....America
First.”
It is
difficult to know who is more contemptible: those who wanted this or those who
merely went along with it. There is a picture in the Oval Office of Rubio and
Vance sitting side by side as Trump rips into Zelenskyy. Rubio looks deeply
uncomfortable, his hands clasped and his face downcast. Vance looks ecstatic.
He finally got the fight he wanted to pick.
‘Free world needs a new leader’, says EU foreign chief after Trump Zelenskyy row
.jpg)
‘Free
world needs a new leader’, says EU foreign chief after Trump Zelenskyy row
The EU
foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said ‘the free world needs a new leader’ and
that it was up to Europeans to take this challenge
Nadeem
Badshah
Fri 28 Feb
2025 23.11 GMT
The EU
foreign policy chief has declared that “the free world needs a new leader”, as
European leaders threw their support behind Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, after the stunning White House confrontation between him and Donald
Trump.
Leaders from
across Europe expressed their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader after the
fractious exchange with JD Vance, the US vice-president, and Trump, who claimed
he was not “ready for peace” and accused him of “gambling with world war
three”.
Although in
general the European leaders did not name the US president, their comments late
on Friday laid bare the gaping rift between the US and its traditional allies
in Europe over the war in Ukraine.
In a social
media post Kaja Kallas, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and
security policy, wrote: “Ukraine is Europe! We stand by Ukraine. We will step
up our support to Ukraine so that they can continue to fight back the
aggressor.
“Today, it
became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans,
to take this challenge.”
Addressing
Zelenskyy directly, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission,
wrote: “Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people. Be strong, be
brave, be fearless. You are never alone.”
She added:
“We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.”
The British
prime minister, Keir Starmer, who just a day before had visited Trump at the
White House, called Zelenskyy to express his support, a No 10 spokesperson
said.
Starmer –
who failed in his effort to convince Trump to commit US support for a
European-led peacekeeping force in Ukraine – told Zelenskyy that “he retains
his unwavering support for Ukraine and is playing his part to find a path
forward to a lasting peace, based on sovereignty and security for Ukraine”, the
official said.
Two days
after his own meeting with Trump in Washington the French president, Emmanuel
Macron, responded indirectly to the US president’s baseless claims that
Zelenskyy was responsible for the war, telling reporters: “Russia is the
aggressor, and Ukraine is the aggressed people … These are simple things, but
they’re good to remember at times like these.”
European
leaders had already been shaken by Vance’s speech to the Munich security
conference two weeks ago in which he lectured them about the state of their
democracy.
Italy’s
prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called for an emergency meeting between the US,
Europe and Ukraine.
“A summit
without delay is needed between the United States, European states and their
allies to talk frankly about how we intend to tackle today’s major challenges,
starting with Ukraine, which together we have defended in recent years,” Meloni
said in a statement.
Jonas Gahr
Støre, Norway’s prime minister, described the episode as “serious and
disheartening”.
“That Trump
accuses Zelenskyy of gambling with world war three is deeply unreasonable and a
statement I distance myself from,” he said.
The Spanish
prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said his country would stand by Ukraine after
the row.
Sánchez, a
staunch backer of Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion who pledged €1bn of aid
in a visit to Kyiv earlier this week, wrote on X: “Ukraine, Spain stands with
you.”
Poland’s
prime minister, Donald Tusk, was among the first to show his support for
Zelenskyy and Ukraine on social media, telling them: “You are not alone.”
The outgoing
German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof,
Luxembourg’s prime minister, Luc Frieden, and Portugal’s prime minister, Luís
Montenegro, also professed their support for Ukraine, along with other leaders
from Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania,
Slovenia, and Sweden.
Canada’s
prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said Ukraine’s fight against Russia is a
defense of democracy.
“Russia
illegally and unjustifiably invaded Ukraine. For three years now, Ukrainians
have fought with courage and resilience. Their fight for democracy, freedom,
and sovereignty is a fight that matters to us all,” he posted on X.
“Canada will
continue to stand with Ukraine,” Trudeau added.
Some world
leaders, however, sided with Trump.
Viktor
Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, wrote on X: “Strong men make peace, weak men
make war.
“Today
President @realDonaldTrump stood bravely for peace. Even if it was difficult
for many to digest. Thank you, Mr. President!”
Orbán, an
outspoken critic of western aid to Ukraine, has been at odds with other Nato
countries over Orbán’s continued cultivation of close ties to Russia.
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