Opinion
As I reported recently, a majority of American voters are sick of being asked to play the world’s policemen. They’ve already seen thousands of their sons and daughters killed and mutilated in a futile attempt to impose liberal democracy on goat-herding savages. Most especially, they’re fed up with their hard-earned tax money being squandered by a Congress in thrall to the military-industrial complex, propping up tinpot autocrats and prolonging destructive conflicts in order to keep running what amount to vast, open-air markets for the defense industry behemoths.
Nor are they happy to be continually expected to yet again save the mendicants of Europe from their own smug foolishness — only to be sneered at for their troubles.
The sentiment is especially strong among Republican voters — and a certain Republican candidate is apparently listening.
Donald Trump won’t give “another penny” to Ukraine if he wins the US presidential election, Hungary’s leader has said after talks with the Republican candidate.
Viktor Orban, who has argued against sanctions on Russia and delayed about €50 billion (£42.7 billion) in EU aid to Kyiv, met Mr Trump in Florida and backed him to return to the White House.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end,” the conservative prime minister of Hungary, a Nato and EU member state, said.
All wars must end some time, much to the chagrin of the Masters of War, and they almost always end with a negotiated peace. It’s almost certain that the Ukraine war would have ended as much as a year ago, if the combatants had been encouraged to the negotiating table. But that’s the last thing the Masters of War have wanted, so they’ve done everything in their power to make sure it continues.
Sure, it will be galling for Ukraine to go to the negotiating table, but the grim reality is that this is a war that it cannot win. They won’t be the first, and certainly not the last country forced to negotiate a peace. Despite the rah-rah jingoism of the media, Ukraine has steadily lost. It will almost certainly keep on losing. And the longer it keeps losing, more Ukrainians will die.
You may object that Putin shouldn’t be allowed to win, after launching an illegal war. Western countries who do so, though, are unmitigated hypocrites: after all, it wasn’t so long ago that the West was launching illegal wars. Wars which, in the end, seemed to have achieved little apart from ruin and death on a grand scale.
Then there is the grim calculus that the deeper the West meddles in Ukraine, the closer it edges us all to the horror of nuclear war. Western brinkmanship went a long way to starting the war; it may yet escalate it in ways that will ruin us all. Especially as Europe once again seems determined to yet again sink itself into the mire of global war.
[Joe Biden] has struggled to get more aid for Ukraine passed by Republicans, who are blocking a $60 billion (£46.9 billion) package in Congress.
That has exacerbated European fears about the future of US financial support for Ukraine if Mr Trump wins in November.
“It is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet,” Mr Orban, who has regularly called for an immediate ceasefire, told Hungary’s state broadcaster on Sunday.
“If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, then the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone are unable to finance this war. And then the war is over.”
The US is the country which has given the most support to Ukraine, the equivalent of £58.6 billion, followed by Germany and the UK. The European Union as a whole has committed about £72.6 billion.
This may seem generous of the EU, but that’s divided among 27 member nations and 448 million people: or, roughly £162 per head. The taxpayers of the USA are being stiffed £183 each. At the same time, feckless EU leaders are yet again failing to keep to their NATO treaty obligations.
Mr Trump, who lambasted European leaders for failing to hit Nato defence spending targets when he was president, has claimed he will end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours if elected.
The Telegraph
Which is no doubt exactly what the Masters of War are terrified of. Where will their rivers of bloodstained gold come from then?