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“Donald Trump appeared to quote Napoleon Bonaparte by way of Rod Steiger on Saturday afternoon after his blitzkrieg of executive actions and threats to federal agencies under Elon Musk were challenged in courts across the country, raising alarms that his administration is preparing to shred court orders and ignite a constitutional crisis.” (source: The Independent)
Did you see the quote?
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Amazing. In this week, as we celebrate our greatest presidents: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt (2), et al, our #FOTUS chooses to emulate Napoleon.
Just for the record, Napoleon is controversial due to his role in wars which devastated Europe, his looting of conquered territories, his mixed record on civil rights, his abolishment of the free press, his ending representative government, his exiling and jailing critics, his reinstating slavery in France's colonies, his reducing the civil rights of women and children in France, his reintroducing a hereditary monarchy and nobility, and his violently repressing popular uprisings against his rule. Napoleon's reign ended definitively after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, with thanks to the Duke of Wellington.
It makes you wonder what Trump’s end game is? Napoleon terrorized Europe over 200 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and yet he wants to march us backwards to a world of the conquerors and the vanquished. I thought Europe was past all of that after the horrors of WWII, when an estimated 50-85M people died.
I was thinking about history and how different decisions might have created different outcomes. For example, what if Neville Chamberlain had said to Hitler, “Czechoslovakia is not yours to take.”
I read a essay that posed this idea. What if Trump had been president in different eras of our history?
When I was growing up in the ‘50s, my world view was pretty simple. The Americans were the good guys and the USSR were the bad guys. Our president was so beloved that even a dog in the neighborhood was named, Ike. To be called “Khrushchev” was the ultimate insult. At the time, we didn’t have diplomatic relations with China, so as a country, they barely registered in my social studies classes. We would look at the world map and see this big red blotch of land that covered much of Asia and part of Europe. That was the USSR (and the eastern block of Europe). They were our nemesis.
In my childlike naivete, I assumed that big red blotch was just like us — lots of states speaking the same language with a common history. I didn’t fully understand that Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, etc. were separate entities with different languages and cultures, many of which had been grabbed up through centuries of conflict and oppression.
In 1968, I did a summer abroad program in Austria. At a party in Vienna, I met a guy from Czechoslovakia, who had been able to leave the country for a student exchange program. His then president, Alexander Dubček, had led a process that accelerated cultural and economic liberalization in Czechoslovakia. For the first time in my life, I could put a face to this amorphous red blotch on the map. In his broken English, this fellow was telling me how proud he was of his country and the reforms that had come. Sadly, later that summer after I had gotten home, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invaded his country and threw Dubček out of power to halt the reforms. I’ve often wondered what happened to that guy, that I met in Vienna.
In 1989, I toured the USSR (Russia, Ukraine) and bits of Poland. Once again, naively, I had thought that since the USSR and the US were the two great superpowers we were somehow equivalent. How wrong I was. While Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) had some beautiful structures from the time of Peter the Great, they were not in particularly good shape. The art in the Hermitage was deteriorating due to poor lighting, etc. Moscow was miserable — the housing was so plain and ugly.
In 1989, the USSR had nothing but a shell of an economy propped up by nuclear missiles. Their retail stores were pathetic with scarce items for sale. People queued outside of grocery stores. Their hotels were awful and the housing was drab, boring and crowded. We only ate in the hotels, because there were no decent restaurants and we were constantly being served beets and cucumbers. Even their toilets didn’t work properly. It was such a shock to see how backwards Russia was. Furthermore, in my many travels around the world, I found the Russians to be the must sullen, unfriendly people I’ve ever met.
But Kiev was different. It was fabulous. I loved the beauty of the city and I loved the Ukrainians. Again, my view of the world opened up… there was real difference between Ukraine and Russia and I could feel it. I’ve always enjoyed this story about Jack Palance standing up for Ukraine.
Chicago is home to over 100,000 Ukrainians. While they tend to live in neighborhoods like Ukrainian Village, etc., I’ve met some of them one way or another. For one, Lora was my previous manicurist. She has lived in the US for a long time and has naturalized as an American citizen. She and her husband have two adult, native-born American sons. All four all have contributed to the fabric of our amazing country. Lora’s folks live near Odessa. When Ukraine was invaded, I immediately thought of her. I was concerned and sought her out when I returned to visit. She was worried about her parents, but they were unwilling to leave their homeland.
Despite the pro-Russian propaganda on FauxNews, Russia has been 100% in the wrong in their unprovoked and brutal attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty. I believe the U.S. should have and should be doing everything in its power to support Ukraine. When I read about the so-called “peace conference” in Saudi Arabia and the offer that Trump made to end this conflict, I nearly threw up. Trump ‘wants 50% cut’ of Ukraine’s mineral riches in return for peace.
The brilliant so-called “deal-maker” threw Ukraine and our allies under the bus and is returning to his role of being Putin’s Puppet. Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction. Call it “national globalism”: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.
That’s not, who we are. Or is it?
And it begs the question, what if Trump said to Putin, “Ukraine is not yours to take.”
The wise men of post-war times - Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy - helped to create a post-war world that has kept us relatively safe for nearly 80 years. And now the Depraved Grifter wants to tear it all down, align with the gangster Putin, and take us back to bygone days. No wisemen now. Instead of Robert A. Lovett we have the incompetent, tattooed FauxNews commentator, Pete Hegseth at the DOD and for Secretary of State, Little Marco.
It’s all so pathetic, sad and unnecessary, and it pains me to see our country marching backwards to the Napoleonic era.
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” ~ Nicolaus Copernicus
What I read every day…
Quote of the day:
“But, as we’ve seen, Trump has a taste for 19th century imperialism. Which makes him a perfect partner for Putin, who still hopes to recover the losses suffered by the Soviet Union. And it makes him a perfect rival for Xi Jinping, the most aggressive Chinese leader in centuries, who still wants the West to pay for the humiliation of the Opium Wars and centuries of racial disdain. Trump, Putin and Xi—made for each other, transactional and brutal. This is their world, for the moment.” ~ Joe Klein
What I’m reading today…
Whatever is discussed, Ukraine seems set to lose out. The same cannot be said of the long-term occupant of the Kremlin. For 20 years, Vladimir Putin has been working towards what Donald Trump has now given him. Ever since Putin bemoaned the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, his foreign policy has been about getting back at least some of the superpower status the Soviet Union enjoyed. In one sense, the US president’s overture to Putin to discuss peace in Ukraine has given the Russian president exactly what he wanted: for Washington to treat Moscow with the respect – and perhaps even fear – that the Soviet Union once commanded from the west.
Trump may withdraw US troops from the Baltic states amid talks with Putin
European officials believe that Trump will most likely agree to withdraw US troops from the Baltic states and possibly further west, as a result of which The EU will become vulnerable to the Russian army.
European leaders set to hold emergency summit on Ukraine
European leaders are set to gather next week for an emergency summit on the war in Ukraine, in response to concerns the US is moving ahead with Russia on peace talks that will lock out the continent.
The ‘astonishing’ U.S.-Russia meeting
The Biden administration’s attempts to isolate and sanction the country gave way to Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a onetime Russia hawk — saying that he would like to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians.”…As the White House and the Kremlin both project confidence that the meeting went well, it’s clear that discussions today were only the start of bilateral talks between the two sides. In the meantime, America’s NATO allies and Ukraine continue to stew that they were left outside the room. European leaders plan to host a second emergency summit in Paris on Wednesday to strategize on how to respond to Washington’s plans.
Why Trump’s Bullying Is Going to Backfire
Instead, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on rivals and allies alike, without any satisfactory explanation of why one is being tariffed and the other not, and regardless of how such tariffs might hurt U.S. industry and consumers. It’s a total mess. As the Ford Motor chief executive Jim Farley courageously (compared to other chief executives) pointed out, “Let’s be real honest: Long term, a 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canada borders would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen.”
Dark times for Zelensky as Russia and US push him out of the picture
Removing Mr Zelensky is plainly a major ambition for Vladimir Putin – nobody has done more to thwart Moscow’s ambition to subjugate Ukraine and crush its spirit. That the FSB intelligence services have failed to kill him is considered an embarrassment. The best hope, the Kremlin now appears to believe, is to push for an election, interfere in it with the usual playbook, and install a pro-Moscow puppet who will sign up to the kind of humiliating peace deal Mr Zelensky would surely refuse.
The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy…Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.
A well-functioning bureaucracy is an organization of highly qualified civil servants who follow established rules to prevent abuses of power. Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior. For this reason, aspiring strongmen are especially likely to go after them. Whether by shuffling the personnel of agencies, creating new ones, or limiting their capacity for oversight, a common tactic among power-hungry leaders is establishing control over the government’s bureaucracy. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, for example, Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdoğan fired or detained as many as 100,000 government workers.
The New Globalism: How MAGA is reimagining foreign policy
Trump’s is not a politics of international cooperation and mutual support, as the cuts to USAID and digs against NATO make clear. Nor does he defer to corporate hegemony: He has no problem banning foreign businesses and threatening multinationals with tariffs. He seems to approach the world, rather, as a wily oligarch does—juggling offshore trusts, fictitious addresses, and numbered accounts to avoid taxes, litigation, and the rules and responsibilities that come with living in a society.
Trump Appears to Forget JD Vance’s Threat to Russia
Trump was asked, “Vice president Vance said that the United States would potentially take military action against Russia if they won’t come to an agreement. Do you agree with that stance?” The president responded: “I don’t know if that’s what he said. I don’t think he said that.”
What I am watching…
“…NATO would be shattered… unable to depend on America’s word…
“Undoing things that go back…”