My post of a few minutes ago in the Europe-Russia-US thread makes a strong case for not letting Putin win in Ukraine. The argument here, as much as I like most of it, argues for pulling the rug from under the Ukes. As stupid and unnecessary as this war was, my thought at the moment is that the toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube. And yes, there are deep problems with proceeding with the war.
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The True Meaning of Trump’s MAGA’
Peace and prosperity for all Americans is GOP’s winning 2024 message
By Peter Navarro
Republican voters clearly embrace Make America Great Again principles, including reshoring U.S. factories, securing borders, strategic energy dominance, an end to endless wars, draining the swamp in Washington, and fair elections.
If this MAGA center holds, a Republican supermajority coupled with MAGA-leaning independents and Trump Democrats will deliver a Republican landslide.
Democratic strategists’ best chance of winning is to turn MAGA into a four-letter word associated with domestic terrorism and extremism. President Biden used this messaging with surprising success in the 2022 congressional elections, and Republican strategists must counter it by more clearly articulating “The True Meaning of Trump’s MAGA,” as my new book by that name describes it.
While normally I would shamelessly urge you to buy this book (a 99-cent Amazon Kindle steal), instead, I recommend former Navy SEAL Jack Carr’s new thriller, “Only the Dead,” as a far more entertaining grassroots MAGA primer.
Mr. Carr transcends his genre with razor-sharp prose offering a pitch-perfect MAGA view of America’s domestic fissures and geopolitical threats. Of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in which Mr. Carr so bravely fought, Mr. Carr’s protagonist offers this pure MAGA poetry: “They failed you and those they sent to fight. For 20 years. They filled the coffers of their defense industry allies, enjoying dinners and drinks with lobbyists, none of whom had the balls to step into the breach.”
From an Afghan peasant’s view, Mr. Carr reveals it was not just venal lobbyists sending America’s “paper tiger” to defeat. It was a “blind” military command making colossal blunders, e.g., opening a “second front” against Afghan poppy growers, which “turned more of the populace against” the U.S.
On the folly of Ukraine, a new endless war strongly opposed by MAGA, “U.S. ‘sanctions’ had the opposite purported effect,” strengthening the ruble and turning a Russian trade deficit into a massive surplus. Ironically, “because of their dependence on Russian energy,” the European Union transfers “more cash to Russia to fund the special operation in Ukraine than they [send] to Ukraine to fight the Russian military.”
Mr. Carr further illuminates treachery I’ve worried about since al Qaeda made billions “speculating” in the oil futures market prior to its 9/11 attack. It’s not speculation if you can manipulate the market by bombing the twin towers.
In advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carr similarly describes this obscenely profitable “managed speculation”: Anticipating an oil price shock following the invasion, Russian “oligarchs, senior politicians, intelligence directors, military leaders, and other friends of the Russian president” loaded up early on “out of the money” futures.
To evade anticipated U.S. sanctions, Russia sold futures contracts to China and India. Russia then made billions more by shorting oil prices at their peak as Mr. Putin flooded the world market and U.S. sanctions collapsed.
In MAGA Nation, we can only wonder why Mr. Biden’s Pentagon, Treasury Department and National Security Council aren’t investigating.
On the need for secure borders and strategic energy dominance, Mr. Carr laments how easy it is for terrorists from around the world to penetrate our borders even as he bemoans American politicians who spend “money they [don’t] have, throwing gasoline on the coals of inflation” while ignoring an increasing “dependence on foreign energy.”
As one Russian villain channeling MAGA’s Steve Bannon notes, America is “a nation in decline” that has “given up on national sovereignty, weaponized their justice system, politicized their military, and lost faith in their elections.”
As for the very real “Deep Swamp,” fictional Congressman Douglas Linden rails on “the lying, the doublespeak, the insider trading” and “family members” of politicians caught red-handed taking millions from foreign governments hostile to the U.S. Yet he cynically trades campaign contributions for legislative support of lawsuit immunity for Big Pharma vaccines.
Mr. Linden even acknowledges this Mike Lindell fair elections wisdom: “If you wanted to make elections more secure, you would get rid of the machines and require identification to vote.” But if you speak such an obvious truth, the “Twitter mobs” call you a “racist” and a “fascist.” So the congressman is “more than happy to take multiple votes from the same person.” Mr. Carr’s plea for a strong American manufacturing base in the interests of the Trumpian mantra “economic security IS national security” harks back to my Trump White House MAGA days: Most products “come from China, the precursor drugs for the antibiotics also come from China. Total [U.S.] dependence on their enemies only requires one additional step: microchips … [and that means taking] Taiwan.” To this “take Taiwan” end is a Russian plot to frame Iran for nuking Israel. Russia’s gambit is designed to divert America’s focus away from both the confl ict in Ukraine and a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with a new endless Iranian war. Russia’s goal: Spawn a new world order featuring a lethal Chinese-Russian axis with ownership of over 25% of global wheat exports, control of a significant percentage of the world’s energy and food supply, and the ability to starve and freeze out the West.
That it takes a Navy SEAL to illustrate MAGA principles so insightfully speaks as much to Mr. Carr’s blue-collar brilliance as it does to the failure of elitist American politics. We in MAGA want only peace and prosperity for all Americans by following MAGA principles. This must be the winning Republican message in 2024.
Peter Navarro served as former President Donald Trump’s White House manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. This column first appeared at
https://peternavarro.sub-stack. com
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Putin’s to-do list
What would happen if Russia were to prevail in Ukraine?
By Clifford D. May
Western leaders have long misunderstood Vladimir Putin.
In 2001, President George W. Bush “looked the man in the eye” and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” Not exactly.
In 2015, President Barack Obama predicted that Mr. Putin would not want to “get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict” in Syria. Five hundred thousand slaughtered Arabs later, Mr. Putin has propped up his client, dictator Bashar Assad.
Angela Merkel made Germany dependent on Russian energy in the belief that Mr. Putin’s ambitions would drown in a river of euros. The chancellor was mistaken.
And after Mr. Putin dismembered Georgia in 2008 and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 (while inserting irregular forces into eastern Ukraine to wage an endless insurgency), American and European leaders went out of their way not to provoke him.
This may explain why President Biden, early in 2022, hoped Mr. Putin was planning only a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.
A question worth asking: Should Mr. Putin come out of this war looking and feeling like a winner — I’m hopeful about the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, but I rule nothing out — what would he do next? The answer, I assure you, will not be: “I’m going to Disneyland!”
Moldova is the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s not a NATO member, and its military capabilities are limited. Russia already occupies Transnistria, a strip of what used to be eastern Moldova between the Dniester River and the Ukrainian border. Moldova would probably fall to Mr. Putin within days.
Mr. Putin might want to formalize his control of Belarus, to which he recently deployed tactical nuclear weapons.
After that, perhaps a bolder move: The creation of a land bridge to Kaliningrad, a Russian territory — it was Konigsberg when it was captured from Germany in 1945 — 400 miles west of the Russian mainland.
Based in Kaliningrad is the Russian navy’s Baltic Fleet. Russian troops there are equipped with mobile nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles, and sophisticated air defense systems. Russian tanks would roll west into Lithuania from Belarus and east into Lithuania from Kaliningrad. Mr. Putin would need to take only a ribbon of southern Lithuania — in particular, the main road running from Belarus to Kaliningrad.
But Lithuania is a NATO member, so Mr. Putin wouldn’t dare, right? Don’t be so sure. He’d likely call the invasion “a special military operation to restore Russian territorial contiguity at a time of increased NATO aggression against Russia.”
He might also charge that the Russian minority in Lithuania, roughly 7% of its 2.8 million population, is being oppressed and requires his help. Neighboring Latvia and Estonia, where ethnic Russians are close to a quarter of the population, could be dealt with later.
Mr. Putin could say to NATO: “I’m open to diplomacy — a land-for-peace deal. But if you’d rather wage war, you should understand that extreme measures will be considered.”
Now ask yourself: Which NATO members would be willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia over a ribbon of countryside in the southern Baltics? Turkey? Germany? France? Would most Americans support such a conflict?
It’s tough to see how NATO could survive if it failed to defend one of its members as pledged in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
For Mr. Putin, NATO’s collapse would be a huge victory, one that his communist allies in Beijing and his Islamist allies in Tehran would regard as a significant battle won in their war against the West.
And in both those capitals, as well as in nuclear-armed Pyongyang, a lesson would be learned: The U.S. and Europe cave in to nuclear blackmail.
There’s one more geostrategic reality I want to mention. Sandwiched between Lithuania on the north and Poland on the south is the Suwalki Gap, a narrow stretch of Polish land running from Belarus to Kaliningrad.
A rail link just north of this corridor links Kaliningrad to the Russian mainland. But it functions under an agreement between Russia and Lithuania, whose relations are now severely strained.
A year ago, Lithuania, complying with European sanctions, prohibited the transit of coal, metals and building materials.
Kaliningrad’s governor called that a “serious violation” of the agreement.
A Russian invasion and occupation of the Suwalki Gap would also trigger Article 5. And it would cut off Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia from their NATO allies, complicating any attempt to provide materiel and reinforcements in case of a Russian invasion.
Not just coincidentally, comrade, two years ago, Russian and Belarusian troops staged a military exercise to practice closing off the Suwalki Gap and attacking Lithuania.
Perhaps you’ll say that, after the war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin wouldn’t have the resources and manpower necessary for such aggressions. But if he’s been successful, Tehran and Beijing would be as helpful as possible. The morale of his troops would improve. And he’d have millions of Ukrainians whom he could draft and then — with bayonets pressed against their backs — use as cannon fodder.
This much we should understand by now: Mr. Putin’s mission, as he sees it, is to restore the Russian Empire, which, for less than a century, was rebranded as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
“If Russia is not defeated [in Ukraine], then it will just be a matter of time before it regroups, rearms, and that it will come for somebody next,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte told a reporter last month.
In the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, geopolitical strategists should be imagining scenarios such as those described above. Defense plans based on deterrence rather than appeasement should be established. A good place to do that would be the next NATO summit. It’s scheduled for July in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for The Washing-ton Times
