Letting the bad guys off the hook
Ukraine and Israel were not allowed to finish off their enemies
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I’m pretty sure William Appleman Williams originated the concept of moral equivalency. He was the University of Wisconsin historian who posited that the United States and the Soviet Union were just two hegemonic superpowers, neither with aims more noble than maximizing domination over all other nation-states and regions of the globe.
The New Left academic movement coalesced around this, and, as we know, that led to the militancy of the next generation of progressives, which resulted in their adulation of Castro and Ho Chi Minh. As this sentiment found wider legitimization, it affected the considerations the Johnson and Nixon administrations let determine policy toward the Soviet empire’s proxies, as well as the USSR itself.
Moral equivalency is a spiritually grotesque basis for crafting foreign policy. It requires a willful ignorance of that which has characterized the West. To embrace it, one must put the instances in which the West has not lived up to its finest vision (Spanish Inquisition, transatlantic slave trade, the totalitarian impulse) front and center and basically forget what Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Montesquieu and Smith bequeathed us.
Now, the Very Stable Genius wouldn’t know William Appleman Williams from Wendy Williams, but, having been born in 1946, viewing everything transactionally, and not being particularly bright, has internalized moral equivalency and made it the foundation of how he’s approaching the two most urgent and devastating major wars currently raging.
Here’s what the VSG had to say about Ukraine in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier:
US President Donald Trump suggested that Ukraine “may be Russian someday,” throwing into question the future independence of a sovereign country that, with Western backing, has defended itself against Moscow’s full-scale invasion for nearly three years.
Trump discussed his administration’s effort to end the war in an interview with Fox News that aired Monday, ahead of a meeting tabled for this week between his vice president, JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“They (Ukraine) may make a deal, they may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” Trump said. He stressed that he also wanted to see a return on investment with US aid for Ukraine, again floating the idea of a trade for Kyiv’s rare earth minerals.
The US president’s comments will likely delight the Kremlin, which has illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions since launching its full-scale invasion and seeks Ukraine’s total submission.
Hegseth’s warning to Ukraine that it should abandon its NATO bid and its push to reclaim all Russian-occupied territory signaled starkly to Kyiv that the administration’s view of a potential settlement is remarkably close to Moscow’s vision. Putin has declared that any peace deal must ensure that Ukraine gives up its NATO ambitions and withdraws its troops from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022but never fully captured.
This signals to Putin that the field will be clear for the next level of his designs.
I’ll repeat something I’ve said a few times here. Yes, Ukraine has had some problems with corruption and political upheaval in the thirty-four years since its post-Soviet independence, but was and is a sovereign nation among the countries of the world, just sitting there, being Ukraine - and, in, fact, in a pretty good position of stability in 2022. And was attacked with missiles, tanks and ground troops all across its territory. Children were kidnapped and taken to brainwashing camps inside Russia. Rape and torture were widely used by Russian thugs invading Ukrainian homes. Family members have been held in adjacent rooms to where the assaults were taking place and made to hear them.
Trump claims that the war is “ridiculous.” I don’t know that he’s looked sufficiently deeply into Putin’s soul. Putin has a strategic purpose, and his determination to pursue it is evidenced by the swaths of Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble. Don’t look for seriousness as the West coerces Zelensky to the “negotiating” table. The whole exercise will be nothing but a demonstration of lack of Western will to preserve itself.
Then there is the VSG’s pronouncement that the United States will step in and take over Gaza, bulldoze it, and erect a “Riviera of the Middle East.” When he first broached his tawdry vision, he was seated at the Oval Office desk, with his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles standing behind him. The priceless look on her face at that moment was photographically captured and has received wide dissemination.
In at least one repeat, he has said that he personally would own the Gaza Strip. Given that he says reckless things on a regular basis, we can’t be sure he wasn’t conflating himself with the United States, but we also can’t be sure he didn’t mean exactly what he said.
A question we all ought to ask ourselves when we see the footage of a dribs-and-drabs group of hostages being paraded on a stand and surrounded by armed and uniformed Hamas personnel (and, in one case, withholding the fact that one hostage’s wife and kids were murdered on October 7, 2023) is why are those uniformed guys still drawing a breath?
We know why. It was all so predictable. When Israel went into Gaza to destroy Hamas, which meant trying within all reasonable limits to minimize collateral deaths of human shields in hospitals and schools, left-leaning Western media, egged on by snot-nosed Hamas supporters on US university campuses, put the emphasis on every collateral death that occurred. It wasn’t long until Antony Blinken commenced his tireless pursuit of ceasefires and “talks.”
Trump has played right into the stereotype held by anti-West players for decades of the US being a swaggering expansionist that takes what it wants, dynamics on the ground be damned. He hasn’t deepened any friendships among Arab leaders. After Jordan’s King Abdullah met with Trump at the White House yesterday, he reiterated his firm position that Gazans must remain on their land.
In each case - Ukraine and Israel - the US has restrained the aggressed-upon parties in their quest to resolutely defeat their aggressors. That started under the Biden administration, and it was shameful policy. Now we’re in a new phase where Trump takes on a peacenik-style stop-the-icky-killing stance, not because he’s some kind of pacifist, but because all this war gets in the way of the one thing he’s after, and always have been after: his own glorification.
He’s not going to achieve some grand and historic agreement among aggressors and aggressed-upon, any more than John Kerry was going to usher in a new era of international comity with a nuclear deal with Iran.
No, the world will remain at at least the current danger level, because the good guys in these two wars were not provided the conditions for finishing the job.
It would be nice if the VSG had some kind of idea of what he’s going to have in his lap as his term progresses, but that’s asking too much of someone with his limited capacity for genuine thought.