Neocon Hal Brands Says Ukraine Is Trump’s War » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The American foreign policy establishment that brought us the war in Ukraine now claims that it is Donald Trump’s war. We’ve seen this movie before. When the war in Vietnam became unpopular and seemingly unwinnable, the “best and the brightest” of the Kennedy–Johnson administration that escalated America’s involvement in the war, and their supporters among the foreign policy establishment, called it “Nixon’s war” when the new president took office in 1969. Now, neoconservative writer Hal Brands, a member in good standing with the foreign policy establishment, writes in Bloomberg that the war in Ukraine is Trump’s fight, whether he likes it or not. (RELATED: Hal Brands Distorts Mackinder to Bash Trump)

It was, after all, the foreign policy establishment and several successive administrations beginning with Bill Clinton’s presidency that planted the seeds of the current war in Ukraine by recklessly and mindlessly enlarging NATO and publicly discussing Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, and later helping to facilitate a “color revolution” which deposed a pro-Russian Ukrainian government. Brands was an enthusiastic supporter of NATO enlargement, and refuses to assign any blame to U.S. foreign policy for the Ukraine war. Instead, Brands blames Trump for “savag[ing] America’s role in Ukraine” and for failing to punish Putin for Russia’s aggression.

Worse, Brands outlines a “strategy” that would get the United States more deeply involved in a war where we have no vital interests at stake. Here is what he recommends: “[S]ustaining U.S. and European weapons shipments beyond this year, so Ukraine can keep killing Russian troops in droves … [B]one-crushing sanctions … to crater Russian oil sales and hasten the crisis of Putin’s war economy … [A]mplify Ukraine’s deep-strike program, helping it build or buy the drones and missiles that can batter Putin’s infrastructure and embarrass him domestically … [S]eizing Russia’s frozen sovereign assets and delivering them to Ukraine … [F]ormulate serious European security guarantees, backed by American power, to hold any armistice in place.”

Perhaps Brands forgets what “bone-crushing sanctions” and economic warfare led to in the Pacific in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. What does Brands think Putin will do when faced with economic calamity and possibly political unrest at home?

Maybe Putin will give in and agree to a ceasefire that includes an American guarantee of Ukraine’s borders. But maybe Putin will, like Japan in 1940-41, strike at the country that is attempting to cripple his regime. Trump wants to avoid World War III. Brands appears willing to risk World War III to more fully support Ukraine. Brands might also recall that back in 2019, he wrote a piece titled “If NATO Expansion Was a Mistake, Why Hasn’t Putin Invaded?” Three years later, with the Biden administration in charge, Putin did invade.

Spare me the “lessons of Munich” and the domino theories that have squandered American lives and treasure since the end of World War II. Spare me the comparisons of Putin to Hitler. Spare me the obeisance to the “rules-based international order.” Brands says that the worst-case scenario “is an erosion of Ukraine’s position that starts slowly, then snowballs, resulting in outright defeat or a murderous peace imposed at the point of a gun.” No, the worst-case scenario is a desperate Putin regime lashing out at NATO or the U.S. for following Brands’s strategy of economic warfare, leading to a wider war between nuclear-armed powers.

Brands is wrong: this is not Trump’s war, any more than Vietnam was Nixon’s war. Trump, like Nixon, is attempting to end a war started by others so that the United States can focus on larger, more important geopolitical challenges. The rulers of China would like nothing more than for the United States to pour more of its limited resources into Ukraine, while it eyes “reunification” with Taiwan.

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