![]() I’ve always thought that it was disingenuous for MAGA to claim that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine under a Trump presidency and then simultaneously undercut support for the Ukrainians defending their country. Now that we have one, MAGA wants to abandon them. Going back to Vietnam, the US has sought proxies that would stand and fight on their own. Contrast that to the Afghan army, which collapsed as the US military left. The Ukrainians are more than willing to carry the fight to the Russians and only request the means to do so. The irony is that the Ukrainians are what we needed in Afghanistan and Iraq. This skepticism shows among two of the three leading Republican contenders, with only Nikki Haley rivaling Biden’s hawkish position. Recent Gallup polling shows qualified support for Ukraine among Americans, but the weak point is among Republicans where a majority is skeptical of Ukraine and favors limits to aid. I’m not even going to talk about Vivek Ramaswamy, but it now seems obvious that Vladimir Putin’s best hope for victory (or at least a stalemate) is if Republicans win big in 2024. The fact is that it is MAGA that is the weak link in Ukraine from Tucker Carlson’s endless apologetics for Putin to Donald Trump applauding the invasion as “ genius” to Ron DeSantis waffling on support for Ukraine. If that was the case, he made a serious error. It may be that Putin assumed that Biden and NATO would be a pushover. Vladimir Putin was waging war in Ukraine during Trump’s entire presidency without facing serious opposition from The Donald. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but again I have serious doubts. The Russo-Ukraine war has actually invigorated NATO and strengthened the alliance while dramatically weakening Vladimir Putin and hopefully giving the Chinese pause about considering a move on Taiwan.Īgain, MAGA will say that the Russian invasion would not have happened if Trump had been president. The Biden Administration’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been surprisingly strong. Trump advocated a faster withdrawal schedule than Biden and I have no reason to believe that would have changed. ![]() I don’t think the outcome would have been different without a massive American military commitment and I haven’t seen any evidence that the story would have ended differently with Donald Trump in charge. But I think that the difference would have been a matter of days, weeks, or months. ![]() At the same time, the Afghan army was running out of supplies and unable to fight, whether due to corruption, a cutoff in US aid, or some other reason.Ĭould Afghanistan have been handled better? Absolutely. These undercover militants seized Kabul and other cities from within, which explains why Kabul collapsed so quickly. More to the point of the final days, Wall Street Journal reporting suggests that T aliban operatives had thoroughly infiltrated the Afghan national government. This is not how counterinsurgency wars are won. The soldiers sat in their firebase and conducted ambush patrols then ultimately abandoned their base to the Taliban. For example, Sebastian Junger’s “War,” an account of an army firebase in the Afghan boonies tells a tale that is eerily reminiscent of the failed strategy of Vietnam. Some of the things that I’ve read, both before and since the fall of Kabul, make me question the basics of our strategy. To be honest, I’m not sure the war was winnable by 2021. As a result of this bipartisan agreement to lose the war, I grade on a curve. I was an opponent of the Afghan withdrawal, but I was overruled by both parties. This seems to have been the low point of the Biden Administration. That month, of course, marked the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s a bit surprising to arrive at this point after August 2021. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Biden is not batting a thousand when it comes to foreign policy (or anything else), but the president has turned out to be more of a stalwart figure than most of the leading Republican contenders. There are several different data points that support this theory, but a recent one is Joe Biden’s emergence as a foreign policy and national security hawk. I’ve theorized in the past that we are undergoing a national political realignment. Photo by David Lienemann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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