In order to try to make some sense of your post, I submit that "idols" and "prophet" would be better options to use.
Abandoning allies
- Thread starter Flatlandcoug
- Start date
You get so many things exactly backwards, and so often, that it makes me wonder if ever take your car out of reverse mode. You and Flat and 90 can keep trying to claim that is the proper use of TDS until the super volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts and annihilates the entire country, but you will still be wrong.
It is almost sad enough to make me feel bad for you.....
Gib, that is a fair question for the missile launched weapons. The fact is that probably no one can be sure. The both the CCCP military and intelligence services had a lot of Ukrainians who then entered the Ukrainian military & intelligence services when the CCCP broke up, from the top down. Did any of them have the codes? My money would be that there is no definitive answer to that question outside of the Ukrainian nationals and any that they told.
Of somewhat different concern were the smaller artillery delivered tactical nukes. I think we can be almost certain that the required means to use those was available to the Ukrainians.
From what I've read the tactical nukes were quickly gathered up and removed from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The strategic ones or those that could not loaded up, driven away, sailed away (or whatever) remained, hence the treaty.
Five Ukrainian Fables
27 Comments / March 6, 2025Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Fable One: Donald Trump Is Appeasing Russia?
Who wiped out the Wagner group in Syria? Who sold offensive weapons to Ukraine first? Who warned Germany not to become dependent on the Russian Nord Stream II deal?
Who withdrew from an unfair missile deal with the Russians? Who cajoled and berated NATO members to meet their military investment promises made following the 2014 invasion of Ukraine?
In contrast, who originally conceived a Russian “reset” in 2009? Who publicly virtue-signaled pushing the red “reset” button in Geneva with the current Russian Minister Sergey Lavrov?
Which ex-European leader got a million euros a year working for Russian energy companies?
Of the last four presidents, under whose watch did Putin not invade another country?
Which American president, in hot-mic style, offered to (and did) dismantle US-Eastern Europe missile defense plans in exchange for temporary Putin quietude (“space”) to aid his 2012 reelection?
Fable Two: A Trade War?
Donald Trump is not wildly slapping tariffs on Europeans.
He is simply saying that 1945 is now 80 years past and that the asymmetrical tariffs that Europe imposes on U.S. imports should be corrected. The massive trade surpluses Europe accumulates each year should give way to fairer, more balanced trade.
If Europe does not want tariffs, then simply calibrate its own tariffs on what America places on European imported goods, and work down jointly to zero tariffs on both sides.
Fable Three: America Is Bullying Europe?
The U.S. does not actively interfere in European elections and politics.
In 2024, Europeans, especially the British Laborites, bragged about sending over campaign “volunteers” to work against Trump and, earlier, his conservative predecessors.
British subject Christopher Steele sought to sabotage an entire American 2016 election with a falsified “dossier.”
The Ukrainian ambassador in 2016 wrote an op-ed all but endorsing Hillary Clinton and trashing her opponent.
In September 2024, Mr. Zelenskyy was flown in on a Biden-provided US military jet to Scranton, Pennsylvania—at a pivotal time in the most pivotal swing state—to surround himself with Democrat politicos.
His media-frenzied presence signaled a partisan campaign theme that a Harris win and the continuance of massive Democrat aid to Ukraine would ensure manufacturing jobs, such as the artillery shell factory he selected to visit.
As to NATO, Trump’s pressure from 2017 to 2021 finally pushed more NATO nations to rearm. But even eleven years after promising to invest a mere 2 percent of GDP in defense, nine of the 32 members still have not complied.
Fable Four: Negotiating With Putin Is Selling Out?
In the long history of Western diplomacy with mass-murdering tyrants, Putin doesn’t even rank among the worst. Just ask his former reset partners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
FDR fueled mass-murdering “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s Red Army as a way to defeat Nazi Germany.
Richard Nixon flattered and cajoled the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong, to triangulate China against the Soviet Union.
Ronald Reagan offered to share missile defense expertise with Soviet Russia.
Europeans have hosted almost every Palestinian murderous terrorist leader, as a way either of deflecting terrorism from their own shores or emphasizing their general loathing of Israel.
Fable Five: Europe Is Going To Save Ukraine?
Europe rushed to congratulate and celebrate with Zelensky after his preplanned White House blow-up. They are loudly announcing that a supposedly isolationist and appeasing U.S.—which has sent more aid to Ukraine than all nearby European nations combined—will now be supplanted by a “new” muscular and rearmed Europe.
We sincerely hope so.
But on every recent international moral question—ganging up on a lone Israel to appease terrorist forces in the Middle East, standing up to China’s mercantilism, neo-imperialism, and domestic oppression of minorities, or Russia’s prior 2008 and 2014 invasions—European outrage has been muted, real consequences nonexistent.
We are now witnessing European heads of state sending the same old, same old virtue signaling support for the brave Zelenskyy, who supposedly spoke truth to power to the mean U.S. Orange Man.
But where does such performance art lead after the cult hero Zelenskyy had gnawed the hand that gorged him?
To multitudes of European tanks, skies full of European jets, and division after division of crack European infantry now heading east to “back up” Ukraine—led on horseback by its new Joan of Arc, Ursula von der Leyen?
Aside from all the present posturing and mock-heroics, the only way to save Ukraine is for the U.S. president, Donald Trump, to reflect joint Ukrainian, American, and European interests in stopping the war, forcing Putin as far back eastward as possible where he started in 2022, and creating a credible deterrent along with a DMZ/industrial corridor tripwire to stop another 2008, 2014, and 2022 invasion.
Anything else is empty carnival barking.
Gib, from what I understand, there was a concerted effort to gather them up, as you've noted. There was also doubt that they were all retrieved, which is why the treaty covered them, as well. Anything you can load in the back of a truck and move was at risk. There were rumors, for example, that some of them ended up in Israel. True? Who knows. But the idea that some elements of the Ukrainian services may have kept some back until the treaty was signed is not out of the realm of possibility. Almost a Le Carre' novel, no?
War and Peace
Book 1, Chapter 1
1805
Written: 1869
Source: Original Text from Gutenberg.org
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pávlovna Schérer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasíli Kurágin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pávlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.
All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
“If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Schérer.”
“Heavens! what a virulent attack!” replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pávlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the sofa.
“First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend’s mind at rest,” said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and affected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be discerned.
“Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” said Anna Pávlovna. “You are staying the whole evening, I hope?”
“And the fete at the English ambassador’s? Today is Wednesday. I must put in an appearance there,” said the prince. “My daughter is coming for me to take me there.”
“I thought today’s fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome.”
“If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been put off,” said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed.
“Don’t tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosíltsev’s dispatch? You know everything.”
“What can one say about it?” replied the prince in a cold, listless tone. “What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours.”
Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part. Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.
Damn you finally posted something worth replying to. This guy does make a lot of good points, not that I necessarily agree with most of them. But coherent and intelligent.
His last comment (above)? I can totally agree with that.
Maybe the Orange One is really the brilliant negotiator that he thinks he is and is outwitting everyone, including Putin, with all his bluster.
Seems like there were books and movies about missing or stolen nukes in the mid to late 90s. The corrupt, disgruntled KGB/Red Army dude selling a nuke to terrorists....
VDH is indeed an intelligent fellow. Check him out, and make sure to at least scan down to the paragraph on "Mexifornia" for his prescient thoughts on immigration. If only that model was followed.
Victor Davis Hanson - Wikipedia
Oh, that's the guy I've seen in a bunch of short videos lately, mostly about water rights in Northern CA.VDH is indeed an intelligent fellow. Check him out, and make sure to at least scan down to the paragraph on "Mexifornia" for his prescient thoughts on immigration. If only that model was followed.
Victor Davis Hanson - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
