by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
So last week was fun. It started with the US Supreme Court’s 9-0 beatdown of using the 14th Amendment to punish political opponents. Then the Wicked Witch of Kiev, Vic(Toria) “Cookies” Nuland was forced out at the State Department after decades of torturing the world with her psychopathy.
Then Donald Trump pretty much sent Nikki Haley back to her Waffle House outside of Greenville.
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It ended with French President Emmanuel Macron making “believe me” eyes at the world that NATO was ready and willing to send troops to Ukraine. Whose troops? Clearly not French troops, which are only good at this point for “going on safari in northern Africa,” according to Col. Doug MacGregor.
Also, clearly not British ships, which can’t seem to get out of port. I think I’m noting a kind of tit for tat going on between Boeing airline failures and British naval ones… but I could just be conspiratorial like that.
*bong*
No, the answer has always been that it would be US troops in Europe fighting Europe’s war that everyone — The UK, Davos and their EU apparatchiks, and the US Neocons — thought would be a slam dunk to bleed Russia out.
And I’m sure that’s exactly the way they plotted it out in their Microsoft Project file over at Globalist Central.
That has obviously not taken place and it is Ukraine that is now in serious trouble. Truth be told, which has been in very short supply since the war started two years ago, Ukraine has always been in serious trouble.
And that has led, predictably, to the situation we see now. US support for Project Ukraine is coming to an end, if it hasn’t ended already. And the panic in Europe is palpable.
This was all very predictable if you accepted the framework that there was a split at the top of the US hierarchy. One faction committed to the Davos vision of the future which implied a compliant, even beaten, US and another that looked up from their quote screens and said, “Uh… no.”
The handwriting was on the wall about eight months ago when the big NATO Summit in Vilnius ended with the whimper by then UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace. Wallace was supposed to replace Jens Stoltenberg as NATO General Secretary and was shot down by no less than Joe Biden (JOAH Bii-Den!).
After that, there was no more real talk of Ukraine joining NATO. Zelenskyy went back to Kiev with the big sads after Biden gave him nothing as well. Then, in October, US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was ousted in a coup by Matt Gaetz and a handful of GOP fiscal hardliners.
They immediately got new Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to tie all further foreign aid funding to as many spending cuts and dollars for border security as a slim majority in Congress would allow.
And since then Biden has been forced to look under the couches at the Pentagon for a few spare millions to send to Ukraine. He found 300 of them the other day As bad as things are, that the number starts with an ‘m’ rather than a ‘b’ has to be considered a victory.
The Senate tried to blackmail Johnson with their ridiculous $95 billion aid bill and Johnson just ‘boss moved’ Chuck Schumer by calling a two-week recess. Now, the best they can hope for a smaller bill with a lend/lease contingent with no money going to ‘humanitarian aid’ — a euphemism for pocket lining.
And despite his movement towards the Senate warhawks, Johnson is still using Ukraine aid as a means to push domestic funding reforms first. Every day these things are haggled over is another day which runs out the clock on Project Ukraine as Russian forces take towns and villages daily in the Western Donbass.
Again, not an ideal solution by any stretch of the imagination, but a Pyrrhic victory nonetheless.
But this is the state of play after last week and it’s far better than it was at the beginning of the year, since this money was already expected six months ago.
It’s put Europe in the position of finally removing the mask completely. Because as the US keeps slowly pulling away from Ukraine the calls from the EU for America to stay the course grow louder and more strident.
Remember, that in 2022-23 when it looked like the US was hellbent on going forward in Ukraine, European leaders like Macron and others were more circumspect. They wanted to virtue signal about the dangers of Ukraine escalating. They got to look like the moderates in the war room, while still sending billions in aid and weapons, arm-twisting everyone into compliance.
The real mask-off event for Europe’s real position on this war was their threatening Hungary’s Viktor Orban with complete economic devastation if he didn’t allow their $50 billion aid package to go through the European Council.
Now that all of Nuland’s military plans have failed, Ukraine’s army has been destroyed for the third time, and all of their attempts to undermine the US legally and economically (Powell must Pivot!) have fizzled, Europe finds itself in the blind panic.
