President Trump, in his first term, suggested buying Greenland.
Now, he renews this proposition while floating the idea of inviting Canada to become the new 51st state. And taking back the Panama Canal.
Interesting impulse. Wrong start to Mr. Trump's neo-imperialism.
Buy Ukraine first. Maybe buying isn’t the most apt word.
How about bribing the Russian Federation to withdraw (keeping Crimea, of course), while bribing Ukraine to join America as our new 50th (replacing California, see below) state? Could be cheaper than funding Ukraine's defense.
To sweeten the pot, let's withdraw from NATO. And, maybe, trade them California as a lagniappe.
I'm a passionate supporter of Ukraine, co-founder, with three Christian leaders led by a Ukrainian resistance leader/pastor, of UkrainianGlory.org. I'm its blogger, millions of pageviews thanks to the proficiency of Bill Collier, our resident webster.
Putin may (or may not) win more battles. He's already lost the war.
Instead of promptly knocking off Kyiv and installing a subservient regime, his incursion has been disastrous for Russia, costing the noble but rapidly dwindling Russian Federation an estimated 600,000 casualties.
And the Russian Federation had to adopt a deferential, even subservient, position toward its real rival: the People’s Republic of China. (Not us.)
The value of the ruble has nosedived. Per the Financial Times:
… the financial underpinnings of Russia’s war economy increasingly look like a house of cards — so much so that senior members of the governing elite are publicly expressing concern. They include Sergei Chemezov, chief executive of state defence giant Rostec, who warned that expensive credit was killing his weapons export business, and Elvira Nabiullina, head of the central bank. This pair know better than many people in the west, who have been taken in by numbers indicating steady growth, low unemployment and rising wages. But any economy on a full mobilisation footing can produce such outcomes: this is basic Keynesianism. The real test is how already employed resources — rather than idle ones — are being shifted away from their previous uses and into the needs of war.
Until the brutal, unjustified, Russian invasion I was a public sympathizer of Russia. NATO, per its original Secretary General Ismay, said early in his career that NATO was invented to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Germany, due in part to the weirdest windmills since Miguel Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, is down.
The USSR, during the 200-proof Cold War, had, per a CIA estimate, 4.5 million active-duty troops. The Russian Federation? 1.5 million.
NATO, now? 3.42 million troops, 1.33 million of which are American.
Mission accomplished!
The Soviet Union is out. Gone.
No need for America to be "in" much longer.
I had strong (now forfeited) sympathies for the Russian fear of invasion. Russia has been invaded six times in living memory, five by NATO members:
- Germany, 1941: 3 million German soldiers.
- The USA (controversially), 1904, using Japan as our proxy, in the Russo-Japanese War.
- France, The Campagne de Russie (known by Russians as the Patriotic War of 1812), claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands.
- Sweden, 1707, “Charles’s Old Testament sense of moral righteousness, of being the wronged party, had served him well thus far, but then it led him to extremes.”
- Poland, 1654. More recently, note that Russia’s 1920 invasion of Poland was disastrous… for Russia.
- And let’s remember the brutal domination of Russia not by the West but by the Mongols for a quarter millennium. Russians have long memories.
This in no way provides even a peppercorn of justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the innocent victim, with whom my sympathies reside.
I am unabashedly anti-invasion. Hope you are too.
What to do?
Donald Trump has promised to end Putin’s hellacious invasion within 24 hours of his inauguration. He hasn’t said how.
Nor does his designated envoy now offering a slower path toward ending that rolling atrocity.
There’s a way.
Mr. President? Despite Denmark’s vestigial imperial incursion into our hemisphere, put aside your Greenland New Deal ... at least for now.
U.S. buys Ukraine.
Meanwhile, withdraw the U.S. from NATO. Europe does not need us to defend itself from a land attack from Russia.
Russia can't even polish off little Ukraine in a land war. Beat NATO?
Nyet comrade!
If needed, offer to toss in California. California seems more aligned with Putin than with Trump anyway.
Bonus: Eliminate two left-wing Democratic U.S. senators!
Mr. Trump? Win-win for you, for Ukraine, for the USA, and for the Russian Federation.
End the carnage! Big feather in your political warbonnet.
America gets a lovely, valuable, new 50th state.
Putin stops worrying about being invaded.
The invasion ends.
Art of the deal!
Mr. President-elect?
Buy Ukraine.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 199,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.