A take-away from yesterday's historic gathering at The White House:
Finland's in. Canada's out.
In a new column, Brian Lilley writes:
Canada is a member of NATO, just like all the countries there. We have the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world. We have invested significantly to support Ukraine, but still no invite.
So much for Carney's comments that "We are the most European of all non-European countries."
While the poseurs posed in Ottawa, Finnish President and Trump golf partner Alexander Stubb was at the big boy's table:
I think in the past two weeks, we've probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past three and a half years...
What a difference an election makes!
Consider how Mark described the situation with Ukraine this time last year:
Meanwhile, how's that sleepwalk into nuclear Armageddon going? From the BBC:
Speaking in St Petersburg, President Putin sent a clear warning to the West: don't allow Ukraine to use your long-range missiles to strike Russian territory.
Moscow, he said, would view that as the "direct participation" of Nato countries in the war in Ukraine.
You can understand how the Kremlin might get that impression. The Ukraine war began over two-and-a-half years ago. Nato members supplied the weaponry but limited the Ukrainians' use thereof:
At first, Zelenskyyyy was forbidden to fire the long-range missiles into Russian territory.
Then, western restraints were modified somewhat. As yesterday's New York Times reports:
This past spring, Mr. Biden put specific limits — around 60 miles — on how far Ukraine can fire American-made weapons into Russia...
The Times story requires suspending any disbelief that this "Mr Biden" character has been doing anything these last three-and-a-half years other than watching Matlock and eating tapioca. Be that as it may, Mr Biden is now reported to be "wavering" - and not just in his usual sense of a slight wobble before tumbling down the steps of Air Force One:
Amid signs that President Biden is wavering, the issue will be on the table when he meets in Washington on Friday with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, after the two leaders dispatched their top diplomats to Kyiv on Wednesday to hear out the latest pleas from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
So, if Nato leaders are not just giving Ukraine the weaponry but micro-calibrating how it can be deployed on the ground, that would appear to be "direct participation" in the war against Russia, no?
Ah, well, relax. According to Euractiv, which (along with The Economist, The Washington Post et al) claims to be part of the bigfoot media "Trust Project", so you know you can trust it:
Sergei Karaganov told Kommersant newspaper in an interview that Moscow could launch a limited nuclear strike on a NATO country without triggering all-out nuclear war.
"All-out nuclear war": There's a phrase to be carelessly bandied. As I said a couple of weeks back:
By the way, if the nukes do start flying, I would bet that (enough of) theirs will work ...and ours won't.
But maybe Mr Karaganov, a Putin confidante and member of the International Advisory Board of America's Council on Foreign Relations, is correct. Perhaps the one lesson the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex have learned from their Afghan humiliation is that the sweet spot in war without end is to be the country that supplies the weapons and let someone else do all the dying. If Putin were to launch "a limited nuclear strike" on one of Nato's softer, more peripheral members, it's not hard to imagine, say, the Czech Republic being once again a faraway country of which we know little.
I don't usually do Second World War allusions. As you know, my view is that its predecessor was the one that unravelled the map and whose pathologies haunt us still. At some point, the slo-mo escalation will pass the point of no return.
What are your thoughts on the prospects for peace under Trump versus Biden/ Harris? Please log-in and let us know in the comment section below.
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