Well, that was a disaster

From what I can tell, it was JD Vance who blew up that meeting yesterday, though it's possible that his boss dragged him into our "cherished Oval Office" for just that purpose. And some blame should be attributed to President Zelensky for not remembering that any meeting with Donald Trump, as with the Pope, requires visitors to kiss the papal ring. Altogether, it was a shameful spectacle, and I apologize to the people of Ukraine that we have these men at the head of our government.

Trump and Zelensky may sign a deal

It appears that Ukraine has a lot of uranium, oil and gas, and "rare earth" minerals like lithium, and where we would be without batteries for our cellphones? Presidents Trump and Zelensky are supposed to meet in Washington today to sign a deal making us part owners of this trove. Unfortunately, it's still in the ground, nobody seems to know for sure where it is, and a lot of it is in the 18 percent of Ukraine that the Russian army controls and is unlikely to give up any time soon.

Mr Trump's positions are always hard to understand and apt to be rolled back tomorrow, but he has already agreed that Ukraine is not going back to its 2014 boundaries, before Putin's "little green men" seized Crimea and started nibbling away at the country's eastern provinces. (And formally annexed four of them, including parts stilled controlled by the Ukrainian army.) Coming on the heels of our shameful vote on Monday in the UN General Assembly, which put us in the company of Russia, Belarus, and North Korea (even China abstained!), I find this rather depressing. If we don't have the courage to label Russia the aggressor, on the third anniversary of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what good are we?

Putin's war begins its fourth year

Is three years enough? Let's look at where we Americans stood in December 1944, after three years of war: The siege of Leningrad had been lifted. American, British, and Canadian troops had landed in France and begun to free Western Europe. Paris had been liberated. The US Army was fighting along the Rhine River in Germany, the Soviet Red Army in Ukraine, and the British Army in Burma. Mussolini had been deposed, Italy had surrendered, and Allied troops had captured Rome and were fighting the Germans at Monte Cassino. The US Army had landed in the Philippines.

And in New Mexico, atomic reactors were working, the design of Fat Man and Little Boy was settled on, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress was modified to carry them, and Col Paul Tibbets was tapped to command the 393 Bombardment Squadron which -- if the bombs actually worked! -- would deliver them to Japan. That would end the Second World War, three years and nine months after we joined it.

The world is watching

Thom Tillis of North Carolina, speaking to the US Senate: "There is no moral person on this planet who can consider Putin to have a legitimate reason to effect this sort of carnage.... I saw it firsthand, and I will never be able to forget it. And what the American people and the world population will never be able to forget either is the aftermath of appeasing Vladimir Putin....

"So look, I’m a Republican. I support President Trump, and I believe that most of his policies on national security are right. I believe his instincts are pretty good. But what I’m telling you—whoever believes that there is any space for Vladimir Putin and the future of a stable globe better go to Ukraine.... They better invest the time to understand that this man is a cancer and the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime. And it will be a cancer that spreads into the South China Sea, into Taiwan, and metastasize across the globe. So ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you that Vladimir Putin is a liar, a murderer and a man responsible for ordering the systematic torture, kidnapping and rape of innocent civilians, believe me, because the evidence is mile high. So for those of us who have invested ... time and understand this, believe me when I tell you this is important to every single one of you. If you believe that Ukraine is a country an ocean away and not relevant to our national security, think again. The world is small. The world is watching. The strength of our alliances are on the line and the future of democracy and the world is on the line if we do anything less than defeat Vladimir Putin."

Now we're selling out Ukraine?

It's not always easy to know what Donald Trump is trying to say, but this seems fairly clear: “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”

Joe Biden did a runner in Afghanistan, and congratulated himself for it. Trump looks ready to do the same in Ukraine. "You should never have started it." True enough if he's speaking to Putin, but it appears he means Zelensky, whom he also calls a dictator with 4 percent approval. In fact, Ukraine's president has a higher approval rating (57%) than Trump in the most recent Rasmussen poll (53%).

This looks bad for us, for Europe, and for the world. Just as Biden gave Putin a green light to invade Ukraine, Trump is telling Xi Jinping it's okay to make a "minor incursion" into Taiwan.

The art of the Ukraine Deal

In any negotiation, we start by asking for more than we hope to gain. Donald Trump knows this, better than most people, so when it comes to the Panama Canal, he demands American control of it, but really probably would settle for getting the Chinese out of there. But when it comes to Ukraine, he's following Biden's example in Kabul: Run for the hills!

Already he has agreed that Ukraine won't recover its 2014 borders, nor will the country join NATO. But that's Putin's position, and the bargaining hasn't even started! The fuckwit in the Kremlin will no doubt demand that in return for doing us the favor of taking 20 percent of Ukraine's territory off our hands, we will de-mine and rebuild the cities he has obliterated in the past three years. Do you think we rely on Elon Musk to hold fast on that?

Let's take the kids to Paris!

I don't begrudge the vice-president a fuel-gulping ride to Paris, but that cozy photo of Mr Vance, his wife, and the kids exiting Air Force Two at Orly Airport the other day made me wince. Not a good look, JD! Time enough for that in January 2029

Talk about a 'forever war'!

When Tulsi Garbard campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she promised to end what she called our "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Full disclosure: I voted for Tulsi in the New Hampshire primary, and I left her bumper sticker on the Subaru until January 2024, when I replaced it with Nikki Haley's.)

Now Ms Gabbard is Donald Trump's pick to become Director of National Intelligence. Meanwhile the president wants to take charge of Gaza, the unhappy enclave housing two million Palestinians claiming to be refugees from 1948, when the British-officered Arab Legion and detachments from seven Arab armies tried to destroy the fledgling state of Israel. How does Ms Gabbard feel about that 77-year-old conflict, I wonder?