A new plan for surrender

Donald Trump thinks he's following the Nixon plan to win an election: promise a "secret plan" to end the war. The difference is that Nixon actually had a plan: first to widen the war, then turn it over to the Vietnamese. And Nixon's plan actually worked. By 1973 the last American combat troops were withdrawn, and the ARVN (South Vietnamese army) soldiered on for two years until North Vietnamese tanks rolled across the border and a Democratic Congress refused to let President Ford provide money and air support for the Saigon regime.

Sounds like Trump's secret plan, doesn't it? Let Putin have what he wants, sign a peace treaty, and wait two years for him to try again. By that time, of course, Xi Jingping will have launched his invasion of Taiwan, and Trump will shrug his shoulders. None of our business, really! As Neville Chamberlain said in 1938, a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing."

So it's all up to Mike Johnson in the US House of Representatives. He can't pass a Ukraine aid bill of his own, because the Republican Clown Caucus takes its orders from Mr Trump. He'll need a whole lot of Democratic votes, which Mr Biden might not allow, figuring that it's better for the good guys to lose two wars (to Hamas as well as to Putin) than to lose the Republicans' disarray as a vote-getter in November. What a cheap country we have become! Biden fled from Afghanistan, following the script Trump had laid out, and now he seems prepared abandone Ukraine and Israel as well.

"The particulars of the bill will be forgotten within weeks," the Wall Street Journal says today. "What America’s allies—and adversaries—will remember is whether the U.S. cuts and runs on its friends in a fight."