Israel's Devastating Capitulation to Hezbollah

From Caroline Glick:

It is almost impossible to grasp the danger of Israel’s present moment. A month before the Knesset elections, the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz is moving full speed ahead with a maritime agreement with an enemy state that it insists will obligate Israel in perpetuity. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement Israel is concluding with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon will fundamentally alter Israel’s maritime borders, deny the Jewish state tens of billions of dollars, which will go instead to a government controlled by Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion, Hezbollah, and transform Hezbollah and Iran into actors in the eastern Mediterranean.

The deal in question has been under negotiation for more than a decade. In 2010, as the natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean were being rapidly explored and developed by Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Egypt, Israel signed agreements with its neighbors to delineate the boundaries of each state’s EEZ. Since Israel and Lebanon are enemy states, Israel did not negotiate an agreement with Lebanon. Lebanon did however negotiate an agreement with Cyprus, as part of which it drew a line delineating the southern boundary of its maritime waters. Israel accepted the Lebanese line and submitted its maritime economic zone borders to the United Nations on the basis of the Lebanese/Cypriot agreement and the bilateral agreement it had concluded with Cyprus.

Given that Hezbollah rejects Israel’s right to exist, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon surprised no one when it immediately objected to Israel’s map, even though it was based on Lebanon’s own demarcation.

Lebanon demanded 854 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters that formally belonged to Israel. The Lebanese demand included complete control over the massive Qana natural gas field, much of which extends into Israel’s waters. Fred Hoff, who served at the time as the Obama administration’s point man for the eastern Mediterranean, offered a compromise deal which would have given around 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and left 45 percent under Israeli sovereignty. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rejected the deal, and there the negotiations stood, more or less, until last July.

In the meantime, Israel began developing the Karish gas field, which by all accounts is located in its EEZ. Karish was scheduled to go online last month, but in July, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah threatened to attack Karish if Israel began production before reaching a deal with Lebanon. Hezbollah then attacked Karish with four drones, which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces.

Rather than retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression, fearful of Hezbollah, Israel delayed the start of work at Karish, and Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein swooped into action. As Lebanon expert Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy has copiously documented, the Biden administration is dead set on giving as much money as possible to Lebanon—with full knowledge that money to Lebanon is money to Hezbollah. The administration’s desire to enrich a state dominated by Hezbollah/Iran stems from what Badran and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran described in May 2021 as its overarching goal of realigning the United States away from its traditional allies—Israel and the Sunni states—and towards Iran.

During his visit to Israel in July, just days after Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Karish, Biden upped U.S. pressure on Israel to conclude a deal with Lebanon and so enable the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to begin raking in billions of dollars in gas revenues from the Qana field. U.S. pressure only increased since then.

Rather than stand up to the administration and oppose a deal that empowers Hezbollah both economically and strategically at Israel’s expense, the Lapid-Gantz government caved. As head of the caretaker government, Lapid, and his partisan subordinate Energy Minister Karine Elharar began marathon U.S.-mediated negotiations with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese negotiators over the maritime boundary. Gantz compelled the IDF to support the deal and present his capitulation to Hezbollah extortion as a massive strategic achievement that strengthens Israel’s deterrent edge over Hezbollah.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the deal is that it doesn’t obligate Lebanon. Israel’s deal is with the United States, not Lebanon. And judging by Nasrallah’s statements, Hezbollah views it as a starting point, not an ending point. During the course of the negotiations, the Lebanese negotiators suddenly presented a new, even more expansive territorial demand. Lebanon, they said, is the rightful owner of more than the disputed 854 km of Israeli waters. It is also the rightful owner of large swaths of the Karish gas field. Hochstein reportedly used the ploy, along with Nasrallah’s extortionate demands, to compel Lapid and Gantz to agree to give up a hundred percent of the disputed waters. But now that Lebanon has already tipped its hat to its next demand, and given that Lebanon is not obliged by the boundary line Israel has accepted, it’s obvious that Lebanon will disavow the deal at a time of Hezbollah’s choosing.

Lapid, Gantz and their allies portray the deal as a diplomatic and strategic masterstroke. By surrendering to all of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon’s 12-year-old demands, they brag that Israel has secured its ability to develop Karish. In other words, they’re bragging that they’re signing a protection deal with Hezbollah. In exchange for 854 square kilometers of sovereign Israeli waters, they believe that Hezbollah will permit us to exploit our natural resources—at least until Nasrallah decides to renew his threats and demands.

Aside from the Israeli media, no one has been buying their line. On Monday morning, former U.S. ambassador David Friedman tweeted incredulously, “We spent years trying to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon on the disputed maritime gas fields. Got very close with proposed splits of 55-60% for Lebanon and 45-40% for Israel. No one then imagined 100% to Lebanon and 0% to Israel. Would love to understand how we got here.”

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted at a press conference on Monday that whereas he held the line against Hezbollah for a decade, Lapid folded after only three months.

To try to present their agreement as something other than capitulation to Hezbollah’s extortion, Lapid and Gantz are claiming the deal is the key to a Lebanon free of terrorist influence. This claim is weird on its face. After all, they insist that the Lebanon they are negotiating with is an independent entity not controlled by Hezbollah. And at the same time, they say Lebanon needs tens of billions of dollars from gas proceeds from Qana to free itself of Hezbollah control.

And that isn’t the only absurdity in their claim. Lebanon’s financial dealings are both controlled by Hezbollah and entirely opaque. Hezbollah can be trusted to take as much of the gas proceeds as it sees fit and leave the Lebanese with the crumbs at the bottom of its plate.

In his press conference Monday, Netanyahu said that the deal will not obligate a government under his leadership because it is “illegal.” And he is right. Under Israel’s 2013 Basic Law on territorial concessions, the government is required to present all agreements involving the relinquishment of Israeli territory to the Knesset for approval. To take legal effect, an agreement requires either the support of two thirds of the Knesset or the majority of the public in a referendum. Contrary to the basic law, Lapid and Gantz are refusing to bring the deal before the Knesset for approval.

And with the support of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, they insist that since the agreement is about economic waters, it isn’t about territory and therefore doesn’t require Knesset approval. Baharav-Miara initially said that all that is required is for the Security Cabinet to approve the deal. That it doesn’t even have to be made available to the Knesset for perusal—let alone approval. Under public pressure, she updated her position Sunday and announced that the deal has to be approved by the full government and submitted to—but not approved—by the Knesset. This too is a mile short of the requirements of the law. Baharav-Miara’s behavior is also a harsh commentary on the corrupted, politicized state of Israel’s legal fraternity.

It was her predecessor Avichai Mandelblit who insisted that caretaker governments may not carry out any non-essential functions or initiate policies that will obligate a successor government. On the basis of his dictate, Mandelblit barred Netanyahu’s caretaker government from appointing an acting state prosecutor. Obviously, the Lapid-Gantz surrender deal to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government falls within the Mandelblit’s criteria for prohibited actions.

Baharav-Miara’s behavior demonstrates that as far as Israel’s politicized legal fraternity is concerned, there are two laws governing the state—one for the left, and one for the right. For the left, everything is permitted. For the right, nothing is. In other words, as far as the legal fraternity is concerned, Israel is governed by its leftist government lawyers, not by the rule of law.

This brings us to the media. In light of the strategic and economic implications of the deal, if Israel had a functioning media, journalists could have been expected to provide critical coverage of the agreement and carry out an informed debate. After all, that’s the purpose of the Fourth Estate. But rather than do its job, in a demonstration of its own political bias and corruption, with a few notable exceptions, Israel’s liberal media have done next to no due diligence in their reporting of the agreement. Instead, they have parroted the Lapid-Gantz government’s talking points one after the other.

The only Hebrew-language media outlet that has subjected the radical surrender agreement to significant scrutiny has been Israel’s new conservative outlet Channel 14. Last week, Lapid petitioned the Central Elections Commission to shutter Channel 14, which, he insists, is opposition propaganda because it doesn’t provide him with enough positive coverage.

On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) tweeted, “I am deeply troubled that Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies to hand over their territory to the Iran-controlled terrorist group Hezbollah.” Cruz indicated that if the Republicans win control of Congress in next month’s elections, they will conduct a formal investigation of the administration’s actions. As Cruz put it, the deal is “another topic for the next Republican Congress to investigate.”

On Monday night, Globes reported that until a few weeks ago, Israel’s position was that it would retain a third of the disputed waters and its rights to the Qana gas field. But then, at a fateful meeting in the Defense Ministry, Gantz and Lapid’s representative, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, abandoned Israel’s long held stand and agreed to give up all of the disputed waters and Israel’s economic rights to Qana. Israel’s chief negotiator, Udi Adiri, vociferously rejected the capitulation and resigned in protest. Hulata was installed as the new head of Israel’s team.

Fighting the Culture War Through Christ

 Allie Beth Stuckey makes the case:

There are plenty of practical, scientific, & secular reasons to oppose progressivism, but Christian theology alone is sufficient to combat it. Without Christianity, we have no ultimate “why” to oppose abortion, gender confusion, or state overreach. Here’s what I mean.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) September 25, 2022

I know this is going to be controversial, even (especially?) for many conservatives. Sorry. This is Twitter. You have to endure my takes & I have to endure yours 😜 Anywho -

We can say, scientifically, that a unique human life is formed at conception. This is a fact. But that fact doesn’t tell us why that human is valuable, why she should be protected, and why it’s wrong to kill her.

We can employ logic & look at history to tell us that dehumanizing any person based on arbitrary reasons like size, age, or location leads to dehumanization of other kinds of people. But this doesn’t tell us why dehumanization or even murder is wrong.

We can look to biology to tell us that humans are sexually dimorphic, that the categories of male & female are fixed. But this doesn’t tell us why these facts are more important than how a person feels.

We can talk about the negative consequences of men identifying as women on girls’/women’s rights, safety & fairness, but we still don’t know why these rights matter more than the rights of men who want to enter women’s spaces.

We can point to economics & history to tell us why socialism and communism are failures. But we are defining “failure” with the assumption that mass starvation & poverty, the murder of dissidents, etc. are evil. Where does that assumption come from? We can say the state shouldn’t go after political opponents. Justice should be impartial. Bad behavior should be punished, good people should be left alone, & the innocent should be protected. But every single one of those words must be defined. Where do we get those definitions?

Admit it or not, our “why” behind the above arguments is the Bible. It’s wrong to kill a baby in the womb because God, who is the creator & authority over the universe, says he made us in His image & therefore it’s wrong to murder (Gen 9:6). There is no substantive, ultimate reason for the existence of human rights of humans are just accidental clumps of matter. The basis for innate humans rights is that humans are uniquely valuable above plants & animals. Christianity insists we are because God says we are.

This God says He made us not only in His image, but as male & female. Feelings don’t override physical reality because we were God-created, not self-created. We don’t have the power to self-declare & self-identify, because God told us who we are when he made us. The right to & legitimacy of private property comes from God (“you shall not steal,” “you shall not covet”). The authority of a government comes from God & He gives its duties to punish evil & reward good (Romans 13).

Good & evil exists because God says that they do and He defines them. “Murder is bad because it is” “women’s rights & privacy matter because they do” will not ultimately be enough against secular progressivism, which is a religion in itself with its own rigid doctrines.

You don’t have to be a Christian to acknowledge the necessity of its worldview in holding together everything that has ever made the West or any civilization lastingly good. There is ultimately no secular way to justify any anti-progressive or conservative argument.

Progressives understand this in a way conservatives don’t. They’re constantly attacking Christianity, because Christianity is and always has been the fundamental threat to their total control. We’ve always been a boil on the back of wicked tyrants and we still are.

God is a God of order, and progressivism constantly seeks disorder. Christians are always to be agents of order, in every place & age. Therefore we will always be - & rightly so - enemies of progressive ideology.

So - while I am happy to link arms with people of all backgrounds to push back against the chaos of today’s leftist lunacy, at the end of the day, simple anti-wokism will never, ever be a match for the threat this ideology poses. No secular movement will. The biggest failure of the conservative movement is thinking we are fighting for neutrality. Meanwhile, the left is playing for keeps knowing every space is for the taking, and nothing is neutral. Everything will be dominated by a worldview. The question is only ever, which one?

 

'Radicals' Are Racist Criminals

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Driving America towards the abyss":

The crisis currently facing our nation is a crisis of faith – faith in the Constitution that has shaped our destiny, faith in the rule of law, and faith in the principle of equality before the law. The root cause of the lawlessness that is consuming our country is the monopoly of the executive power in Washington by a political party that has fallen under the control of the radical Left. This Left describes itself as “progressive,” but is focused on the goal of “re-imagining” American institutions and principles, in other words of dismantling the constitutional order that created the prosperity and freedoms that have shaped this country since its beginnings.

Having been born into this political Left and then rejected it, I have acquired an intimate perspective on its nature, and the threat it poses to the American future, which is grave. I was raised by Communists who always referred to themselves as “progressives,” and were sworn enemies of America and its institutions, as was I. We saw ourselves as warriors for social justice, acting on the “right side” of history.

We could not have been more mistaken. The “moral arc” of history is not “bent towards justice,” as progressives like to say. If it were, the 20th Century would be the most enlightened instead of the scene of the greatest atrocities and oppressions on human record. Worse yet, for this progressive myth, these atrocities and oppressions were perpetrated by progressives in the name of “social justice.”

The practical achievement of the revolutionaries was the dismantling of whole societies, and their reconstruction as national prisons, and slave labor camps. Supported by progressives everywhere, Communists bankrupted whole continents while killing more than 100 million people – in peacetime – in order to realize their radical schemes. Their atrocities and failures continued until the day they saw their progressive future collapse under its own weight. This failure was entirely predictable because as every similar attempt to “re-imagine society” and change it by force has shown, it is simply beyond the power of human beings to create a “just” world.

Forty years ago, a series of tragic events that I have described in my autobiography, “Radical Son,” stopped me in my tracks, and caused me to re-evaluate what I had believed until then. These second thoughts turned me against the cause to which I had been devoted since my youth, and which I now saw as a threat to everything human beings hold dear. Most of my generation of radicals, however, chose to continue on their destructive course. Over the next decades I watched the radical movement I was born into infiltrate and then take control of the Democratic Party and the nation’s cultural institutions, until one of its own, Barack Obama, became President of the United States.

From the moment I joined the conservative Right forty years ago, I was impressed – and also alarmed – by the disparity in political rhetoric used by the two sides fighting this fateful conflict. My radical comrades and I always viewed these battles as episodes in a war conducted by other means – even as our opponents did not. Our rhetoric proclaimed our goals to be “peace,” “equality” and “social justice.” But this was always a deception. We used terms that demonized our opponents as “racists,” and “oppressors” because we believed our goals could only be achieved by vanquishing our opponents and destroying America’s constitutional order.

The Constitution valorized political compromise and was built on the defense of individual rights – most prominently the right to own property. America’s founders regarded property ownership as the basis of individual freedom. As radicals, we regarded property as the root cause of the evils that oppressed us. Consequently, the principles we operated under were not the same as those we gave lip service to in order to win public support.

The Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained our attitude in a famous pamphlet called “Their Morals and Ours.” “Their” morals, he denigrated as bourgeois morals. They were morals based on class values that served the oppressors. One can hear the same sophistry today in the Left’s attacks on meritocracy and standards as “racist,” and in their demands for equal outcomes regardless of whether they are earned or not.

While “their morals” served a ruling class, “our morals” served the people, and therefore social justice. Because we believed these propositions, “our morals” were by default Machiavellian: The end justifies the means.

Trotsky’s pamphlet was, in fact, a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that there was anything amoral or immoral in this cynical outlook. He did so by denying the existence of moral principles, claiming instead that all morality was self-interested and designed to serve a class interest. “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed,” i.e., to accept universal moral standards, Trotsky argued, “must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.”

But this is just an admission that “our” morals were indeed accurately summarized as, “the end justifies the means.” The future we imagined we were creating was so noble that achieving it justified any means to get there, which included the lies that hid our destructive purposes, and the atrocities they led to.

The full import of this belief was brought home to me in the spring of 1975 when our so-called “anti-war movement” forced America out of Indo-China, allowing the North Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists to win. For more than a decade, we had claimed to care about the people of Indo-China, championed their rights to self-determination and condemned the war as a case of American imperialism and American racism oppressing Asian victims.

By the time America withdrew from the conflict and abandoned its Indo-Chinese allies, I already knew that Communism was a monstrous evil. But I remained a supporter of the “anti-war” cause, and of the rights of the Indo-Chinese to self-determination. To defend the commitments I had made, I deluded myself into believing that self-determination meant the Vietnamese and Cambodians should be able to choose even this evil if they wanted. This was so much sophistry because I knew that the Communists would not give them an inch of space in which to breathe free. The end that justified my position was that I believed America was the world’s arch imperialist power and its defeat was an absolute good.

What I was not prepared for was the moral depths to which the movement I had been part of had sunk. These depths were revealed in the events that followed the Communist victory. When America left Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists proceeded to slaughter between two and three million peasants who were “politically incorrect” and did not welcome their Communist “solutions.” It was the largest genocide since Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. In Cambodia they killed everyone who wore glasses on the grounds that as readers they would transmit the oppressive ideas of the past and obstruct the Communist future. But there was no resistance to these atrocities from the “anti-war” Left.

As the genocidal slaughter proceeded, prominent Leftists like Noam Chomsky provided cover for the Communists’ crimes by denying that the atrocities were taking place. More disturbingly, there was not a single demonstration to protest the slaughter by the activists who claimed to be “anti-war” and to care about the Cambodians and Vietnamese. This silence unmasked the true agendas of the movement I had been part of.

My comrades’ abandonment of the peoples they claimed to defend showed in a definitive manner that the anti-war movement was never “anti-war.” It was anti-American. It wanted America to lose and the Communists to win. Progressives had lied about the nature of their movement and its agendas in order to accomplish their real goal, which was the “fundamental transformation” of America and the creation of a socialist state. I had known this to be the case for many years, but had accepted the lies because they served what I imagined was a noble end. But when the lies led to the embrace of genocide, my eyes were opened to the realization that the movement I had been part of my whole life was evil.

On my way out of the Left, I spent several years re-thinking what I had believed, and trying to understand the nature of the cause that I had served. Perhaps, my most profound and certainly most disturbing conclusion was that revolutionaries were by nature – and of necessity – criminals, who would routinely lie and break laws to achieve their ends. Every radical who believed in a “revolution” or a “re-imagining” of society from the ground up, every progressive who believed in a “fundamental transformation of America” as Barack Obama described his own agenda on the eve of his 2008 election, was a criminal waiting to strike.

America’s Constitution includes methods to amend it, and therefore to reform the American social order when and where changes are needed. In making such changes there are procedures to ensure that these changes represent the will of the American people, and are done lawfully. But revolutionaries do not respect a constitutional order created by rich, white men, many of whom were slaveowners. Radicals believe instead that “social justice” requires them to dismantle the social order, and “due process” along with it. Radicals are not “reformers.” In the name of social justice, they refuse to be bound by the laws and procedures that an unjust and oppressive “ruling class” has created. The end justifies the means.

Before President Obama – a constitutional law professor – decided to break America’s immigration laws and grant 800,000 illegals resident status, he admitted to his fellow Americans on 22 public occasions that he had no constitutional authority to do so – none. Creating such an amnesty by executive order was illegal and unconstitutional. And he knew it. But he did it anyway because to him and his party, violating the fundamental law of the land was justified because the system that had created the law was oppressive and unjust – racist. In committing this crime against the nation he led, Obama was guided by a radical ideology that justified the illegal means as a victory for “social justice.”

As a former radical I understood how high the stakes had become with Obama’s election. Since the Right was defending America’s freedoms while the Left was paying lip-service to patriotic pieties but intending nothing less than the destruction of constitutional order, I also understood that the rhetorical disparity between the two factions posed a grave threat to America’s future.

In fighting this cold war, progressives regularly demonize Republicans as racists, white supremacists, insurrectionists, Nazis and traitors. Republicans respond to these reckless attacks by calling Democrats “liberals” and similarly tepid descriptions. For example, they describe Democrats as “soft on crime.” Democrats are not soft on crime. They are pro-crime: Democrat prosecutors have systematically refused to prosecute violent criminals; Democrat mayors and governors have released tens of thousands of violent criminals from America’s prisons, and abolished cash bail so that criminals are back on the streets immediately after their crimes and arrests; Democrat mayors did nothing to prevent the mass violence orchestrated by Black Lives Matter in 220 cities in the summer of 2020, provided bail for arrested felons, de-funded police forces, and instructed law enforcement to stand down in Democrat-run cities, which allowed “protesters” to loot and burn, and criminal mobs to loot and destroy downtown shopping centers.

Democrats regard the criminal riots that took place in the summer of 2020, as social justice. The riots cost $2 billion in property damage, killed scores of people and eventually thousands as their “De-Fund the Police” campaign triggered a record crime wave in America’s major cities. Democrats regard criminal lawlessness and mayhem as understandable responses to what they perceive as “social injustice” – courts and the law be damned. To them, mass lootings are “reparations,” and individual robberies and thefts a socialist redistribution of wealth.

If you are in a battle of words – which is the nature of political warfare – and you are calling your enemies “liberals,” portraying them as not really understanding the gravity of what they are doing, while they are calling you “white supremacists” and “Nazis,” you are losing the war.

Why are Republicans so self-destructively polite? Why do they fail to see, or to identify their opponents as the criminals they are – or, at least, when they are?

Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, Democrats have conducted a verbal war against white America. This war has been so effective that Gallup polls show that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are white racists. At the same time the Biden administration has made “Equity” a centerpiece of its policies and programs. “Equity” is a weasel word to cover a socialist agenda. The White House defines “Equity” as privileging select racial groups with government largesse on the basis of skin color – a policy that is racist, inequitable, unconstitutional, and illegal.

Even when it is the government doing the redistribution and not street mobs, “social justice” – the policy of equalizing outcomes among politically select groups, regardless of merit – is another name for theft. Redistributing income on the basis of race is not equity, it is racism. Joe Biden is the first overt racist to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson – who not coincidently was also a progressive Democrat. Yet Republicans avert their eyes from this anti-American travesty. Why don’t Republicans call Democrats out for their racism?

Over the years I gave a lot of thought to these questions, and eventually I came up with an answer that should have been obvious in the first place...

 Keep reading.

Putin's American Apologists

From Joshua Muravchik, at Commentary, "A collection of voices on the left, right, and center have found a way to blame the United States and the West...,":

from the international consensus to vote with Russia at the UN, so here at home, a miscellany of voices demurred, pointing fingers of blame in other directions, expressing sympathy for Russia’s position, or warning against any strong reaction from Washington.

Almost none offered words of worship to Vladimir Putin, as many had to Joseph Stalin in Soviet days, and none declared outright support for his actions. But still, a number of writers, political groups, and politicians offered a counterpoint to the broad chorus of indignation at Putin’s action. They came from both political poles, as well as from the camp of isolationist ideologues difficult to locate on a left-to-right spectrum. Some registered their disapproval of Russia’s attack before proceeding to their main point: warning against a U.S. response stronger than admitting refugees. Others offered up outright apologetics for Putin’s actions.

On the left, the Democratic Socialists of America—once a fringe group but that now boasts in its ranks four members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman) as well as dozens of state legislators and many local officials—issued a statement on January 31 in response to Russia’s massing its army on Ukraine’s borders. It began:

Following months of increased tensions and a sensationalist Western media blitz drumming up conflict in the Donbas, the US government is responding to the situation in Ukraine through the familiar guise of threats of sweeping sanctions, provision of military aid, and increased military deployment to the region. [DSA] opposes this ongoing US brinkmanship, which only further escalates the crisis, and reaffirms our previous statement saying no to NATO and its imperialist expansionism and disastrous interventions across the world.

Nowhere did the document attempt to explain what had caused the sudden “increased tensions,” or so much as mention the Russian forces. It called instead on the U.S. “to reverse its ongoing militarization of the region.”

When the Russians attacked, DSA issued a new statement, which did indeed condemn the invasion while opposing any “coercive measures… economic or military” to counter it. In contrast to the UN General Assembly, which voted almost unanimously to “demand” the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, DSA merely “urge[d]” this. It went on to “reaffirm our call for the USA to withdraw from NATO, and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” and it declared “solidarity with…antiwar protestors in both countries [Russia and Ukraine],” although it did not explain where the latter had been sighted.

Others on the left were less flagrant but also assigned more blame to Washington than Moscow. Noam Chomsky, in a lengthy interview in the online journal Truthout, explained:

The crisis has been brewing for 25 years as the US contemptuously rejected Russian security concerns, in particular their clear red lines: Georgia and especially Ukraine. There is good reason to believe that this tragedy could have been avoided.

Now, he said, focus must turn to the future. He warned, “repeatedly, [America’s] reaction has been to reach for the six-gun rather than the olive branch.” But the superior wisdom of a gentler approach, he explained, had been taught to him personally during his wartime travels to North Vietnam by representatives of the Viet Cong, a group whose penchant for gentleness was lost on less acute observers than Chomsky. Moreover, he added, “like it or not, the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression—or the strong possibility of terminal war.” In short, our only sure path to avoid nuclear Armageddon is one that “rewards” Putin.

Writing in the Nation, Rajan Menon described the original sin that led to today’s crisis. As always in that journal, America was the sinner:

Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country’s borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.

That magazine’s publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, has recently been awarded a weekly column in the Washington Post. There, at the end of January, she warned of the danger of war and of “screeching hawks.”

In Russia, Putin is already under fire for not having taken Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in 2014.…In Washington, Biden is under fire for not being tough enough…For all its hysteria about imminent war, it’s clear that the Biden administration believes Putin is bluffing….the danger is that Putin will face escalating pressure from more hawkish factions within Russia.

When the Russians attacked, she spoke for the Nation, “condemn[ing]” the invasion in somewhat roundabout words, before resuming her theme that equal or greater blame lay with the West:

Putin’s actions are indefensible, but responsibility for this crisis is widely shared. This magazine has warned repeatedly that the extension of NATO to Russia’s borders would inevitably produce a fierce reaction. We have criticized NATO’s wholesale rejection of Russia’s security proposals. We decry the arrogance that leads U.S. officials to assert that we have the right to do what we wish across the world, even in areas, like Ukraine, that are far more important to others than they are to us.

A week later, in her Washington Post column, she advised against countering Russia. “By invading Ukraine,” she opined, “Putin demands a return to [an] archaic and obsolete Cold War order. The world would be wise not to accede.” In other words, Putin is trying to start a fight; we could frustrate him by turning the other cheek. She counseled out-of-the-box thinking:

What’s needed above all is a courageous and transnational citizens’ movement demanding not simply the end of the war on Ukraine but also an end to perpetual wars. We need political leaders who will speak out about our real security needs and resist the reflex to fall into old patterns that distract from the threats we can no longer afford to ignore [i.e., “pandemics and climate change”].

The Nation’s competitor among left-wing journals, Jacobin, took a similar tack. Staff writer Branko Marcetic asserted that Putin’s invasion was “reckless and illegal,” before going on to argue that it might have been averted by “a different set of US policies over the past few months.” He explained:

Already, the army of war-hawk pundits that has been predicting—salivating over, may be more accurate—a Russian invasion has seized on this latest move as vindication of their usual talking points: Putin is Hitler, he seeks to revive the glory of the Soviet Union, he can’t be reasoned with, and only a show of force, not further “appeasement” or negotiations that “reward” his behavior, can make him stop. This is…exactly the approach Washington and its allies…have taken to get us to this point.

If readers wondered whether it wasn’t Moscow, rather than Washington and its allies, who had gotten us to this point, Marcetic offered an example of “the most over-the-top of Western predictions” that had inflamed the situation, namely, the image of Russian soldiers “marching to Kiev and toppling the Ukrainian government.”

Elected officials on the left tended to be more forthright in denouncing the Russian invasion, while often adding caveats. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, called it “premeditated aggression,” but he did not retract his previously expressed sympathy for Russia’s adamancy about Washington’s refusal to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine. “Does anyone really believe,” he asked, “that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”

Sanders is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Its chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal, together with the chair of its Peace and Security Taskforce, Representative Barbara Lee, spoke for the caucus during this crisis. As Russian forces poised on Ukraine’s borders, they issued a statement voicing “alarm,” although this seemed to be mostly about possible American reactions. “We have significant concerns that new troop deployments, sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions, and a flood of hundreds of millions of dollars in lethal weapons will only raise tensions and increase the chance of miscalculation,” they said.

They offered an interpretation of the mobilization on Ukraine’s borders akin to vanden Heuvel’s: “Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy.” Apparently, the way to stymie Putin would be to go about our business of reforming America or saving the planet and to ignore his belligerent actions entirely.

Their colleague Rashida Tlaib seconded this, adding: “Enough of rushing to war…  . Diplomacy and de-escalation must be the focus, not ‘lethal’ aid. My constituents are tired of war and are demanding we use everything in our toolbox to prevent conflict.”

When the Biden administration began warning of an imminent Russian invasion, and Congress rushed to enact emergency legislation to shore up Ukraine and deter Russia, caucus member Ilhan Omar voiced her opposition:

The proposed legislative solution to this crisis, escalates the conflict without deterring it effectively….The consequences of flooding Ukraine with half a billion dollars in American weapons, likely not limited to just military-specific equipment but also including small arms and ammo, are unpredictable and likely disastrous. It also threatens unbelievably broad and draconian sanctions that will utterly devastate the Russian economy, likely doing very little to deter Putin’s aggression while causing immense suffering among ordinary Russian civilians who did not choose this.

After the Russian forces rolled across the border, caucus members were clearer in “condemning the violent invasion of Ukraine,” while still focusing most of their appeals on the need to restrain the U.S. response. In their new statement, the caucus said:

We urge the Biden administration to be guided by two goals: to avoid dangerous escalation that is all too easy in the chaos of war, and to ensure we are minimizing harm to civilians. We applaud President Biden for rightly saying there can be no military solution to this conflict, and wisely committing to not deploying U.S. troops… . The president must seek congressional authorization…before any U.S. troops deploy into areas or situations where there is a risk of imminent hostilities.

Since deploying U.S. forces to Ukraine had already been ruled out, the latter sentence seemed to aim at the movement of several thousand troops into frontline NATO states. In addition to objecting to these deployments designed to deter the Russians from moving against the Baltic states, the progressives also were chary of economic sanctions. They said: “The goal of any U.S. sanctions should be to stop the fighting and hold those responsible for this invasion to account, while avoiding indiscriminate harm to civilians or inflexibility as circumstances change.”

These attitudes on the left, if in some ways shocking, are not surprising. And the same might be said about the camp of ideological isolationists. It is centered today in the Quincy Institute, a D.C. think tank of relatively recent vintage, lavishly funded from the two extremes, George Soros on the left and Charles Koch on the right.

In the run-up to the Russian invasion, Quincy’s website was replete with items diverting blame from Russia, casting aspersions on Ukraine and its sympathizers, and warning against U.S. involvement. Research fellow Ben Freeman posted an exposé, claiming to reveal that “lobbyists from Ukraine are working feverishly to shape the U.S. response.” It went on: “Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks and journalists with more than 10,000 message and meetings in 2021.” Freeman added, “With U.S. weapons manufacturers making billions in arms sales to Ukraine, their CEOs see the turmoil there as a good business opportunity,” citing another Quincy exposé by another staff member.

In addition to the various writings of vanden Heuvel, a Quincy board member, that are posted on its site, its other principal commentators on this issue were Andrew Bacevich, the institute’s president, and senior fellow Anatol Lieven.

As the Biden administration issued warnings in February, citing intelligence that Putin was intent on war, Bacevich published an op-ed debunking it, warning that “a full-fledged war scare is upon us.” He likened the administration’s revelation of Russian plans for staging a false-flag attack to the Bush administration’s erroneous 2003 warnings about Iraqi nuclear weapons. And he vented anger at news organizations for reporting the Russia story. “The incessant warmongering of the American media [is] disturbing and repugnant,” he lamented, protesting reports that 130,000 Russian troops had massed on Ukraine’s borders. He didn’t dispute this number but rather the verb, “massed,” which he called “a favored media mischaracterization.” He suggested no preferable term, but reporters might have said more neutrally that Russian soldiers “convened” or “congregated” or “flocked” or “disembarked” at Ukraine’s border.

Two weeks later, as the crisis intensified, Bacevich took to print again, adding to his indictment of the media and of America more broadly. “Some members of the American commentariat will cheer” war, he said, owing to “the depth of their animus toward Putin.” This in part reflected “the unvarnished Russophobia pervading the ranks of the America political elite” and “disdain for Russia” that has “roots going at least as far back as the Bolshevik Revolution.” However, the “deeper” source of “our present-day antipathy toward Russia [lies in] a desperate need to refurbish the concept of American exceptionalism.” In “our collective identity [w]e Americans…are the Chosen People.” It would be more accurate, he went on, to characterize ourselves as “reckless,” “incompetent,” “alienated,” “extravagantly wasteful,” and “deeply confused.” Rather than “flinging macho-man insults,” Bacevich concluded, the U.S. should “acknowledge the possibility that Russia possesses legitimate security interests” in Ukraine.

The day after Russia’s assault began, Bacevich published yet another op-ed. “The eruption of war creates an urgent need to affix blame and identify villains,” he began, with gentle sarcasm that then grew stronger. “Russia is the aggressor and President Vladimir Putin a bad guy straight out of central casting: on that point, opinion in the United States and Europe is nearly unanimous. Even in a secular age, we know whose side God is on.” It would be better, he said, to avoid a “rush to judgment.”

Yes, Russian aggression deserves widespread condemnation. Yet the United States cannot absolve itself of responsibility for this catastrophe… . By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion.

Quincy’s most prolific commentator on the Ukraine crisis was senior research fellow Anatol Lieven. He, too, sounded a note of contempt for Americans. “A mythological monster is haunting the fevered imagination of the West,” a cartoon image of a creature whose name Americans ignorantly mispronounce “Put’n.” In contrast,

the real Putin is cautious and levelheaded—too much so, in the view of more ambitious and hotheaded members of the Russian elite. …This should give confidence that we can emerge from the present crisis without disaster… . Only the mythological Putin would March into Kiev and central Ukraine, let alone attack Poland or the Baltic states. These are ridiculous Western fantasies generated partly by genuine paranoia, partly by members of the US and European blobs who need to demonize Russia in order to cover up their own appalling mistakes and lies over the past 30 years and to parade heroic resistance to a threat that does not in fact exist.

The recurrent theme of Lieven’s many articles was that Western anxieties were unwarranted. In early February, he wrote:

One Western line about Russia’s demands has already been proved false, namely that they were never intended as a serious basis for negotiations; and that Russia always planned to use their rejection as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Clearly if that were the case, Russia would have invaded by now.

Then, when their intelligence prompted Western governments to withdraw diplomatic personnel, Lieven wrote mockingly that Russia therefore had no need to invade. “Western policy towards Ukraine is evolving from the ridiculous to the positively surreal… . Putin can enjoy a quiet cup of coffee while Western governments run around squawking hysterically and NATO’s credibility collapses along with the Ukrainian economy.” And a week after that, he forecasted: “If by the time of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting, Russia has not in fact invaded Ukraine except for the Donbas, then all these Western warnings about an imminent Russian invasion will start to look a bit silly.”

When the invasion finally came, Lieven did not stop to acknowledge who it was that now looked silly, but he did condemn it in clear terms before proceeding to suggest the outline of a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine would cede substantial territory and a bit of sovereignty.

Finally, once the war was underway, two other Quincy authors, Matthew Burrows and Christopher Preble, chimed in airily that “one way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down” and the really important thing was to avert “a new Cold War between Russia and the West.” In other words, Ukraine’s cities could end up resembling Grozny after Putin finished suppressing the Chechen uprising, but then we could move on.

If the stance of the isolationist Quincy Institute as well as that of the left was to be expected, the response on the right was less predictable, but here, too, Putin found apologists. Foremost among them was Donald Trump. In the first two days after Putin announced diplomatic recognition of the two breakaway “people’s republics” in Donbas, Trump several times called it “smart” and “genius” that Russian troops were going in as “peacekeepers.” He gushed that Putin is “very savvy,” although his words of admiration stopped short of directly endorsing or defending Putin’s action.

Indeed, characteristically, he added that the invasion wouldn’t have happened if he were president. He didn’t explain why that would have been so, beyond sneering that Biden “has no concept of what he’s doing.” Would he have mollified Putin? After all, he had recently recalled aloud that he “got along great with President Putin,” and said, “I liked him. He liked me.” Or would Putin have been afraid of him? He had once boasted of having a bigger “nuclear button” than Kim Jong Un (before he and Kim “fell in love”). Credulous admirers were left to fill in their own scenarios.

Within a week, however, as, at home and abroad, a near-consensus of indignation at Russian actions crystallized, and Ukrainians heroically stalled Russia’s advance, Trump switched the script. He branded the Russian rampage a “holocaust” and demanded that it stop. Then he claimed that the Ukrainians were able to hold off the invaders because of weapons that he had provided them.

General Mike Flynn, Trump’s first appointed national security adviser, spoke more coherently than Trump and defended Putin entirely:

Russia has…one core concern… . If Ukraine were admitted into NATO…the Russians understand that would likely result in nuclear weapons being placed at its doorstep—closer to Russia than Cuba is to the United States.…If president John Kennedy was justified in risking war to prevent nuclear missiles from being installed in Cuba in 1961, then why exactly is Russian president Vladimir Putin being reckless in risking war to prevent NATO weapons from being installed in Ukraine in 2022? Would any great nation allow the development of such a threat on its border?

Another former Trump aide, now a social-media figure with a large following, Candace Owens, took a similar stance...

Still more.

 

 

The End of Citizenship

From Michael Lind, at the Tablet, "Having converted their own republic into a borderless credit union, Americans have to borrow other people’s national pride":

In the spring of 2022, speculation in the commentariat that partisan rivalries were bringing the United States to the verge of actual civil war abruptly came to an end. With few exceptions, Americans of left, right, and center rallied around the national colors. Postmodern multiculturalism and anti-Enlightenment paleoconservatism suddenly were marginalized by romantic nationalism of the 19th-century variety. As war fever swept America, progressives and conservatives joined in denouncing not only the enemy government but also the enemy people and their enemy music, enemy literature, and enemy cuisine. Americans displayed the national flag in every imaginable form and pledged undying hatred of the nation’s foes.

The nation that Americans celebrated was not their own, but rather Ukraine, following the brutal Russian invasion of the former Soviet republic. Liberal Americans who would have thought it vulgar if not fascist to wave the Stars and Stripes took selfies with the blue and gold of Ukraine’s national flag. Democrats and Republicans who routinely demonize the leaders of the rival American party engaged in a kind of sentimental, uncritical hero worship of Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, which would have been mocked had its object been Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Neoconservatives and centrist liberals used the Ukraine war as an opportunity to settle scores by accusing opponents in the rival party and rivals in their own parties of moral if not legal treason for less than total and uncritical support of a foreign country with which the United States does not even have an alliance.

Whether the war in Ukraine is a final aftershock of the first Cold War or the first major proxy war in Cold War II remains to be seen. The sudden outburst of vicarious Ukrainian patriotism on the part of many Americans—as well as people in similar North Atlantic democracies—seems like a Freudian “return of the repressed.” Taught that celebrating their own national traditions is racist and xenophobic, and deprived of opportunities to play a meaningful role in national defense, many Americans and Western Europeans have found an outlet for a lost sense of belonging by borrowing the national pride of another nation.

Long before the United States began selling green cards—the tickets to U.S. citizenship—to rich foreigners by creating the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program in 1990, American citizenship had been devalued. From the days of the Greek city-states and the Roman republic to the city-republics of the Renaissance and the cantons of Switzerland, citizenship in the fullest sense originally involved active participation of citizens—a group not only male but also usually smaller than the population as a whole—in the government of their communities, as electors, office-holders, jurors, and citizen-soldiers.

In practice, the ideal of the amateur, omnicompetent citizen—a member of the militia today, a town or county council member tomorrow and a juror next week—could be realized only in small, relatively undeveloped communities. The ideal of the self-sufficient family farmer with a musket and a copy of the Constitution on the fireplace mantle was a casualty of economic centralization and modernization. Most Americans are proletarians who live from paycheck to paycheck, and a majority of American workers are employed by firms with more than 500 employees and supervised by salaried corporate bureaucrats.

The ideal of the male citizen-soldier who earns his civil rights by contributing to the defense of the republic survived for a while by being transferred to the colossal modern nation-state, whose citizens, mostly unknown to one another, are united by common culture, institutions, location, or some combination of the three. For a time, the mass national conscript army and its reserves were thought of, however implausibly, as the heir to the local militia. The older tradition of civic republicanism inspired the linkage of military service to government benefits like the GI Bill and other privileges for veterans. That link was all but eliminated by the abolition of the draft in 1973. Today’s American military is a professional force, more like those of premodern European bureaucratic monarchies than frontier militias.

The right to vote remains, but its power has been diluted, even as it has been extended in law and practice—first to white men without property, then to white women, and finally to nonwhite citizens. In a world of industrialized nation-states, in which even small countries are vastly more populous than the city-republics of antiquity and the Middle Ages, scale alone ensures that the influence that any one individual can exert by voting periodically in free and fair elections is negligible.

While the positive duties formerly associated with citizenship have gradually been discarded, there has been a trend to establish government requirements for the provision of positive rights or benefits, from public or publicly funded education and public retirement spending to guaranteed health care. As a result, in the United States and other Western democracies, it is widely accepted in the 21st century that national citizens have a right to various public goods and welfare services without any need to earn the benefits at all, purely on the basis of their status as citizens of a particular nation-state.

Already by the 1960s and the 1970s, the link between a citizen’s personal contribution and a citizen’s right to government benefits was being questioned...

Keep reading.

 

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault

This article from John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention, as well as the lecture video I posted the other night. 

Prescient, you might say. (And liberalism here means "classical" liberalism grounded in philosophies of the Enlightenment, from folks like Emmanuel Kant, John Locke, etc.). It's not the American ideological "liberalism" associated with an earlier version of the Democrat Party, now a radical, extreme left party, not *liberal* at all). 

At Foreign Affairs, "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin":

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement—which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion...

 

Joe Rogan Speaks the Way Men Do With Each Other in Private

And that's the fundamental basis of his appeal, which is gargantuan with 11 million viewers. 

Andrew Sullivan has thoughts:

No, the left is not calling all masculinity toxic. But they get pretty quiet when you ask for a definition of non-toxic masculinity that doesn’t end up sounding like being a woman. And, no, they’re not explicitly denying that there are biological differences between men and women — they just speak and act on the premise that there aren’t, that boys do not need a different kind of education than girls, that all-male groups are problematic, and that finding a way to direct masculinity to noble ends is somehow enabling the oppression of women, or gay people. The result is that men are subject to left derision, right machismo, and complete cultural derailment.

And that’s where Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson come in. They too, of course, are mocked constantly, demeaned as chauvinists or white supremacists, etc. But what Rogan does is speak and talk the way men do with each other in private, which, in this media era, is a revelation. He doesn’t entertain the woke bromides of gender theory because he’s lived a life, clearly loves being a man as much as Adele says she loves being a woman, and believes, as he once put it, that “bad men are just bad human beings who happen to be men.”

He lifts weights, watches fights, eats elk meat, smokes pot, dabbles in DMT, and asks the kind of questions normie men might ask of experts. Which is why they listen. They feel at home with him. Unlike so much of the MSM, he feels real: not a throwback to patriarchy but an opening to a kind of brotherhood that feels sane to many disoriented men in America — especially the majority who haven’t yet bent the knee to the doctrines of the successor ideology.

He’s in no way a bully or blowhard. Just listen to him: his tone is mellifluous, curious, amused. His masculinity is unforced, funny and real. He’s genuinely ingenuous — the way most humans are, possessing the kind of credulousness journalists are trained out of. But that’s why he has 11 million listeners and CNN has a little over 500,000. One of his most frequent guests is the brilliant comic Tim Dillon — openly gay and stereotypically male.

Rogan’s politics are eclectic, but they reflect a male concern with practical things, straightforward people, and solutions. The idea that he is a right-wing ideologue is silly and untrue. He readily admits when he’s wrong and often self-deprecates. He’s not afraid to show emotion and choke up — whether it’s over the triumph of female fighters or putting down a puppy or the death of Chadwick Boseman. Rogan is simply not the brutish caricature that left-Twitter and CNN would have you think.

The same goes for Peterson. The Canadian prof and clinical psychologist is cantankerous, yes, but also compassionate...

RTWT: "Between the World and Men Truckers, Rogan, Peterson and the revolt of masculinity."

Ukraine and the American Crack-Up

It's Caroline Glick:

From Washington to Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv, everyone says that only Russian President Vladimir Putin knows what he plans to do with the 120,000 troops he has deployed to the Ukrainian border. But at this point, even if Putin decides not to invade, even if he withdraws all of his forces from the border zone he has already won a strategic victory of historic proportions against the United States.

Without firing a bullet, Putin and his 120,000 soldiers have fomented the unofficial – but very real – break-up of the NATO alliance. NATO is rightly considered one of the most successful military alliances in history. It was founded in 1949 at the outset of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Its purpose was to deter the Soviets from trying to expand their empire from Eastern and Central Europe into Western Europe. NATO’s success derived from two main factors. First, NATO member states were by and large agreed that their common interest in preventing Soviet expansion outweighed their separate national interests, and so required collective action under the U.S. strategic umbrella. Second, the Soviets and America’s NATO allies all believed that the U.S. was strategically credible. The Soviets believed that the U.S. was serious about fulfilling its commitments to its NATO partners. And NATO members believed that the U.S. would make them pay a very severe price if they opted to blow off the alliance and cut a separate deal with the Soviet Union.

Today, NATO cannot act collectively against Putin in a coherent way because Germany no longer views Russia as a strategic threat, and no longer views the U.S. has a leader it needs to follow.

How has this situation come about?

Much of the credit goes to Putin, who has been working towards this point for 15 years. Putin recognized that when used strategically, Russian energy exports could drive a wedge between NATO members. Traditionally, Russian natural gas exports to Europe went overland through Poland and Ukraine. This meant that energy supplies to Germany and Western Europe were dependent on Russian energy exports to former Soviet bloc countries, and Germany needed to protect Poland and Ukraine to protect its own interests.

In 2006, Gazprom, Russia’s oil and gas conglomerate unveiled its plan to lay an underwater pipeline across the Baltic Sea that would transport natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing Poland the Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, then German Chancellor Gerhardt Shroeder left office. And a month after he departed the chancery, Shroeder announced that he had taken a position as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gazprom’s subsidiary responsible for laying the gas pipeline.

The message was clear. Germany had agreed to delink its strategic energy and economic interests from the former Soviet republics and Poland, which had joined NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War, and from Ukraine.

Today we see that Putin’s Baltic Sea gas pipeline – now known as Nord Stream 2 – did precisely what he hoped it would do. Over the past few weeks, the Germans have made little effort to hide that they are siding with Russia against Ukraine and their NATO allies. Germany prohibited NATO member Estonia from transferring weapons to Kyiv. And when Britain sent an arms shipment to Kyiv earlier in the week, the British were careful not to fly over Germany. They didn’t ask the Germans for permission to overfly their airspace, because they assumed the Germans would deny their request. In other words, London recognized that Germany, the linchpin of NATO is pitching for the other team, but didn’t want to didn’t want to make a stink about it.

But with all due respect to Putin and his successful use of energy exports as a strategic weapon, Putin couldn’t have pulled Germany away from NATO without Biden. Indeed, gas exports from Russia are more an excuse than an explanation for Germany’s moves.

The Germans feel free to walk away from their commitments to their NATO allies because they realize that the Biden administration won’t make them pay a price for their behavior. Like German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz, Biden has no intention of lifting a finger to protect Ukraine from Russia.

When Nord Stream 2 was announced, the Bush administration immediately understood the implications for NATO and strongly objected to the project. Barak Obama and his vice president Joe Biden also strongly opposed the pipeline. As the construction of Nord Stream 2 neared conclusion in 2019, then President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on all firms involved in the project. Trump’s intention was clear. Since Nord Stream 2 is geared towards breaking up NATO by driving a wedge between Germany and the Western European members on the one hand and NATO members Poland and the Baltic states on the other, to protect NATO, Trump decided to make every entity that endangers it pay a steep price.

Given Biden’s long record of opposing Nord Stream 2, going back to his days in the Senate, there was good reason to believe that he would maintain Trump’s sanctions. But President Joe Biden rejected the views of Vice President and Senator Biden.

Last May President Biden cancelled Trump’s sanctions on Nord Stream 2 participants. And last August, the Biden administration cut a deal with Germany over Nord Stream 2. The deal was one which no German leader in their right mind could object to, and no U.S. President who sought to prevent the NATO crack up could support. Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. dropped its opposition to the operation of Nord Stream 2 in exchange for a vague German commitment to do something for Ukraine. If Biden’s abandonment of U.S. opposition to Nord Stream 2 wasn’t enough to convince Germany and Russia, (and Ukraine) of his rank unseriousness in everything related to Ukraine and NATO, Biden’s amazing acknowledgment during his news conference last week that “a minor incursion” of Russian forces into Ukraine would not be met with a unified response from NATO ended any residual doubt. Despite the administration’s fervent clean-up efforts, Putin got the message, and so did the rest of the world.

It’s important to note that Biden’s decision not to block Russia from invading Ukraine is eminently defensible. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. And while the U.S. certainly supports Ukrainian independence, America’s interest in Ukraine’s sovereignty does not outweigh its interest in avoiding a war with Russia.

Had they been inclined to do so, Biden and his advisors could have easily made the case for non-intervention in a way that would have secured both NATO and America’s credibility as a superpower to its adversaries and allies alike.

Biden could have expressed support for Ukraine while noting rightly that Russia’s aggressive behavior threatens the nations of Europe more than it threatens the U.S. And while the U.S. would be happy to stand with its European allies to confront Russia, it will not confront Russia for them. That would have put the ball in Germany’s court, and whatever the outcome, the U.S. would have emerged unscathed.

Instead, seemingly on an hourly basis, the administration is ratcheting up its war mongering rhetoric and threats against Russia. Tuesday Pentagon spokesman James Kirby said that Biden had ordered 8,500 troops in Europe on alert.

Apparently, the Russians, Ukrainians and the rest of the world were supposed to take Kirby’s announcement as proof of Biden’s seriousness of purpose. But the opposite is the case. Kirby’s statement was utterly meaningless. He didn’t say which troops were on alert, or on alert for what. He didn’t mention what mission the alerted troops had received. And almost at the same time Kirby made his meaningless announcement, Biden said that no U.S. forces would be deployed to Ukraine.

More than Biden’s surrender on Nord Stream 2, it is the complete disconnect between Biden’s actual policy and his strategic messaging policies that make governments like Germany’s realize that they will pay no price for acting with U.S. adversaries against the U.S. Busy turning America into a joke on the world stage, Biden will have no interest in punishing Berlin for betraying NATO, and America.

Ukraine is far from the only place where there is zero connection between the Biden administration’s policies and its communications strategy. Biden’s Iran policy is equally disingenuous and self-destructive. Biden and his team claim that the purpose of the nuclear talks with Iran in the Vienna is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state. But the agreement the U.S. is negotiating with Iran will guarantee Tehran will become a nuclear armed state in short order.

The implications of Biden’s foreign policy for the United States are clear enough. Not only is the administration enabling the break-up of NATO. The Biden administration is destroying America’s deterrent power and superpower position.

As for Israelis, and other threatened U.S. allies watching from the sidelines, the take-home lesson of Ukraine is clear. No U.S. security guarantee can outweigh independence of action. To survive, a nation requires strategic, economic and energy independence, and the will to wield it.

 

Challenging Critical Race Theory, Rhode Island Mom Demands School Curriculum from South Kingstown School District (VIDEO)

This is getting to be a very big thing. Democrats can't be that stupid. The 2022 midterms aren't that far off, and Lord knows the country's turned to hell since Trump left office. 

And this takes courage. The freakin' school district is threatening a lawsuit? No, this isn't right. Public schools are for the public, right? Well then the people shouldn't have to go to hell and back to get the most basic information on what schools are teaching their kids. Applause for this brave woman, wow.

It's Nicole Solas, at Legal Insurrecion, "I’m a Mom Seeking Records of Critical Race and Gender Curriculum, Now the School Committee May Sue to Stop Me (Update)":

I am a mother in the South Kingstown School District in Rhode Island investigating through public records requests how critical race and gender theories are integrated into lessons, school policies, and contracts. Now the School Committee is considering suing me to stop me.

My child is enrolled in kindergarten and I became concerned that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender theory were integrated into lessons when an elementary school principal told me that teachers don’t refer to students as “boys” and “girls.” Additionally, I was told a kindergarten teacher asks five-year-olds, “what could have been done differently on the first Thanksgiving” in order to build upon a “line of thinking about history.” I asked why kids could not be called “boys” and “girls” and was told it was “common practice.” I asked for clarification on the “line of thinking” about history but got no answers. The more questions I asked, the less answers I received.

Then I asked for a tour of the elementary school and the Superintendent offered me an in-person or virtual tour, but never responded with a date and time despite my numerous follow-up emails and phone calls. After almost a month of radio silence the Superintendent then told me that now they were not offering tours due to Covid restrictions. Yet the Superintendent offered tours of other schools to campaign for a school bond.

I also asked to see the elementary school curriculum. I asked the principal, the school committee, the superintendent, the director of curriculum, and even the legal department at the Rhode Island Department of Education to allow me to view the curriculum. The school’s Director of Curriculum told me she was unavailable and never responded when I said I could view the curriculum on any day and time. Then a school committee member directed me to file an Access to Public Records Act (APRA) request on the school district website to obtain the curriculum. After thirty days, I received an incomplete curriculum and filed an APRA complaint with the Attorney General.

By contrast, curriculum for two charters schools in South Kingstown (Kingston Hill Academy and The Compass School) is available on their websites. I scheduled a tour of a private school in five minutes. Why was it so hard to get a tour and see the curriculum in my own public school district?

At this point I had reason to believe that the school district was hiding information and deliberately stonewalling me. I started using the APRA request google link on the school district’s website to request public documents that might answer my questions about CRT, gender theory, and other concerns. When I requested the emails of a school committee member the estimate of what they would charge me came back as $9,570. Who can afford that?

Under the APRA, “a reasonable charge may be made for the search or retrieval of documents. Hourly costs for a search and retrieval shall not exceed fifteen dollars ($15.00) per hour and no costs shall be charged for the first hour of a search or retrieval.” Additionally, each copy costs 15 cents.

I amended my request to narrow the scope of requested emails to six months and requested digital copies instead of hard copies. That $9,570 estimate dropped to $79.50. I quickly realized that if I structured many specific and narrow requests, I could afford to purchase the public information which was otherwise inaccessible to me due to the non-responsiveness of my school leadership. I felt like I had cracked the code to this mystery of inaccessible information.

These initial high estimates of public records requests are common barriers to parents obtaining information about their children’s school district. A parent in another Rhode Island school district received an estimate of $17,295.75 to obtain public information related to the cost of an athletic field. Access to public information is not cheap. Or equitable.

I continued to submit small and numerous public record requests to investigate my school district. The school department continued to respond in the statutory time period of ten days. A school committee member even made a snarky reference to my APRA requests in an email. Evidently my APRA requests were not problematic if they were the subject of sarcasm from a school committee member. No one in the school department ever told me it was a problem while I was in constant contact with them to request and purchase information. I purchased over $300 worth of public information and shared it to a private Facebook group to raise awareness about indoctrination in Rhode Island schools. I developed a growing network of likeminded teachers, parents, and community members who gave me information about CRT and gender theory infiltrating Rhode Island school districts.

Then, on Friday, May 28, the school committee set an agenda item for a public meeting to discuss “filing litigation against Nicole Solas to challenge the filing of over 160 APRA requests.”

My school committee now is considering suing me because I submitted a lot of public records requests to get answers to my questions which the School District would not answer. This same school committee which told me to use a statutorily prescribed process to obtain one piece of information (curriculum) is now having a public meeting to discuss suing me for using the same statutorily prescribed process to obtain other information. The message was clear: ask too many questions about your child’s education and we will come after you.

The most puzzling part of this shameful abuse of government power is that numerous attorneys with whom I’ve consulted cannot figure out the basis of a claim against me. There is no limit to submitting public record requests. Further, the APRA statute contemplates multiple requests made in a 30-day period for the purpose of cost. It states: “[M]ultiple requests from any person or entity to the same public body within a thirty (30) day time period shall be considered one request.” Accordingly, I did not submit 160 requests – I submitted ONE.

I suspect the South Kingstown School Department is displeased that a parent has found a way to legally compel responses to difficult questions surrounding CRT and gender theory in public school. I suspect they are also displeased about my criticism of the antiracism policy and appointment and hiring policy, both of which are under review and breathtakingly racist.

The Access to Public Records Act prohibits a government body from compelling a citizen to justify or explain her requests for public information. But, here I am attending my first in-person school committee meeting where my own name is one of two agenda items in open session. Here I am feeling immense pressure to explain and justify my public information requests to this shameful government body on pains of potential litigation against me. A school committee scheduling a public meeting to discuss “filing lawsuit against Nicole Solas to challenge filing of over 160 APRA requests” is nothing short of an attempt to deprive me of my civil rights to obtain public information about my child’s school.

I can think of a dozen better ways my APRA requests could have been addressed. The Superintendent could have hired a temporary assistant for $12 an hour to retrieve documents. If the school department is concerned about this extra cost of fulfilling my public record requests, it should use its 64 million dollar budget more wisely than to hire a consultant to manage School District’s Facebook page for $50 an hour to post important messages like memes that say “Happy Mother’s Day.”

The school committee also could have reached out to me and asked if they could answer my questions directly. But no. Instead, they sought to publicly vilify a mother.

Although I am shocked that a government body would use the threat of litigation to publicly bully, harass, and intimidate a mother who was advocating for her child’s education, I am not afraid. And I will not stop asking questions.

This shameful retaliation against a parent who demand transparency from public schools will not be tolerated. Every parent needs to keep asking questions. Every parent needs to submit more public records requests when they do not receive answers to their questions from school leaders. Hold your elected representatives accountable and do not allow them to prevent you from protecting and advocating for your children.

If the school system starts to bully you because you are asking too many questions, then you’re winning. Don’t give up.

How to Be an Anti-Antiracist

I have agreed to participate in a "How to Be an Anti-Racist Book Discussion" on my campus (an event based on the currently "all-the-rage" book by Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist).

Here are the discussion points for the participants for the book discussion, which is to be held on Zoom: 

* What did you learn from the book that will help set you on a path to be an antiracist educator?

* In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi shares his own experience with racist thinking. How does his honesty help give us space to acknowledge and name our own racist behaviors and attitudes?

* Kendi writes, “The only way to undo racism is to constantly identify it and describe it—and then dismantle it.” Why does he believe we need to call out racism when we see it, even if it can be uncomfortable to identify?

* The book’s central message is that the opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” The true opposite of “racist” is antiracist. “The good news,” Kendi writes, “is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” What does it mean to have to constantly reaffirm your identity as an antiracist? Is there any benefit to the fact that you can’t just decide you are “not racist” or an antiracist and be done with it?

* What is the first step you, personally, will take in striving to be an antiracist? How will you check yourself and hold yourself accountable if you notice you, or someone else, is being racist?

* Anyone who values immigrants from European countries and devalues immigrants from Latin America is guilty of racism. Have you ever been guilty of this type of racism? Discuss the unique resilience and resourcefulness people possess if they leave everything in their native country behind and immigrate to another, as Kendi examines in the chapter on Ethnicity.

* Identify two practices at the course level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.

* Identify two practices at the department level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.

* Identify two practices at the institutional level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.

* Why do you think it is so hard for people to not assess other cultures from their own cultural standards? How does doing this trap people in racist ideas?

And I gotta say it: Don't get mad a me, bro. 

I know there's a huge push on the right to actually shut down thinking, and, in a few cases, to actually completely embrace and evangelize the most wild claims and conspiracies against the radical left and the Democrats (but I repeat myself). At some point, you have to draw a line on how far you'll go to demonize and destroy the other side -- and to defend yourself against the other side. I'm a good person. I want to make things better: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, then dwell on these things" (Philippians 4:8).  

But being good as I am means I will also defend myself. And to the death. And once again, lately, I'm defending myself against a lot of ideological hatred, obsessive leftist anti-conservative and anti-religious bias, and the once-again leftist condescension and hubris on social media that is even stronger than usual when a leftist Democrat "wins" the White House. Back in 2016, Facebook comments and posts I wrote after the election were reported to my college, and the same trolls have come back out of the woodwork this time around, now that I decided to give Facebook another try (for the new era, same as the old era, alas). But nah. Leftist are not driving me off the site this time. I'm sick and tired of their attacks. Defend against the left's hate. Defend against the left's destruction. Defend against the left's lies: "Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and said to Him, 'All these things I will give you if you will worship me.' Then Jesus said, "Go, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only'" (Matthew 4:8-10).

The left has abandoned the Lord and is doing the work of Satan. There's no other way, as a Christian, to understand this, and thus we must gather strength in faith and gird for the battles ahead. 

So I'm defending myself. I'm holding the line for truth and facts. I mean, ask yourself: Do leftists say and advocate things that have any basis in factual reality (for example, L.A. County's latest total restaurant lockdown is entirely devoid of any basis in scientific fact)? Nah. But frankly, if I'm going to remain employed at my college, then I've (somewhat) got to go along to get along. I've got to at least be professional and collegiate, and it's hard. Longtime readers will know that I've been fighting a ten-year war against radical leftist harassment, cancelling, and multiple attempts to get me fired. And I've been fighting against a college administration that rarely, if ever, gives me the benefit of the doubt, one that in the past has investigated the most absurd claims by anonymous trolls who tagged me and my college in the same tweets (this was after I got a lot of viral coverage for my on-the-ground reporting of the ANSWER/HAMAS protest against Israel, for example, "Communists, Hamas Solidarity Protesters Demand Israel's Extermination in Los Angeles — #ANSWERLA"). It was me who was investigated. I mean, fuck! Trolls had gotten the home phone number of the vice president of academic affairs at my school. They harassed him. They claimed I was "stalking" Cassandra Fairbanks, the erstwhile militant SoCal leftist who volte-face went all Cernovich or something shortly before Trump was elected. Now she's the doyenne of the Gateway Pundit set in D.C. (Weird, I know.) In any case, I had my administration threatening me to get this trolling "stopped," even though I literally had nothing to do with these completely anonymous randos working their evil to make things bad for me. I KNOW WHAT EVIL LEFTISTS DO. Seriously. I had an attorney at one point, and I now have an accommodation with the college on my "private First Amendment activities," as my human resources department labeled my blogging and tweeting at the time. 

Therefore sometimes I have to just roll my eyes at folks, on either side, who literally can't entertain an idea that contradicts their political ideology and positions. I blame the left most of all. But I see conservatives copying the left when they engage in the exact same kinds of speech suppression campaigns. (Wayne Dupree? C'mon.) It's out of control, and an honest person should and will call it out, from wherever it may come. (And one more time, it comes overwhelming from the left.) 

So, yeah, I'm actually reading Kendi's book, with an open mind, for the college's Zoom book discussion, I'm gonna calling be myself an "anti-antiracist" lol. 

And with that, here's Glenn Loury and John McWhorter at the Bloggingheads video. McWorther name-drops Coleman Hughes, at City Journal, "How to Be an Anti-Intellectual," and Kelefa Sanneh, at the New Yorker, "The Fight to Redefine Racism."

More later.

Both Sides Dig In Over Senate Trial

Noah Feldman, who testified during the House impeachment hearings (before Nadler's Judiciary Committee), posted something of a bombshell piece at Bloomberg the other day, "If Trump's Impeached, Then Why Can't a Senate Start Now?"

The whole delay is totally predictable. The Dems are losing the debate over impeachment, which went down on straight party lines. Trump's approval ratings are at the highest points of his presidency. Some House Democrats were grumbling about how they only wanted to "censure" the president, not impeach. Blah, blah.

It's going to the Senate one way or another, mainly because the American people aren't going to stand for the left's shenanigans too much longer.

In any case, at LAT, "Trump impeachment trial: Squaring off in the Senate":

Trump impeachment trial: Squaring off in the Senate https://t.co/Gsi93DcVku

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 23, 2019

WASHINGTON —  A senior White House official and leading Senate Republicans predicted Sunday that congressional Democrats would fail in their bid to force the Senate to summon witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial.
Democrats countered by asking why, if Trump were innocent, he would block the testimony of top aides with direct knowledge of his dealings with Ukraine — actions that led the House of Representatives to approve two articles of impeachment against the president last week.

Following Wednesday’s vote, only the third time in history that the House has impeached a president, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not immediately forward the articles to the Senate for trial.

Democrats said that, in light of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pledge to work in close concert with the White House, they were not satisfied the proceedings would be conducted fairly and impartially. Pelosi said she wanted clarity about what rules the Senate planned to follow before deciding which members of the House would act as the prosecutors, known as managers, of the case in the Senate.

Pelosi (D-San Francisco) is expected to send the articles to the Senate after the holiday recess. Senior White House aide Marc Short said he expected Republicans would make no concessions in return, even though Trump says he wants a quick trial in the GOP-controlled Senate.

“We’re confident this position is untenable, and she’s going to move it along,” Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence and a former White House legislative director, told “Fox News Sunday.”

“She will yield — there’s no way she can hold this position,” he said, referring to Pelosi.

The White House’s current opposition to witnesses in the Senate marks an about-face. Until recently, Trump was insisting he wanted extensive witnesses. He hoped to turn a trial into an opportunity for his lawyers to call prominent Democrats and force them to answer questions about his so-far-groundless allegations of misconduct among that party’s members. McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate Republicans opposed that idea and appeared to have convinced Trump to drop it.

Democratic lawmakers defended Pelosi’s delay.

“I think what she’s just trying to do is make sure the best possible case for a fair trial happens,” said Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Addressing Trump directly, Booker said: “If you’re innocent, have acting Chief of Staff [Mick] Mulvaney come before the Senate, swear to an oath — settle this whole thing.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Pelosi was doing “exactly the right thing” in “focusing a spotlight on the need to have a fair trial in the United States Senate.”

Since an impeachment inquiry began nearly three months ago, Trump has refused any cooperation by the executive branch. The blanket rejection of subpoenas for documents and squelching of appearances by key figures such as Mulvaney and Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo formed the basis for one of the two articles of impeachment, alleging obstruction of Congress. The other accuses Trump of abuse of power.

More than a dozen diplomats and current or former administration officials defied Trump’s instructions and testified in the House proceedings. Those witnesses helped House Democrats make their case that the president withheld crucial military aid and a coveted White House meeting as a means of pressuring Ukraine’s newly elected leader to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Trump, who has never consistently accepted U.S. intelligence findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf, also asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into a debunked theory that Ukraine interfered in that election on behalf of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent.

Although new evidence continues to emerge, Democrats say it is impossible to establish key details of what transpired if Trump blocks testimony by senior aides...

More at WaPo, via Memeorandum, "Impeachment live updates: McConnell, Pelosi dig in on impasse over Trump's Senate trial."