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OPINION

Don't Blame Trump for Putin's Pummel of Ukraine

Don't Blame Trump for Putin's Pummel of Ukraine
Then-President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin talk during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' summit in 2017. (AFP via Getty Images)
 

Deroy Murdock By Tuesday, 01 March 2022 09:46 AM EST Current | Bio | Archive

As predictably as the sun's daily rise in the east, the Left blames one man for last week's egregious, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: President Donald J. Trump. Never mind that Trump is out of the White House and at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, far from the levers of power and eight time zones from control of Russia's armed forces.

● "If you remember, the argument over Trump’s first impeachment was about Trump refusing to give military aid to Ukraine because he imagined he could get some dirt on Joe Biden from the Ukrainians," The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum told MSNBC. "So why didn’t Putin do this during the Trump administration? Because he thought Trump was weakening Ukraine, especially on this ground. The problem of Ukraine being unfortified goes back several years and much of the fault lies in the Trump administration."

Applebaum conveniently forgot that President Trump, in fact, delivered this $391 million in military aid, notwithstanding his supposedly extortive July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukraine's now-Churchillian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

That Sept. 1, Zelenskyy met Vice President Mike Pence in Warsaw and reassured him that he would keep his anti-corruption promises. Ten days later, with the U.S. government's anti-graft concerns alleviated, the military assistance began to flow.

"And after this meeting, the U.S. unlocked the aid and added $140 million," Zelenskyy said. "That’s why there was no blackmail."

Indeed, "KGB Agent" Trump furnished the same 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles (cost: $47 million) that, at this writing, have slowed Russia's brutal incursion into Ukraine.

● "There’s a straight line from Russia’s attack on the US election in 2016 to 1/6 to today’s new invasion of Ukraine," journalist Garrett Graff declared via Twitter. "The chaos that Russia unleashed with the election of Trump weakened us to the point Putin feels confident invading Europe."

● CNN's John Harwood chimed in with similar sentiments: "The Russian thug now attacking Ukraine helped Donald Trump become president because he thought that would someday make this kind of attack easier to pull off."

Again with the Putin-elected-Trump nonsense? Did Putin prevent Hillary Clinton's campaign jet from landing in Wisconsin during the fall 2016 campaign?

Did Putin also steer hundreds of thousands of fervent, energized supporters into Trump's scores of rallies? They added their voices to Trump's 63 million votes. Just the right number arose in just the right states to secure 304 Electoral College votes for Trump — 34 more than the 270 that he needed to secure the White House.

Trump ran for and won the White House, in part, by promising that he would make America's wealthy European allies pay more for the West's common defense, rather than have U.S. taxpayers continue to carry more than their fair share of this collective burden, after more than seven decades since the end of World War II.

Removing 9,500 of the 34,500 American GIs in Germany was part of that policy. Trump argued that U.S. troops have been defending affluent countries since Hitler blew out his brains in the Führerbunker in April 1945.

Most NATO allies followed through with their pre-Trump pledges to pay at least 2% of their GDPs into defense. Germany, arguably Europe's wealthiest nation, stubbornly refused to meet this obligation — never mind that they already had dedicated themselves to do so.

When Chancellor Angela Merkel dug in her heels and, in essence, broke her promise, Trump threatened to reduce U.S. forces in Germany — which he did.

That is the genesis of that policy. Not an alleged Trump bid to make life easy for Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.

Trump also blocked the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, specifically to deprive Putin of natural-gas revenue and prevent Germany from hooking itself to the Kremlin for gas, which would give Putin the priceless means to blackmail Germany and its neighbors into doing whatever he wants, lest he freeze them in the winter.

Biden, in his brilliance, reversed this policy, removed anti-Nord Stream sanctions, and approved the completion of Putin's blackmail pipeline.

Biden boneheadedly did this just after Russian hackers blocked the U.S. Colonial Pipeline, triggering gas lines at filling stations from Washington, D.C. to the Georgia-Florida border. They also sabotaged JBS USA, America's largest beef producer last June.

The Gatestone Institute's Soeren Kern reported on Feb. 15 that Biden also withdrew Trump's backing for the EastMed Pipeline, a proposed conveyance that would carry natural gas from Israel, through Greece, into Western Europe.

Biden's unilateral move shocked U.S. allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel — the project's chief participants, further reduced Europe's access to non-Russian gas, and increased the likelihood that its nations would become gas junkies with Putin as their dealer.

Biden's Inauguration Day termination of the Keystone XL Pipeline was the first step in demolishing the U.S. energy independence that kept oil and gas prices low, curbed Putin's revenues from Russia's sole major export, and curtailed his international ambitions for want of resources.

Since Jan. 20, 2021, Biden's recklessness helped increase crude oil prices from $53.35 per barrel of West Texas Intermediate to $95.72 on Monday — up 81%.

Such Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement emboldened Putin to roll tanks into Ukraine — something he scrupulously avoided on Trump's watch, but which he viciously perpetrated under G.W. Bush (Georgia, August 2008), Obama (Crimea, February 2014), and Biden (Ukraine, February 2022).

President Trump earned brickbats last week for calling Putin "smart," presumably as in "crazy like a fox." He chose his words far better on Saturday when he told his supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, "The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling, an outrage and an atrocity that should have never been allowed to occur. We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all."

Donald J. Trump's support for Vladimir Putin is another Left-wing myth. Furthermore, rumors of Joe Biden's national-security prowess are greatly exaggerated.

Aaron Cichon contributed research to this opinion piece.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Read Deroy Murdock's Reports — More Here.

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.


Murdock
As predictably as the sun's daily rise in the east, the Left blames one man for last week's egregious, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine: President Donald J. Trump. Never mind that Trump is out of the White House and at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, far from the levers of power..
putin
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2022-46-01
Tuesday, 01 March 2022 09:46 AM
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