The current, and typical unhinged barking moonbat, leftist talking point is that Putin waited till Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine because it would have hurt Trump if he did it while Trump was in office, and Trump was controlled by Putin, right? These people are nuts, and, while their voices are loud and end up in the news a lot, most Americans are sane enough not too believe it. In reality, Trump held Putin in check
Russia-Ukraine crisis: Biden’s twin failures on energy and foreign policy gave Putin tools to invade
When it comes to both foreign policy and his liberal energy agenda, President Joe Biden has embarrassed our nation. I can sum up President Biden’s incompetence in these areas with one simple story: a tale of two pipelines.
On one hand, Biden blocked the crucial Keystone XL Pipeline, signaling to the world that American energy independence is no longer a priority. On the other hand, he green-lit the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, strengthening Russia’s energy hold on Europe. And in the process, he gave Russia the leverage to create the crisis that we are witnessing unfold in Ukraine. Let me begin with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden’s policy failure on that score.
Until last year, getting tough on Russia was one of the few issues that seemed to unite conservatives and progressives. When I served on the House Armed Services Committee, my colleagues all recognized the real threat that Russia poses to our nation. In 2019, Congress passed a bipartisan measure to impose sanctions on the Russian company that is building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. The sanctions had strong support from both Democrat leadership and the Trump administration.
America was a net exporter of natural gas, so, European nations didn’t have to rely on Russian gas. American could sell it to them. And what happened next? Why, Biden waived those legally passed sanctions
Some theorize that President Biden simply reversed an important accomplishment of the Trump administration for spite. A more sinister theory suggests that because his son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, President Biden had, at a minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest. To make matters worse, Hunter “received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow,” according to a Congressional report.
Doing it out of spite pretty much is par for the course with the Brandon administration.
It is impossible to say for certain whether such a conflict exists. But leaders of both parties were sure that blocking this Russian pipeline was the right thing to do. And by allowing it to move forward, the United States lost vital leverage over Moscow. Biden is now scrambling to regain this leverage he lost, but it is too little, too late. His new sanctions come after Russian troops have already moved into Ukraine. Unfortunately, it appears the damage is done.
Not to be too cynical, but, what will happen is the European Union will start relaxing their sanctions within a year, because they need Russian natural gas. And it is mostly the EU imposing sanctions, not individual European nations. Sure, a lot of those nations are condemning Russia and Putin, but, they aren’t really Doing Something. Regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, the sanctions will be relaxed. You might see them relaxed next winter. Parts of Ukraine will be controlled by Russia, and everyone will just move on. Remember Crimea? Are there any real sanctions with teeth for that Putin adventure in 2014, when Obama was president and Joe was VP?
What makes Biden’s approach to Nord Stream 2 so much worse is the fact that he took a completely opposite approach to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have benefitted my home state of South Dakota and our entire nation. On his first day as President, Biden blocked Keystone XL from moving forward. This pipeline would have been able to deliver more than 800,000 daily barrels of Canadian crude to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
Unfortunately, President Biden took a shortsighted approach to appease his liberal base. Americans are seeing the results at the pump. Gas prices continue to rise. And we have lost our ability to counter Russian energy policy because we are significantly weakened from an energy production standpoint.
Biden is doing everything he can, from day 1, to reduce the ability of America to have inexpensive fossil fuels. While using a lot himself.
Victor David Hansen has a long piece explaining just how weak Obama (with Joe) was and how weak Joe is now, contrasting with what Trump did to contain Putin’s aggression. It can sometimes be so, so simply.
CNN trots out a piece which is essentially the old trope of Putin being on “the wrong side of history.” History says he’ll get away with it, just like Georgia and Crimea. Sadly. And, with Biden being so weak and ineffective, Putin might even get more frisky.
Finally, there’s a thought in the back of my mind that Biden wanted this to happen. Why? Because the U.S. economy is not doing well under Biden.
— Jack Poso ???????? (@JackPosobiec) February 23, 2022
Natural gas was coming down till Biden, then it skyrocketed. Everything is going up. The root causes are not Biden, but, China’s Wuhan flu, yet, most moves Biden has made make the situation much worse. Goading Putin into going into Ukraine, triple dog daring…remember, it wasn’t that long ago that the Ukrainian president was telling Biden to chill, to stop pushing Putin…Russia to invade. And now everything bad happening in the U.S. economy can be Blamed on Putin. The media will be happy to comply. They already are. A great way to deflect and allow Biden and Dems to blame Russia going into the mid-terms.
When you stop teaching history, history will teach you.
So Kristi Noem is running for president! Yay.
Yes, Putin will get away with it. Psychopaths don’t respond to normal disincentives. Economic sanctions might generate some resistance within Russia but Putin is a murderous dictator so critics will “fall” out of windows. Putin’s goal is to gather voluntary satellites, or involuntary if necessary. Putin desires a new cold war. Clearly Putin is still afraid of NATO. For now.
The winger talking point that ‘tough trump’ kept Putin is check is obvious nonsense. trump was essentially working for Putin, weakening NATO (even calling it obsolete), weakening sanctions, honoring Putin with summits, etc etc etc… you know all the stories. Putin, as irrational as he is, has a long plan which is to recreate the Soviet Union, or at least, A Soviet Union. He would like Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, at a minimum, back in the fold. He’s in no hurry.
Look for more nations in the region to apply to NATO. Hello Finland and Sweden.
Why trump adamantly disliked NATO is hard to understand unless one factors in Putin’s wishes. trump was and is very naive regarding the murderous dictator Putin.
Well, he should be in a hurry: he’s 69 years old!
President Trump wanted the Europeans to pay more for NATO’s upkeep.
However, President Trump understood one thing the neoconservatives — who all seem to be Democrats these days — don’t want to admit: at a time in which
the Soviet UnionRussia has more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world, extending NATO to Russia’s borders was just poking the bear, and simply wasn’t very smart.We are now obligated, by treaty, to defend Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia if nuclear-armed Russia moves to take them. Latvia is roughly the same size as West Virginia, Lithuania just a hair bigger, and Estonia is smaller than them. Forty of our fifty states are larger than any of the Baltic nations. President Trump was smart enough to realize that we couldn’t defend them, couldn’t stop Russia if President Putin sent in the tanks.
This is a lesson that the dummkopf from Delaware, if he didn’t already know it, is learning now; we can try to punish Russia with temporary sanctions, but we can’t stop Russia from conquering the eastern NATO countries.
Of course, Russia attacked Ukraine when Barack Hussein Obama was President, and attacked Ukraine when Joe Biden is President, but didn’t attack anybody while Donald Trump was President, so, obviously, to the mage from Missouri, Vladimir Putin sending in the troops in 2014 and 2022 was all Donald Trump’s fault!
Mr Dana does not understand the Mar-a-Lago Moron’s strategy for ridding the world of NATO. The Moron called NATO ‘obsolete’. Cons have always disliked Europeans. nuCons hate Europe AND America, and for some reason are terrified of the Russian ‘strongman’. Mr Dana seems content to let Russia take the Baltic nations. After all, they used to be part of the Soviet Union. The ‘libertarian’, Mr Dana, wants to enable superpowers to take whatever land they want. After all, big fish eat little fish – it’s the way of nature! If Russia wants Poland, then Germany, then France, etc etc, that’s OK with Mr Dana.
The kage of Kintuckistan thinks Putin is not responsible for the invasion. Like all of the right, he wants to blame America for Putin’s actions. To them, Putin is the victim.
Why, then, if President Trump somehow ‘enabled’ President Putin, didn’t Vladimir Vladimirovich send the tanks in while Mr Trump was still in office? After all, according to you, Mr Trump was just Mr Putin’s lap dog, and thus, had he sent in the tanks in 2019 or 2020, whatever sanctions were imposed would be less severe, right?
Once again we see the propaganda from the left. I pointed out, as I have several times, the strategic situation, that Russia is right there, while NATO had hundreds and hundreds of miles to cross to get to the fighting, and the United States would have to cross the Atlantic Ocean to bring power to bear. Those are truths which Mr Dowd has not challenged, but which he interprets as me “want(ing)” Russia to take what Mr Putin wishes, me being “content” to allow Russia to take the Baltic States. A clue for you: pointing out the facts does not in any way imply that I like the facts; pointing out history does not mean I’m happy with it.
The Kintuckistani typed: why… didn’t (Putin) send the tanks in while Mr Trump was still in office
Probably a lot of reasons, right? One is because Putin wanted The Teflon Don to win in 2020. Duh. Putin now hopes the invasion will help the nuGOP chances in 2022 and 2024, although that’s not his only reason, or even his main reason, for invading this week. Perhaps Putin needed time to build up his forces. Perhaps he hoped that Don and Rudy’s excellent adventure in Ukraine would destabilize the nation. It did, but the wrong nation, sadly.
Do you feel The Don’s strategy was to ingratiate and embarrass himself before Putin and attack NATO… then if Putin attacked Ukraine, The Don would withdraw his ‘love’ for Vlad and support NATO? Possibly. Maybe The Don is a savvy genius like Putin.
The sage from St Louis wrote:
Sweden has long protected its neutrality, including through World War II. It’s difficult to imagine the Swedes changing that now.
Finland? Finland lost the Winter War with the USSR in 1940, not because the Finns were bad, but because, after a poor early performance, Josef Stalin sent masses hordes against the Finns. Finland is in land communication with Russia, and NATO forces are far away, and separated by sea; NATO defending Finland would be a hugely difficult task.
Even with the world’s mightiest industrial plant, already ramped up to provide Lend-lease war materiel to Britian and the USSR, it took us 2½ years to marshal the forces in England to invade Nazi-held France, and almost another year to finish off Germany, which was fighting against the Soviets at the same time. In war, distance and logistics are huge factors, and it would be impossible to defend Finland against a Russian attack without the men and machinery already in place.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required us to send reservists and National Guard units to help with the fighting, and while we killed Saddam Hussein, those countries aren’t exactly functioning Western democracies today. My daughter, an Army Corps of Engineers reservist, was deployed to Kuwait in 2017, and wound up, most of the way through her deployment, being sent to Afghanistan. It was her choice: volunteer for Afghanistan or Syria, where we supposedly weren’t. We sent reservists to Syria!
NATO simply cannot defend what it is supposed to defend; we have ‘trip-wire’ forces there, American soldiers whose function is to get killed by the Russians so that we’ll be outraged and mobilize our country to go to Europe and fight the Russkies.
And yet the odious Putin has yet to invade a NATO nation.
But we understand that the Kolonel from Kintuckistan supports voiding NATO, as does Putin.
There actually is an Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, to which, Alas! I have yet to be named!
The obvious question is: do you dispute anything I have said about the strategic problems for NATO? Facts are facts, Mr Dowd, and you have yet to dispute them on this subject, yet you claim that I want to “Void” NATO, “as does Putin,” thereby trying to say that I must be somehow supporting the President of Russia.
Of course, I have said that no, I don’t want to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia over Latvia, something you seem to have found offensive. Does that mean that you would support declaring war on Russia if Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the troops rolling into Riga? That, after all, is what the North Atlantic Treaty obligates us to do!
Why do you pro-Putin nuGOPhers blame everyone BUT the megalomaniacal, murderous dictator Putin for this?
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, has sent natural gas and oil prices skyrocketing. And this was not a virus that emerged in their country, it was a deliberate act by a psychopathic despot.
What is your fascination with Putin? We’ve yet to hear one word of criticism for the actions of Putin and Russia from the American right.
Why does Teach (and the right) hate America? Heil Putin??
Perhaps the US needs to give nukes to all the threatened nations around the world. Maybe this will keep Xi and Putin in check. But we doubt it.
Jeff,
If you have a bad, rabid dog that is securely fenced in and all is well. And a demented, corrupt, idiot opens the gate, it is not the fault of the dog as to the ultimate result.
Fuck joe biden
As we suspected, the davebot1619 is a Russian robot. It could be part of the Nobelium group of hackers.
Anyway, the Russians and the demented Putin, just like the American traitors who support him, want the free world to place the blame on anyone BUT the vile Putin.
Less than 2 years.
Mission accomplished.
#LetsGoBrandon
#FuckJoeBiden
Bwaha! Lolgf
Ya know dOwd, you can never offer a cogent explanation or argument to anything your leftists support and invariably default to the name calling. So right out of the box you’re gonna start calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you or who is not for jumping into war like the Democrats and their retarded leader want Putin supporting traitors. You really have zero class, dude (if you really are a dude).
Tell us the exact reason we should go to war with Russia over Ukraine. Other than Hunter and “the Big Guy” can make more millions.
Let’s go Brandon, countries to bomb, people to kill. You’ll show that so-in-so Trump a thing about Russia!
Marl0n,
We are not advocating war. Neither is President Biden, who has said that the US will send personnel into this nasty mess.
Why do you celebrate the ‘savvy genius’, Vlad Putin’s unprovoked and deadly invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy in Europe?
Do you think The Teflon Don sees his millions from Russia being cut off by President Biden’s economic sanctions that stops the flow of money from Russia to the US?
There is nothing wrong with criticizing President Biden’s policies. My question is why many rightists are in awe of the murderous Putin? Is it because he is a murderous despot who has his critics assassinated, even in other countries?
Because the Obama and Biden administrations poked the Bear. Russia was content to let things sit as long as the West didn’t break their promises about not expanding NATO into the Ukraine. But when the Obama administration helped orchestrate the 2014 coup and install a pro-nazi anti-Russian government, and then the Biden administration made noises about expanding NATO to the Ukraine (breaking our promise to Russia when it broke apart from the Soviet Union) we crossed a line that Putin/Russia had been warning and warning us about.
We essentially threatened Russia with a reverse Cuban Missle Crisis, and they are reacting exactly as they told us they would.
This war is our fault for having a fumble-but State Department, foreign policy, and CIA.
I am not pro-Putin. I frankly don’t care how this war turns out. The US has no legitimate national interest in Ukraine. But I am willing to admit a lot of the fault of this war lies with us.
This has nothing to do with “defending democracy” because the Ukraine is far from being democratic. That is nothing but a propaganda phrase used by our Deep State that wants to get us entangled in this clusterfuck.
rc: install a pro-nazi anti-Russian government
Does ruralcounsel work for the Russian regime??
Poking the bear? Why is the US right so afraid of the murderous despot Putin?
Like almost all nuCons, ruralcounsell fears democracy and “we the people”. And he blames America for the actions of this trumpiss despot, Putin.
HeckuvaJobJoey!
We knew you could do it.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
#LetsGoBrandon
#FuckJoeBiden
Bwaha! Lolgf
Brandon’s secret weapon… https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-warns-russia-that-if-they-dont-stop-he-will-deploy-deadly-trans-admiral
Not to mention this Devine slob can give every Russian soldier a yeast infection and jock itch simultaneously.