OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

It may be a practical reality that Ukraine has to give up a slice of "Russian speaking" territory to end the killing on both sides.

It may take another hundred years to civilize the Russians. Or maybe a thousand.

Of course Trump doesn't want Americans to die in yet another stupid European war. War is bad for business.

I know, but he thinks he rules most of the World and NATO will fall apart without him. Then, once the unity is broken, he can manipulate the individual countries in any way that suits him.

We need to make ourselves as independent of America as quickly as possible so as to be free to fight whatever threat appears without being coerced because our food supplies and military equipment depend on doing what Trump wants. Can you see the present UK polticians taking the lead and taking the population along with them? It will only happen when things have become so bad that we are clutchng at straws.

He is acting in the interest of the people who elected him. That is a radical concept nowadays.

The next election will test whether they think he has done that ...if there is a next election.

US Presidential elections happen every 4 years. But maybe the sun will go supernova or Climate Change will kill us all before we get to elect Vance.

War has a heavy price in blood and treasure and Trump - quite rightly

- wishes to avoid such expendiiture if it can possibly be avoided. A novel standpoint for a US president, I grant you, but a welcome one AFAIC at least.

For once this is something I agree with Bitrex on. JDV would make an

Perhaps if we hadn't breached the Minsk II Treaty and expanded NATO up to Russia's doorstep, none of this ghastly mess would have happened in the first place. All this s*it can be traced back to that and it was entirely predictable. In fact Henry Kissinger explicitly said so at the time.

Can I remind you, Russia has invaded a neutral country and exploded drones in a NATO country - NATO didn't cause any of this to happen, Russia did.

I don't believe that Russia saying "Now look what you've made me do!" justifies their actions.

Not exactly novel, America didn't get involved in WWII until December

It wasn't popular to send kids to die in yet another european war. Pearl Harbor did it.

The US was keeping England alive before Pearl, at some considerable loss in merchant marine ships and lives. The US was hardly neutral.

Some American volunteers were fighting, too.

The US is a trading partner for Europe and Australia. We are no more dependent on it than we are on all our other trading partners. Trump wants less trade so the rest of us will have to make more of what the US currently supplies. The US may be the sole supplier of some of their more baroque military equipment, and their farm subsidies mean that they do ship cheap food overseas, but Trump isn't in a position to coerce anybody, though he likes to pose as if he is.

They don't have to take any kind of lead. If the US doesn't want to sell stuff, other suppliers will exploit the market that this creates.

Twaddle. International trade is now largely a free market, and if the US wants to sell and buy less stuff, the rest of the world will adapt essentially automatically.

By which you understand the "the people who voted for him". In reality Trump is acting in the interests of the people who paid for his election propaganda - in 2016 that included Putin.

It's a weakness of American "democracy" which has always acted on the principle that "the people that own the country should run the country". Trump put a four multi-billionaires together in the front row at his second inauguration.

Putin has his oligarchs and Trump has his billionaires.

There's nothing radical about that concept. Modern democracy is all about minimising the influence of the rich and discouraging them from excessive rent-seeking. It has been less effective in the US than in western Europe, and the US is worse off in consequence.

His unwillingness to say that Trump lost the 2020 election may cost him the support of some voters.

The US is remarkably tolerant of criminally corrupt politicians, but there are limits.

It might stop Putin killing Ukrainians for a bit, but he'd be emboldened to start nibble away at the other states along his western border. Appeasement isn't a good long term strategy.

The US is also a work in progress. Trump is a definite step backwards.

Pity that George W Bush didn't think the same way. Iraq isn't in Europe but that invasion did turn out to be a remarkably stupid foreign war.

Probably as stupid as Putin's invasion of the Ukraine (if initially more successful).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a reminder of why Russia's neighbours were so keen to join NATO.

The ghastly mess is entirely driven by Russia's territorial ambitions.

Henry Kissinger wasn't big on democracy or the rule of law.

...and the failure of the rest of the World to react to it strongly and quickly enough.

It depends what business you are in.

Which would have triggered another world war.

I'm sorry for Ukraine, but they've committed a grave error trying to snuggle up to NATO too early. It might have worked if they'd waited another 50 years or so, or until relations of Russia with the west had developed into solid mutual trust. Unfortunately, that is now out of the question.

It's really a pity. For a while, it looked like it could become a reality.

Jeroen Belleman