The Long Shadow of Hillary Clinton Much of the Ukraine problem can be traced back to the failed presidential candidate. by Alan Joseph Bauer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-long-shadow-of-hillary-clinton/
While one cannot blame all of the world’s problems on the former first lady and senator, much of the trouble in Ukraine is related to her actions.
Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. One of the hallmarks of great comedians is their ability to read the room. When my high school had a very ugly and contentious merger with its sister school (New Trier East and West), a traveling group from Second City came to perform. One of the comedians was asked about the merger, which had made its way into the local papers. He whipped out his Kipling and, without losing a beat, stated, “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” He was met with wild applause by the crowd.
The president of Ukraine did not know how to read the Oval Office on Friday. Zelensky supposedly was coached by Obama retreads Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and others. If the story is true and they told Ukraine’s president to be tough with Trump, he got some bad advice. One of the strangest features of American governance is the potential for whiplash changes in policy. In dictatorships or even European-style coalition rule, things either remain unchanged or change at a glacial pace. The winner of Germany’s recent elections promised to deal with the problems of large-scale immigration. Once he saw that he could form a coalition without AfD, he said the status quo wasn’t so bad. But not in America. When you change parties, policies can spin around 180 degrees in a second. Somehow, the Obama brain trust tried to convince Zelensky that it was just like the days of Biden, though it was not.
If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election. Without evidence, Hilary Clinton and John Podesta claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge and that through Russian interference in the US election, he was elected president. If you could get the ex-secretary of state away from her glass of Chardonnay for a few minutes, she would no doubt repeat the same: the election was stolen from her, and Vladimir Putin was the culprit. These claims had profoundly negative repercussions in the world. The first was the “Russian Collusion” investigation that wasted two and a half years of the Trump administration. Nothing was found, and the millions spent on Robert Mueller’s dream team were wasted, other than it hamstrung the president and supercharged the support, often bipartisan, for Ukraine, a country known for widespread corruption.
During the first Trump presidency, there should have been a series of photo ops of Trump and Putin at Camp David and at Putin’s lair in Sochi. Like Gorbachev with Reagan and Thatcher, Putin and Trump should have started a new era of respect and cooperation. China was emerging as the major economic and military threat to the world. Pulling a reverse Nixon and bringing Russia closer and away from China would have been a big win for the United States. China would have had to rethink its aggressive moves in Asia and its world-conquering “belt and road” initiative, with Russia being out of the picture. But with Clinton’s accusations and the snowball effect of media and investigations, Putin was radioactive for Trump. They could not meet regularly, and any approach to Russia would be labeled a quid pro quo for helping Trump get elected. A strong US-Russian alliance could have prevented the present Ukraine war and allowed for some type of settlement between the countries on the issues of Crimea and the Donbas. One has to recall that it was Nuland who said that she paid $5 billion to “rent a mob” to get rid of the democratically elected Ukrainian leader, who was leaning towards Moscow. Zelensky’s rise was not organic; whereas Trump honestly owed Putin nothing, Zelensky owed his rise to the USAID crowd who helped get him into office.
It was said at the time that the American ambassador to Iraq may have signaled to Saddam that the US would not mind his grabbing Kuwait; what followed was a great deal of destruction and bloodshed. Vladimir Putin cited Clinton’s rolling him on Libya as a reason not to trust the US. The US, under Obama, got Putin to vote in favor of the UN plan to deal with Libya. After Clinton received permission from the Security Council, she went in and eventually brought about the then-Western-leaning Qaddafi’s demise. She thought herself so pithy when she commented, “We came. We saw. He died.” Her ambassador to Libya later died because Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton did not want to admit that Al-Qaeda was behind the consular attack so close to the 2012 election. Those who died in Benghazi were collateral damage to their political ambitions. No military rescue was undertaken during the hours-long siege, though planes in Italy were waiting for instructions that never came.
One must always be careful attributing major historical trends to one person or a single event. Still, the debacle in Ukraine might have been avoidable if Hilary Clinton had not fabricated a case of Donald Trump being a Russian asset. Trump himself has written that the current war would not have started had he continued as president in 2020; Vladimir Putin seemed to suggest the same in comments he made recently. President Zelensky was playing from an old playbook to a new administration that wants the war to end and wants mineral sales to cover the huge outlays made by the US. Joe Biden never suggested trying to recoup America’s outlays. Donald Trump and JD Vance read Zelensky the Riot Act, and he was caught off-guard. His options are either to crawl back to Trump and head towards a ceasefire preceding a settlement he will not fully like or try his hands with the Europeans. I saw a quote from him Sunday morning that if the US is out of the arms-providing business, he will “demand” $250 billion from Europe. Apparently, the flight from Washington to London was not long enough for him to rethink his tactics. He may be able to scare the Europeans into ponying up this massive sum with the threat that if Kyiv falls, Berlin, Paris, and London are next. Trump wasn’t buying it, and unlike a good quarterback, Zelensky had no audible to call when cornered by the president and his bulldog vice president. The Europeans are now talking boots on the ground. I guess they, too, need a Vietnam of their own.
It has been suggested that Putin attacked Ukraine 3 years ago because Nuland and others in the Biden administration wanted to get Ukraine into NATO—as one more punishment for the man so detested by Democrats. Putin did not wait for his neighbor’s ascension and sent the tanks rolling towards Kyiv. After 1.5 million dead, wounded, and captured, the time has come to end this war. Ukraine cannot win it, and Trump’s offer to facilitate an end is the best deal that Zelensky will get—even if he does not realize it. The Europeans were too weak to win and would only prolong the death and destruction. I don’t think Zelensky’s pride will let him return to Trump and ask for negotiations in exchange for the still unsigned minerals agreement. And that truly is a shame.
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