Dakota Beacon

There is a reason we should all study history.  Here is one example.  RIght now, the Trump administration is trying to force-feed a horrible mineral extraction deal to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  He rationalizes it this way:  Under Biden the American people were boondoggled into shipping $383 BILLION to Zelenskyy to “fight” Russian “aggression”.  

We’ve already written a lot about the genesis of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.  No need to restate it here.  The essence is, that special interests in the US - tied to Biden and his family and friends - wanted to provoke this war.  In the words of some of our  leaders, we were in this (financially, anyway) to get rid of Putin and presumably take over Russia.  It sounds . . . well, just weird.  Putin was the target. And according to people like Sen. Lindsay Graham, it is all worth it because the people who are dying are Ukrainian, not American.  In other words, he advocates for proxy wars where we instigate war between nations and let them kill each other until we achieve something we want.  Obviously, no moral compass there at all.

It is true that under Biden, for reasons of his own, American taxpayers sent huge sums of money and massive amounts of war materiel to Ukraine to make this war with Russia last, even though everyone and his monkey’s uncle knows there was never hope of Ukraine defeating Russia.    It is also true that Zelenskyy, our chosen and appointed and installed puppet (having overthrown a Ukrainian election) has “lost” the money and can’t account for it and has no intention of even trying to pay any of it back.   And it is true that Trump was elected to keep us out of just such wars, get a handle on our nation’s finances and make America great for Americans.  That would seem to entail getting that money back.

As it happens, Ukraine has vast mineral wealth, which is one reason the special interests were so interested.  Trump is very well aware of this wealth and has a plan to make some money back on the future extraction, in true real estate investor fashion.  This is what you call “creative negotiating”.  Or at least I do.  So he concocted a scheme by which the U.S., in perpetuity, can receive 50% of all of the wealth taken out of the ground in Ukraine.  In this way we will get our money back.

Now, to a certain extent, this might be a great idea.  But we all know what happened after World War I, when the victorious Allied Powers carved up Europe and in the process totally bankrupted and left without sustenance, Germany.  It didn’t take long.  And it wasn’t good.  Supposedly the lesson learned was not to do this.  Following World War II - the natural result of this peace negotiation of 1919 - we made a big point of helping  Europe to recover.  We spent a lot of money in order to achieve some kind of recovery for Europe and for Germany in particular.  We thought we’d learned how not to have more wars.  

In 1914, a young Canadian woman from Quebec, Julia Grace Wales, proposed a plan for peace negotiations to stop World War I.  She proposed that everyone draw on a map what they hoped to get out of the war.  Was it no more than Alsace-Lorraine, perhaps?  Whatever was the land in dispute could have been drawn on a map to put into perspective just what it was that lives and treasure were being poured into.  Sadly, the leaders of Europe in 1914 were just about like the global powers today - they all had special reasons for their interest in war and the reasons did not bear the light of day.  So nothing ever came of it.  If we took a map of Ukraine and Russia and the two parties drew lines to show what they wanted, you would probably see exactly what is on the map today with no changes.  Yet more than half a million innocent people have died, the nation’s economy and infrastructure and cultural heritage have been destroyed and worse, yet, the institutions of free speech and all that go with it have died there.  Perhaps never to return.  All for nothing.  At least nothing on a map.  But all for some foreign special interest, schemes of kickbacks and whatever else it takes to entice people to kill for it.

Now we are about to make a Mafia-style deal with Zelenskyy.  Now, he has this and more coming to himself.  He would not be in this position if he had exhibited a modicum of character.  Zelenskyy’s best chance was to sign the peace offered by Russia way back in 2022.  In April of that year, the two belligerents had come to an agreement and Putin was pulling his troops out of Ukraine as a token of good faith.  The agreement would have left Ukraine intact for all intents and purposes, with a caveat that Russian speakers in the Donbas would not be persecuted and, finally, that Ukraine would stop efforts to become a member of NATO.  That was the essence of the deal.  No one lost anything, no one got hurt - just an end of war.  At that point there were only some 200 or so dead.  Any death of course is tragic, but now there are some 600,000 dead.  At that point, the US had not committed the terrorist act of blowing up a civilian gas pipeline in the North Sea.  At that point, cities and towns and infrastructure throughout Ukraine had not been demolished.  If you drove through Ukraine in April of 2022, most likely you would not know that a war was being waged.  Today almost every square inch of Ukraine is rubble and its economy is in tatters.  Pictures of Ukraine look worse than pictures of post-WWII Germany.  Nothing has been gained for Ukraine.  Quite the contrary.  

But had Zelenskyy exhibited some character, had he gone to Ankara and sat down with Putin and agreed to stop at that point in the interest of his own people and the benefit of Ukraine, he would have been a hero.  Instead, Biden dispatched his lightweight errand boy, Boris Johnson, late of 10 Downing Street, to snatch this agreement and tear it up.  Or rather instruct Zelenskyy to do so.  And Zelenskyy obliged.  To the eternal misery of his own people, in order to get to the inner circle of the western special interest club.  And so Biden’s administration went about protecting and enriching the investment bankers and other global and American special interests, giving points to Lindsay Graham, to shore up his approval rating with the people who count.  And the people of Ukraine?  Just more misery.

So Zelenskyy showed us he has no character and no moral compass.  He is and has always been a puppet of special interests in the West.  A comedian in drag who just stumbled into world politics and war.  Not that a comedian in drag is necessarily devoid of character, just that Zelenskyy is.  

Now, back to the current situation.  Trump promised to end this war on Day One.  Well, none of us really thought that was a thing.  But we all expect some muscle combined with creative negotiating to bring this to an end at long last.  So Trump thought up this deal to get our money back and stop the fighting.  

Here is my problem with it.  It looks hauntingly like our post WWI treatment of Germany . .  . which resulted in WWII.  We don’t ever want WWIII.  And we are looking at that prospect right now.  And meanwhile, every day hundreds more young men are dying.  Why not temper this demand a little?  What would be wrong with demanding 50% of the extraction of minerals up to whatever is the established amount is that the U.S. spent on this Ukraine adventure?  It would give hope to Ukraine for a future, enable them to get investment in their own country, get U.S. money back to the taxpayers, help maintain a stable government and economy and the U.S. would not look like Simon Legree.  We don’t need to bankrupt other countries or rob them.  We don’t need to throw orphans out in the snow.  We can leave something on the table.  

That is the rule of a good real estate deal - leave something on the table for the other party.  If you don’t, it’s hard to make that deal and it will be very unpleasant either way.  So what about it?  Why not get what we are after - peace and our money back - and leave hope for Ukraine’s future?  

Comments:

What you bring up may very well come to pass. I think Trump is asking for more than he expects to get in the final agreement. I disagree with the news and think putting this all on TV was a great advertisement for MAGA.  My surprise here is that the European countries seem to think they can continue this war without the help of the United States. Their economies are worse than ours and how are they going to afford it? If they can't even kick the Muslim hordes out to their respective countries, good luck pushing Putin's troops out of Ukraine. I think the war will be coming to a close very soon. At least I hope so.  --M.R.