Not after continuing to green-light and arm Israel’s genocidal madness on Gaza and elsewhere. And not, most especially, after fronting for an even bigger defense budget than the bloated $1.0 trillion per year monstrosity that the UniParty already had in place.
Indeed, Washington’s $1 trillion war machine is an inherently metastasizing historical aberration on the world stage. It thrives in a tax-adverse democracy only by virtue of funding a vast ecosystem of arms merchants, think tanks, NGOs, PACs, lobbies and war-mongering politicians, which perpetuate a false narrative of foreign perils, threats and enemies that are largely its own self-justifying fabrications.
Still, Trump should get his Nobel prize anyway for breaking out of the Warfare State’s utterly false narrative on Ukraine and blundering his way into an end to the hideous proxy war on Russia being conducted there.
Indeed, you don’t have to read too much between the lines of the Alaska summit to see that a peace fix is in – perhaps to be inked a few weeks hence in Moscow; and that the Donald’s guests at the White House today – the un-useful idiot, Zelensky, and the clown car of European leaders – Macron, Merz, Starmer, Rutte and van der Leyen, especially – will be afforded an opportunity to like it or lump it, as they appear to be doing during this Oval Office stunt staged by the Donald.
The tragedy and outrage, of course, is that the main points of the peace deal coming out of the summit could have been achieved years ago. And sans the sheer waste of $150 billion of US weapons and economic aid, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the utter destruction of a country that was essentially taken hostage by the neocon hegemonists and military-industrial complex arms merchants that ruled the roost on the banks of the Potomac until the Donald stumbled into the Oval Office the second time.
After all, anyone with even a modicum of common sense, historical knowledge and minimum regard for human decency should find nothing objectionable in the following apparent “Elmendorf Meeting” formula, And that’s notwithstanding all the Munich-betrayal howling by neocon politicians and MIC bag carriers in the establishment media on both sides of the Atlantic.
Key Elements Of The Elmendorf Formulation:
- A comprehensive peace deal and sustainable settlement of “root causes” of the current conflict will be agreed upon first to be followed by a cease fire later, not vice versa as had been demanded by Zelensky and his European supporters.
- Ukraine won’t join NATO or function as a stalking horse to bring NATO’s military capacities to Russia’s back yard.
- The four Russian-speaking provinces plus Crimea that voted to secede from Ukraine will be permitted to do so after some minor and symbolic “swapping” of territories around the current line of contact. That is, Russia would get all of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (i. e. the Donbass) in return for not attempting to capture the small areas of Zaporizhia and Kherson that are still on the Ukraine side of the contact line.
- A fig-leaf of security guarantees will be afforded to the rump of Ukraine via an ad hoc squad of European, US and other guarantors. This will provide an “article five” type security “commitment” on paper, albeit without any real mechanism to activate and execute it–including no American “peacekeeping” boots on the ground.
- The rump state of Ukraine will by quasi-demilitarized via a sharp limit on the size of its armed forces and the nature and lethality of its armaments.
- The Trump-threatened secondary sanctions against India and China for buying Russian oil will be withheld to enable the execution phases of the deal to go forward.
- No further arms or intelligence support to Ukraine will be provided by the US or NATO during the peace process implementation.
- A milestone-based lifting of US/NATO primary sanctions on Russia will be phased in—so long as Russia adheres to the deal and stays in the territorial/political lane specified in the upcoming agreement.
- Various aspirational future economic opportunities for both sides will be appended to the deal as an expression of Trump-style deal-making.
- Free elections will be held in the rump state of Ukraine upon the implementation of the peace treaty and the exile of current corrupt Ukrainian leaders including Zelensky.
The heart of the deal, of course, is the territorial partition. As is evident from the map below, 95% of Luhansk (dark red area) and 75% of the Donetsk oblast are already under Russian military control and that will go to 100%. On the other hand, the 20% to 25% of Kherson and Zaporizhia claimed by Russia will remain under Ukrainian control (light red area) as is presently the case on the battlefield. This is a far better deal for Ukraine than is likely to occur upon further combat, where its forces have been in relentless retreat for months.
After the proposed “swap”, therefore, roughly half of historic Novorossiya (New Russia) will be ceded back to Russia – from whence it came after being settled and developed during the time of Catherine the Great (late 18th century) by Russians. Indeed, the whole of Novorossiya had been an integral part of the late Czarist Empire during the 19th century. It ended-up inside the borders of what had been a tiny kingdom along the Dnieper River of Cossack warriors and brigands in 1922 for reasons of convenience to the bloody Bolshevik rulers who had sized power during the war-induced collapse of Czarist Russia in October 1917.
Likewise, Crimea lasted as an integral Russian territory even longer. After being purchased by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman’s in 1783, Crimea was solidly Russian – even through the time of the Crimean War of the 1850s when Russian nationalists turned back the imperial advances of England and France; and remained so until 1954, when the Ukrainian-born Soviet tyrant, Nikolai Khrushchev, emerged atop the post-Stalin power struggle and rewarded his Ukrainian comrades on the Politburo with Crimea as a door prize.
It is to be taken for granted that the Donald knows nothing of this history. Then again, perhaps an alert publicist at the White House might note that the Donald’s deal at least unwinds half of the Soviet tyrants’ border drawing with respect to Novorossiya.
Even more to the point, the ethno-linquistic map below fits like a hand-in-glove to the Elmendorf Settlement. That is, when the anti-Russian and neo-nazi nationalists took-over the Kiev government during the CIA-NED-State Department sponsored coup in February 2014, the Russian speaking areas in the yellow portions of the map moved to succeed in a manner echoing America’s own Declaration of Independence against a tyrannical ruler.
It was only the subsequent US/NATO funded attack by Kiev on these succeeding provinces that started the Ukrainian civil war and ultimately brought about the Russian intervention in 2022.
The fact is, when it comes to sovereignty the present borders of the fake state of Ukraine are what actually materialized under the point of machine guns a century ago. What the Trumpian settlement will actually do is restore the more natural ethno-linquisitic borders that encompassed Novorossiya for a century and one-half prior to the Soviet tyranny.
In any event, the map below tells you all you need to know about why much of the Donbass revolted and sought separation after the ne0-Nazi Maidan coup. To wit, one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw Russian as an official language for tens of millions of inhabitants in these yellow-marked areas whose mother-tongue was Russian!
For want of doubt, here is a map of the last free presidential election in Ukraine in 2010. The pro-Russian candidate who won, Janukovych, received upwards of 80-90% of the vote in the darker blue areas of the Donbass east and southern rim of the Black Sea. These are the very same territories which are heavily Russian-speaking per the ethno-linguistic map above, and which will be permitted to succeed from Ukraine on the settlement implicit in the Elmendorf Deal per the second map above.
Would it actually be too much trouble for the hyperventilating neocons in Washington and the mainstream press to just eyeball these three maps? What is happening is actually a clean-up of 100 years of misbegotten history, not a betrayal of the Ukrainian nation, whatever that actually is; or, most certainly, not a repudiation of Imperial Washington’s phony “rules-based order”.
The truth is, hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have died because a viper’s nest of Washington neocons overthrew the winner of the 2010 election as shown below, thereby igniting the bloodbaths and demolition derby’s that have now led to the imminent partition of a communist-built nation that was never meant to last.
Vote Distribution of the 2010 Ukraine Presidential Election
Moreover, the claim that this history is irrelevant and that the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed the current Ukrainian borders – drawn by communist tyrants or not – is risible beyond belief. After all, the Budapest Memorandum was inked at the very moment that President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, the German Chancellor and numerous others had also guaranteed Moscow that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”.
As shown below, so much for the utter hypocrisy of the Washington neocons! Since 1997 14 former Warsaw Pact satellite have joined NATO. So bravo to the Donald for having been too lazy to have absorbed their mendacious narrative.
Meanwhile, the European clown car is lined-up in the Oval Office trying to save their own political hides after years of leading their countries down the destructive primrose path of proxy war on Russia. In the case of Germany especially, they have badly wounded their own economies and living standards in subservience to the sanctions and economic warfare leveled against Russia by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.
No wonder the Donald has rendered them desperate. The upcoming Elmendorf Settlement will reveal them (save for Giorgia Meloni) to be knaves and incompetents who deserve to be driven from office at the earliest possible date.
Who’s attending the crucial Trump-Zelensky meeting in Washington?
Yesterday was a good day for world peace. Zelensky put on a suit (of sorts) and kept his mouth shut—even as the Clown Car of his European sponsors dutifully sat on the floor of the Oval Office cross-legged and feigning rapt attention to the random stream of consciousness emanating from behind the Resolute Desk.
So, yes, at last the peace fix is in with respect to ending the madness of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. We believe that within weeks there will be a crowning summit in Moscow where the Donald will earn his Nobel Peace Prize, owing to some version of the potential 10-point agreement being inked into a binding agreement.
Alas, the tricky part will be to gussy-up a completely hollow “security guarantee” (item # 4) that will tiptoe around Putin’s understandable red line that there be no NATO boots on the ground in the rump of Ukraine, posing as peacekeepers and trip-wires for the “article-5 like” guarantee that will be included in the deal.
Actually, we think that won’t be so difficult, either. The Donald has already taken the possibility of American boots on the ground off the table and nobody wants Russian-hating Brits or a return to the Russian borders of German-speakers in uniform for the third time in 110 years.
Then again, it is likely that French soldiers bearing muskets that have never been fired and dropped only once could form the nucleus of an “observers” force. The latter might include a pick-up squad of UN draftees from Algeria, Azerbaijan and Argentina, if they start with the “A”s.
In any event, any fig leaf of rag-taggers will do. That’s because the giant lie upon which the whole Ukraine insanity has been predicated is about to be eviscerated. To wit, this has always been about Washington’s aggression against Russia in the form of the pointless and duplicitous expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep after 1997; the US-instigated Maidan coup in February 2014; and the NATO supplied and funded attack by the neo-Nazi putschists in Kiev on the breakaway Russian speaking provinces of the Donbass and the south, who were fleeing for their lives.
Accordingly, we are about to witness the geopolitical equivalent of the noiseless tree falling in the empty forest. That is, there will be no Russian forces on the move westward at all.
The truth is, Putin is way too smart, realistic and civilized to attempt to recreate the Soviet Empire as per the false narrative of the Washington/NATO neocons. He never wanted to even rule the Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, Hungarian, Romanian and others nationalities who inhabit the left bank of the Dnieper River and on west and north in Ukraine.
And that’s to say nothing of shooting his own country in the economic and political kneecaps by attempting to occupy and subdue Russian-hating Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Germans, Danes, and the inhabitants of the hapless bankrupt socialist states further west. And heaven forfend, who in their right mind would think that the degenerate, wokified socialist precincts of the British Isles are any kind of prize whatsoever?
Indeed, the chutzpah of the British pols like Starmer and the UK nomenklatura is a wonder to behold. There is not a would be conqueror on the planet today (or in the known past) who would see anything from the cliffs of Dover to the Scottish Out Stack that is worth the candle of invasion.
In short, the very idea of an expansionist Russia and Putin-with-a-mustache is an utterly bogus lie. There is no there there. Whatsoever.
And the fact that nothing untoward is going to happen when the Donald partitions and cuts loose the fake state of Ukraine is the real reason that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. The impending “Elmendorf Deal” will knock the props out from under the whole case for Empire and the very business of the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.
At length it will actually make pursuit of the dream that Trump ventured early in his second term about world disarmament and a 50% cut in defense budgets a realistic possibility. That’s because once it becomes clear that there was nothing to the Russian Menace, the case against Red China will become all the more dubious, as well.
After all, the red rulers of Beijing have staked their very tenure in power and likely their lives on the prosperity emanating from becoming the Factory Floor of the planet. And no one, especially the wily comrades of Beijing, are foolish and stupid enough to make war on $3.5 trillion per year of global export customers.
So it just may be that these words the Donald spoke upon being sworn to office for the second time will turn out to be the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”
At the time we said, yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there seemed will nigh insuperable.
But with the Ukraine Peace Settlement now in tow what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you reach the point were tabling this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized heads of America’s purported leading enemy nations becomes feasible, everything – and we do mean everything – heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.
After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $1.0 defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.
That’s because once you ixnay the Russian (and Chinese) Menace and essentially euthanize NATO, as will now happen in the wake of the Elmendorf Settlement, you can bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.
Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify below, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.
And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need! It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.
Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to invalidating every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to the nation’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence – the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the American homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.
At the present time and for the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland – Russia and the People’ Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.
With respect to Russia and despite all utter demonetization of Putin, which hopefully well now be undone, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillion of commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.
Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the aforementioned arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London – assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.
In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat because it will eventually attack, occupy, pacify and militarize the entire continent of Europe! Well, unless stoutly resisted by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.
After all, that’s the only scenario by which Moscow could possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not the Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, Russified Germans, Poles and Frogs.
To repeat: There is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by all the very evidence of the Elmendorf deal he is about to agree to is far more limited and reasonable: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.
Again, that was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin had a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.
Fortunately, the cat is now out of the bag. The Elmendorf Deal shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.
That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.
That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the exact frontier as between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.
So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home forthwith. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutual defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.
Source: AntiWar.com.
