Nå sa også Robert Mood for 2 dager siden at Norge er det svakeste landet i Nato og det mest avhengige av USA støtte.
Men ikke sikkert han har rett i alt han sier.
As with Joe Biden, having a hand on Ukraine isn’t the same as playing it.
www.wsj.com
I just got done last Wednesday saying Ukraine has leverage in its dealings with Donald Trump. Friday’s tiff-heard-round-the-world drew a bead on why. Mr. Trump wants a big cease-fire celebration first, leaving harder issues for later. In essence, he asks Ukraine to give up its strong card—its readiness to go on fighting against Russian aggression—in return for Vladimir Putin’s unreliable promise to stop aggressing.
Ukraine answered with the universally obnoxious syllable: No.
Mr. Trump has always understood (and said) that Russia would have to be brought to the table with a stick. We can guess from his behavior Friday no stick has yet been brandished in his phone dealings with Mr. Putin or a meeting of aides in Riyadh. Mr. Trump kvetches instead about Volodymyr Zelensky not giving him an easy win, an agreement to be announced Tuesday night to end the shooting with no nettlesome requirement that the U.S. help secure a lasting peace.
Mr. Zelensky has a second card to play. Mr. Trump can’t sustain Monday’s petulant “pause” in U.S. military aid. Mr. Zelensky knows it and Mr. Trump knows Mr. Zelensky knows it.
All else, especially the minerals deal, is a sideshow now, however usefully aimed at Mr. Trump’s core problem: getting MAGA—aka the JD Vance wing of the new Republican Party—aboard a continuing investment in Ukraine’s security.
Let it be said Mr. Putin isn’t playing his own weak hand brilliantly; he just sees his opponents for what they are. Europe has dragged its feet for three years on rearming and rebuilding its defense industries. Mr. Biden actually let the U.S. defense budget shrink in real terms amid the Ukraine war. The message to Russia’s leader since Kyiv’s failed 2023 offensive: Hang in there, Vlad. The West is happy to exact a bloody toll on the troops you’ve chosen to sacrifice for mingy territorial gains. The West won’t threaten your regime.
In imitation of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Mr. Trump shows having cards to play against Russia isn’t the same as playing them. I’ve made the point so many times it bores even me. The U.S. and its NATO and Asian allies have a GDP 25 times Russia’s. Western leaders, including Mr. Trump, don’t lack courage to take on Mr. Putin. They lack courage to take on their domestic spending interests.
This is what Mr. Putin also sees. It’s what undergirds China’s strategic bet that the U.S. is on a path of inexorable fiscal decline.
Mr. Zelensky deserves blame too, albeit different from the blame he’s getting. He stopped reading the room long before last week. Instead of settling in for a long cold war against a declining Russia, with willing Western backing, he wanted to spend Western aid on the fruitless 2023 offensive that was supposed to get U.S. buy-in for an open-ended war to expel Russia from every inch of Ukrainian soil. It simply isn’t and wasn’t ever in the Western program to do so, whatever advice Mr. Zelensky might be getting from Twitter.
Also contrary to much wishful thinking, Europe’s NATO members have zero desire to make the Russia-Ukraine border their border with an aggressive Russia. And that’s fine. The proper model for Ukraine is the proper model for NATO, taking advantage of a changed, post-Warsaw Pact dynamic. It’s feasible now for Europeans to deter Russia with their own military forces rather than rest passively on the U.S. A properly supported and equipped Ukraine, itching to prosecute its own revanchist claims, would be a giant deterrent to Russia getting spiky anywhere along its 1,600-mile border with NATO countries.
Mr. Trump is clearly irked that Ukraine wouldn’t make round one easy for him, supplying a cease-fire agreement without nettles. Mr. Trump was a chiseler as a builder too, but he knows some bills can’t be ducked. When he made his “24 hours” promise 20 months ago, he said: “I would tell Putin: If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give them a lot. We’re going to give them more than they ever got, if we have to. I will have the deal done in one day. One day.”
That Trump has yet to show up on game day. At some point he’ll have to. The hell of our situation is, don’t expect to see it when and if it happens: 1,000% of any Putin reason to come to the table is to obtain a face-saving exit from a horribly botched war. Say what you will about Mr. Trump’s method, he understands this where a thousand online kibitzers don’t.
In his builder phase, Mr. Trump demonstrated shrewdness about a million engineering and financial details, about high-stakes bargaining. He made a second career as a parody of high-end business acumen in “The Apprentice,” which he parlayed (with the help of an incompetent opposition) into presidential power. By the second half of this century, all anyone may remember about him is whether he botched the Ukraine settlement or not.
Vi ( Norge) er særdeles viktige for USA på etteretningssiden. Vi har sensorer som overvåker ganske mye som foregår i Ruzzland. Vi kan jo f.eks gi beskjed om at denne informasjonen forsvinner hvis ikke tRump "tar seg sammen"! At vi kommer til å gjøre det? Nei tror ikke det, Jonas har ikke guts til å utfordre USA, han foretrekker at vi "lister oss så stille fram" så at ikke tRump blir grinete!
Om det er Norge som eier denne etteretningen er står vi vel fritt til å dele med Ukraina? Og strengt tatt bør vel ingenting deles med medarbeidere av agent Orange all tid det nå ser ut som han åpenlyst har tatt side med muskovittene.
Om det er Norge som eier denne etteretningen er står vi vel fritt til å dele med Ukraina? Og strengt tatt bør vel ingenting deles med medarbeidere av agent Orange all tid det nå ser ut som han åpenlyst har tatt side med muskovittene.
Vi ( Norge) er særdeles viktige for USA på etteretningssiden. Vi har sensorer som overvåker ganske mye som foregår i Ruzzland. Vi kan jo f.eks gi beskjed om at denne informasjonen forsvinner hvis ikke tRump "tar seg sammen"! At vi kommer til å gjøre det? Nei tror ikke det, Jonas har ikke guts til å utfordre USA, han foretrekker at vi "lister oss så stille fram" så at ikke tRump blir grinete!
French Senator Claude Malhuret: "Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine... We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."
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"Washington became the court of Nero": must read from french Senate allocution
Claude Malhuret: situation in Ukraine and security in Europe
March 4, 2025
Statement by the Government, followed by a debate, pursuant to Article 50-1 of the Constitution, on the situation in Ukraine and security in Europe
Mr. President,
Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen Ministers,
My dear colleagues,
Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is evading, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.
Washington became the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester under ketamine in charge of the purification of the public service.
It's a drama for the free world, but it's first a drama for the United States. Trump's message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, that he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and threaten you to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is on a flat stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is undoubtedly accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. No one has ever supported an aggressor against an ally. No one has ever trampled on the American Constitution, made so many illegal decrees, revoked the judges who could prevent it, dismissed the military staff at once, weakened all counter-powers and took control of social networks.
It is not an illiberal drift, it is a beginning of confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only a month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.
I have confidence in the strength of American democracy and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war against a dictator, we are now fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very time that Trump passed his hand behind Macron's back at the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against Europeans demanding the departure of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the oval office, the military service hide-and-seek gave moral and strategy lessons to the war hero Zelensky before dismissing him as a brother-in-law by ordering him to submit or resign.
That night, he took a step further into infamy by stopping the promised delivery of weapons. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.
And first don't make a mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltics, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin's goal is the return to Yalta where half of the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.
What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with the first principle of prohibiting the acquisition of territories by force.
This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressor, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to the spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.
To me Greenland, Panama and Canada, to you Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, to him Taiwan and the China Sea.
This is called "diplomatic realism" in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago.
So we are alone. But the speech that we cannot resist Putin is false. Contrary to the Kremlin's propaganda, Russia is doing badly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has only managed to grab crumbs from a country three times less populated.
Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, and demographic collapse show that it is on the edge of the abyss. The American boost to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.
The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans come out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American release, to make it hold, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
It will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to bypass Moscow's accomplices even within Europe by a coalition of only voluntary countries, with of course the United Kingdom.
Secondly, require that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what the agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we would have to build the neglected European defense, for the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and sunk since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today's democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. It is to recognize that France was right for decades in pleading for strategic autonomy.
It remains to build it. It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and ammunition systems, accelerate Ukraine's entry into the Union, which is today the first European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence from French and British capacities, relaunch anti-missile and satellite shield programs.
The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And it will take much more.
Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be applied. For good.
But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of weariness and fear of war, and especially in the face of Putin's companions, the extreme right and the extreme left.
They pleaded again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr. Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is the capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain in Putin's boot.
The peace of the collaborators who have refused for three years any help to the Ukrainians.
Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky's public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have ended up making Americans react.
Polls are falling. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News becomes critical.
The Trumpists are no longer in majesty. They control the executive, Parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.
But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They begin to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine is played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means of their common defense, and to make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of all sacrifices.
The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.
Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
www.wsj.com
Trump sin helomvending for amerikansk politikk har fått russerne mer gira på krigwww.aftenposten.no
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