Ending the World to Own Trump

Ukraine's 18-month plan to execute "Russia's Pearl Harbor" leaves humanity at the edge of extinction, and Western analysts are giddy

In a segment titled, “Ukraine burns Putin, but also schools Trump with surprise drone attack,” MSNBC hosts Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow chatted giddily after a paradigm-shifting operation by Volodymyr Zelensky that left the world on the edge of nuclear exchange. Rachel first plugged Wallace’s new podcast, The Best People, then they bantered about Wallace’s husband, then moved on to Ukraine’s “audacious” Sunday drone attacks, said to have destroyed a third of Russia’s “strategic carriers” in an operation widely dubbed “Russia’s Pearl Harbor.”

“I feel like you’re, you’re one of my friends who understands how my brain works on this sort of thing,” Rachel asked, beaming. “Like, it is an incredible war story about Ukraine’s capability and their resilience and their creativity and the way they have just done this, you know, like David versus Goliath… But it also does have international strategic implications for every country in the world… In Russia’s position, in terms of thinking about its own defenses, thinking about its own nuclear deterrence…”

A network scriptwriter once told me the purpose of every TV news segment was to end on the note, “Isn’t that weird?” That’s how Rachel framed this moment: “Ukraine just pulled off this incredible David and Goliath story, but it also has strategic implications in terms of nuclear deterrence — isn’t that weird?”

It was, agreed Wallace, who managed a few moments of smileless narration as she offered a grave observation. “The idea that Ukraine will not score massive victories in this war, and do massive damage to Russia that will also have implications to our national security, was probably an erroneous assumption,” she said. But yes, in general, the situation is “bat bleep crazy,” because:

Trump is moving the country away from what the people want it to be. And when you look at what Ukraine did it, it didn’t just score a massive military victory. It displayed technological competence that is the envy of the world this morning. So it’s, it’s not just that we’re on the wrong side. It’s not just that we’re flying blind, it’s that we may have missed out on an unbelievable technological breakthrough that we, heaven forbid might need someday…

For almost ten years we’ve had a consensus mechanism that evaluates all things this way: if it’s bad for Trump, it’s good for the world. It started with being “disappointed” to learn Robert Mueller didn’t find Russian agents in the White House and progressed to “told you so” tales of 400,000 deaths proving Trump wrong about Covid. Now we have the best political Schadenfreude story ever: Nuclear showdown proves Trump’s incompetence. Or, as Walter Kirn put it, ending the world to own Trump.

The Maddow segment was one of a pile of ebullient “Peace Averted!” responses to Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb,” which in any normal era would be covered first as an unprecedented escalation of nuclear tension. Officially now, politicians and media have gone mad, so focused on Trump that they no longer see or acknowledge danger to you, me, and the rest of the world beyond. The headlines alone are mind-boggling:

“Trump administration left clueless about Ukraine’s attack on Russia,” chirped Salon. “Lindsey Graham leads GOP push to Punish Putin as Trump Dithers,” countered the Daily Beast. “Trump Silent on Ukraine Drone Attacks as MAGA Blames ‘Deep State,’” read Axios. “Trump Promised Peace in Ukraine in a Day. Here’s What Actually Happened,” roared NPR. “Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged,” cheered the New York Times, which quoted experts saying Ukraine “has taken warfare to the next level” and also exposed Donald Trump’s missile defense plan:

General Hodges and several other people said that Ukraine’s strikes should, at least, force the Trump administration to rethink its plans for a “golden dome” missile defense shield, which President Trump unveiled last month… Administration officials say it will be a next-generation military system designed to guard against a variety of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles deployed by adversaries such as Russia.

But the missile shield as envisioned wouldn’t protect the United States from the types of drones Ukraine used.

Few outlets attempted to answer what should be the first question after these attacks. How much danger are we in? What is the likelihood of a Russian response in Europe or the United States? The only context I saw in which this issue was even addressed was as an element of irrational paranoia described in Tal Axelrod’s Axios story, about how “MAGA blames ‘Deep State.’” This passes for political commentary in America:

MAGA’s alarm over Ukraine’s attack — and comparative silence when Russia targets Ukrainian civilians — underscores the movement's deep skepticism of the Western-backed government in Kyiv.

Incredible. The reason there’s less “alarm” about Russian attacks in Ukraine is that Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons and has no capability of starting an apocalyptic missile exchange. No one is comparing levels of moral “alarm.” They’re doing what alleged grownups in the White House and Pentagon should have done from the start, namely weighing strategic pros and cons for the American population. There are no “implications to our national security,” as Nicolle Wallace put it, in Russia’s attacks. There are following Ukraine’s. That’s the entire issue, for those of us who are thinking about our kids, not playing “Risk” with other peoples’ lives.

The implications of Ukraine’s attack, particularly Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s post-attack TD dance about how “the preparation took over a year and a half,” are drastic and obvious. The symbolism of the attack being launched a day before peace talks also speaks volumes about Ukraine’s attitude toward potential settlement, as well as the attitude of Ukraine’s backers in the West. These people don’t want a negotiated peace of any kind, among other things for the beyond-bat-bleep reason that it might be perceived as a political win for Trump.

The Trump administration claims it was not informed of these attacks, which may be true. However, it strains credulity to think no one in NATO or the CIA or the Pentagon had inkling of this plan. The New York Times take about the status of U.S.-Ukraine joint planning hardly inspired confidence:

Ukraine has always been protective of its operational security; even more so in recent months since senior Trump administration national security officials inadvertently disclosed operational American strike plans in Signal group chats. There currently is no joint planning between the United States and Ukraine on strikes in Russia.

Not “currently,” but perhaps before? It’s bad either way.

If the Trump administration knew, and does not move quickly to disavow Ukraine, Russia will be forced to conclude there is no post-election policy change, and the Trump White House helped carry out a dangerous Biden-era mission. If Trump didn’t know, that’s worse: now the presidency itself, the last avenue by which the American population could ask out of this conflict, has been humiliated and rendered irrelevant.

This is the situation being celebrated. Ukraine and Zelensky, along with our former allies in Europe and (at minimum) elements of U.S. media, are pushing us farther down the road to disaster. The very concept of “de-escalation” has, 1984-style, been eliminated from the vocabulary of these people. As Delaware Senator Chris Coons put it, the idea that Ukraine can engage in escalation is “ridiculous”; it’s Russia that escalates, while Ukraine is only defending itself. Keep fighting or win, those are the two choices, despite the former being untenable, the latter almost certainly impossible.

Peel away the gushing about Ukraine’s “brilliant technical performance” and what you find everywhere underneath are American and European officials who believe, now more than ever, that Ukraine can “win” this war. They’ve rejected voters’ demands that we stop supporting this endeavor financially and rejected their concerns about strategic risk. They want to keep fighting at any cost, even annihilation. They are deluded, treasonous, and insane.

Former Pentagon official Dan Caldwell, who was fired in the leakgate lunacy but claims he was ousted because of his opposition to open-ended conflict in the Middle East, was one of the only Americans to suggest something other than continued war. The U.S., he said, should “not only distance itself from this attack but end any support that could directly or indirectly enable attacks against Russian strategic nuclear forces.” Is there any doubt that he’s right? What can we do to get out from under these lunatics?