While voters are rightly aggrieved over President Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, they need to recognize that the president is ready to inflict an even greater foreign policy disaster on our country.
The president has openly aligned the American government with Russia against the democracies of Europe, including Ukraine.
Having dropped his threadbare pretense of U.S. neutrality on ending the Ukraine war, Trump is now effectively helping Moscow pummel defenseless Ukrainian civilians with drones and bombs. He is trying to force Kyiv to surrender its independence and submit to Vladimir Putin’s draconian terms.
Meantime, the president is denying Russia’s extensive help to Iran and ignoring its increasing drone attacks on NATO allies. The Kremlin is positively gleeful. Moscow’s chief negotiator on Ukraine, businessman Kirill Dmitriev, reposted on X a picture of a Russian bear and a U.S. eagle geared up for battle against a British lion and a European Union flag.
But take a deep breath, because Trump is leading the country toward even greater foreign policy degradation.
Last week, he acquiesced to Putin’s proposal to hold a three-way summit with Xi Jinping in China to resolve the war on Moscow’s terms. European allies — and Ukraine itself — would be excluded.
In other words, a Republican president who decries Democrats as “communists” seeks to ally with communist China and the ex-Communist, still Soviet-minded KGB killer Putin. Trump wants to join them in undermining European democracies and dividing the world into three spheres of influence. (In reality, the two dictators believe the U.S. president is weak and are playing America’s wannabe despot like a fiddle.)
Here is the question that Americans face when they make their choices at the polls on Nov. 3: Do they want to support a GOP that has so far capitulated to a leader who is eager to partner with Putin and Xi as they help Iran and seek to undermine America around the world?
Aid for Putin
Trump’s claims that his waving of Russia sanctions — lifting restrictions on Russian export of diesel to the world — are necessary to keep Russia at the bargaining table are false. The diesel amounts are too small to matter, and Russia has never been willing to bargain, still insisting on the complete capitulation of Ukraine.
Yet in his eagerness for a “deal,” any deal, Trump insisted that “Russia has been fine on Ukraine” even as Moscow continued to bombard urban apartment blocks, children in playgrounds and an infant in a stroller. He consistently excuses Russia’s massive attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
Most heinous, Trump is refusing to let Europeans send Patriot missiles they have paid for to Ukraine, leaving Kyiv totally unable to stop Putin’s ballistic missiles. Moreover, the administration degraded U.S. Starlink and Starshield connections to Ukraine over last weekend, which still haven’t been restored fully. They are vital to intercepting Moscow’s turbojet drones and giving Ukraine advance warning of missile attacks.
Even as Ukraine proposes a mutual ceasefire on striking energy production sites — which Putin refuses — Trump is aiding Russian efforts to bombard Ukraine into submission.
Most despicable, the U.S. president and his team are lying when they deny they had anything to do with the intelligence and Starlink-Starshield cuts. Elon Musk (who undoubtedly knows the truth, and bears culpability) said Trump would have had the last word on any such cuts.
Helping Iran
Trump insisted “Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran,” saying, “I want to keep it that way” as an excuse for his series of concessions to Moscow. He ignores or denies well-documented Russian intelligence and technology support to Tehran, which has helped the Iranians kill U.S. troops in the Middle East.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reaffirmed Russia’s full support for Tehran. “I am confident that Iran’s cause, like Russia’s, is a just cause,” said Lavrov, standing next to the Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi at a news conference in Tehran. Yet Trump has aligned himself with Putin’s “just cause.”
Misbegotten alliance
Putin reportedly views his proposal for a three-way summit on Ukraine’s future as a way to elevate Russia’s global standing and divide the world into spheres of influence dominated by the United States, Russia and China.
This plays into Trump’s long expressed eagerness for such a status quo, harking back to centuries ago when nondemocratic emperors, kings and dictators gathered to divide the global spoils.
It would also be reminiscent of the post-World War II Yalta Conference held in November 1945 in the Soviet Union, when the “Big Three” leaders of the victorious allies — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill — gathered to reshape the postwar world.
The two democratic leaders at Yalta prevented Stalin from totally dominating Europe, although they acquiesced in his takeover of Eastern Europe, which condemned those countries to remain behind the Iron Curtain until 1989.
Starry-eyed Trump, who envisions himself as smarter than Putin or Xi, ignores Putin’s expressed desire to reestablish domination of the former subject countries of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine. He ignores Putin’s current military and financial efforts to fragment the European Union, which amount to a shadow war.
Trump seems oblivious to the fact that Russia and China believe he is weak and that the United States is on the way down, and both want to hasten that decline. He clearly never reads the speeches of Putin and Xi that make that intent clear and never listens to intelligence briefings. Trump’s megalomania convinces him he will be top dog of the troika when in reality he is too willfully ignorant to recognize how he is being played.
So, dear voters, you are confronted with a leader unlike any in U.S. history, who, to promote his own personal interests is ready to partner with adversaries who wish our nation ill.
This president refuses to see that America needs its democratic allies in Europe and Asia to stand up against the dictators with whom he seeks to bond. He is ready to cut those alliances and leave the Europeans to stand alone against Putin, and our Asian allies, including Taiwan, to deal alone with Xi. He is ready to sacrifice Ukraine and its people to Russian domination so he can declare a “win.”
True, Trump is not on the ballot in November, but his Republican Party has not challenged his traitorous sacrifice of U.S. security and alliances in service of his whims. The only hope of stopping him from this madness is electing a Congress that will confront and resist his delusions.
On Nov. 3, we will see if Americans recognize the dire historical foreign policy turning point at which this country has arrived.
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