236 - The Fifth Column that Sabotages our Democratic Roots and Compromises Global Freedom
It is more and more evident that Trump is Putin's handmaiden. And now he has enlisted a cabal of Congresspersons led by the likes of Marjory Taylor Greene and Sen. Lindsay Graham to sabotage Ukraine's ability to resist the Russian invasion well into a third year of combat.
Ukrainians could soon lose their war with Putin exactly because Trump has held up support for a legislative compromise that would have appropriated $60 billion in funding the Ukrainian war effort (and $14 billion for Israel) in exchange for a major shutdown of the border with Mexico. Even Sen. Mitch McConnell sided with Trump after first favoring and even crafting the compromise that would have, should have, helped to shore up Ukraine's soldiering. (First he was for it, then -- like a posse of other Republicans -- he was against it, flipping and flopping.)
For youthful readers, "Fifth Column" is a Spanish civil war term that refers to "a group of secret sympathizers or supporters of an enemy that engage in espionage or sabotage within defense lines or national borders." The quinta columna battled behind the lines against General Francisco Franco's usurpation of the Spanish Republic in the mid-1930s, especially his march on Madrid. During World War II, fifth columnists sabotaged Nazi hegemony in the Nordic countries and throughout the rest of occupied Europe.
Now Trump has brought such sabotage (recall Jan. 6, 2021) to American shores in service of Putin's merciless attempt to boost his own power and riches at the expense of literally hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian (and Russian) lives, the sanctity of Ukraine's bombarded cities and infrastructure, and the real freedom not only of Europeans but of the entire so-called free world. This is the intellectual as well as the actual rule of law system that replaced the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic almost perpetual warfare of the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, especially in Europe and Asia, and culminated -- after the pulverizing of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- with a magical new order enshrining respect for human rights and personal freedoms, sanctioning genocide, restricting excuses for wars between nations, and giving the United Nations authority to settle disputes peaceably rather than by resort to combat. (If Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had not opposed its creation, the new world order ushered in by the World War II victors might even have included a UN army or police force dedicated to ending mayhem between or within sovereign nations. The U. S. also demanded a Security Council veto, arguably a great mistake.)
Polish and German officials are visibly concerned that the withdrawal of the U. S. from serious support for Ukraine's defense will mean a truce there that will embolden Putin, feed his avarice and ambitions, and eventuate in attacks on their countries and NATO. That is one reason why the European Union managed last month to out-maneuver Hungarian President Viktor Orban, another anti-democratic Putin acolyte, to promise about $55 billion to shore up Ukraine, hoping that Washington would note, and follow.
But Trump, riding high toward a Republican nomination, instead prefers to help his potential election and materially help Putin to undermine world peace by enlisting Republicans in Congress -- a minority within a minority, really -- to sabotage a carefully crafted attempt to fulfill our promises to Ukraine. Indeed -- not that Trump cares at all -- much more than Ukraine's sanctity is at stake. Our human future is tied to that stake, and the fires are being lit.
The U. S. might conceivably be able to survive a super-polarized and traduced America. But the world will not. It needs our leadership. It needs both the moral and the mostly humane direction that Americans have given to world order since 1945. What was achieved then is not only imperiled now, but most if not all of what was achieved before and during the Cold War is dangerously at risk.
This is not hyperbole. To save the world from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping, we need to save ourselves from Trump. He is far less capable than the two dictators, and similar thugs like Orban, Kim Jung-un, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But because he has enfeebled and infantilized what once was a robust conservative but honest opposition, Trump's desire to throw his weight around, Mafia-like, is bound to dethrone the fundamental architecture that protects citizens everywhere from might over right and elevates liberal values above personal whim by rulers captivated by their own genius. Trump would if elected maliciously be able to misuse the power of the U.S. to wreak the kinds of mayhem that have long been inconceivable.
President Biden may look a little battered, but he has had a very productive presidency and has accomplished more domestically and abroad than almost any U. S. president since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Moreover, as columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote so powerfully yesterday, the U.S. is the "tent pole that holds up the world." He elaborated: "If we let that pole disintegrate," future Americans will grow up in "a much worse" world. So will all of our planetary neighbors and friends.
Putin is bent on becoming a twenty-first century Stalin. Small like Napoleon, he covets grandeur. Trump is his enabler. "Putin," rightly says Friedman, "is licking his chops at the thought that we will walk away from Ukraine," leaving it without ammunition and air defenses. It is past time that Republicans in Congress (and voters) came to their senses and approved funds to save Ukraine (and ourselves) from conquest - and from Trump's Quisling-like calumnies.