All Hail the New York Post for Reminding Trump Who's a Dictator and Who's a U.S. Ally
I posted and ran quite a few webcasts in the pre-Substack version of Sustain What about Vladimir Putin’s horrific, criminal and destabilizing acts in Ukraine - in relation to everything from nuclear war risk to African food shortages to basic morality and its opposite. This is not off topic. All of our sustainability goals are threatened when basic functioning diplomatic norms erode.
So I hope you don’t mind this post hailing the New York Post for its stunning cover and the accompanying list of “ten truths” for President Trump and his cabinet and cronies written by Douglas Murray of the Manhattan Institute.
As I just tweeted, one can only hope that somehow this vital critique of Trump's dangerous and false statements (and beliefs?) about Putin, Russia, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine gets through the protective bubble Trump has built around himself.
Here’s the opening salvo and the 10-point list. Read the full essay for the supporting arguments for each. I don’t want to deny the Post its page views!
This has been a dizzying and disorienting week in international diplomacy. One with wild implications for Ukraine, the future of America’s standing in the world and President Trump’s legacy.
Trump is absolutely right in wanting to end the bloodshed in Ukraine. The suffering has been appalling and the stalemate brutal. But in the furious mix of wild opinions this week from the White House down, there are at least 10 truths that every American voter must hang onto.
In Trump’s rush to end the bloodshed, these are also the truths against which any deal will be judged and which will define him when the history books are written.
To ignore them or not treat them with the gravity they deserve will also have enormous consequences for decades to come:
Truth No. 1 - Vladimir Putin started this war….
Truth No. 2 - Russia is fighting for conquest….
Truth No. 3 - Ukraine is fighting for its independence.
Truth No. 4 - Ukrainians are not Russians. Ukrainians and Russians are not “one people — a single whole,” as Putin wrote in a 2021 essay. He is also simply lying in his assertion that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.”
Truth No. 5 - Putin is a dictator. Putin has ruled Russia with an iron KGB fist since coming to power in 1999. He has ruthlessly quashed independent media, ended free and fair elections, crushed civil society and killed his political opponents. And not just inside Russia, but around the world….
Truth No. 6 - Zelensky is not a dictator. A political outsider, Zelensky won the 2019 presidential election, which was relatively free and fair. He has a 57% approval rating, not the 4% Trump claimed.
Truth No. 7 - Russia is not a friend of the US. It is a hostile, nuclear-armed state that resents American power and the world the US has built….
Truth No. 8 - Ukraine is a friend of the US. Ukraine wants to be part of the American-led order. Its people and government are deeply pro-American. Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian men and women I have seen fighting at the front lines are fighting the Russian military to protect their loved ones and their country. They also do it in the knowledge that if they fail, other countries will be next.
Truth No. 9 - Putin cannot be trusted. This isn’t just a statement of fact. It is also something that 81% of American voters agree on….
Truth No. 10 - American aid to Ukraine is not being wasted…. Nobody would argue that Ukraine is a country without corruption. But that does not mean its people and sovereignty should not be protected…. Putin and his cronies have been accumulating power and wealth all their careers. And they will torture and kill anyone who exposes this corruption. Remember his political opponent Alexey Navalny and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky? It is easy to expose corruption in Ukraine. But in Russia, it is deadly.
Murray’s concluding message:
Trump has a chance to bring an end to this war, to stop the killing. Maybe even win a Nobel Peace Prize…. But he will not be honored if the peace is an appeasement, one that bows down in the face of evil as it denies obvious truths.
The judgment of history will be even harsher — decades of peace and prosperity in Europe and America thrown away to a resurgent Russia harassing the East. Without a strong peace, it won’t be just Ukraine that suffers. It is all of us.
That is the ultimate truth.
The truths on the ground in Ukraine are vivid as well.
