Fact: President Joe Biden has all the appearances of a lame duck. When a person of authority is unlikely to succeed himself there is a palpable loss of power.
Unless.The perception and hopefully the reality of a continuation of a strong Alliance compensates for the status of its leading figure. In capability the United States is the leading member of the Alliance that is, with Ukraine, fighting Russia. What we now need is an assertion from Former President Donald Trump that the U.S. will remain a stalwart member of the Alliance. A failure to do that will weaken Trump if he is president again.
The Alliance operationally is the Ukraine Contact Group (It is called the Ramstein Group because it meets at the U.S. Ramstein Air Force base in Germany) and it contains 57 member nations. (Link) The Group currently is led by the United States. The documented support of this Alliance assures that Ukraine will ultimately have a strong position at the negotiating table.
In every foreign conflict there are first and last years—provocation and settlement. The first year of the Alliance for a free Ukraine is, of course, long past. Knowing what we now know should we have engaged? My view, an unalterable yes. Regardless, we are engaged and the Congressional leaders of both Parties have been supportive.
The resulting war has seriously weakened Russia. It lost the semi-neutrality it had with Finland and Sweden. Russia borders Finland for 833 miles, now 833 miles with the NATO alliance.
It has dissipated wealth and talent as a large number of its most talented left Russia early in the war. It has also dissipated whatever goodwill might have existed in Ukraine for the Russians. And now its only unqualified supporters overseas tend to be North Korea and Iran. They are principally motivated by a hatred of our country. Neither provide Russia strong trade partnerships.
Imagine: The Ramstein Group of 57 nations is in one way or another fighting Russia, Iran and North Korea (active Russians allies). Relatedly the stronger the Ramstein Group, the more wary the Chinese about accelerating its support for Russia or invading Taiwan.
But, back to the first and last. America’s strength abroad and its internal strength for international alliances received a serious set back as the Afghanistan war resulted in an embarrassing retreat. We left and the Taliban took over. As the Ukraine war enters the third year we must have a tight understanding of what victory is. Eventually Ukraine and its allies will get out of the war. Hopefully the end will be a favorable boundary map for Ukraine along with a positive trajectory toward membership in NATO.
Donald Trump knows how to conduct successful negotiations. His business career assured that at any given point he was involved in some sort of buy or sell negotiation. We are told that he was “a tough customer”. And he knows, but probably won’t admit, that a loss to Russia will cause severe friction in NATO and weaken the Alliance for the next time around. And there will be a next time around and especially if the Ramstein Group and Ukraine together fold.
Recall Kenny Rogers’ admonition to the young gambler “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em—Know when to fold ‘em—Know when to walk away”. In war the strong do not walk away. The strong make sure the last year is worthy of the first.
Fact Checking
Article after article regarding last week’s debate mentioned the need for fact checkers and a somewhat instantaneous posting. Presumably by the debate host.
Fact checking is important, but my sense of a gifted debater is that he/she know the facts so the pushback can be immediate. Most of the questions and their contexts can be anticipated; the debaters need to be able to correct the record. While the media can fact check over the next few hours; the debaters need to do it with confidence at the time.
If a candidate is not verbally adept with knowledgable answers he/she should not appear in a presidential debate. Or negotiate with Congress or with our foreign enemies. Golf scores are irrelevant.
Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.
Bob Moores says
The problem with real-time fact-checking the Donald is that he tells so many whoppers per unit time that not even an AI could post rebuttals fast enough. And even if an AI could display instantaneous corrections as he spoke, I would not have time to read them because Trump tells fibs faster than anyone can read. Complicating the analysis of Trump’s speech is the fact that he seamlessly intersperses opinions (“If I were president, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine”) within the same statements of “Fact” (Biden, you’re the worst president in history who …) and its hard for me to keep track of his BS line.
James Nick says
More formally, Mr Moore is referring to the Gish Gallop.
From Wikipedia…
“The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time alloted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality…
During a Gish gallop, in a short space of time the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies that makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.”
The technique very much predates trump but the name for the technique was only coined in 1994. trump is undoubtedly its foremost practioner today and has elevated it to an impressive performance art form that thrills his base at his travelling Rocky Horror Picture Shows, aka, rallies. It comes naturally to him because he is such a moron that renders him both incapable of knowing, and willfully unconcerned with, actual facts and truth.