Uwe Parpart
Steve Bannon, no longer in Donald Trump’s inner circle, but no less politically savvy for it, remarked recently, “If we aren’t careful, it [Ukraine] will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war, not Lyndon Johnson’s.”
Bannon reacted to President Trump’s tasking of his Special Envoy for Russia and Ukraine, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, with ending the Ukraine war in 100 days … 99 days later than candidate Trump had bragged. To Bannon, that’s an ominous delay that will only heighten the risk of the US being pulled deeper into a war he believes is unwinnable and isn’t in America’s national interest.
I agree. Failure to act swiftly on a ceasefire, and failure to make a clean break with the neocon Ukraine/Russia strategy candidate Trump promised brings back into play the tired old peace-through-strength fantasies and magical sanctions (“ruble to rubble”) of the Biden administration; strategies that failed for Johnson in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, for George W Bush with the January 2007 surge in US forces in Iraq, and for Barack Obama with the 2010 surge in Afghanistan.
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