Don’t Start World War III in Ukraine
Americans do not want to go to war with Russia over a border conflict halfway around the world. Instead of clamoring for further American involvement in the unstable nation of Ukraine, our leaders should be encouraging a peaceful resolution of that conflict. We should stop misleading Ukrainians into fighting on in the hope that the Russian economy will be crippled by economic sanctions, or that NATO will send fighter jets into the war zone.
Bellicose rhetoric from American politicians is worsening the conflict, rather than bringing it to a peaceful resolution. A new $13.6 billion package of aid for Ukraine, which would only extend the armed conflict and increase its casualties, was rushed through Congress amid a climate of hysteria and propaganda.
Ukraine is not a Western democracy with historic ties to the United States. It was ranked as the 92nd most democratic country in the world, just behind Burma in a list of 176 nations compiled by the Democracy Matrix. Ukraine has long been controlled by a few billionaire oligarchs who milk the country for their own benefit. It formerly had a democratically elected leader who got along with neighboring Russia, but he was ousted by a leftist-funded revolution in 2014.
Russia has repeatedly offered a cease-fire to settle the conflict, but as long as Ukrainian politicians expect a lifeline from the West they have little reason to compromise. Russia demands that Ukraine end its military hostilities, promise not to join the anti-Russia EU or NATO, recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and acknowledge the independence of the eastern Donbas region whose residents speak Russian.
Those modest demands hardly fit the liberal narrative that Putin is supposedly trying to restore the old U.S.S.R. or even the Imperial Russia of the Tsars, neither of which is possible. Beating war drums prolongs the bloodshed until residents leave, as more than 2 million Ukrainians already have.
Without the support of the American people, a handful of globalists have quietly expanded NATO all the way to the Russian border, including nations that were part of the former Soviet Union or members of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. Joe Biden has repeatedly endorsed this reckless expansion, which provoked the war that now tragically unfolds before us.
The immediate harm to Americans is the soaring cost of products made from petroleum such as gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, fertilizer, and many types of building materials. Our politicians should be addressing this man-made energy crisis instead of rushing to send lethal weapons to Ukraine. Congress should reverse the ban on new domestic oil and gas drilling which Biden announced on his first day in office and reiterated last month in defiance of a federal court order.
Biden has banned the importation of Russian oil and many other natural resources, except of course for materials demanded by big corporations such as titanium for Boeing, plus nickel, palladium, and cobalt which are needed for the Green New Deal. The import ban hurts only the American consumer, not Russia, which can easily sell its oil and minerals to other countries.
China can buy all the oil and any other Russian products that are blocked from being imported here. India and Pakistan have also declined to participate in sanctions against Russia, so such political stunts do not affect Russia much. Venezuela, which we have already tried to punish with sanctions, stands to gain from a ban on Russian oil. Biden is considering importing oil from the communist Venezuelan regime and even the terrorist-supporting Iranian regime to replace the oil we use from Russia.
We should be producing our own oil and gas, but Biden rejects tapping into unused oil fields here. Liberal environmentalists demand that Biden continue to block our own energy production, so we will remain dependent on foreign oil until Donald Trump is reelected.
One week after the invasion, Sen. Joe Manchin (D- WV) publicly mused to himself, “Joe, would you pay 10 cents more a gallon to support the people of Ukraine?” Answering his own stupid question, the multimillionaire Manchin, who famously lives on a 56-foot houseboat moored in the Potomac River, said “I would gladly pay 10 cents more a gallon.”
Most Americans would be glad to pay only 10 cents more, but gas prices have surged by $2.00 a gallon since the last election, while the price of diesel fuel is up by $2.50 a gallon. Truckers, farmers, and other hard-working Americans cannot afford to fill up the big rigs they need to produce and deliver the food and supplies that we all depend on every day.
Not only dollars are at stake in Biden’s misguided approach. Lives are lost when Congress pours kerosene on the fire in Ukraine.
Most worrisome are the irresponsible calls to send American fighter jets to Ukraine, or to Poland in a three- way deal to replace older fighter jets that Poland would send to Ukraine. This would merely escalate the war and spread it to NATO member countries that we have unwisely promised to defend.
Unnecessary wars are good only for the media, weapons manufacturers, and pompous politicians, most of whom never served in combat themselves. Merely six months after the end of our 20-year war in Afghanistan, Americans must oppose entanglement by globalists in another war in a faraway land that we never promised to defend.
Deep State Debacle in Ukraine
Europeans do not want to merge with Ukraine, just as Americans do not want to be allied with that country through common membership in NATO. Yet the Deep State pressed ahead for this fantasy until a horrible conflagration ignited.
This is the so-called New World Order that leads nations into wars. In the United States and western Europe, the unelected officials who comprise the Deep State think they can force global alliances that are contrary to millennia of bonds and cultures.
On February 28, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced his new application to become a member of the European Union, in defiance of Russian opposition. Zelensky requested immediate admission at a time when millions were praying for a de-escalation in hostilities.
The Deep State has wrongly promoted the European Union for everyone on the continent, as if its purpose were to have as many members as possible without regard to the resultant conflicts. The United Kingdom famously voted to leave the EU after its Brussels-based bureaucrats repeatedly opposed Britain’s national interest.
Ukraine does not qualify for membership in either NATO or the EU, whose current members rightly oppose the admission of Ukraine. Yet both organizations are controlled by unaccountable bureaucrats who feel they do not need the consent of nations they purport to represent.
European Council President Charles Michel encouraged Zelensky’s ill-advised application by saying, “It is a crucial moment to close the long-standing discussion once and for all and decide on Ukraine’s membership in the EU.” The EU thereby engages in global governance without regard to the sovereign national interests of its current members in Europe or partners in the United States.
Bill Clinton promoted global government as a “web of institutions and arrangements” that seek expanding NATO eastward. Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that he would not allow the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, but Deep Staters in our own State Department pressed for that war-inducing strategy anyway.
The European Council President Michel irresponsibly fanned the flames of war further by declaring, “Ukraine and its people are family. Further concrete support is on its way.”
Ukraine is family, to Russia, in language, culture, ethnicity, religion, and geography. Attempts by European Deep Staters to bring Ukraine into the European Union are merely incitement for Russia and its allies to prevent it.
The United Nations estimates that 5 million refugees will flee from Ukraine, which is more than 10% of its population. They are flooding into neighboring countries that are already struggling to meet the needs of their own citizens.
This dwarfs the previous record for refugee migration into Europe, which was set in 2015 when 1.3 million Syrian, Afghan, and other refugees sought asylum. Germany absorbed many of them and subsequently Trump had to angrily confront the German chancellor for failing to pay its share of NATO expenses.
Neither European countries nor the United States can cope with the expected influx of refugees from Ukraine. Already more than 2.5 million Ukrainians have left home with little more than a bag over their shoulder, expecting housing, food, and energy from the country they enter.
Hungary had built a border fence against prior refugees, while Poland began construction of a border wall to block more asylum seekers from entering through Belarus. Europe’s initial enthusiasm for accepting refugees from Ukraine may wane if the numbers grow as large as some predict. Moreover, the European countries accepting the Ukrainian refugees have allowed themselves to become dependent on Russia for their energy, after refusing to develop their own energy resources.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has just introduced the American Energy Independence Act (S. 3714). If Biden and the radical environmentalists would get out of the way, we could be exporting energy to our European allies to alleviate their dependency on Russia.
Coincidentally, on February 28 the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in an historic energy appeal by West Virginia, during which justices were skeptical of regulations imposed by the EPA on energy. The obsession by some with unproven claims of man-made global warming should be sorted out in Congress, not by unelected federal agency bureaucrats.
World War I was caused by a similar web of entanglements and alliances that drew everyone and his neighbor into the worst war ever known. Nothing was accomplished by that war except to impoverish European countries and enable fascism to exploit the poverty left in the wake of that so-called Great War.
Illustrating how clueless the Biden Administration is, two days before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine John Kerry delivered a speech in Egypt on what he views as a much bigger crisis: a projected increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the earth’s temperature over the next 30 years. This former Democratic presidential nominee had traveled to Egypt (by private jet, of course) as Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate.
NATO Has Run Out of Gas
Many Americans experienced an involuntary polar plunge last month, as temperatures across the northern plains dropped by as much as 50 degrees, just as war broke out on the other side of the world. This was a timely reminder of how important affordable energy sources are.
Europe is weak because it is in the grip of an energy crisis with some prices soaring tenfold in the last two years. Europe depends for nearly 30% of its oil and gas supplies on Russia, while German manufacturing is particularly dependent for energy on Russia after environmentalists forced Germany to dismantle all 17 of its nuclear power plants that did not even contribute to any climate change.
So the announcement in February that there would be no pre-invasion sanctions against Russia was not a surprise. If Russia further rations its energy shipments, Europe may struggle to survive a harsh winter.
President Trump achieved oil independence for the United States for the first time in more than a half-century, but Biden has made us dependent on foreign oil again. Biden reinstated Obama’s phony “social cost of carbon” theory, which places a prohibitively high price on each ton of carbon dioxide released by an energy-related activity.
There is no credible evidence supporting such a “social cost of carbon,” which the good Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has appropriately referred to as “voodoo economics.” He pointed out that Congress never authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations based on such an arbitrary estimate.
Louisiana prevailed on February 11 by persuading a federal court there to order the Biden Administration to stop using this imaginary concept to interfere with oil and gas drilling. Our country depends on new drilling to ensure our continued energy independence, and to supply our allies so that they are not dependent on Russia.
Louisiana was joined by Attorneys General representing the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Other states that are not big energy suppliers, such as Missouri, probably also agree with this legal challenge.
Trump-appointed federal district judge James Cain sided with the states, and ordered the government to reverse its arbitrary suspension of oil and gas drilling on federally controlled land and waters. The Biden Administration vowed to appeal, but the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans is unlikely to reverse this good decision.
Indeed, this is the second federal judge to rule against the interference with energy production by the Biden Administration. Last year another federal judge in Louisiana ordered Biden to allow gas and oil drilling to move forward.
With gasoline prices skyrocketing to $6 per gallon in some parts of our country, and more than $7.50 per gallon in England, environmentalists’ interference with energy production is causing poverty and inflation. As Trump mocked liberals at one of his rallies this year, a debatable slight future rise in sea levels is not a valid reason to block American energy production and use now.
But rather than comply with the court ruling of February 18, the Biden Administration responded by suspending all new permits and leases for oil and gas drilling on all federal lands. As the federal government owns nearly half of all the land in 11 energy-rich Western states, Biden’s moratorium on drilling essentially halts new energy production.
The federal government controls 640 million acres of public land in our country, and its interference with energy development on that land is what drives up our energy costs and dependency on foreign suppliers. We can survive without foreign energy, thanks to Trump, but our allies cannot.
Biden’s suspension of all new drilling on federal land is as shocking as if Biden were to block the midterm elections because he did not like a judge’s ruling about it. The federal judge in Louisiana should respond by holding Biden in contempt of court.
Immediately a U.S. Senator from Wyoming, Cynthia Lummis, criticized Biden for interfering with the economy in her energy-producing state. Liz Cheney (R-WY) purports to be the congresswoman representing that same state, but she failed to speak out as Sen. Lummis did.
Sen. Lummis pointed out that Biden “has prioritized the agenda of radical environmentalists in his administration over the needs of people in Wyoming and the rest of the country.” She added that the Biden Administration made “a conscious decision to continue to attack Wyoming and our domestic energy industry in favor of progressive, unrealistic climate policies.”
Gasoline prices increased 18 times in just the first 3 weeks of February in San Diego County, California. But rather than address that by allowing new drilling, Biden blusters that NATO will inflict tremendous hardship on energy exporter Russia despite Europe’s dependency on Russian energy.
The real “social cost of carbon” is an unnecessary dependency on foreign countries for energy. A NATO that has run out of gas is useless to protect America’s values and interests.
Exploiting the Vacuum in U.S. Leadership
Barely a year into the Democrats’ experiment of installing the hapless Joe Biden as president, crises have inevitably unfolded. Nobody believes that Biden can put out the fires that are being lit around the world.
Foreign leaders may perceive the next three years as an opportunity to get away with mischief that would never occur under the strong leadership of President Trump. “Politics abhors a vacuum” is the cliche that accurately describes how bad things happen when there is a void in leadership as there is now.
In our large northern neighbor of Canada, a 21st- century version of martial law was imposed by a petty tyrant who should have resolved the trucker convoy dispute without placing his entire nation under house arrest. The western provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan and the eastern province of Quebec all opposed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s never-before invocation of the draconian Emergencies Act to deal with peaceful protesters having legitimate grievances.
This dictatorial Canadian law authorized the government to seize bank accounts and compel individuals and private companies to crack down against peaceful protesters. The long-term damage wrought by this infringement on civil liberties in our most important neighbor is immeasurable and could spill over into our own country.
Perhaps Biden is so quiet about the emerging dictatorship in Canada because his advisers would like to see him do likewise here. After all, Biden himself ordered private employers to impose his vaccine mandate, until the Supreme Court stopped him in a 6-3 vote.
In 1959 Americans were understandably alarmed when a Communist seized power in Cuba and installed a brutal dictatorship on the island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Canada is even closer, across a border that is the longest in the world, and a progressive takeover there could cause great damage to our country.
With his unprecedented invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act, Trudeau asserted the power to control domestic travel, command services deemed essential, control the distribution of goods, and impose hefty fines on his own citizens. Like the inhumane retaliation against January 6th protesters by House Democrats, which included imprisonment in solitary confinement without trial, Canada’s Liberals seem bent on doing likewise to peaceful truckers.
The widespread, heartfelt public support of the truckers is obvious from the volunteer help they have received, and from the outpouring of donations. The retaliation by internet trolls who publicly disclose small donors’ identities is shocking, and such invasions of privacy and harassment should be prosecuted.
At the pricey Super Bowl, celebrities brazenly violated the mask mandate on national television, yet punishment of them is not even suggested by Democrats. Instead the regime picks on working truckers, many of whom brought their entire families in their coaches while enduring the frigid February temperatures up north.
In the Maru poll, only 16% of Canadians approved of Trudeau’s handling of the trucker protest, while Biden’s average net approval/disapproval rating fell to -11% across all major polls. Yet as in the United States, Canadian media have protected Trudeau and failed to report fully on the events.
For example, it was the New York Post that reported how cameras caught an Antifa-affiliated Canadian hitting and injuring four peaceful protesters with his Jeep before speeding off in an attempt to escape. He then ran several stoplights and resisted arrest before finally being captured by Winnipeg police, yet the major media continue to falsely portray the truckers as criminals.
Instead of helping defuse the tyranny in our next- door neighbor and most important trading partner, Biden focused his diminished mental capacity on a complex situation halfway around the world between Russia and Ukraine. Biden cannot possibly understand or navigate that conflict, and Ukrainian leaders themselves criticized Biden’s unhelpful rhetoric. Liberals are intensely anti- Russia for reasons having nothing to do with Ukraine, such as Putin’s conservative social policies.
At his Arizona rally in January, Trump observed that none of these crises would be happening if he were still in the White House. Trudeau was one of the foreign leaders who tried to ridicule Trump, when instead Trudeau should have tried to learn from him.
It was the Ukrainian-born member of the Deep State, Alexander Vindman, who sparked the first impeachment of Trump, and who recently sued Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump supporters. Yet Ukraine fared far better under Trump than under Biden.
