Filenews 15 December 2023 - by Andreas Kluth
A remarkable document was circulated among Republicans in the US Congress. It's called the "Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine," even though it's not exactly what its title says. As its origins and content make clear, it should be titled "Proposed Plan to Prevent the Republican Party from Failing the Test of History."
Retreat
But before we get into the substance of the document, here's where it certainly didn't come from: Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, who this week was in Washington for his third and most "worried" visit since Russia invaded his country last year. His own supreme military commander recently admitted that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed and that the war had now reached a "stalemate". Ukraine's struggle for national survival has turned into a war of attrition, which it can only win if it continues to receive money, weapons and ammunition from its friends, especially the US and the European Union. Hence the growing alarm signals in Kiev. Both in the EU and and in the US, support for Ukraine is in retreat.
One reason is the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has distracted attention from the atrocities committed by the Russians in Ukraine. Another reason is the disinformation spread by Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to distance like-minded politicians in the West from the pro-Kiev consensus. Notable in this camp is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is campaigning pro-Putin and against Ukraine. Meeting each other in Argentina this week, the Hungarian leader and Zelensky had what looked like a heated confrontation.
For both his authoritarian style and his political affinities with Russia, Orbán is also a role model for many of the American politicians who are moving away from Ukraine and who belong mainly to the MAGA (Make America Great Again) wing of the Republican Party, i.e. under the political auspices of former and possibly future U.S. President Donald Trump. yet another good buddy of Putin.
Some of certain Republicans have concluded that Ukraine cannot win and do not want to throw any more dollars at a "lost" cause. "What will the $61 billion that the $100 billion fail to achieve?'' , as J. S. Vance, a MAGA current senator, puts it referring to the additional aid the White House wants to send to Ukraine. Vance wants everyone to accept that "Ukraine will have to cede some territory to the Russians."
Immigrants from Mexico and... Ukraine
Others, however, understand that the world must stop Putin in Ukraine to prevent him from subsequently threatening other countries in Europe, thus dragging the U.S. into the war at an immeasurably greater cost in dollars and lives. But they are politically afraid. Their voters have lost interest in Ukraine and are instead obsessed with migrants crossing the border from Mexico.
The chaos at the border is indeed another, if completely separate, problem that President Joe Biden wants to solve. Tactically, the White House has tied up tougher immigration policies and additional funding for border security with aid to Ukraine, along with support for Israel and Taiwan. This supplementary package – worth €110.5 billion – will be implemented by the European Commission. dollars, more than half of which go to Ukraine — is the one Biden sent to Congress. Withholding this additional aid to Kiev, as the White House has warned Congress, could bring Ukraine to its knees on the battlefield. That hasn't stopped Republicans in the federal House of Representatives, the lower house of the U.S. Congress, from escalating their demands in an effort to blackmail the White House into agreeing to the MAGA wing's most extreme anti-immigrant policy proposals. They include, among other things, restricting the right to asylum in ways that would violate both U.S. and international law. Surprisingly, some Republicans have even suggested linking aid to Ukraine "measurably," based on rates of decline in U.S. border crossings. The federal Senate, the upper house of Congress, blocked Biden's bill in a procedural preliminary vote. It is no longer clear whether a deal is yet within reach before the end of the year or more generally.
This explains Zelensky's unplanned visit. He met senators behind closed doors, as well as Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives (also of the MAGA current), who appeared apparently immovable. Zelensky ended his day with Biden in his most welcoming White House setting.
Sense of responsibility
Some Republicans in Congress, however, still have a sense of proportionality and responsibility. Many, like Michael McCall, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now fear their party may end up on the wrong side of history. With his father's World War II military uniform framed next to his desk, the MP draws analogies with the 1930s, when appeasement failed and it turned out that Adolf Hitler should have encountered a wall of resistance earlier.
So McCall and two other House Republican committee chairmen, Mike Rogers and Michael Turner, co-authored and circulated this crimson pamphlet among their Republican Party colleagues. It does not offer a real "plan of victory in Ukraine". Instead, it seeks to rally Republicans to the just cause of supporting Ukraine and, therefore, maintaining American credibility with allies and aggressors around the world.
The document is revealing both in terms of what it distorts, but also in terms of what its authors understand correctly. On the first part, he blames everything that has gone wrong in Ukraine on Biden — his alleged "weak leadership," which the document's authors claim provoked Putin's aggression in the first place, and the "debilitating hesitation" with which he supplied weapons to Ukraine in 2022, when the authors believe Kiev could have prevailed. Completely missing are criticism of Trump's allegiance to Putin, the risk that in 2022 Putin would have escalated into nuclear war, as well as recognition of Biden's successful leadership in rallying the West so far.
Where the appeal of Republican lawmakers is accurate is in linking Putin's bellicose policy to the threats posed by his partners in Beijing, Tehran, Minsk and Pyongyang. The war in Ukraine, the three committee chairmen write, is "a wake-up call to see if the United States and the rest of the free world can resist unprovoked aggression."
We hope McCall's colleagues at the Grand Old Party get the message. If Republicans in Congress ultimately remain in a swing stance toward Putin, so will the U.S. as a country, and if the U.S. moves like this, so will Europe and the world. There is too much at stake for the Republican Party to fail at this turning point in world history. Performance – Editing – Selection of Texts (2019-2023): G.D. Pavlopoulos
