There is no 'leader of the free world' anymore.

"There's no leader of the free world anymore. ...

"[T]he Trump Administration's ... stupid trade war isn't about leverage to get other economies to open up; it is old fashioned autarky* ... the economics of hardened Marxists and moronic economic nationalists ...

"[I]t is however the moral depravity of the line on Ukraine which deserves the most opprobrium.

"There is no morality in surrendering to an aggressor all that it has [grabbed] so that you have 'peace' while the aggressor rebuilds...  and at the same time your erstwhile ally has blackmailed you into signing a predatory deal to hand over resources [without even] vague promises of security. ...

"[T]o be even-handed between Russia and Ukraine is a complete moral inversion. [Trump] has been excoriating about Zelenskyy, but said nothing negative at all about Putin or the behaviour of Russia. ...  He has only demanded that Ukraine stop....

"Of course everyone wants the war to end. It could end tomorrow if Putin just decided to end it and withdraw. But he's a psychopathic kleptocrat who feeds young Russian men (from poor backgrounds) and North Korean men to their deaths. ...

"If the war does ends soon on [Trump's terms, with a capitulation to Russia granting it time to rearm and come again] then it will only prolong the inevitable. Russia can spend a few years rearming, and use its renewed economic potential after sanctions are lifted by the US, to steal military capability and be ready for another attack. ... 

"[Contemplate this:] If the territorial integrity of sovereign states doesn't matter in Ukraine, then maybe it doesn't matter anywhere that the Trump Administration doesn't care about, and that includes any country—in Europe, Asia, in the Indo-Pacific ...

"[T]he cost ... of letting it be known that the US is isolationist and won't act to protect any nation states from attack ... is going to be much higher than the tens of billions taken to bolster Ukraine. 

"Even Marine Le Pen is critical of Trump on Ukraine, because by and large, European countries want to ensure defence against the predatory criminal gangster state to the east that treats its neighbours with impunity.

"Perhaps a deal will be struck,... [Perhaps] Europe will do all it can to support Ukraine. Regardless, it is now a time for small countries everywhere to acknowledge that it's all on now — that the US doesn't care if you are attacked, that you have to fend for yourselves with any other allies.

"There is no 'leader of the free world' anymore."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'There's no leader of the free world anymore'

The toddler-in-chief speaks

"Trump’s [first] speech [to Congress] was a performance of contradictions—proclaiming the virtues of capitalism while advocating economic controls, calling for individual rights while violating them, and celebrating American greatness while embracing policies that betray its foundations.
    "Nowhere was his dishonesty more blatant than in his discussion of Ukraine. He claimed that both Ukraine and Russia were ready to negotiate and that his leadership would end the war. This is a lie. Trump is not offering peace—he is offering surrender. ...
    "Trump’s immigration stance was another betrayal of America’s principles. ... America was built by those who arrived with nothing but a willingness to work and build a better life. Trump’s vision replaces that with state-controlled borders and tribal loyalty. ...
    "Tonight, he claimed America is entering a “golden age.” That is another lie. His economic policies increase state control. His foreign policy rewards dictators. His governance breeds chaos. If America is to remain great, it must reject the strongman tactics Trump embraces. He does not seek to restore America’s greatness; he seeks to twist it into a closed-border, state-run, nationalist machine where power—not principle—rules.
    "His promises of peace will lead to more war. His economic plan will lead to more government. His leadership will bring more instability. Trump is not America’s saviour—he is its greatest betrayer."

~ Nicholas Provenzo from his post 'My Hot Take on Trump’s Address to Congress'

PS: Trump’s speech to Congress exposes "two foundational fallacies that surround his protectionism." Don Boudreaux explains:

One fallacy is that tariffs are used against foreign countries. In fact, tariffs are used against the citizens of the government that imposes the tariffs. Canadian tariffs, for example, are taxes on Canadians’purchases of imports, and U.S. tariffs are taxes on Americans’purchases of imports. And so while foreign exporters do suffer when the U.S. government raises tariffs, the bulk of the suffering is by Americans – by American families who pay higher prices for food, clothing, and other household goods, and by American producers who pay higher prices for raw materials and intermediate products used in production here in the U.S.
    Moreover, these higher prices at home are by design: U.S. tariffs will not cause American manufacturing and agricultural outputs to rise unless these tariffs increase the prices that Americans pay for these outputs. When Trump and other protectionists deny that Americans will pay higher prices as a result of tariffs, they are either lying or displaying frightening economic ignorance.
    The second fallacy is the frequently heard excuse that Trump’s tariffs are bargaining chips to compel other governments to step up actions to stop the flow into America of illegal drugs. Yet last night, Trump himself identified other countries’ tariffs – which, again, ‘rip off,’ not Americans, but their own citizens – as the principal justification for his tariffs.
    In short, Trump insists that, because other countries use tariffs to rip off their citizens, he’s going to use tariffs no less harshly to rip off Americans.

PPS: And a question for you is if you are an advocate for capitalism and also, somehow, still, an apologist for the toddler ...

Trump and Capitalism. #economics pic.twitter.com/2RsqkOFYgN

— Michael Liebowitz (@Lieboisout) March 5, 2025

Adrian Orr irresponsible to the last

"What of yesterday[, when Reserve bank governor Adrian Orr up and abruptly left]?

"... We had brief press releases from the Bank and from the Minister but no real answers. We are told there were no active conduct concerns – although there probably should have been, when deliberately misleading Parliament has happened time and again, and just recently – and yet the Governor just disappeared with no notice on the eve of the big research conference, to mark 35 years of inflation targeting that he was talking up only a week or two ago, (I also know that one major media outlet had an in-depth interview with Orr scheduled for Friday – they’d asked for some suggestions for questions). And with not a word of explanation. 

    "If you simply think your job is done and it is time to move on, the typical—and responsible – way is to give several months of notice, enabling a smooth search for a replacement. 

    "He could easily have announced something next week, after the conference, and left after the next Monetary Policy Statement in May.

"Instead, it is pretty clear that there has been some sort of 'throw your toys out of the cot and storm off' sort of event, which (further) diminishes his standing and that of the Bank (but particularly the Board and its chair). 

    "It all must have happened so quickly that we now have this fiction that Orr is on leave for the rest of the month ... After several hours of uncertainty, the Board chair finally decided to hold a press conference, which he didn’t seem to handle particularly well and (I’m told—I only have a transcript—in the end he too stormed off) we still aren’t much the wiser. ...

"I guess it is probably true that Orr can’t be forced to explain himself, although since he is still a public employee until 31 March I’m not sure why considerable pressure could not be applied. But even if he won’t talk the answers so far from either Willis or Quigley really aren’t adequate. You don’t just storm off from an $800000 a year job you’ve held for seven years, having made many evident policy mistakes and misjudgments, as well as operating with a style that lacked gravitas or decorum etc, with not a word. 

   "Or: decent and honourable people, fit to hold high public office don’t.

"... I had heard a story—apparently well-sourced—that the Bank had actually been bidding for a material increase in its funding, on top of the extraordinary increases of the last five years ... and Orr has long been known more for his empire-building capabilities than for his focus on lean and efficient use of public money, But ... [it] surely it can’t be the whole story.

"Comments by Quigley suggests that perhaps Orr was getting to the end of his tether, and some one or more recent things made him snap, reacting perhaps more than a normal person would do faced with the ups and downs of public sector life. It seems highly likely the budget stuff, and the desire to keep pursuing whims, was part of it, but it can hardly have been all. 

    "I don’t suppose he felt any great compunction about misleading Parliament so egregiously again…..but he should. And all this time – having stormed off with no adequate explanation—Quigley declares that he still had confidence in Orr.

    "Surely yesterday confirms again that both of them, in their different ways, were unfit for office.

"[Not to mention] the latest estimate of the losses to the taxpayer from the Bank’s rash punting in the government bond market in 2020 and 2021. $11 billion dollar in losses. Three and a bit Dunedin hospitals or several frigates or…..all options lost to us from this recklessness, undertaken to no useful end, and a loss which Orr endlessly tried to play down (suggesting it was all to our benefit after all), and about which not one of his Monetary Policy Committee members—one now temporarily acting as Governor—either dissented or gave straight and honest contrite answers. 

    "It has been 43 years since a Reserve Bank Governor was appointed from within. That is an indictment on the way the place has been run."

~ Michael Reddell from his post '$11 billion and out'

"What if people with 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' in 2016 were right about pretty much everything, but premature about the timing?"

"What if people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in 2016 were right about pretty much everything," asks Nick Catoggio, "but premature about the timing?"

The Pax Americana is in flames and burned almost beyond recognition. And with a majority in both Houses of Congress willingly removing the Executive's constitutional guardrails against more destruction—politically, economically, globally—it sure does seem like Trump 2.0 is "shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be."

Yikes!

Just look:

• Trump will appoint a Cabinet of lunatics. He did try in Trump 1.0. But eventually almost all left in a fit of sanity, leaving only their distaste at the buffoon. 
Not so this term, in which "Kash Patel is the Senate-confirmed head of the FBI, joining embarrassments like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s key policymakers."
• Trump will engage in grotesque corruption. Trump 1.0 did try, but that pales into insignificance compared to "the breathtaking grifts he’s running now. Just yesterday, he announced a new 'U.S. Crypto Reserve,' a blatant scam to use taxpayer money to boost the value of investments held by his crypto-bro fans. 
Meanwhile, the main bureaucratic 'reform' initiative in his administration is being run by a mega-billionaire with immense financial interests in industries regulated by the very agencies whose databases he’s been rummaging through for weeks."

Also: 

• Trump will let grudges and vendettas drive his policies. Check: To a degree unmatched in his first presidency, Trump’s new government brazenly divides politics into friends and enemies. Friends show their appreciation; enemies are apt to lose every public privilege that it’s within his power to deny them.
• Trump will govern chaotically and malevolently. Check: "never did the first President Trump embark on a policy project as haphazard and destructive as DOGE, and not until Election Day 2020 did he do anything as nakedly malicious as pardoning violent loyalists."
• Trump will destroy NATO and the American-led international order. Check: "It took until his second term, specifically this past Friday, for him to fully immolate the United States’ credibility as leader of the free world."

Check, check, and check again.

Trump 2.0, summarises Catoggio,

is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again. ...
    And so, six weeks in, Trump’s second term as president already looks like the sum of all fears that [never-Trumpers] felt nine years ago. If there ever were such a thing as irrational 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

You'll remember what happened then? You know, that the Western Alliance was split asunder  on national television in a fit of Ukraine-splaining”?

Shaking down Ukraine for mineral interests had a distinct Trump 1.0 feel, not unlike when he demanded that allies with U.S. troops stationed on their territory increase their payments to Washington. Because he perceives no strategic American interest in allying with liberal nations, he needs to believe that it’s in our financial interest to justify continuing that alliance. He’s a famously transactional politician; if you want something from him, you need to hand him some sort of victory, ideally involving cash.
    But dressing down Zelensky publicly on Friday had more of a Trump 2.0 feel. It wasn’t about finances. If it had been, Trump wouldn’t have refused to proceed with the minerals deal after things went south in the Oval Office. It was about 'respect.' Zelensky didn’t show enough of it, supposedly, and that was reason enough for the president and vice president to burn down the transatlantic alliance that’s prevailed since World War II on live television.
    If I had told you in 2016 that America would switch sides in a major war involving Russia and part of the reason would be that the guy we’re allied with didn’t wear a suit to a meeting, you would have accused me of the most hysterical case of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' you’d ever seen. Yet that’s what happened.

Yes, Orange Man really is Bad.

Really Bad.  You might even say: deranged.

I can't help but think back to 2016 when life-long Republican, the late humorist PJ O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton.: 

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, ... She's wrong about absolutely everything. But she's wrong within normal parameters.

"If Trudeau and other politicians want to send Trump a message about tariffs, putting tariffs to zero is the solution."

 

"If Trudeau and other politicians want to send Trump a message about tariffs, putting tariffs to zero is the solution. Nobody wins a trade war, but you can win by not engaging in one.
    "Show the US that you do not believe tariffs help and that not levelling them leaves your economy stronger. Show them the power of free trade.
    "But, no, apparently Canada and everyone else would prefer to make it worse by taxing their [own] people. ..."

~ Dwayne Davies from his post

Why America (and New Zealand) Should Be on Ukraine's Side and Not Putin's Side, explained in 8 minutes.

 

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore."

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) 

German historian and philosophe 

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
    "A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
    "And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

~ attributed (incorrectly) to Hannah Arendt

NB: The Hannah Arendt Centre says "the spirit of the quote is very much in line with Arendt’s own thought. But as far as I can tell, Hannah Arendt never said this or wrote this. She did, however, say many similar things. ..."

The closest in spirit and content, and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world: 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism.

Which is all that the liars need. 

"...a thin-skinned, malicious toddler with poor impulse control."

 

"So even if you think Zelenskyy made a fatal error by actually telling the truth about the predicament his nation finds itself in, even if you think the mineral deal—with no security guarantees—is brilliant, the fact remains that the administration mishandled the situation. Remember, Zelenskyy is a politician too. And for the better part of an hour he was asked to sit there as Trump painted a false moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine and was dismissive of Ukraine’s plight and the history that led to this. If you actually want a deal, maybe don’t do that in public? I mean, the Ukrainians are watching too.
    "In response to Zelensky’s bait-taking, [commentator Rich] Lowry says that Zelensky 'made an excellent point, but he wasn’t there to be right or to win an argument.' Fair enough. But this is yet another situation where others are to blame for not fully adjusting to the fact that Trump is a thin-skinned, malicious toddler with poor impulse control. It’s always someone else’s fault for not enabling or humouring him sufficiently.
    "You know who knows Trump is easily baited into childish outbursts? J.D. Vance. And either out of cynicism or petulant incompetence, he acted on that. ...

"This disaster never should have been possible in the first place. [For starters, this was supposed to be a photo op. Lots of arguments happen behind closed doors between world leaders. They were supposed to head into a meeting to hammer out the details on this mineral deal. Instead, Trump took 40 minutes of questions, some from MAGA loyal 'journalists' who asked him stuff like how he mustered so much 'moral courage' and what not. But then,] Trump’s position is that we should make a profit over Ukraine’s misfortune. That’s why he insists America should get its money back 'plus.' As in we should get back the '350 billion' we gave to Ukraine (a wildly inflated and inaccurate numberTrump cannot be talked out of using) plus a little extra for our troubles.
    "That’s grotesque.
    "Even as a rhetorical negotiating ploy, it’s grotesque. In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy Jr. said, 'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.' That might have been overly grandiose, but it was directionally right for the leader of the free world to draw those lines. Trump’s—and most emphatically Vance’s—position is 'We might help you out, we might not. It all depends on our cut'."

~ Jonah Goldberg from his op-ed 'Dishonor and Incompetence in the Oval Office'

PS: From Paul Wells: 

"Donald Trump’s empty heart makes him crave a breathtaking amount of sucking up, all the time.
    "The big thing that everyone noticed when the sucking up became too insufficient, was that Trump and JD Vance jumped Volodomyr Zelensky in the Oval Office because, Vance said, Zelensky is ungrateful for American support. On that score, here is video of Zelensky thanking America again and again and again, for years:

"NZ urgently needs the support of retired individuals or those whose livelihoods are not yet affected by government or iwi control."

"New Zealand is facing a significant freedom of speech crisis. Across the country, people dependent on their business or employment income are being intimidated into silence regarding the influence of the tribal elite over many aspects of our lives. It’s not just about expressing personal opinions but about elected representatives, public servants and private business operators being silenced when it comes to the facts. ... [see for just a few examples: Real Estate agent Janet Dickson's court fight over licensing modules; so-called 'cultural safety' and 'cultural competence' requirements for nursing and teacher registration; 'Mātauranga Māori' being taught as science in schools; proposed 'competency standards' for pharmacists, & creeping tribal control over state assets]    

    "That’s why NZ urgently needs the support of retired individuals or those whose livelihoods are not yet affected by government or iwi control. You have the freedom to speak up for those Kiwis who feel unable to do so themselves. I encourage anyone, who can, to take up this cause, as the consequences for New Zealanders—including Māori who are not part of the leadership elite—will only worsen if this takeover continues."

~ Fiona Mackenzie from her article 'Too Intimidated to Speak Out?'

Another National tax grab

Leadership aspirant Chris Bishop headed to Auckland recently to tell us of the grand plans he will very kindly allow us to build. But before that, a new tax.

David Farrar kindly ssummarises. I unkindly fisk ...

Bishop says: "Congestion stifles economic growth in Auckland, with studies showing that it costs between $900 million to $1.3 billion per year. Congestion is essentially a tax on time, productivity, and growth. And like most taxes, I’m keen to reduce it."

Yes, congestion stifles economic growth. Yet little has been to arrest it. And over the last dozen or so years councils and transport ministries and bureaucracies have done everything to promote it, with transit lanes, bottlenecks, speed humps, speed restrictions, cycle lanes, bus lanes, no-right-turns, no-left-turns, pedestrianisation, beautification ... anything but combat traffic congestion.

Sit beside almost any major Auckland thoroughfare and you'll see that useable traffic lanes at rush-hours have nearly halved, while traffic has nearly doubled. A few nights back around 10pm a friend and I sat beside Hobson St — a near-motorway that once had six lanes or so allowing motorists to get out of the city on her motorways. Those lanes are now halved (with beautification works, don't you know, as part of John Key's bloody Convention Centre white elephant) and even at 10pm motorists were in a jam.

Will Bishop improve mobility?

Will he hell: he intends instead to make mobility more expensive.

Bishop says: "The government will be progressing legislation this year to allow the introduction of Time of Use pricing on our roads."

As commenter Bill says on Farrar's thread: "OK so another tax. Is there no problem the government thinks can’t be fixed without more taxes?

"We the motorists already pay for the roads with petrol tax and registration fees. How much of this money has been spent creating traffic bottlenecks, humps, removing free left turns etc? How is any of that helping with congestion? This latest tax proposal should be vehemently opposed. The money squandered on all the traffic obstruction should instead be spent on facilitating the uninterrupted flow of traffic. It sounds like they want to tax motorists to fix a problem that they themselves created. This is not incompetence, it is villainy."

Bill is right.

Bishop says: "Any money collected through time of use charging will be required to be invested back into transport infrastructure that benefits Kiwis and businesses living and working in the region where the money was raised."

Bishop is bullshitting.

Nicola Willis is so short of the readies already that she'll be overjoyed to grab as much of this windfall as she can. And if not her, then as soon as things are "bedded down," your next finance minister will have his or her hand in your pocket to root around in your small change. Don't doubt it.

Bishop says: "Modelling has shown that successful congestion charging could reduce congestion by up to 8 to 12 percent at peak times."

As every hired modeller knows, modelling will show whatever the modeller's hirer wants it to show; it all depends on the parameters chosen for said model. Sure, make something more expensive and (depending on one's marginal utility) then less of that thing will get utilised. But if the marginal utility of getting around is high enough (and it probably is) then Bishop's new tax will just make getting around more expensive. And we'll still be congested. And poorer.

Bishop says: "New Zealand can raise our productivity simply by allowing our towns and cities to grow up and out."

Well, duh.

Some of us have been arguing for years that up-and-out will make Auckland both more liveable and affordable. (Productive? That's an odd one to claim.) But with developers and builders having to sit on their hands while Bishop's bureaucrats rewrite the RMA to say what councils will allow developers and builders to do — to relieve the uncertainty since Bishop and his boss canned the MDRS — it seems like we're as far away as ever. And that uncertainty is hardly making developers and builders more productive ...

Bishop says: "My aspiration [for Auckland] is ..."

You know, frankly, it doesn't matter a shit what Bishop's aspirations for Auckland are! Because given the piss-poor popularity of his boss, and the pathetically slow promise to abolish and replace the RMA (to protect property rights, we're promised, and to finally give some certainty to those developers and builders) then  it will be too damn late this term for any changes at all to be made, and next term he'll have lost his chance.

And this time, three years from now, we'll all be sitting here in exactly the same position.

Only by then we'll (maybe) have a new train set.

And we will have bloody Bishop's new tax.

'A Day of American Infamy' [update 2]

"In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on 'common principles' for a postwar world. ...
    "The Charter, and the alliance that came of it [including the supply of military equipment to Britain by Lend-Lease] is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.
    "If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
    "Where do we go from here?"

~ Bret Stephens from his editorial 'A Day of American Infamy 

PICS: Bottom, war leader Winston Churchill at the White House 3 January 1942, wearing his air-raid suit (Imperial War Museum); top, a war leader at the White House with two thugs (Getty Images) 

UPDATE 1: 

"What does seem clear is that Trump is putting an end to the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of World War II. Indeed, his worldview seems to rest on two assumptions that run directly counter to the way in which, for all the serious differences between them, every president since 1945 has thought about America’s role in the world.
    
"The first is that Trump has a fundamentally zero-sum view of the world. America’s relationship with allies like Japan or the United Kingdom has been based on the assumption that both sides would benefit from the partnership. In particular, America would provide its allies with a security guarantee; in return, it would enjoy international stability, reap the benefits of free trade, and have huge sway over the rules governing the world order. Even if the United States might be a net contributor in the short run, expending more for its military budget than its partners, these alliances would over the long run serve the country’s 'enlightened self-interest.'

"Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that every deal has a winner and a loser; since American allies in Europe or East Asia are not unhappy about the current arrangements, this must mean that it is his nation that’s the sucker. ...

"The second assumption shaping Trump’s foreign policy is his belief that spheres of influence are the natural, and perhaps even the morally appropriate, way to organise international relations. ... [and] that maintaining an alliance structure that ignores spheres of influence is naive, needlessly costly, and fundamentally sentimental. ...

"Panama and Greenland are in America’s sphere of influence, and so Trump believes that he is entitled to make outrageous demands on them. Conversely, he seems to regard Ukraine as falling into Russia’s natural sphere of influence ...

"If Trump gets his way, the world will become much more transactional. America’s erstwhile allies in the western hemisphere will either need to learn to stand on their own feet or to pay financial tribute to their protector. Those which happen to be located in the vicinity of the world’s most powerful authoritarian countries will need to accommodate themselves to the diktat of Beijing or Moscow ..."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'Help Me Understand... The New World Order'

UPDATE 2:

"In light of the events of the past week [which includes the US siding with Russia and North Korea on a UN resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a three-ship Chinese naval circumnavigation of Australia], the Washington faction of NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade faces a new and major problem. ...

    "President Donald Trump’s affection for dictatorial regimes; the brutality of his transactional approach to international affairs; and his apparent repudiation of the 'rules-based international order' in favour of cold-eyed realpolitik; makes it difficult for America (and its increasingly apprehensive allies) to retain their footing on the moral high-ground.
    "It is difficult [therefore] to criticise the transactional elements of the relationships forged between China and the micro-states of the Pacific – the Cook Islands being only the latest in a succession of Chinese-initiated bilateral agreements negotiated in New Zealand’s 'back yard' – when the United States is demanding half of Ukraine’s rare earths in part-payment for the American munitions supplied to counter Russian aggression.
    "What those three Chinese warships have produced, however, is a much more compelling argument for aligning New Zealand’s defensive posture in general and its military procurement in particular with Australia’s. In the much colder and more brutal world that is fast emerging from the collapse of the 80-year-old Pax Americana, only the Australians can be relied upon to protect us – and only then if they are satisfied that the Kiwis are pulling their weight."

 ~Chris Trotter from his post 'What Are We Defending?'

So, what's a doge?

Canaletto: The Doges' Palace and Piazza San Marco, Venice

 oil on canvas by Canaletto; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

This may come as a shock to your average Magat, or Dogeling — whose knowledge of world history is as frail as their economic understanding — but a doge is historically nothing to do with government efficiency, and everything to do with statism and dictatorship.

No. surprise, right?

From Encyclopaedia Britannica:

doge, (Venetian Italian: “duke”), highest official of the republic of Venice for more than 1,000 years (from the 8th to the 18th century) and symbol of the sovereignty of the Venetian state. ...

In Venice the office of doge (from Latin dux, “leader”) originated when the city was nominally subject to the Byzantine Empire and became permanent in the mid-8th century. According to tradition, the first doge was Paolo Lucio Anafesto, elected in 697.

From the 8th to the 12th century the doge’s power was extensive ... and became more and more powerful, with hereditary successions, conflicts and violent deaths. ...  By the 15th century the office had assumed the character of prince subject to law.

You can see why Magats in inappropriate leader-love with their leader would like the idea of a prince, subject to no law.

 Maybe the rest of us could refer instead to the dog that is it really is.

The marvellous price system

 

"[I]in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people ...  It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes ...
"Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. 

    "It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economise tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favour of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. 

    "The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. 

    "The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process. ...

"The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. 

    "This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or 'normal' level....

"I have deliberately used the word 'marvel' to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. 

    "Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamour for 'conscious direction'—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilisation of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."

~ FA Hayek from his famous 1945 article 'On the Use of Knowledge in Society.' Hat tip Russ Roberts from his recent EconTalk interview of Peter Boettke, “Who Won the Socialist Calculation Debate? — and David Henderson who notes: "When I taught this, I paused at the sentence, 'I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.'”

 

"Consequently, there is no incentive for the politicians to change their behaviour. It is for this reason we see tariffs consistently fail as a negotiation tool."

"To listen to protectionists, one would think tariffs are something of a miracle drug. Anything and everything can be solved by tariffs. Prices too low? Tariffs will raise ‘em. Prices too high? Tariffs will lower ‘em. Sprained knee? Just take two tariffs and call me in the morning. ...

"Take, for example, the argument that tariffs can be used as negotiation tools. The argument goes that you can threaten another nation with tariffs, impose the costs of the tariffs on them, and force them to bend to your will (whatever that will may be). ...

"[Yet] politicians face a different set of incentives. The major issue with many tariff supporters’ models is that they improperly model these incentives. This is a side effect of collectivist thinking; we must always remember that a 'nation' is a useful abstraction, but ultimately is made up of individuals who choose. A 'nation' never, ever chooses. And a government is not synonymous with the nation or the people located therein. ...

"Consequently, there is no incentive for the politicians to change their behaviour. It is for this reason we see tariffs consistently fail as a negotiation tool.

"Indeed, so-called trade sanctions and tariffs end up having the opposite effect. The American embargo of Cuba entrenched the Castro regime. Tariffs and embargoes on Iran failed to halt their nuclear program or weaken the regime. Putin still wages war in Ukraine despite (or because of?) trade sanctions. Perhaps most damningly, the Chinese government developed DeepSeek as a direct response to Trump’s original 'economic statecraft' against the Communist Party (continued by Biden).

"Adam Smith recognised this problem. In the 'Wealth of Nations' ... he notes that tariffs could be a potential tool to negotiate lower barriers in other nations. ...   Such negotiations could work, he states, but could also lead to war ...."

~ Jon Murphy from his post 'The Political Problem of Tariffs'

We are living in the Age of Slop

"A century ago, the creative world was buzzing with exciting artistic movements. Everything was fresh, new, and vital:

• You could be a Surrealist or a Futurist or a Post-Impressionist or a Cubist. 
• You could align yourself with Art Deco or Dada or Bauhaus or Fauvism. 
• You could proclaim your allegiance to Imagism or Verismo or the Harlem Renaissance—and dozens of other creative movements.

"And what about today? …..

"Instead of aesthetic manifestos, we get web platforms. They have machines to make big decisions—and the machines have invented the dominant art style of our day.

"It’s called Slop. And it’s everywhere.

"There’s Slop music and Slop visual art and Slop video. There’s Slop enough for all of us—because the machines Slop nonstop. ... It’s easy: Just find an AI bot, and give it a prompt—the goofier the better.

"So I created this image of Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift on a motorbike, with teddy bears celebrating the couple’s impending nuptials.

"Yes, I am deliberately creating something ridiculous. But that’s the essence of Slop. ...

"AI image generation is boring unless the results are stupid. That’s the consensus view. And it’s why AI artists are in a race to make the most abominable Slop they can extract from the bots.

"People collect and curate these images. Entire social media accounts are devoted to stupid Slop. ... The supply is endless—because AI never sleeps.

"We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.

"Slop is the opposite.

"It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for twelve-year olds with no artistic sensitivity—but possessing a crude sense of humour and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads. ...

"[N]one of this happens by chance.

"AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.

"Any human quality it possesses will be based on imitation, pretense, and deception. None of it is real.

"AI doesn’t even have a direct sense of objectivity—its knowledge of objects is all secondhand, assimilated through data. This results in a lack of depth or felt significance in any artistic work it creates.

"That why Slop is inevitable in an Age of AI.

"But this will not stop it from dominating the aesthetics of our time. ...

"In a previous day, people who got rich quick but lacked good taste were called vulgar. I don’t hear that word much anymore. But maybe it should have a comeback."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The New Aesthetics of Slop'

"Trump’s administration has quickly moved beyond normal policy disputes into the realm of constitutional crisis." [updated]

"Trump’s administration has quickly moved beyond normal policy disputes into the realm of constitutional crisis. His claim of authority to override courts, ignore Congress, and rule by decree presents Americans with a stark choice: They can defend their constitutional system, with all its frustrating checks and balances, or they can embrace an authoritarian leader who promises to impose their preferred policies by force.
    "The former path preserves liberty, even when policies disappoint. The latter leads, inevitably, to tyranny. Those who think Trump’s authoritarianism serves conservative ends should remember that power, once unleashed, outlives its wielder. The precedent Trump seeks to set would be available to every future President — including those with very different ideological aims.
    "America’s founders created a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent the concentration of power they had fled in Europe. They knew that liberty depends not on the character of individual leaders, but on binding all leaders within constitutional constraints.
    "That system now faces its greatest test since the Civil War."

~ Roger Partridge from his op-ed 'Trump’s War on Constitutional Democracy'

UPDATE: James Allan, a colleague of Roger Partridge's and a former Otago law professor —and normally one of the good guys — pushes back against Partridge's column. "Silly," he calls it. "Sensible," I would have said.

"In November 2023 a new Govt was sworn in with a promise to 'get our country back on track.' In 15 months, their highlights have been few."

"In November 2023 our new Government was sworn in ... with a promise that they would 'get our country back on track'....
    "In 15 months, their highlights have been few. ...
    "To be fair, they inherited a hell of a mess. ...
    "But the big problems remain. The health system remains a mess which has already taken a minister’s scalp. As Mayor Wayne Brown pointed out this week, the road cones remain. Despite tinkering around the edges of staff numbers, the bureaucracy continues to grow. Government debt continues to escalate and interest is now one of our top five expenditure items. ...
    "The Prime Minister has put his stock in the pursuit of a growth agenda. And he’s right. ... [But] the pace of change is frustrating to watch. ...
    "Argentine economist Javier Milei became that country’s President around the same time as our current Government was sworn in. Since then he’s eliminated 28% of government spending and reduced the number of ministries by half. He’s achieved the first budget surplus in 16 years and reduced monthly, yes monthly, inflation from 25% to 2.4%.
    "And despite the tough decisions, he ... is maintaining and building his popularity. Because the people like seeing action. ... The best thing about Trump and Milei is they are showing a new approach to political behaviour that is giving permission to other countries to follow suit. In our current state, we should be grabbing that opportunity with both hands. ...
    "When compared to similar-sized countries, we have twice as many Government departments as we need. ... We can’t afford to spend $4 million playing sperm whale noises in forests to combat kauri dieback. We can’t afford for the Department of Internal Affairs to spend almost $1m teaching 'indigenous knowledge to become change agents.' MBIE has 30 people focused on grocery prices who haven’t made a 1c difference to the cost of groceries. They have similar teams working on banking and retailing. Why?"

~ Bruce Cotterrill from his op-ed 'Time for Decisive Govt Action to Get NZ Back on Track'

"They talk endlessly about the cost of beating Russia. But they never talk about the more frightening and much more expensive alternative. The cost of not."

"Together, they were not simply telling Ukraine that America was overextended, or that the paradigm had shifted. They were broadcasting to the whole world that the United States could not offer so much as moral support to a country invaded by another country—a country run by a despot who wants to reassemble the empire the United States once crushed.
    "This was a betrayal not only of Ukraine, but America. ...
    "What is the point of an America that does not defend, if only from the bully pulpit, the right of ... smaller, weaker countries to defend themselves against their bigger, rapacious neighbours? How have we become so alienated from ourselves that we not only find it difficult to empathise with the Ukrainians but feel compelled to demonise them? We used to celebrate the likes of Zelenskyy, who proudly refused an American offer to airlift him out of his country two days after Russia invaded it. 'The fight is here,' he said. 'I need ammunition, not a ride.'
    "Neither Trump nor his subordinates ever says what will happen after Russia is rewarded for its aggression. They simply say that that is our only option. They don’t imagine or talk about the new world order according to the authoritarians ... Nor do they ever bring up the countless democratic movements that America helped usher into being.
    "They talk endlessly about the cost of beating Russia. But they never talk about the more frightening and much more expensive alternative. The cost of not."

~ Peter Savodnik from his post 'My Ancestors Fled Ukraine. It Was America That Allowed Me to Return.'

"The PM is right about the problem of our negative and utterly risk-averse culture. But changing our bureaucratic culture requires more than speeches."

"Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he wants a bureaucracy that says 'yes.' He is right to want that of course, but a lot of current rules would need to change. ...
    "New Zealand’s regulatory culture of “no” has become so pervasive that even the simplest reforms now spark fierce resistance. ... This reflexive negativity illustrates a deeper problem. New Zealand’s economy is being strangled by excessive caution and regulatory overkill.

    "Some numbers are telling. Property developers now spend $1.29 billion annually navigating consent processes. ...
    "The Port of Tauranga’s expansion would boost exports for forestry, kiwifruit and dairy. Yet bureaucratic delays have stalled the project for years. Eden Park operates under council-imposed event caps while New Zealanders fly to Australia for concerts in packed stadiums.
    "Even our tax system seems designed to say 'no.' When businesses invest in new machinery to boost productivity, New Zealand’s depreciation provisions are among the most restrictive in the OECD. ....
    "Similar patterns emerge in construction. .... The building code and certification process favour established products and make it slow and expensive for new or imported products to gain approval. Even common materials used safely for years in Australia or Europe face lengthy and costly verification processes here. The result is higher costs for builders and homeowners alike.
    "Meanwhile, the banking sector faces its own regulatory headwinds. ...

"Reform need not be complex. Sometimes it simply means removing bureaucratic obstacles. Trust regulators in other developed countries rather than retesting everything here. ... But ... every change, no matter how sensible, must overcome a chorus of imagined risks and hypothetical problems. ... 
    "Those objecting to developments need to be confronted with the lost value to the community of getting their way.
    "The Prime Minister is right about the problem of our negative and utterly risk-averse culture. But changing our bureaucratic culture requires more than speeches. It demands sustained effort to identify and eliminate unnecessary rules, requirements and restrictions. ...
    "The alternative is continued decline."

~ Bryce Wilkinson from his post 'Bureaucracy is strangling NZ’s potential for growth'

"Nationalism is not patriotism!"

"Alchemy is not chemistry.

"Altruism is not caring.
"Socialism is not sharing.
"Astrology is not astronomy.
"H2SO4 is not water.
"Nationalism is not patriotism."

~ Keith Weiner

"Nationalism is not patriotism! A French patriot roots for their Olympic basketball team; a French nationalist grumbles that almost all the players are black....
    "Note that 'identity politics' is not an inherently left or right wing idea. Where it favours minority groups, it is typically framed as left wing. When it favours the majority ethnic group (or more precisely the group in power – recall South Africa before 1994), it’s typically viewed as right wing. Thus [both varieties of] nationalists tend to oppose immigration, which threatens to dilute the [favoured] ethnic group."

~ Scott Sumner, from his post on 'The authoritarian nationalist playbook'

"Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think"

"There is, within every reader worth the ink spilled in his direction, an impulse both criminal and holy: to scrawl and to deface the pristine margins of a book with the unruly evidence of thought. We call this annotation, ... the very gesture by which a book is rescued from the museum glass of mere consumption and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the flickering present of a mind alive with questions.
    "Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think, and thought, unruly thing that it is, resists containment. It overflows and demands articulation. If it is not spoken, it will be written. And so, the margins—those innocent blank expanses to the right and to the left—become battlefields, sites of interrogation, where the reader takes up the pen not as a scribe but as a conspirator. Here, in the tight scrawl of a half-formed argument, in the underlined passage thick with silent agreement, in the snide rebuttal penciled next to an author’s pronouncement, is evidence of that most radical act: the refusal to simply receive. The marked book is the thought-through book, the wrestled-with book, the book taken apart and reconstructed in the mind of its reader."

~ Michael S. Rose from his post 'The Subversive Art of Annotation' [hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi]

"...the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America."

"Vice President ... JD Vance ... [and his advisers] belong to an elite coterie of illiberal Christian conservatives animated by an attitude reminiscent of what historian Fritz Stern once called the 'politics of cultural despair' ... [harking back to] a movement of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectuals who shared a loathing of liberalism rooted in personal frustration. 'They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it. . . . their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts.' ...

"The worldview many of Vance’s muses hold up as the alternative to liberalism is self-avowedly Roman Catholic. Catholicism offers anti-liberal intellectuals a way to anchor their dislike of the modern world in something bigger, a tradition that promises timeless truths and solutions to every social problem. Yet their Catholicism is much smaller than the tradition it rests on because of the way they have politicised it: Their use of the Catholic tradition is motivated by their animus against liberalism and therefore selective.

"One sees this in the barely disguised admiration some of them have for twentieth-century Catholic 'corporatism,' what others call clerical fascism. ...

"The high-water mark for Catholic corporatism came in the wake of the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno. Speaking to the social question, Pope Pius XI explicitly embraced the idea of 'corporations' [a system drawing inspiration from mediaeval guilds in which the whole of society would be organised into distinct corporations arising from common interests]. 

"In a controversial set of paragraphs, he even appeared to approve of Italian fascism. Years later, the primary ghostwriter of Quadragesimo anno insisted the encyclical had been misread. Be that as it may, the encyclical was widely understood in its time as endorsing clerical fascism. In the words of one historian, 'Virtually every Fascist revolution of the next decade was to fly the flag of Quadragesimo anno and its corporative State.' ...

"[C]orporatist regimes were not merely experimenting with policy proposals that others might copy; they were engaged in a radical project of social transformation. The corporatist organisation they envisioned aimed to embrace every aspect of society and define life’s meaning. “In the corporation,” Messner wrote, “the individual discovers himself placed in a community whose reality he experiences, which embraces him in the day to day life of his vocation, but which also shapes the entire surroundings of his life, because it determines an area of life and cultural values of a special kind.”

"One needn’t engage in endless debates about the nature of fascism to recognise [this] as a political vision that treated individuals as parts of a societal collective, assigned the state responsibility for directing the pursuit of happiness, and had the audacity to equate its repressive regulation of people’s lives with human flourishing. That such a vision is deeply inimical to America’s Constitutional tradition should be self-evident to every honest legal scholar.

"Which brings us back to JD Vance. One cannot tell the extent to which he is an unprincipled opportunist, a true believer, or just a very online guy. What we do know, however, is that he moves among a small circle of intellectuals who toy with dangerous, deeply un-American ideas. Vance’s remark that the United States is currently in a 'late republican period' in need of a Caesar may be an indication that he’s studied De bello civili—but it’s much more likely he’s reading figures from the conservative revolution like Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler who talked about how Germany needed a Caesar to deliver it from parliamentary democracy. Or, likelier still, he’s reading others who have imbibed their ideas.

"That ideas like these, and the people who promote them, have influence with a man who might be placed a heartbeat from the presidency is one more piece of evidence, if more were needed, of the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America."

~ H.David Baer from his article 'The Influence of Austrofascism on JD Vance'

"We are witnessing a very sad moment in American history." [updated with a FACTCHECK]

 

I confess that I never thought I'd be posting a video here by Bernie Sanders.

But it is the right time.

He captures the gravity, and the tragedy, of an American president dictating verbatim Russian propaganda lines to a willing American audience, an abject capitulation to dictatorial force, dismissing with a wave a Western Alliance that has lasted eighty years—and outraging folk as diverse as Bernie in Vermont, Emanuel Macron in Paris, and even the illiberal Peter Dutton in Canberra. 

It is indeed a very sad moment in American history.

There is literally nothing in Trump's recapitulation of Russian propaganda in any way based on reality.

"Trump Blames the Victim," says National Review, accurately. National Review! 'The American Betrayal of Ukraine' is its headline.

[S]o far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump has offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctionson Russia. And Trump might even throw in a withdrawal of the extra 20,000 U.S. troops that Joe Biden sent to NATO’s eastern flank after the invasion of Ukraine.
And in exchange, Putin offered . . . well, nothing, really. ... 

So much for the "art of the deal," huh.

"Peace" talks? These are talks to see how quickly Putin can be given all he asks for on a plate. 

    Russia has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, and more than 6 million Ukrainian citizens live under the brutal hand of occupying Russian forces, and our government is talking about [terms of surrender and] 'historic economic and investment opportunities' with them?
    What exactly does Russia have to offer us that we want so badly?

Who the hell knows. But this is Trump sending his Secretary of State to "impose terms of surrender on a sovereign nation that committed the crime—in his eyes now—of refusing to allow Russia to take it over." This, above and below, by the way, is written by a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

Trump literally blamed [Zelenskyy] and the country he leads for the war itself:“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.”
    You should never have started it. What madness, what cravenness, what repulsive factitiousness, is this?

"Started it"? Zelenskyy wasn't even within a sniff of his presidency when Putin invaded for the first time, in 2014. And the second invasion, in 2022, all he had time to start was firm resistance to Putin's bid for lebensraum.

As Volodomyr Zelenskyy responded, as diplomatically as he knew how, "Trump is living in a disinformation bubble."

[Trump's] claim is effectively that Zelenskyy is illegitimate; according to Trump, Zelenskyy has a 4 percent approval rating. That’s a near-psychotic lie. The last poll, for whatever a poll in the middle of a war is worth, had the Ukrainian leader at 52 percent.

That's a better rating than Trump's, for what it's worth.

Trump insists Zelenskyy holds elections, even as it struggles under the martial law imposed since Putin's second invasion. However, 

the Ukrainian constitution literally creates an election exception under conditions of martial law; not only are elections not to be held under its terms, but once martial law is lifted, there is to be no election for six months. As the scholar Elena Davlikanova explains, “Several laws would need to be changed in order for presidential elections to be held, which raises its own problems. Even if a legal solution could be found, security, financial, and organisational obstacles to holding free, fair, and representative elections are far more serious.”

It is not for Trump to decide whether Ukraine continues to defend its territory and its sovereignty. He is, of course, within his mandate as president to cut off aid, and thereby make the war sputter out—in order to make the Ukrainians suffer for their disobedience in refusing to walk quietly to the gallows while thanking him as they are hanged in the worldwide public square.

Down here, Oliver Hartwich weighs in on this historic shift in world affairs. 'The Day the West Died' is how he titles his piece.

Predictable though these developments were, they are still shocking. Not since the end of World War II has there been such a dramatic shift in the global security architecture. And rarely has a great power abandoned its allies with such devastating consequences.
    If you are not sure just how dramatic the events of the last week are, think about them this way. When World War II was coming to an end, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met at Yalta to plan post-war Europe. But they did not invite Hitler to these discussions.
    Now, as the Ukraine War appears to be ending, it is the aggressor (Putin) and a sympathetic US President planning Ukraine’s future.
    Meanwhile, Ukraine and America’s European allies are effectively excluded from the talks.
    As Estonia’s former Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now EU foreign policy chief, put it, “Why are we giving Russia everything they want even before negotiations have started?” ...

    As former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt observed on X, “It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started. Not even Chamberlain went that low in 1938.”

If Europeans had fronted up when they needed to—as a friend pointed out, if NATO were even barely competent, "this shouldn't matter. It'd be the same as Luxembourg negotiating with Russia on Ukraine's behalf." But they've made it matter by sitting on their hands when it mattered, and now it matters that an American president is hearing siren songs from a saurian despot.

Historian Niall Ferguson summarises, in firing back at a raving J.D. Vance:

I simply cannot understand the logic of beginning a negotiation this difficult by conceding so many crucial points to Russia. 

    As I understand it, before negotiations have even begun, NATO membership for Ukraine has been taken off the table and the loss of 20% of its territory has in effect been conceded. Correct me if I am wrong. 

    I have read also (though it may not be true) that “American officials are suggesting a different sort of peacekeeping force, including non-European countries such as Brazil or China, that would sit along an eventual ceasefire line as a sort of buffer.” China? Seriously? 

    On Wednesday, President Trump accused Ukraine of having “started it,” meaning the war. He also cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Zelensky’s government. 

    It is not “moralistic garbage” but a hard and realistic lesson of history that wars are easy to start and hard to end. As for “historical illiteracy,” here are some facts. 

    It took 1 year, 10 months, 25 days for Woodrow Wilson to negotiate an end to World War I (it helped that the Allies won); 2 years, 18 days to negotiate an end to the Korean War; 3 years, 5 months, 24 days to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War; and 5 years, 5 months, 1 day to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt. 

    I earnestly hope that the Trump administration can negotiate an end to this war. 

    But if we end up with a peace that dooms Ukraine first to partition and then to some future invasion, it will be a sorry outcome.

A line has been drawn here. A line Bernie is not alone in recognising. Writing on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt observed that

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” 

The distinction right now is between those who are still reality-based, and those willing to entertain the ravings of a fantasist. A fantasist in thrall to dictators, oligarchs, and his own headlines.

 

But one who holds, for another four years, the once-respected office of the US presidency.

FACTCHECK:

Claim: Ukraine started the war

Fact: Russia started the war, openly initiating in 2022 what they termed a special military operation after denying for weeks that they were preparing to invade. Russia also invaded Crimea by force in 2014 and organized the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk starting that year to destabilize Ukraine, using Russian forces masquerading as local separatists.

Claim: Zelenskyy is unpopular with approval rating polls at 4%.

Fact: Zelenskyy approval rating polls are ~50%.

Claim: Zelenskyy is a dictator.

Fact: Putin is a dictator. Zelenskyy was elected in a free election and would win a second term depending on whether or not General Zaluzhnyi (popular former C-in-C, currently Ambassador to UK) runs. Pro-Russia politicians are extremely unpopular. Elections with much of four regions under Russian occupation would be difficult, and Ukraine's Constitution forbids elections during martial law, a status that Parliament must approve every 90 days (and has). Russia's last even partly free election was in 2000.

Claim: Russia is winning the war.

Fact: Russia has lost half of its military capability in the war, and proven that a supposed first rate military power cannot defeat a third rate power. Russia's economy is crippled by sanctions, brain drain, and 21% interest rates. They have suffered an estimated 500,000 battle casualties, naval decimation, and a recent embarrassing loss of its satellite state in Syria. The cards dealt to Trump in negotiating are actually quite strong.

Claim: U.S. has spent $350 billion on the war, half of which is missing.

Fact: U.S. government figures have Congress approving $183 billion for Ukraine and NATO partners assisting Ukraine, of which $86.7 billion has been spent. $58 billion of that was spent in the U.S. fulfilling arms orders, and $32 billion on direct budget support for Ukraine's government. A private estimate by the Kiel Institute adds indirect spending to total $124 billion to date. The $350 billion number is a 2022 World Bank estimate of the cost of rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure after the war. Zelenskyy's comment about missing money was about the U.S. not spending the full amount Congress has approved.

Claim: The U.S. has spent $200 billion more than Europe on aiding Ukraine.

Fact: Europe has spent more total aid, $140 billion to date. The U.S. has spent slightly more on military equipment ($67 billion vs $65 billion) but Europe has spent more on financial and humanitarian aid.

Claim: Ukrainian provinces have voted to join Russia.

Fact: The sham referendums - claiming 87% to 99% support for Russia - were hastily arranged with no secret ballots, involved armed men going door to door to collect ballots, multiple ballots cast by supporters, and documented reprisals against those who refused to cooperate. Many residents had also fled the Russian occupation of their regions. Prewar polling of Russian annexation of their region ranged from 1% (Kherson) to 13% (Luhansk).

Claim: The U.S. launched a coup in 2014 against Ukraine's government.

Fact: Russia attempted a coup against Ukraine's government in 2013-14, sending support to a pro-Russian President's attempt to end an agreement with the EU that Parliament had ratified, jail his opponents (deploying "Berkut" riot police against them), and curtail press freedom. Ukraine's Parliament voted 328 to 0 to remove the President, who fled to Russia. Polling showed overwhelming Ukrainian support for his removal and the country had a free election later in 2014 to select his replacement.

Claim: Ukraine could have made a deal.

Fact: Ukraine negotiated up until the full-scale invasion in 2022, and even after it began. Russia's pre-conditions were (and remain) annexation of Crimea and four Ukrainian regions including portions Russia does not currently occupy, NATO rejection of Ukrainian membership and withdrawal of NATO forces from eastern Europe, and the replacement of Ukraine's democracy with a pro-Russia government. Ukraine ended negotiations after the Bucha massacre.

Claim: Zelenskyy was asleep and refused to meet with Treasury Secretary Bessent last week and refused to agree to Ukrainian mineral wealth being sold to the U.S.

Fact: Zelenskyy and Bessent met (see photo). The mineral wealth deal - Zelenskyy's idea of encouraging post-war investment while showing tangible value for American aid - is continuing to be negotiated. The first draft did not contain security guarantees which Ukraine views as vital and was written as a joint venture between governments rather than a private investment arrangement.