“Two red lines remain,” the Associated Press reported on July 5, regarding the topic of Ukraine at this week’s North Atlantic Treaty organization summit: “No NATO membership until the war is over, and no NATO boots on the ground there.”

But, Politico reports as the summit opens, citing two anonymous sources, one a Ukrainian official, “NATO members are likely to declare that Ukraine’s path to membership in the alliance is ‘irreversible.'”

The reality:

Ukraine was, and is, never going to formally become a NATO member state.

Why is that never going to happen?

Because formal NATO membership requires unanimous consent from all of the current member states, because several NATO member states enjoy friendly relations with the Russian Federation, and because there’s no way at least one such member state wouldn’t exercise its veto for the purpose of maintaining and enhancing those friendly relations.

That being the case, why does NATO keep dangling the prospect of membership in front of Ukraine? And why do defenders of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine continue to pretend that the prospect is real — just as Putin himself has from the beginning of the conflict?

As a bargaining chip, of course.

If peace talks ever begin in earnest, NATO negotiators get to offer a meaningless concession (withdrawing the non-existent prospect), and the Russian Federation’s negotiators get to pretend they got a meaningful concession (withdrawal of the non-existent prospect).

A key element of international negotiations is that all sides have to “get something.” Unconditional surrenders occur only when one side is militarily defeated and/or economically exhausted.

NATO’s likely “irreversible” statement is just NATO’s way of saying it’s not ready to negotiate yet. And if NATO isn’t ready to negotiate, neither is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has essentially become a US/UK/EU/NATO puppet “president.”

Zelenskyy wants the “irreversible” statement because he fears the appearance of any daylight at all between him and his regime’s western backers. Any slight crack in the wall of western support for his regime would encourage Russian forces to stay their military course, and likely end with him in exile at best, and more probably dead.

As a non-interventionist, I’ve opposed US meddling in Ukraine for a decade — ever since the US-sponsored coup that culminated in the secessions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and eventually in the 2022 Russian invasion.

The US and its allies worked hard to bring the current situation about, and — with the full cooperation of Vladimir Putin — succeeded.

If it was up to me, US aid to Zelenskyy’s regime would end today. Not because I support the Russian invasion, but because it’s simply not (and never was) any of “my” government’s business.

Of course, that aid WON’T end today, and after more than two years of stalemate, the war is far more likely to end in a negotiated settlement that leaves neither side completely happy than in either side collapsing.

The sooner Ukraine and its backers come to the table and start their horse-trading, the better for everyone involved.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Who runs the country?”

I’ve been hearing variants of that question a lot over the last  few weeks, mainly in forms like “given Joe Biden’s age and apparent mental decline, can we trust him to run the country for another four years?”

For the last eight or nine years, I’ve also heard it a lot, in slightly different forms, about Donald Trump.

I visited Google Trends to find out if I’m just imagining increased frequency of that annoying question. Turns out my perception is correct: After a brief spike in 2004, the phrase “who runs the country” took a long vacation, only beginning to rise to prominence again a decade or so ago, and recently peaking at its highest point since 2015.

It’s a really dumb question … and a pet peeve of mine.

Donald Trump did not “run the country” from 2017 to 2021.

Nor has Joe Biden “run the country” since then.

Whoever wins this November’s presidential election will not “run the country” starting next January 20.

What are you doing today?

Whatever that might be, did you ask Joe Biden for permission to do it? Next January, will you start running your daily calendar by Joe Biden or Donald Trump for approval?

Almost certainly not.

The president is just one of more than 330 million Americans. He (or, someday, she) may be more powerful than most of us, But not so much more powerful that he “runs the country” in any meaningful sense.

At MOST, the president “runs” one of three branches of the federal government … and the federal government is not “the country.”

Economics isn’t everything, but it’s a useful thing. US Gross Domestic Product (the value of all goods and services produced) in 2023 topped $27 trillion, of which the federal government spent $6.13 trillion. That’s a lot. It’s WAY too much. But it’s hardly “running the country.”

That $6.13 trillion was appropriated by Congress, not the president.

His only power over that is to sign or veto the appropriations bills (in the latter case, Congress can override him), then spend the money as Congress directs.

Increasingly “imperial” presidents since World War 2 have tried to get around such strictures with “executive orders.” Sometimes that works. Other times Congress or the courts say “nope.”

Outside the purely economic arena, the president gets to negotiate treaties (but the Senate must approve them) and act as commander in chief of the armed forces when they are “called into the service of the United States,” which should only happen when Congress has declared war (it hasn’t done so in 80 years).

The president doesn’t “run the country.” He only “runs the government” to a limited extent, if Congress and the courts allow it (they allow it far too much).

The country is “run” by those of us who produce that $27 trillion in goods and services every year … or don’t .. and who go about our business with or without a president’s permission.

We should stop fantasizing so much power into the hands of politicians. They’re just wasteful parasites. We’re the productive hosts.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

“Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing” feels like a current headline eight years after it ran in Politico.  Is America trapped in a rerun of the Republican Revolution of ’94, with the platforms of “presidential candidates Buchanan, David Duke and Ross Perot — the most visible figures of the political fringe” perpetually mainstreamed? The New York Times Book Review‘s Jennifer Szalai is convinced (“Ticking Time Bomb,” June 30). Or in one of the ’80s, “When Greed Was Good” — Jacob Goldstein’s headline on the facing page of the Book Review.

Goldstein writes that the cultural catchet of financial flummery made “the United States suddenly fall in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed,” suggesting Billy Joel-style verses about the likes of “Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose,’ Jane Fonda, running shoes.” At the time, Mother Jones quipped that the rock star “ain’t ‘livin’ here in Allentown'” after “marryin’ a … fashion model.” Nowadays, an ode to Air Jordan marketing from Matt Damon, previously known for plugging Howard Zinn’s People’s History, raises few eyebrows.

The line from Gekko to Gingrich needs little elaboration when Szalai places the sociopolitical rancor of the early 1990s “atop a wreckage of junk bonds, bank failures and vacant skyscrapers” of “the debt-fueled growth of the ’80s.”  While Friedman was civil enough in his limited-government sentiments to be a PBS host, Szalai finds one of the most vocal supporters of Buchanan’s 1992 campaign in “the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard” who considered George Herbert Walker Bush’s re-election bid “too timid and polite.”

Szalai traces Rothbard’s “taste for conflict” to his juvenile insistence that “Communist aunts and uncles” were too harsh on Francisco Franco’s repressive rightist regime in Spain. Yet Rothbard’s pugnaciousness led him to positions unhinted at by Szalai’s selections. In 1988, he advocated voting for Democratic “cautious spender” Michael Dukakis since Bush was providing “only lip service to the free market.” His Libertarian Forum berated Friedman for providing “a free-market cloak for state despotism” in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and recommended an “angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class” by Noam Chomsky.

Buchanan offered meager warmth to his libertarian bedfellows, who he said “don’t know anything about American history” when Rothbard’s publications identifying the ills of intervention included four volumes on the Revolutionary period alone. Llewelyn Rockwell recalled that by 1995, Rothbard could see that Buchanan’s “commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state;” by 2002, hostility to international comity ranged from the Buchanan who “hates China and the developing world” to a President George Bush who “hates the Muslim world” (Rockwell would sum up his administration as “red-state fascism”).

Goldstein notes that Trump’s first presidential term ended with a release of the Michael Milken who personified “the ’80s financialization wave” from boom to bust; the Trump of 1989 drew Rothbard’s mockery for calling Milken overpaid “from his own lofty financial perch.” Real competition in business and political economy would cut Trump’s towering shadow down to size.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 4, 2024
2. “SCHLOSBERG COLUMN: When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, July 5, 2024