As Americans witness the spectacle of a grimacing Donald Trump, fidgeting nervously as he faces criminal charges in a Manhattan courtroom, an even more consequential drama continues to unfold some 5,000 miles away, where the Russian military is capitalizing on the months-long effort of Vladimir Putin’s GOP puppets to withhold military aid to Ukraine.
Whether that delay, caused by members of the GOP House’s so-called “Freedom Caucus,” seals Ukraine’s fate has yet to be seen.
As The New York Times’ David Sanger, Julian E. Barnes, and Kim Barker wrote, “Because of the delay in U.S. funding, Russia has been able to achieve a huge artillery advantage over Ukraine.”
Former national security adviser Steven Hadley observed that the lack of adequate air defense ammunition has allowed Russia to employ its “glide bombs” fairly at will, degrading Ukraine’s civil defenses and terrorizing the Ukrainian population even further, according to the Times.
While the media seems unable to comprehend how Trump’s difficulties connect to larger geopolitical ramifications, Putin is surely watching the New York proceedings with great interest. Putin most certainly does not want to prosecute his war with another four years of President Joe Biden in office, particularly with a potential Democratic House in place, allocating further aid to Ukraine next year. For the first time in his life, he actually needs Trump.
Similarly, Trump’s much-noted craving for Putin’s favor has not dissipated. Given the gravity of his pending criminal indictments—and barring some miraculous ruling in his favor from the U.S. Supreme Court—winning the 2024 election might be the only conceivable means for Trump to avoid facing serious legal repercussions. And, though there is no evidence suggesting Russian interference in this election yet, the 2016 election suggests that Putin needs no encouragement.
This confluence of mutual interest between Trump and Putin is why, of all the obsequious toadies who’ve appeared in court to genuflect before Trump, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s appearance is the most significant.
While all of Trump’s sycophants have motives for swearing allegiance to Trump in his hour of need, Vance’s motivation is fairly understood to be a bid for Trump’s vice president slot.
For Putin, Trump’s selection of Vance would constitute a coup of the highest order, and it’s not hard to understand why.
In April, Vance wrote an earnest argument for appeasement in Ukraine in The New York Times.
“Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war,” Vance wrote, apparently drawing upon a hidden surfeit of foreign policy knowledge.
He went on to urge the U.S. to “accept the brutal reality” that this war cannot possibly be won, adding that Biden’s claims that it’s not possible to negotiate with Putin are “absurd.”
For his part, Trump has already telegraphed to Putin that, if re-elected, he will abandon NATO, leaving Russia to do “whatever the hell it wants” with Western Europe.
Putin, whose state propagandists routinely refer to Trump as “Our Trumpushka,” is quite aware that Trump’s re-election in 2024 represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve his goal of reinvigorating the former Soviet empire. And while no vice president of Trump’s would interfere with his evident intent to stab our European allies in the back, Putin also knows that Trump, who will turn 78 next month, might not be around forever.
The popular wisdom is that Trump will pick a woman as vice president to “soften” the fact that he’s responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the women aren’t exactly cooperating with Trump’s plans; Kristi Noem appears to have made a joke of herself, Nikki Haley seems clearly off the table, and Sarah Sanders holds exactly zero national appeal. Apparently, there just aren’t enough women in Trump’s good graces willing to prostrate themselves before a serial sexual assailant whose fickleness toward running mates is already well understood.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has been floated as a possible candidate, but he has vocally supported continued aid to Ukraine, so he would seem to be a poor fit.
Vance benefits from the fact that people outside of Ohio know little about him, mostly because Vance himself apparently doesn’t know either. His political philosophy going into his political career was a relatively incoherent mishmash of liberalism and economic populism. At one point he was decidedly anti-Trump (he’s since deleted those tweets). But as a regular fixture on Tucker Carlson’s program, Vance has since honed himself as an “intellectual version of Trumpism.”
Heavily backed for his 2022 election run by billionaire Peter Thiel, for whom he once worked, Vance now tends to parrot the pseudo-libertarian blather that passes for conservative populism.
As noted last year in a piece authored by Pablo Manriquez for Vanity Fair, Vance essentially hitched himself to the Trump bandwagon by opportunistically emulating the boorish “shitposting” of Donald Trump Jr. while railing against “wokeness” and “identity politics.”
The fact that a 39-year-old Vance would blithely assert that the U.S. lacks the manufacturing wherewithal to keep pace with Russian military efforts in Ukraine shows a staggering incomprehension of our nation’s history, capability, and—probably most significantly—the brutal reality of Putin’s ambitions. It suggests he is indifferent—if not completely oblivious—to Putin’s intentions regarding the Baltic states, now members of NATO, and beyond.
But Putin couldn’t care less about deciphering Vance’s domestic policy pretensions, and Trump is too intellectually averse to even bother trying. All Putin cares about is that Vance went out of his way to publicly and passionately declare his opposition to Ukraine aid. He’s also opposed turning seized Russian assets over to Ukraine. So whether Vance has any cogent philosophy or not, he clearly doesn’t believe the Ukraine war is worth fighting, which dovetails with Putin’s immediate needs.
Meanwhile, Trump took time off from his busy criminal trial schedule to co-host with Vance a $50,000 per person fundraiser for himself on Wednesday in Cincinnati, fueling further speculation that Vance is now a rising star in Trump’s orbit.
For Putin, having Trump’s designated successor standing at the ready— literally a heartbeat away, in fact—to embrace abject Neville Chamberlain-style defeatism in the face of further Russian aggression would be the ultimate insurance policy.
For Trump, it would simply be another curious instance of ingratiating himself with the Russian despot, for whom he has always expressed such deep admiration.
In short, picking Vance would constitute a win for both of them.
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