On the menu today: Why only a blithering moron would expect Vladimir Putin and the brutal regime in Moscow to honor any treaty it signed; Representative Majorie Taylor Greene calls it quits, and why you do not want to run into a Bengal tiger in India.
What Kind of Idiot Would Trust the Russians?
My distinguished colleagues Noah Rothman, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Wright — writing from Kyiv! — and The Editors have weighed in on the nebulous, 28-point “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine put together by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists it was not written by the Russians, and that the text of the proposal is apparently changing day by day. “I’m not going to speculate or go into the details of any of the specific items in the latest version of the proposal because, frankly, by tomorrow or the next day, that may have evolved and changed further,” Rubio said.
My take is simple: Negotiations with the Russian government are moot, because the Russian government breaks its treaties on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter what Vladimir Putin promises, because he’s either never going to keep that promise or he will break that promise at the first moment of convenience.
- In 1991, Russia declared that it was continuing the Soviet Union’s membership in the United Nations and that it would honor its treaty obligations with that organization. The U.N. charter declares, “All members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.” Then Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine twice — 2014 and 2022, although the Ukrainians would argue the first invasion never really stopped.
- In 1994, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine dismantling its nuclear arsenal. Russia violated this with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2022 invasion.
- In 1997, Russia signed the “Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” which declared the inviolability of existing borders, and respect for territorial integrity. Russia violated this with the annexation of Crimea and subsequent “little green men” attacks; in 2018, Ukraine chose to not extend the treaty because Russia was not honoring it.
- In 2003, Russia signed the “Treaty on the Russian–Ukrainian border” which formally delineated the border between the two countries. Russia violated this with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2022 invasion.
- In 2010, Russia signed the Kharkiv Pact, which extended the Russian lease on naval facilities in Crimea to 2042, in exchange for a discounted price on natural gas sold to Ukraine. Russia violated this with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
- After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia signed two rounds of Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015, which “established a formal Russian commitment to return the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukrainian control.” Instead, Putin’s regime issued 200,000 passports to residents of those regions and declared them independent from Kyiv right before the invasion. In September 2022, Russia declared it was formally annexing Donetsk and Luhansk.
And these are just the treaties that Russia has broken with Ukraine. (Ukraine contends that since 2014, Russia has violated about 400 different international treaties.) Russia has repeatedly violated its treaties with the United States as well:
- In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, banning intermediate-range nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers. (The treaty did not cover sea- or air-launched missiles.) By 1990, the Soviet Union had destroyed all launchers in this category. But by 2014, the Obama administration announced that the Russian military had been testing, developing, and deploying SSC-8 ground-launched medium-range cruise missiles, in violation of the treaty. After five years of no progress with Putin, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the treaty in 2019.
- In 1990, 22 countries, including the Soviet Union, signed the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which set limits on conventional weapons deployments in Europe. In 2008, Putin announced that Russia would no longer provide information on or host inspections of its treaty-limited weapons, and withdrew from the treaty.
- In 2010, President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev signed the New START Treaty, setting limits on the number of nuclear missile launchers. In 2021, President Biden and Vladimir Putin signed an extension of that treaty, which Biden touted as a major diplomatic accomplishment. By 2023, the Russian government had blocked inspections of Russia’s nuclear stockpile in violation of treaty obligations, and a few weeks later, Putin announced he was suspending Russia’s participation in the treaty.
And then of course, there’s the Geneva Conventions, which the Soviet Union signed but has breached in just about every possible way. In July, the European Court of Human Rights determined that it had found “interconnected practices of manifestly unlawful conduct by agents of the Russian State (Russian armed forces and other authorities, occupying administrations, and separatist armed groups and entities) on a massive scale across Ukraine.” (Note that in 2019, the Russian government formally withdrew from the portion of the Geneva Conventions regarding international commissions investigate war crimes against civilians.)
Getting Russian leaders to sign a document pledging to not harm Ukrainians is not that hard. But getting Russian leaders to honor those documents is just about impossible.
Considering all this, how can anyone get excited about the prospect of Russian officials signing any treaty? What’s the point?
And how can any American president or his administration think that getting Putin’s signature on a piece of paper is worth jack squat?
MTG, Headed Toward the Door
Last week, over in that other Washington publication, I wrote, “[Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor] Greene is demonstrating that a high-profile member of the MAGA movement can vehemently disagree with the president and apparently not pay a price.”
As Emily Litella used to say, never mind.
I have never liked Representative Space Lasers as a political force, and yet even I felt a few molecules of sympathy for her as she lamented how long and hard she had worked to support President Trump, and how little disagreement with him was required to get the president to withdraw his support and furiously denounce her:
I have fought harder than almost any other elected Republican to elect Donald Trump and Republicans to power, traveling the country for years, spending millions of my own money, missing precious time with my family that I can never get back, and showing up in places like outside the New York Courthouse in Collect Pond Park against a raging leftist mob as Trump faced Democrat lawfare. Meanwhile most of the Establishment Republicans, who secretly hate him and who stabbed him in the back and never defended him against anything, have all been welcomed in after the election.
And I will never forget the day I had to leave my mother’s side as my father had brain surgery to remove cancerous tumors in order to fly to Washington D.C. to defend President Trump and vote NO against the Democrat’s second impeachment in 2021. My poor father and my poor mother, it was way too much.
Through it all, I never changed or went back on my campaign promises and only disagreed in a few areas like my stance against H1-Bs replacing American jobs, Al state moratoriums, debt for life 50-year mortgage scams, standing strongly against all involvement in foreign wars, and demanding the release of the Epstein files. Other than that, my voting record has been solidly with my party and the President.
Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest because our job title is literally, “Representative.”
Except, that’s never how Trump has ever perceived loyalty. He expects complete loyalty to whatever he wants at any given moment, and rarely if ever feels much obligation to offer loyalty in return. Greene seemed to think her hard work and dedication would persuade Trump to make an exception in her case. Now every Republican in Congress and the administration knows the score. There are no exceptions or special cases; Trump will interpret any disagreement or disobedience as a betrayal slightly worse than that of Judas.
Yes, yes, insert the joke about how the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party found herself sobbing, “’I never thought the leopards would eat MY face.”
Maybe, as some reports indicate, Greene is contemplating a 2028 presidential bid, but knocking off JD Vance or Rubio in a presidential primary as a former-representative apostate seems like a tall order. Greene’s mid-term resignation reminds me of Sarah Palin’s abrupt resignation as governor of Alaska. Once Palin saw the lucrative opportunities available outside of elected office, she never seemed all that interested in government work again.
The MAGA media ecosystem seems to have no shortage of opportunities for those who like to spin conspiracy theories, emote for the cameras, and hawk prepper materials and supplements. I would note than when you treat your congressional office as a steppingstone to social media prominence and fame, after a while, you don’t really need the congressional office anymore.
I, of the Tiger
This latest issue of the print magazine is a special one for me, as it features my review of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir 107 Days and the big reporting piece based upon my trip to India. For the latter, the editors asked for a certain word count, and I blew well past it, so one section had to be cut. Readers, this is what I wanted to tell you about the Bengals of India, much tougher than the ones in Cincinnati:
Nagpur boasts that it is “The Tiger Capital of the World.” After all our RSS meetings, we drove about two and a half hours to the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve.
Alas, the only tiger I saw on this trip was the logo on the Singaporean brand of beer. Tigers usually avoid humans, although we kept running into other tourists who showed us pictures of Bengali tigers who leisurely strolled along or across the park’s roads. I did see a sign by the reserve’s crocodile-laden lake saying, “Absolutely no swimming. Survivors will be prosecuted.”
I wasn’t entirely heartbroken, because Bengal tigers are world-class apex predators, and can kill elephants, rhinos and crocodiles if they’re sufficiently motivated. They’ve found king cobras in the stomachs of dead tigers. Tooth to tail, Bengali tigers can grow up to ten feet long, up to four feet tall, and up to 370 pounds for the biggest males. Despite all that size, the padding on its feet allows it to stalk its prey while making exceptionally little sound.
If a tiger decides you’re prey, to it, you’re just a slow-moving ham sandwich. A Bengal tiger’s top speed is forty miles an hour. Fighting it isn’t going to go your way, either. A Bengal tiger’s retractable claws are about four inches long when extended, and a swing of their paw exerts about ten-thousand pounds of force, six or seven times that of a trained boxer.
All that makes it hard to believe these spectacular orange-and-black killing machines are endangered. Alas, “traditional Chinese medicine” loves tiger parts and in particular believe that consuming a tiger penis can cure erectile dysfunction. There’s no scientific evidence to support this, but this doesn’t stop Chinese men from going to black markets, and big demand means lots of poachers. (Environmentalists always seem to give you endless grief for your Big Mac or your SUV, but never seem to get as loud about some middle-aged Chinese Communist Party apparatchik who’s chowing down on the wang of an endangered species because he’s hoping it’ll work as well as Viagra.) Trading in tigers or their parts has been banned since 1975, but from 2000 to 2022, more than 3,300 tigers were seized from poachers and smugglers in more than 50 countries — and keep in mind, those are just the ones they caught.
The good news is that India’s conservation efforts like the ones in the Tadoba preserve are getting results; in just over a decade, India doubled its tiger population to more than 3,600, accounting for 75 percent of the world’s tigers.
ADDENDUM: The Friday Morning Jolt: “If you’re going to create a video accusing the president of the United States of making unlawful orders, you probably should have at least one or two solid and recent examples in mind before you do so.”
ABC News’s This Week, yesterday:
MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC “THIS WEEK” CO-ANCHOR: Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?
SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN, MICHIGAN DEMOCRAT: To my knowledge, I — I am not aware of things that are illegal.