"He's Just Protecting Putin" - Dr. Phillips O'Brien On Trump, Ukraine, Europe

Описание: Friends, I'm excited to introduce our community at Hopium Chronicles to a brilliant foreign policy commentator and fellow Substacker, Dr. Phillips O'Brien, noted historian and professor at University of St Andrews.
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/he...

We cover a lot of ground in our discussion - what’s next for Europe and Ukraine after the Munich Security Conference; Ukraine’s remarkable success against Russia this past year; what Trump might be up to with Iran; how important Democrats winning these November elections is for democracy here in the US and all around the world. What turned me into a true Phillips O’Brien fan has been his clear-eyed assessment of what Trump was up to with his Ukrainian “Peace Negotiations.” From our interview:

"These are not peace negotiations. This is the thing that really bugs me, Simon, is that these are not peace negotiations. And when Trump says, oh, he wants to stop the killing…Trump could care less about the killing. He doesn’t really care about Ukrainian lives at all or Russian lives. It’s an irrelevance to him. What he is trying to do is, I think, twofold... one, he’s trying to get a really good deal for Putin. He wants to get back to work with Russia. He doesn’t care about Ukraine. Trump could give two figs for Ukraine…just doesn’t care about Ukraine. He hates Zelensky, by the way, but really doesn’t care about Ukraine. So what Trump is trying to do is get a good deal, the best deal possible for Putin.....he’s helped Putin a great deal, and he’s sidelined the Europeans, as you said. So that’s where we are in these negotiations. They’re not negotiations for peace. I think that’s the thing that has to be said more than anything."

Keep fighting all. Lots of work ahead - Simon