Monthly Archives: December 2025

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.

A Lesson for Republicans

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This one in the final outcome of Chile’s Presidential election, concluded last Sunday.

[Left-wing candidate Jeanette] Jara conceded with over 80% of the ballots counted. [Conservative candidate Antonio] Kast won with 58% of the votes in one of the most lopsided presidential victories since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.

A marked turnaround in the runoff from the original, in which Jara had won a solid plurality, 27%, with Kast having gotten 24%.

There’s a hint in all of that: Jara was the only one, or maybe of two, Leftist candidates in the pre-runoff electoin; there were more than a half-dozen right and right-wing candidates who, in the aggregate, diluted those final 58-ish% across the lot of them, denying each of them an outright victory in that stage. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a lesser candidate than Kast, with that dilution, could have been the one making the runoff, potentially handing the final election to Jara.

Republicans could benefit from that hint by coalescing early in their primaries. One or two rounds should be sufficient for all but the most desperately egoistic candidate(s) to identify the only or the couple of candidates who would be viable in the final election. Those egoists hanging on purely out of pridefulness should be resoundingly outvoted to the point of political destruction.

Gun Control by the Weak

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Recall the mass shooting/killing just a few days ago on a Sydney beach. No one had firearms on that beach but the shooters, by design of the Australian laws. In the aftermath, we get this from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

Albanese called for tougher gun laws, saying that leaders would discuss limits on the number of guns that can be licensed and a review of licenses over time.
“People can be radicalized over a period of time. Licenses should not be in perpetuity,” he said in a press conference Monday.

Recall, also, the unarmed man—all one of him—on that beach who charged one of the shooters and took him down and disarmed him. And was not allowed to shoot him, under Australian law, and so the shooter got away. Fortunately, the police, arriving later (no knock on them, but they can only react when called, so their arrival will always be minutes after shooting has been in progress) got that one.

If armed citizens had been present, and it would not have taken many at all, the one shooter could have been stopped much sooner with far fewer dead and wounded, and the other shooter perhaps also by the time the police arrived.

But Albenese’s solution in the face of such mass shootings is to further disarm Australians, making them even more defenseless, even more helpless, in the face of such attacks.

Via my wife, but entirely a propos here: The cowards never started, the weak died along the way, that leaves us.

Foolish

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But a matter of little choice and less practical change.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has—reportedly—dropped his insistence on a path to NATO membership as a condition to an end of the war that Russia has inflicted in his nation. Instead, Zelenskyy has said that he would be open to a security arrangement that has

Washington and European states offering security guarantees in the event of another invasion, according to the Financial Times. “We are talking about bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States—namely, [NATO] Article 5-like guarantees…as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan, and others,” he said.

Zelenskyy had little choice in making this offer, since Ukraine had little chance of joining NATO for all the pre-war favorable talk about such a thing. The acceptance of a new member requires the unanimous agreement of the existing members, and too many members, out of timidity, ego, or being too close to Russia would say no to the accession.

The offer represents even less as a practical matter. Many of the same nations that would guarantee Ukraine’s national security in the event of another invasion are the same signatories to the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukraine’s national territory and sovereignty and who promptly betrayed Ukraine over 10 years ago when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and first invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Still, Zelenskyy has little choice but to make such an offer, regardless of its practical foolishness. That’s the outcome of the West’s collective decision to withhold from Ukraine the wherewithal to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine, a victory that Ukraine almost certainly could achieve were it not being held back.

Contradiction in Terms

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This time, regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) move to remodel and expand the White House East Wing so that, among other things, important diplomatic events involving large groups of dignitaries, their significant others, et al., can be held indoors inside a facility fitting for the occasion rather than outdoors, in the White House’s back yard, in tents.

Leftist critics, of course, object. One of their more risible objections is this:

Critics say Trump barreling through bureaucracy to reshape an iconic piece of American history reflects a wider disdain for democratic norms.

Never mind that giving an unelected bureaucratic authority functional veto power is what violates democratic norms.