Ukraine, Democracy, and Dictators

Are we headed back to the Age of Big Powers?

Even though Bob Dylan said you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, I nominate Lindsey Graham (R-Shifting Sands) for that position. He missed his calling. He should have been a meteorologist. He has an uncanny knack for knowing which way the wind blows. With Obama in power he cozied up to his friend of convenience, the late great John McCain (R-Integrity). Graham, whose self-proclaimed deepest fear is irrelevance, could be relied upon to parrot McCain, and often President Obama.

Before he died, Senator McCain saw Senator Graham drifting toward the new center of power in what was once the Grand Old Party, and which for its entire history, championed freedom, and for the last twenty years, disdained Vladimir Putin as a former KGB agent and current despot intent on dragging unwilling former satellites back into Russia’s orbit. John McCain was distraught. I guess it’s good he didn’t live to see his former colleague sell out entirely to a transactional reality television star who has spent >$30m on golf in the last month. (Transportation and security are the two big line items—no greens fees since the president owns the courses). That’s more than we spent last year on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

An aside: The CFPB has returned a whopping $21B to defrauded consumers, $7.7B of which is in debt relief from usurious and unscrupulous lenders of last resort. Prior to the CFPB, consumers had little recourse against the big banks, payday lenders, and credit card companies. It’s no surprise that the Trump Administration, receiving marching orders from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and oodles of cash from said banks, sides with financial institutions over average Americans.

If you’re not paying attention—I don’t blame you, it’s overwhelming—this is just a piece of the massive undoing being directed Elon Musk. Of course we’re all in favor of un-bloated efficient government, but the Muskovites are gleefully taking a chainsaw to the bureaucracy. A scalpel would’ve been smarter.

Little Marco becomes one with Oval Office couch

And then there’s Little Marco Rubio, our pliant Secretary of State, who used to recognize Putin for the murderous thug he is. He wasn’t bashful about saying so. That all ended in the Oval as he slumped on a couch. Had he been a turtle, he’d have pulled his head into his shell. Mortified or not, Little Marco—you do have to hand it to The Donald—he’s mastered the insulting nickname—weathered the Trump/Vance storm of invective aimed at the only guy in the room with an ounce of courage, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled wartime president. He could have been there to give a lesson in ethics and principles, but instead was assigned the role of punching bag by Putin’s thuggish friends, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio.

You can sue Rubio, Vance, and Graham for giving you whiplash—their collective about-face spun more than a few heads. Go ahead. They’re well insured, and you pay that bill anyway.

I have an old friend named Brad Sharp who has spent a lot of time in Russia. I don’t agree with him about how to resolve Russia’s war, but I have little expertise here, and am probably naïve. Because of that, I asked him to weigh in. He wrote: “I do believe that offering NATO membership to Ukraine would lead to an eventual WW III. The majority of people in the Dumbas, Lugansk, and Crimea regions would rather be Russian than Ukrainian. Many already hold Russian passports. For there to be any kind of workable peace plan, negotiations will have to include at the minimum making these areas some kind of autonomous region like Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Republic of Georgia. The Ukrainians might not like it but it would recognize the principle of self-determination and choice of government by the people that live there and end the current war.”

Personally, I can’t imagine trusting Putin enough to let him keep a beachhead in Ukraine, but an international peace keeping force in an autonomous zone in Eastern Ukraine might be workable.

Any way you look at it, Trump has made a one-hundred-eighty degree turn in both American foreign policy and our eight-decade collaboration with Western Europe. It sure looks like President Trump wants to return us to the era of Big Powers big-footing small countries and small alliances. It appears that he wants Xi of China to control Asia, Putin of Russia to again control Eastern Europe, giving the U.S. control of the Americas.

Nervous former partners and allies like Japan, Taiwan, the Philipines, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Canada, Panama, the Baltic and Scandinavian countries know that Trump, and by extension, the United States, is no longer a reliable friend.

©2025 Jon Sinton