Well written article. American diplomacy (if you can even call it that) is one-dimensional and myopic.

American diplomacy is rather reminiscent of German diplomacy in 1917, in that expanding NATO into Ukraine and the Baltics is as stupidly provocative to Moscow as the Zimmerman Telegram was to the US. Zimmerman's offer was incredibly stupid since it provoked a US declaration of war but Germany had absolutely no way to provide Mexico any material assistance. Neither will NATO be providing any real assistance to Ukraine or the Baltic states if the balloon goes up -- today's Bundeswehr is not your grandfathers Wehrmacht.

True. The stupidity of US policy toward Russia can only be defeated by stupidity of the limitrophus of Eastern Europe, like Poland or the Baltic states. If "balloon goes up" they will be first to evaporate.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

The bi-partisan foreign policy consensus intends to remedy that.

Thumbs up on the article - the valiant Ukraine facing perfidious Russia is a gross oversimplification. And as noted, the US is involved in this mess up to its eyeballs. The first person to speak out publicly was the former diplomat (and godfather of "Containment") George Kennan. In his last public comment, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times warning against pushing NATO to the East as a policy guaranteed to cause Russian fear and resentment. In the early years of the century, Mikhail Gorbachev - no friend of Putin's - accused the West of trying to treat Russia like a third rate nation. It is sad that the "deep state" maneuvers against Trump (up and running early enough to destroy Paul Manafort) derailed Trump's plans to talk openly with Putin and thus earn him the blind hatred of John Brennan. The rest is history.

The stable genius seems to be running his own deep state using his crooked lawyers to undermine US interests for personal gain.

Someone who is a billionaire and spends makes every weekend a long weekend staying at his own resorts and playing golf sounds a lot like an elite to me.

How much is it costing us to fly and protect him while he vacations every weekend?

US interests would be supporting Ukraine against Russia, far better to have the front line way over there than closer to the US. Every country that leaves the Warsaw pact and joins the west adds a buffer zone to help contain Russian expansion plans.

Jeopardizing those on the front lines to ask for a sham investigation of the front runner thru bribery is definitely personal gain for stable genius and only strengthens Russia.

Money is flowing out of the Trump brand for the same reason he is booed when he goes out in public - most of the nation is disgusted with him, his lies and loser kids.

Trump's "loser kids"? Hunter Biden is the poster child for "loser kids"...

Did Hunter Biden work in the White House? Or be given a Top Secret clearance over the objections of the professionals only to have it taken away later.

And this is related to the subject of the article through...?

How much had it cost you to fly and protect him before he became the POTUS?

Its not, just like most of what is written in these comments, including many of yours.

Cost to fly and protect whom?

Most of my comments are answers to those who write things unrelated to the article. Logically, they are related to it to the same degree as the original comments.

Fly and protect Trump, who even before 2016 was rich enough to have his own jets and security service.

Yes, he sounds just like the very elitist that he is always complaining about.

Except he was spending his own money instead of using public funds.

He is using lots of public funds now.

He made shady deals so as to not pay taxs so the American taxpayers are subsiding his lifestyle.

Are you really trying to say that what was spent during campaign was in any way meaningful? Also he did have Secret Service protection so his own bodyguards are a moot point. Candidates do not fly on Air Force One so there is absolute no difference between him campaigning for his first term and Obama's.

Then provide court documents indicting him to corroborate these allegations you've made.

Well he is more than making up for that now.

Then gather the facts and sue him.

Less that when Obama and moochele took separate jets

Like when stable genius and his third wife travel separately as has occurred multiple times.

By May of this year the cost for stable genius golf trips have exceed the total travel cost of all 8 years for Obama.

1034 days in office, 549 days on vacation

Golfed at least 227 times already

The cost of Trump's travel has exacerbated ethics breaches within his administration. A number of Trump administration figures have drawn backlash for their travel habits. Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt spent $124,000 of taxpayer money on first- and business-class travel while leading the agency, according to the agency's inspector general. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke also violated agency travel policy by having his wife travel in government vehicles.

Russia is still treated as such.

Can you see the Horseshoe?

What does it mean when the US conservatives of the American Conservative website and the socialists of the World Socialist Web Site are both concerned with the same thing with regard to the impeachment of Trump?

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Pelosi doubles down on anti-Russia politics of impeachment inquiry

https://www.wsws.org/en/art...

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Impeaching Trump And Demonizing Russia: Birds Of A Feather

https://www.theamericancons...

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Russia as a state is not the friend of any working-class, so I'm not sure why socialists would make it an issue. My assumption is an irrational nostalgia leads to a reflexive response to defend the once socialist Russia. The democratic party and Pelosi deserve condemnation, but the Russian state does not deserve defense because of that.

In my experience, US conservatives have always generally demonized Russia up until the Trump administration. To see US conservatives defending an autocracy reflects they have embraced those fascistic principles.

US conservatives support the wealthy classes against the working-class so it's not too strange to see them defending the fascistic tactics of an autocracy to which they are connected by financial ties and mutual class interest.

I wonder why socialists of wsws.org would not see this situation as powerful autocratic forces connected in both countries attacking the psychology of the US working-class in a way that attacks class-consciousness and undermines democracy.

Defending Russian state attacks does not serve the working-class of either nation.

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Seeing similar headlines from opposite political poles exposes a 'horseshoe' phenomenon of left/right ideologies in which the two poles are close together in significant contexts.

There was a response from a WSWS contributor to your ridiculous claim that the WSWS article is in any way supporting Russia. Check it out, please.

Good comment. The Monarchists sat on the right side of the French assembly and the revolutionaries sat on the left. That is how the modern spectrum morphed into Fascism (corporate state) on the right and Communism (revolutionary) on the left.

And none of them are healthy for our country. Is there any way to get to the middle? Seems we need both sides to balance each other.

How do you know he is exercising the will of the Russian people.It is a corrupt authoritarian regime and does not have a free press or elections. Who knows what Russians think since they are not all that free to express their opinion. So you must be saying that Russians like Putin and his policies are popular (are they) and therefore this is the will of the Russian people. Really?

How do you know it's a corrupt authoritarian regime that doesn't have a free press or elections, where people are not all that free to express their opinion? Let me guess - because the MSM told you so? And you really think you're not laughable?

I've actually been to Russia, twice in the last year and a half, and I had a chance to meet and to converse with, and to hear from, Russians of all sorts: academics, students, politicians, government employees, businessmen, environmentalists, scientists, and journalists.

Based on what I saw and heard, I categorically reject your statement that Russians "are not all that free to express their opinion."

I heard from people who are well known in Russia who disagree with Putin. I heard criticisms of the government from people who are not well known, or who are just average people. People note that corruption is still a problem, at many levels of society and government, but they did not seem at all reticent to make that point.

No one displayed any fear or reluctance to express his views. At the same time, Russians acknowledge a great deal of improvement since the tragedy of the Yeltsin years.

And while there are people who criticize the government's domestic policies, they tend to be much more in support of what the government under Putin has accomplished in terms of foreign policy. And that seems to me to be a very rational reaction.

First of all, show me one single state on the planet today which is pro working class. Secondly, juxtaposing the concepts of working class and fascism is just a demonstration of how badly you know the history. Suffice it to say that the set of political views deriving from the ideas of Mussolini are called right-wing socialism. Hence, your ignorance of history logically begets that of today's politics. No, Trump and Putin cannot be called truly pro working class. But they're at least are not so blatantly anti working class as neolibs who oppose them.

Perhaps neither end of the horseshoe is game for negotiating a storm of mushroom clouds as I'm sure you are.

Russia is associated with the image of the USSR which developed an alternative model to financial capitalism. Financial capitalism is collapsing for objective and totally unavoidable reasons. The search for an alternative will continue drawing more attention to Russia as a country that is, in principle, capable of offering an alternative development model.

How many times do you have to be told? Your disagreement with the policy towards Ukraine should not translate into support for wrong behavior. The allegations is NOT that Trump wanted to change the policy about Ukraine, but that he sought for personal advantage by engaging in bribery with money that wasn't his to begin with.

Do not damage your support for a different policy by linking it to support for corruption

As I said before, if the delivery man who bring you a pizza your ordered by phone will not deliver it unless you give him your watch, or sexual favors, or other things, claiming that pizza is bad for you is not a defense.

How many times to you have to be told? There is no evidence of that.

No evidence. You wouldn’t see a barn door if it was in front of you. The best argument for Trump is that what he did is not impeachable behavior. There is not much question about what he did. Trump is corrupt and his lackeys are too.

The only possible evidence that the transcript ain't true would be a tape with Trump saying something else. Have you got such a tape? No? Then no evidence. Period.

How many times do you have to be told that allegations shall remain utterly unfounded until Vindman shows the tape or, at least, his own version of the transcript, if he claims that the one published by Trump isn't full?

Vindman cannot produce the tape. Je listened, didn't record it. Full transcript is hidden, and it's not up to Vindman to release it. Ask WH to do it.

The NSA hasn't recorded something related to real or perceived national security issues? Seriously? In which fantasy world is it even possible? While Trump's transcript shall remain full until someone shows the purported "real" one.

Boy, if you thought you've been frustrated up to now.

How many times do you have to be told that Trump as POTUS has responsibility to make sure that allocations to foreign goverments are now squandered on graft and malfeasance? It appears that Biden indulged in a great deal of both and the Democrats are intent on covering it up by making up dramatic interpretations of the phone call transcript.

1. From my perspective, the article is saying that our Ukraine policy is immoral, not that the impeachment is not founded.

2. Further to 1. above, your pizza analogy doesn't hold up. If pizza is bad for you, eating pizza harm nobody but the eater and the eater's insurers.

By contrast, our Ukraine policy is the support of actual live Nazis and has resulted in the deaths of numerous innocents, not to mention the economic destruction of Ukraine.

This is more like providing one pizza company weapons and support, knowing full well that they will use those weapons and cash to murder rivals and customers who order from those rivals.

The good news is that the influence of apparatchiks like Mr. Kent and Mr. Taylor will be at an end within a few years. America thought the blood of hundreds of thousands of foreign children was a "fair price" to pay for the dollar's continued role as a reserve currency (Madeleine Albright's words) and cheaper gas at the pump. The effort was a bust. Endless trillion-dollar-a-year deficits will come to an end quickly. There isn't that much liquidity in the private sphere to sop up at the price the U.S. Gov can afford.

Americans have forgotten how much money a billion dollars is, much less a trillion: to wit, the Democrats future plans are priced in dozens of trillions of dollars. Is it even possible to count that high (given that no one has any real idea how the economy will react)?

Boomers destroyed the country. It only took one "me" generation to introduce such deep structural instability that there is no recovery. Really, does anyone think a trillion dollars a year of demand can ever be pulled out of the economy? No. Does anyone really think a trillion dollars a year will magically appear for free, from nowhere, for a decade or more? The intelligentsia will reap the fruit of its effort within a few years. And it will be dried cat food for dinner. Bless them!

So the West was "aggressive when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia," but Russia's actual bloody invasion of both of these places was merely "an inevitable hunger for protective lands"?

Which is more aggressive, do you think -- invading one's neighbors, or "dangling the prospect of NATO membership" for them?

Which is more aggressive, do you think -- Russia's direct meddling via election fraud in the democratic process of other countries, or Westerners saying mean things about those poor Russians?

Which is more aggressive, do you think -- the Russian government's poisoning of its dissidents in Democratic countries, or Western countries' complaints about these poisonings?

What "actual bloody invasion" of Ukraine and Georgia. Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, and got a bloody nose for their trouble. They didn't lose any territory however, which is odd, if Russia were the attacker.

If Russia had actually invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian clown army would be obliterated in days or hours. Note how there are some 500 miles of open border between Donbass and Sumskaya Oblast - but no fighting? Do you think that the Russian military doesn't know the geography of their own border?

You think the creation of Russian statelets does not constitute the loss of national territory, but is something like the settlement of Brighton Beach.

Ukraine was already devided before it separated from USSR. People from western Ukraine called Russians and eastern Ukrainians moskali. Eastern Ukraine spoke mostly Russian, western Ukraine spoke mostly Ukrainian. I believe tension escalated after Russia was about to loose access to the Black Sea and its navy there. Sorry. That was a big mistake to even think that it would happen easy. Russia annexed Crimea from Ottoman Empire in 18th century. Since then it was part of Russia. Khrushchev transferred it to Ukrainian republic in 1954. You seriously believe that Russia would easy let it go after almost 2 centuries of its presence there? Big chunk of Russian history associated with Black Sea Fleet.

Russia did easily let it go. When it signed the Budapest Accord with US recognizing and guaranteeing the boundaries of Ukraine, there was no caveat cc. Crimea. They were thenjust part of the Russian family living in Ukraine -- just as there are many Ukrainians living well beyond the Donbas in Russia proper. I read history too.